City on the Moon

by Murray Leinster

  And he did.

  He saw the saboteur's jeep as a faint glittering in reflected dawnlight. There was a steep and narrow gateway where that light glowed down. The ungainly, faraway vehicle crawled into that partial, tinted brightness. It crawled on, out of it, between monstrous stony portals that could have opened upon nothingness itself.

  Kenmore followed recklessly; he know what lay beyond. His jeep clanged and clattered through a narrow gorge. It came out, lurching crazily, to an area where earthlight seemed almost brilliant. Actually it was a weird twilight, and in it could be seen the whole of a small crater hardly a mile across, which had been formed in the wall of a greater one. A part of its own circular rampart had collapsed into an abyss to one side. There was what might be called a lunar glade—a roughly circular, almost level space. It ran some two thousand yards each way, with a mound in the center and starkly vertical cliffs everywhere but at the abyss' edge and where previous jeep trails ran close to it.

  The fugitive jeep had turned aside into this place. It swung about neatly, and the motors of its four wheels stopped. Its occupants complacently set its brakes.

  The pursuers could now hear the fugitives' exclamations in their helmet phones. They saw a flash of light and their complacency vanished. They felt a very faint jarring sensation, turned startled eyes and saw swirling mist and moondust mixed together, and a trail of crimson sparks leading arrow-straight away from it. At the end of that trail there was another jeep—Kenmore's—and it lurched and skittered grimly toward them. A rope ladder dangled from its airlock and a figure swung there. A second streak of crimson sparks flamed from his hands toward them.

  The fugitives were at once incredulous and appalled. The driver slammed on the motors; the jeep shot ahead.

  But it had been stopped without thought of possible emergencies. It had now to be turned again for flight— and one needs many hands to operate a jeep.

  Apparently, the driver panicked. He swerved, and one wide wheel ran into a place where two great stones converged, in just the fashion needed to pinch a wheel to immobility. He tried to force them apart by ramming the wheel ahead; then he tried to back. He could not.

  Kenmore saw a vacuum-suited figure drop out of the other jeep's lock and run frantically to the caught wheel. A second figure swarmed down to help.

  The two of them tugged; they strained terribly, and the impossible happened. The wheel came free.

  And the jeep moved. A jeep is necessarily designed to take great abuse and travel anywhere. This one had stalled, but apparently its driver had not set the control intended for just such situations. There was a control which would let the jeep move forward an adjustable distance, and then stop to let its crew return to it. It is extremely useful, but it was not in use now.

  The jeep moved ahead, steadily, with increasing speed, toward the chasm on which the small-crater abutted.

  One of the men from the jeep roared with fury. It could be heard in helmet phones in the pursuers' cabin. The other man screamed. They rushed after the moving machine. It outdistanced them, speeding toward the cliff that dropped to nothingness . . .

  Kenmore flung his own jeep forward at its topmost speed, to try, quite hopelessly, to crash into and stop the runaway jeep. But Moreau fired rocket after rocket from the rope ladder, swearing hysterically because joltings spoiled his aim.

  A rocket, though, smashed a front wheel when the runaway was no more than fifty yards from the chasm's edge. It slid thirty—striking sparks—before it came to rest. There the ground sloped visibly downward. But the jeep stopped.

  Kenmore stopped beside it only instants later. He plunged for the airlock, but the chief was going through. When Kenmore touched ground, outside, the chief growled to the fugitives, "You give up if you want to, or take what's coming! But you'd better decide fast!"

  He faced the two vacuum-suited figures a hundred yards away in the earthshine. One of them uttered unintelligible sounds. Moreau raised a signal rocket. "Shall I pot him?"

  "Let me handle him!" panted Kenmore. "Let me . . ."

  The nearer of the two fugitives rushed. He came in great leaps of forty and fifty feet, bellowing incoherently. Kenmore moved to meet him—and then saw something more satisfying than even tearing this other man apart with his hands.

  "Let him go by!" he snapped.

  His tone was so fierce that the others instinctively obeyed. Kenmore threw himself aside.

  The one thing that hardly anyone raised on Earth can ever remember in times of stress is that gravity and momentum are different things. The bellowing man soared ferociously at the three avengers—four, when Mike got outside—with his hands outstretched to rend and tear. On Earth, he would have weighed about two hundred pounds, plus a hundred pounds or more for his vacuum suit. Here, man and suit together came to fifty pounds or less. But his forward rush still had the momentum it would have possessed on Earth.

  The big man could not stop himself. He plunged through the opening that Kenmore's sidewise movement made for him, and found himself hurtling toward the cliff edge which the crippled jeep had narrowly escaped. He howled suddenly, tried to fling himself down onto the surface—to stop his progress at any cost. But an object falls only two and a half feet in the first second, on the moon. When this man essayed to throw himself down, his legs ceased to touch anything; but his body did not descend. He floated.

  His body was two feet above the surface when it floated past the place where that surface sloped downward. He reached toward the stone, crying out in sudden shrillness, trying to seize something and stop himself.

  He failed.

  He floated out over the edge of the precipice, and began to curve very gently and very deliberately downward. He screamed. He screamed again.

  Darkness swallowed him. He fell only five feet the following second, and not much more than ten, the third. But that particular precipice was thousands of feet high; the pit into which he dropped was thousands of feet deep. His voice came very terribly to them for what seemed centuries, screaming as he fell.

  His voice stopped in the middle of a shriek. If the fall had not killed him directly, his suit was torn or his helmet crushed. There was no point at all in going after his body—even if it could have been done.

  "And now," said Kenmore savagely, "that other one!"

  The other armored figure had stopped. It wrung its space-gloved hands. Those who converged grimly upon it heard whimperings in their headphones.

  "We'll keep you alive," said Kenmore, very coldly indeed, "until you get back to the City and tell what you know. But we don't promise more than that!"

  They heard sobbings and slavering sounds. The second fugitive wailed and wailed; then he turned and fled blindly, weeping in his ultimate despair and terror.

  Moreau squeezed a signal rocket. The flare of red light jerked from his hand even as Kenmore grated a command against it. But it was two late; the signal rocket flew in an almost mathematically straight line, leaving its trail of lurid sparks. The fugitive fled in the crazy, clumsy leaps low gravity imposes upon panic The rocket seemed to miss him—to be headed past him five feet away.

  But then the flame inside it reached the explosive at its head. There was a flare of sun-bright white light. No sound; no impact; nothing but a, sudden flash of intolerable brilliance, and a spouting cloud of moondust—and the fugitive was gone.

  "And now," said Kenmore, his throat dry once more, "we'll see If Arlene's all right."

  She was.

  CHAPTER XVIII. THURSTON'S REACTION

  IT SEEMED that all the future was cut and dried, and that there were to be no surprises. Arlene Gray was alive and unharmed, which was reason for rejoicing. But the enterprise, which—by Joe Kenmore's lights—meant a magnificent future for mankind seemed to be ended. No cause for joy here.

  There was, to be sure, the fact that Major Gray had told Kenmore not to think too much in such terms, and that a Navy ship was heading for a lunar missile base. But this did not seem to matter. Anyho
w, it would arrive after sunrise—when travel was not practical.

  Meanwhile the matter of continued existence had to be handled, even though its purpose was frustrated. There was the return of the jeeps in which the inhabitants of the City had fled—a long time ago, it seemed now. They came in one by one, their air tanks refilled by the military, and their needed repairs made by missile-base personnel. When they learned of the destruction of the Laboratory, some of the returned men were visibly jubilant. Now they could return to Earth—not by their own fault—and they would never leave it again.

  But some of them were aggressively on the defensive. They had run away, while Kenmore and others had met the emergency they fled from; so the fugitives did not show up well. They were insistently suspicious of Kenmore's behavior. Some muttered darkly that only he and the chief and Moreau really knew how the Laboratory came to be destroyed, and they might have reason not to tell the truth.

  There was a time, indeed, when Kenmore and the others were considered highly doubtful characters. They'd known exactly what to do in the leaking City. How would they know how to meet an emergency like that unless they'd caused it?

  Cecile Ducros stopped those murmurings by the add comment that she, at least, would not be alive but for Kenmore. She added, "Eet ees steel posseebeel for me to broadcast to Earth on the behavior of those who ran away, abandoning the City and the landing-beam apparatus." She should have died in a crash landing, because of their desertion; and certainly she'd have died afterward but for Kenmore's search for her in a jeep.

  At this point, Joe Kenmore was a very admirable person again, because nobody wanted to offend Cecile. The inhabitants of Civilian City wanted to be presented on her next broadcast, and praised to viewers on three continents. They worked feverishly to attain this end, pestering Arlene, Lezd, and Cecile herself for a promise of praise as heroes. It followed, obviously, that they interfered a great deal with Arlene's natural desire to be with Kenmore in privacy.

  She complained ruefully about the persecution, and he told her dourly that there'd be at least two weeks of it to come. It would be so long before the Earthship was ordered to take off—after sunset—to begin the evacuation of the City. Arlene would be among the first to go; he'd see to that. For himself, he foresaw a long period of uselessness—with further uselessness awaiting him on Earth until he had an entirely new plan for his and Arlene's future worked out. He did not think to mention the Navy ship on the way out, coming to the moon to land at a missile base. It seemed to have nothing at all to do with him.

  Then he grudgingly gave of his time to a highly official inquiry into the sabotage of the City. The conclusion-accurate enough—was that all the sabotage so far experienced could have been made by the men who'd made the last attack, had carried off Arlene and had been destroyed in the mountains by their pursuers. It was considered that they'd done most of it, anyhow.

  But Joe Kenmore hardly cared. He was not even interested when Mike Scandia, Moreau, the chief, and Haney enthusiastically volunteered to go out and make a movie of a solar-power mine for the next broadcast. The mines were interesting, but unimportant. A solar mirror concentrated blistering, unshielded sunshine to a focus the temperature of which was comparable to that of the sun itself. Turned on a moon-cliff, the focused sunlight would melt the most refractory stone to lava. Turned on a vein of metal ore, it not only smelted but could boil metal away as steam. But, controlled properly, it brought trickles of pure liquid metal pouring down into a waiting mold.

  The mining process was the subject of the broadcast. Cecile, of course, appeared on the television screen to be at the mine itself. She explained vividly the way one traveled in daylight—when one must. One left the City in a jeep which ran swiftly through furnace heat to a place of shadow, where the jeep cooled off. Then another quick rush through the inferno which was the moon's surface in sunshine, and so to the mine itself. And the mine was merely a great sun-mirror beside a cliff, with a dust-covered sun-shelter for the jeep and those who operated the mirror.

  It was an effective show. Cecile described the danger and the baking desolation with contagious shudders. She made it very clear why men were nocturnal on the moon. One could heat a vacuum suit against cold, but there was no way to cool it so that a man could live long in the sun.

  But the City, itself, disapproved of the show. The returned refugees considered that she should introduce them all, one by one, to her watching audience on three continents on Earth.

  Kenmore didn't even watch the production; he was sunk in gloom, dangerously close to apathy. When word came that the Navy ship had landed—the one that Major Gray had spoken of—he felt.no elation. Even the news that a jeep had been especially equipped with heat reflectors and refrigeration, to try to make a journey in daylight to Civilian City, did not arouse his interest.

  The chief and Moreau came to him in some excitement. After the broadcast, they'd gone back to the solar mine. They had a wild idea of casting a rocket-ship in metal smelted on the moon—running the metal straight from the vein into a mold. It was to be its own cargo. The idea was practical enough in itself, but Kenmore saw the problem of getting such a vessel back to Earth. It could be lifted past the neutral point easily enough-past the point where the Earth's and the moon's gravities cancel each other. Then it would fall to the Earth of its own weight. But landing it . . .

  He told Arlene about it eventually, when, between sleep periods, she tried to arouse him from his depression.

  "It's not a bad trick," he admitted. "They say they're going to see if they can cast a ship, and then figure out a way to land it. That's the problem, of course. It costs as much fuel to land a ship as to take it off. They can let drone-rockets smash on the moon, here, and it's all right. They hit the mares, and are spotted by radar, then a jeep goes out and picks them up. But that couldn't be done on Earth. You couldn't safely drop drone-ships, like meteors, anywhere on Earth—unless you picked the polar icecaps. But it takes three tons of fuel to land one ton of ship gently, and that three tons has to be brought up here—which is as far as ten times around the equator. The fuel to land a ship would cost more than any ship was worth in money, no matter what it was made of."

  Arlene wanted to keep him talking—no matter what the subject—rather than brood as he'd been doing. She said interestedly, "Why not drop them on the icecaps? Couldn't they use helicopters instead of jeeps to pick them up?"

  "Not in the Arctic," said Kenmore. "That's mostly ocean, and they'd smash through the ice and sink. On Antarctica, the weather's impossible; they melt into the snow and become invisible, anyhow."

  "There must be some way," Arlene insisted, though she did not care about the problem at all. "The Sahara?"

  "They'd bury themselves in sand . . . Hello!" Kenmore blinked, and said in a surprised voice, "There are places where the ocean is miles deep. A drone could be designed— Look! They could make drones like supersonic ships on Earth! Drop them into the ocean for their fall to be checked, and have them fixed so they'd float back up to the surface . . . They could broadcast their position . . . I've got to see about this!"

  He showed animation for the first time in a long while, and Arlene seemed fascinated as he explored new angles of the idea. She went with him to the colony computer and exclaimed admiringly at the results he got. Metal, mined and cast on the moon, could be hauled up to the place where it would begin to fall to Earth-some metals, anyhow. Then mortars turned up as possibly more efficient than rockets for firings in a vacuum. With no air resistance to allow for . . .

  He was deep in still further complexities when Moreau and the chief, Haney, and Mike Scandia—Mike was lately recruited into the scheme—came back from a hop-skip-and-jump journey to the solar-heat mine.

  We can do it," Moreau miserably. "We can make the ship. But when we began to compute the cost of landing it, we saw that it was idiocy. No ship could pay for its fuel."

  "No?" asked Kenmore. "Look at these figures!"

  He leaned back, and A
rlene was infinitely relieved. She sat very still as Moreau went over the computer tape, exclaimed excitedly, and then the others began to argue about the drone-ship design, talking all at once and tending to outshout each other in their enthusiasm. The chief knew where there was cobalt in quantity. Haney knew of stannous ore. There was a place where silver was to be found, and even more precious metals...

  And there were laws—drawn up for window dressing— by which private individuals could claim minerals if quite impossibly they could make use of them. The four companions went garrulously off to comply with formalities nobody had ever bothered with before. And then Kenmore said grimly:

  "It'll work. And it's such a natural, for publicity, that there'll be plenty of capital available. So I probably have a job for the future, helping run the operations of Lunar Mines and Metals, Incorporated. Swell, eh?"

  But his eyes were devoid of happiness. Arlene patted his hand. It wasn't her fault, but she was sorry that he was disappointed in the future he'd planned.

  It was a remarkable coincidence that the specially shielded, refrigerated jeep arrived at Civilian City within an hour. Its journey was a great achievement. It had huge reflectors to cast the heat of the sun away from it. It was even shielded from heat in the moondust over which it rolled. It had refrigeration on a large scale. But even so, it had stopped often to cool off. It brought, however, a civilian named Thurston.

  He had come to talk to Joe Kenmore. He was a weedy sort of man and still unaccustomed to moon-gravity. But he spoke with a dry precision.

  "Out at the Laboratory," he told Kenmore flatly, "they made a mistake. The poor devils were under a killing strain, and it killed them. D'you know how they worked? Like men in wartime defusing shells and bombs and mines. They'd report they were going to try something, and then try it. If it didn't blow them up, they'd say so, and then report what they were going to try next. Not very soothing as a way of life for months on end."