City on the Moon

CHAPTER VII. SABOTAGE

MIKE had reports to be sent to Earth by facsimile transmission. They came from the Space Laboratory for the scientists, the administrators, the organizers of the project which included City and Laboratory, and the arrangements for their supply. He headed for the dome to put them on the transmitter which, though they were coded, would still scramble and rescramble them before sending them through space. On the way, he said succinctly to Joe Kenmore, "The Lab's a madhouse. The guys are looping." He vanished.

Kenmore pointed out to Arlene the remarkably simple navigation arrangements of the little Shuttle ship. It used solid-fuel rockets—as the Earthship did on its return voyages—because solid fuel was practical to transport up by drone-rocket, and liquid fuel wasn't. Separate tubes, like jatos, fitted into racks outside the hull. Mike would fire one marked twelve-three—meaning three gravities acceleration for twelve seconds—or a ten-two, or a five-two, or a six-three. He made change for the time of burning and acceleration effect desired. Smaller change could be made by releasing a burning rocket before its flame went out. The frantically flaming object then flew away at fantastic speed, either vanishing in emptiness or smashing on the barren mountains of the moon. Mike had landed in just that fashion.

Inside the City, Scandia transmitted his message, then ate hugely. He was presented to Cecile Ducros; he bristled a little.

Later—hours later—Lezd hunted up Kenmore. "Earth is calling," he said interestedly. "Are you in charge here?" "In emergencies," Kenmore observed, "the angriest man usually does take over. There is an emergency, and I am angrier than anyone else. So I suppose I am the boss."

Lezd nodded.

"I know my business," he observed. "I also know men who know theirs. If I can help you, tell me. Earth asks to speak to you."

"Thanks," said Kenmore.

He went into the City and to the communicator. He said impatiently, "Kenmore, on the moon. What is it?" The three-second pause. Then a voice from Earth; "Record this, please. At the conclusion of this message there will be a coded message to be received on facsimile and delivered to the Space Laboratory with all possible speed. The immediate delivery of this message takes precedence over all other actions, even emergency requirements of any nature. Give orders for the Shuttle-rocket to be refueled and to prepare to return to the Space Laboratory immediately."

Kenmore raised his eyebrows. He bellowed, and Mike came fretfully through a doorway. "Another trip," Kenmore told him. "Back to the Laboratory. Right away. Top, crash, emergency!"

Mike sputtered. Then he went off.

Kenmore said, "The order's given. What next?"

"The missile bases," said the voice, after the usual three-second pause, "report that no refugees from Civilian City have arrived. From your report, they are long overdue. They may have lost their way. Jeeps from the bases are setting out to search for them."

Kenmore went sick. A hundred and fifty human beings had started out in panic twenty—forty—perhaps sixty hours ago. They could have been ambushed and overwhelmed by a blasted-down cliff in the manner from which he and Moreau had so narrow escaped. They could have lost their way hopelessly—or the jeeps could have been sabotaged. If the first possibility were fact, then they had been murdered. If the second were the case, then there could be little hope. If the last—why, every person who had fled might now be going mad in their stalled vehicles, waiting for their air to give out, or for the sun to rise. If they were marooned like that, and did not suffocate before sunrise, the monstrous heat of the lunar day would bake them in their steel shells.

The voice went on:

"Until proper authorities return to Civilian City you will make all possible repairs—subject to the first need to send the following coded order to the Laboratory. Nothing must be put before that! Nothing! The message follows."

The face of the clerk on Earth disappeared. The tricky, preliminary dots of facsimile transmission began. Kenmore turned the communicator to facsimile printing. Arlene Gray appeared, looking for him.

He told her icily of the non-arrival of the fifteen jeeps in which the folk of Civilian City had fled.

"Of course," he said, "if there is a guerrilla fighting force somehow landed on the moon, they might be on the way here now. Or they might be waiting to backtrack a missile base jeep, and locate the bases. But I think it's simpler than that. I think it's traitors in the City. Mike has to make a special trip back to the Lab. Top-urgency coded message."

Arlene hesitated. "I ought to go with him," she said uneasily. "I'm supposed to gather material for Cecile's broadcasts. It would be safe enough for me to go, wouldn't it?"

"Right here," Kenmore told her, "you are in the second least-safe place in the solar system. If there's a first, it's the Laboratory, but I'd say there's not much choice." "Then I'll top my tanks and be ready," said Arlene. "You watch me and see if I don't do it properly."

He watched, and she did. But a suit only carries two hours' air supply; to withstand twenty-five-hundred pounds' pressure a tank has to be heavy even on the moon. Nobody can carry much more.

They went out together, to the vast stillness beyond the City. There seemed to be no change. One day on the moon is equal to fourteen on Earth, and a night is equally long. It had been near midnight when a cliff began to fall on Kenmore's jeep, and still near midnight when he searched for the fallen Earthship on the lava sea. Even now, it was only slightly past the middle of the two-week-long darkness of lunar nighttime. The stars did not seem to have stirred in their places; the shadows of earthlight upon the mountains had not altered.

Only by looking up at the great bright shining Earth could any change be seen; some stars had moved a little, with relation to it. But the continents were no longer where they had been, for the Earth rotates.

Mike's voice came in the helmet headphones, from near the small Shuttle-ship. "Not like that! Easy! I know you haven't got the brains of a gnat, but—"

Pitkin rumbled. He heaved a long tube up for Mike to fasten it in the proper rocket clamp. Naturally a rocket pilot fastened his own rockets in place. Mike fumed and fussed as he made the highly critical adjustments and securing of his drive-elements.

"Arlene's going with you, Mike," said Kenmore through his helmet phone. "She'll gather atmosphere, so that Cecile Ducros can pretend she saw the things herself." Mike Scandia stopped dead, halfway up the slender rocket-ship's hull. "Like hell she does!" he snapped. "I was getting set to mutiny, anyhow! Somebody besides me has to see that gang of eggheads and make a report on them!"

"Why?" demanded Kenmore.

"They're going batty, like I told you!" snapped Mike. "If I ever saw anybody going slaphappy, it's them! They're cracking up! I hoped the message I sent Earth from them would show it, and some of them would be ordered to quit the Lab and get straightened out. But who'd get straightened out in the City now? I tell you, though, they're really going wacky out there! And it needs somebody else's word besides mine!"

Arlene's vacuum-suited figure moved as she looked from one to the other.

"Things are bad!" insisted Mike. "They wouldn't believe me, back on Earth. They might not believe Arlene and me. But—"

"I'll call Earth back," said Kenmore.

He wheeled and went back into the City. When he returned, his headphones picked up Arlene's voice: "Can you use a compass here, Mike?"

"Huh!" said Mike. "No need. Look up at Earth and you got your directions. Well?"

"I'll go with you," said Kenmore. "I left Moreau in charge."

He followed Arlene up the cleat ladder on the ship's fin. She went first into the lock. They settled themselves inside; five minutes later Mike joined them.

"Taking off at two gravities," he said grandly. "Slow enough for you really to see some scenery! Firing five seconds, four, three two—"

He pressed a firing button marked "5-2". There was a roaring and a very great weight. He'd counted down to firing time, because it is desirable to have one's lungs full when such acceleration begins suddenly.

The weight, though, lasted only five seconds. Five-two. Five seconds, two gravities. Then there was no weight at all. There was a great and restful silence; the rocket floated up and up. And there were ports—they would be shielded beyond the shadow of the moon, to keep sunshine out—through which Arlene could see the quite incredible landscape in the earthlight. The silence lasted, and the dusty frozen "sea" reached out and out in the pale twilight, and the mountains dropped down and down.

For ninety-odd seconds the ship floated up, and as it rose ever higher the mountains dropped more slowly. The revelation of ever-new wildernesses of peaks came more gradually, with the disclosure of ever more breathtaking wonders. At twenty-three thousand feet there were thousands of square miles of mountains visible on the one hand, and the downward-curving lunar sea on the other.

Mike said, "This view is kinda pretty, Arlene, even by earthlight. I thought you'd like to see it like this. Now we head around for the Laboratory. Settle back, now. We're blowing off." To Joe, he said crisply, "A six-three, Joe. It'll be neat."

Mike counted according to precedent: "Five, four, three, two, one—"

He pressed the firing button, and the cosmos seemed to explode.

The little ship should have disintegrated. A rocket flamed outside, but it was not a three-gravity acceleration which flung the small spacecraft forward. It was an overwhelming, unbearable thrust which was the equivalent of a continuous explosion. Joe Kenmore was thrust back in the contour chair by a brutal pressure, which held him immovable. He could not lift his hands against it; he could not move at all. He felt his cheeks drawn back, exposing his teeth. He felt the flesh of his body straining to spread out, to flatten, to burst with the weight of blood going to the back part of his body. He fought fiercely to stay conscious, with blood draining from the forepart of his brain. His struggle seemed to last for centuries.

But it ended; he battled back to full awareness, and tried to move. His arms and legs would not obey him at first; they fluttered feebly. He croaked, "Arlene! Arlene! Are you alive?"

There was no answer, and the silence was a horrible stimulus. He reeled up—he was weightless—and a light came on in the cabin. He pulled himself to the chair which held Arlene. Her eyes were barely flickering back to life when he heard Mike Scandia's voice behind him. Mike gasped incoherently; his small body writhed with anguish and with rage. He turned blazing eyes upon Kenmore.

"This was—on purpose!" he panted. "I—checked these rockets! Somebody's been—tampering! To kill us! They switched Earthship rockets for Shuttle ones! Oh . . ." He moaned with the fury that filled him. But Kenmore called again: "Arlene . . ."

She whispered faintly, "I think—I'm all right . . ." And then Kenmore began really to appreciate the crime that had been committed against the City, and the Laboratory, and Arlene and himself. He dragged himself to a port and looked out. The ship was far, very far out from the moon's surface; that did not matter. It was still headed out; that meant little, though its velocity would be of the order of half a mile per second or more. Even that was not necessarily deadly.

But one of the rockets had ben mismarked. Mike himself had chosen the rockets, and bolted them in their proper racks. But instead of a solid-fuel rocket, intended to give the Shuttle-ship three gravities acceleration for six seconds, Mike had mounted and later fired a rocket intended to lift the big ship back toward Earth. A thrust meant for a ship twenty times heavier had been used on the Shuttle; the consequences were bad, but the prospects were worse.

Any or all of the remaining rockets might be absolutely anything. Any of them might be another take-off job for the Earthship, and another would crumple the little Shuttle like an eggshell.

But rockets had to be fired. The ship was rising; it had to be turned back, or it would start the long fall down to Earth, into whose atmosphere it would plunge like a flaming meteor. And should they turn back toward the moon, it would need to be checked before it crashed on the rocky surface there. Somehow, the Shuttle had to be landed. Each of these maneuvers required the firing of rockets; and any of them might involve the collapse of the ship's structure under the stress of forces it was not designed to endure.

Even more: There would be little use in merely landing on the moon. On the nearside lunar hemisphere, there was the land-surface of a large continent—much more land-surface than on the entire continent of North America. In that vastness, with its mountain ranges miles high, and hundreds of miles long, there were just three guided-missile bases, and four radar-spotting posts, and the abandoned Civilian City. That was the equivalent of four hamlets, and as many trappers' huts, on a continentsized wilderness. And when or if the small ship landed, the people in it would be wearing vacuum suits which held just two hours' supply of air.

The odds against landing the ship as an intact object were great, the odds against surviving a landing were greater. And against landing in the lunar night, within foot-travel distance of shelter, with two hours' air travel on . . .

Survival seemed completely impossible. Appropriately enough for an emergency in space, the odds against success were astronomical.