Arthur Clarke - A Fall of Moondust

“Not a trace. What's new from your end?”

“We don't think she's out in the Sea. The Chief Engineer wants to speak to you.”

“Right; put him on.”

“Hello, Duster Two. Lawrence here. Plato Observatory's just reported a quake near the Mountains of Inaccessibility. It took place at nineteen thirty-five, which is near enough the time when Selene should have been in Crater Lake. They suggest she's been caught in an avalanche somewhere in that area. So head for the mountains and see if you can spot any recent slides or rockfalls.”

“What's the chance, sir”, asked the dust-ski pilot anxiously, “that there may be more quakes?”

“Very small, according to the Observatory. They say it will be thousands of years before anything like this happens again, now that the stresses have been relieved.”

“I hope they're right. I'll radio when I get to Crater Lake; that should be in about twenty minutes.”

But it was only fifteen minutes before Duster Two destroyed the last hopes of the waiting listeners.

“Duster Two calling. This is it, I'm afraid. I've not reached Crater Lake yet; I'm still heading up the gorge. But the Observatory was right about the quake. There have been several slides, and we had difficulty in getting past some of them. There must be ten thousand tons of rock in the one I'm looking at now. If Selene's under that lot, we'll never find her. And it won't be worth the trouble of looking.”

The silence in Traffic Control lasted so long that the ski called back: “Hello, Traffic Control — did you receive me?”

“Receiving you”, said the Chief Engineer in a tired voice. “See if you can find some trace of them. I'll send Duster One in to help. Are you sure there's no chance of digging them out?”

“It might take weeks, even if we could locate them. I saw one slide three hundred meters long. If you tried to dig, the rock would probably start moving again.”

“Be very careful. Report every fifteen minutes, whether you find anything or not.”

Lawrence turned away from the microphone, physically and mentally exhausted. There was nothing more that he could do — or, he suspected, that anyone could do. Trying to compose his thoughts, he walked over to the southward-facing observation window, and stared into the face of the crescent Earth.

It was hard to believe that she was fixed there in the southern sky, that though she hung so close to the horizon, she would neither rise nor set in a million years. However long one lived here, one never really accepted this fact, which violated all the racial wisdom of mankind.

On the other side of that gulf (already so small to a generation that had never known the time when it could not be crossed), ripples of shock and grief would soon be spreading. Thousands of men and women were involved, directly or indirectly, because the Moon had stirred briefly in her sleep.

Lost in his thoughts, it was some time before Lawrence realized that the Port signals officer was trying to attract his attention.

“Excuse me, sir — you've not called Duster One. Shall I do it now?”

“What? Oh yes — go ahead. Send him to help Two in Crater Lake. Tell him we've called off the search in the Sea of Thirst.”

The news that the search had been called off reached Lagrange II when Tom Lawson, red-eyed from lack of sleep, had almost completed the modifications to the hundred-centimeter telescope. He had been racing against time, and now it seemed that all his efforts had been wasted. Selene was not in the Sea of Thirst at all, but in a place where he could never have found her — hidden from him by the ramparts of Crater Lake, and, for good measure, buried by a few thousand tons of rock.

Tom's first reaction was not one of sympathy for the victims, but of anger at his wasted time and effort. Those YOUNG ASTRONOMER FINDS MISSING TOURISTS headlines would never flash across the news-screens of the inhabited worlds. As his private dreams of glory collapsed, he cursed for a good thirty seconds, with a fluency that would have astonished his colleagues. Then, still furious, he started to dismantle the equipment he had begged, borrowed, and stolen from the other projects on the satellite.

It would have worked; he was sure of that. The theory had been quite sound — indeed, it was based on almost a hundred years of practice. Infrared reconnaissance dated back to at least as early as World War II, when it was used to locate camouflaged factories by their telltale heat.

Though Selene had left no visible track across the Sea, she must, surely, have left an infrared one. Her fans had stirred up the relatively warm dust a foot or so down, scattering it across the far colder surface layers. An eye that could see by the rays of heat could track her path for hours after she had passed. There would have been just time, Tom calculated, to make such an infrared survey before the sun rose and obliterated all traces of the faint heat trail through the cold lunar night.

But, obviously, there was no point in trying now.

It was well that no one aboard Selene could have guessed that the search in the Sea of Thirst had been abandoned, and that the dust-skis were concentrating their efforts inside Crater Lake. And it was well, also, that none of the passengers knew of Dr. McKenzie's predictions.

The physicist had drawn, on a piece of homemade graph paper, the expected rise of temperature. Every hour he noted the reading of the cabin thermometer and pinpointed it on the curve. The agreement with theory was depressingly good; in twenty hours, one hundred ten degrees Fahrenheit would be passed, and the first deaths from heatstroke would be occurring. Whatever way he looked at it, they had barely a day to live. In these circumstances, Commodore Hansteen's efforts to maintain morale seemed no more than an ironic jest. Whether he failed or succeeded, it would be all the same by the day after tomorrow.

Yet was that true? Though their only choice might lie between dying like men and dying like animals, surely the first was better. It made no difference even if Selene remained undiscovered until the end of time, so that no one ever knew how her occupants passed their final hours. This was beyond logic or reason; but so, for that matter, was almost everything that was really important in the shaping of men's lives and deaths.

Commodore Hansteen was well aware of that, as he planned the program for the dwindling hours that lay ahead. Some men are born to be leaders, and he was one of them. The emptiness of his retirement had been suddenly filled; for the first time since he had left the bridge of his flagship Centaurus, he felt whole again.

As long as his little crew was busy, he need not worry about morale. It did not matter what they were doing, provided they thought it interesting or important. That poker game, for instance, took care of the Space Administration accountant, the retired civil engineer, and the two executives on vacation from New York. One could tell at a glance that they were all poker fanatics; the problem would be to stop them playing, not to keep them occupied.

Most of the other passengers had split up into little discussion groups, talking quite cheerfully among themselves. The Entertainment Committee was still in session, with Professor Jayawardene making occasional notes while Mrs. Schuster reminisced about her days in burlesque, despite the attempts of her husband to shut her up. The only person who seemed a little apart from it all was Miss Morley, who was writing slowly and carefully, using a very minute hand, in what was left of her notebook. Presumably, like a good journalist, she was keeping a diary of their adventure. Commodore Hansteen was afraid that it would be briefer than she suspected, and that not even those few pages would be filled. And if they were, he doubted that anyone would ever read them.