A Fall of Moondust

With great dignity, he performed a complete circuit of the tube, keeping one arm wrapped around it. As he fell on the wrench from the other side, he grabbed it with both hands to keep himself from collapsing. For a moment he rested against it, head bowed.

“Up periscope,” he mumbled. Now what on Earth did that mean? He had no idea, but he had heard it somewhere and it seemed appropriate.

He was still puzzling over the matter when the drill head started to unscrew beneath his weight, very easily and smoothly.

Fifteen meters above, Chief Engineer Lawrence and his assistants stood for a moment almost paralyzed with horror. This was something that no one could ever have imagined; they had thought of a hundred other accidents, but not this.

“Coleman—Matsui!” snapped Lawrence . “Connect up that oxygen line, for God's sake!”

Even as he shouted at them, he knew that it would be too late. There were two connections still to be made before the oxygen circuit was closed. And, of course, they were screw threads, not quick-release couplings. Just one of those little points that normally wouldn't matter in a thousand years, but now made all the difference between life and death.

Like Samson at the mill, Pat trudged round and round the pipe, pushing the handle of the wrench before him. It offered no opposition, even in his present feeble state. By now the bit had unscrewed more than two centimeters; surely it would fall off in a few more seconds.

Ah—almost there. He could hear a faint hissing, that grew steadily as the bit unwound. That would be oxygen rushing into the cabin, of course. In a few seconds, he would be able to breathe again, and all his troubles would be over.

The hiss had deepened to an ominous whistling, and for the first time Pat began to wonder if he was doing precisely the right thing. He stopped, looked thoughtfully at the wrench, and scratched his head. His slow mental processes could find no fault with his action; if the radio had given him orders then, he might have obeyed, but it had abandoned the attempt.

Well, back to work. (It was years since he'd had a hangover like this.) He started to push on the wrench once more-and fell flat on his face as the drill came loose.

In the same instant, the cabin reverberated with a screaming roar, and a gale started all the loose papers fluttering like autumn leaves. A mist of condensation formed as the air, chilled by its sudden expansion, dumped its moisture in a thick fog. When Pat turned over on his back, conscious at last of what had happened, he was almost blinded by the mist around him.

That scream meant only one thing to a trained spaceman, and his automatic reactions had taken over now. He must find some flat object that could be slid over the hole; anything would do, if it was fairly strong.

He looked wildly around him in the crimson fog, which was already thinning as it was sucked into space. The noise was deafening; it seemed incredible that so small a pipe could make such a scream.

Staggering over his unconscious companions, clawing his way from seat to seat, he had almost abandoned hope when he saw the answer to his prayer. There lay a thick volume, open face downward on the floor where it had been dropped. Not the right way to treat books, he thought, but he was glad that someone had been careless. He might never have seen it otherwise.

When he reached the shrieking orifice that was sucking the life out of the cruiser, the book was literally torn from his hands and flattened against the end of the pipe. The sound died instantly, as did the gale. For a moment Pat stood swaying like a drunken man; then he quietly folded at the knees and pitched to the floor.

CHAPTER 22

The really unforgettable moments of TV are those which no one expects, and for which neither cameras nor commentators are prepared. For the last thirty minutes, the raft had been the site of feverish but controlled activity—then, without warning, it had erupted.

Impossible though that was, it seemed as if a geyser had spouted from the Sea of Thirst . Automatically, Jules tracked that ascending column of mist as it drove toward the stars (they were visible now; the director had asked for them). As it rose, it expanded like some strange, attenuated plant—or like a thinner, feebler version of the mushroom cloud that had terrorized two generations of mankind.

It lasted only for a few seconds, but in that time it held unknown millions frozen in front of their screens, wondering how a waterspout could possibly have reared itself from this arid sea. Then it collapsed and died, still in the same uncanny silence in which it had been born.

To the men on the raft that geyser of moisture-laden air was equally silent, but they felt its vibration as they struggled to get the last coupling into place. They would have managed, sooner or later, even if Pat had not cut off the flow, for the forces involved were quite trivial. But their “later” might have been too late. Perhaps, indeed, it already was.. ..