A Fall of Moondust

“Calling Selene! Calling Selene!” shouted Lawrence . “Can you hear me?”

There was no reply. The cruiser's transmitter was not operating; he could not even hear the sounds her mike should be picking up inside the cabin.

“Connections ready, sir,” said Coleman. “Shall I turn on the oxygen generator?”

It won't do any good, thought Lawrence , if Harris has managed to screw that damned bit back into place. I can only hope he's merely stuffed something into the end of the tube, and that we can blow it out.

“O. K.” he said. “Let her go—all the pressure you can get.”

With a sudden bang, the battered copy of The Orange and the Apple was blasted away from the pipe to which it had been vacuum-clamped. Out of the open orifice gushed an inverted fountain of gas, so cold that its outline was visible in ghostly swirls of condensing water vapor.

For several minutes the oxygen geyser roared without producing any effect. Then Pat Harris slowly stirred, tried to get up, and was knocked back to the ground by the concentrated jet. It was not a particularly powerful jet, but it was stronger than he was in his present state.

He lay with the icy blast playing across his face, enjoying its refreshing coolness almost as much as its breathability. In a few seconds he was completely alert—though he had a splitting headache—and aware of all that had happened in the last half-hour.

He nearly fainted again when he remembered unscrewing the bit, and fighting that gusher of escaping air. But this was no time to worry about past mistakes; all that mattered now was that he was alive—and with any luck would stay so.

He picked up the still-unconscious McKenzie as though he were a limp doll, and laid him beneath the oxygen blast. Its force was much weaker now, as the pressure inside the cruiser rose back to normal; in a few more minutes it would be only a gentle zephyr.

The scientist revived almost at once, and looked vaguely round him.

“Where am I?” he said, not very originally. “Oh—they got through to us. Thank God I can breathe again. What's happened to the lights?”

“Don't worry about that—I'll soon fix them. We must get everyone under this jet as quickly as we can, and flush some oxygen into their lungs. Can you give artificial respiration?”

“I've never tried.”

“It's very simple. Wait until I find the medicine chest.”

When Pat had collected the resuscitator, he demonstrated on the nearest subject, who happened to be Irving Schuster.

“Push the tongue out of the way and slip the tube down the throat. Now squeeze this bulb—slowly. Keep up a natural breathing rhythm. Got the idea?”

“Yes, but how long shall I do it?”

“Five or six deep breaths should be enough, I'd guess. We're not trying to revive them, after all—we just want to get the stale air out of their lungs. You take the front half of the cabin; I'll do the rear.”

“But there's only one resuscitator.”

Pat grinned, without much humor.

“It's not necessary,” he answered, bending over his next patient.

“Oh,” said McKenzie. “I'd forgotten that.”

It was hardly chance that Pat had headed straight to Sue, and was now blowing into her lips in the ancient—and highly effective—mouth-to-mouth method. But to do him justice, he wasted no time on her when he found that she was breathing normally.

He was just starting on his third subject when the radio gave another despairing call.

“Hello, Selene, is there anyone there?”

Pat took a few seconds off to grab the mike.

“Harris calling. We're O. K. We're applying artificial respiration to the passengers. No time to say more—we'll call you later. I'll remain on receive. Tell us what's happening.”

“Thank God you're O. K. —we'd given you up. You gave us a hell of a fright when you unscrewed that drill.”

Listening to the Chief Engineer's voice while he blew into the peacefully sleeping Mr. Radley, Pat had no wish to be reminded of that incident. He knew that, whatever happened, he would never live it down. Yet it had probably been for the best; most of the bad air had been siphoned out of Selene in that hectic minute or so of decompression. It might even have lasted longer than that, for it would have taken two or three minutes for a cabin of this size to lose much of its air, through a tube only four centimeters in diameter.

“Now listen,” continued Lawrence , “because you've been overheating badly, we're letting you have your oxygen just as cold as we think it's safe. Call us back if it gets too chilly, or too dry. In five or ten minutes we'll be sinking the second pipe to you, so that we'll have a complete circuit and can take over your entire air-conditioning load. We'll aim this pipe for the rear of the cabin, just as soon as we've towed the raft a few meters. We're moving now. Call you back in a minute.”