“If you want to know,” he said, putting down the oxygen mask, “I was thinking that I wouldn’t have much of a chance if you decided to keep the bottle for yourself.”
McKenzie looked a little surprised; then he too grinned.
“I thought all you Moon-born were sensitive about that,” he said.
“_I’ve_ never felt that way,” Pat answered. “After all, brains are more important than muscles. I can’t help it that I was bred in a gravity field a sixth of yours. Anyway, how could you tell I was Moon-born?”
“Well, it’s partly your build. You all have that same tall, slender physique. And there’s your skin color—the U.V. lamvs never seem to give you the same tan as natural sunlight.”
“It’s certainly tanned you,” retorted Pat with a grin. “At night, you must be a menace to navigation. Incidentally, how did you get a name like McKenzie?”
Having had little contact with the racial tensions that were not yet wholly extinct on Earth, Pat could make such remarks without embarrassment—indeed, without even realizing that they might cause embarrassment.
“My grandfather had it bestowed on him by a missionary when he was baptized. I’m very doubtful if it has any—ah—genetic significance. To the best of my knowledge, I’m a fullblooded abo.”
“Abo?”
“Aboriginal. We were the people occupying Australia before the whites came along. The subsequent events were somewhat depressing.”
Pat’s knowledge of terrestrial history was vague; like most residents of the Moon, he tended to assume that nothing of great importance had ever happened before 8 November 1967, when the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution had been so spectacularly celebrated.
“I suppose there was war?”
“You could hardly call it that. We had spears and boomerangs; they had guns. Not to mention T.B. and V.D., which were much more effective. It took us about a hundred and fifty years to get over the impact. It’s only in the last century—since about nineteen forty—that our numbers started going up again. Now there are about a hundred thousand of us—almost as many as when your ancestors came.”
McKenzie delivered this information with an ironic detachment that took any personal sting out of it, but Pat thought that he had better disclaim responsibility for the misdeeds of his terrestrial predecessors.
“Don’t blame me for what happened on Earth,” he said. “I’ve never been there, and I never will—I couldn’t face that gravity. But I’ve looked at Australia plenty of times through the telescope. I have some sentimental feeling for the place—my parents took off from Woomera.”
“And my ancestors named it; a woomera’s a booster stage for spears.”
“Are any of your people,” asked Pat, choosing his words with care, “still living in primitive conditions? I’ve heard that’s still true, in some parts of Asia.”
“The old tribal life’s gone. It went very quickly, when the African nations in the U.N. started bullying Australia. Often quite unfairly, I might add—for I’m an Australian first, and an aboriginal second. But I must admit that my white countrymen were often pretty stupid; they must have been, to think that we were stupid! Why, ‘way into the last century some of them still thought we were Stone Age savages. Our technology was Stone Age, all right—but we weren’t.”
There seemed nothing incongruous to Pat about this discussion, beneath the surface of the Moon, of a way of life so distant both in space and time. He and McKenzie would have to entertain each other, keep an eye on their twenty unconscious companions, and fight off sleep, for at least five more hours. This was as good a way as any of doing it.
“If your people weren’t in the Stone Age, Doc—and just for the sake of argument, I’ll grant that you aren’t—how did the whites get that idea?”
“Sheer stupidity, with the help of a preconceived bias. It’s an easy assumption that if a man can’t count, write, or speak good English, he must be unintelligent. I can give you a perfect example from my own family. My grandfather—the first McKenzie—lived to see the year two thousand, but he never learned to count beyond ten. And his description of a total eclipse of the Moon was ‘Kerosene lamp bilong Jesus Christ he bugger-up finish altogether.’
“Now, I can write down the differential equations of the Moon’s orbital motion, but I don’t claim to be brighter than Grandfather. If we’d been switched in time, he might have been the better physicist. Our opportunities were different-that’s all. Grandfather never had occasion to learn to count; and I never had to raise a family in the desert—which was a highly skilled, full-time job.”
“Perhaps,” said Pat thoughtfully, “we could do with some of your grandfather’s skills here. For that’s what we’re trying to do now—survive in a desert.”
“I suppose you could put it that way, though I don’t think that boomerang and fire stick would be much use to us. Maybe we could use some magic—but I’m afraid I don’t know any, and I doubt if the tribal gods could make it from Arnhem Land.”
“Do you ever feel sorry,” asked Pat, “about the breakup of your people’s way of life?”
“How could I? I scarcely knew it. I was born in Brisbane, and had learned to run an electronic computer before I ever saw a corroboree—“
“A what?”
“Tribal religious dance—and half the participants in that were taking degrees in cultural anthropology. I’ve no romantic illusions about the simple life and the noble savage. My ancestors were fine people, and I’m not ashamed of them, but geography had trapped them in a dead end. After the struggle for sheer existence, they had no energy left for a civilization. In the long run, it was a good thing that the white settlers arrived, despite their charming habit of selling us poisoned flour when they wanted our land.”
“They did that?”
“They certainly did. But why are you surprised? That was a good hundred years before Belsen.”
Pat thought this over for a few minutes. Then he looked at his watch and said, with a distinct expression of relief: “Time I reported to Base again. Let’s have a quick look at the passengers first.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
There was no time now, Lawrence realized, to worry about inflatable igloos and the other refinements of gracious living in the Sea of Thirst. All that mattered was getting those air pipes down into the cruiser. The engineers and technicians would just have to sweat it out in the suits until the job was finished. Their ordeal would not last for long. If they could not manage inside five or six hours, they could turn round and go home again, and leave Selene to the world after which she was named.
In the workshops of Port Roris, unsung and unrecorded miracles of improvisation were now being achieved. A complete air-conditioning plant, with its liquid-oxygen tanks, humidity and carbon-dioxide absorbers, temperature and pressure regulators, had to be dismantled and loaded on to a sledge. So did a small drilling rig, hurled by shuttle rocket from the Geophysics Division at Clavius. So did the specially designed plumbs ing, which now had to work at the first attempt, for there would be no opportunity for modifications.
Lawrence did not attempt to drive his men; he knew it was unnecessary. He kept in the background, checking the flow of equipment from stores and workshop out to the skis, and trying to think of every snag that could possibly arise. What tools would be needed? Were there enough spares? Was the raft being loaded on to the skis last, so that it could be off-loaded first? Would it be safe to pump oxygen into Selene before connecting up the exhaust line? These, and a hundred other details—some trivial, some vital—passed through his mind. Several times he called Pat to ask for technical information, such as the internal pressure and temperature, whether the cabin relief valve had blown off yet (it hadn’t; probably it was jammed with dust), and advice on the best spots to drill through the roof. And each time Pat answered with increasing slowness and difficulty.
Despite all attempts to make contact with him, Lawrence resolutely refused to speak to the newsmen now swarming
round Port Roris and jamming half the sound and vision circuits between Earth and Moon. He had issued one brief statement explaining the position and what he intended doing about it; the rest was up to the administrative people. It was their job to protect him so that he could get on with his work undisturbed; he had made that quite clear to the Tourist Commissioner, and had hung up before Davis could argue with him.
He had no time, of course, even to glance at the TV coverage himself, though he had heard that Doctor Lawson was rapidly establishing a reputation as a somewhat prickly personality. That, he presumed, was the work of the Interplanet News man into whose hands he had dumped the astronomer; the fellow should be feeling quite happy about it.
The fellow was feeling nothing of the sort. High on the ramparts of the Mountains of Inaccessibility, whose title he had so convincingly refuted, Maurice Spenser was heading swiftly toward that ulcer he had avoided all his working life. He had spent a hundred thousand stollars to get Auriga here—and now it looked as if there would be no story after all.
It would all be over before the skis could arrive; the suspense-packed, breath-taking rescue operation that would keep billions glued to their screens was never going to materialize. Few people could have resisted watching twenty-two men and women snatched from death; but no one would want to see an exhumation.
That was Spenser’s cold-blooded analysis of the situation from the newscaster’s viewpoint, but as a human being he was equally unhappy. It was a terrible thing to sit here on the mountain, only five kilometers away from impending tragedy, yet able to do absolutely nothing to avert it. He felt almost ashamed of every breath he took, knowing that those people down there were suffocating. Time and again he had wondered if there was anything that Auriga could do to help (the news value of this did not, of course, escape him), but now he was sure that she could only be a spectator. That implacable Sea ruled out all possibility of aid.
He had covered disasters before, but this time he felt uncommonly like a ghoul.
It was very peaceful now, aboard _Selene_--so peaceful that one had to fight against sleep. How pleasant it would be, thought Pat, if he could join the others, dreaming happily all around him. He envied them, and sometimes felt jealous of them. Then he would take a few draughts from the dwindling store of oxygen, and reality would close in upon him as he recognized his peril.
A single man could never have remained awake, or kept an eye on twenty unconscious men and women, feeding them oxygen whenever they showed signs of respiratory distress. He and McKenzie had acted as mutual watchdogs; several times each had dragged the other back from the verge of sleep. There would have been no difficulty had there been plenty of oxygen, but that one bottle was becoming rapidly exhausted. It was maddening to know that there were still many kilograms of liquid oxygen in the cruiser’s main tanks, but there was no way in which they could use it. The automatic system was metering it through the evaporators and into the cabin, where it was at once contaminated by the now almost unbreathable atmosphere.
Pat had never known time to move so slowly. It seemed quite incredible that only four hours had passed since he and McKenzie had been left to guard their sleeping companions. He could have sworn that they had been here for days, talking quietly together, calling Port Roris every fifteen minutes, checking pulses and respiration, and doling out oxygen with a miserly hand.
But nothing lasts forever. Over the radio, from the world which neither man really believed he would ever see again, came the news they had been waiting for.
“We’re on the way,” said the weary but determined voice of Chief Engineer Lawrence. “You only have to hang on for another hour—we’ll be on top of you by then. How are you feeling?”
“Very tired,” said Pat slowly. “But we can make it.”
“And the passengers?”
“Just the same.”
“Right—I’ll call you every ten minutes. Leave your receiver on, volume high. This is Med Division’s idea—they don’t want to risk your falling asleep.”
The blare of brass thundered across the face of the Moon, then echoed on past the Earth and out into the far reaches of the solar system. Hector Berlioz could never have dreamed that, two centuries after he had composed it, the soul-stirring rhythm of his “Rakoczy March” would bring hope and strength to men fighting for their lives on another world.
As the music reverberated round the cabin, Pat looked at Dr. McKenzie with a wan smile.
“It may be old-fashioned,” he said, “but it’s working.”
The blood was pounding in his veins, his foot was tapping with the beat of the music. Out of the lunar sky, flashing down from space, had come the tramp of marching armies, the thunder of cavalry across a thousand battlefields, the call of bugles that had once summoned nations to meet their destiny. All gone, long ago, and that was well for the world. But they had left behind them much that was fine and noble—examples of heroism and self-sacrifice, proofs that men could still hold on when their bodies should have passed the limits of physical endurance.
As his lungs labored in the stagnant air, Pat Harris knew that he had need of such inspiration from the past, if he was to survive the endless hour that lay ahead.
Aboard the tiny, cluttered deck of Duster One, Chief Engineer Lawrence heard the same music, and reacted in the same fashion. His little fleet was indeed going into battle, against the enemy that Man would face to the end of time. As he spread across the Universe from planet to planet and sun to sun, the forces of Nature would be arrayed against him in ever new and unexpected ways. Even Earth, after all these aeons, still had many traps for the unwary, and on a world that men had known for only a lifetime, death lurked in a thousand innocent disguises. Whether or not the Sea of Thirst was robbed of its prey, Lawrence was sure of one thing—tomorrow there would be a fresh challenge.
Each ski was towing a single sledge, piled high with equipment which looked heavier and more impressive than it really was; most of the load was merely the empty drums upon which the raft would float. Everything not absolutely essential had been left behind. As soon as Duster One had dumped its cargo, Lawrence would send it straight back to Port Rons for the next load. Then he would be able to maintain a shuttle service between the site and Base, so that if he wanted anything quickly he would never have to wait more than an hour for it. This, of course, was taking the optimistic view; by the time he got to Selene, there might be no hurry at all.
As the Port buildings dropped swiftly below the sky line, Lawrence ran through the procedure with his men. He had intended to do a full-dress rehearsal before sailing, but that was another plan that had had to be abandoned through lack of time. The first count-clown would be the only one that mattered.
“Jones, Sikorsky, Coleman, Matsul, when we arrive at the marker, you’re to unload the drums and lay them out in the right pattern. As soon as that’s done, Bruce and Hodges will fix the cross-members. Be very careful not to drop any of the nuts and bolts, and keep all your tools tied to you. If you accidentally fall off, don’t panic; you can only sink a few centimeters. I know.
“Sikorsky, Jones, you give a hand with the flooring as soon as the raft framework’s fixed. Coleman, Matsui, immediately there’s enough working space, start laying out the air pipes and the plumbing. Greenwood, Renaldi, you’re in charge of the drilling operation—“
So it went on, point by point. The greatest danger, Lawrence knew, was that his men would get in each other’s way as they worked in this confined space. A single trifling accident, and the whole effort would be wasted. One of Lawrence’s private fears, which had been worrying him ever since they left Port Roris, was that some vital tool had been left behind. And there was an even worse nightmare—that the twenty-two men and women in Selene might die within minutes of rescue because the only wrench that could make the final connection had been dropped overboard.
On the Mountains of Inaccessibility, Maurice Spenser was staring through his binoculars and listening to the radio voices cal
ling across the Sea of Thirst. Every ten minutes Lawrence would speak to Selene, and each time the pause before the reply would be a little longer. But Harris and McKenzie were still clinging to consciousness, thanks to sheer will power and, presumably, the musical encouragement they were getting from Clavius City.
“What’s that psychologist disc jockey pumping into them now?” asked Spenser. On the other side of the control cabin, the ship’s Radio Officer turned up the volume, and the Valkyries rode above the Mountains of Inaccessibility.
“I don’t believe,” grumbled Captain Anson, “that they’ve played anything later than the nineteenth century.”
“Oh yes they have,” corrected Jules Braques, as he made some infinitesimal adjustment to his camera. “They did Khachaturian’s ‘Sabre Dance’ just now. That’s only a hundred years old.”
“Time for Duster One to call again,” said the Radio Officer. The cabin became instantly silent.
Right on the second, the dust-ski signal came in. The expedition was now so close that Auriga could receive it directly, without benefit of the relay from Lagrange.
“Lawrence calling Selene. We’ll be over you in ten minutes. Are you O.K.?”
Again that agonizing pause; this time it lasted almost five seconds. Then:
“_Selene_ answering. No change here.”
That was all. Pat Harris was not wasting his remaining breath.
“Ten minutes,” said Spenser. “They should be in sight now. Anything on the screen?”
“Not yet,” answered Jules, zooming out to the horizon and panning slowly along its empty arc. There was nothing above it but the black night of space.
The Moon, thought Jules, certainly presented some headaches to the cameraman. Everything was soot or whitewash; there were no nice, soft half tones. And, of course, there was that eternal dilemma of the stars, though that was an aesthetic problem, rather than a technical one.
The public expected to see stars in the lunar sky even during the daytime, because they were there. But the fact was that the human eye could not normally see them; during the day, the eye was so desensitized by the glare that the sky appeared an empty, absolute black. If you wanted to see the stars, you had to look for them through blinkers that cut off all other light; then your pupils would slowly expand, and one by one the stars would come out until they filled the field of view. But as soon as you looked at anything else--_phut_, out they went. The human eye could look at the daylight stars, or the daylight landscape; it could never see both at once.