William F. Temple - Shoot at the Moon, page 11
“What’s it like out there, Pet?”
Looking at the general area of my navel, he muttered, “It’s all right.”
Thomson, behind me, commented, “You don’t sound exactly overenthusiastic.”
Pettigue turned his back on him and began to open his specimen container.
“Leave that—it can wait,” I told him. “Just get your suit off. And, Tommy, start unpacking the runabout.”
I joined him at the task. The protective packing was tough, and I tore a fingernail ripping it from the part I awarded priority. This was the dashboard with fitted radio. I tuned the instrument and called the Marleys. No response. I supposed they were still messing around somewhere beyond the sky line. I left it at “Receive.”
And that reminded me that Pettigue must have done some involuntary receiving.
I glanced at him to check if he were registering suppressed anger. He was taut and suppressing some emotion, obviously, but it seemed to me more fear than anger.
I said, at a venture, “Pet, you weren’t happy out there, were you?”
He shook his head and said, tight-lipped, “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.”
One of Pascal’s better-known Pensées.
Thomson looked up from the huge wheel he was uncovering and quipped sarcastically, “To be frightened of nothing means that you must be a brave little man.”
“Nothing can be pretty frightening if you step on it, thinking that something’s there,” I said.
“If space scares him, then he was a damn fool to come,” said Thomson. “Space is no place for anyone with agoraphobia.”
“But he came,” I said. “Was that foolishness—or plain guts?” Thomson shrugged and resumed work.
Presently the runabout took shape between us. Simply, it was a large plastic bubble mounted on four outside wheels, thick-tired and independently sprung. Its five seats were each capacious enough to accommodate a space-suited man with all his gear. The battery and motor were mounted up front, and the bubble could be entered only through an air lock at the rear.
I was in the driving seat making final adjustments to the dashboard instruments when Marley’s voice sounded impatiently from the radio.
“Marley calling ship. Marley calling ship.”
“Ship answering. Brunei here. Go ahead.”
“Why didn’t you answer before, damn you?”
“Because the moon is round, damn you.”
“And made of green cheese,” added Thomson, over my shoulder.
The mike picked that up and Marley caught it.
“Oh no, it isn’t.” Triumph ousted impatience. “It’s made of gold. Rich, ripe, yellow gold. The Marleys have struck it richer than anyone did in the Yukon—or anywhere else. I’m telling you, Tycho’s a gold mine. All its streaks are pay streaks. This is the bonanza to end all bonanzas.”
Maybe I should have become excited too, but I couldn’t feel anything very much except some concern for Lou.
“Are you both all right?”
“Sure, but kind of tired. It’s been a long walk. Lou, your man’s worried about you. Tell him what it’s like to feel on top of the world.”
“Were you really worried about me, Franz?”
It was good to hear her voice again.
“Frantically,” I said. “We can’t find where you left the can opener. However, just rest your feet now. The runabout’s all fixed —I’ll drive over and pick you up.”
“Okay, darling. Know where to find us? We’re returning the way we went.”
“I’ll find you.”
I crossed my fingers, then switched on the motor. It revved up with a buzz-saw noise that set your teeth on edge. Once warm, the motor quietened to a bearable hum. The designers had failed to eliminate that initial scream without at the same time trebling the misfire rate. It was a choice between irritants, and they chose the scream.
Thomson said, from the floor, “Hold it a minute. There’s just one more screw to this chair.”
“Aren’t you coming along?”
“What—and leave Pettigue alone in the ship? Not on your life —and I mean your life. Next thing you know he’d blast off back to earth and maroon us. Then he’d spin them some yam back home about us being hit by meteorites; that would make a change from poisoned arrows. Or say we’d been wiped out by a volcanic eruption or something just as crazy. Believe me, Brunei, I’m serious about this. That nut has a psychotic compulsion to be the sole survivor. He just has to keep proving he’s tougher or smarter than any bunch of heroes anywhere.”
The point was debatable, but I wasn’t inclined to start a debate at this time.
I pointedly waited for him to get out. He hesitated at the exit.
“You risking it without a suit? Clearplast is tough, I know, but it isn’t proof against meteorites. You’ll be riding in a bubble. If it’s holed, you’ll be a dead duck.”
He was right. It was taking a chance. But Lou had been taking chances out there for quite a while now. Her luck could ran out while I prolonged her danger by delay over the tedious business of getting suited.
I said, “Hurry it up, Tommy. Open the big door and let me out. Then make sure you keep in touch with us on the net.”
His smile had the now familiar twist of pain. “You can’t wait to see her again, can you? Oh well, I know how it is.”
He got out, shutting the double doors of the runabout’s little air lock, and quitted the garage—Pettigue had already done so. Soon afterward the wall facing me swung outward into the lunar night. The floor section began to move, taking the runabout with it through the aperture. For some moments I was suspended out there under the coal-black sky with its million hard, bright stars.
The section down-tilted, became a ramp. I eased off the brake. The tires, ballooning higher than head level, began revolving and in no time were contacting the lunar surface. I slid the vehicle into gear.
As the first close-up photos showed long ago, the Mare Nubium was pitted with potholes averaging a yard in diameter and a couple of feet deep. The runabout’s wheels and suspension were designed to make light of them and did; I never felt a jar.
Of course, the lesser gravity helped. Even when all four wheels left the ground because of some hump or depression taken at speed, the runabout’s bound was long, shallow, gentle. After a series of these I felt as though I were traversing some enormous trampoline.
So this was the moon.
Even though (unlike a space suit) the bubble in which I sat held off the vacuum at arm’s length, providing a measure of detachment and illusory protection, I felt something of Pettigue’s unease about being alone out here.
It was as though I were cut off from all human association. True, over my shoulder I could see earth itself, the home of the race. But distance had shrunk it to a small impersonal object, no more real than a cardboard cutout. Pale blue and vaguely configured, one side blotted out by night, it looked like half of a broken willow-pattern plate perched on a high shelf—exotic and remote.
The unblinking stars were cold snakes’ eyes watching the insect me scurrying across this vast and lifeless plain.
Just one mistake, they warned, just one accident cracking your frail bubble, just one unlucky hit, and you’ll be as dead as the world you’re on, a stone figure petrified in nothingness for all eternity.
My skin crawled.
There was a man in an outpost in the far north of Alaska who walked alone in the long, long night under the silent, slow-changing patterns of the aurora borealis. Awe came upon him. He became aware that the mysterious universe was inexorably overwhelming him and diminishing him not merely as a person but also as a representative of his kind, by both its difference and indifference.
He described the feeling to me in a bar by Limehouse Reach.
I imaginatively sensed it then, and I actually sensed it now.
Maybe, scattered over immense stellar distances, mankind has potential friends. Maybe, again, he is all there is of his kind. How can he ever know? Outside the solar system stretched gulfs unthinkably wide and seemingly unbridgeable.
Sometimes it appeared to me that there were comparable gulfs between myself and my fellow men. I was unable to make contact. I had no real friends, and doubtless that was my own fault; I had more spines than a hedgehog, and they were always at the on-guard position.
I was a very lonely man until Lou came my way. Across the freezing gulf I had felt a breath of warmth at last. And now I was scared of losing this sole contact. So long as it existed my life, at any rate, held some meaning and the inscrutable universe’s disregard of us all could itself be disregarded—much of the time, anyhow… .
I peered ahead, searching for Lou in the earthlight.
chapter eight
Two people tried to speak simultaneously to isolated little me, blotting intelligibility from each other and sounding like a small angry mob.
“One at a time, please,” I said to the mike. “Lou first.”
“Naturally,” Thomson whipped back, disobediently, sarcastically.
Lou said, “You’re way off beam, love. Alter course by ten or twelve degrees to your right.”
I obeyed and sought her again. If she could see the runabout, then any time now I should be able to see her. Within seconds I picked up a tiny white speck near the horizon; it was probably both of them.
The guess was confirmed as I raced on. Slowly the speck enlarged and split in two.
“All right, Lou, I’ve got you in my sights.”
“And about time, Franz. It’s been the other way around long enough.”
“I’ll make up for it—don’t worry. Off to you now. Tommy, what did you want?”
“Me? Nothing. Nothing I’m likely to find in this godforsaken ash heap. It’s just that you told me to keep in touch—remember?”
Yes, I remembered. Poor devil, he was odd man out now, and keeping in touch with anyone at all was his problem.
“Okay, Tommy,” I said quietly.
When I could discern the Marleys as shapes rather than specks,
they appeared curiously squat. Then I realized that they were foreshortened, reclining and resting with feet toward me on the slope of a hump.
As the runabout covered the final couple hundred yards, they arose and walked down the gentle slope to meet it. Each was carrying something which looked like a thick golden rod.
The slighter figure was Lou, of course; somehow she projected femininity even through her stiff-jointed space suit. She made that anonymous, sexless thing walk like a woman. At least, so it seemed to me. Maybe my imagination contributed something.
Niggardly I spared a brief glance for Marley. Obviously he was still full of excitement, but it was all inward now. He had his dreams too, and his attention was absorbed by them. He was walking only automatically.
I drew up beside them. They entered separately through the small air lock at the rear. Lou flopped in the seat beside me, relaxing her grip on her golden rod. Slowly it became thicker, like an unrolling parchment.
I helped her to remove her helmet. Warm air wafted up from the collar. She was a bit flushed and perspiring. I held her tightly and kissed her. It was like trying to embrace an armored Joan of Arc, but the kiss part of it was all right. She reacted as though we hadn’t seen each other in months.
Then she murmured, “It’s wonderful, darling. I’ve never been so close to real happiness before.”
It was as though she’d assumed that happiness, by some natural law, was destined to be kept at arm’s length from her and that only now was it dawning on her that it could come within arm’s reach.
Her father occupied best part of a brace of seats behind, still helmeted, still silent in his wonderful private world.
Lou commented, “He’s just achieved his life’s ambition. He’ll never again be so happy as he is now.”
With a twinge of jealousy I asked, “You’re so happy just because he’s so happy?”
She smiled and gently tweaked my nose. “Only partly, dear. It’s a double happiness. It’s marvelous to be with you again. Dad’s fulfilled himself. Now we’re free to try for what we want in life.”
Mollified, I restarted the runabout. It screamed like a coursed hare. I headed it back to the ship.
Tommy called again, “Found them yet, skipper?”
“Yes, they’re both safely stowed aboard. We’re just starting back.”
“Good. Congratulations to one and all.”
After a pause he came up again: “Well, at least say hello, Lou.” “Hello, Tommy,” she replied absently, caressing my jawline. “Hello, goodbye, and out,” he said curtly, sensing her indifference.
I began fingering the golden cylinder lying aslant my knee. It was composed of a score or so of thin sheets of what appeared to be beaten gold, rolled up together.
“These came from Tycho’s rays?”
Lou nodded. “The rays are a most peculiar formation. Made up of countless separate sheets, like those, lying flat but overlapping each other slightly—rather like fish scales, except that they’re diamond-shaped. They’re not fused into the bedrock at all—at least not in the area which we explored. You can detach them quite easily. They’re as limp as gold leaf, and you can roll them up like newspapers.”
“Yes, they do resemble gold leaf. But are they gold?”
“Dad says they are, and he should know.”
“So should you,” I said shrewdly.
“I haven’t examined them all that closely.”
“Afraid of spoiling the dream?”
“I suppose so. But why shouldn’t they be gold?”
I shrugged. “So far as I know, it’s never been found in this form.”
“No, not on earth, you idiot. But this is the moon. Even on earth it’s often been found as nuggets of pure gold. Under this much weaker gravitation it’s conceivable that it could come in a less compact mold. Say, spewed out in streams from the Tycho crater, spreading itself thin. And then drying and hardening in scales like these.”
“Could be,” I admitted.
A voice spoke behind us, firm and loud, “It is gold. There’s no doubt of it.”
I glanced over my shoulder. Marley had removed his helmet and his eyes burned into mine.
“Gold,” he said.
Pettigue had been working in his cramped laboratory for more than half an hour.
Now he came to my cabin, slowly climbing up the connecting tube as though reluctant to reach the top of it.
Lou and I stared at him expectantly.
“It’s not gold,” he mumbled.
Lou continued to stare at him, but her face was paler.
I said, “I was afraid of that. What is it then?”
“I can’t say. Some new element, it would seem. But certainly it’s not gold—I’ve tried all the tests.”
I glanced at Lou. She still stared at Pettigue as though he were Thomson and she was half expecting him to give a silly guffaw and admit that he was only joking.
“Well, that’s great,” I said. “Marley’s already told everyone back home that he’s made the biggest gold strike ever.”
Pettigue said miserably, “I asked him to wait until I had verified it. But he just told me I was a fool, that if I couldn’t recognize gold when I saw it then I didn’t know my job. He said he didn’t need to test it; he knew it was gold.”
“He always knew,” said Lou tonelessly. “He always knew it all.” I sighed. “Well, there’s no dodging it. I’ll have to go and tell him.”
“I’ll tell him,” said Lou dully.
“He’ll about go off his head,” I warned. “Better leave it to me.” “It doesn’t really concern you, Franz. It concerns him—and me. I grew up with this dream, you know. It won’t be easy to uproot. He’ll still go on believing in it though the heavens fall. And they may very well fall. It would be like him to pull them down on himself and on all of us, rather than face up to the truth.”
“Then it does concern me. And all of us, as you say. I’m coming with you. Pet, you’d better keep out of sight.”
Pettigue lifted his head and his opaque eyes looked right at me. “I’m not skulking in any more comers any more, Captain. It’s come to the point where I’d rather not live at all than go on dodging consequences. I have just passed a verdict and I want to be there to stand by it.”
I gripped his shoulder. “There, I always said you had guts.”
Had I? Well, not exactly.
We came upon Marley down below at the radio extension in the big circular promenade. He was in the full spate of his triumph. Thomson lounged back, with crossed legs, on the couch, watching him between boredom and cynicism.
“Yes, Sir Humphrey, it means that we’re back on the gold standard and need never come off it. Just think what that means. Inevitably trade will leap …”
Lou gently placed her palm over the mouth of the mike.
“Dad-”
Marley gripped her hand and crushed it so that she winced. He dragged it down to his side and continued with hardly a pause, . . right up the chart. We can pay now—and make them pay. Excuse me, Sir Humphrey, something’s just cropped up. I’ll be back in a moment.”
He looked daggers at Lou.
“Just what are you trying to do to me?”
“Don’t say any more, Dad, not just yet. It isn’t gold. You mustn’t make any more promises before we know where we stand.”
For a second his mouth hung slackly open. Then it closed in a tight line. His grim gaze passed from Lou to me, then to Pettigue.
“Pettigue,” he whispered fiercely, “Pettigue, I’ll have your living heart for this, you utter fool.”
Then calmly into the mike, “I’m sorry, Sir Humphrey, but I’ve been called away to deal with a matter that, unfortunately, seems to be of some urgency. So we’ll have to resume this discussion later. Goodbye for now.”
He laid aside the mike and took a deep breath, gulping air like a skin diver just up from five fathoms. Then he exhaled with a sigh like Prometheus bracing himself against another liver attack.
He was a man given to exaggerating his reactions, and now he gave us yet another: the unnatural calm of a man forcing himself to be patient.
