Collected Short Fiction, page 595
“Here’s General Hahn, with his latest official report on the lunar flight.” Clem Peabody was with the general on the screen; they both looked almost as worn and anxious as she thought Jim must be. “General, by now I suppose you must be ready to admit that West has met the same space gremlins that got Emilani and Prieto and Slavik?”
“I wouldn’t put it quite that way.” Hahn’s tired face tightened. “But West’s motors did fire out of control again—for twenty-one seconds, this time—on his boost from the orbit out toward the moon.”
“How do you account for that?”
Hahn frowned and shook his head.
“Couldn’t it be the fuel?” Peabody’s voice turned harsh with accusation. “The solid propellant? Aren’t liquid fuels more powerful and safer?”
“But they don’t store so well,” Hahn said quietly. “They corrode pipes and valves and pumps. We had to use something stable enough to be stored in the satellite stage, and safe enough to be carried all the way to the moon.”
“Your safety record is not impressive.” Clem Peabody grinned sarcastically. “Would you mind telling us how you attempt to control a fire in five hundred tons of high explosive?”
“We form it into thousands of separate charges,” the general told him patiently. “We pack each charge in a separate insulated cell. An electrical ignition system fires each cell, as its thrust is needed. Each one should burn without setting off the next.”
“Then how do you explain these accidents?”
“I don’t.” Hahn looked grim. “I can’t.”
Clem Peabody nodded, with a certain satisfaction.
“Now what about Captain West?” he demanded. “I think you’ll have to admit that he’s in a bad spot now.”
The general wet his stern lips before he answered. “It’s true that he’s in an extremely distressing situation. Those twenty-one seconds of uncontrolled thrust burned approximately four tons of fuel, and pushed the rocket dangerously out of its computed trajectory.”
“And now what?”
Vicky Hill held her breath, leaning desperately to hear.
“Captain West has a choice to make.” The general paused, scowling into the camera, until Peabody prompted him. “He can go into orbit around the moon, instead of attempting to land. That should save fuel enough to get him back alive.”
“Assuming the gremlins don’t strike again! But what’s his other choice?”
“He can carry out his original mission.” The general’s drawn face furrowed severely. “He can reach his assigned target area, in Copernicus crater. He can radio back a scientific report on the moon. Perhaps he can even tell us what happened to Slavik—and to all of our rockets!”
“Well?” Peabody’s sharp hawk-face jutted toward the general. “Which decision will you advise?”
“I’ve already talked to West. I advised him to take the safe orbit around the moon, to observe what he can from a few hundred miles, and come on home.”
“What was his decision?”
“He seemed badly shaken up. He asked for time to think.”
Bruised from the mauling power of the runaway rocket, Jim West felt unfit to face any decision. When he had painfully completed his report to General Hahn, he snapped the radio off. It left a deathly stillness. He sucked water out of a plastic tube to wash the dry fear from his throat, and floated limply in his tiny pool of captive air.
The lack of weight, which had made him ill at first, was strangely restful now. Somehow, shooting out across the long quarter-million miles to the moon, he went to sleep. The harmless ping of a micrometeor woke him. He felt strong and fit and suddenly hungry. He ate a sandwich and then amused himself with an orange, letting it spin in the air beside him like a tiny yellow planet, before he ate it and gathered the drifting debris of his meal into the disposal bag.
Floating loosely moored in his narrow space between the crash pad and the electronic astrogation gear, he manipulated the telescope to pick up the hazy, cloud-clotted Earth, and then the cold little globe of the waxing moon. They were bright and strange against the bottomless blackness of space, somehow unreal. It was hard to remember how much they mattered.
Drifting there, free from the old rule of gravity, remote from all the human calls of the living world behind him and the inhuman menace of the dead satellite ahead, he methodically monitored his instruments. Once again, painstakingly, he tested every circuit of the electronic pilot—and still he found no cause for its fatal misbehavior.
Resting, he pondered the actions of Dan Slavik—whose reckless hunger for what was not his own seemed oddly unimportant now. Lingeringly, he thought of Vicky Hill. Closing his eyes, trying vainly to see her gay red head, he saw instead what he had to do. Calmly, at last, almost lazily, he snapped on the radio transmitter and called Cape Canaveral.
Somehow, toward the end of each endless night, Vicky Hill got an hour or two of sleep. Each morning, somehow, she got up and drank her coffee and got to school on time. She even escaped from the wearing anxious strain for a little while each day as she taught her science classes, building new study units out of the scientific and mathematical problems of the trip to the moon. As early as she could, each afternoon, she rushed back to her room and the television set. For four long nights she sat watching and waiting for news of Jim, before she heard Clem Peabody’s hoarse-voiced announcement:
“Folks, he’s falling toward the moon!
“General Hahn has just reminded him that landing on the moon is in some respects more difficult and more dangerous than landing on the Earth, because he will meet no atmosphere to help cushion his fall. His rocket is now tail-down, so that he can burn the motors to brake his descent. General Hahn warned him that the slightest pilot error, or the smallest mechanical failure, could leave him a dead man on the moon. He replied that he was proceeding with the rescue operation.”
Vicky Hill waited through a dark blankness of time that was blurred with Clem Peabody’s breathless speculations, and punctuated with meaningless commercials, until she saw General Hahn’s tired face beside Peabody’s on the screen.
“Folks, he made it!” Peabody was rasping. “Here’s General Hahn, to tell you all about it.”
“Actually, we don’t know much about it.” Hahn shook his head, with a tired frown. “Radio transmission at that distance isn’t good. West’s faint signals were interrupted by interference from the sun. But we know that he is down on the moon—”
“And apt to stay there,” Peabody broke in. “Because he’s fresh out of fuel.”
“That’s not quite true,” Hahn protested mildly. “We have computed that the fuel he has left would lift him back into orbit around the moon—”
“Where he would be a moon of the moon for the next million years,” Peabody said. “But tell us, General—has he found Captain Slavik?”
“Not yet. He searched the target area in Copernicus crater from space, as he came down. He failed to locate Slavik’s rocket. But the sun is just rising there, and half the crater is still in the dark. He is going outside in his spacesuit to make a surface search of the dark half of the crater.”
“And what are the odds?”
“Not good.” Hahn looked bleak. “His spacesuit was designed for brief emergency repair work, not for extended exploration. Besides, he’ll soon be in danger from the sun. Slavik’s flight was timed to put him on the target area at night, but now—”
He saw Peabody’s puzzled frown.
“The moon’s day,” he explained, “is a whole month long—with two weeks of sunlight. With no air or clouds to moderate it, the rocks get scorching hot. I reminded West of that. He replied that he understood the risks and, anyhow, he hadn’t much to lose.”
Down on the moon, West unstrapped his crash harness and wriggled to the bulging plastic door. Outside, he found a strange sea of liquid blackness, scattered with towering islands of fire. No air softened the sun; every shadow was frozen ink; every sunlit surface blazed. On his right, a curving mountain barrier stood jagged and black against the blacker sky. That would be the ringing wall of Copernicus, and those blazing peaks marked the center of the crater. The sun lay on the crater floor to his left—a sheet of fire that hurt his eyes.
He’d have to hurry.
Hastily, he coupled the portable air. tanks to his pressure suit. He fitted and locked the helmet. He sealed the closures, and inflated the suit to test them. He pumped the air out of the sphere, back into the tanks. He unsealed the little door at last, and climbed down the flimsy ladder to the surface of the moon.
Whatever the coming day might bring, the long lunar night had left its cold in the black shadow of the cliffs. He reached gingerly down to pick up his first small sample of the moon, and the savage cold of the dark little rock bit into his fingers, even through his insulated glove. Here, he knew, a thermometer would read two hundred degrees below zero, Fahrenheit.
Yet that cold was no real threat. Thermometer readings had little meaning here. There was no air to have a temperature—nothing to stop heat radiation from the shadows, and no shield against the cruel sun. His insulated suit gave protection from the cold, but heat was a more troublesome problem. His own body was a source of heat—deadly, unless it could be dissipated. In the shadows, his own radiation would cool him fast enough. In the sunlight, he would die.
Aware of that, he tried to be deliberate. A thousand unknown dangers watched him, from the frozen shadows and the incandescent cliffs. No man had learned to cope with them. One tiny mistake could be too many. He had to be deliberate.
Holding to the ladder, he lifted on his toes in the clumsy, weighted boots, and then jumped cautiously up and down, trying to get the feel of the lighter gravity. He looked carefully around, trying to memorize the cliffs and craters that could guide him back to the rocket. His dazzled eyes could see no stars to guide him. The sky was a roof of suffocating darkness pressed down upon the moon—until he found the Earth.
It was almost overhead, and hard for him to see, but he stood a long time leaning back in his cramping suit, gazing at it with wonder and regret. It was an immense bright crescent, four times as long as the moon he remembered. The polar ice made a diamond dazzle at one horn, and the storms were small white flakes scattered over the steel-blue curve of the sea. At the edge of the sunlight, he could make out the faint brown bulge of western America. Florida lay in the dark, invisible. Vicky Hill, he thought, would be asleep.
Thinking of her, he released the ladder and turned his back to the rocket. The high Earth would be his compass and his clock. He would have a dozen hours, he estimated, before the sun caught him. With all that vast black moonscape to search, he would need it all.
Stumbling up a stony slope in the pale light of Earth, he slowly learned to cope with the moon’s tricky gravity. Even in the bulky suit, with all his load of oxygen tanks, he weighed less than forty pounds. At first he imagined that he should be able to make huge, soaring leaps, but he found that his suit was too stiff and too vulnerable to damage. He fell twice, sprawling in slow motion into the fine, dry lunar dust, before he learned a spread-legged hop that took him safely but slowly across the crater-scarred crater floor.
The bright Earth guided him. Following the black, ragged curve of that Himalayan mountain ring, he jumped the bottomless cracks that moonquakes had made. He inched himself up knife-bladed ridges where molten stone had splashed and frozen. He toiled to the tops of a dozen lower peaks, to search the smaller cups inside the vast one.
All he found was the naked moon.
Yet he didn’t turn back. Beyond each empty pit were a hundred more where Slavik might be. He went on until he was slow and awkward with fatigue. He misjudged a jump, and fell into a narrowing black crevasse. Hampered with the cramping suit, he came down on his back. The fall hurt.
He lay half dazed for a long time. He realized dully that something was wrong with his breathing. Vaguely, he knew that his oxygen equipment must have been damaged, but it didn’t seem to matter much. His pain from the fall was fading, and he felt too tired to move, and he didn’t care—
“Jim!” He thought he heard Vicky Hill, calling urgently through the dark fog in his brain. “Can’t you find Dan Slavik?”
Slavik didn’t matter, but Vicky did. He sat up to look for her. All he could see was the black rock walls of the crevasse, and the bright crescent Earth in a thin strip of blacker sky. Vicky was a long quarter-million miles away.
But the movement had cleared his head a little. Before the fog came back, he reached to switch the reduction valve to his last oxygen tank. His fingers fumbled and slipped. He set his jaw and fought the tiny valve. He had to turn it—to find Dan Slavik.
Stiffly, stubbornly, it turned. Air hissed softly, and he could breathe again. Life came back. He got to his feet on the rubble and dust in the bottom of the pit. His raw skin burned where the stiff suit had rubbed it, and his bruised bones ached. But he could move again.
He climbed out of the crevasse, out of icy darkness into hot white fire. The rising sun had caught him. Its hot blaze burned his face inside the plastic helmet, and its first flash blinded him.
When sight came back to his stinging eyes, he climbed another dead moon peak. The mountain-shadow had been retreating far too fast, while he searched and while he lay in the crevasse. All around him, the hot sun burned on dark moon rock and dry moon dust. He turned to search that fiery desert, and saw a silver gleam.
A rocket!
It stood shining in the sun on a far moon slope. For a moment he thought he had found Slavik. But then he glanced at the turning Earth, and recovered his sense of direction. Slowly, he began to recognize the peaks and pits that the white tide of fire had changed. The rocket was his own—too far away.
He estimated the life he had left, in that last oxygen tank, and adjusted the valve to the most economical setting that he thought he could endure, and started back toward the distant vehicle.
The numbing cold of the crevasse vanished quickly from his tingling hands and feet. He was suddenly too warm. Useless to cool him, his own sweat merely stung his blisters and trickled blindingly into his eyes. A savage thirst parched his throat. He stumbled on as far as he could go, and collapsed into the cooling shelter of a solitary boulder.
He lay there, half-drowned in his own perspiration and gasping for his life, but he knew he couldn’t stay. There were still a thousand spots unsearched inside Copernicus, pits that meteors had dug and cracks where the hard moon had split. And he might come out to search again, when the long blazing day was over, if he lived to reach the rocket.
Calmly, he resolved to live. He set the oxygen valve again, stretching the minutes of life it measured. He shaded his face to study the blazing moonspace, planning his path, searching out every cliff and pit that still offered shelter.
Grimly, he went on again. He made the most of every shrinking shadow. He stumbled desperately through each inevitable barrier of fire. He came at last to the blazing rocket, and hauled himself up the hot metal ladder, and fell through the little door.
Feebly, he struggled to seal the door. He opened the main reduction valves. With air around him in the sphere, he fought to get out of his suffocating helmet. The locking lever slipped out of his fingers, and slipped again, until he had no will to try any longer. He was slipping down into a shapeless dark haze as deep as space, when he saw Vicky watching. Her look of sick reproach made him clutch at the lever once more—
The helmet was unlocked, when he was conscious again, and he was breathing. Engineered against the solar heat, the sphere was not intolerably hot. He unsealed the seams of his suit, and relieved himself into a plastic bottle, and lay a long time resting.
At last he was able to try the radio.
“Space pilot—” His hoarse voice stuck, and he had to try again. “Space pilot West, calling Cape Canaveral ground control.”
He waited for the answer. Three long seconds for his signal, flashing at the speed of light, to reach the far-off Earth and bring its answer back. They passed. They stretched to half a minute. He heard no answer.
Perhaps his signal had been drowned in interference from the sun. Perhaps his power pack had failed. Perhaps some electronic bug had got into the communication gear. He checked the switches, and tried again.
“Space pilot West, on the moon, calling—calling anybody! Get word to Cape Canaveral that I’ve failed to find Captain Slavik—”
“West!” This reply was strangely loud, and it rapped back with no delay at all. “You’ve found me now!”
“Slavik!” He knew that brittle voice. “Where are you? I’ve been looking all over Copernicus—”
“The wrong place, you fool! I’m two hundred miles over your head right now, and moving a mile a second. I’m stuck in an orbit around the moon!”
“Then you never landed, after all?”
That brought no reply.
“Slavik?”
“Sure I landed,” the cocky voice came back suddenly. “In the same area where I dropped the marker shot—eight hundred miles from Copernicus. I made my observations and got up into orbit again, but some mechanical bug that I can’t locate has wasted so much fuel that I can’t get home. I’ve been waiting for you to pick me up.”
“It won’t be quite so simple as that,” West answered. “You see, that same bug has bitten me. We’re both out of gas.”
“Can’t you get up into orbit?”
“Just a minute.” West made a quick computation. “If I toss out my radio, and the fire extinguisher, and the automatic cameras and cosmic ray counters, and everything else I can knock loose—I might barely make it.”
“With no fuel left for me?” Slavik blunted the instinctive sharpness of that, almost apologetically. “I mean, I thought we might have fuel enough, between us—”
“Then you have some fuel?”
