City on the Moon

by Murray Leinster

  If the Laboratory succeeds, Kenmore thought, Earth will become a garden and the stars may be ours. It was the most splendid dream men had ever tried to realize. But because of the nature of human beings, the hope itself has enemies.

  There are social systems which only work when men are half-starved and ignorant. There were nations where such systems still prevailed. Their ruling castes would be overthrown if prosperity reached the people; their teachings could not survive enlightenment; their governments would be destroyed by progress. And to such nations, the purpose of the City and the Space Laboratory was a real and present danger. So there were spies and saboteurs who could earn fabulous rewards by any action which hampered or overthrew the moon project.

  The jeep went thumping away from the place where it should have been overwhelmed. The wheel would last— or it would not. It would be absurd for Kenmore and Moreau to try to confront those who had set off the blast in such tangled territory as this. The culprits couldn't be found; moreover, the jeep was not equipped for fighting. No jeep was. Strangely, no weapons were permitted on the moon, outside the hidden military bases. So the most ruthless of conflicts, Kenmore thought, for the highest stake ever fought for, has to be fought barehanded. Jeeps could not fight save by ramming each other, and men could not offer battle but only practice assassination.

  Cliffs drew aside on either hand. The limping, pounding, vehicle arrived at a vast open plain which was a lunar crater—its farther wall invisible below the nearby horizon. The tracks of its former journey, to pick up a freight drone-rocket and bring it back, were vividly clear in the earthlight. Kenmore swung in close to the cliffs from which he had emerged.

  "They'll expect us to make a wide sweep to dodge another ambush," he said curtly, "so we'll disappoint them—I hope. We'll head back direct, before they can set up another deadfall. I wish we could use radio. With a dented wheel . . ."

  The wheel thumped and pounded horribly, but radio was impossible. The lack of atmosphere on the moon meant that there was no inonosphere to refract radio waves around the horizon. Radio worked, but for line-of-distances only. To communicate with Earth required microwaves to penetrate Earth's atmosphere, and a forty-foot reflector to direct them in a tight beam across two hundred thirty-six thousand miles of emptiness. Civilian City was barely forty miles away, but it was out of radio range on the moon.

  Yet Kenmore threw on the communicator switch. A tinny voice spoke, and he stiffened. Then he heard the words:

  "Calling Civilian City! Calling Civilian City! We have no beam! Come in, Civilian City!"

  Moreau's mouth dropped open.

  "I thought," said Kenmore, "that our friends back yonder might fake a distress call, hoping that we would be fools enough to answer. Then they could get a directional beam on us and guess how we'd try to get back."

  The speaker hummed and hummed. The tinny voice cried:

  "Calling Civilian City! Calling Civilian City! We're coming in! We have to! Give us a beam, Civilian City! This is emergency! We've got to have a beam! Come in! Come in!"

  It could be nothing but the Earth-rocket—the passenger-carrying ship which made two trips each Earth-month. The rocket brought personnel and supplies, and carried back voluminous reports of scientific observations that were actually by-products of the real space project. The really essential work went on out at the Space Laboratory beyond farside. The Earth-rocket had left Earth six days before, and blasted up to the Space Platform— the artificial satellite circling Earth, which was mankind's first toe hold upon emptiness—and there had refueled for a second blast-out. For something over four days it had been in free fall toward the moon, its rockets silent. But now the rockets flamed, and the ship needed a directional beam to land by—because nearly all the human activities on the moon took place in darkness.

  Kenmore touched a button, and the jeep's port-shutters rolled back. He and Moreau could look straight up through the observation-blister above the cabin. There were the stars overhead, and the Earth a brilliant, frightening object in the sky. It was of a tawny-greenish shade, with distorted continents visible upon it, and there was a polar icecap to be seen. Round about it shone the stars, and everywhere that a glimmer of light could be, it was. The stars were of all the colors that light could be.

  But close by the edge of Earth's dazzling face, there was a moving, blue-white flame—rocket fumes, illuminated by the hellfire that produced them. The rocket was already deep in the moon's shadow overhead. It might be five hundred miles up, or two hundred, or one; it looked like a bright and nearby nebula moving among the stars.

  Kenmore stared up at it. The misty, corona-like brightness drifted slowly sidewise. It would be decelerating at an angle to the line between Earth and moon. Its pilot was matching lateral velocity with the moon's surface by tilting his ship. Lunar gravity was drawing the ship down; presently, giant braking rockets must be fired to check its fall completely, and land it very, very gently somewhere within a mile of the conical dust-heaps which were Civilian City. The inhabitants of the City should have heard these calls from space; they should be rejoicing. Some of them should have donned vacuum suits to go out into the frigid, airless night to watch the rocket come to the surface. They might do grotesque dances of welcome in the small gravity and the earthshine.

  The tinny voice cracked suddenly, as if whoever spoke was nerve-racked past endurance:

  "Calling Civilian City! Calling Civilian City! Listen, down there! This is the Earth rocket! We're coming in! We can't help it! We've got three passengers and two of them are women! Give us a beam to land by! Answer us! Answer!"

  Moreau said uneasily, "Could there be sabotage of the beam? And why do they bring women to the moon? Nothing could be more insane!"

  The voice from the speaker was abruptly hysterical: "You fools!" it cried frantically. "Give us a beam! We've got to land! Come in, Civilian City! We've got Cecile Ducros on board, and a girl named Arlene Gray—" Joe Kenmore uttered a sound like a roar. He shook clenched fists at the sky. There was a girl he was going to marry, if he ever got back to Earth. Her name was Arlene Gray, and her father was associated with the Space Laboratory Project.

  He jammed on the power and sent the moon-jeep leaping crazily across the crater's nearly level floor. It was useless, of course; Civilian City was forty miles away. On such tumbled surface as he had to cover, ten miles an hour was high speed. He might double it by sufficiently reckless driving, if the damaged wheel held up; but even so, he could not reach Civilian City in less than two hours. The rocket would have to come down in twenty minutes at most; perhaps ten. Possibly it must touch down somewhere even sooner . . .

  The moon-jeep bumped crazily toward another route that would lead to the City. It threw up waves of powdery, slow-falling dust from the sides of its gigantic wheels, one of which was no longer round.

  They heard the voice from the sky three times more, frantically calling for a landing-beam to guide it. The third time, the voice was very faint; the rocket was passing beyond the horizon.

  The jeep sped on like a mad thing. Inside there were clankings and thumpings and the soft sighing sound of its engines. But outside, there was no sound at all.

  CHAPTER III. DESERTED CITY

  THE moon is a small world, its mountains tall. Therefore, when the moon-jeep came hurtling out of the last obstacle to sight, and the City was in line-of-sight below, the jeep was very high up indeed. The Apennines about it reached clutching, rocky fingers toward the stars, a full twenty thousand feet above the frozen lava sea that was the Mare Imbrium. In the pass, the jeep was three miles higher than the City. The vast, gently undulating mare reached out to a horizon which was no more than the place where stars began to shine. It was a seemingly limitless gray nothing—gray in the earthlight close below, but fading to utter blackness in the distance.

  But there was no light where the City should be. Far, far out, Kenmore and Moreau could see a tiny winking splinter of brightness, but it was not the City.

 
"Call the City," panted Joe Kenmore. "Find out if the Earth-rocket got down safely!"

  Moreau called; there was no answer. Their radio should reach the City; he called again, and again. There was no reply at all. The winking light far out on the mare could have answered, perhaps; but it disappeared as the jeep went hurtling down the tread-marked trail.

  Sweat stood out on Kenmore's face as the radio remained obstinately silent. He could not see the City itself, of course. It was only three great dust-heaps, invisible a mile away. But there should be a light atop it; there should be glaring lights about the surfaced Earth-rocket as its cargo was unloaded and taken into the City's airlocks. There should be jeeps carrying burdens, and the chest lights of vacuum-suited figures moving about. But there wasn't.

  "Stop calling!" snapped Kenmore, when they were two-thirds of the way down the pass. "Something's happened!"

  Moreau clicked off the transmitter. The jeep plunged down the carefully surveyed way, marked by the wheels of other jeeps on other journeys through these mountains. There were places where sheer drops of thousands of feet awaited the incautious. There was a long, crazily sloping hillside which ended abruptly; one could survive the descent only if he passed between two jagged monoliths on which the top-surfacing of moondust had the ironic look of snow.

  They reached the level, frozen sea of stone, where jeep trails in the dust showed the way. The twenty-foot wheels of the vehicle rolled erratically—one of them thumped violently—as Kenmore drove downward through the night.

  They reached the great dust-heaps which were the City, and still there were no lights—no light atop the dome, none at the airlock. No jeeps even stood outside the City. There was nothing at all to indicate normal occupancy.

  And there was no Earth-rocket.

  Kenmore braked a hundred yards from the tunnel-like entrance to the. main dome's airlock. With Arlene Gray on his mind, he sweated, raged, and was numb with horror all at once. But Moreau said encouragingly, "If there had been true disaster, the domes would have collapsed. They have not."

  True—the domes were intact, their conical shapes undisturbed. Moondust has a very small angle of repose, and if the inner bubble had collapsed, the cone itself would show the fact. Even filled with uneasiness for Arlene, Kenmore realized that nothing so drastic as complete destruction had come upon Civilian City.

  He struggled into his vacuum suit, but Moreau was ready first. He crowded into the jeep's small airlock, and there was the clanking of the inner door and the thudding of the pump. Then the sound which was the opening of the outer door. Kenmore saw the jeep-lights' glare upon the dusty sea-surface, and on the square metal opening of the City's lock, and on upward-sloping flanks of impalpable gray dust. Moreau's shadow appeared, multiplied by the number of the lights. It was a group of shadows fanning out from his feet, all moving in jerky but precise imitation of each other.

  Kenmore crawled into the lock. The pump began to thud, but he couldn't wait; he released the outer door, and it opened explosively. The air inside burst out, to be whipped away to nothingness. Kenmore swung down the rope ladder.

  Moreau's voice—calm as usual—came in the helmet phone. "The lock-door is open. There are many footprints, all going out."

  Kenmore moved to see. The immense loneliness a man feels in a vacuum suit on the moon was justified in a new fashion, now. To Joe, it was mingled with terror because of Arlene. Civilian City rose from the plain of the Mare Imbrium, some three miles from the foot of the Apennine range. And the lunar Apennines are spectacular. Now, in the curious reflected light from Earth, they looked like giant fingers reaching imploringly toward the sky. They were a jagged, tumultuous wall against the senselessly cheerful sky of stars. Earth shone brightly, impartially, upon them and upon the frozen sea. The Mare Imbrium was ever-so-gently less than perfectly flat; it had a bloom, a coating, which was a thin layer of moondust. The earthlight served to emphasize a man's loneliness on a world where men did not belong.

  Kenmore reached the airlock, and Moreau pointed to more footprints. The powdered surface showed them clearly. There were many; too many. All moved outward.

  The two went in and Moreau switched on the chest lights of his armor. He pressed the stud that should have closed the outer door; nothing happened.

  Without a word, they hauled it shut by hand. Again Moreau struck the knob that should have opened the inner door; again nothing happened. Kenmore worked the manual handle—raging—and presently it yielded; there was a puffing of air. They entered the inner of the dome's double locks and closed the outer door. They opened the inner—and found themselves in absolute blackness. They were in the central air-space of the main dome of Civilian City, and no light glowed anywhere, save for those on the two vacuum suits; it was unthinkable.

  The bubble under the dust-cone was very large. The floor was flat, of course. The air-space was a half-globe, three hundred feet across and a hundred and fifty high. It was circular, and around its rim were the ceilingless cubicles which provided office space and laboratory space and game areas, as well as merely furnishing arrangements for privacy, which was as needful as anything else. In the center were the Earth plants, which kept the air from smelling flat and stale, regulated humidity, and had some share in removing C02

  But the room was dark. The plants had closed their blossoms, as if at night; their leaves drooped.

  Kenmore swung around to look at a pressure gauge. There were a dozen about, each with its gong to give alarm if the pressure dropped a single ounce. The needles were far, far over into the red area, which meant that vacuum suits must be worn within the dome. The pressure was five pounds, when normal was fourteen point seven. Kenmore tapped one instrument and the needle fell to indicate four point eight pounds. The temperature was forty-eight degrees. The City had not cooled unduly. He swallowed.

  "Don't open your helmet," he warned Moreau by helmet phone. "The air hasn't gone, but it's going." Then he added, "See if anybody's dead."

  But a glance at the rack for vacuum suits answered him. There had been a suit for everyone in the City, plus spares for normal outside activities. The usefulness of a vacuum suit which contained enough air for only two hours, could be doubted in a case like this. If there was a complete loss of air from the City, death would be inevitable. But such suits were handy for lesser emergencies, and they had been used. Everybody in the City had donned them and gone out.

  Kenmore went quickly to the communications office, to the regular beam communicator to Earth. It was turned on, but no tubes glowed; no dial registered any output. It was dead.

  "We'll try the other buildings," he said. "We want to know about the Earthship, too! It was coming in. What happened to it?"

  Arlene Gray was on that ship. She shouldn't have been, Joe thought; no girl should come to the moon with the City's present state of technical equipment, or in the state of affairs among its inhabitants.

  The lessened weight was nerve-racking; the constant confinement was frightening. But to go out into the outside emptiness was terror-inspiring. Neuroses would flourish on the moon in any case, but currently things were worse than merely neurotic. Rumors of the turmoil had gotten back to Earth, undoubtedly. So—the intent was perfectly obvious—Cecile Ducros had come on the lavishly publicized Earthship. She was the most popular television personality on at least three continents. Her coming was a public-relations stunt to glamorize the entire project of a colony on the moon. Yet . . .

  What had happened to the Earthship? At least two hours ago, it had expected to surface immediately. The rocket must be down by now—but where? It couldn't have stayed aloft; it didn't have enough fuel. It couldn't have gone back to Earth; it depended on extra rockets brought up by freight missiles. But the ship would have had no help in getting down anywhere. It didn't have a radar beam to guide it to a small, nearby area from which Civilian City could be reached on foot in vacuum suits.

  And if it hadn't landed properly, then the ship had crashed in the Apennines. That mountain
range is said to have the most spectacular scenery of any place on Earth or moon. But to try to find a crashed spacecraft among its thousands of peaks and multiple thousands of square miles . . .

  Kenmore trembled, but he went hurriedly through the locks that led to the power dome, which was a second mound of moondust with a similar balloon inside. Here was the power equipment, the machine shops, and the primary generators. There were growing plants here, too, to help condition the air. But he found no light. This was as large as the main dome, and its machines glittered eerily in the inadequate light from the chest lamps of the two vacuum suits.

  The air pressure here was three point two pounds, the temperature was thirty-eight. This dome had lost air faster than the main dome. The generator switches were off; somebody had carefully shut down everything before the City was abandoned. The huge tanks of reserve fuel were intact. Normally, of course, the City's power came from mercury boilers outside. During the day, sunlight provided power without limit.

  Moreau said mildly, "If someone does not run the generators, the boilers will pop off and the mercury will be lost when the sun rises."

  But sunrise was an Earth-week off. Kenmore did not even think about it; he made incoherent noises of rage and anguish. He led the way frantically to the locks to the air-plant dome. Any part of the City could be shut off from any other. Naturally!

  There was seven pounds pressure in the air dome, the temperature sixty degrees. The jungle-like masses of vegetation in the hydroponic tanks glittered in the lights from the two men's suits. There were towering racks of tanks, from which leaves extruded themselves extravagantly. The faceplates of their helmets tended to mist from the humidity here, thin as the air was. But one could survive in this dome without a vacuum suit. It would be like a very high mountain, but the low gravity would help. The demand of one's body for oxygen would be less; one could even be comfortable.