City on the Moon

CHAPTER XI. DESPERATION TAKE-OFF

He WENT in search of the spotter-station men who'd found him on the lava sea. The big brown man who'd piloted the jeep was regarding Cecile Ducros with vast admiration. Haney, the other spotter-station man, was in the act of devouring delicacies especially brought moonward for her.

"Chief!" said Kenmore angrily. "Haney! Moreau! Mike! I want you!"

He jerked his still-mittened hand toward the other dome. They followed him. Arlene came after them. "What's the matter?" she asked anxiously, once in the main dome.

"Plenty! We've got a mildly impossible job to do. Now . . ."

He began to outline, crisply, what would be needed. They had inspected the crashed Earthship. One landing fin was crumpled; there were cracked ports. There was at least one tear in the hull-plating. The ship had no air, and it had chilled nearly to the surface temperature of the moon at night; it would be utterly brittle and not much like a thing made of metal. But with enough flares, it could be warmed past the brittle-point; and with the materials on board for emergency repairs in space—but there never had been and never would be time to make repairs in space—it could be sealed up. Air snow could be carried from the city to refill its air tanks. Rockets could be carried to it, too . . .

"Yeah?" asked Mike Scandia ironically. "Cross-marked like they are?"

"You'll check on that," commanded Kenmore. "The odds are that the original markings were only painted over, and false ones put on top; scrape the paint and it'll show. The rest of you come along!"

They made for the vacuum-suit racks. Arlene said, "I'm coming, too!"

He frowned at her.

"I know the last trip was bad, but am I safer in the City than with you?"

He shrugged; she wasn't—despite the Shuttle-ship sabotage. She climbed back into a suit and topped its air tanks with a professional air. He watched to make sure. She said in a low tone, "How bad is it, Joe?"

"As bad as it could be," he said bitterly. "We're all going back to Earth—if we live."

Arlene looked at him sharply. Kenmore's expression was unrelieved resentment. She slipped on her helmet without a word. If, in its concealment, she looked hopeful rather than depressed, it did not show.

They loaded the spotter-station jeep with materials from the outside storage sheds. Outside storage was best on the moon. There was no weather, and supplies kept perfectly in places where sunlight never struck, even at second-hand. Even air did not need pressure tanks for storage. It was a solid; it was snow—or a cloudy, faintly-bluish ice. They took vacuum flares by scores. They took oxhydrogen torches. They took this, and that, and the other equipment. They sealed up the jeep's cargo compartment and climbed one by one into the cabin through the airlock.

They headed for the wrecked and airless ship. On the way, the chief said meditatively, "It's toppled; it's got to point up to take off."

Kenmore growled half a dozen words. They had two jeeps; that was explanation enough. They rode in one, and Mike Scandia would presently drive the limping, battered other jeep out with a load of rockets. The wheels of all jeeps could be raised and lowered. They carried their large burdens slung underneath, and they crouched over them while they were fastened firmly, and then rose up. When both jeeps were available, they would get under the nose of the Earthship and then rise with it. Moving inward, they would get it at least partly upright; then cables and towing winches would haul it erect. The jeeps could hold the ship upright while the crumpled fin was cut away and rewelded more nearly straight.

Kenmore drove, his features dark and scowling. Moreau said apologetically, "I am not handy in such matters. What will I do?"

"You'll warm the ship's inside with flares," said Arlene confidently, "and I'll watch out the observation-blister in case—well, in case somebody wants to interfere."

Kenmore's expression changed a little. It was curious that finding the saboteurs seemed less important than the disaster to which—it now appeared—they had only contributed. Yet it was still possible that whoever had waylaid Moreau and himself, and damaged the City, and all too probably was responsible for the disappearance of the City's population—might come to interfere with work on the Earthship. The irony lay in the fact that saboteurs no longer needed to commit murder in order to destroy the City and the Laboratory. Both were to be abandoned, anyhow.

Miles and miles out in the lunar sea, they came to the toppled ship; what followed looked like a scene in some inferno. Glaring red vacuum flares burned fiercely on the moondust, their light reflected from the bright plating of the ship. Other flares burned inside, showing through the ports like furnace openings in the hull.

But the labor was swift and well-ordered. Cracked, smashed ports vanished—sealed shut with sheets of plastic. An oxhydrogen torch flamed luridly, surrounded by a tiny cloud of microscopic snowflakes; it welded together the rent in the hull plating. The vacuum-suited workers glittered in the weird glare, and the moondust glowed a blinding crimson.

Flares burned out and were replaced. Presently, Arlene called anxiously on helmet-phone frequency that something moved out at the edge of the light. But Mike Scandia's voice came fretfully into their several headphones. "This infernal bumping wheel! Pitkin said it would fall off, and I've been expecting it to go any second!"

The limping jeep emerged from the blackness all about. Its cargo door was open and great wire-wound rockets stuck out and a bundle of other monsters dangled from chains between its wheels.

"I got Pitkin to help me load up," said Mike peevishly. "I checked the markings; some of them were just painted over, and new numbers painted on. But when I looked for that, I could tell. I guarantee those to be as marked, now!"

He came wriggling out of his airlock. Kenmore said, "Hold it, Mike! Handle that jeep for me!"

There followed a crisp and highly technical discussion in the total silence of airlessness. But helmet antennas glittered as figures moved or gestured, and the squat vacuum-suited figure which was Mike moved to survey the exact situation of the ship. Presently he scrambled back into his jeep; the chief entered the airlock of the other, and the spidery vehicles performed a task unthinkable for them on Earth.

The Earthship weighed but a sixth of its weight on its home spaceport, though ten tons earthweight was no easy mass to manage anywhere. In the unearthly, blood-red light of the flares, the skeletal jeeps seemed to crouch down and strain to lift the ship's nose at an impossible angle. And they did; then they strove to push it higher, with wheels which tended to slip and spin upon the dusty stone. And as they pushed and strained, Haney and Kenmore and Moreau flittered in and out and under them, and under the swollen hull of the ship. They handled the cables and chains.

Presently the ship seemed to stagger erect—and one wheel of Mike's jeep collapsed under the strain of thrusting. But the jeep continued to push, nevertheless, and the two of them held the Earthship's nose toward the stars. Then it hung there, supported by the two insectile glittering metal things. Two flame torches worked furiously on its crumpled tail fin. Presently it was patched—cobbled would be a better word—and the white-hot joinings cooled and cooled; after a time, the chains and cables relaxed very gently and the ship stood—well, almost perfectly vertical in a ring of lurid crimson flames.

After that they fastened the rockets in their clamps. They did not pause at all. Kenmore said, "Now it's just a matter of taking off. Mike . . ."

"Yeah?" said Scandia defensively.

"I'm piloting. You and Haney, take the working jeep back to the City. Chief and Moreau go with me to the Laboratory."

Mike sputtered in protest.

"There's only the one jeep working and at the City," said Kenmore. "It could take everybody on board in case of more trouble. And you know the moon's surface by heart around here. You've crossed it often enough. You stay to take care of the people who are left."

Mike sputtered again. Haney said nothing. Kenmore motioned the rest into the ship's airlock. He climbed up the ladder rungs last of all. Mike, still sputtering, climbed gloomily into the still-operable jeep; Haney followed him. The jeep backed away to a safe distance.

There was a small pause, then. The great silvery hull pointed skyward—whitened a little with moondust where it had lain prone on the lunar sea. It was surrounded by a now-broken ring of fierce red vacuum flares.

Suddenly, rockets poured out flame, and the burning flares were flung crazily everywhere by the blast. A cloud of scattered dust arose, and the rocket fumes were whipped away to nothingness; then the great ship leaped upward for the sky. In seconds it was merely a moving white-hot flame which grew smaller and smaller.

But there wasn't any rocket roar; there is never any sound on the moon.

. . . And a long time later, with the pallid, mottled grayness of the moon and its mountains far below—a very long time later—Kenmore pointed. At the edge of solidity, where the stars ceased to shine, there was a speck of light. It was as far as anybody could possibly see even from many miles aloft. It was a bright, warm, brilliant dot of light at the very edge of the horizon. It was sunshine on a remote and unnamed peak.

"That's sunrise," said Kenmore somberly. "Unfortunately it's only a fact. It's not a symbol of good times coming."