City on the Moon

CHAPTER XII. THE MAD ONES

THE SHIP continued to float upward. It was almost a shock when Kenmore closed all the port shields and dimmed the stars to specks. Arlene protested a little, and he said, "Wait!" The Earthship rose and rose. Presently Kenmore turned. He nodded to Arlene. "Now watch!"

She gazed out the thickly shielded port. For moments she saw nothing at all. Then there were dots of bright light at the edge of the horizon. They increased in number; they multiplied in size and. brilliance. And then the sun came into view.

It was gigantic against the shadow-speckled edge of the moon; great streamers reached out from the edge of its disk. There were even dark places—sunspots—which were really furious and unthinkably huge storms in its photosphere. The ship went up and up again, and the lighted areas of the moon joined together—but there were still vast shadows of the ring mountains at the dawn line—and Arlene saw the moon from the most remarkable angle from which it can be seen. There is no sight in the solar system quite as unearthly, quite as dazzling, quite as strange, as the view of the moon's surface when one rises from its night into its dawn.

Arlene caught her breath. And Kenmore fired a drive rocket to set the ship on course toward the farside.

It was not really much later when Moreau began to point out the larger of the craters which bore names, to Arlene. He indicated a peculiar valley, one apparently carved by a racing planetoid which grazed the moon and gouged out a valley eighty miles long and five miles wide, and then apparently kept on out to limitless space. He showed her the immense, straight streaks of white which puzzled Earth astronomers for so long, and had so absurdly simple an explanation when men examined them in situ. He pointed out that very tiny crater which is quite stark and barren when the sun first strikes, and becomes filled with mist as daylight grows stronger.

"Mist!" protested Arlene. "It's not possible!"

"Moon-fog," said Moreau gravely. "Ask Joel"

Kenmore spoke over his shoulder as he checked his course for height and velocity.

"Worse than an ordinary fog. It's a dry fog!"

Which it was. There was a special type of surface material there—neither Kenmore nor Moreau could remember the mineral, and Moreau was irritated with himself—which the alternations of day heat and night cold had broken into dust particles even finer than the dust of the lava seas. Where ordinary moondust is like talcum, the dust particles in this particular crater and in half a dozen other places were really microscopic in size. This dust had a photoelectric property which gave it an electric charge when the sunlight struck it. In the small gravity of the moon, and with the intense light of the sun, the particles repelled each other like charged pith-balls. The result was a fog, a mist, a cloud of electrified dust that rose slowly from the surface. It was a cloud sustained by electrostatic fields, instead of air.

"And believe it or not," said Moreau, "there are sometimes lightning-strokes in it!"

Arlene wouldn't believe that until Kenmore agreed. He hadn't been in this particular crater, but he had walked into a moon-fog on one occasion. His suit had been charged, and the dust particles had clung to it in thick masses. They formed tufts; it was like moss or whiskers growing from every part of the vacuum suit. When Joe Kenmore went back to his jeep, the discharge of static electricity could have punctured his suit if he hadn't known suitable measures to take.

Then there was the official boundary between nearside and farside, which divides the moon into two not-quite-equal halves, since four-sevenths of the moon can be seen from Earth, at one time or another. Moreau pointed out to Arlene the craters and the mountain chains that had no names on the older maps of the moon, because they were on farside. He told her the results of international squabbling, by which the invisible side of the moon is solemnly divided into sectors, with divers nations having the privilege of honoring national heroes by naming things after them. Not more than fifty or sixty people out of all the Earth's more than two billion had ever seen those named features, and even fewer cared about the names.

But the farside surface, in time, began to grow remote. The ship was drawing away, going out. Arlene had a peculiar sinking feeling when she realized that Earth was no longer visible; it was hidden on the other side of the moon. She had a sensation of homelessness which was much worse than she'd felt in Civilian City. To be on the moon was thrilling, while Earth was always right overhead; but to be where Earth was invisible was a shattering experience. Arlene barely heard Moreau's lecture on the fact that the moon is egg-shaped, with the big side toward Earth, so that the horizon is less than two miles away on farside.

The ship drove on, and the unfamiliar farside dwindled. From a great expanse of sunlit, pock-marked aridness, it became a gibbous globe, because night was moving round one edge. It grew smaller, and smaller—but Earth did not reappear. Which seemed very strange, because by the time the ship drew near to the Laboratory, the moon itself was a round thing only a little larger than Earth as seen from Civilian City.

Actually, the Earth as seen from nearside is the size of a twenty-five cent piece thirty inches from one's eye; the farside of the moon seen from the Laboratory was the size of the same coin twenty inches away—the moon from Earth is the size of a quarter ten feet distant. And here, for the first time, Arlene felt the loneliness which space-travelers have to endure. She was in a rocket-ship and there was absolutely nothing in sight that she had ever seen before. The great and flaming sun was strange; it was not the familiar orb that had lighted sunshiny days on Earth. It was a ball of hellfire, spreading slow-moving tentacles into space. The moon was unfamiliar; the central dark splotch on the farside made it impossible for her to consider it the moon she'd known. And Earth was hidden.

Arlene's teeth chattered.

But there was activity about her before she could yield to panic. The chief was at the radar, his bronze hands amazingly deft. Moreau was strapped in by the computer. When the chief called readings from the nearest-object radar dial, Moreau punched keys and curtly relayed the results to Kenmore.

"Hm . . ." said Kenmore. "A little deceleration is called for."

He swung the ship end for end, and Arlene gulped as the whole cosmos swung in great half circles about her. Kenmore said, "Deceleration coming. Five—four—three-two—one—"

There was weight. Not great weight. Not intolerable weight. But it lasted, and lasted, and lasted.

Kenmore pressed a button, and something fled away into the vastness in which all things were strange.

Then the chief said warmly, "Joe, you did a job of work!"

And Arlene Gray, with her teeth clamped tightly, looked out a shielded port on the shadow side of the ship and saw the Laboratory hanging stationary in space.

It was a rocket-ship, or it had been. It was very much larger than the Earthship. Since it would float in space without ever being out of sunshine, one-half of it was brightest silvery metal, and one-half was dead-black. Temperature was adjusted by varying the amount of silver which reflected heat and light away, and the black which radiated heat to the stars. There was an airlock, much too small to admit the Earthship and there were ports. There were some curious tubular blisters—position-adjusting rockets could be loaded into them from within the ship and fired.

To Arlene, the Laboratory looked like a derelict floating in emptiness; as a matter of fact, it was much more depressing than that. This was a place in which men had set out soberly to make a discovery which might be beneficent, gambling that they would not acquire knowledge by which a Madman could destroy humanity.

The space-radio speaker said wearily, "Well, who are you and what's it all about?"

"This is the Earthship," said Kenmore into the microphone before him. "The Shuttle's smashed. We're bringing orders from Earth. How about opening your lock?" The voice muttered. Then it said, as wearily as before, "Opening up now. It would be amusing if . . ."

There was a muffled sound, and then silence.

The silence continued. A long time later, the chief said, "There's the lock opening. This looks queer to me!" Kenmore shrugged. "Mike says they've all gone wacky. He says they've flipped. They're looping."

The lock in the side of the Laboratory-ship swung open. Kenmore said irritably, "I ought to do this, but— Chief, will you go in our lock and moor the two ships together?"

The chief unstrapped himself, and floated to the inner lock-door of the ship from Earth. It closed behind him. There was a long, long period during which Kenmore jockeyed the Earthship closer to the Laboratory, and the lock pump throbbed. Then silence. Another long wait, and they heard a singularly unpleasant clanking noise; the two ships had touched.

The chief's voice came through by suit-talkie. "I'm using the outside ladders for mooring-bitts. It means there has to be a gap between the hulls."

"No matter," said Kenmore impatiently. "We'll go on board."

"I'll go ahead. I'm stepping over to the other ship. I'll close this lock-door."

There was the sound of its closing, and Kenmore fumed a little. He was going on board the ship he'd really been working for since the beginning of things extraterrestrial, bringing instructions to quit. He felt wretched.

Moreau climbed into a vacuum suit; Arlene started to get into another.

"You can wait," suggested Kenmore ungraciously. "We shouldn't be long. They're ordered to abandon ship and come back with us."

Arlene said in a still voice, "I'd like to come, Joe."

She couldn't have explained why she wanted to board the Laboratory.

The three of them—Kenmore, Arlene, and Moreau— went into the Earth ship's airlock and waited while the pump throbbed and their suits took on the curious, bouncy feel of a vacuum suit in emptiness. Joe loosened his space-rope and clipped the end of it through Arlene's belt; Moreau hooked on, too.

The lock-door opened, and the ships were not two feet apart, but four or five. The other lock didn't reopen; the chief had gone in the other ship. Kenmore stepped out to emptiness, and floated across the gulf. He caught at handholds and tried the lock-door. He put his helmet against the other ship's side. He said, "The pump's running. The chief went in."

He waited, and Arlene looked out of the gap between the spacecraft.

It was a mistake. She was used to no weight, of course; she was accustomed to the sensations of upside-downness, and topsy-turvy dimensions, which rocket travel involves. But nobody can quite disabuse himself of an idea that there is an up, and that there is a down.

Arlene looked down toward her feet, and saw an abyss of stars. She caught her breath and looked upward; the selfsame abyss loomed there—and to either side. She could not see sun or moon or Earth; where she stood in the open airlock door there were only stars. It seemed that if she took one step outward she would fall forever, shrieking, toward nothingness.

But then Kenmore got the other airlock open; he went in. He took a firm grip inside, and tugged at the rope attached to Arlene's waist. Sheer hysterical panic yammered at her. And then she stepped toward him and was drawn across the abyss, with her eyes tight-shut.

She did not open them again until she heard the lock-door close. Then her teeth chattered, but she did look about her. Moreau was in the lock also, and air was coming in.

But something was wrong with the air. The bouncy feeling of their suits ceased; then there was a new feeling, very peculiar and breathless. Kenmore looked at the lock air gauge, and seemed startled. He opened his faceplate. Moreau followed suit. They spoke sharply. Arlene opened her helmet. She had trouble with the faceplate; it seemed to stick, but she forced it open, and a puff of wind struck her cheek But there should be no wind in an airlock!

Her ears buzzed and she swallowed. Arlene said, "Joe, what . . She gasped. Her voice was loud, too loud.

"Something's very wrong," said Kenmore grimly. He had not raised his voice at all, but it was like a shout. "The pressure's too high. Much too high!"

Arlene's ears buzzed again and she swallowed. A moment later they buzzed still once more.

Kenmore said evenly, "We can't open the outer door against this pressure! They must have had an air-tank leak inside the ship. Unless somebody's cracked up . . ."

Then they heard clankings, the perfectly natural sounds of the undogging of an inner airlock door before it opens, only magnified.

Then the lock-door opened to the inside of the ship, and they saw the chief, his face very pale beneath its bronze pigment. His expression was sternness itself.

"Get Arlene back to the ship, Joe," he said harshly. "I'll try to argue with these guys. They've cracked up to a fare-you-well!"

His voice boomed. It roared. It echoed and re-echoed.

The eight men of the Laboratory's staff and crew were gathered in the compartment beyond the airlock. One of them floated placidly in midair, watching the newcomers with bright eyes. A white-bearded man stood head-downward on the ceiling, held there by his magnetic-soled shoes, and looked at them with an ironic expression on his face. One man sat in a chair on a side wall.

A man in a laboratory smock, with pince-nez glasses, spoke in a refined voice which had the volume of a bellow:

"Mr. Kenmore, I believe. We expected Mike in the Shuttle. I am afraid we cannot receive you for more than a very few minutes, if you wish to be able to leave. We have loosed all our reserve air tanks into the ship. The air pressure now is ninety pounds to the square inch, or higher. It is equal to the pressure on a diver at two hundred feet underwater. If you stay more than twenty minutes, you will have what divers call—ah—the bends when you leave. We have been under this pressure for seventy-two hours, and our body tissues are thoroughly saturated with nitrogen. It is impossible for any of us to leave this laboratory. At the least we would become paralyzed. At the best we would die immediately. Will you leave, please?" -

His tone was determinedly matter-of-fact, but his hands shook uncontrollably.

The chief said, "The fools did it, Joel That guy'll show you."

The man in the chair on the wall grinned mirthlessly at them and put a cigarette to his lips. He struck a light. The flame rose six inches. He touched it to the cigarette and inhaled. The cigarette burned to ashes with the one draught upon it. Such a thing could only happen in compressed air, with a superabundance of oxygen.

Then a voice said in a tone of astonishment, "Why— it's a girl!"

And eight pairs of eyes fixed themselves upon Arlene's face with expressions of fascinated astonishment.