A Fall of Moondust

“I think that's a question for Earth,” said Lawrence . “Doctor Evans, would you like to comment?”

Everyone waited for the three seconds, which, as always, seemed very much longer. Then the physicist answered, quite as clearly as if he were in the same room: “I've been wondering about that. There might be organic binders—glue, if you like—that would make it stick together so that it could be handled more easily. Would plain water be any use? Have you tried that?”

“No, but we will,” answered Lawrence , scribbling a note.

“Is the stuff magnetic?” asked the Traffic Control Officer.

“That's a good point,” said Lawrence . “Is it, Father?”

“Slightly; it contains a fair amount of meteoric iron. But I don't think that helps us at all. A magnetic field would pull out the ferrous material, but it wouldn't affect the dust as a whole.”

“Anyway, we'll try.” Lawrence made another note. It was his hope—though a faint one-that out of this clash of minds would come some bright idea, some apparently farfetched but fundamentally sound conception that would solve his problem. And it was his, whether he liked it or not. He was responsible, through his various deputies and departments, for every piece of technical equipment on this side of the Moon—especially when something went wrong with it.

“I'm very much afraid,” said the Clavius Traffic Control Officer, “that your biggest headache will be logistics. Every piece of equipment has to be ferried out on the skis, and they take at least two hours for the round trip—more, if they're towing a heavy load. Before you even start operating, you'll have to build some kind of working platform—like a raft—that you can leave on the site. It may take a day to get that in position, and much longer to get all your equipment out to it.”

“Including temporary living quarters,” added someone. “The workmen will have to stay on the site.”

“That's straightforward; as soon as we fix a raft, we can inflate an igloo on it.”

“Better than that; you won't even need a raft. An igloo will float by itself.”

“Getting back to this raft,” said Lawrence , “we want strong, collapsible units that can be bolted together on the site. Any ideas?”

“Empty fuel tanks?”

“Too big and fragile. Maybe Tech Stores has something.”

So it went on; the brain trust was in session. Lawrence would give it another half-hour, then he would decide on his plan of action.

One could not spend too much time talking, when the minutes were ticking away and many lives were at stake. Yet hasty and ill-conceived schemes were worse than useless, for they would absorb materials and skills that might tilt the balance between failure and success.

At first sight, it seemed such a straightforward job. There was Selene, within a hundred kilometers of a well-equipped base. Her position was known exactly, and she was only fifteen meters down. But that fifteen meters presented Lawrence with some of the most baffling problems of his entire career.

It was a career which, he knew well, might soon terminate abruptly. For it would be very hard to explain his failure if those twenty-two men and women died.

It was a great pity that not a single witness saw Auriga coming down, for it was a glorious sight. A spaceship landing or taking off is one of the most impressive spectacles that Man has yet contrived—excluding some of the more exuberant efforts of the nuclear engineers. And when it occurs on the Moon, in slow motion and uncanny silence, it has a dreamlike quality which no one who has seen it can ever forget.

Captain Anson saw no point in trying any fancy navigation, especially since someone else was paying for the gas. There was nothing in the Master's Handbook about flying a space liner a hundred kilometers—a hundred kilometers, indeed!—though no doubt the mathematicians would be delighted to work out a trajectory, based on the Calculus of Variations, using the very minimum amount of fuel. Anson simply blasted straight up for a thousand kilometers (this qualifying for deep-space rates under Interplanetary Law, though he would tell Spenser about this later) and came down again on a normal vertical approach, with final radar guidance. The ship's computer and the radar monitored each other, and both were monitored by Captain Anson. Any one of the three could have done the job, so it was really quite simple and safe, though it did not look it.

Especially to Maurice Spenser, who began to feel a great longing for the soft green hills of Earth as those desolate peaks clawed up at him. Why had he talked himself into this? Surely there were cheaper ways of committing suicide.

The worst part was the free fall between the successive braking periods. Suppose the rockets failed to fire on command, and the ship continued to plunge Moonward, slowly but inexorably accelerating until it crashed? It was no use pretending that this was a stupid or childish fear, because it had happened more than once.