Arthur Clarke - Earthlight

They were now almost a kilometer above the plain, and could see for at least fifty kilometers to the north. They shielded their eyes from the glare of the Earth and began to search.

It took only a moment to find their objective. Halfway to the horizon, two extremely large freight rockets were standing like ungainly spiders on their extended undercarriages. Large though they were, they were dwarfed by the curious dome-shaped structure rising out of the level plain. This was no ordinary pressure dome—its proportions were all wrong. It looked almost as if a complete sphere had been partly buried, so that the upper three-quarters emerged from the surface. Through his binoculars, whose special eye pieces allowed him to use them despite his face plate, Wheeler could see men and machines moving round the base of the dome. From time to time clouds of dust shot into the sky and fell back again as if blasting was in progress. That was another odd thing about the Moon, he thought. Most objects fell too slowly here in this low gravity, for anyone accustomed to conditions on Earth. But dust fell much too quickly—at the same rate as anything else, in fact— for there was no air to check its descent.

“Well,” said Jamieson after he too had carried out a long scrutiny through the glasses, “someone’s spending an awful lot of money.”

“What do you think it is? A mine?”

“It could be,” replied the other, cautious as ever. “Perhaps they’ve decided to process the ores on the spot, and all their extraction plant is in that dome. But that’s only a guess—I’ve certainly never seen anything like it before.”

“We can reach it in an hour, whatever it is. Shall we go over and have a closer look?”

“I was afraid you were going to say that. I’m not sure it would be a very wise thing. They might insist on us staying.”

“You’ve been reading too many scare articles. Anyone would think there was a war on and we were a couple of spies. They couldn’t detain us—the Observatory knows where we are and the director would raise hell if we didn’t get back.”

“I suspect he will when we do, so we might as well get hung for sheep as lambs. Come along—it’s easier on the way down.”

“I never said it was hard on the way up,” protested Wheeler, not very convincingly. A few minutes later, as he followed Jamieson down the slope, an alarming thought struck him.

“Do you think they’re listening to us? Suppose someone’s got a watch on this frequency—they’ll have heard every word we’ve said. After all, we’re in direct line of sight.”

“Who’s being melodramatic now? No one except the Observatory would be listening on this frequency, and the folks at home can’t hear us as there’s rather a lot of mountain in the way. Sounds as if you’ve got a guilty conscience; anyone would think that you’d been using naughty words again.”

This was a reference to an unfortunate episode soon after Wheeler’s arrival. Since then he had been very conscious of the fact that privacy of speech, which is taken for granted on Earth, is not always available to the wearers of spacesuits, whose every whisper can be heard by anyone within radio range.

The horizon contracted about them as they descended to ground level, but they had taken careful bearings and knew which way to steer when they were back in Ferdinand. Jamieson was driving with extra caution now, for this was terrain over which he had never previously traveled. It was nearly two hours before the enigmatic dome began to bulge above the skyline, followed a little later by the squat cylinders of the freighters.

Once again, Wheeler aimed their roof antenna on Earth, and called the Observatory to explain what they had discovered and what they intended to do. He rang off before anyone Could tell them not to do it, reflecting how crazy it was to send a message 800,000 kilometers in order to talk to someone a hundred kilometers away. But there was no other way of getting long-distance communication from ground level; everything below the horizon was blocked off by the shielding effect of the Moon. It was true that by using long waves it was sometimes possible to send signals over great distances by reflection from the Moon’s very tenuous ionosphere, but this method was too unreliable to be of serious use. For all practical purposes, lunar radio contact had to be on a “line of sight” basis.

It was very amusing to watch the commotion that their arrival had caused. Wheeler thought it resembled nothing so much as an ant heap that had been well stirred with a stick. In a very short time they found themselves surrounded by tractors, moon-dozers, hauling machines, and excited men in spacesuits. They were forced by sheer congestion to bring Ferdinand to a halt.

“At any moment,” said Wheeler, “they’ll call out the guards.”

Jamieson failed to be amused.

“You shouldn’t make jokes like that,” he chided. “They’re apt to be too near the truth.”

“Well, here comes the reception committee. Can you read the lettering on his helmet? SEC. 2, isn’t it? ‘Section Two,’ I suppose that means.”

“Perhaps. But SEC. could just as easily stand for Security. Well—it was all your idea. I’m merely the driver.”

At that moment there was a series of peremptory knocks on the outer door of the airlock. Jamieson pressed the button that opened the seal and a moment later the “reception committee” was removing his helmet in the cabin. He was a grizzled, sharp-featured man with a worried expression that looked as though it was permanently built in. It did not appear that he was pleased to see them.

He regarded Wheeler and Jamieson thoughtfully, while the two astronomers put on their friendliest smiles. “We don’t usually get visitors in these parts,” he said. “How did you happen to get here?”

The first sentence, Wheeler thought, was as good an understatement as he had heard for some time.

“It’s our day off—we’re from the Observatory. This is Dr. Jamieson—I’m Wheeler. Astrophysicists, both of us. We knew you were around here, so decided to come and have a look.”

“How did you know?” the other asked sharply. He still had not introduced himself, which would have been bad manners even on Earth and was quite shocking here.

“As you may have heard,” said Wheeler mildly, “we possess one or two rather large telescopes over at the Observatory. And you’ve been causing us a lot of trouble. I, personally, have had two spectrograms ruined by rocket glare. So can you blame us for being a trifle inquisitive?”

A slight smile played around their interrogator’s lips, and was instantly banished. Nevertheless, the atmosphere seemed to thaw a little.

“Well, I think it would be best if you come along to the office while we make a few checks. It won’t take very long.”

“I beg your pardon? Since when has any part of the Moon been private property?”

“Sorry, but that’s the way it is. Come along, please.”

The two astronomers climbed into their suits and followed through the airlock. Despite his aggressive innocence, Wheeler was beginning to feel a trifle worried. Already he was visualizing all sorts of unpleasant possibilities; and recollections of what he had read about spies, solitary confinement and brick walls at dawn rose up to comfort him.

They were led to a smoothly fitting door in the curve of the great dome, and found themselves inside the space formed by the outer wall and an inner, concentric hemisphere. The two shells, as far as could be seen, were spaced apart by an intricate webbing of some transparent plastic. Even the floor underfoot was made of the same substance. This, Wheeler decided, was all very odd, but he had no time to examine it closely.