"This place is a madhouse!" snapped Kenmore. "It needn't have been abandoned! Apparently nobody thought of trying to do anything without orders! It should be a pioneer town, but it's filled up with government clerks from a dozen different nations! Good men in their way, but they think that what isn't ordered is forbidden!"
A three-second pause. Major Gray's voice; "Do you want me to pass that comment on?"
"I wish you would. This City's been run according to ironclad instructions from Earth. That should mean efficiency, but it works out to lunacy! Nobody can do anything without authority for it, so anybody who has the capacity to get something done has to use all his brains getting orders issued! It's bound to end up in somebody cracking up from pure futility!"
Again a long pause. Gray: "Go on."
"I'm sounding off," said Kenmore coldly, "because I'll undoubtedly be in great disfavor here for what I've done. When I got here, the only man in the City was Pitkin. He was sleeping happily. I've taken command because I'm the only one who seems to have any idea that anything can be done! I assume that help will be coming from the nearest missile base; meanwhile, I've patched the main dome so it holds air, and I'm setting Moreau to repair the power dome. Then I'm going out to see if the Earthship can be repaired to get Arlene and Cecile Ducros back to Earth."
A long pause. Major Gray: "Then what?"
"Then," said Kenmore, "I'm going to kill somebody." He clicked off. When he turned, Lezd—the electronics technician who had accompanied Cecile Ducros to handle the technical end of the broadcasts—was regarding him.
Lezd said with detachment, "This is the way one talks to his superiors?"
"When necessary," Kenmore told him. "What about it?"
"I like it," said Lezd. He nodded and turned away. Kenmore growled. He had been a minor figure, here on the moon. He had been among the first to land, and his experience was outstanding. But authority could not be distributed—not in an international, co-operative enterprise—on the basis of experience or ability.
When there was relative safety for everybody, political considerations dictated highly unrealistic divisions of position and command. But now there was disaster and a man who knew what to do had to take command, because nobody else could.
Kenmore got Moreau back into a vacuum suit and took him into the power dome. He walked purposefully to a place where the fuel tanks that held 80% hydrogen peroxide—which must not be frozen—stood against the wall.
"There'll be a slash in the plastic here," he said, pointing, "and another one there. Somebody went comfortably about to make the City uninhabitable. Look!" Moreau looked, and stared. "How did you know?" "Pattern of action," said Kenmore. "Find and fix them."
CHAPTER VI. THE SHUTTLE
He WENT back to the air dome, where Pitkin beamed amiably at the still-storming Cecile. Arlene's eyes turned to him.
"I'm going out to look around," he told her. "And I've got to check on the jeep. You'd better get some rest." She shook her head. "I couldn't! I'm not used to being on the moon, Joe. I don't want to sleep yet! Besides, there was nothing to do in the ship coming up. We coasted for days! I'm rested!"
"Top your suit tank, then," he told her curtly.
He showed her how to check the contents of her vacuum-suit's air tanks. He checked and topped his own. They went out.
There was a truly deadly tranquility in the night outside. In a sense it was not really night; the vast round disk of Earth with its seas and icecaps filled a vast amount of the sky, and its light was bright. Since it was midnight on the moon, the Earth was necessarily full, and its reflected light on the peaks and sea was at least equal to twilight at home. There was utter stillness everywhere. Nothing moved; nothing made a sound. In a vacuum suit, of course, one could hear one's own breathing, and the earphones brought the breathing of anybody else whose talkie was turned on. One heard one's crunching footfalls on the moondust. But the silence and the stillness beyond that was appalling.
Kenmore pointed. "The generators are working again," he told Arlene, "so there's a light at the top of the City. Not full brightness yet, though. There'll be other lights presently, there and at the lock. You mustn't ever go out of sight of the City under any circumstances! Stay close to me.
She did not need to answer; she moved closer. The loneliness of the landscape made separation a frightening idea. At midnight on the moon, the ground had been radiating its heat to empty space for all of a hundred and fifty hours. And empty space is cold! The stone underfoot was actually colder than liquid air. Earthshine seemed bright, but it yielded no appreciable heat. And yet it was much more practical to move about on the moon in such frigidity than to try to perform any action out of shelter in the day. A suit could be kept heated at the temperature about them now, but it wasn't practical to try to cool a vacuum suit in lunar sunshine.
Joe Kenmore walked toward the moon-jeep with its battered, misshapen wheel. The vehicle's body glittered mirror-bright in the light from Earth. Without air, there could be no rust; even aluminum, polished in the outside emptiness, stayed bright as a silver mirror. And when men in vacuum suits turned solar mirrors on ore veins in the hillsides, and smelted out metal from its place, the white-hot stuff ran down and into waiting molds without a trace of dross. Even iron was a glittering white metal, when vacuum-cast.
But now, Kenmore restlessly inspected the jeep. The drone freight-rocket it had brought in still hung beneath it. The drone was a forty-foot cylinder which had been flung up from Earth and captured at the Space Platform, refitted there with rockets, and aimed and fired toward the moon. There were radar spotter-posts to watch it and mark its fall. It was much more efficient to let drone-rockets fall where they would, and then bring them into the City, than to try to guide the drones to a target space. This rocket might hold food, or fuel, or machinery for mankind's outpost in space, but it could not carry a passenger. The frenzied acceleration which lifted it from Earth saved costly fuel, but would destroy anything alive.
The jeep's great wire-spoked wheel, seemingly so fragile and so spidery, was actually a sturdy structure. But far back in a narrow ravine, now hours since, a house-sized mass of stone had fallen against it. Mass is not changed by gravity; the wheel was badly bent. Kenmore played the chest light of his vacuum suit upon it. It had crawled forty miles through the mountains after its injury, and then had hunted the Earth ship for an indefinite distance. The tread of the wheel was crumpled; there was a great crack in it, and that crack was serious. It was a miracle that the jeep still stood erect.
"No good without repair," Kenmore decided. "And the people of the City took every other jeep away when they ran off."
He needed a jeep for a journey. The Earthship lay out on the stony sea, and had to be made ready to take Arlene back to Earth, when that desirable event could be managed. But there were enough dangers in traveling on the moon, anyhow, without multiplying them by using a defective jeep.
Arlene Gray looked up at the firmament. Kenmore heard her saying, absurdly, "Star bright, star bright—Joe, how many stars are there?"
"Plenty," said Kenmore. "Enough to keep us busy for millions of years, just hunting among them for planets to move to."
The heavens were an unbelievable sight, to Arlene. On Earth, the number of visible stars is relatively small; there are rarely as many as three thousand to be seen by the naked eye. But here the stars were revealed as numerous as the sands of the sea, of all colors and all possible variations of brightness.