City on the Moon

CHAPTER VI. THE SHUTTLE

He WENT back to the air dome, where Pitkin beamed amiably at the still-storming Cecile. Arlene's eyes turned to him.

"I'm going out to look around," he told her. "And I've got to check on the jeep. You'd better get some rest." She shook her head. "I couldn't! I'm not used to being on the moon, Joe. I don't want to sleep yet! Besides, there was nothing to do in the ship coming up. We coasted for days! I'm rested!"

"Top your suit tank, then," he told her curtly.

He showed her how to check the contents of her vacuum-suit's air tanks. He checked and topped his own. They went out.

There was a truly deadly tranquility in the night outside. In a sense it was not really night; the vast round disk of Earth with its seas and icecaps filled a vast amount of the sky, and its light was bright. Since it was midnight on the moon, the Earth was necessarily full, and its reflected light on the peaks and sea was at least equal to twilight at home. There was utter stillness everywhere. Nothing moved; nothing made a sound. In a vacuum suit, of course, one could hear one's own breathing, and the earphones brought the breathing of anybody else whose talkie was turned on. One heard one's crunching footfalls on the moondust. But the silence and the stillness beyond that was appalling.

Kenmore pointed. "The generators are working again," he told Arlene, "so there's a light at the top of the City. Not full brightness yet, though. There'll be other lights presently, there and at the lock. You mustn't ever go out of sight of the City under any circumstances! Stay close to me.

She did not need to answer; she moved closer. The loneliness of the landscape made separation a frightening idea. At midnight on the moon, the ground had been radiating its heat to empty space for all of a hundred and fifty hours. And empty space is cold! The stone underfoot was actually colder than liquid air. Earthshine seemed bright, but it yielded no appreciable heat. And yet it was much more practical to move about on the moon in such frigidity than to try to perform any action out of shelter in the day. A suit could be kept heated at the temperature about them now, but it wasn't practical to try to cool a vacuum suit in lunar sunshine.

Joe Kenmore walked toward the moon-jeep with its battered, misshapen wheel. The vehicle's body glittered mirror-bright in the light from Earth. Without air, there could be no rust; even aluminum, polished in the outside emptiness, stayed bright as a silver mirror. And when men in vacuum suits turned solar mirrors on ore veins in the hillsides, and smelted out metal from its place, the white-hot stuff ran down and into waiting molds without a trace of dross. Even iron was a glittering white metal, when vacuum-cast.

But now, Kenmore restlessly inspected the jeep. The drone freight-rocket it had brought in still hung beneath it. The drone was a forty-foot cylinder which had been flung up from Earth and captured at the Space Platform, refitted there with rockets, and aimed and fired toward the moon. There were radar spotter-posts to watch it and mark its fall. It was much more efficient to let drone-rockets fall where they would, and then bring them into the City, than to try to guide the drones to a target space. This rocket might hold food, or fuel, or machinery for mankind's outpost in space, but it could not carry a passenger. The frenzied acceleration which lifted it from Earth saved costly fuel, but would destroy anything alive.

The jeep's great wire-spoked wheel, seemingly so fragile and so spidery, was actually a sturdy structure. But far back in a narrow ravine, now hours since, a house-sized mass of stone had fallen against it. Mass is not changed by gravity; the wheel was badly bent. Kenmore played the chest light of his vacuum suit upon it. It had crawled forty miles through the mountains after its injury, and then had hunted the Earth ship for an indefinite distance. The tread of the wheel was crumpled; there was a great crack in it, and that crack was serious. It was a miracle that the jeep still stood erect.

"No good without repair," Kenmore decided. "And the people of the City took every other jeep away when they ran off."

He needed a jeep for a journey. The Earthship lay out on the stony sea, and had to be made ready to take Arlene back to Earth, when that desirable event could be managed. But there were enough dangers in traveling on the moon, anyhow, without multiplying them by using a defective jeep.

Arlene Gray looked up at the firmament. Kenmore heard her saying, absurdly, "Star bright, star bright—Joe, how many stars are there?"

"Plenty," said Kenmore. "Enough to keep us busy for millions of years, just hunting among them for planets to move to."

The heavens were an unbelievable sight, to Arlene. On Earth, the number of visible stars is relatively small; there are rarely as many as three thousand to be seen by the naked eye. But here the stars were revealed as numerous as the sands of the sea, of all colors and all possible variations of brightness.

"I need this jeep," Kenmore commented acidly, "if only to have something to let everybody here run away in, in case of need! After all, the people who sabotaged the City might not like it that we're here and alive in it. They might come back!" He scowled. "This is a nasty mess! I'd like to start building up air pressure in the domes again, but I'm not sure . . ."

"There's plenty of air?"

"Some hundreds of tons of it," he assured her. "It's kept frozen, as now. We rechill it every night and insulate the tanks again before morning."

Arlene said curiously, "You don't seem too worried about what's happened to the City. You're taking it pretty calmly."

"I'm far from calm. But I'm thinking beyond the City and even our lives. I'm thinking of what the City's here for and what its smashing could mean."

Arlene sounded wistful. "You were talking about the Laboratory trying to find a way to get unlimited power for Earth. But to you it's power for rockets. Isn't that really what's in your mind?"

"You can't get far with chemical fuels," he said. "Right here is about as far as they'll take a ship. But if we had atomic rockets, then Mars would be easy, and the asteroids, and Saturn—or at least its moons, and Jupiter's moons . . . Even Pluto, in time."

"Why?"

"They're there," said Joe defensively.

"Rockets are just beginnings, Arlene, just as dugout canoes were the beginnings of ships. We need something better than rockets. There may be an energy-field to change the constants of space—including the limit on the speed of light. There's even a chance that the mass that builds up with velocity—it shows up at a thousand miles a second—may be a property of space instead of matter, the way that the wind resistance at the speed of sound isn't in an airplane, but in the air. If we can ever change space with an energy-field, we'll be able to reach the stars!"

"And then?"

"We'll—we'll go there and settle there . . ."

Arlene grimaced. "I'll bet a cave girl asked a young savage, thousands of years ago, why he had to go exploring a place where the cave tigers were, when they had a nice place to live, right where they were. I'll bet he answered her just about the way you just did, Joe." Kenmore looked at her, frowning.

"And I'll bet," she added wryly, "that when all the stars are visited, and all the planets settled on—I'll bet some girl out in the Milky Way will be asking somebody like you why he wants to go on to another island of stars—another galaxy—when the planet they were both born on is so nice a place to live."

"Maybe," admitted Kenmore. "Maybe that's right."

"And," said Arlene, "she'll like it if he agrees with her, but she'll be proud if he doesn't."

There was silence for a while. Kenmore fidgeted. "You make it sound senseless," he protested. "If at the end it's all the same."

"No," she said, rather forlornly, "a girl would rather be proud than pleased—for a while."

There was a peculiar, almost imperceptible change in the light about them. Kenmore looked up sharply.

A rocket flame burned among the stars. It was not descending; it floated toward them across the heavens, and by the fact that it had shape, Joe knew that it was not far distant. They could see the flame itself in its nimbus of illuminated rocket fumes. The flame was lanceolate, with the wider part in the direction toward which it moved. Its motion slowed, so it was a rocket decelerating to land—but it would land among or beyond the mountains.

"Look!" snapped Kenmore. "That's the Shuttle to the Laboratory! Mike Scandia's the jockey—you know him. He's too high! It must be the radar beam's still off."

He reached behind him and wrenched out a signal rocket. He tore off the cap, aimed it skyward, and squeezed the tail. It leaped up from his hands, leaving a lurid trail of crimson sparks. It went up and up and up . . .

The rocket flame seemed abruptly to double in brilliance. The slowing of the moving flare became more pronounced. Kenmore found himself wincing at the sight.

"That'll be tough!" he said uneasily. "Mike has to decelerate at two Earth gravities, but he'll be using four, now! That's hard to take when you've been on the moon a long time . . ."

The scene was very strange indeed. There were the sloping dust-heaps of the City, with feeble lights atop; the jagged mountains with their shining dust and dark shadows in the earthshine, the round, greenish platter of Earth hanging in the sky; and the fierce white flattened flame aloft, responding to the skyward-streaking trail of red sparks . . .

Before the first signal rocket burned out, Kenmore sent up another. He fumbled, and Arlene was competently handing him another from the belt loops of her own suit. He took it for granted that she understood; she did. Mike Scandia—Arlene knew him because he was Kenmore's friend. And Mike was in that furiously speeding rocket overhead.

The flame among the stars was almost intolerably bright, now. It thickened yet again. That would mean a deceleration of six gravities! Kenmore sent up another rocket, and still another, to insist that the rocket's landing place was here. Which it was.

The flame overhead slowed and slowed, and then it seemed not to move; a part of it darted away, and streaked with infinite swiftness toward nothingness. The remaining flame grew brighter and brighter, and abruptly halved itself, and the again-remaining part of the flame burned with a white-hot fury but nevertheless descended.

Then it went out. Something up aloft was falling, now, with its movement across the heavens stopped.

Kenmore sent up rocket after rocket. But things fall slowly in the gravity-field of the moon. Presently there was a vague spot of incandescence above them. Arlene said anxiously, "Will he crash, Joe? Will he crash?"

"Not Mike. The radar beacon from the City must still be off—I should have made sure of it!—and Mike couldn't know. Everything was cut off when the City was deserted. But he came in on course from away beyond farside, and there was nothing to guide by. He'd have landed in the mountains, most likely . . ."

A mere few hundred feet up, something flamed so savagely that Arlene turned away her head. The lava sea, the City, and even the mountain flanks glowed fiercely.

And the downward-plunging flame slowed, and slowed, and touched the surface of the lava mare a quarter-mile away. The source of the flame became visible— a tiny rocket-ship much smaller than the Earthship. The flame splashed out in a pancake of unbearable whiteness.

Then it shot up at incredible speed. It rose and rose far higher than the mountain peaks. It went on toward the stars, and winked to extinction.

The little rocket-ship from the Laboratory, the Shuttle ship, remained standing upright on its landing fins. Something moved. A brittle, cracked voice said furiously in Kenmore's headphones, "Somebody's going to get hurt for this I Why the devil wasn't that landing-beam on?"

Something climbed down the ship's side to the lava sea. It was a very small figure, a tiny figure, in an incongruously bulky vacuum suit. Kenmore heard the sputterings of impending profanity.

"Steady, Mike I" he growled. "Arlene Gray's listening. She just got here. The City's been abandoned. There's a mess all around."

"Mess?" raged Mike's cracked voice. "You ought to see the guys in the Lab . . ." Then it changed. "Arlene? Arlene Gray? You, Arlene, you belong back home! Who let you come up here?"

The tiny figure in the bulky vacuum suit came soaring in a long, preposterous moon-jump to land with some precision beside Kenmore and Arlene. He gripped Arlene's hands with the clumsy gloves of his own suit, and the two figures made as grotesque a contrast as anything else in view. Because Mike Scandia was a midget; he stood forty-two inches high. He and Arlene, greeting each other warmly, made a picture in keeping with the grotesquerie of the scenery around them.

At the moment, the near escape of the Shuttle from destruction seemed enough to worry about. There were other disturbing items, of course. The City could be attacked again—from outside, this time. At least one jeep had been damaged, and was probably unsafe to use, in an attempt to murder its occupants. The City's population had fled, and its safety was doubtful. The mere continued existence of human lives on the moon was in jeopardy. Arlene, Kenmore, and everybody else—even the missile bases—were in deadly danger.

There was too much to worry about, so Kenmore allowed himself to feel relief over the safety of the Shuttle, and did not concern himself too much about Mike's acid comment on the state of mind of the occupants of the Space Laboratory.