A Fall of Moondust

“Between the two of us, twelve hours. Plenty of time for the skis to get here. But we may have to give most of it to the others, if they show signs of distress. I'm afraid it's going to be a very close thing.”

They were both sitting cross-legged on the floor, just beside the pilot's position, with the oxygen bottle between them. Every few minutes they would take turns with the inhaler-but only two breaths at a time. I never imagined, Pat told himself, that I should ever get involved in the number-one cliche of the TV space operas. But it had occurred in real life too often to be funny any more—especially when it was happening to you.

Both Pat and McKenzie—or almost certainly one of them-could survive if they abandoned the other passengers to their fate. Trying to keep these twenty men and women alive, they might also doom themselves.

The situation was one in which logic warred against conscience. But it was nothing new; certainly it was not peculiar to the age of space. It was as old as Mankind, for countless times in the past, lost or isolated groups had faced death through lack of water, food, or warmth. Now it was oxygen that was in short supply, but the principle was just the same.

Some of those groups had left no survivors; others, a handful who would spend the rest of their lives in self-justification. What must George Pollard, late captain of the whaler Essex, have thought as he walked the streets of Nantucket , with the taint of cannibalism upon his soul? That was a two-hundredyear-old story of which Pat had never heard; he lived on a world too busy making its own legends to import those of Earth. As far as he was concerned, he had already made his choice, and he knew, without asking, that McKenzie would agree with him. Neither was the sort of man who would fight over the last bubble of oxygen in the tank. But if it did come to a fight—

“What are you smiling at?” asked McKenzie.

Pat relaxed. There was something about this burly Australian scientist that he found very reassuring. Hansteen gave him the same impression, but McKenzie was a much younger man. There were some people you knew –that you could trust, whom you were certain would never let you down. He had that feeling about McKenzie.

“If you want to know,” he said, putting down the oxygen mask, “I was thinking that I wouldn't have much of a chance if you decided to keep the bottle for yourself.”

McKenzie looked a little surprised; then he too grinned.

“I thought all you Moon-born were sensitive about that,” he said.

“I've never felt that way,” Pat answered. “After all, brains are more important than muscles. I can't help it that I was bred in a gravity field a sixth of yours. Anyway, how could you tell I was Moon-born?”

“Well, it's partly your build. You all have that same tall, slender physique. And there's your skin color—the U. V. lamvs never seem to give you the same tan as natural sunlight.”

“It's certainly tanned you,” retorted Pat with a grin. “At night, you must be a menace to navigation. Incidentally, how did you get a name like McKenzie?”

Having had little contact with the racial tensions that were not yet wholly extinct on Earth, Pat could make such remarks without embarrassment—indeed, without even realizing that they might cause embarrassment.

“My grandfather had it bestowed on him by a missionary when he was baptized. I'm very doubtful if it has any—ah-genetic significance. To the best of my knowledge, I'm a fullblooded abo.”

“Abo?”

“Aboriginal. We were the people occupying Australia before the whites came along. The subsequent events were somewhat depressing.”

Pat's knowledge of terrestrial history was vague; like most residents of the Moon, he tended to assume that nothing of great importance had ever happened before 8 November 1967, when the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution had been so spectacularly celebrated.

“I suppose there was war?”

“You could hardly call it that. We had spears and boomerangs; they had guns. Not to mention T. B. and V. D., which were much more effective. It took us about a hundred and fifty years to get over the impact. It's only in the last century-since about nineteen forty—that our numbers started going up again. Now there are about a hundred thousand of us-almost as many as when your ancestors came.”

McKenzie delivered this information with an ironic detachment that took any personal sting out of it, but Pat thought that he had better disclaim responsibility for the misdeeds of his terrestrial predecessors.

“Don't blame me for what happened on Earth,” he said. “I've never been there, and I never will—I couldn't face that gravity. But I've looked at Australia plenty of times through the telescope. I have some sentimental feeling for the place-my parents took off from Woomera.”

“And my ancestors named it; a woomera's a booster stage for spears.”

“Are any of your people,” asked Pat, choosing his words with care, “still living in primitive conditions? I've heard that's still true, in some parts of Asia .”