City on the Moon

CHAPTER XV. A DUCROS PRODUCTION

He WENT heavily to the privacy-cubicle that was his own. He sat down on his cot—it took a perceptible interval between the moment when he willed to sit and the contact of his body with the object sat on—and tried to think out the matter of the sabotage, to pick out those who were guilty of it. They had, very probably, started off in a jeep with the rest of the fugitives, after sabotaging the City. Most likely they'd lost themselves from the jeep caravan and made the attack on Kenmore and Moreau. Quite possibly they'd also attacked spotter stations and casually murdered their occupants. They might have other plans, even now. Ultimately they'd turn up with a story which couldn't be disproved, and be returned to Earth as fortunate survivors of the disasters to the moon colony. But Joe Kenmore could not think clearly. He'd worked a highly improbable number of hours without any pause; when he relaxed, exhaustion took charge. He didn't realize that he had slept until suddenly there was the chief shaking him, a steaming cup of coffee in his hand.

"Broadcast coming up," said the chief, grinning. "I'm going to act. Haney, too. Arlene says you ought to watch."

It was painful to sit up, even in moon-gravity, but Kenmore did it. The chief handed him the coffee cup. "Arlene said to let you sleep, but we need some kind of studio audience."

Kenmore gulped the coffee. "Any of the jeeps back yet?"

"Some. Coming in one by one. Man! Are those guys scared! They saw themselves strangling or roasting. They want out. They crave to go back home!"

"Including the ones who did it all," said Kenmore. "Pretty, isn't it? But they have no more reason for sabotage. The Lab is smashed and the City will be abandoned. No need for any more murders."

"Except," said the chief, "that those guys might just love their work."

Kenmore stood up and followed the chief across the main dome and into the air-plant part of the City, where hydroponic tanks nourished vegetation to purify the air and at least partly feed the colonists. Cecile prepared her broadcast magnificently. There would be no script; there was no director. Lezd merely carried out her orders. From time to time, he offered suggestions. She accepted none; she appropriated them. Kenmore heard him make a mild suggestion about the orders of events in the coming production. She ignored him—five minutes later she repeated his suggestion in the form of a command.

From seeming chaos, presently order appeared. Lezd hung a curtain of plastic, dome-balloon material and tinted its surface blue. He set up a slide projector behind it and critically surveyed the projected image from the front. He had made a slide from pictures available in the City. The result was not convincing to the naked eye, but he nodded to Kenmore.

"It will look right to the camera," he said. "Cecile will appear in a vacuum suit and show the people of Earth what moon flowers are like. She will discover them. Fortunately, there is a photograph."

Kenmore said coldly, "Arlene is the only human being besides Mike ever to hold one in her hands!"

But what have facts to do with art?" asked Lezd. "Cecile is an artist!"

Cecile Ducros appeared in a vacuum suit with a special helmet Lezd had contrived for her. It would not be practical outside the domes—it was not airtight—but it was very becoming. She examined her own image in a monitor television screen Lezd had set up. She gave crisp, authoritative commands.

Broadcast time came; the monitor lighted, then went blank. And then Cecile Ducros' face appeared, wearing its heavy-lidded, mysterious smile.

She said sweetly, "How do you do? Thees ees your leetle Cecile Ducros, speaking from the moon. And now I speak in a special manner, because I am een a place remote from the Ceety—from a lonely station many, many miles away—a spotter station where two intrepeed men brave all the dangers of solitary life upon the moon, to search the star-filled skies for leetle freight-sheeps coming up from Earth."

She wore the phony vacuum helmet, with its phony faceplate lifted back. The camera view widened, and the set which had been built to represent the Space Laboratory appeared quite convincing as something else. Cecile explained the function and the loneliness of these isolated posts, where two men and a moon-jeep stayed for fourteen days in the appalling airless cold of a lunar night.

She showed a view from a spotter-station port. It was close to dawn on this part of the moon, she observed excitedly, and there—look! look! look!—were the faraway specks of sunshine on the very tallest mountains.

It was actually a projection, but even those present found it was difficult to believe that the camera lens did not point out at a desolate landscape, with mysterious mountains against the stars. Of course there was no movement anywhere.

Back to Cecile. She had Haney before a convincing operations board—a spare—and he mumbled awkwardly in answer to her questions. The chief swaggered into the scene and displayed remarkable histrionic ability. There were four spotter stations, he said splendidly, occupied only during the more-than-three-hundred-hours-long night of the moon. One man was supposedly always on duty, watching for the tiny radar pips which should be freight-ships coming to the moon with food and air. Cecile deftly extracted an anecdote or two about journeys through mountain passes with avalanches waiting to plunge down in slow motion. There was a story of the spotter station where the reserve air leaked out, and was lost. The chief told how they patched the leak, electrolyzed water into oxygen and hydrogen, and breathed that highly explosive mixture for six Earth-days, knowing that a single spark of static electricity would blow them and their station to atoms.

That was a moon-story akin to that ancient tale of the rider on the obedient mule who trotted over a precipice with a man on its back—the man's life was saved when he called "Whoa!" and the mule obediently halted in its descent. The chief finished with the bland statement that the really tough part of the ordeal was that they couldn't smoke except out-of-doors.

Cecile smiled sweetly at him and closed her faceplate, explaining that, "Ef theese should break, now that I go outside, I would look vairy ugly to you!" She seemed to enter an airlock. The camera shifted, and she appeared to come into outer airlessness through the lock. There was a moon-jeep in the projected background; she pointed to its picture and explained with seeming excitement about those vehicles of burden. She explained about vacuum suits—information she'd gotten from Arlene. She lifted a handful of moondust, brought in for the purpose, and let it sift from her mittened hands, showing how slowly it fell. She talked of landslides and dust-lakes with a contagious shudder, which was just right to give her audience shivers without frightening it in the least.

Then she seemed to clamber a little, the camera following her, and there was a view of a moon crater, with Cecile looking across it and telling in an awed voice of the wonder of its creation. A monstrous planetoid of stone and iron had come plunging out of the sky at many miles per second, and had literally exploded from the violence of its impact. This ring mountain, miles in diameter, was the consequence; it was the splash of that ancient catastrophe.

There was more; by the end, Kenmore was angry, because there was every appearance of Cecile Ducros leaping lightly down in the gentle gravity of the moon, to stand at last before blackness and then to say excitedly that here was something she had discovered herself. Here were flowers—the blossoms of the moon I And she was vairy proud that though other growing tufts of such moon flowers had been reported, she, Cecile Ducros, had found this leetle garden wheech the charming people of Civilian City had decided to name after her. And here eet was!

She pointed dramatically, and it seemed that lights from a moon-jeep shone upon and past her; and there was an infinitely delicate garden of slender, silver stalks and drooping leaves.

The camera seemed to approach it; the detail and the delicacy of the flowers was quite incredible, but Kenmore recognized it as a photograph. He'd taken it himself under a cliff, when he and Mike and Arlene were trying to find a spotter station after the Shuttle-ship had crashed—an hour before Haney and the chief found them.

But it was excellent television. There was not one word to hint at sabotage, murder, sudden death. Still less was there any reference to the destruction of the Space Laboratory.

The show ended when Moreau, also in a vacuum suit, appeared and gestured imperiously for Cecile to come with him. His helmet was a normal one, and his face could not be seen in it. But Cecile's helmet allowed her to be seen very clearly; she smiled at him eagerly and turned half-regretfully to the camera.

"Now I am told that eet ees dangerous for me to stay any longer in thees wonderful, beautiful place. So I go back to the Ceety, and there I weel talk to you again." And she looked at the rather statuesque figure of Moreau in his vacuum armor—with much of its equipment removed to make it look better—and sighed audibly.-"I have to do as I am told," she confided flutteringly to her audience.

"He ees vairy handsome!" And then she said, "Ah! I am so susceptible!" and moved toward Moreau.

The monitor screen went blank on an excellent public-relations job for a project which was a failure.