Arthur Clarke - Earthlight

The Hyginus Cleft ranks among the greatest wonders on the Moon. From end to end it is more than three hundred kilometers long, and in places it is five kilometers wide. It is not so much a canyon as a series of interlinked craters, branching out in two arms from a vast central well. And it is the gateway through which men have reached the buried treasures of the Moon.

Sadler could now look down into the depths without flinching. Infinitely far below, it seemed, some strange insects were slowly crawling back and forth in little pools of artificial light. If one shone a torch upon a group of cockroaches, they would have looked like this.

But those tiny insects, Sadler knew, were the great mining machines at work on the floor of the canyon. It was surprisingly flat down there, so many thousands of meters below, for it seemed that lava had flooded into the cleft soon after it was formed, and then congealed into a buried river of rock.

The Earth, almost vertically overhead, illuminated the great wall immediately opposite. The canyon marched away to right and left as far as the eye could follow, and sometimes the blue-green light falling upon the rock face produced a most unexpected illusion. Sadler found it easy to imagine, if he moved his head suddenly, that he was looking into the heart of a gigantic waterfall, sweeping down forever into the depths of the Moon.

Across the face of that fall, on the invisible threads of hoisting cables, the ore buckets were rising and dropping. Sadler had seen those buckets, moving on the overhead lines away from the Cleft, and he knew that they were taller than he was. But now they looked like beads moving slowly along a wire, as they carried their loads to the distant smelting plants. It’s a pity, he thought to himself, that they’re only carrying sulphur and oxygen and silicon and aluminum—we could do with fewer of the light elements and more of the heavy ones.

But he had been called here on business, not to stand gaping like a tourist. He pulled the coded notes from his pocket, and began to give his report.

It did not take as long as he could have wished. There was no way of telling whether his listener was pleased or disappointed at the inconclusive summary. He thought it over for a minute, then remarked, “I wish we could give you some more help, but you can imagine how shorthanded we are now. Things are getting rough; if there is going to be trouble, we expect it in the next ten days. There’s something happening out around Mars, but we don’t know what it is. The Federation has been building at least two ships of unusual design, and we think they’re testing them. Unfortunately we haven’t a single sighting, only some rumors that don’t make sense but have worried Defense. I’m telling you this to give you more background. No one here should know about it, and if you hear anybody talking on these lines it will mean that they’ve somehow had access to classified information.

“Now about your short list of provisional suspects. I see you’ve got Wagnall down, but he’s clear with us.”

“O.K. I’ll move him to List B.”

“Then Brown, Lefevre, Tolanski—they’ve certainly had no contacts here.”

“Can you be sure of that?”

“Fairly. They use their off-duty hours here in highly non-political ways.”

“I’d suspected that,” Sadler remarked, permitting himself the luxury of a smile. “I’ll take them off altogether.”

“Now this man Jenkins, in Stores. Why are you so keen on keeping him?”

“I’ve no real evidence at all. But he seems about the only person who’s taken any objection to my nominal activities.”

“Well, we’ll continue to watch him from this end. He comes to town quite often, but of course he’s got a good excuse—he does most of the local purchasing. That leaves you with five names on your A list, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, and frankly, I’ll be very surprised if it’s any of them. Wheeler and Jamieson we’ve already discussed. I know that Maclaurin’s suspicious of Jamieson after that trip out to the Mare Imbrium, but I don’t put much reliance on that. It was largely Wheeler’s idea, anyway.

“Then there are Benson and Carlin. Their wives come from Mars, and they keep getting into arguments whenever the news is being discussed. Benson’s an electrician in Tech Maintenance; Carlin’s a medical orderly. You could say they have some motive, but it’s a pretty tenuous one. Moreover, they’d be rather too obvious suspects.”

“Well, here’s another we’d like you to move up to your List A. This fellow Molton.”

“Dr. Molton?” exclaimed Sadler in some surprise. “Any particular reason?”

“Nothing serious, but he’s been to Mars several times on astronomical missions and has some friends there.”

“He never talks politics. I’ve tackled him once or twice and he just didn’t seem interested. I don’t think he meets many people in Central City—he seems completely wrapped up in his work and I think he only goes into town to keep fit in the gym. You’ve nothing else?”

“No—sorry. It’s still a fifty-fifty case. There’s a leak somewhere, but it may be in Central City. The report about the Observatory may be a deliberate plant. As you say, it’s very hard to see how anyone there could pass on information. The radio monitors have detected nothing except a few unauthorized personal messages which were quite innocent.”

Sadler closed his notebook and put it way with a sigh. He glanced once more down into the vertiginous depths above which he was so insecurely floating. The cockroaches were crawling briskly away from a spot at the base of the cliff, and suddenly a slow stain seemed to spread across the floodlit wall. ( How far down was that? Two kilometers? Or three?) A puff of smoke emerged, and instantly dispersed into the vacuum. Sadler began to count the seconds to time his distance from the explosion, and had got to twelve before he remembered that he was wasting his efforts. If that had been an atom bomb, he would have heard nothing here.

The man in blue adjusted his camera strap, nodded at Sadler, and became the perfect tourist again.

“Give me ten minutes to get clear,” he said, “and remember not to know me if we meet again.”

Sadler rather resented that last advice. After all, he was not a complete amateur. He had been fully operational for almost half a lunar day.

Business was slack at the little cafe in the Hyginus station, and Sadler had the place to himself. The general uncertainty had discouraged tourists; any who happened to be on the Moon were hurrying home as fast as they could get shipping space. They were probably doing the right thing; if there was trouble, it would be here. No one really believed that the Federation would attack Earth directly and destroy millions of innocent lives. Such barbarities belong to the past—so it was hoped. But how could one be sure? Who knew what might happen if war broke out? Earth was so fearfully vulnerable.

For a moment Sadler lost himself in reveries of longing and self-pity. He wondered if Jeannette had guessed where he was. He was not sure, now, that he wanted her to know. It would only increase her worries.

Over his coffee—which he still ordered automatically though he had never met any on the Moon worth drinking—he considered the information his unknown contact had given to him. It had been of very little value; he was still groping in the dark. The tip about Molton was a distinct surprise, and he did not take it too seriously. There was a kind of trustworthiness about the astrophysicist which made it hard to think of him as a spy. Sadler knew perfectly well that it was fatal to rely on such hunches, and whatever his own feelings, he would now pay extra attention to Molton. But he made a private bet with himself that it would lead nowhere.