A Fall of Moondust

by Arthur C. Clarke

  Above all, it had to make an effort to find them and give them a decent burial. This little problem had been placed squarely in the lap of Chief Engineer Lawrence, who was still at Port Roris.

  He had seldom tackled anything with less enthusiasm. While there was a chance that the Selene’s passengers were still alive, he would have moved heaven, Earth, and Moon to get at them. But now that they must be dead, he saw no point in risking men’s lives to locate them and dig them out. Personally, he could hardly think of a better place to be buried than among these eternal hills.

  That they were dead, Chief Engineer Robert Lawrence did not have the slightest doubt; all the facts fitted together too perfectly. The quake had occurred at just about the time Selene should have been leaving Crater Lake, and the gorge was now half blocked with slides. Even the smallest of those would have crushed her like a paper toy, and those aboard would have perished within seconds as the air gushed out. If, by some million-to-one chance, she had escaped being smashed, her radio signals would have been received. The tough little automatic beacon had been built to take any reasonable punishment, and if that was out of action, it must have been some crack-up.

  The first problem would be to locate the wreck. That might be fairly easy, even if it was buried beneath a million tons of rubble. There were prospecting instruments and a whole range of metal detectors that could do the trick. And when the hull was cracked, the air inside would have rushed out into the lunar near-vacuum; even now, hours later, there would be traces of carbon dioxide and oxygen that might be spotted by one of the gas detectors used for pinpointing spaceship leaks. As soon as the dust-skis came back to base for servicing and recharging, he’d get them fitted with leak detectors and would send them sniffing round the rockslides.

  No--_finding_ the wreck might be simple—but getting it out might be impossible. He wouldn’t guarantee that the job could be done for a hundred million. (And he could just see the C.A.’s face if he mentioned a sum like that.) For one thing, it was a physical impossibility to bring heavy equipment into the area—the sort of equipment needed to move thousands of tons of rubble. The flimsy little dust-skis were useless. To shift those rockslides, one would have to float moondozers across the Sea of Thirst, and import whole shiploads of gelignite to blast a road through the mountains. The whole idea was absurd. He could understand the Administration’s point of view, but he was damned if he would let his overworked Engineering Division get saddled with such a Sisyphean task.

  As tactfully as possible—for the Chief Administrator was not the sort of man who liked to take no for an answer—he began to draft his report. Summarized, it might have read: “A. The job’s almost certainly impossible. B. If it can be done at all, it will cost millions and may involve further loss of life. C. It’s not worth doing anyway.” But because such bluntness would make him unpopular, and he had to give his reasons, the report ran to over three thousand words.

  When he had finished dictating, he paused to marshal his ideas, could think of nothing further, and added: “Copies to Chief Administrator, Moon; Chief Engineer, Farside; Supervisor, Traffic Control; Tourist Commissioner; Central Filing. Classify as Confidential.”

  He pressed the transcription key. Within twenty seconds all twelve pages of his report, impeccably typed and punctuated, with several grammatical slips corrected, had emerged from the office telefax. He scanned it rapidly, in case the electrosecretary had made mistakes. She did this occasionally (all electrosees were “she”), especially during rush periods when she might be taking dictation from a dozen sources at once. In any event, no wholly sane machine could cope with all the eccentricities of a language like English, and every wise executive checked his final draft before he sent it out. Many were the hilarious disasters that had overtaken those who had left it all to electrOnics.

  Lawrence was halfway through this task when the telephone rang.

  “Lagrange II on the line, sir,” said the operator—a human one, as it happened. “A Doctor Lawson wants to speak to you.”

  Lawson? Who the devil’s that? the C.E.E. asked himself. Then he remembered; that was the astronomer who was making the telescopic search. Surely someone had told him that it was useless.

  The Chief Engineer had never had the dubious privilege of meeting Dr. Lawson. He did not know that the astronomer was a very neurotic and very brilliant young man—and, what was more important in this case, a very stubborn one.

  Lawson had just begun to dismantle the infrared scanner when he stopped to consider his action. Since he had practically completed the blasted thing, he might as well test it, out of sheer scientific curiosity. He prided himself, rightly, as a practical experimenter; this was something unusual in an age when most so-called astronomers were really mathematicians who never went near an observatory.

  He was now so tired that only sheer cussedness kept him going. If the scanner had not worked the first time, he would have postponed testing it until he had had some sleep. But by the good luck that is occasionally the reward of skill, it did work; only a few minor adjustments were needed before the image of the Sea of Thirst began to build up upon the viewing screen.

  It appeared line by line, like an old-fashioned TV picture, as the infrared detector scanned back and forth across the face of the Moon. The light patches indicated relatively warm areas, the dark ones, regions of cold. Almost all the Sea of Thirst was dark, except for a brilliant band where the rising sun had already touched it with fire. But in that darkness, as Tom looked closely, he could see some very faint tracks, glimmering as feebly as the paths of snails through some moonlit garden back on Earth.

  Beyond doubt, there was the heat trail of Selene; and there also, much fainter, were the zigzags of the dust-skis that even now were searching for her. All the trails converged toward the Mountains of Inaccessibility and there vanished beyond his field of view.

  He was much too tired to examine them closely, and in any event it no longer mattered, for this merely confirmed what was already known. His only satisfaction, which was of some importance to him, lay in the proof that another piece of Lawson-built equipment had obeyed his will. For the record, he photographed the screen, then staggered to bed to catch up with his arrears of sleep.

  Three hours later he awoke from a restless slumber. Despite his extra hour in bed, he was still tired, but something was worrying him and would not let him sleep. As the faint whisper of moving dust had disturbed Pat Harris in the sunken Selene, so also, fifty thousand kilometers away, Tom Lawson was recalled from sleep by a trifling variation from the normal. The mind has many watchdogs; sometimes they bark unnecessarily, but a wise man never ignores their warning.

  Still bleary-eyed, Tom left the cluttered little cell that was his private cabin aboard Lagrange, hooked himself on to the nearest moving belt, and drifted along the gravityless corridors until he had reached the Observatory. He exchanged a surly good morning (though it was now late in the satellite’s arbitrary afternoon) with those of his colleagues who did not see him in time to take avoiding action. Then, thankful to be alone, he settled down among the instruments that were the only things he loved.

  He ripped the photograph out of the one-shot camera where it had been lying all night, and looked at it for the first time. It was then that he saw the stubby trail emerging from the Mountains of Inaccessibility, and ending a very short distance away in the Sea of Thirst.

  He must have seen it last night when he looked at the screen—but he had not noticed it. For a scientist, that was a serious, almost an unforgivable, lapse, and Tom felt very angry with himself. He had let his preconceived ideas affect his powers of observation.

  What did it mean? He examined the area closely with a magnifier. The trail ended in a small, diffuse dot, which he judged to be about two hundred meters across. It was very odd—almost as if Selene had emerged from the mountains, and then taken off like a spaceship.

  Tom’s first theory was that she had blown to pieces, and that this smudge of heat was the
aftermath of the explosion. But in that case, there would have been plenty of wreckage, most of it light enough to float on the dust. The skis could hardly have missed it when they passed through this area—as the thin, distinctive track of one showed it had indeed done.

  There had to be some other explanation, yet the alternative seemed absurd. It was almost impossible to imagine that anything as large as Selene could sink without trace in the Sea of Thirst, merely because there had been a quake in that neighborhood. He certainly could not call the Moon on the evidence of a single photograph and say, “You’re looking in the wrong place.” Though he pretended that the opinion of others meant nothing to him, Tom was terrified of making a fool of himself. Before he could advance this fantastic theory, he would have to get more evidence.

  Through the telescope, the Sea was now a flat and featureless glare of light. Visual observation merely confirmed what he had proved before sunrise: there was nothing more than a few centimeters high projecting above the dust surface. The infrared scanner was no greater help; the heat trails had vanished completely, wiped out hours ago by the sun.

  Tom adjusted the instrument for maximum sensitivity, and searched the area where the trail had ended. Perhaps there was some lingering trace that could be picked up even now, some faint smudge of heat that still persisted, strong enough to be detected even in the warmth of the lunar morning. For the sun was still low, and its rays had not yet attained the murderous power they would possess at noon.

  Was it imagination? He had the gain turned full up, so that the instrument was on the verge of instability. From time to time, at the very limit of its detecting power, he thought he could see a tiny glimmer of heat, in the exact area where last night’s track had ended.

  It was all infuriatingly inconclusive—not at all the sort of evidence that a scientist needed, especially when he was going to stick his neck out. If he said nothing, no one would ever know, but all his life he would be haunted by doubts. Yet if he committed himself, he might raise false hopes, become the laughingstock of the solar system, or be accused of seeking personal publicity.

  He could not have it both ways; he would have to make a decision. With great reluctance, knowing that he was taking a step from which there could be no turning back, he picked up the Observatory phone.

  “Lawson here,” he said. “Get me Luna Central—priority.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Aboard Selene, breakfast had been adequate but hardly inspiring. There were several complaints from passengers who thought that crackers and compressed meat, a dab of honey and a glass of tepid water, scarcely constituted a good meal. But the Commodore had been adamant. “We don’t know how long this has got to last us,” he said, “and I’m afraid we can’t have hot meals. There’s no way of preparing them, and it’s too warm in the cabin already. Sorry, no more tea or coffee. And frankly, it won’t do any of us much harm to cut down on the calories for a few days.” That came out before he remembered Mrs. Schuster, and he hoped that she wouldn’t take it as a personal affront. Ungirdled after last night’s general clothesshedding, she now looked rather like a good-natured hippopotamus, as she lay sprawled over a seat and a half.

  “The sun’s just risen overhead,” continued Hansteen, “the search parties will be out, and it’s only a matter of time before they locate us. It’s been suggested that we have a sweepstake on that; Miss Morley, who’s keeping the log, will collect your bets.

  “Now about our program for the day. Professor Jayawardene, perhaps you’ll let us know what the Entertainment Committee has arranged.”

  The Professor was a small, birdlike person whose gentle dark eyes seemed much too large for him. It was obvious that he had taken the task of entertainment very seriously, for his delicate brown hand clutched an impressive sheaf of notes.

  “As you know,” he said, “my speciality is the theater—but I’m afraid that doesn’t help us very much. It would be nice to have a play-reading, and I thought of writing out some parts; unfortunately, we’re too short of paper to make that possible. So we’ll have to think of something else.

  “There’s not much reading matter on board, and some of it is rather specialized. But we do have two novels—a university edition of one of the classic Westerns, Shane, and this new historical romance, The Orange and the Apple. The suggestion is that we form a panel of readers and go through them. Has anyone any objection—or any better ideas?”

  “We want to play poker,” said a firm voice from the rear.

  “But you can’t play poker all the time,” protested the Professor, thus showing a certain ignorance of the nonacademic world. The Commodore decided to go to his rescue.

  “The reading need not interfere with the poker,” he said. “Besides, I suggest you take a break now and then. Those cards won’t last much longer.”

  “Well, which book shall we start on first? And any volunteers as readers? I’ll be quite happy to do so, but we want some variety.”

  “I object to wasting our time on The Orange and tile Apple,” said Miss Morley. “It’s utter trash, and most of it is—er—near-pornography.”

  “How do you know?” asked David Barrett, the Englishman who had commended the tea. The only answer was an indignant sniff. Professor Jayawardene looked quite unhappy, and glanced at the Commodore for support. He did not get any; Hansteen was studiously looking the other way. If the passengers relied on him for everything, that would be fatal. As far as possible, he wanted them to stand on their own feet.

  “Very well,” said the Professor. “To prevent any argument, we’ll start with Shane.”

  There were several protesting cries of: “We want The Orange and the Apple!” but, surprisingly, the Professor stood firm. “It’s a very long book,” he said. “I really don’t think we’ll have time to finish it before we’re rescued.” He cleared his throat, looked around the cabin to see if there were any further objections, and then started to read in an extremely pleasant though rather singsong voice.

  “’Introduction: The Role of the Western in the Age of Space. By Karl Adams, Professor of English. Being based on the 2037 Kingsley Amis Seminars in Criticism at the University of Chicago.’”

  The poker players were wavering; one of them was nervously examining the worn pieces of paper that served as cards. The rest of the audience had settled down, with looks of boredom or anticipation. Miss Wilkins was back in the air-lock galley, checking the provisions. The melodious voice continued:

  “’One of the most unexpected literary phenomena of our age has been the revival, after half a century of neglect, of the romance known as the “Western.” These stories, set in a background extremely limited in both space and time—the United States of America, Earth, circa 1865-1880--were for a considerable period one of the most popular forms of fiction the world has ever known. Millions were written, almost all published in cheap magazines and shoddily produced books, but out of those millions, a few have survived both as literature and as a record of an age-though we must never forget that the writers were describing an era that had passed long before they were born.

  “’With the opening up of the solar system in the 1970’s, the earth-based frontier of the American West seemed so ludicrously tiny that the reading public lost interest in it. This, of course, was as illogical as dismissing Hamlet on the grounds that events restricted to a small and drafty Danish castle could not possibly be of universal significance.

  “’During the last few years, however, a reaction has set in. I am creditably informed that Western stories are among the most popular reading matter in the libraries of the space liners now plying between the planets. Let us see if we can discover the reason for this apparent paradox—this link between the Old West and the New Space.

  “’Perhaps we can best do this by divesting ourselves of all our modern scientific achievements, and imagining that we are back in the incredibly primitive world of 1870. Picture a vast, open plain, stretching away into the distance until it merges into a far-off l
ine of misty mountains. Across that plain is crawling, with agonizing slowness, a line of clumsy wagons. Around them ride men on horseback, bearing guns—for this is Indian territory.

  “’It will take those wagons longer to reach the mountains than a star-class liner now requires to make the journey from Earth to Moon. The space of the prairie was just as great, therefore, to the men who challenged it as the space of the solar system is to us. This is one of the links we have with the Western; there are others, even more fundamental. To understand them, we must first consider the role of the epic in literature. . . .’”

  It seemed to be going well, thought the Commodore. An hour would be long enough; at the end of that time Professor J. would be through the introduction and well into the story. Then they could switch to something else, preferably at an exciting moment in the narrative, so that the audience would be anxious to get back to it.

  Yes, the second day beneath the dust had started smoothly, with everyone in good heart. But how many days were there still to go?

  The answer to that question depended upon two men who had taken an instant dislike to each other even though they were fifty thousand kilometers apart. As he listened to Dr. Lawson’s account of his discoveries, the Chief Engineer found himself torn in opposing directions. The astronomer had a most unfortunate method of approach, especially for a youngster who was addressing a very senior official more than twice his age. He talks to me, thought Lawrence, at first more amused than angry, as if I’m a retarded child, who has to have everything explained to him in words of one syllable.

  When Lawson had finished, the C.E.E. was silent for a few seconds as he examined the photographs that had come over the telefax while they were talking. The earlier one, taken before sunrise, was certainly suggestive—but it was not enough to prove the case, in his opinion. And the one taken after dawn showed nothing at all on the reproduction he had received. There might have been something on the original print, but he would hate to take the word of this unpleasant young man for it.