A Fall of Moondust

“The old tribal life's gone. It went very quickly, when the African nations in the U. N. started bullying Australia . Often quite unfairly, I might add—for I'm an Australian first, and an aboriginal second. But I must admit that my white countrymen were often pretty stupid; they must have been, to think that we were stupid! Why, 'way into the last century some of them still thought we were Stone Age savages. Our technology was Stone Age, all right—but we weren't.”

There seemed nothing incongruous to Pat about this discussion, beneath the surface of the Moon, of a way of life so distant both in space and time. He and McKenzie would have to entertain each other, keep an eye on their twenty unconscious companions, and fight off sleep, for at least five more hours. This was as good a way as any of doing it.

“If your people weren't in the Stone Age, Doc—and just for the sake of argument, I'll grant that you aren't—how did the whites get that idea?”

“Sheer stupidity, with the help of a preconceived bias. It's an easy assumption that if a man can't count, write, or speak good English, he must be unintelligent. I can give you a perfect example from my own family. My grandfather—the first McKenzie—lived to see the year two thousand, but he never learned to count beyond ten. And his description of a total eclipse of the Moon was 'Kerosene lamp bilong Jesus Christ he bugger-up finish altogether. '

“Now, I can write down the differential equations of the Moon's orbital motion, but I don't claim to be brighter than Grandfather. If we'd been switched in time, he might have been the better physicist. Our opportunities were different-that's all. Grandfather never had occasion to learn to count; and I never had to raise a family in the desert—which was a highly skilled, full-time job.”

“Perhaps,” said Pat thoughtfully, “we could do with some of your grandfather's skills here. For that's what we're trying to do now—survive in a desert.”

“I suppose you could put it that way, though I don't think that boomerang and fire stick would be much use to us. Maybe we could use some magic—but I'm afraid I don't know any, and I doubt if the tribal gods could make it from Arnhem Land .”

“Do you ever feel sorry,” asked Pat, “about the breakup of your people's way of life?”

“How could I? I scarcely knew it. I was born in Brisbane , and had learned to run an electronic computer before I ever saw a corroboree—”

“A what?”

“Tribal religious dance—and half the participants in that were taking degrees in cultural anthropology. I've no romantic illusions about the simple life and the noble savage. My ancestors were fine people, and I'm not ashamed of them, but geography had trapped them in a dead end. After the struggle for sheer existence, they had no energy left for a civilization. In the long run, it was a good thing that the white settlers arrived, despite their charming habit of selling us poisoned flour when they wanted our land.”

“They did that?”

“They certainly did. But why are you surprised? That was a good hundred years before Belsen .”

Pat thought this over for a few minutes. Then he looked at his watch and said, with a distinct expression of relief: “Time I reported to Base again. Let's have a quick look at the passengers first.”

CHAPTER 20

There was no time now, Lawrence realized, to worry about inflatable igloos and the other refinements of gracious living in the Sea of Thirst . All that mattered was getting those air pipes down into the cruiser. The engineers and technicians would just have to sweat it out in the suits until the job was finished. Their ordeal would not last for long. If they could not manage inside five or six hours, they could turn round and go home again, and leave Selene to the world after which she was named.

In the workshops of Port Roris, unsung and unrecorded miracles of improvisation were now being achieved. A complete air-conditioning plant, with its liquid-oxygen tanks, humidity and carbon-dioxide absorbers, temperature and pressure regulators, had to be dismantled and loaded on to a sledge. So did a small drilling rig, hurled by shuttle rocket from the Geophysics Division at Clavius. So did the specially designed plumbs ing, which now had to work at the first attempt, for there would be no opportunity for modifications.