City on the Moon

CHAPTER II. EMERGENCY LANDING

MOREAU crawled from where he had been flung by the gyrations of the jeep and stared at the dimly glowing instrument board, where Kenmore's eyes, also, were fixed. In the back of the jeep something clicked; there was a sighing as the air apparatus worked briefly. But the air pressure indicator did not stir; incredibly, the jeep was not losing its air to the vacuum outside. The plastic-glass-wool layers between inner and outer hulls had sealed off any cracks that may have come in the outside plating.

"That blast was fired too soon," said Joe Kenmore. 'If we'd had one wheel all the way over the rock we stopped at, we'd be buried now."

Moreau swallowed. "A wheel—is bent," he said thinly. "Do you think we can return to the City on it?"

"No use even looking," Kenmore told him. "Well run on it until it collapses—if it does. If the wheel falls off, that's that."

Moreau swallowed again. "That flash could have been a meteor. A meteor could have struck the top of the cliff . . ."

"Only it didn't," said Kenmore, savagely. "Vaporized iron wouldn't give a pure white light. That was magnesium marking-powder in liquid oxygen; we could make blasts like that!"

He had named the explosive which was at once the safest to ship by rocket—it is utterly harmless unless the ingredients are mixed—and the one whose constituents were normal supplies for Civilian City. Oxygen, of course, was for breathing; magnesium powder for a stalled jeep to spread over square miles of moondust by airjet, to mark its position so that it could be seen from space. No jet had thus been helped yet—before its crew was dead—but there was still hope.

"Then it was . . ." Moreau lapsed into infuriated syllables in his own language. If somebody had blasted down a cliff to destroy this jeep and murder its crew, some profanity was justified.

"That was meant to kill us, yes," said Kenmore. "It'll be interesting to find out who, besides us, was roaming around outside in a jeep. They'll be our would-be assassins."

He opened a drawer and took out the large-scale, space-photographs which were at once the maps and the surveys of this general area of the moon's surface.

After a time, Moreau said slowly, "Of course it could be that there are enemies of Civilian City who do not live in the City itself."

Kenmore said nothing. He clipped a photo to the map rack, where he could see it clearly, and began to edge the jeep out of its still-unpleasant situation. The gigantic stone directly before them was surrounded by debris; boulders of all possible dimensions encircled it. The jeep could ride, lurching violently, over the smallest of these; it could get around some, and a few could be crossed by straddling. The rest had to be avoided altogether, if possible.

"Our would-be murderers," said Moreau unhappily, "could be fellow citizens of the City who disapprove of the entire project of which they are a part. Or they could be from Earth, secretly landed and operating from a base somehow established without the radars having detected them. But there are still some who say that the United States does not enjoy having people of other nations on the moon. They say that your—ah—military men may contrive accidents to be discouraging."

"You don't believe that!" snapped Kenmore.

"No," admitted Moreau, "I do not. Nor do I believe in a secret base established by our enemies. But some will say that the United States works covertly to sabotage the project to which it admitted other countries. The proposition is foolish, but it is believed."

Kenmore grunted. There was a crisis on Earth, which it was hoped the moon project would conquer. There had been twenty-odd known civilizations on Earth in the past, he recalled, and everyone had reached a point of crisis and collapsed. China and Babylonia, Greece and Rome rose and fell—and they were at least as much civilizations as nations. Current, Western civilization was built on mechanical power rather than on human muscles; it had risen higher than any others. With power enough, men could make Earth a garden, and colonize the stars. Man not only can do this, Kenmore thought; man must do it, or this civilization will decay. Civilization must climb, or die!

But there was the question of power—its foundation. Coal and oil were limited; only atomic energy promised to let progress continue. Only atomic power involved radioactivity, and radioactivity meant danger. Already the background-count of splitting atoms in the atmosphere had multiplied eight times from the relatively trivial power-reactors in use. No matter how careful the screening, or how painstaking the disposal of atomic wastes, a steady trickle of atomic poison seeped into the air. There was a limit to the power that could be produced without destroying all life on Earth, and that limit had nearly been reached—without releasing enough power so that human civilization could continue to rise.

That was the reason for the Space Laboratory—to try to work out a new principle of releasing atomic energy. For the men in it, this was the most hazardous enterprise ever undertaken. The best brains of the human race worked feverishly amid atomic explosives more terrible than fusion bombs; every breath was peril; every heartbeat was likely to be their last. They did research too dangerous to attempt on Earth, or even on the moon; it had to be done forty thousand miles out in space, with the moon as a shield for Earth against what might happen in the Laboratory. Civilian City itself existed as a supply base for the Laboratory, as a place where men from the Lab might relax from time to time.

If the Laboratory succeeds, Kenmore thought, Earth will become a garden and the stars may be ours. It was the most splendid dream men had ever tried to realize. But because of the nature of human beings, the hope itself has enemies.

There are social systems which only work when men are half-starved and ignorant. There were nations where such systems still prevailed. Their ruling castes would be overthrown if prosperity reached the people; their teachings could not survive enlightenment; their governments would be destroyed by progress. And to such nations, the purpose of the City and the Space Laboratory was a real and present danger. So there were spies and saboteurs who could earn fabulous rewards by any action which hampered or overthrew the moon project.

The jeep went thumping away from the place where it should have been overwhelmed. The wheel would last— or it would not. It would be absurd for Kenmore and Moreau to try to confront those who had set off the blast in such tangled territory as this. The culprits couldn't be found; moreover, the jeep was not equipped for fighting. No jeep was. Strangely, no weapons were permitted on the moon, outside the hidden military bases. So the most ruthless of conflicts, Kenmore thought, for the highest stake ever fought for, has to be fought barehanded. Jeeps could not fight save by ramming each other, and men could not offer battle but only practice assassination.

Cliffs drew aside on either hand. The limping, pounding, vehicle arrived at a vast open plain which was a lunar crater—its farther wall invisible below the nearby horizon. The tracks of its former journey, to pick up a freight drone-rocket and bring it back, were vividly clear in the earthlight. Kenmore swung in close to the cliffs from which he had emerged.

"They'll expect us to make a wide sweep to dodge another ambush," he said curtly, "so we'll disappoint them—I hope. We'll head back direct, before they can set up another deadfall. I wish we could use radio. With a dented wheel . . ."

The wheel thumped and pounded horribly, but radio was impossible. The lack of atmosphere on the moon meant that there was no inonosphere to refract radio waves around the horizon. Radio worked, but for line-of-distances only. To communicate with Earth required microwaves to penetrate Earth's atmosphere, and a forty-foot reflector to direct them in a tight beam across two hundred thirty-six thousand miles of emptiness. Civilian City was barely forty miles away, but it was out of radio range on the moon.

Yet Kenmore threw on the communicator switch. A tinny voice spoke, and he stiffened. Then he heard the words:

"Calling Civilian City! Calling Civilian City! We have no beam! Come in, Civilian City!"

Moreau's mouth dropped open.

"I thought," said Kenmore, "that our friends back yonder might fake a distress call, hoping that we would be fools enough to answer. Then they could get a directional beam on us and guess how we'd try to get back."

The speaker hummed and hummed. The tinny voice cried:

"Calling Civilian City! Calling Civilian City! We're coming in! We have to! Give us a beam, Civilian City! This is emergency! We've got to have a beam! Come in! Come in!"

It could be nothing but the Earth-rocket—the passenger-carrying ship which made two trips each Earth-month. The rocket brought personnel and supplies, and carried back voluminous reports of scientific observations that were actually by-products of the real space project. The really essential work went on out at the Space Laboratory beyond farside. The Earth-rocket had left Earth six days before, and blasted up to the Space Platform— the artificial satellite circling Earth, which was mankind's first toe hold upon emptiness—and there had refueled for a second blast-out. For something over four days it had been in free fall toward the moon, its rockets silent. But now the rockets flamed, and the ship needed a directional beam to land by—because nearly all the human activities on the moon took place in darkness.

Kenmore touched a button, and the jeep's port-shutters rolled back. He and Moreau could look straight up through the observation-blister above the cabin. There were the stars overhead, and the Earth a brilliant, frightening object in the sky. It was of a tawny-greenish shade, with distorted continents visible upon it, and there was a polar icecap to be seen. Round about it shone the stars, and everywhere that a glimmer of light could be, it was. The stars were of all the colors that light could be.

But close by the edge of Earth's dazzling face, there was a moving, blue-white flame—rocket fumes, illuminated by the hellfire that produced them. The rocket was already deep in the moon's shadow overhead. It might be five hundred miles up, or two hundred, or one; it looked like a bright and nearby nebula moving among the stars.

Kenmore stared up at it. The misty, corona-like brightness drifted slowly sidewise. It would be decelerating at an angle to the line between Earth and moon. Its pilot was matching lateral velocity with the moon's surface by tilting his ship. Lunar gravity was drawing the ship down; presently, giant braking rockets must be fired to check its fall completely, and land it very, very gently somewhere within a mile of the conical dust-heaps which were Civilian City. The inhabitants of the City should have heard these calls from space; they should be rejoicing. Some of them should have donned vacuum suits to go out into the frigid, airless night to watch the rocket come to the surface. They might do grotesque dances of welcome in the small gravity and the earthshine.

The tinny voice cracked suddenly, as if whoever spoke was nerve-racked past endurance:

"Calling Civilian City! Calling Civilian City! Listen, down there! This is the Earth rocket! We're coming in! We can't help it! We've got three passengers and two of them are women! Give us a beam to land by! Answer us! Answer!"

Moreau said uneasily, "Could there be sabotage of the beam? And why do they bring women to the moon? Nothing could be more insane!"

The voice from the speaker was abruptly hysterical: "You fools!" it cried frantically. "Give us a beam! We've got to land! Come in, Civilian City! We've got Cecile Ducros on board, and a girl named Arlene Gray—" Joe Kenmore uttered a sound like a roar. He shook clenched fists at the sky. There was a girl he was going to marry, if he ever got back to Earth. Her name was Arlene Gray, and her father was associated with the Space Laboratory Project.

He jammed on the power and sent the moon-jeep leaping crazily across the crater's nearly level floor. It was useless, of course; Civilian City was forty miles away. On such tumbled surface as he had to cover, ten miles an hour was high speed. He might double it by sufficiently reckless driving, if the damaged wheel held up; but even so, he could not reach Civilian City in less than two hours. The rocket would have to come down in twenty minutes at most; perhaps ten. Possibly it must touch down somewhere even sooner . . .

The moon-jeep bumped crazily toward another route that would lead to the City. It threw up waves of powdery, slow-falling dust from the sides of its gigantic wheels, one of which was no longer round.

They heard the voice from the sky three times more, frantically calling for a landing-beam to guide it. The third time, the voice was very faint; the rocket was passing beyond the horizon.

The jeep sped on like a mad thing. Inside there were clankings and thumpings and the soft sighing sound of its engines. But outside, there was no sound at all.