A Fall of Moondust

“Hello, Selene,” he began. “I want to tell you that all the resources of the Moon are now being mobilized for your aid. The engineering and technical staffs of my administration are working round the clock to help you.

“Mister Lawrence, Chief Engineer, Earthside, is in charge, and I have complete confidence in him. He's now at Port Roris, where the special equipment needed for the operation is being assembled. It's been decided—and I'm sure you'll agree with this—that the most urgent task is to make certain that your oxygen supply can be maintained. For this reason, we plan to sink pipes to you; that can be done fairly quickly, and then we can pump down oxygen—as well as food and water, if necessary. So as soon as the pipes are installed, you'll have nothing more to worry about. It may still take a little time to reach you and get you out, but you'll be quite safe. You only have to sit and wait for us.

“Now I'll get off the air, and let you have this channel back so that you can talk to your friends. I'm sorry about the inconvenience and strain you've undergone, but that's all over now. We'll have you out in a day or two. Good luck!”

A burst of cheerful conversation broke out aboard Selene as soon as Chief Administrator Olsen's broadcast finished. It had had precisely the effect he had intended; the passengers were already thinking of this whole episode as an adventure which would give them something to talk about for the rest of their lives. Only Pat Harris seemed a little unhappy.

“I wish,” he told Commodore Hansteen, “the C. A. hadn't been quite so confident. On the Moon, remarks like that always seem to be tempting fate.”

“I know exactly how you feel,” the Commodore answered. “But you can hardly blame him—he's thinking of our morale.”

“Which is fine, I'd say, especially now that we can talk to our friends and relatives.”

“That reminds me; there's one passenger who hasn't received or sent any messages. What's more, he doesn't show the slightest interest in doing so.”

“Who's that?”

Hansteen dropped his voice still further. “The New Zealander, Radley. He just sits quietly in the corner over there. I'm not sure why, but he worries me.”

“Perhaps the poor fellow has no one on Earth he wants to speak to.”

“A man with enough money to go to the Moon must have some friends,” replied Hansteen. Then he grinned; it was almost a boyish grin, which flickered swiftly across his face, softening its wrinkles and crow's feet. “That sounds very cynical— I didn't mean it that way. But I suggest we keep an eye on Mr. Radley.”

“Have you mentioned him to Sue—er, Miss Wilkins?”

“She pointed him out to me.”

I should have guessed that, thought Pat admiringly; not much gets past her. Now that it seemed he might have a future, after all, he had begun to think very seriously about Sue, and about what she had said to him. In his life he had been in love with five or six girls—or so he could have sworn at the time—but this was something different. He had known Sue for over a year, and from the start had felt attracted to her, but until now it had never come to anything. What were her real feelings? he wondered. Did she regret that moment of shared passion, or did it mean nothing to her? She might argue-and so might he, for that matter—that what had happened in the air lock was no longer relevant; it was merely the action of a man and a woman who thought that only a few hours of life remained to them. They had not been themselves.

But perhaps they had been; perhaps it was the real Pat Harris, the real Sue Wilkins, that had finally emerged from disguise, revealed by the strain and anxiety of the past few days. He wondered how he could be sure of this, but even as he did so, he knew that only time could give the answer. If there was a clear-cut, scientific test that could tell you when you were in love, Pat had not yet come across it.

The dust that lapped—if that was the word—against the quay from which Selene had departed four days ago was only a couple of meters deep, but for this test no greater depth was needed. If the hastily built equipment worked here, it would work out in the open Sea.

Lawrence watched from the Embarkation Building as his space-suited assistants bolted the framework together. It was made, like ninety per cent of the structures on the Moon, from slotted aluminum strips and bars. In some ways, thought Lawrence , the Moon was an engineer's paradise. The low gravity, the total absence of rust or corrosion—indeed, of weather itself, with its unpredictable winds and rains and frosts-removed at once a whole range of problems that plagued all terrestrial enterprises. But to make up for that, of course, the Moon had a few specialities of its own—like the two-hundredbelow-zero nights, and the dust that they were fighting now.