City on the Moon

CHAPTER III. DESERTED CITY

THE moon is a small world, its mountains tall. Therefore, when the moon-jeep came hurtling out of the last obstacle to sight, and the City was in line-of-sight below, the jeep was very high up indeed. The Apennines about it reached clutching, rocky fingers toward the stars, a full twenty thousand feet above the frozen lava sea that was the Mare Imbrium. In the pass, the jeep was three miles higher than the City. The vast, gently undulating mare reached out to a horizon which was no more than the place where stars began to shine. It was a seemingly limitless gray nothing—gray in the earthlight close below, but fading to utter blackness in the distance.

But there was no light where the City should be. Far, far out, Kenmore and Moreau could see a tiny winking splinter of brightness, but it was not the City.

"Call the City," panted Joe Kenmore. "Find out if the Earth-rocket got down safely!"

Moreau called; there was no answer. Their radio should reach the City; he called again, and again. There was no reply at all. The winking light far out on the mare could have answered, perhaps; but it disappeared as the jeep went hurtling down the tread-marked trail.

Sweat stood out on Kenmore's face as the radio remained obstinately silent. He could not see the City itself, of course. It was only three great dust-heaps, invisible a mile away. But there should be a light atop it; there should be glaring lights about the surfaced Earth-rocket as its cargo was unloaded and taken into the City's airlocks. There should be jeeps carrying burdens, and the chest lights of vacuum-suited figures moving about. But there wasn't.

"Stop calling!" snapped Kenmore, when they were two-thirds of the way down the pass. "Something's happened!"

Moreau clicked off the transmitter. The jeep plunged down the carefully surveyed way, marked by the wheels of other jeeps on other journeys through these mountains. There were places where sheer drops of thousands of feet awaited the incautious. There was a long, crazily sloping hillside which ended abruptly; one could survive the descent only if he passed between two jagged monoliths on which the top-surfacing of moondust had the ironic look of snow.

They reached the level, frozen sea of stone, where jeep trails in the dust showed the way. The twenty-foot wheels of the vehicle rolled erratically—one of them thumped violently—as Kenmore drove downward through the night.

They reached the great dust-heaps which were the City, and still there were no lights—no light atop the dome, none at the airlock. No jeeps even stood outside the City. There was nothing at all to indicate normal occupancy.

And there was no Earth-rocket.

Kenmore braked a hundred yards from the tunnel-like entrance to the. main dome's airlock. With Arlene Gray on his mind, he sweated, raged, and was numb with horror all at once. But Moreau said encouragingly, "If there had been true disaster, the domes would have collapsed. They have not."

True—the domes were intact, their conical shapes undisturbed. Moondust has a very small angle of repose, and if the inner bubble had collapsed, the cone itself would show the fact. Even filled with uneasiness for Arlene, Kenmore realized that nothing so drastic as complete destruction had come upon Civilian City.

He struggled into his vacuum suit, but Moreau was ready first. He crowded into the jeep's small airlock, and there was the clanking of the inner door and the thudding of the pump. Then the sound which was the opening of the outer door. Kenmore saw the jeep-lights' glare upon the dusty sea-surface, and on the square metal opening of the City's lock, and on upward-sloping flanks of impalpable gray dust. Moreau's shadow appeared, multiplied by the number of the lights. It was a group of shadows fanning out from his feet, all moving in jerky but precise imitation of each other.

Kenmore crawled into the lock. The pump began to thud, but he couldn't wait; he released the outer door, and it opened explosively. The air inside burst out, to be whipped away to nothingness. Kenmore swung down the rope ladder.

Moreau's voice—calm as usual—came in the helmet phone. "The lock-door is open. There are many footprints, all going out."

Kenmore moved to see. The immense loneliness a man feels in a vacuum suit on the moon was justified in a new fashion, now. To Joe, it was mingled with terror because of Arlene. Civilian City rose from the plain of the Mare Imbrium, some three miles from the foot of the Apennine range. And the lunar Apennines are spectacular. Now, in the curious reflected light from Earth, they looked like giant fingers reaching imploringly toward the sky. They were a jagged, tumultuous wall against the senselessly cheerful sky of stars. Earth shone brightly, impartially, upon them and upon the frozen sea. The Mare Imbrium was ever-so-gently less than perfectly flat; it had a bloom, a coating, which was a thin layer of moondust. The earthlight served to emphasize a man's loneliness on a world where men did not belong.

Kenmore reached the airlock, and Moreau pointed to more footprints. The powdered surface showed them clearly. There were many; too many. All moved outward.

The two went in and Moreau switched on the chest lights of his armor. He pressed the stud that should have closed the outer door; nothing happened.

Without a word, they hauled it shut by hand. Again Moreau struck the knob that should have opened the inner door; again nothing happened. Kenmore worked the manual handle—raging—and presently it yielded; there was a puffing of air. They entered the inner of the dome's double locks and closed the outer door. They opened the inner—and found themselves in absolute blackness. They were in the central air-space of the main dome of Civilian City, and no light glowed anywhere, save for those on the two vacuum suits; it was unthinkable.

The bubble under the dust-cone was very large. The floor was flat, of course. The air-space was a half-globe, three hundred feet across and a hundred and fifty high. It was circular, and around its rim were the ceilingless cubicles which provided office space and laboratory space and game areas, as well as merely furnishing arrangements for privacy, which was as needful as anything else. In the center were the Earth plants, which kept the air from smelling flat and stale, regulated humidity, and had some share in removing C0₂

But the room was dark. The plants had closed their blossoms, as if at night; their leaves drooped.

Kenmore swung around to look at a pressure gauge. There were a dozen about, each with its gong to give alarm if the pressure dropped a single ounce. The needles were far, far over into the red area, which meant that vacuum suits must be worn within the dome. The pressure was five pounds, when normal was fourteen point seven. Kenmore tapped one instrument and the needle fell to indicate four point eight pounds. The temperature was forty-eight degrees. The City had not cooled unduly. He swallowed.

"Don't open your helmet," he warned Moreau by helmet phone. "The air hasn't gone, but it's going." Then he added, "See if anybody's dead."

But a glance at the rack for vacuum suits answered him. There had been a suit for everyone in the City, plus spares for normal outside activities. The usefulness of a vacuum suit which contained enough air for only two hours, could be doubted in a case like this. If there was a complete loss of air from the City, death would be inevitable. But such suits were handy for lesser emergencies, and they had been used. Everybody in the City had donned them and gone out.

Kenmore went quickly to the communications office, to the regular beam communicator to Earth. It was turned on, but no tubes glowed; no dial registered any output. It was dead.

"We'll try the other buildings," he said. "We want to know about the Earthship, too! It was coming in. What happened to it?"

Arlene Gray was on that ship. She shouldn't have been, Joe thought; no girl should come to the moon with the City's present state of technical equipment, or in the state of affairs among its inhabitants.

The lessened weight was nerve-racking; the constant confinement was frightening. But to go out into the outside emptiness was terror-inspiring. Neuroses would flourish on the moon in any case, but currently things were worse than merely neurotic. Rumors of the turmoil had gotten back to Earth, undoubtedly. So—the intent was perfectly obvious—Cecile Ducros had come on the lavishly publicized Earthship. She was the most popular television personality on at least three continents. Her coming was a public-relations stunt to glamorize the entire project of a colony on the moon. Yet . . .

What had happened to the Earthship? At least two hours ago, it had expected to surface immediately. The rocket must be down by now—but where? It couldn't have stayed aloft; it didn't have enough fuel. It couldn't have gone back to Earth; it depended on extra rockets brought up by freight missiles. But the ship would have had no help in getting down anywhere. It didn't have a radar beam to guide it to a small, nearby area from which Civilian City could be reached on foot in vacuum suits.

And if it hadn't landed properly, then the ship had crashed in the Apennines. That mountain range is said to have the most spectacular scenery of any place on Earth or moon. But to try to find a crashed spacecraft among its thousands of peaks and multiple thousands of square miles . . .

Kenmore trembled, but he went hurriedly through the locks that led to the power dome, which was a second mound of moondust with a similar balloon inside. Here was the power equipment, the machine shops, and the primary generators. There were growing plants here, too, to help condition the air. But he found no light. This was as large as the main dome, and its machines glittered eerily in the inadequate light from the chest lamps of the two vacuum suits.

The air pressure here was three point two pounds, the temperature was thirty-eight. This dome had lost air faster than the main dome. The generator switches were off; somebody had carefully shut down everything before the City was abandoned. The huge tanks of reserve fuel were intact. Normally, of course, the City's power came from mercury boilers outside. During the day, sunlight provided power without limit.

Moreau said mildly, "If someone does not run the generators, the boilers will pop off and the mercury will be lost when the sun rises."

But sunrise was an Earth-week off. Kenmore did not even think about it; he made incoherent noises of rage and anguish. He led the way frantically to the locks to the air-plant dome. Any part of the City could be shut off from any other. Naturally!

There was seven pounds pressure in the air dome, the temperature sixty degrees. The jungle-like masses of vegetation in the hydroponic tanks glittered in the lights from the two men's suits. There were towering racks of tanks, from which leaves extruded themselves extravagantly. The faceplates of their helmets tended to mist from the humidity here, thin as the air was. But one could survive in this dome without a vacuum suit. It would be like a very high mountain, but the low gravity would help. The demand of one's body for oxygen would be less; one could even be comfortable.

"I shall open my helmet," said Moreau's voice in the helmet phones. "Watch me, Joe."

He opened his faceplate; then his expression became one of pure astonishment. "One lives here! I hear snoring!"

He went scurrying through the passages between the low-level hydroponic troughs. Kenmore followed quickly.

There was a single, hot-bright light. Against the side wall, an emergency lamp glowed in the vast darkness of the air dome. A huge, whiskered man snored loudly on a bunk by the lamp. Kenmore snapped open his own faceplate as Moreau kicked the bunk. "Wake up!" he snapped. "What's happened? Where are the people?"

Kenmore panted, "The Earthship! It was coming in! What happened to it?"

The whiskered man's eyes opened in the middle of a snore. He regarded them blankly; then he beamed. "You come, eh? Kahk vasha zdarovya! I waited for you. Pitkin fears nothing—not even Americans!" He stood up. "All the rest were frightened when the air began to go. The Director went gray with terror. He opened the secret instructions and left in the first jeep. But I knew the Americans would come before the City was destroyed. So I waited. Pitkin fears nothing!"

"What happened to the City?" demanded Moreau. "The Earthship! The rocket!" panted Kenmore. Pitkin waved a large hand. "The City leaked. That is all. Pressure began to drop two days ago. In all three domes at once. The Director was frightened. He tried to call Earth for orders, but there was no radio. He cried that there was sabotage—he was clever, eh?" Pitkin winked elaborately. "He knew the Americans were driving everybody out, so he led them all, in jeeps, to a missile base for safety. He had written instructions, and he was terrified, but he went. And all the others followed. All but Pitkin!"

"But the rocket!" cried Kenmore. "The rocket from Earth! Where did it land?"

Pitkin shrugged until his shoulders almost touched his ears. He looked at a clock and said placidly, "I have slept twelve hours. I know nothing of the rocket. But I know the Americans, eh? I knew you would come!"

Kenmore said fiercely to Moreau, "I'm going to hunt for it! It was coming down, and surely it had distance radar. Surely the skipper wouldn't be an idiot who couldn't tell the difference between the Apennines and the Mare Imbrium! I'll circle . . ."

He made for the airlock. Moreau said thoughtfully, "You found the leaks in this dome, Pitkin? You must have, to risk sleeping. What sort of leaks?"

"Razor slashes," said Pitkin blandly, "in the plastic wall behind a water tank, and elsewhere. The air went out. There were those who said that cosmic rays had rotted the plastic. But I—I am Pitkin! I guessed!" He winked again, wisely. "Americans do not wish any but Americans on the moon, eh? They drive them out of the City, eh? But I—I, Pitkin, become an American!"

Moreau said shortly, " Pitkin, you are a fool! We go to hunt for the rocket. If you can bring up the air pressure in this dome, it would be well to do it. We—ah—we will probably be back."

He ran after Kenmore—not Earth-fashion, but in the only way that one can travel fast in low gravity. He seemed to glide across the floor, almost as if he were on skates.

He went through the lock, into the main dome, and caught up with Kenmore in time to share the main lock with him.

In the lock, Moreau said wryly into his helmet phone, "Truly, Joe, the inhabitants of Luna are lunatics! Somebody sabotaged the City! It is madness!"

Kenmore did not answer; he acted as if he did not hear. He moved across the powdery-coated sea to the jeep, and swung up the ladder.

He opened the outer lock-door and paused. "I remember something," he said with an air of great calm and reasonableness. "As we came down the pass I saw a light out on the mare. It was winking. It could have been a jeep coming to the City, but a jeep should have gotten here by now. I'm going to see if it could possibly be the rocket."

"Excellent," said Moreau gravely. "It is most promising!"