Arthur Clarke - A Fall of Moondust

“Have you ever met one, Commodore?” asked Mrs. Schuster, obviously half convinced. “Or are you in the — what did Mister Radley call it-conspiracy of silence?”

“I'm very sorry to disappoint you”, said Hansteen. “You'll have to take my word for it that all the spaceships I've ever met have been on Lloyd's Register.”

He caught Pat's eye, and gave a little nod that said, “Let's go and talk this over in the air lock.” Now that he was quite convinced that Radley was harmless, he almost welcomed this interlude. It had, very effectively, taken the passengers' minds off the situation in which they now found themselves. If Radley's brand of insanity could keep them entertained, then good luck to it.

“Well, Pat”, said Hansteen, when the air-lock door had sealed them off from the argument, “what do you think of him?”

“Does he really believe that nonsense?”

“Oh yes — every word of it. I've met his type before.”

The Commodore knew a good deal about Radley's peculiar obsession; no one whose interest in astronautics dated back to the twentieth century could fail to. As a young man, he had even read some of the original writings on the subject — works of such brazen fraudulence or childish naivety that they had shaken his belief that men were rational beings. That such a literature could ever have flourished was a disturbing thought, though it was true that most of those books had been published in that psychotic era, the Frantic Fifties.

“This is a very peculiar situation”, complained Pat. “At a time like this — all the passengers are arguing about flying saucers.”

“I think it's an excellent idea”, answered the Commodore. “What else would you suggest they do? Let's face it, we've got to sit here and wait until Lawrence starts knocking on the roof again.”

“If he's still here. Barrett may be right — perhaps the raft has sunk.”

“I think that's very unlikely. The disturbance was only a slight one. How far would you imagine we went down?”

Pat thought this over. Looking back on the incident, it seemed to have lasted a long time. The fact that he had been in virtual darkness, and had been fighting that jet of dust, still further confused his memory. He could only hazard a guess.

“I'd say — ten meters.”

“Nonsense! The whole affair only lasted a couple of seconds. I doubt if we dropped more than two or three meters.”

Pat found this hard to believe, but he hoped that the Commodore was right. He knew that it was extremely difficult to judge weak accelerations, particularly when one was under stress. Hansteen was the only man aboard who could have had any experience of this; his verdict was probably correct — and was certainly encouraging.

“They may never have felt a thing on the surface”, continued Hansteen, “and they're probably wondering why they can't make contact with us. Are you sure there's nothing we can do about the radio?”

“Quite sure. The whole terminal block's come loose at the end of the cable conduit. There's no way of reaching it from inside the cabin.”

“Well, I suppose that's that. We might as well go back and let Radley try to convert us — if he can.”

Jules had tracked the overcrowded skis for a hundred meters before he realized that they were not as overcrowded as they should have been. They carried seven men — and there had been eight on the site.

He panned swiftly back to the raft, and by the good luck or precognition that separates the brilliant cameraman from the merely adequate one, he arrived there just as Lawrence broke his radio silence.

“C. E. E. calling”, Lawrence said, sounding as tired and frustrated as would any man who had just seen his carefully laid plans demolished. “Sorry for the delay, but as you'll have gathered, we have an emergency. There appears to have been another cave-in; how deep it is, we don't know — but we've lost physical contact with Selene, and she's not answering our radio.

“In case there's another subsidence, I've ordered my men to stand by a few hundred meters away. The danger's very slight — we hardly felt that last tremor — but there's no point in taking chances. I can do everything that's necessary for the moment without any help.

“I'll call again in a few minutes. C. E. E. out.”

With the eyes of millions upon him, Lawrence crouched at the edge of the raft, reassembling the probe with which he had first located the cruiser. He had twenty meters to play with; if she had gone deeper than that, he would have to think of something else.

The rod sank into the dust, moving more and more slowly as it approached the depth where Selene had rested. There was the original mark — fifteen point one five meters — just disappearing through the surface. The probe continued to move, like a lance piercing into the body of the Moon. How much farther? whispered Lawrence to himself, in the murmurous silence of his space suit.

The anticlimax was almost laughable, except that this was no laughing matter. The probe penetrated an extra meter and a half — a distance he could comfortably span without straining his arms.

Far more serious was the fact that Selene had not sunk evenly, as Lawrence discovered after a few additional probings. She was much lower at the stern, being now tilted at an angle of about thirty degrees. That alone was enough to wreck his plan; he had relied upon the caisson making a flush contact with the horizontal roof.

He put that problem aside for the moment; there was a more immediate one. Now that the cruiser's radio was silent — and he had to pray that it was a simple power failure — how could he tell if the people inside were still alive? They would hear his probe, but there was no way in which they could communicate with him.

But of course there was. The easiest and most primitive means of all, which could be so readily overlooked after a century and a half of electronics.

Lawrence got to his feet and called the waiting skis.

“You can come back”, he said. “There's no danger. She only sank a couple of meters.”

He had already forgotten the watching millions. Though his new plan of campaign had still to be drawn up, he was going into action again.

When Pat and the Commodore returned to the cabin, the debate was still going full blast. Radley, who had said so little until now, was certainly making up for lost time. It was as if some secret spring had been touched, or he had been absolved from an oath of secrecy. That was probably the explanation; now that he was convinced that his mission was discovered, he was only too happy to talk about it.

Commodore Hansteen had met many such believers — indeed, it was in sheer self-defense that he had waded through the turgid literature of the subject. The approach was almost always the same. First would be the suggestion that “Surely, Commodore, you've seen some very strange things during your years in space?” Then, when his reply was unsatisfactory, there would be a guarded — and sometimes not so guarded-hint that he was either afraid or unwilling to speak. It was a waste of energy denying the charge; in the eyes of the faithful, that only proved that he was part of the conspiracy.

The other passengers had no such bitter experience to warn them, and Radley was evading their points with effortless ease. Even Schuster, for all his legal training, was unable to pin him into a corner; his efforts were as futile as trying to convince a paranoiac that he was not really being persecuted.

“Does it seem reasonable”, Schuster argued, “that if thousands of scientists know this, not one of them will let the cat out of the bag? You can't keep a secret that big! It would be like trying to hide the Washington Monument!”