City on the Moon

CHAPTER XVII. PURSUIT

It WAS the weirdest of scenes. The beginning dawn made the topmost peaks of the Apennines sheerly incandescent. The Mare Imbrium was not yet touched by light, yet the mountaintops tinted it strangely. There were figures soaring here and there in the preposterous leaps of men in a hurry in light gravity. A moon-jeep moved to one, and then to another, gathering them up with their burdens, and then sped—twinkling in the dawnlight—toward the rampart of stony monsters which were the mountains.

In minutes it crawled up the beginning of the pass, through which another jeep had fled—leaving the City presumably half-wrecked and all jeeps booby-trapped by empty air tanks. The mountains here rose four miles, straight up toward the stars and Earth. Their peaks were bathed in white-hot sunshine. Their valley were dark with the darkness of the Pit. Only the faintest of earthshine now came from the more-than-gibbous Earth. The jeep's multiple lamps glared ahead; all about, hung avalanches.

In the haste of loading, the jeep's cargo doors had been opened to emptiness, and closed again, and the inner doors to the cargo space opened to admit the men who'd leaped up into it with their burdens. It was effectively empty of air, and those inside it breathed from their suit tanks, which would supply them for no more than two hours. Yet its interior was not cold with the chill of outside, and the drum of air-snow bulged until the chief punctured its top; then there was a bubbling of liquid inside it. So the warmth of the jeep's interior gradually restored an atmosphere which was not yet breathable and utterly dry—but might presently grow thick enough to sustain life.

Moreau enlarged the opening in the air-snow drum, and gouged out masses of snow, which he zestfully mixed with magnesium marking-powder—which again he stuffed into the broken-off ends of signal rockets and sealed in. It was a singularly appropriate mixture for the end he had in view; this was the assembled explosive which had blasted a moon-cliff in the attempt to kill him and Kenmore earlier. This was the explosive used on the moon—magnesium powder in frozen air. The least spark would ignite the magnesium in its binder of solid air, melting enough air to permit a flame; then the whole mass would detonate in blinding, blue-white destructiveness. It had never been used in rockets before. The explosive-head rockets that Moreau prepared now would be the first missiles ever fired in anger on the moon.

But Arlene Gray was in the vehicle they must attack.

Kenmore had thought he knew the ultimate of futility, in the proposed abandonment of the moon and all efforts at space-voyaging. But now he felt a kind of helplessness which was literally maddening. The men he pursued were doomed, of course. They didn't know it, because nobody ever commits a crime unless he expects to dodge its consequences.

The men in the jeep undoubtedly believed that they had a perfect alibi. They could have been a part of the fugitive train away from the City in its first abandonment; and they might claim they'd gotten lost from it, had repaired their jeep themselves, and gotten back to the City to find the dome collapsed. They would anticipate that the site of the City would be visited by jeeps from the missile bases—which would have happened— and that they themselves would then be picked up and returned to Earth.

Their scheme was already shattered, but they'd involved Arlene in the consequences of their insanity. And this is the really ghastly part of all crime, thought Joe Kenmore: Criminals often injure others in destroying themselves.

Moreau, fashioning deadly weapons, said abruptly in the jeep, "Lezd must have grappled with whoever took Arlene. His air supply was turned off. We'd better remember that trick if we come to grips with these people."

There is an air-supply control at the neck of a vacuum suit. A man can change or stop the supply of air from his tanks, according to his work or his entrance into a dome or jeep, when he opens his faceplate. Somebody had contemplated hand-to-hand combat in a vacuum, and worked out a perfect tactic on the order of lunar judo; it would not have occurred to most men.

Mike Scandia ground his teeth. The chief and Haney stared out the ports, ahead. Kenmore drove fiercely. He couldn't imagine the destruction of the other jeep without destroying Arlene. The utmost to be hoped for was instant vengeance for her abduction—and that was futility. But he was filled with that rage which is in part pure horror at the wantonness of crime.

His jeep climbed the mountain pass with a reckless speed that nevertheless seemed to him a crawl. Miles above, needlesharp mountaintops groped skyward. They could see feeble earthlight about the jeep, at times. More often, now, there was stark blackness in which the lights of the jeep seemed to cast only pitiful small gleams.

The tracks curved on a mountainside; there was a bottomless chasm to one side. More than a mile distant, the jeep lights wavered over a sheer wall of darkened stone.

There was another curving climb, and the jeep's forward ports pointed toward a sunlit mountain flank. The sun already beat on that. It held no life, yet it looked tormented—tortured—as if it strained terribly to become alive, or at the least to give shelter to some small living thing.

But those who traveled glanced at it only once. Mostly, their eyes were upon the dust of the pass before them. There were trails here; if men abandoned the moon today, their footprints would remain until the sun burned dim.

At the moment, though, the fact was only important because if the escaping jeep turned aside, the pursuers would know instantly.

Kenmore .knew this path. He had traversed it more than once, and only recently he and Moreau had brought a freight-rocket's carcass back to the City, slung under a jeep with a dented wheel. Their quarry would have no actual destination; they would consider that they had wrecked the City. They fled into the mountains simply to wait until any chance survivors fled again— and this time, any such refugees would surely die, because their air tanks were empty.

They would expect lavish reward from some country's ruler, when they returned to Earth.

Joe Kenmore drove like a man demented or inspired. One needed at least three pairs of hands, and other remarkable gifts, to drive a moon-jeep properly. The faster one drove, the more urgent the need for more-than-human abilities. But Kenmore's jeep would gain on the fugitive vehicle, because its occupants would hardly expect pursuit in the panic and confusion they should have created. They might not bother to travel very far, but he meant to overtake them—fast!

And he did.

He saw the saboteur's jeep as a faint glittering in reflected dawnlight. There was a steep and narrow gateway where that light glowed down. The ungainly, faraway vehicle crawled into that partial, tinted brightness. It crawled on, out of it, between monstrous stony portals that could have opened upon nothingness itself.

Kenmore followed recklessly; he know what lay beyond. His jeep clanged and clattered through a narrow gorge. It came out, lurching crazily, to an area where earthlight seemed almost brilliant. Actually it was a weird twilight, and in it could be seen the whole of a small crater hardly a mile across, which had been formed in the wall of a greater one. A part of its own circular rampart had collapsed into an abyss to one side. There was what might be called a lunar glade—a roughly circular, almost level space. It ran some two thousand yards each way, with a mound in the center and starkly vertical cliffs everywhere but at the abyss' edge and where previous jeep trails ran close to it.

The fugitive jeep had turned aside into this place. It swung about neatly, and the motors of its four wheels stopped. Its occupants complacently set its brakes.

The pursuers could now hear the fugitives' exclamations in their helmet phones. They saw a flash of light and their complacency vanished. They felt a very faint jarring sensation, turned startled eyes and saw swirling mist and moondust mixed together, and a trail of crimson sparks leading arrow-straight away from it. At the end of that trail there was another jeep—Kenmore's—and it lurched and skittered grimly toward them. A rope ladder dangled from its airlock and a figure swung there. A second streak of crimson sparks flamed from his hands toward them.

The fugitives were at once incredulous and appalled. The driver slammed on the motors; the jeep shot ahead.

But it had been stopped without thought of possible emergencies. It had now to be turned again for flight— and one needs many hands to operate a jeep.

Apparently, the driver panicked. He swerved, and one wide wheel ran into a place where two great stones converged, in just the fashion needed to pinch a wheel to immobility. He tried to force them apart by ramming the wheel ahead; then he tried to back. He could not.

Kenmore saw a vacuum-suited figure drop out of the other jeep's lock and run frantically to the caught wheel. A second figure swarmed down to help.

The two of them tugged; they strained terribly, and the impossible happened. The wheel came free.

And the jeep moved. A jeep is necessarily designed to take great abuse and travel anywhere. This one had stalled, but apparently its driver had not set the control intended for just such situations. There was a control which would let the jeep move forward an adjustable distance, and then stop to let its crew return to it. It is extremely useful, but it was not in use now.

The jeep moved ahead, steadily, with increasing speed, toward the chasm on which the small-crater abutted.

One of the men from the jeep roared with fury. It could be heard in helmet phones in the pursuers' cabin. The other man screamed. They rushed after the moving machine. It outdistanced them, speeding toward the cliff that dropped to nothingness . . .

Kenmore flung his own jeep forward at its topmost speed, to try, quite hopelessly, to crash into and stop the runaway jeep. But Moreau fired rocket after rocket from the rope ladder, swearing hysterically because joltings spoiled his aim.

A rocket, though, smashed a front wheel when the runaway was no more than fifty yards from the chasm's edge. It slid thirty—striking sparks—before it came to rest. There the ground sloped visibly downward. But the jeep stopped.

Kenmore stopped beside it only instants later. He plunged for the airlock, but the chief was going through. When Kenmore touched ground, outside, the chief growled to the fugitives, "You give up if you want to, or take what's coming! But you'd better decide fast!"

He faced the two vacuum-suited figures a hundred yards away in the earthshine. One of them uttered unintelligible sounds. Moreau raised a signal rocket. "Shall I pot him?"

"Let me handle him!" panted Kenmore. "Let me . . ."

The nearer of the two fugitives rushed. He came in great leaps of forty and fifty feet, bellowing incoherently. Kenmore moved to meet him—and then saw something more satisfying than even tearing this other man apart with his hands.

"Let him go by!" he snapped.

His tone was so fierce that the others instinctively obeyed. Kenmore threw himself aside.

The one thing that hardly anyone raised on Earth can ever remember in times of stress is that gravity and momentum are different things. The bellowing man soared ferociously at the three avengers—four, when Mike got outside—with his hands outstretched to rend and tear. On Earth, he would have weighed about two hundred pounds, plus a hundred pounds or more for his vacuum suit. Here, man and suit together came to fifty pounds or less. But his forward rush still had the momentum it would have possessed on Earth.

The big man could not stop himself. He plunged through the opening that Kenmore's sidewise movement made for him, and found himself hurtling toward the cliff edge which the crippled jeep had narrowly escaped. He howled suddenly, tried to fling himself down onto the surface—to stop his progress at any cost. But an object falls only two and a half feet in the first second, on the moon. When this man essayed to throw himself down, his legs ceased to touch anything; but his body did not descend. He floated.

His body was two feet above the surface when it floated past the place where that surface sloped downward. He reached toward the stone, crying out in sudden shrillness, trying to seize something and stop himself.

He failed.

He floated out over the edge of the precipice, and began to curve very gently and very deliberately downward. He screamed. He screamed again.

Darkness swallowed him. He fell only five feet the following second, and not much more than ten, the third. But that particular precipice was thousands of feet high; the pit into which he dropped was thousands of feet deep. His voice came very terribly to them for what seemed centuries, screaming as he fell.

His voice stopped in the middle of a shriek. If the fall had not killed him directly, his suit was torn or his helmet crushed. There was no point at all in going after his body—even if it could have been done.

"And now," said Kenmore savagely, "that other one!"

The other armored figure had stopped. It wrung its space-gloved hands. Those who converged grimly upon it heard whimperings in their headphones.

"We'll keep you alive," said Kenmore, very coldly indeed, "until you get back to the City and tell what you know. But we don't promise more than that!"

They heard sobbings and slavering sounds. The second fugitive wailed and wailed; then he turned and fled blindly, weeping in his ultimate despair and terror.

Moreau squeezed a signal rocket. The flare of red light jerked from his hand even as Kenmore grated a command against it. But it was two late; the signal rocket flew in an almost mathematically straight line, leaving its trail of lurid sparks. The fugitive fled in the crazy, clumsy leaps low gravity imposes upon panic The rocket seemed to miss him—to be headed past him five feet away.

But then the flame inside it reached the explosive at its head. There was a flare of sun-bright white light. No sound; no impact; nothing but a, sudden flash of intolerable brilliance, and a spouting cloud of moondust—and the fugitive was gone.

"And now," said Kenmore, his throat dry once more, "we'll see If Arlene's all right."

She was.