City on the Moon

by Murray Leinster

  It was a man named Thurston who carried the examination through. He was the same one who'd uncovered the false assumptions about kinetic energy in satellite-primary relationships. He worked out this problem on the Harvard analogue computer, at whose controls he sat for seventy-two hours straight, gulping coffee and working with a magnificent obstinacy. When he finished, he was bleary-eyed and staggering from fatigue, and he uttered pungent and unprintable words as he explained the answer tape to those who waited for it.

  It was simply that the experimenters had used the idea of a small and homogenous object as the idea of a neutron. They thought of neutrons as something like nuts; it was convenient to think of them that way. But a neutron is actually much more like a gas-giant planet than a pecan. It has an extremely dense core, but it thins out to nothingness from there.

  The point brought out by the analogue computer was that the physical structure of a neutron was important. If two things like nuts collided at high speed, one or both would smash. But when a neutron of the actual sort collided with another particle, it would not smash; at any speed up to the speed of light, it would bounce. At the speed of light it would not be a neutron. It would not even be an object, but a wave.

  But on the moon, Joe Kenmore knew nothing of this theoretic discovery. He sad angry, crackling things after Cecile Ducros' broadcast ended.

  "Phony from beginning to end," he concluded. "Nothing but sweetness and light!—And she took the credit for everything Arlene learned at the risk of her life!"

  "I don't mind," said Arlene soothingly. "I wouldn't have gotten here if she hadn't needed somebody like me to help."

  "You'd be a lot better off back on . . ."

  There was a very peculiar sound in the dome, an incredible sound because it came from outside. And of course there could not be any sound outside. This was a peculiarly muffled, roaring noise. It began, and grew louder and louder.

  Those within the air dome froze. Kenmore started up, and saw a patch of the plastic dome wall begin to bulge outward. Then—and this happened in the fraction of a second—there was a reddish glow and instantly thereafter a flaring crimson flame burned through the plastic balloon which was the dome's inner wall and structural member. Something emitted a dense trail of red sparks. It soared across the top of the dome and plunged at the plastic on the other side. It seemed that a giant, curved, red-hot blade had been thrust through the open space from side to side. The moving flame-head vanished, but its trail of crimson fire remained. And under the roaring, there came suddenly the thin, whistling noise of air escaping to a vacuum.

  Kenmore found himself crashing into Moreau. The two had leaped for patches at the same instant. But they had leaped. It was agonizing seconds before they touched ground again, seized separate sheets of plastic, and again leaped upward. There was a six-inch hole in the ceiling of the dome. It was twenty feet above the ground, but a man can jump twenty feet on the moon.

  Kenmore reached the hole. The plastic snapped into place over it, drawn and held by the vacuum outside. It caught. It stuck. Kenmore felt moondust settling to position against it on the outside, because the outdraft of air was stopped. Moreau was performing an exactly similar feat at the other puncture. They began the agonizingly deliberate drop back to the floor.

  "Get into suits," snapped Kenmore, still in mid-air. "Make it quick!"

  Some of the surprisingly long-lived carmine sparks drifted down with him. They told what had done the damage, of course. A signal rocket had had a notch cut in its head to produce a small jet of flame before it; it had been thrust into the dust-heap from the outside. The leading flame had thrust dust aside; the following flame had pushed the rocket forward. It would not conceivably have pierced anything but dust—nor anywhere but on the moon. But it had punctured the dome in two places; and it was not likely that this was the only one to be attacked.

  Arlene was getting into her suit with practiced swiftness. Kenmore landed, moved swiftly to her, and pushed a mass of her hair away from the helmet gasket, so that there could be no leakage. He began to climb into his own armor.

  He settled the helmet and said swiftly, "Jake! Check the other domes!"

  He made sure that Arlene's faceplate was ready to be closed on an instant's notice, and said grimly to Moreau, "Watch the ceiling. If it starts down, more air's being lost somewhere we haven't caught. You can hold it, probably, with air from the air tank. But if you need to get out, do so. The airlock's a good refuge for the time being."

  He ran to the main dome. There were three gaping holes in its plastic ceiling, and a still-glowing signal rocket flamed where it was caught in a metal girder forty feet up. Mike Scandia swarmed up another girder, plastic mending sheets dangling from him, to close a leak. The chief made his way to another. Haney—vacuum-suited—fastened three long rods together. A patch waited. Haney speared the bottom of a wastebasket with his lengthened rods, spread the patch over the open end, jumped to the top of a privacy-partition and thrust the patch into place where it was too high to be jumped to and could not be reached from a girder. It stuck, held there by what air pressure remained.

  Kenmore realized that the thin, clanging sound that came' through his helmet was the pressure-alarm gongs. But the air situation was actually under control by now.

  Kenmore made for the power dome and found a slash five feet long where a rocket had pierced the plastic at an acute angle. Three men in vacuum suits worked on it. They were scared, but they had run away once; now they knew better. They worked to save the City as a way of saving themselves.

  Then Kenmore allowed himself to fly into. a rage. A man had needed only to notch a certain number of signal rockets to send a small expanding flame before them, and he'd been able to puncture the City's domes at will. And he'd be outside . . .

  A race back to the main dome. Its pressure gauges were far into the red, but Haney was down on the floor again and Mike and the chief were descending. Kenmore snapped, on his talkie, "I'm going out after the man who did this!"

  He streaked for the airlock, and heard the chief grunt as if he'd landed from a height that was extreme even for one-sixth gravity.

  Haney said, "With you, Joe!" and Mike's voice came sputtering:

  "I'm on the way, too!"

  But Kenmore was out-of-doors first; he emerged into the incredible spectacle of a lunar dawn. The peaks to westward glowed with an incandescent glare. The lava bay on which the City was built still lay deep in shadows; but sunshine smote the tips of the Apennines, and there was a radiance of reflected light everywhere. One could almost be persuaded that there was an atmosphere to give so softly illumined an effect. Earth, near the zenith, was now less than at the half and would presently diminish to the smallest of crescents, with a dull-red completing line of light to prove that it remained a sphere.

  Kenmore paid no heed to any of this. His eyes went to the moon-jeeps. There were not many, as yet; only a part of the City's population was back. The returned vehicles were parked near the airlock, and Kenmore uttered an inarticulate sound of fury. There were no tracks under them. There was what seemed to be a mist about them and among them. And there are no mists on the moon save in bright sunshine and where photoelectric substances lie on the surface. Those mists are dust-clouds, supported in emptiness by electrostatic repulsion from charged particles like themselves. This was something else.

  He made for the jeeps at the highest speed that moon-gait could give him. When he arrived, he found that a few minutes sooner he might have prevented the damage, and a few minutes later he might have failed to notice it. The parked jeeps stood motionless, thinly veiled in a whitish mist which was moondust now drifting back downward to make a smooth, untrodden layer on the surface of the bay. It only needed seconds to make sure. The air valve—by which a man outside might hook onto a jeep's air tanks—was broken off. It was standard practice for men working outside to breathe by long hoses from the jeep, that carried them. It always left two hours' breathing in the suit tanks. But now those
hose connections were broken off.

  The tanks had poured out their contents in a whistling stream, and the dust was already settling again. In five more minutes, only the absence of footmarks in the new-settled stuff would have given warning. If the returned fugitives had fled again, this time they would have suffocated.

  The figures of Haney and the chief, and the minute figure of Mike, emerged into the morning. Kenmore called out to them by talkie, explaining what had taken place. Mike darted back into the City to give warning, so that nobody—however panicked would take refuge in a jeep. Haney and the chief went racing around to the back of the City, to look for the saboteur's work there.

  And then cries came in Kenmore's helmet phones from vacuum-suited figures within the City. He rushed; he was through the locks in seconds. He'd heard Arlene scream . . .

  She'd been in the air dome. He plunged for that. A girder of the air dome had collapsed and half the ceiling sagged. A part was down to the floor, crushing hydroponic racks beneath it. Two figures dragged desperately at a third, caught under the descending ceiling with yards upon yards of moondust above it. Kenmore threw over the air-tank emergency valve by the lock. Great masses of expanding air rushed in. The descending ceiling wavered and retreated—a little—and he leaped forward and helped to drag, pushing at the sagged roof-stuff with one foot as he hauled with both arms.

  But the entrapped figure was Lezd; he was unconscious. The active figure were Pitkin and Moreau. Kenmore cried, "Arlene! Where is she?"

  She must be under the rest of the collapsing plastic balloon, no longer stiffened by girders and burdened with dust outside. Cecile panted shrilly, "Somebody came in—through the wall! The roof fell down, and she —and she—"

  It was patently impossible. To walk into the dust covering of a moon-city should be the same as to walk into a dust-lake. One should be overwhelmed, submerged, packed in dust as in quicksand. Kenmore raced back and opened the air valve fully. For a moment, the ceiling lifted to show all the expanse of floor. But there was a man-high tear in the plastic at ground level on the far side. The roof came down again near that monstrous leak.

  And Kenmore's throat clicked. Arlene was not in the dome, either living or dead. All its floor had momentarily been visible. "Somebody—came through the wall!" insisted Cecile hysterically. "Somebody . . ."

  And Kenmore saw that, too. Complete ruthlessness was behind this last attempt to destroy the already-doomed City. The trick was the same as that of the punctures. It couldn't have been done anywhere else. But when one thought about it, walking through a dust-lake, or a city's covering, would be quite as simple as sending a rocket through it. Signal rockets had a thrust of five pounds, earthweight; they burned for twenty seconds. A man could hold one reversed before him, its flame and fumes roaring ahead, and the blast would literally blow away any amount of the gossamer-weight moondust. More might slide down, but its sliding would be slow. A man could make his own tunnel if only he moved briskly and his signal rockets held out. And Arlene had been here, in her vacuum suit . . .

  Kenmore roared commands as he ran to carry out his own part in them. The fate of the City was taken care of—if it mattered. The worst leaks were patched, save in the air dome. But Arlene had been carried away!

  Moreau came swarming after him. Once outside, Joe Kenmore made a terrific leap, which carried him an incredible distance. He headed for the outside storage space where supplies were kept. The chief and Haney came soaring around the City's sagging mounds.

  "There's a jeep beating it for the mountains!" snapped the Indian. "We saw it! Haney yelled for it to stop and it tried to run over him!"

  Kenmore panted into his suit microphone and the chief swore—unintelligible words which had blue fire around their edges. Kenmore grimly inspected and tested the nearest jeep for sabotage beyond the loss of all its air stores. Moreau came panting with an armload of signal rockets. Mike came bouncing with magnesium marking-powder. The chief balanced a monstrous drum of air snow...

  CHAPTER XVII. PURSUIT

  It WAS the weirdest of scenes. The beginning dawn made the topmost peaks of the Apennines sheerly incandescent. The Mare Imbrium was not yet touched by light, yet the mountaintops tinted it strangely. There were figures soaring here and there in the preposterous leaps of men in a hurry in light gravity. A moon-jeep moved to one, and then to another, gathering them up with their burdens, and then sped—twinkling in the dawnlight—toward the rampart of stony monsters which were the mountains.

  In minutes it crawled up the beginning of the pass, through which another jeep had fled—leaving the City presumably half-wrecked and all jeeps booby-trapped by empty air tanks. The mountains here rose four miles, straight up toward the stars and Earth. Their peaks were bathed in white-hot sunshine. Their valley were dark with the darkness of the Pit. Only the faintest of earthshine now came from the more-than-gibbous Earth. The jeep's multiple lamps glared ahead; all about, hung avalanches.

  In the haste of loading, the jeep's cargo doors had been opened to emptiness, and closed again, and the inner doors to the cargo space opened to admit the men who'd leaped up into it with their burdens. It was effectively empty of air, and those inside it breathed from their suit tanks, which would supply them for no more than two hours. Yet its interior was not cold with the chill of outside, and the drum of air-snow bulged until the chief punctured its top; then there was a bubbling of liquid inside it. So the warmth of the jeep's interior gradually restored an atmosphere which was not yet breathable and utterly dry—but might presently grow thick enough to sustain life.

  Moreau enlarged the opening in the air-snow drum, and gouged out masses of snow, which he zestfully mixed with magnesium marking-powder—which again he stuffed into the broken-off ends of signal rockets and sealed in. It was a singularly appropriate mixture for the end he had in view; this was the assembled explosive which had blasted a moon-cliff in the attempt to kill him and Kenmore earlier. This was the explosive used on the moon—magnesium powder in frozen air. The least spark would ignite the magnesium in its binder of solid air, melting enough air to permit a flame; then the whole mass would detonate in blinding, blue-white destructiveness. It had never been used in rockets before. The explosive-head rockets that Moreau prepared now would be the first missiles ever fired in anger on the moon.

  But Arlene Gray was in the vehicle they must attack.

  Kenmore had thought he knew the ultimate of futility, in the proposed abandonment of the moon and all efforts at space-voyaging. But now he felt a kind of helplessness which was literally maddening. The men he pursued were doomed, of course. They didn't know it, because nobody ever commits a crime unless he expects to dodge its consequences.

  The men in the jeep undoubtedly believed that they had a perfect alibi. They could have been a part of the fugitive train away from the City in its first abandonment; and they might claim they'd gotten lost from it, had repaired their jeep themselves, and gotten back to the City to find the dome collapsed. They would anticipate that the site of the City would be visited by jeeps from the missile bases—which would have happened— and that they themselves would then be picked up and returned to Earth.

  Their scheme was already shattered, but they'd involved Arlene in the consequences of their insanity. And this is the really ghastly part of all crime, thought Joe Kenmore: Criminals often injure others in destroying themselves.

  Moreau, fashioning deadly weapons, said abruptly in the jeep, "Lezd must have grappled with whoever took Arlene. His air supply was turned off. We'd better remember that trick if we come to grips with these people."

  There is an air-supply control at the neck of a vacuum suit. A man can change or stop the supply of air from his tanks, according to his work or his entrance into a dome or jeep, when he opens his faceplate. Somebody had contemplated hand-to-hand combat in a vacuum, and worked out a perfect tactic on the order of lunar judo; it would not have occurred to most men.

  Mike Scandia ground his teeth. The chief and Han
ey stared out the ports, ahead. Kenmore drove fiercely. He couldn't imagine the destruction of the other jeep without destroying Arlene. The utmost to be hoped for was instant vengeance for her abduction—and that was futility. But he was filled with that rage which is in part pure horror at the wantonness of crime.

  His jeep climbed the mountain pass with a reckless speed that nevertheless seemed to him a crawl. Miles above, needlesharp mountaintops groped skyward. They could see feeble earthlight about the jeep, at times. More often, now, there was stark blackness in which the lights of the jeep seemed to cast only pitiful small gleams.

  The tracks curved on a mountainside; there was a bottomless chasm to one side. More than a mile distant, the jeep lights wavered over a sheer wall of darkened stone.

  There was another curving climb, and the jeep's forward ports pointed toward a sunlit mountain flank. The sun already beat on that. It held no life, yet it looked tormented—tortured—as if it strained terribly to become alive, or at the least to give shelter to some small living thing.

  But those who traveled glanced at it only once. Mostly, their eyes were upon the dust of the pass before them. There were trails here; if men abandoned the moon today, their footprints would remain until the sun burned dim.

  At the moment, though, the fact was only important because if the escaping jeep turned aside, the pursuers would know instantly.

  Kenmore .knew this path. He had traversed it more than once, and only recently he and Moreau had brought a freight-rocket's carcass back to the City, slung under a jeep with a dented wheel. Their quarry would have no actual destination; they would consider that they had wrecked the City. They fled into the mountains simply to wait until any chance survivors fled again— and this time, any such refugees would surely die, because their air tanks were empty.

  They would expect lavish reward from some country's ruler, when they returned to Earth.

  Joe Kenmore drove like a man demented or inspired. One needed at least three pairs of hands, and other remarkable gifts, to drive a moon-jeep properly. The faster one drove, the more urgent the need for more-than-human abilities. But Kenmore's jeep would gain on the fugitive vehicle, because its occupants would hardly expect pursuit in the panic and confusion they should have created. They might not bother to travel very far, but he meant to overtake them—fast!