"I! I, Maureen? Tell me--do you know the formula for chlorophyll? Do I?
Does anyone aboard this ship, now _he_ is gone?"
"Don't be upset, Brian. No, we don't--but there's no cause for despair.
It, and everything else you need know, is at our disposal. That's why
he went to such pains to provide a scientific library for the ship. All
man's knowledge lies there, waiting for us to seek it out."
I took a deep breath. I said, "That's just it, Maureen. I couldn't
bring myself to tell him. But--"
"But, Brian--?"
"The library is gone! The books that meant life or death for mankind
are a pile of crumbled ashes!"
* * * * *
I suppose I should be grateful that we are here. I should be thankful
that Maureen's quick intelligence made it possible for us to land here
at the crater of Copernicus. I look from the window of my little shack.
I see shanties like my own arranged in a crude circle here at the base
of towering mountains.
Dr. Mallory was right. We have air here, and water. We have enough
provisions to last us for years. By the time those are exhausted, we
will be independent of our Earthly supplies, for already Sanders and
Van Huys have set soil into cultivation; they claim, gleefully, that
this thick, rich, Lunar soil flowers like a desert when watered. And we
have set up plants for the synthesis of water.
Strange how quickly we have adapted ourselves. We even laugh sometimes,
nowadays. There have been marriages; I suppose that means that in a
little while there will be births. Imagine that! The first Earth child
to be born on the Moon.
I, too, should be happy. At times I am--comparatively. For I have
Maureen beside me; our love is a great, sustaining force in a
desperate existence.
But I cannot be completely happy, for night or day I am reminded of
the great, impossible burden that weighs my shoulders low. The Earth,
a massive, glowing globe, lights our sky. Occasionally I think I can
glimpse the gleaming ocean waters of Earth; once, on a clear night, the
familiar outline of our lost homeland, America, was crystal clear to
our eyes.
Yet all life on that nearby mother planet is, must be, now deep in
everlasting sleep. Everlasting because I am powerless to interrupt it.
Because Mallory's library is no more; because I am a stupid soldier,
not a clever man.
Only recently there came a wan ray of hope. It was as we were
transferring the last pieces of furniture from the _Jefferson_ to
our shacks. In the berth that had been Danny Wilson's--gay, laughing
Danny!--I found pile upon pile of those amusing, colorful "magazines"
that Danny loved.
They are old and ragged; many of them are coverless. But most of
them--for such was Danny's preference--are the kind which Mallory once
called "science fiction." Dreams of the world-to-be, pathetic in the
face of that which now confronts us.
But it is my only ray of hope, these magazines. I brought them to my
shack. I am culling them carefully, one by one. There is a faint, and
oh! so faint, chance that....
Yet I fear it is a hopeless search. There is so much of fancy in
these little books, so little simple fact. Had but _one_ of those
imaginative writers of years ago thought to include in one of his
stories that which must have been, to him, a commonplace formula--that
for chlorophyll--I could yet do that which Mallory demanded of me. Here
we are rich with ores, the soil teems with every element known to man.
We have a well-equipped laboratory, we could synthesize _anything_. But
we cannot create this "chlorophyll" because we do not know what it is,
nor what elements combine to form it.
Hope dwindles as I read. There remains but one more slim pile of
magazines before me. If the answer is not in one of them, then we must
perish. I turn pleading eyes to the past, to the year 1940, before I
was born. But there is no one to hear my plea. Unless, in one of these
remaining--
(_Here the manuscript ends._)
* * * * *