weighed nearly as much as Sammy Breen, swung away from him. It went
around until it was behind McCauley. There was now a system of three
weights on a string. The middle one, which was McCauley, did not spin
around. He only rotated. The others swung in a wide circle about him.
"Get set, Randy," he said sharply, "and have your rope ready."
"What...." Then Randy understood. He swore.
McCauley let go of Sammy Breen's space rope at an instant when in his
circle around McCauley he moved toward the Platform. At that instant,
of course, McCauley still moved away. But he let go. The result was
that he sent Sammy Breen floating back toward the spidery metal
framework, and he himself moved away faster. In effect, he'd taken
to himself a large part of Sammy's momentum toward destruction. But
not quite all. There was still Sammy's equipment, which formed a new
two-weight system of masses spinning about a common center of gravity.
Yet it did look as if he'd seen the possibility of saving one of the
two of them, and had taken the action which gave that chance at life to
Lieutenant Sammy Breen.
"Major!" Sammy cried out desperately. "This is all wrong! It was my
fault! I should have cut the rope! I protest, sir...."
"Shut up!" rasped McCauley. "Within a minute or two you'll float to the
Platform. It's not likely you'll strike a beam direct. Get ready to
throw your rope to Captain Hall so he can pull you in!"
Now he cut his own space rope and held its end. With Sammy Breen gone
away toward life, he and the mass of equipment at the rope's other
end still had a spinning motion. But it was a slow one. Yet he could
repeat the same trick he'd worked with Sammy, though not with the same
effectiveness. He could sacrifice the weight at the end of his rope,
just as before he'd sacrificed himself. If he chose the moment when in
their spinning the heavy objects were moving fastest toward the stars,
that would be the moment when his own motion toward annihilation was
least.
He let go. The awkward clump of tethered space equipment went swiftly
toward nowhere. McCauley seemed to cease to drift away from where Sammy
Breen, floating steadily, made bubbling noises to himself as if he were
sobbing in shame that McCauley had given him life at the expense of his
own. McCauley was now a good six hundred feet off in emptiness from the
lacework of silvery bars.
"How am I doing, Randy?" asked McCauley curtly. "You want to catch
Sammy when he comes through the framework. Get to where you can help
him. But when you have time, make an estimate on me."
There was silence. The Platform hurtled on around Earth. The changing,
distorted patterns of land and sea seemed to writhe as they went past
in the intolerably brilliant sunshine. But over at the very edge of
the bright disk a little trace of blackness appeared. That would be
the night line on Earth. The Platform and its company moved separately
yet together toward that darkness. Presently it would cover half the
disk of Earth, and then it would sweep on until only a swiftly thinning
crescent of light remained, and then the Platform would plunge into
utter darkness, where most of the cosmos was only shining stars and a
pallid moon, the rest the blackness of the Pit. And of course, in this
darkness the building satellite's unprotected substance would--like
McCauley--drop to a temperature of two hundred and twenty-odd degrees
below zero.
"Throw your rope to Captain Hall!" McCauley snapped to Sammy Breen. "I
know you'll turn somersaults. But throw it!"
Silence again. McCauley made his own estimate. It was not good. He did
not drift swiftly away into the emptiness which would presently be
blackness and cold and death. But he had not lost all his velocity away
from the Platform.
He took the wrench with which he fastened together the frame members
of the unlikely object which he left with such deadly deliberation.
He drew up his feet below him. He placed the wrench under them. At a
carefully chosen instant he thrust it violently away.
He pushed the wrench toward nothingness. Its mass may have been ten
pounds on Earth. His own mass, with his space suit and air tanks
and the like, was probably thirty times as much. If he thrust the
wrench away at thirty feet per second--and he did--he would change
his own velocity by one foot per second. This might mean a slowing of
his motion away, or it might mean a terribly slow drift back to the
Platform and a chance for life.
He took his space knife. It might weigh a pound. He threw it.
Systematically and unhurriedly he denuded his belt of the tools hanging
to it. A mass of possibly sixty pounds, thrown violently away, changed
his velocity by as much as six or--considering that he had less mass
with each bit of mass he discarded--probably seven feet per second.
"I've got Sammy," said Randy's voice, hoarse and strained. "He's all
right.... You don't seem to be going away any more, Ed. You're no
farther than you were. Maybe I can knot ropes.... No. There aren't
enough."
"Right," said McCauley with an odd calm. "There wouldn't be time,
anyhow. We're heading for eclipse. I've got to get back on my own--and
fast. The storybooks say rockets are used by men in space to go bobbing
around in their space suits. We know better. But I'm going to use one
air tank."
He writhed in the harness outside his space suit. He managed to detach
one of his two air tanks. He aimed its pipe carefully.
Air poured out with a rush when he opened the stop-cock. There was
two thousand pounds pressure to begin with. The tank had been in
unshielded sunshine for more than an hour. The effective pressure of
the air had tripled, at least, because of its rise in temperature. It
made a rocket jet of gas. McCauley could feel its quick, sharp tug at
him.
It went empty.
He put it under his feet and gave it the most violent of thrusts toward
the Milky Way. Now he could see that he had given the discarded things
all the momentum that had carried him away from the Platform, plus all
he had taken from Sammy Breen. He was moving toward the Platform. It no
longer dwindled as time went by. It grew in size with an intolerable,
incredible slowness. But that slowness amounted to doom.
"You're headed back," said Randy's agonized voice in his helmet phones.
"But it's slow, Ed! It's desperately slow!"
The blackness, which was Earth's own shadow cast upon its night-side
surface, was now fully halfway from the rim of the world toward that
halfway point which was the middle of the space that Earth occupied
within the cosmos.
"There's about fifteen minutes left before totality," said McCauley
with deliberation. "I've one more thing I can throw away. But I need to
steer with it too, and I can't be accurate at this distance. I don't
dare to use it from so far away. I've no space rope left to throw for
you to catch. I have to throw that last thing away at the very last
instant."
He heard confused sounds. Sammy Breen, back at the Platform, made
incoherent noises. He probably gesticulated, because Randy understood.
"Yes," said Randy's voice harshly. "Make it quick. But take care! More
than your own life depends on your being careful now!"
Sammy Breen gulped. McCauley heard him. Then silence again.
It was necessary to wait. McCauley was a tiny, glistening object
in emptiness, a desperately long way from the equally glistening
Platform. He turned slowly, foolishly, as he floated. Away off
against a background of stars--but the sun moved momentarily nearer
its edge--there was a shape that now was not quite half of a circle
of brilliant light, and more than half of a circle of darkness
like that of the Abyss. It did not look like Earth. It had not the
least appearance of a world in which human beings lived and moved
and breathed and loved and died. It was a monstrosity whose details
changed their shape as half minutes and quarter minutes went by. And
continually and implacably the darkness spread over more of it.
Randy's voice came desperately.
"Hurry, Sammy! Give it to me and get back into the cabin. We won't have
time to wait our turns at the air lock.... Right! Now get back in the
cabin!"
"How am I doing now, Randy?" McCauley asked calmly. "How's my line of
motion?"
"I don't like it!" said Randy fiercely. "It's off to one side! Sammy
just brought me all the extra space ropes. He tied them together
inside. I'm checking them now. There are four of them."
McCauley said:
"I hate to seem overanxious, but how much will I miss the Platform by?"
"Too much," answered Randy bitterly. "What have you got left that you
can throw away to steer by?"
"Eighty pounds of mass," said McCauley with composure. "But I have to
wait until the last second."
Silence again. Darkness covered three-quarters of the Earth's strange
disk. It was not the darkness of a night on Earth, with trees and
plants and men as darker shapes against starlit or moonlit ground or
sea. It was the blackness of nothingness, of annihilation.
"You can't stay out much longer, Randy," McCauley said. "I'll have to
try it."
"There's the moon," said Randy hoarsely. "I can see by that, ... maybe."
Again silence. The shape which was Earth became the thinnest of
crescents. The sun blazed fiercely almost at its outer rim.
The sun turned orange, crimson, ruby-red. It ceased to be a circle. One
edge blacked out. It was half blacked out. It was gone.
McCauley wriggled in the harness outside his space suit. He spoke
deliberately.
"I'm going to take all the deep breaths I can, Randy. I'll even let a
little extra pressure into my suit. Then I'll take off my last air tank
and try to steady myself with its jet of air. Then I'll put it under
my feet and jump against it, toward you. Now listen! If anything goes
wrong, it won't be your fault! Understand? Don't take any crazy risks.
If I go on past the Platform, get into the cabin fast before the cold
comes! That is my order! I expect you to obey it!"
"Cripes, Ed!" Randy's voice broke.
McCauley bled air into his suit. He breathed deeply and fast,
saturating his lungs with oxygen. He removed the tank and then spent
precious seconds stripping away the harness that had held tools and
extra equipment to his suit.
He jetted away the air. In the utter silence that was the universe, the
whistle of escaping compression was conducted to his gloved hands and
so to the remaining air inside his space suit. He used the jet with
infinite care. The tank tugged briefly and his random body rotation
stopped. He saw the Platform, almost incredibly dim in the moonlight.
He jumped against the mass of the air tank and harness together. In
seconds he could see that he was moving closer toward the silvery,
spidery framework in the moonshine. He kept himself still. Nothing he
could do now would add anything to his chance for life, and exertion
would lessen the time left before he suffocated for lack of air.
He relaxed by an iron effort of will. He had gambled. He could win or
he could lose. But he must keep the calmness of a man who sees the
stakes down and waits for the outcome.
The Platform was no more than a hundred and fifty yards away. No more
than a hundred.
He would miss it. He would pass sixty feet or more beyond its outermost
edge. Randy would undoubtedly try to throw him the space ropes he'd
tied together. The odds were enormously against his being able to catch
them.
He said nothing. If Randy thought that he'd run out of air before he
reached the point nearest the Platform, he would reproach himself less;
he'd believe he couldn't have done anything, anyhow.
Fifty yards. Twenty. He saw glittering metal only sixty feet away. But
there was no conceivable action he could take to move himself that
sixty feet.
Then something dark came toward him. It grew larger. It was Randy,
plunging out from the girders with a hundred and twenty feet of space
rope trailing behind him, made fast to a firmly bolted beam.
He collided with McCauley. McCauley felt him gripping fiercely. He felt
Randy clinging to him savagely against the jerk of the rope which must
tighten presently.
The jerk came, violent and abrupt.
Randy gasped in relief. He took away one space-suited arm to haul
at the space rope that had checked McCauley's slow drift past to
nothingness.
"Very nice work, Randy," said McCauley composedly, "but you took an
awful chance."
They bumped against the substance of the Platform--one square metal
tube some three inches by five.
"Can you hold on?" demanded Randy, panting. "I'll give you one of my
air tanks!"
They were out at the farthermost limit of the framework of the Space
Platform. McCauley's faceplate began to frost now, with the loss of
heat to the darkness.
"Make it fast," said McCauley. "We want to get in out of the cold."
Fumblings. Clatterings. McCauley heard Randy's teeth chatter, which
might be cold or might be reaction from the terror he'd felt on
McCauley's account.
"Right!" McCauley said suddenly. He felt air blowing past his face.
Randy's extra tank was connected. "I'm all set now. Let's get headed
for the cabin."
"Hold it!" said Randy angrily. "You tie a space rope to yourself and
loop it around a beam! Do you want to take a chance on slipping away?
Maybe there is only one chance in ten thousand of getting lost, but
there's no need to take that!"
"Okay, boss," said McCauley. "I shoulda known better."
Hardly more than seconds later he was sliding toward the cabin, Randy
following close behind. He came to a joint where three of the beams
came together. He unlooped his space rope from the near side, looped it
around beyond the joint, crawled over, and slid again.
The cold came fast, but they would make it. Already his mind was at
work on a matter that bothered him. He was in charge of the building
of the Platform. That meant that he had to think about the feelings of
the men under him. Randy was all right. He'd done a good job, and he
knew it. But Sammy Breen was different. He was a very young officer,
and he felt right now that he'd blundered and imperiled a senior
officer--practically killed him, in fact--and he'd be in a state of
almost hysterical self-abasement. Not a good state for young officers
to be in.
When McCauley squirmed out of the air lock, young Sammy Breen looked at
him. He was deathly white and utterly ashamed.
"Hm," said McCauley ruefully. "Sammy, I think I'll have to report
myself for incompetence. When a second man's standing by while somebody
does a tricky job, he ought to be sure that his space rope can't slip.
I didn't. I doggone near got you killed, Sammy. I'm sorry."
Sammy Breen made an inarticulate sound. Then Randy came out of the air
lock.
"For the love of Heaven, Sammy!" he said, scolding. "It's your trick to
fix food! We've got less than an hour for eating before the sun comes
back. And you haven't even got the stuff heating up! What kind of a
cook are you, anyhow?"
Sammy swallowed. He swallowed again. Neither McCauley nor Randy
mentioned the late so nearly complete disaster. Randy was kidding him.
McCauley made a joke of it, too.
Sammy put the food on to thaw and heat. He struggled to become worthy
of the companionship of men like McCauley and Randy Hall. Presently he
swallowed and said accusingly:
"You characters were late for dinner. Don't blame me if it's cold!"
He looked anxiously at them. He hoped....
McCauley grinned at him. Randy laughed. They laughed together.
Lieutenant Sammy Breen felt wonderfully good. And he would be very
careful hereafter.
_4_
(There was high adventure on the moon when it was first colonized.
Men faced various ways of dying--all of them unpleasant--and
found that simply staying alive was a great satisfaction and a
full-time occupation. Because of this spirit--which is that of true
adventure--there came to be bases where hydroponic gardens
freshened the air and men took continued living as a matter of
course. This, obviously, was not adventure. So problems arose. Men
began to be moved by other motives than the zest they'd known at
first. But there were still a great many ways of getting killed on
the moon. So there came a time when Colonel Ed McCauley had to
insist that certain men under his command put first things first,
as adventurers do, and not act for the gratification of their
problem personalities.)
Traveling at moon gait, which is the standard travel pace on Earth's
big moon, McCauley had ten of the last twenty miles behind him when he
saw the sledge trail in the dust. He frowned at it and looked over to
the west. He saw Earth, blue-green and glamorous, hanging as usual in
the lunar sky just above the edges of the ring mountains. But Earth
was always just there. He squinted at the sun through the faceplate of
his helmet. It was a trifle over ten degrees above the horizon and it
moved across the black, star-speckled sky at half a degree per hour.
In twenty hours, then, lunar night would fall. And here was the sledge
track that said that the relay unit for Repeater Two, carrying word to
and from Farside and the rest of the human race, had passed this way en
route to be set up; but the lack of returning footprints said that the
men with it had not come back.
Repeater One was already in place and ready to operate. Repeaters
Three and Four had also been put in position by men from faraway
Farside Base. Repeater Two was necessary to bring Farside Base into
communication with the rest of the cosmos. Two weeks of lunar night
with no word from outside the base and not even Earth to look at in the
sky--this would not be good for the men on Farside.
McCauley stopped. He'd been moving in that swooping, semi-flying
fashion which the lesser lunar gravity allows. He stared at the trail.
No, the men had not come back. Yet he'd ordered a party of two to set
up the relay unit. It was to be put into place on the very tip of a
mountain that was now away below the horizon. There it would be in
line of sight of Repeater One, which was relatively near, and Repeater
Three, which was farther away but which in turn could relay signals to
Four, which was farthest away of all. From Four, the relayed messages
would go on to Farside Base. When all this was accomplished, the
Grimaldi Base ten miles distant could communicate with Farside through
Repeaters One, Two, Three, and Four, and with Earth by line-of-sight
transmission; so Farside could communicate with Earth and through Earth
Relay with all the other moon bases--in short, with all humanity. But
Two should have been up and in operation by now.
McCauley shook his head impatiently inside his space helmet. He'd been
away from his command for thirty hours, during which he'd traveled
twenty miles on foot, at moon gait, to Gerritson Bay. It wasn't a bay,
of course, but an intrusion of now-frozen lava into the mountainous
country here at the edge of the moon's earthside surface. He'd been met
by a moon jeep and had traveled seven hundred miles over a _mare_--one
of the dark areas that were once thought to be seas but actually were
dry and level--to the main lunar base near Hipparchus. He'd had a
one-hour conference with the base commander there, trying to work out
something to prevent the first murder on Earth's big satellite. The
conference was unsatisfactory. He'd come back to Gerritson Bay and now
he'd covered ten of the twenty remaining miles to Grimaldi Base. When
he reached Grimaldi the excessively irritating problem of a murder
in the making was still unsolved, and now in addition there was the
failure to complete placing the relay at the site of Repeater Two. The
sledge ought to be in its place on the peak which was invisible from
here, and the men who'd set it up should have returned. They hadn't.
He flipped on his space radio and said curtly:
"McCauley calling relay placing party. Come in!"
There was no answer. He called again and again. Then he called Grimaldi
Base. Again no answer. He was out of radio contact with all humanity
on the moon--even his own base ten miles away--though by switching
frequencies he could raise Earth Relay a quarter million miles farther
away. The men with the moon sledge might only be behind a mountain wall
or anywhere in any direction below the horizon, but radio communication
on the moon is limited to line-of-sight because there is no air and
hence no layer of ions to bounce radio signals down behind obstacles or
around the moon's curvature.
McCauley started off again, fuming. Moon gait is a highly specialized
form of travel. In one-sixth gravity a man can cover ten miles an hour
over rough ground if he knows the trick of the gait and the trail is
marked. He travels in slow-motion giant steps, with something of the
effect of an extremely deliberate ballet. He begins with a leap up and
forward, and he rises slowly and deliberately while soaring ahead.
At mid-leap he is six feet higher than at take-off. Then he descends
slowly and with dignity, touches ground and strides at the same time,
and bounds up and ahead once more. There are long seconds between steps
and long yards between strides. When a person is used to it, moon gait
is almost restful. Some people even find it familiar. They've dreamed
of such effortless half flight in their sleep.
Now, though he was disturbed, McCauley made two miles with no other
known cause for worry than the lateness of the two men who'd placed
the relay and the prospective killing he'd had on his mind before.
He passed between precipices and over dust-strewn stone and through
winding defiles. The two men should be back....
Then he spotted something. Abruptly he raised his arms and extended
both feet before him. He came down to the ground and stopped short.
Then--not soaring this time--he walked back to an object on the trail.
It was an air tank, exactly like the two tanks at the back of his own
space suit. It had been dropped from the moon sledge. It would hold air
for one man for three hours.
Men driving a moon sledge would wear one tank on their space suits for
safety, and they'd shed one for lightness. They'd breathe from the much
larger tanks on the sledge itself while they traveled. Spare and extra
tanks like this would ride on the sledge. It was not easy to imagine
that it had dropped. One man would go on ahead of the sledge and one
would follow. It was hard to believe that the second man would not
notice the loss of an air tank. Air tanks were life. True, a sledge
party always had more air than was needed for any expected journey--a
good margin for emergency--but this tank could cut the margin for this
journey seriously.
McCauley growled to himself. He knew the calculations for placing
the relay. The mountain beyond the horizon was an eight-hour journey
by sledge--the horizon on the moon is only two miles away instead of
eight. Breathing from the sledge, the men would arrive with one tank
on their suits untapped, another, also untapped, to be mounted; and
an extra tank for good measure. When they'd put the sledge in place
and aired its beams and set up the nondirectional auxiliary antennae,
they'd start back with two full tanks each and another one for reserve.
They'd make better time coming back--six hours, no more. And each man
had a full six hours on his back, and there were three additional hours
in the extra they'd take turns carrying. It was ample margin. But now
the spare tank was left behind. There was no margin.
McCauley tried to lift the tank. But it had lain in the shadow of a
boulder, out of the sun's fierce glare--on moon dust, radiating heat
away toward the stars. It had cooled off to the temperature of a
shadow, two hundred and forty degrees below zero. It was frozen. The
air was liquid air. The tank was more brittle than glass was.
It slipped, striking the boulder. It cracked and broke. A glistening
liquid poured out and evaporated instantly. Where it fell into shadow,
part of it froze and then vanished more quickly than any earthly frost.
McCauley growled again. Air was precious on the moon. But there was no
use crying when it was spilt. He turned around and began his journey
again. He had good reason to worry now.