"I need this jeep," Kenmore commented acidly, "if only to have something to let everybody here run away in, in case of need! After all, the people who sabotaged the City might not like it that we're here and alive in it. They might come back!" He scowled. "This is a nasty mess! I'd like to start building up air pressure in the domes again, but I'm not sure . . ."
"There's plenty of air?"
"Some hundreds of tons of it," he assured her. "It's kept frozen, as now. We rechill it every night and insulate the tanks again before morning."
Arlene said curiously, "You don't seem too worried about what's happened to the City. You're taking it pretty calmly."
"I'm far from calm. But I'm thinking beyond the City and even our lives. I'm thinking of what the City's here for and what its smashing could mean."
Arlene sounded wistful. "You were talking about the Laboratory trying to find a way to get unlimited power for Earth. But to you it's power for rockets. Isn't that really what's in your mind?"
"You can't get far with chemical fuels," he said. "Right here is about as far as they'll take a ship. But if we had atomic rockets, then Mars would be easy, and the asteroids, and Saturn—or at least its moons, and Jupiter's moons . . . Even Pluto, in time."
"Why?"
"They're there," said Joe defensively.
"Rockets are just beginnings, Arlene, just as dugout canoes were the beginnings of ships. We need something better than rockets. There may be an energy-field to change the constants of space—including the limit on the speed of light. There's even a chance that the mass that builds up with velocity—it shows up at a thousand miles a second—may be a property of space instead of matter, the way that the wind resistance at the speed of sound isn't in an airplane, but in the air. If we can ever change space with an energy-field, we'll be able to reach the stars!"
"And then?"
"We'll—we'll go there and settle there . . ."
Arlene grimaced. "I'll bet a cave girl asked a young savage, thousands of years ago, why he had to go exploring a place where the cave tigers were, when they had a nice place to live, right where they were. I'll bet he answered her just about the way you just did, Joe." Kenmore looked at her, frowning.
"And I'll bet," she added wryly, "that when all the stars are visited, and all the planets settled on—I'll bet some girl out in the Milky Way will be asking somebody like you why he wants to go on to another island of stars—another galaxy—when the planet they were both born on is so nice a place to live."
"Maybe," admitted Kenmore. "Maybe that's right."
"And," said Arlene, "she'll like it if he agrees with her, but she'll be proud if he doesn't."
There was silence for a while. Kenmore fidgeted. "You make it sound senseless," he protested. "If at the end it's all the same."
"No," she said, rather forlornly, "a girl would rather be proud than pleased—for a while."
There was a peculiar, almost imperceptible change in the light about them. Kenmore looked up sharply.
A rocket flame burned among the stars. It was not descending; it floated toward them across the heavens, and by the fact that it had shape, Joe knew that it was not far distant. They could see the flame itself in its nimbus of illuminated rocket fumes. The flame was lanceolate, with the wider part in the direction toward which it moved. Its motion slowed, so it was a rocket decelerating to land—but it would land among or beyond the mountains.
"Look!" snapped Kenmore. "That's the Shuttle to the Laboratory! Mike Scandia's the jockey—you know him. He's too high! It must be the radar beam's still off."
He reached behind him and wrenched out a signal rocket. He tore off the cap, aimed it skyward, and squeezed the tail. It leaped up from his hands, leaving a lurid trail of crimson sparks. It went up and up and up . . .
The rocket flame seemed abruptly to double in brilliance. The slowing of the moving flare became more pronounced. Kenmore found himself wincing at the sight.
"That'll be tough!" he said uneasily. "Mike has to decelerate at two Earth gravities, but he'll be using four, now! That's hard to take when you've been on the moon a long time . . ."
The scene was very strange indeed. There were the sloping dust-heaps of the City, with feeble lights atop; the jagged mountains with their shining dust and dark shadows in the earthshine, the round, greenish platter of Earth hanging in the sky; and the fierce white flattened flame aloft, responding to the skyward-streaking trail of red sparks . . .
Before the first signal rocket burned out, Kenmore sent up another. He fumbled, and Arlene was competently handing him another from the belt loops of her own suit. He took it for granted that she understood; she did. Mike Scandia—Arlene knew him because he was Kenmore's friend. And Mike was in that furiously speeding rocket overhead.
The flame among the stars was almost intolerably bright, now. It thickened yet again. That would mean a deceleration of six gravities! Kenmore sent up another rocket, and still another, to insist that the rocket's landing place was here. Which it was.
The flame overhead slowed and slowed, and then it seemed not to move; a part of it darted away, and streaked with infinite swiftness toward nothingness. The remaining flame grew brighter and brighter, and abruptly halved itself, and the again-remaining part of the flame burned with a white-hot fury but nevertheless descended.
Then it went out. Something up aloft was falling, now, with its movement across the heavens stopped.
Kenmore sent up rocket after rocket. But things fall slowly in the gravity-field of the moon. Presently there was a vague spot of incandescence above them. Arlene said anxiously, "Will he crash, Joe? Will he crash?"
"Not Mike. The radar beacon from the City must still be off—I should have made sure of it!—and Mike couldn't know. Everything was cut off when the City was deserted. But he came in on course from away beyond farside, and there was nothing to guide by. He'd have landed in the mountains, most likely . . ."
A mere few hundred feet up, something flamed so savagely that Arlene turned away her head. The lava sea, the City, and even the mountain flanks glowed fiercely.
And the downward-plunging flame slowed, and slowed, and touched the surface of the lava mare a quarter-mile away. The source of the flame became visible— a tiny rocket-ship much smaller than the Earthship. The flame splashed out in a pancake of unbearable whiteness.
Then it shot up at incredible speed. It rose and rose far higher than the mountain peaks. It went on toward the stars, and winked to extinction.
The little rocket-ship from the Laboratory, the Shuttle ship, remained standing upright on its landing fins. Something moved. A brittle, cracked voice said furiously in Kenmore's headphones, "Somebody's going to get hurt for this I Why the devil wasn't that landing-beam on?"
Something climbed down the ship's side to the lava sea. It was a very small figure, a tiny figure, in an incongruously bulky vacuum suit. Kenmore heard the sputterings of impending profanity.
"Steady, Mike I" he growled. "Arlene Gray's listening. She just got here. The City's been abandoned. There's a mess all around."
"Mess?" raged Mike's cracked voice. "You ought to see the guys in the Lab . . ." Then it changed. "Arlene? Arlene Gray? You, Arlene, you belong back home! Who let you come up here?"
The tiny figure in the bulky vacuum suit came soaring in a long, preposterous moon-jump to land with some precision beside Kenmore and Arlene. He gripped Arlene's hands with the clumsy gloves of his own suit, and the two figures made as grotesque a contrast as anything else in view. Because Mike Scandia was a midget; he stood forty-two inches high. He and Arlene, greeting each other warmly, made a picture in keeping with the grotesquerie of the scenery around them.
At the moment, the near escape of the Shuttle from destruction seemed enough to worry about. There were other disturbing items, of course. The City could be attacked again—from outside, this time. At least one jeep had been damaged, and was probably unsafe to use, in an attempt to murder its occupants. The City's population had fled, and its safety was doubtful. The mere continued existence of human lives on the moon was in jeopardy. Arlene, Kenmore, and everybody else—even the missile bases—were in deadly danger.