City on the Moon

CHAPTER XVIII. THURSTON'S REACTION

IT SEEMED that all the future was cut and dried, and that there were to be no surprises. Arlene Gray was alive and unharmed, which was reason for rejoicing. But the enterprise, which—by Joe Kenmore's lights—meant a magnificent future for mankind seemed to be ended. No cause for joy here.

There was, to be sure, the fact that Major Gray had told Kenmore not to think too much in such terms, and that a Navy ship was heading for a lunar missile base. But this did not seem to matter. Anyhow, it would arrive after sunrise—when travel was not practical.

Meanwhile the matter of continued existence had to be handled, even though its purpose was frustrated. There was the return of the jeeps in which the inhabitants of the City had fled—a long time ago, it seemed now. They came in one by one, their air tanks refilled by the military, and their needed repairs made by missile-base personnel. When they learned of the destruction of the Laboratory, some of the returned men were visibly jubilant. Now they could return to Earth—not by their own fault—and they would never leave it again.

But some of them were aggressively on the defensive. They had run away, while Kenmore and others had met the emergency they fled from; so the fugitives did not show up well. They were insistently suspicious of Kenmore's behavior. Some muttered darkly that only he and the chief and Moreau really knew how the Laboratory came to be destroyed, and they might have reason not to tell the truth.

There was a time, indeed, when Kenmore and the others were considered highly doubtful characters. They'd known exactly what to do in the leaking City. How would they know how to meet an emergency like that unless they'd caused it?

Cecile Ducros stopped those murmurings by the add comment that she, at least, would not be alive but for Kenmore. She added, "Eet ees steel posseebeel for me to broadcast to Earth on the behavior of those who ran away, abandoning the City and the landing-beam apparatus." She should have died in a crash landing, because of their desertion; and certainly she'd have died afterward but for Kenmore's search for her in a jeep.

At this point, Joe Kenmore was a very admirable person again, because nobody wanted to offend Cecile. The inhabitants of Civilian City wanted to be presented on her next broadcast, and praised to viewers on three continents. They worked feverishly to attain this end, pestering Arlene, Lezd, and Cecile herself for a promise of praise as heroes. It followed, obviously, that they interfered a great deal with Arlene's natural desire to be with Kenmore in privacy.

She complained ruefully about the persecution, and he told her dourly that there'd be at least two weeks of it to come. It would be so long before the Earthship was ordered to take off—after sunset—to begin the evacuation of the City. Arlene would be among the first to go; he'd see to that. For himself, he foresaw a long period of uselessness—with further uselessness awaiting him on Earth until he had an entirely new plan for his and Arlene's future worked out. He did not think to mention the Navy ship on the way out, coming to the moon to land at a missile base. It seemed to have nothing at all to do with him.

Then he grudgingly gave of his time to a highly official inquiry into the sabotage of the City. The conclusion-accurate enough—was that all the sabotage so far experienced could have been made by the men who'd made the last attack, had carried off Arlene and had been destroyed in the mountains by their pursuers. It was considered that they'd done most of it, anyhow.

But Joe Kenmore hardly cared. He was not even interested when Mike Scandia, Moreau, the chief, and Haney enthusiastically volunteered to go out and make a movie of a solar-power mine for the next broadcast. The mines were interesting, but unimportant. A solar mirror concentrated blistering, unshielded sunshine to a focus the temperature of which was comparable to that of the sun itself. Turned on a moon-cliff, the focused sunlight would melt the most refractory stone to lava. Turned on a vein of metal ore, it not only smelted but could boil metal away as steam. But, controlled properly, it brought trickles of pure liquid metal pouring down into a waiting mold.

The mining process was the subject of the broadcast. Cecile, of course, appeared on the television screen to be at the mine itself. She explained vividly the way one traveled in daylight—when one must. One left the City in a jeep which ran swiftly through furnace heat to a place of shadow, where the jeep cooled off. Then another quick rush through the inferno which was the moon's surface in sunshine, and so to the mine itself. And the mine was merely a great sun-mirror beside a cliff, with a dust-covered sun-shelter for the jeep and those who operated the mirror.

It was an effective show. Cecile described the danger and the baking desolation with contagious shudders. She made it very clear why men were nocturnal on the moon. One could heat a vacuum suit against cold, but there was no way to cool it so that a man could live long in the sun.

But the City, itself, disapproved of the show. The returned refugees considered that she should introduce them all, one by one, to her watching audience on three continents on Earth.

Kenmore didn't even watch the production; he was sunk in gloom, dangerously close to apathy. When word came that the Navy ship had landed—the one that Major Gray had spoken of—he felt.no elation. Even the news that a jeep had been especially equipped with heat reflectors and refrigeration, to try to make a journey in daylight to Civilian City, did not arouse his interest.

The chief and Moreau came to him in some excitement. After the broadcast, they'd gone back to the solar mine. They had a wild idea of casting a rocket-ship in metal smelted on the moon—running the metal straight from the vein into a mold. It was to be its own cargo. The idea was practical enough in itself, but Kenmore saw the problem of getting such a vessel back to Earth. It could be lifted past the neutral point easily enough-past the point where the Earth's and the moon's gravities cancel each other. Then it would fall to the Earth of its own weight. But landing it . . .

He told Arlene about it eventually, when, between sleep periods, she tried to arouse him from his depression.

"It's not a bad trick," he admitted. "They say they're going to see if they can cast a ship, and then figure out a way to land it. That's the problem, of course. It costs as much fuel to land a ship as to take it off. They can let drone-rockets smash on the moon, here, and it's all right. They hit the mares, and are spotted by radar, then a jeep goes out and picks them up. But that couldn't be done on Earth. You couldn't safely drop drone-ships, like meteors, anywhere on Earth—unless you picked the polar icecaps. But it takes three tons of fuel to land one ton of ship gently, and that three tons has to be brought up here—which is as far as ten times around the equator. The fuel to land a ship would cost more than any ship was worth in money, no matter what it was made of."

Arlene wanted to keep him talking—no matter what the subject—rather than brood as he'd been doing. She said interestedly, "Why not drop them on the icecaps? Couldn't they use helicopters instead of jeeps to pick them up?"

"Not in the Arctic," said Kenmore. "That's mostly ocean, and they'd smash through the ice and sink. On Antarctica, the weather's impossible; they melt into the snow and become invisible, anyhow."

"There must be some way," Arlene insisted, though she did not care about the problem at all. "The Sahara?"

"They'd bury themselves in sand . . . Hello!" Kenmore blinked, and said in a surprised voice, "There are places where the ocean is miles deep. A drone could be designed— Look! They could make drones like supersonic ships on Earth! Drop them into the ocean for their fall to be checked, and have them fixed so they'd float back up to the surface . . . They could broadcast their position . . . I've got to see about this!"

He showed animation for the first time in a long while, and Arlene seemed fascinated as he explored new angles of the idea. She went with him to the colony computer and exclaimed admiringly at the results he got. Metal, mined and cast on the moon, could be hauled up to the place where it would begin to fall to Earth-some metals, anyhow. Then mortars turned up as possibly more efficient than rockets for firings in a vacuum. With no air resistance to allow for . . .

He was deep in still further complexities when Moreau and the chief, Haney, and Mike Scandia—Mike was lately recruited into the scheme—came back from a hop-skip-and-jump journey to the solar-heat mine.

We can do it," Moreau miserably. "We can make the ship. But when we began to compute the cost of landing it, we saw that it was idiocy. No ship could pay for its fuel."

"No?" asked Kenmore. "Look at these figures!"

He leaned back, and Arlene was infinitely relieved. She sat very still as Moreau went over the computer tape, exclaimed excitedly, and then the others began to argue about the drone-ship design, talking all at once and tending to outshout each other in their enthusiasm. The chief knew where there was cobalt in quantity. Haney knew of stannous ore. There was a place where silver was to be found, and even more precious metals...

And there were laws—drawn up for window dressing— by which private individuals could claim minerals if quite impossibly they could make use of them. The four companions went garrulously off to comply with formalities nobody had ever bothered with before. And then Kenmore said grimly:

"It'll work. And it's such a natural, for publicity, that there'll be plenty of capital available. So I probably have a job for the future, helping run the operations of Lunar Mines and Metals, Incorporated. Swell, eh?"

But his eyes were devoid of happiness. Arlene patted his hand. It wasn't her fault, but she was sorry that he was disappointed in the future he'd planned.

It was a remarkable coincidence that the specially shielded, refrigerated jeep arrived at Civilian City within an hour. Its journey was a great achievement. It had huge reflectors to cast the heat of the sun away from it. It was even shielded from heat in the moondust over which it rolled. It had refrigeration on a large scale. But even so, it had stopped often to cool off. It brought, however, a civilian named Thurston.

He had come to talk to Joe Kenmore. He was a weedy sort of man and still unaccustomed to moon-gravity. But he spoke with a dry precision.

"Out at the Laboratory," he told Kenmore flatly, "they made a mistake. The poor devils were under a killing strain, and it killed them. D'you know how they worked? Like men in wartime defusing shells and bombs and mines. They'd report they were going to try something, and then try it. If it didn't blow them up, they'd say so, and then report what they were going to try next. Not very soothing as a way of life for months on end."

"That's obvious," agreed Kenmore, "considering what happened."

"They'd been developing a focused, accelerated beam of neutrons," Thurston observed. He added, "I can tell you this, because you already know too much. They could focus the beam absolutely, and accelerate the neutrons to any degree. They found that, at low power, the beam was so dense that it would break down molecules. Nice work in itself! Then they found that with even tighter focus and higher acceleration they could break the heavier atoms—bismuth and up. The power gain was terrific. They had controlled atomic fission. They reported that."

Kenmore said ironically, "Very useful!"

He meant, of course, that the whole reason for the City and the Space Laboratory was that there was a limit to the amount of atomic fission that could be done on Earth. It poisoned the air. There was a time when controlled atomic fission would have seemed occasion for delirious joy. It was so no longer.

But Thurston said mildly, "Quite useful. You see, with a dense enough beam, the released energy couldn't backfire. The release was directional."

Kenmore jumped. Controlled atomic fission with the energy released directionally would solve many problems. All the released energy could be captured and used. All of it! And in space . . .

"So we made a couple of atomic rockets to try it out," said Thurston. "The Lab was to test them. While they waited for the rockets to be made, they started to figure what would happen if the neutron beam hit lighter elements at the speed needed to break them.

"But they'd been under a killing strain. It was inhuman. It was intolerable to work under the strain they were under! So when they came up with figures stating that such a beam would start a chain reaction, one which would destroy the universe—why, they couldn't weigh it calmly. It was an answer to end all research, and they were at the breaking point. So they believed it. They couldn't help themselves!"

"I knew most of this," said Kenmore. "Go on!"

"But they happened to be wrong," Thurston told him.

"They didn't take the structure of neutrons into consideration. They forgot. So I've brought up the rockets. They may detonate, though I don't think so. But I know they won't start a chain reaction. Since the Lab's gone, I want to mount them in the rocket racks of the ship you've got here. The Earthship. Run controls inside, and mount them along with standard rockets. Use the standard ones to get aloft and well out in space—and turn on the reaction that the men in the Lab thought would set off the cosmos. It won't do that Will you pilot the ship?"

Kenmore said hungrily, "What do you think I am? When de we start?"

It would be a matter of hours to clamp on the atomic rockets and install the complex controls inside the ship. But the test had to be made in a civilian vessel. The purpose of the City and the Laboratory had to be accomplished by civilians, or there would be anguish and accusations. If the Laboratory had been destroyed, and its work completed by the military—why, much of the world would accuse the Americans of murdering the geniuses who had achieved so much. So it was necessary, as a matter of politics, to complete the job through the international organization of the moon.

Kenmore found Arlene while missile-base technicians went to work on the Earthship. She smiled hopefully at him. "Anything—"

He picked her up and hugged hr. He swung her as extravagantly as a girl can be swung only on the moon. He babbled almost incoherently. Arlene freed herself.

"This is all very nice," she said breathlessly, "but what's happened?"

He managed to control himself. He told her. She stared. Then Cecile Ducros snapped, "My next broadcast! A magneeficent broadcast. Thees I must tell about!

Arlene, you shall go weeth Kenmore and tell me of eet, and the next broadcast weel be from witheen the returned sheep and I weel tell my listeners of the triumph of mankind!"

Kenmore grinned at Arlene. "Would you like to go along?"

"You're going, aren't you?"

There was no concourse of people to watch the Earthship take off. It was midmorning on the moon—the sun was four days high—and the surface of the mare was already hotter than boiling water. The sunlight itself had the virulence of the glare of an open furnace door. It could have been cooked by. So there was only the jeep from the missile base nearby, with its enormous heat reflectors looking like the headdress of a nursing nun, only forty-odd feet high and of glittering silver. The missile-base men withdrew into their jeep, and Thurston ascended the sun-heated ladder rungs to the ship's airlock. He went in.

Mike Scandia said grandly, via talkie in the shadow under the jeep, "Arlene, I gave you a bouquet once, when things looked pretty bad. Now I'm giving you another one, when things look pretty good for the Lunar Mining and Metals Corporation as soon as you get back. From the Board of Directors!"

In the shadow-space beneath the reflectors there were only harsh reflections of the incandescence outside. But Mike held out something in his mittened hand. And it was incredible. Where the moon flowers Arlene had seen before were silver, these were gold. They were infinitely intricate, of impossible delicacy, of breathtaking beauty. Mike held out a bouquet of slender stalks and branching leaves. They were inextricably intertwined. They had the seeming fragility of maidenhair fern, but they were golden, brightly shining—such things as would be dreamed of in fairy tales as suitable christening gifts for a princess.

Arlene stared at them. "Oh, beautiful! But, Mike—don't tell me they'll vanish!"

She almost wailed it, and the chief's chuckle came into the helmet phones.

"We argued about those moon flowers," he said comfortably. "They had to be mercury, of course. Mercury vapor made by sunshine of some kind of ore, condensing in shadow where they couldn't be just liquid because it was too cold. They had to be frost. Mercury frost. Snowflakes of mercury. Naturally they'd vanish when anybody came near to warm 'em! So Mike and Haney and me, we were out at the solar-heat mine, and we boiled some gold in front of a shadow-place to make sure. It couldn't happen except in low gravity but— pretty, ain't they?"

"They're lovely!" said Arlene, bright-eyed. "Lovely." "Use 'em," said the chief, "for a bridal bouquet when you and Joe get hitched up."

He stood back. He and Haney and Mike and Moreau watched from the shadow of the jeep as Arlene climbed to the airlock with Kenmore close behind her.

The jeep drew back and the four men trudged beneath it. Presently it stopped and they stared back at the tall Earthship, shining silver in a landscape of fire, with a star-speckled sky of purest black above it.

The Earthship spurted flame. It rose swiftly for the stars.

A long, long time later, Joe Kenmore said evenly, "You know how to do it, Arlene."

She nodded, and put her hand on his. The ship floated free, pointed away from both Earth and moon. There was no sound inside it. Thurston, new from Earth, watched composedly as Kenmore's and Arlene's hands hovered over the control which would start atomic rockets to low-power firing outside the hull.

"Five," said Kenmore. "Four. Three. Two. One. Fire!" Arlene pressed down on Kenmore's hand. There was a gentle rumbling, which ceased. There was a feeling of weight. Gentle weight. Kenmore pressed harder. The weight increased. He lifted his hand. It lessened. He pressed again, and the Earthship leaped ahead like a mettlesome horse . . .

Kenmore nodded, awed in spite of himself.

"It works," he said to Thurston. He sounded incredibly calm. "How much fuel is there?"

"A hundred hours at one gravity," said Thurston mildly. "Of course these are small rockets. We'll have bigger ones."

"We could go to Mars and back with these alone," said Kenmore very quietly. "Someday, now, we will reach the stars!"

Arlene said confidently, "Of course!"