City on the Moon

CHAPTER XVI. THE LAST STROKE

AMONG the more than two billion living human beings, perhaps fifty still lived who knew what the Space Laboratory had reported—that further progress in atomic science meant the suicide of humanity. Most of those fifty faced the conclusion with violent emotion. There were three suicides. Several collapsed into quasi-schizophrenic withdrawal from reality.

A few—a very few—reacted to the report by the decision that it could not be true. The cosmos, they asserted, made sense; it would not make sense if it could be destroyed by one of its own parts—man. Therefore, the report must be wrong.

And while Joe Kenmore watched Cecile Ducros' phony broadcast, there were possibly half a dozen men at work checking and rechecking the implications of the report from the Space Platform.

The data, itself, was past question. There was a field of force in which neutrons could be guided and accelerated, like electrons in a television tube. That field could be formed into lenses, which would focus a stream of neutrons to a mathematical point, while raising their speed to any imaginable value. If such a focused stream of neutrons hit matter—why, no molecule, no atom, no subatomic particle at all could possibly escape collision. If those neutrons were hit hard enough, it seemed that they must crack; and if even one neutron cracked . . .

The cracking of a subatomic particle should mean its instant conversion into pure raw energy, equal in mass to the object destroyed. This would not be the energy of fission or fusion, but the true energy of matter—the energy of the composition of substance itself.

One cracked particle of any nature should crack other nearby particles. They should crack others. The true explosion of one single atom should set off every other atom within a horrifying range, and a chain reaction should begin in which all matter was explosive and exploded. Had this begun in the Space Laboratory, the detonation should have set off the moon, though forty thousand miles away. The moon should explode the Earth; and Earth the sun; and the sun all the planets, and the nearer stars, and they . . .

Such an explosion should be propagated even by the infinitely diluted matter in interstellar space—one atom per cubic centimeter. It should leap the gap between galaxies and turn the cosmos into flame.

This line of thought had destroyed the men in the Space Laboratory; they could not live with it. But a bare dozen men, back on Earth—scientists—refused to accept the Laboratory conclusion, and set out to find the flaw in the thinking which led to it.

It was a man named Thurston who carried the examination through. He was the same one who'd uncovered the false assumptions about kinetic energy in satellite-primary relationships. He worked out this problem on the Harvard analogue computer, at whose controls he sat for seventy-two hours straight, gulping coffee and working with a magnificent obstinacy. When he finished, he was bleary-eyed and staggering from fatigue, and he uttered pungent and unprintable words as he explained the answer tape to those who waited for it.

It was simply that the experimenters had used the idea of a small and homogenous object as the idea of a neutron. They thought of neutrons as something like nuts; it was convenient to think of them that way. But a neutron is actually much more like a gas-giant planet than a pecan. It has an extremely dense core, but it thins out to nothingness from there.

The point brought out by the analogue computer was that the physical structure of a neutron was important. If two things like nuts collided at high speed, one or both would smash. But when a neutron of the actual sort collided with another particle, it would not smash; at any speed up to the speed of light, it would bounce. At the speed of light it would not be a neutron. It would not even be an object, but a wave.

But on the moon, Joe Kenmore knew nothing of this theoretic discovery. He sad angry, crackling things after Cecile Ducros' broadcast ended.

"Phony from beginning to end," he concluded. "Nothing but sweetness and light!—And she took the credit for everything Arlene learned at the risk of her life!"

"I don't mind," said Arlene soothingly. "I wouldn't have gotten here if she hadn't needed somebody like me to help."

"You'd be a lot better off back on . . ."

There was a very peculiar sound in the dome, an incredible sound because it came from outside. And of course there could not be any sound outside. This was a peculiarly muffled, roaring noise. It began, and grew louder and louder.

Those within the air dome froze. Kenmore started up, and saw a patch of the plastic dome wall begin to bulge outward. Then—and this happened in the fraction of a second—there was a reddish glow and instantly thereafter a flaring crimson flame burned through the plastic balloon which was the dome's inner wall and structural member. Something emitted a dense trail of red sparks. It soared across the top of the dome and plunged at the plastic on the other side. It seemed that a giant, curved, red-hot blade had been thrust through the open space from side to side. The moving flame-head vanished, but its trail of crimson fire remained. And under the roaring, there came suddenly the thin, whistling noise of air escaping to a vacuum.

Kenmore found himself crashing into Moreau. The two had leaped for patches at the same instant. But they had leaped. It was agonizing seconds before they touched ground again, seized separate sheets of plastic, and again leaped upward. There was a six-inch hole in the ceiling of the dome. It was twenty feet above the ground, but a man can jump twenty feet on the moon.

Kenmore reached the hole. The plastic snapped into place over it, drawn and held by the vacuum outside. It caught. It stuck. Kenmore felt moondust settling to position against it on the outside, because the outdraft of air was stopped. Moreau was performing an exactly similar feat at the other puncture. They began the agonizingly deliberate drop back to the floor.

"Get into suits," snapped Kenmore, still in mid-air. "Make it quick!"

Some of the surprisingly long-lived carmine sparks drifted down with him. They told what had done the damage, of course. A signal rocket had had a notch cut in its head to produce a small jet of flame before it; it had been thrust into the dust-heap from the outside. The leading flame had thrust dust aside; the following flame had pushed the rocket forward. It would not conceivably have pierced anything but dust—nor anywhere but on the moon. But it had punctured the dome in two places; and it was not likely that this was the only one to be attacked.

Arlene was getting into her suit with practiced swiftness. Kenmore landed, moved swiftly to her, and pushed a mass of her hair away from the helmet gasket, so that there could be no leakage. He began to climb into his own armor.

He settled the helmet and said swiftly, "Jake! Check the other domes!"

He made sure that Arlene's faceplate was ready to be closed on an instant's notice, and said grimly to Moreau, "Watch the ceiling. If it starts down, more air's being lost somewhere we haven't caught. You can hold it, probably, with air from the air tank. But if you need to get out, do so. The airlock's a good refuge for the time being."

He ran to the main dome. There were three gaping holes in its plastic ceiling, and a still-glowing signal rocket flamed where it was caught in a metal girder forty feet up. Mike Scandia swarmed up another girder, plastic mending sheets dangling from him, to close a leak. The chief made his way to another. Haney—vacuum-suited—fastened three long rods together. A patch waited. Haney speared the bottom of a wastebasket with his lengthened rods, spread the patch over the open end, jumped to the top of a privacy-partition and thrust the patch into place where it was too high to be jumped to and could not be reached from a girder. It stuck, held there by what air pressure remained.

Kenmore realized that the thin, clanging sound that came' through his helmet was the pressure-alarm gongs. But the air situation was actually under control by now.

Kenmore made for the power dome and found a slash five feet long where a rocket had pierced the plastic at an acute angle. Three men in vacuum suits worked on it. They were scared, but they had run away once; now they knew better. They worked to save the City as a way of saving themselves.

Then Kenmore allowed himself to fly into. a rage. A man had needed only to notch a certain number of signal rockets to send a small expanding flame before them, and he'd been able to puncture the City's domes at will. And he'd be outside . . .

A race back to the main dome. Its pressure gauges were far into the red, but Haney was down on the floor again and Mike and the chief were descending. Kenmore snapped, on his talkie, "I'm going out after the man who did this!"

He streaked for the airlock, and heard the chief grunt as if he'd landed from a height that was extreme even for one-sixth gravity.

Haney said, "With you, Joe!" and Mike's voice came sputtering:

"I'm on the way, too!"

But Kenmore was out-of-doors first; he emerged into the incredible spectacle of a lunar dawn. The peaks to westward glowed with an incandescent glare. The lava bay on which the City was built still lay deep in shadows; but sunshine smote the tips of the Apennines, and there was a radiance of reflected light everywhere. One could almost be persuaded that there was an atmosphere to give so softly illumined an effect. Earth, near the zenith, was now less than at the half and would presently diminish to the smallest of crescents, with a dull-red completing line of light to prove that it remained a sphere.

Kenmore paid no heed to any of this. His eyes went to the moon-jeeps. There were not many, as yet; only a part of the City's population was back. The returned vehicles were parked near the airlock, and Kenmore uttered an inarticulate sound of fury. There were no tracks under them. There was what seemed to be a mist about them and among them. And there are no mists on the moon save in bright sunshine and where photoelectric substances lie on the surface. Those mists are dust-clouds, supported in emptiness by electrostatic repulsion from charged particles like themselves. This was something else.

He made for the jeeps at the highest speed that moon-gait could give him. When he arrived, he found that a few minutes sooner he might have prevented the damage, and a few minutes later he might have failed to notice it. The parked jeeps stood motionless, thinly veiled in a whitish mist which was moondust now drifting back downward to make a smooth, untrodden layer on the surface of the bay. It only needed seconds to make sure. The air valve—by which a man outside might hook onto a jeep's air tanks—was broken off. It was standard practice for men working outside to breathe by long hoses from the jeep, that carried them. It always left two hours' breathing in the suit tanks. But now those hose connections were broken off.

The tanks had poured out their contents in a whistling stream, and the dust was already settling again. In five more minutes, only the absence of footmarks in the new-settled stuff would have given warning. If the returned fugitives had fled again, this time they would have suffocated.

The figures of Haney and the chief, and the minute figure of Mike, emerged into the morning. Kenmore called out to them by talkie, explaining what had taken place. Mike darted back into the City to give warning, so that nobody—however panicked would take refuge in a jeep. Haney and the chief went racing around to the back of the City, to look for the saboteur's work there.

And then cries came in Kenmore's helmet phones from vacuum-suited figures within the City. He rushed; he was through the locks in seconds. He'd heard Arlene scream . . .

She'd been in the air dome. He plunged for that. A girder of the air dome had collapsed and half the ceiling sagged. A part was down to the floor, crushing hydroponic racks beneath it. Two figures dragged desperately at a third, caught under the descending ceiling with yards upon yards of moondust above it. Kenmore threw over the air-tank emergency valve by the lock. Great masses of expanding air rushed in. The descending ceiling wavered and retreated—a little—and he leaped forward and helped to drag, pushing at the sagged roof-stuff with one foot as he hauled with both arms.

But the entrapped figure was Lezd; he was unconscious. The active figure were Pitkin and Moreau. Kenmore cried, "Arlene! Where is she?"

She must be under the rest of the collapsing plastic balloon, no longer stiffened by girders and burdened with dust outside. Cecile panted shrilly, "Somebody came in—through the wall! The roof fell down, and she —and she—"

It was patently impossible. To walk into the dust covering of a moon-city should be the same as to walk into a dust-lake. One should be overwhelmed, submerged, packed in dust as in quicksand. Kenmore raced back and opened the air valve fully. For a moment, the ceiling lifted to show all the expanse of floor. But there was a man-high tear in the plastic at ground level on the far side. The roof came down again near that monstrous leak.

And Kenmore's throat clicked. Arlene was not in the dome, either living or dead. All its floor had momentarily been visible. "Somebody—came through the wall!" insisted Cecile hysterically. "Somebody . . ."

And Kenmore saw that, too. Complete ruthlessness was behind this last attempt to destroy the already-doomed City. The trick was the same as that of the punctures. It couldn't have been done anywhere else. But when one thought about it, walking through a dust-lake, or a city's covering, would be quite as simple as sending a rocket through it. Signal rockets had a thrust of five pounds, earthweight; they burned for twenty seconds. A man could hold one reversed before him, its flame and fumes roaring ahead, and the blast would literally blow away any amount of the gossamer-weight moondust. More might slide down, but its sliding would be slow. A man could make his own tunnel if only he moved briskly and his signal rockets held out. And Arlene had been here, in her vacuum suit . . .

Kenmore roared commands as he ran to carry out his own part in them. The fate of the City was taken care of—if it mattered. The worst leaks were patched, save in the air dome. But Arlene had been carried away!

Moreau came swarming after him. Once outside, Joe Kenmore made a terrific leap, which carried him an incredible distance. He headed for the outside storage space where supplies were kept. The chief and Haney came soaring around the City's sagging mounds.

"There's a jeep beating it for the mountains!" snapped the Indian. "We saw it! Haney yelled for it to stop and it tried to run over him!"

Kenmore panted into his suit microphone and the chief swore—unintelligible words which had blue fire around their edges. Kenmore grimly inspected and tested the nearest jeep for sabotage beyond the loss of all its air stores. Moreau came panting with an armload of signal rockets. Mike came bouncing with magnesium marking-powder. The chief balanced a monstrous drum of air snow...