A Fall of Moondust

It was a paradoxical fact, which Spenser took completely for granted, that when you were covering a story like this you often had no idea of the big picture. Even when you were in the center of things, as he was now. He had started the ball rolling, but now he was no longer in control. It was true that he and Jules were providing the most important video coverage-or would be, when the action shifted back here—but the pattern was being shaped at the news centers on Earth and in Clavius City. He almost wished he could leave Jules and hurry back to headquarters.

That was impossible, of course, and even if he did so, he would soon regret it. For this was not only the biggest scoop of his career; it was, he suspected, the last time he would ever be able to cover a story out in the field. By his own success, he would have doomed himself irrevocably to an office chair—or, at best, a comfortable little viewing booth behind the banked monitor screens at Clavius Central.

CHAPTER 23

It was still very quiet aboard Selene, but the quietness was now that of sleep, not of death. Before long, all these people would be waking, to greet a day few of them could really have expected to see.

Pat Harris was standing somewhat precariously on the back of a seat, mending the break in the overhead lighting circuit. It was fortunate that the drill had not been five millimeters to the left; then it would have taken out the radio as well, and the job would have been much worse.

“Throw in number-three circuit breaker, Doc,” he called, winding up his insulating tape. “We should be in business now.”

The main lights came on, blindingly brilliant after the crimson gloom. At the same time, there was a sudden, explosive sound, so unexpected and alarming that it shocked Pat off his unstable perch.

Before he reached the floor, he identified it. It was a sneeze.

The passengers were starting to waken, and he had, perhaps, slightly overdone the refrigeration, for the cabin was now extremely cold.

He wondered who would be the first to return to consciousness. Sue, he hoped, because then they would be able to talk together without interruption, at least for a little while. After what they had been through together, he did not regard Duncan McKenzie's presence as any interference—though perhaps Sue could hardly be expected to see it that way.

Beneath the covering of blankets, the first figure was stirring. Pat hurried forward to give assistance; then he paused, and said under his breath: “Oh, no!”

Well, you couldn't win all the time, and a captain had to do his duty, come what may. He bent over the scrawny figure that was struggling to rise, and said solicitously: “How do you feel, Miss Morley?”

To have become a TV property was at once the best and the worst thing that could have happened to Dr. Lawson. It had built up his self-confidence, by convincing him that the world which he had always affected to despise was really interested in his special knowledge and abilities. (He did not realize how quickly he might be dropped again, as soon as the Selene incident was finished.) It had given him an outlet for expressing his genuine devotion to astronomy, somewhat stultified by living too long in the exclusive society of astronomers. And it was also earning him satisfactory quantities of money.

But the program with which he was now involved might almost have been designed to confirm his old view that the men who weren't brutes were mostly fools. This, however, was hardly the fault of Interplanet News, which could not resist a feature that was a perfect fill-in for the long periods when nothing would be happening out at the raft.

The fact that Lawson was on the Moon and his victims were on Earth presented only a minor technical problem, which the TV technicians had solved long ago. The program could not go out live; it had to be taped beforehand, and those annoying two-and-a-half-second pauses while the radio waves flashed from planet to satellite and back again had to be sliced out. They would upset the performers—nothing could be done about that—but by the time a skilled editor had anachionized the tape, the listener would be unable to tell that he was hearing a discussion that spanned almost four hundred thousand kilometers.

Chief Engineer Lawrence heard the program as he lay flat on his back in the Sea of Thirst , staring up into the empty sky. It was the first chance of resting he had had for more hours than he could remember, but his mind was too active to let him sleep. In any event, he had never acquired the knack of sleeping in a suit, and saw no need to learn it now, for the first of the igloos was already on the way from Port Roris. When that arrived, he would be able to live in well-earned, and muchneeded, comfort.