City on the Moon

CHAPTER IX. MAROONED

Two minutes later the three of them stood in the foot-thick moondust on the surface of the mare. The Earth shone brightly overhead. The Shuttle-ship looked like a tin can that had been stamped on, save that parts of its skeleton were exposed.

They looked at it. Then Kenmore moved—and found himself limping, even in moon-gravity—to see around it on the other side of the wreckage.

They were in the middle of what seemed to be a flat plain, but was not. They could see uncountable millions of stars, stretching down to an absolutely unbroken and very near horizon on either hand. There was no dimming as the stars reached the edge of the moon; they kept full brightness until the horizon cut them off.

"You might say," said Mike, breathing hard, "that were out of sight of land. But there's nothing but land. Joe?"

"We got down," said Kenmore.

Their surroundings, actually, were more lonely and more desolate than even the stark and tragic mountains of the moon. They could see for two miles in every direction before the flat surface curved down—and there was the horizon. Not that there was anything to see but the dust-covered, powdered mare surface; there was nothing. Literally nothing.

Kenmore stared carefully up at Earth. It hung huge and green and brilliant in the sky. It was not quite where it had seemed to be from the City; it slanted farther away from the very center of the sky. He said, "Hm. A degree of arc on the moon here is just a fraction over seventeen miles, instead of sixty-odd on Earth. Mike, how far has the Earth shifted from where it seems to be at the City?"

Mike squinted up; this was his business. As jockey of the Shuttle to the Space Laboratory, his journeyings-out were made on computations included in his flight orders. But his return trips to nearside, on Luna, were different. Normally, he had a radar beam to talk him down at the end of the run, but he knew where Earth should hang in the sky on the way. And of course Earth's icecaps and continents were much more serviceable than a compass. Now he said profoundly, "Hmmm. Let's sight it."

And they did, with markings in the dust and the height of Kenmore's helmet top to furnish data. Perhaps it was not a particularly sensible undertaking, from one point of view. They had something under two hours of breathable air in their tanks, and the number of inhabited places on the nearside half of the moon could be numbered on one's fingers, with some digits left over. But the ship had started out in a specific direction toward one of those places; they had headed back from catastrophe toward their starting point. And when a degree of arc is only seventeen miles, and Earth is there, hanging overhead for an object to sight from, the fixing of positions is much simpler than on Earth. Instead of a lunar or stellar observation, they took a terrestrial one. On Earth. When they had finished Kenmore said, "It could be as little as thirty miles away, Mike."

"Not more than sixty," agreed Mike hungrily. "Let's go!"

Arlene said very gently, "Joe—Mike—you're trying to spare me for as long as you can, but we've only two hours' supply of air. We can't travel sixty miles in two hours!"

"How long was it after the Earthship landed and lost air before I found you, Arlene?"

"But we had the ship's tanks to breathe from!" she protested.

"This ship is pretty well smashed," submitted Joe. "But I don't remember any signs that its tanks were cracked!"

Mike emitted an astonished grunt, and darted into the wreckage. Kenmore crawled in after him, his chest light burning. Presently Mike said into his suit microphone, "I guess you've got influence, Arlene."

She waited outside. She could see only that they worked furiously inside the wreck. Mike Scandia crawled somewhere and came back. There came the extraordinary sight of a flame burning in emptiness; it was on oxhydrogen torch, whose flame in a vacuum did not look much like flame on Earth. Dense white smoke poured from it, expanded madly, and then glistened as if it were a cloud of infinitesimal diamonds floating in emptiness. But this was something rarer than diamonds on the moon. Oxygen and hydrogen, burned together, yield water vapor. In the monstrous cold of night upon the moon, water vapor could exist only inches from the flame. The white clouds were tiny ice crystals drifting slowly, very slowly downward.

The torch cut swiftly; in no more than twenty minutes from the ship's landing, they had two reserve air tanks out on the dust of the lunar sea. The tanks looked huge, but they would have been peculiarly light even on Earth, because they'd had to be shipped so far where freight was so costly. But even that light weight was divided by six on the moon.

Wherefore, out of the ship, Kenmore had Arlene painstakingly top her tanks again, and he and Mike repeated the performance. They found a torn-away sheet of steel, and Kenmore hitched himself to it with a length of that highly special plastic rope which does not become brittle even at midnight outside Civilian City, and which is a part of normal vacuum-suit equipment. They started off.

"For this sort of traveling," said Mike kindly, "you go so, Arlene."

He showed her that eccentric moon-gait which many people never learn, even though they stay on the moon for months. It is derived from the loose-jointed shuffle of the practiced long-distance walker. It is useless in Civilian City, and most people travel outside only in jeeps. But those who work from the jeeps—whether at the mines or at retrieving freight missiles sent up from Earth—learn it of necessity.

Mike Scandia showed it to Arlene Gray. Moon-walking technique takes full advantage of the fact that one falls very slowly from a very small height. One moves forward, and bounces gently up, and floats. Then one descends very gently, while still moving forward, touches ground and gives a delicately adjusted touch to whatever is underfoot; one then bounces up and continues to move forward. It is rather like that kind of floating in which we sometimes move about in our dreams.

The three set out across the featureless and dust-covered sea. Kenmore got the sledge with the air tanks into the rhythm of his own motion, and they made a good eight miles an hour. They'd have made more but for their hourly stops to check air tanks. That was the purpose of vacuum flares Mike had made a dive back into the wreck to salvage.

When they'd traveled their first hour, there was still no break in the completely featureless moonscope. They were in the center of a gently undulating surface that was four miles in diameter; beyond was nothing. It was two miles to the horizon, where the plain dropped down out of sight and there were only the stars and the Earth overhead.

After an hour's journey, they stopped. Mike cracked a flare and set it on the bent steel sledge; it glared blindingly with a fierce red glare, providing its own oxygen for burning. It warmed the air tank—at least a little, so there was air pressure to refill the suit reservoirs.

At the second stop, it appeared that there were mountains far beyond the horizon ahead. They could see the peaks in silhouette against the stars. The red glare made a startling sight, illuminating as it did the figures of Kenmore and Arlene in identical vacuum suits, Mike in his cut-down, bulky outfit, the bright-metal air tank, and the wide expanse of carmine-lighted dust all around.

At the third stop, Kenmore ordered Arlene to sleep for an hour. She refused, and they went on.

Before the fourth hour of their journeying was over, they had reached mountains rising steeply from the stony sea. Mike and Kenmore consulted soberly. In the end, they turned northward and skirted the precipices, keeping to the gently rolling mare, and not venturing into the passes. It was a question of choosing north or south.

They did not dream of venturing into unexplored mountains. Rockslides and smothering avalanches of dust await the foot-traveler in any mountain area on the moon. One does not go among mountains, even in a moon-jeep, when it can be avoided. Especially one does not move about, at all, except in passes where all possible avalanches have been precipitated in advance by setting off one-pound charges of explosive, fired against the stone, not more than a mile apart.

So the three of them went northward under the looming cliffs. The spotter post they hoped to reach was serviced by its own moon-jeep, and all trails upon the moon remain forever. If they came upon the track of the moon-jeep to the spotter post, they could follow it safely.

Arlene was practically dead upon her feet. One-sixth gravity saves much energy, to be sure, but still a normal person needs to sleep. She had had considerably more of turmoil and excitement in the past twenty-four hours than anybody is apt to take in stride.

Presently she was stumbling, nearly blind with fatigue. After a long time, she heard the voices of the others in her headphones. They had stopped. The flicker of Mike Scandia's chest lamp had struck upon something which glittered metallically in the cliff.

Arlene roused from a stupor of exhaustion to hear Kenmore say sardonically, "Of course it's real. But it'll vanish if you go near."

Mike replied indignantly, "You're crazy! It's metal! There must have been people on the moon, once upon a time. They made it! Some of this stuff would drive those scientist guys crazy! I'm gonna pick some of it!" "It's a waste of time," insisted Kenmore. "I don't want to waste time. We have to think of Arlene!"

She roused. "I'm all right . . ." But she was desperately weary. "I'm quite all right . . ."

The two of them peered at her, and she realized that they were in the shadow of a monstrous cliff. Earthshine did not strike here; the blackness was absolute, save for the bright chest lights of the two men's vacuum suits. Her own lights burned whitely, too, though she did not remember turning them on.

They seemed to nod at each other. Mike said gently, "You need sleep, Arlene, but there's something not half a dozen other people have ever seen. Moon flowers. Look!"

Arlene looked. Before her rose the stark dark mass of a cliff that rose past estimate overhead. It was the terrible dead-black of a moon-cliff in shadow. But the beam of Mike's lamps shone upon a spot, quite low down, where metal shimmered and shone.

It looked like a miniature jungle of silver. There were glittering stalks, thread-thin, which rose delicately and branched; from the branches, leaves extended and drooped gracefully. The number of stalks could not be guessed. A space perhaps fifteen feet across contained the incredible foliage. There were hundreds of the moon plants, interwoven and intertangled. Some were three feet high, some five or six, and some were shorter. But they were sheer beauty. Flowers and foliage of infinite delicacy grew motionless beneath a mile-high cliff of blackness which fronted on a sea of stone.

"We take her out a way?" said Mike abruptly. Kenmore agreed. He took her arm and moved slowly out beyond the shadow of the cliff—out to where earthshine began again, and they could see the world from which all of them had come.

He cracked a vacuum flare and said sternly, "Sit down." Arlene obeyed, sitting on the sledge which held the air tanks. And the act of relaxation was so infinitely luxurious that she barely heard Mike say, "Give her an hour, huh? I'll go pick those things. She rates a bouquet." Arlene tried not to acquiesce by silence, but it was almost impossible to speak. She sat dully in the red, red glare of the flare. Its radiation was actually warm!

She was never quite sure how long she rested. Very probably she dozed and waked and dozed again, in such weariness that she was not aware of it. But she heard Mike's voice in her earphones, saying angrily, "There's gotta be a way to carry 'em!"

Then there was another long time, and Scandia was there before her. She saw something else, far away, but she was too tired for it to register. But Mike's mittened hands were filled with moondust, and across his outstretched arms were stalks of the impossible silver flowers. "Look quickly, Arlene. They'll be gone soon!"

Arlene said numbly, "They're beautiful, Mike! So beautiful!"

They were like gossamer, like the finest and most precious of lace. They were the most beautiful things that anyone had ever looked at. Moon flowers.

Arlene reached out and took them. Kenmore shone his chest lights on them.

She held them for just a moment, then a leaf—was not. Stalks vanished. Arlene clutched at them, startled, and they ceased to be. There was nothing left in her grasp. The shock of it brought her wide awake.

She stared, she looked down at the dust beneath her feet. Nothing.

"You get what they are, Joe?" asked Mike sharply, in her earphones. "It couldn't be anything else!"

"No," agreed Kenmore's voice. "It couldn't."

Arlene was confused, but now she was awake. She blinked and shook her head. Then she said queerly, "I've been—asleep and dreaming, I think. I thought there were—silver flowers. But that—that isn't a dream, is it?" She pointed. There was a moving light in the distance, down on the same surface where they stood. Mike yelped in relief and satisfaction, and Kenmore growled in relief.

It was a moon-jeep. It came with extraordinary silence up to where the vacuum flare burned crimson. It stopped. A bulky figure already swung down the rope ladder.

"Mike!" rumbled a new voice in the headphones. "Joe! You two crazy fools! Why didn't you keep talkin'? We've been goin' crazy, Haney and me! Trying to find your ship . . . If we hadn't run across your trail, we'd never have got to you!"

Arlene said politely, "Hello, Chief." Then she blacked out.