touched their arms and legs like a thousand pin pricks and
lay like needles in their lungs until every movement was
sheer agony.-Yet their survival depended upon movement,
hence every moment away from Bandit was filled with forced
activity. But even the space cabin of Bandit was more like
an outsized icebox than a place designed for human habi-
tation. The rocket's insulated walls were ice to the touch,
their breaths were frosty streams—sleep was possible only
because of utter fatigue. At the end of each work shift the
body simply rebelled against the task of retaining conscious-
ness. Thus a few hours of merciful respite agamst the
cold was obtained. —
Crag assigned Prochaska the task of monitoring the radio despite his plea to share in the more arduous work. The knowledge that one of his crew was a saboteur lay constantly in his mind. He had risked leaving Prochaska alone before, he could risk it again, but he wasn't willing to risk leaving any of the others alone in Bandit. Yet, Prochaska hadn't found the bomb! Larkwell had worked superhumanly at the task of rebuilding the Aztec—Nagel had saved his life when he could just as easily have let him die. Neither seemed the work of a saboteur. Yet the cold fact remained —there was a saboteur!
Richter, too, preyed on his mind. The self-styled Eastern scientist was noncommittal, speaking only when spoken to. Yet he performed his assigned duties without hesitation. He had, in fact, made himself so useful that he almost seemed one of the crew. That, Crag told himself, was the danger. The tendency was to stop watching Richter, to trust him farther and farther. Was he planning, biding his time, preparing to strike? How? When? He wished he knew.
They toppled Red Dog in the dark of the moon.
Larkwell had nut two cables to manually operated winches set about twenty-five yards from the rocket. A second line extended from each winch to the ravine. The ends of these were weighted with rocks. They served to anchor the winches during the lowering of the rocket. Finally a guide line ran from the nose of the rocket to a third winch. Richter and Nagel manned the lowering winches while Larkwell worked with the guide line, with only small hand torches to aid them. It was approximately the same setup used on the Aztec—they were getting good at it. Crag helped until the moment came to lower the rocket, then there was litde for him to do. He contented himself with watching the operation, playing his torch over the scene as he felt it was needed.
It was an eery feeling. The rocket was a black monster bathed in the puny yellow rays of their hand torches. The pale light gave the illusion of movement until the rocket, the rocks, and the very floor of the crater seemed to writhe and squirm, playing tricks on the eyes. It was, he knew, a dangerous moment, one ripe for a saboteur to strike—or ripe for Richter.
It was dark. Not an ebony dark but one, rather, with the odd color of milky velvet. The earth was almost full, a gigantic globe whose reflected light washed out the brilliance of the stars and gave a milky sheen to Crater Arzachel. It was a light in which the eye detected form as if it were looking through a murky sea. It detected form but missed detail. Only the gross structures of the plain were visible: the blackness of the rocket reaching upward into the night; fantastic twisted rocks which blotted out segments of the stars; the black blobs of men moving in heavy space suits, dark shadows against the still darker night. The eery almost futile beams of the hand torches seemed worse than useless.
"All set." LarkwelTs voice was grim. "Let her come."
Crag fastened his eyes on the nose of Red Dog, a tapered indistinct silhouette.
"Start letting out line at the count of three." There was a pause before Larkwell began the countdown.
"One . . . two . . . three . . ."
The nose moved, swinging slowly across the sky, then began falling. "Slack offl"
The lines jerked, snapped taut, and the nose hung suspended in space, then began swinging to one side.
"Take up on your line, Richter." The sideward movement stopped, leaving the rocket canted at an angle of about forty-five degrees.
"Okay . . The nose moved down again, slower this time. Crag began to breathe easier. Suddenly the nose skidded to the rear, falling, then the rocket was a motionless blob on the plain.
That did it." Larkwell's voice was ominous, yet tinged with disgust.
"What happened?" Crag found himself shouting into the lip mike.
"The tail slipped. That's what we get for trying to lower it under these conditions," Larkwell snarled. "The damn thing's probably smashed."
Crag didn't answer. He moved slowly toward the rocket, playing his torch over its hull in an attempt to discern its details. He was conscious that the others had come up and were doing the same thing, but even when he stood next to ft Red Dog was no more than a black shadow.
"Feel it," Larkwell barked, "that's the only way to tell. The torches are useless." They followed his advice. Crag walked alongside the rocket, moving his hand over the smooth surface. He had reached the tail and started back on the opposite side when Larkwell's voice rang in his ears.
"Smashed!"
"Where?"
"The under side—where she hit the deck.Looks like she came down on a rock."
Crag hurried back around^ the rocket, nearly stumbling over Larkwell's legs. The construction boss was lying on his stomach.
"Under here." Crag dropped to his knees, then to his stomach and moved alongside Larkwell, playing his beam over the hull. He saw the break immediately, a ragged, gaping hole where the metal had shattered against a small rock outcropping. Too big for a weld? Larkwell answered his unspoken thought.
"You'll play hell getting that welded."
"It might be possible."
There may be more breaks." They lay there for a momerit playing their beams along the visible underside of Red Dog until they were satisfied that, in this section at least, there was no more damage.
"What now?" Larkwell asked, when they had crawled back from under the rocket.
"The plans haven't changed," Crag said stonily. "We repair it ... fix it up . . . move in. That's all there is to it."
"You can't fix it by just saying so," Larkwell growled. "First it's got to be fixable. It looks like a cooked duck, to me. .
"We gotta start back," Nagel said urgently, "oxygen's getting low."
Crag looked at his gauge. Nagel was right. They'd have to get moving. He was about to give the signal to return to Bandit when Richter spoke up.
• "It can be repaired." For a moment there was a startled silence. ' "How?"
"The inside of the cabin is lined with foam rubber, the same as in Bandit—a self-sealing type designed for protection against meteorite damage."
"So . . . ?" Larkwell asked belligerently.
Richter explained, "It's not porous. If the break were covered with metal and lined with the foam, it would do a pretty good job of sealing the cabin."
"You can't patch a leak that big with rubber and expect it to hold," Larkwell argued. "HelL the pressure would blow right through,"
"Not if you lined the break with metal first," Richter persisted.
The suggestion startled Crag, coming as it did from a man whom he regarded as an enemy. For a moment he wondered if the German's instinct for survival were greater than his patriotism. But the plan sounded plausible.
He asked Larkwell: "What do you think?"
"Could be," he replied noncornmittally. He didn't seem pleased that Richter was intruding in a sphere which he considered his own.
Crag gave a last look at the silhouette of the fallen giant on the plain and announced: "Well try it."
"If it doesn't work, we're in the soup," Larkwell insisted. "Suppose there are more breaks?"
"Well patch those, too," Crag snapped. He felt an unreasonable surge of anger toward the construction boss. He sucked his lip, vexedfy, then turned his torch on his oxygen meter. "We'd better get moving."<
br />
CHAPTER 18
COLONEL MICHAEL COTCH looked at die agent across the narrow expanse of his battered desk, then his eyes fell again to the dockets. Four "dockets, four small sheaves of paper, each the capsuled story of a man's life. The names on the dockets were literally burned into his mind: Adam Philip Crag, Martin LeRoy Larkwell, Cordon Wells Nagel, Max Edward Prochaska. Four names, four ^ men, four separate egos who, by the magic of man, had been transported to a bleak haven on another world. Four men whose task was to survive an alien hell until the U.N. officially recognized the United States' claim to sovereignty over the stark lands of the moon.
But one of the men was a saboteur, an agent whose task was to destroy the Western claim to ownership by destroying its occupancy of the moon. That would leave the East free to claim at least equal sovereignty on the basis that it, too, had established occupancy in a lunar base.
The agent broke into his thoughts. "I'd almost stake my professional reputation he's your man." He reached over and tapped one of the dockets significantly.
"The word, the single word, that's what you used to teD me to watch for. Well, the single word is there—the word that spells traitor. I'd gone over his record a dozen times before I stumbled on it" He ceased speaking and watched the Colonel.
"You may be right," Gotch said at last. "That's the kind of slip I'd pounce on myself." He hesitated.
"Go on," the agent said, as if reading his thoughts.
"There's one thing I didn't tell you because I didn't want to prejudice your thinking. The psychiatrists agree with you."
"The psychiatrists?" The agent's brow furrowed |axa question.
"They've restudied the records exhaustively, ever since we first knew there was a saboteur in the crew.
"They've weighed their egos, dissected their personalities, analyzed their capabilities, literally taken them apart and put them together again. I got their report just this morning." Gotch looked speculatively at the agent "Your suspect is also their choice. Only there is no traitor." -
"No traitor?" The agent started visibly. "I don't get you."
"No traitor," Gotch echoed. "This is a tougher nut than that. The personality profile of one man shows a distinct break." He looked expectantly at the agent
"A plant." The agent muttered, the words thoughtfully. "A ringer—a spy who has adopted the life role of another. That indicates careful planning, long preparation." He muttered the words aloud, talking to himself.
"He would have had to cover every contingency—friends,
relatives, acquaintances, skills, hobbies—then, at an exact time and place, our man was whisked away and he merely stepped in." He shook his head.
That's the kind of nut that's really tough to crack."
"Crack it," Gotch said.
The agent got to his feet "111 dig him out," he promised savagely.
The drive to rehabilitate Red Dog became a frenzy in Crag's mind. He drove his crew mercilessly, beset by a terrible sense of urgency. Nor did he spare himself. They rigged lines in the dark of the moon and rotated the rocket on its long axis until the break in the hull was accessible.
Crag viewed it with dismay. It was far longer than he had feared—a splintered jagged hole whose raw torn edges were bent into the belly of the ship. They finally solved the problem by using the hatch door of Drone Charlie as a seal, lining it with sheets of foam from Bandit, whose interior temperature immediately plummeted to a point where it was scarcely livable.
Prochaska bore the brunt of this new discomfort. Confined as' he was to the cabin and with little opportunity for physical activity, he nearly froze until he took to living in his space suit.
Crag began planning the provisioning of Red Dog even before he knew it could be repaired. During each trip from Bandit he burdened the men with supplies. Between times he managed to remove the spare oxygen cylinders carried in Drone Charlie. There was still a scant supply in Drone Baker, but he decided to leave those until later.
The problems confronting him gnawed at his mind until each small difficulty assumed giant proportions. Each time he managed to fit the work into a proper mental perspective a new problem or disaster cropped up. He grew nervous and irritable. In his frantic haste to complete the work on Red
Dog he found himself begrudging the crew the few hours they took- off each day for sleep. Take it easy, he finally told himself. Slow down, Adam. Yet despite his almost hourly resolves to slow down, he found himself pushing at an ever faster pace. Complete Red Dog . . . complete Red Dog .- . . became a refrain in his mind.
Larkwell grew sullen and surly, snapping at Richter at the slightest provocation. Nagel became completely indifferent, and in the process, completely ineffectual. Crag had long realized that the oxygen man had reached his physical limits. Now, he knew, Nagel had passed them. Maybe he was right . . . maybe he wouldn't leave the moon.
When the break in Red Dog was repaired, Crag waited, tense and jittery, while Nagel entered, the rocket and pressurized it. It'll work, he told himself. It's got to work. The short period Nagel remained in the rocket seemed to extend into hours before he opened the hatch.
"One or two small leaks," he reported wearily. He looked disconsolately at Crag. "Maybe we can locate them—with a little time."
"Good." Crag nodded, relieved. Another crisis past. He ordered Larkwell to start pulling the engines. If things went right . . .
The work didn't progress nearly as fast as he had hoped. For one thing, the engines weren't designed for removal. They were welded fast against cross beams spread between the hull. Consequendy, the metal sides of the ship were punctured numerous times before the job was completed. Each hole required another weld, another patch, and increased the danger of later disaster.
Crag grew steadily moodier. Larkwell seemed to take a vicious satisfaction out of each successive disaster. He had adopted an I-told-you-so attitude that grated Crag's nerves raw. Surprisingly enough, Richter proved to be a steadying influence, at least to Crag. He worked quietiy, efficiendy, seeming to anticipate problems and find solutions before even Crag recognized them. Despite the fact that he found himself depending on the German more and more, he was determined never to relax his surveillance over the man. Richter was an enemy—a man to be watched.
Larkwell and Nagel were lackadaisically beginning work on the ship's airlock when Frochaska came on the interphones with an emergency call.
"Gotch calling,'' he told Crag. "He's hot to get you on the line."
Crag hesitated. Tell him to go to helL" he said finally. Til call him on the regular hour."
"He said you'd say that," Prochaska informed him amiably, "but he wants you now."
Another emergency—another hair-raiser. Gotch is a damn ulcer-maker, Crag thought savagely. "Okay, I'm on my way," he said wearily. "Anything to keep him off my back."
"Can I tell him that?"
Tell him anything you want," Crag snapped. He debated taking the crew with him but finally decided against it They couldn't afford the time. Reluctantly he put the work party m Larkwell's charge and started back across the bowl of the crater, each step a deliberate weighted effort. So much to do. So little time. He trudged through the night cursing the fate that had made him Gotch's pawn.
Gotch was crisp and to the point. "Another rocket was launched from east of the Caspian this morning," he told him.
"Jesus, we need a company of Marines." "Not this time, Adam." "Oh . ." Crag muttered the word. That's right ... a warhead," Gotch confirmed Crag kicked the information around in his mind for a moment "What do the computers say?"
"Too early to say for sure, but it looks like it's on the right track."
"Unless it's a direct hit it's no go. We got ten thousand foot walls rimming this hell-hole."
The Colonel was silent for a moment. "It's not quite that pat," he said finally.
"Why not?"
"Because of the low gravity. Thousands of tons of rock will be lifted. Some will escape but the majority will fall back lik
e rain. They'll smash down over a tremendously large area, Adam. At least that's what the scientists tell us."
"Okay, in four days well be underground," he said with exaggerated cheerfulness, "as safe as bunnies in their burrows."
"Can you make it that fast?"
"Well have to. That means well have to use Prochaska. That'll keep you off the lines except for the regular broadcast hour," he said with satisfaction.
Gotch snorted: "Go to hell."
"Been on the verge of it ever since we left earth." "One other thing," Gotch said. "Baby's almost ready to try its wings."
The atomic spaceship 1 Crag suppressed his excitement with difficulty. He held down his voice. "About time," he said laconically.
"Don't give me that blase crap," the Colonel said cheerfully. "I know exactly how you feel." He informed him that the enemy was proclaiming to the world they had established a colony on the moon, and had formally requested the United Nations to recognize their sovereignty over the lunar world. "How's that for a stack of hogwash?" he ended.
"Pretty good," Crag agreed. "What are we claiming?"
"The same thing. Only we happen to be telling the truth."
"How will the U.N. know that?"
"Well cross that bridge when we get to it, Adam. Just keep alive and let us worry about the U.N."
"I'm nut going to commit suicide if that's what you're thinking."
"You can—if you don't keep on your toes." "Meaning . ?"
"The saboteur . . His voice fell off for a moment. "I've been wanting to talk with you about that, Adam. We have a lead. I can't name the man yet because it's pretty thin evidence. Just keep on your toes."
"I am. I'm a grown boy, remember?"
"More than usual," Gotch persisted. "The enemy is making an all-out drive to destroy Pickering Base. You can be sure the saboteur will do his share. The stage is set, Adam."
"For what?"
"For murder."
"Not this b
"Don't be too cocky. Remember the Blue Door episode? You're the key man . and that makes you the key target. Without you the rest would be a cinch."
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