Mission to the Moon

by Lester Del Rey

The man laughed, and his face was suddenly almost youthful. "Since I persuaded President Andrews to appoint me as his personal observer on the trip. And don't think I didn't have a hard time to swing it." He grinned, and found himself a place to hold himself upright while the cargo ship was tugged around into position. "I started all this as business, Jim. Sometime along the line, you space boys converted me. I wanted to go."

  It was good to have him, and Jim told him so. He'd learned to have a lot of respect for Jonas.

  "Zero in three minutes," he called to Halpern. "I'm still one shy."

  "I know it." The colonel sounded frantic. "Keep your shirt on, Jim. There's an official tangle. Five minutes delay. You've got alternate courses to cover such situations."

  Jim muttered in disgust and clicked off. This wasn't like the opening of a convention. It had to be based on careful timing. The Moon wasn't going to wait for them. But the officials couldn't seem to get it through their heads.

  "Five minutes," he told Jonas. "And then, whether it's okay or not, I blast!"

  Jonas shrugged. "You're in command, except for orders from Gantry, until we get there. I can't tell you what to do."

  Jim could hear Gantry and Poorhouse calling the station, in the same threatening, pleading tones. He waited, while the clock ticked away four minutes, and then began strapping himself into his seat. "Takeoff positions," he called, making sure the radio was open.

  Halpern's voice was ragged this time. "Postponed five more minutes. Urgent reasons of safety. Your passenger is on the way, Jim."

  Jim cut the switch and glanced out. The taxi was more than a minute off. He reached for the controls, watching the hand of the chronometer. It hit the zero, and he started to bring both hands down on the blast lever.

  Then he stopped, shaking his head. He reached for the radio again. "Okay, Stanley acknowledging delay. But this is final!"

  "Final," Halpern confirmed. "Thanks, Jim."

  Jim sat back, avoiding the amused eyes of Jonas. All right, so he didn't feel like being a rebel any longer.

  He couldn't, with the lives of the others as his responsibility now. So long as there was any chance that there might be sound reason for the delay, he had to accept it.

  The taxi bumped alongside, and Jonas worked the lock for the final time as Charkejian came in and hastened to his seat. He chuckled at Jim's surprise.

  "In return for his assistance, Chiam gets a representative aboard again," he explained. "I didn't think I'd make it, but the acceptance came through in time. I didn't cause all that delay, though, Jim."

  Co-operation, Jim thought. The officials of all countries were getting almost too thick with it. It must mean more than had been released.

  Then the time ran out again. This time there were no more delays. Jim had the second revision of the course out in front of him, and most of it was already memorized. He called out the warning and began counting backward. Over the radio there was a confirming count, which broke off at zero minus thirty while Halpern wished them good luck, and then began again.

  The chronometer hand met the indicator and Jim's fingers eased back on the lever. More than four thousand tons of ship and cargo stirred gently and began to move.

  This time, Jim realized, he wasn't a mere replacement. There would be no Gantry sitting beside him

  to help if he should foul up the trip. Here was one ease where nobody had more experience than he had, since no such trip had ever been made, unless it was by Freddy and Mark Emmett.

  It would be the first real landing on the surface of a world without the help of an atmosphere.

  For a second, the mixture of thrill and fear ran through him. Then he turned to the job ahead, figuring their course in his mind and body as he checked it with the instruments. Finally, he eased back on the control and the first blast cut off.

  They were dropping toward Earth.

  Chapter 16 »ohd

  t required close estimating as they drew nearer the Earth. At the speed of over eighteen thousand miles an hour they would reach, and with ships having no streamlining, even a few wisps of air could cost them more speed than the maneuver would gain—if it didn't burn them to cinders! These weren't ships designed for atmospheric travel. But the closer they could get, the better it would be for speed. They had finally decided on a height of 320 miles.

  Jim watched the long-range altimeter carefully, trying to make sure that he was within the normal variation. They came down now, and began to turn under Earth's pull. The interconnecting radios were open and the ships were holding in a compact group of three. It wouldn't do to spread, if they hoped to achieve the same course without costly maneuverings. Gantry was running the official count now. But he

  couldn't control all the blasts. That had to be done on each ship. He suddenly made up his mind. "Now!"

  The blast ripped out behind Jim's ship as he hit the lever. He checked the course and kept his eye on the screen that showed the others. He was almost precisely keeping up with Gantry, and Poorhouse was close enough. Gantry's ship, the Hohmann, would be the pace setter, of course. Poorhouse was at the left in the Oherih, and Jim to the right in the Goddard.

  The acceleration wasn't as heavy as that of one of the supply rockets, but it was more than the Moon ships had originally been designed to take. They had to burn their fuel now as quickly as they could to throw off its weight here where they were close to Earth, rather than doing the work of carrying it higher again before using it. It was pouring out through the great banks of rocket motors in rivers, draining the big globular side tanks in a matter of minutes.

  Jim was only barely conscious of the pressing weight that was crushing him. His fingers were leaden on the control board, but his attention was riveted on his instruments and the other ships. The acceleration wasn't great enough to bother his vision.

  They were rising again, around the Earth and arcing back up toward the station orbit. But now their speed was rising above that of the fall.

  Gantry had the hardest job—it was up to him to decide when they were ready to cut blast His count began, just as Jim tensed to expect it. They were in smooth synchronization with each other.

  All feeling of weight disappeared as the blasts cut off. He studied the other ships, wondering if there would be a slow drifting apart to mark errors in their courses. But he could see none.

  From the station, a signal came out. "Perfect within our observation!"

  It couldn't have been more welcome news. Jim heard Gantry's sigh through the speaker, and then the click of the switch being closed. The older pilot had the heavy responsibility, and Jim was glad of it.

  And then, as always when drifting in space, there was nothing to do. The passengers unfastened themselves. Jonas, Pierotti, Charkejian, Nora and himself were nearly as at home in such conditions as they were on the surface of a planet. But he wondered about the others. He'd have appreciated having a few plain crewmen or maintenance engineers, but somehow he'd drawn five of the scientists. Probably Charkejian and the others had replaced his crew. It was the sort of foulup that could happen at the last minute.

  He checked over everything, making sure it had stood the strain of acceleration, and was finally satisfied. Then he turned to Pierotti. "Want to help me release the balloons?"

  The young man grinned back at him and began getting into a space suit. The release could have waited until near the end of the trip, but Jim felt more comfortable doing it at once.

  They pumped the air out of the lock and climbed out through it into a forest of girders and onto the top of the cargo tank. At thousands of miles an hour, there was no feeling of speed. Only a change in rate or the resistance of air could produce that. They had the same momentum as the ship, and it was like standing on a still platform.

  Jim grabbed a thin rope and tied it about himself, in case of an accidental slip or movement that might throw him off. But it was only a casual precaution. Pierotti seemed no more concerned as he followed Jim out toward the places where the girders holdi
ng the big balloons were fastened to the rest of the frame. They moved along from handhold to handhold.

  Jim saw men coming out of Gantry's ship to do the same, and then others moved from the Oberth. He felt some satisfaction in knowing he'd been the first, though he suspected all the decisions had been independent.

  They pumped the little remaining fuel back into the other tanks. The pumps were actually thin rollers that squeezed the bags empty. Here there was no pressure outside to force the empty globe walls together; and when not under acceleration, the fuel might clump into a sphere anywhere inside the tanks, so no ordinary pump could work. Then they loosened the big hitches. Bracing themselves, they shoved the framework and bags away, where the assemblies would drift off slowly back and sideways. Eventually, they would crash on the Moon. It was wasteful, but less so than using the fuel needed to brake the extra weight down to the satellite. They repeated the same action on the other side, and then went back into the Goddard.

  The first day wasn't so bad. The five new voyagers managed to take it for most of the time. But then the excitement wore thin and their fears mixed with whatever weakness they felt. They hadn't much space training, obviously, and life under the spin of the station wasn't the same thing.

  There were grumblings and bickerings, particularly when they realized that there was only a single tiny rest-closet and that they would have to sleep in shifts. They'd been told all that, of course. But now they were feeling it, together with the fact that they were imprisoned in a small globe, thousands of miles from Earth, and without any fixed up or down. There was a quarrel between one man and woman who both had several degrees after their names about which one would have the seat nearer the pilot, until Jim settled it by sending them both to the back. There were complaints at the smell of the food in the small cabin.

  It reached the worst when one girl became space sick. She'd been quiet before, but now suddenly she couldn't control herself. Nora had to chase about frantically, cleaning up and setting fans to high speed to purify the air. The others turned on the girl.

  Pierotti got up then and went swimming back through the air toward them. Jim realized why he had been chosen for the position of a diplomat as he watched Pierotti soothe the others and bring some order out of things. Mercifully, the girl recovered quickly and there was no recurrence.

  Jonas moved up at Jim's beckoning, to slip into the seat behind.

  "Is this what they call adventure?" Jim wanted to know.

  The older man smiled. "I suppose it is, Jim. I imagine all through history, every great event has been loaded with such preliminary bickerings and later troubles. At least, I seem to remember that Columbus ran into trouble at the court of Isabella; and he certainly had enough grief with the inadequate crew of unwilling sailors he got. They'll probably be all right later. They're just realizing they can't get out and walk back."

  Jim nodded and tried to forget his own grievances. He finally got into a game of chess with Charkejian, while Jonas kibitzed. Then he watched as the two older men played, surprised to see that it became an entirely different game when both players were expert.

  Again, it was discussion of a colony on the Moon that finally filled the time. With five scientists there, the speculation on what could be done was almost fantastic. Jim wondered how much of it could ever come true. More than seemed likely, he suspected. It had taken only this last century for men to move from the ground into the air and then out into space. Maybe in another century the Moon could be converted into the livable world these people were dreaming of. At any rate, it gave them something to think about.

  Certainly, if fuel could be made there, trips would become relatively simple and cheap. With such fuel, the ferry would need little changing to handle the trip regularly.

  Things had shaken down somewhat by the time the third day began. Jim pulled out one of the survey pictures of Dewey Bay and began studying it. Its official name was Sinus Roris, on the northern section of the Stormy Ocean—actually less of a sea than the Sahara Desert, of course. It lay well toward the North Pole of the Moon, where the sun would strike the surface at an angle, and where there wouldn't be the impossible daytime heat to be found at the Equator. On the photograph it was a great dark plain, flat enough for a good landing, but with areas that offered good shelter possibilities. They had no idea how much danger there might be from meteors there, but it could do no harm to play it safe.

  Unfortunately, though, they couldn't pick the ideal landing site, as the original plan had been. They'd be forced to depend on where Freddy had landed, since they would need to get to him as quickly as possible.

  Suddenly the radar bipped at him, blinking with tiny pinpoints of light. Charkejian let out a pleased chuckle.

  "So I was right," he explained. "I thought there was evidence of a small meteorite swarm due here. You're seeing something that's pretty rare, actually. But that's why I insisted on having the trip held back as long as I could, to make sure it would be safe. They should just pass before we reach that section. A couple of big ones—big as a small car, see? Those are really rare ones. We got signs of them on the observatory micro-microwave radar, and ..."

  There was a sharp, intense splatting sound, followed by a brief scream of air, and something that might have been an explosion! It had come from the bottom of the passenger globe, and now there was a movement of the air toward that section.

  One of the women screamed, and a man was sitting back with dawning fear on his face as Jim dived down the central pole. He saw that the automatic detectors had been released and were moving slowly toward the small hole—like little balloons drifting in the air currents.

  He grabbed an emergency kit from the wall, yanked it open, and slapped a prepared patch over the hole where the air was escaping. The internal pressure held it tight, until the cement could seal it.

  Then he turned. At first, it looked as if they had been lucky. He bent over to examine the damage more closely, however, and groaned.

  The meteorite must have been as big as a small pea. It had obviously hit with force enough to drive it through the bumper, meant to offer enough resistance to vaporize the bit of rock before it had time to break through. Then it had driven in at such a speed that the air had acted as a solid, piling up ahead of it, and heating it almost instantly to a gas. That had been the explosion. The meteorite hadn't gone through anything but the wall, but the shock from its vaporizing had acted like a small bomb.

  The chief damage had been done to the central tube, down which the wiring from the navigation controls ran, on their way toward the rocket motors. Some of the wires had been broken entirely, and the rest were twisted into a messy tangle, with insulation laid bare in spots. There would have been even more damage if he hadn't been drifting with no electricity flowing through the wires.

  He felt sick as Charkejian joined him, to be followed by Nora and Jonas.

  "Maybe you should have gotten this trip postponed another five minutes," he said to the scientist. "Or maybe that radar stuff of yours wasn't too accurate."

  "Not very," Charkejian admitted. "It's still brand-new methods, and amazing we get any reliable results. Anyhow, there's always a faint chance of being hit by one, though it's pretty slim. You're lucky you didn't hit the main part of that little swarm."

  Jim nodded. The man was right. If he'd taken off on the original schedule or the next, in defiance of authority, there was a good chance he'd have been hit by more, and worse.

  There was still trouble enough. "Any chance more will hit while we're down here?" he asked.

  Charkejian spread his hands helplessly. "Who knows? There's always a chance. But the end of the swarm is past by now. Anyhow, there's nothing you can do about it, so you might as well stay."

  Jim had finished his study of the wiring. He could probably have repaired it, given time. It would have meant ripping off more of the tubing, up to a height where he could trace the color codes on the insulation of the wires, before he could run replacements. He mig
ht be able to rob wire from something else, if the ship had no spares. Probably the directory list in his official papers would show wire somewhere.

  But with what he knew of wiring and the mess this was in, there wouldn't be time to get it fixed before they were landing on the Moon. And he couldn't use the rockets for landing until it was fixed.

  Naturally, it had to happen to his ship! There wasn't

  supposed to be one chance in a hundred of one that size hitting; most of the meteorites were dust particles or smaller. Probably the meteor bumper would show pits where some of those had hit before the trip was over. But out of all the billions of cubic miles of empty space, he'd had to arrive here at the same time as that lump of rock!

  "So what do we do about it?" Jonas asked.

  Jim grimaced. "We yell for help, I guess," he decided.

  ChUpter IV Emergency Repair

  Iantry listened in surprise. Obviously he hadn't "I known there was any trouble. No sound could J carry across the vacuum, and the flash of the meteorite must have been too small to notice on the outside. The leader of the trip consulted briefly over his intercom and then grunted reassuringly. ,

  "We're pretty well staffed here," he said. "One of the maintenance crew helped to lay out the original wiring. We have tools enough. It shouldn't take too long. The men will be right over."

  Jim turned back to the nervous passengers. Pierotti and Nora had calmed them somewhat, but they wanted official word now. "We got hit," Jim told them truthfully. "But it was a small meteorite. The hole in the hull is patched, and men are coming over to fix some of the wiring that got tangled up."

  If they thought he meant the wiring that gave them light, instead of the controls of the ship, he was happy

  to leave it that way. He wasn't going to lie to them— that would ruin everything if they ever discovered it— but the less they had to worry about, the better. He saw Jonas nod approvingly as he finished.