"As to that, we'll see. The main thing is to get down in one piece. Maybe we'll take off again."
But Kenmore didn't believe that, and neither did Mike. It was conceivable, but hardly possible, and both of them knew it very well. Kenmore had said the optimistic thing for Arlene to hear.
Joe saw her looking at him through her transparent helmet, and she was smiling curiously. He had an uncomfortable feeling that she read his mind and knew they had little chance of living.
The incredible, pock-marked landscape of the moon enlarged slowly before them. Had there been sunshine, it would have been unbearable to look at. Yet, though the earthlight upon it was pale, all the larger features of the dead world were lighted up. They floated on—fell on— and the rate of enlargement increased. Presently Kenmore said, "About time to try some more deceleration, Mike."
Scandia unhooked from the ship's tanks and returned to the pilot's chair. Kenmore went back to his place.
"There's one likely thing," he said, after a moment. "The man who did the sabotage in the City made all his slashings in the same places. He made a routine of it. It's possible that when he started painting new marks on the Earthship's steering jobs he marked them all the same. He might have that kind of brain. Three times a rocket marked six-three has been wrong. Maybe the others are right. The ten-twos were right. We can't count on his marking all the wrong 'uns as six-threes, but it might be so."
"Yeah," said Mike in a gravelly voice. "But six-threes are what I loaded most of. I like three-gravity firing. But I'll do what I can."
He turned the ship about again. Ring mountains, expanding, moved sidewise below. The tumbled, unmappable confusion of a wrecked mountain chain lay beneath. Kenmore and Arlene could see it through the ports as the ship turned. The ship drifted downward, but it drifted sidewise, too. Then a featureless plain, a mare, a solidified lava sea, moved into position under the ship. Mike flicked on the nearest object radar.
It didn't work; it had been smashed by one of the impacts of the mismarked rockets as they were fired.
"We're landing by the seat of my pants," said Mike. "Unhook from the tank, Arlene, and strap yourself in."
Arlene obeyed; Kenmore strapped himself in also, but loosely.
"Five," said Mike. "Four—three—two—one—"
A rocket pushed mightily. Kenmore counted, straining, up to ten; Scandia had fired a ten-two. Then Mike peered down out the port. He muttered furiously, "Nothing to tell distance by! Nothing!"
He swung the ship delicately, so that its sidewise motion would be countered by the same rocket blast that checked the ship's fall.
"Five— four—three—two—one—"
Another valiant thrust. A five-two. Mike said angrily, when it ended, "But I'm running out of rockets, Joe! I've got three more six-threes—and that's all!"
"You'll have to take a chance, then," said Kenmore. He looked across the cabin. " 'Luck, Arlene!"
A long, long wait. Mike said abruptly, "We're close now. I can't take a chance counting. I'm going to fire when I have to."
Ten seconds. Fifteen. Twenty.
The roaring of a rocket. Weight. Three-gravity weight. A six-three rocket which was what it purported to be. The thrust stopped. Mike said, "That's what I need to land on! One more . . ."
But this was a blow like a bomb blast. The safety loop released this rocket quickly, but a great rent appeared in the side wall of the ship's cabin; it was about to fall to pieces.
"I'm taking the last chance," said Mike abruptly. "Nothing else to do! Here goes!"
He fired the last rocket in his racks.
It was cataclysmic; it was intolerable; it was monstrous. If it was not an Earthship take-off rocket, it was assuredly a deceleration job, intended to halt the big rocket-ship as it approached its destination. But it flew free.
There was a great silence, and the lights in the small ship were out. There were cracklings and creakings conveyed by solid conduction through the substance of the ship's torn hull.
And then the ship hit.
It crumpled. It rolled over and hit again, and crumpled once more; then it slid over moondust on top of the lava surface of the sea. The moondust served as a lubricant, as talcum might have done, and probably kept the ship from grinding itself to pieces. But even so, when the motion ended they could see the stars between stripped metal girders all about them. Kenmore hung from the acceleration chair in his straps, and the ship was a crumpled, shattered, almost unrecognizable mass of scrap metal.
He heard himself crying fiercely: "Arlene! Arlene!"
She panted, "I—think I'm all right, Joe ... I hurt, but . . ."
Mike sputtered and was silent. Then he said with an unnatural calm, "Arlene, turn off your talkie! I've got to say something about the guy who did this to us!"
Kenmore loosened his straps. He crawled out between indented plates and strength members, then fought his way through debris to Arlene, and loosened her straps. Something had bent and imprisoned her. He turned on his chest lights and loosened the catch that held the chair in use position. He dropped it. He could feel Arlene holding herself convulsively close to him when he dragged her free. Then Mike squirmed out of nowhere, his lights also burning.
"Something hit my helmet," he said. "It's bent in. I can feel it. Almost busted it. I've postponed cussing that guy until I feel safer! We get out this way."
CHAPTER IX. MAROONED
Two minutes later the three of them stood in the foot-thick moondust on the surface of the mare. The Earth shone brightly overhead. The Shuttle-ship looked like a tin can that had been stamped on, save that parts of its skeleton were exposed.
They looked at it. Then Kenmore moved—and found himself limping, even in moon-gravity—to see around it on the other side of the wreckage.
They were in the middle of what seemed to be a flat plain, but was not. They could see uncountable millions of stars, stretching down to an absolutely unbroken and very near horizon on either hand. There was no dimming as the stars reached the edge of the moon; they kept full brightness until the horizon cut them off.
"You might say," said Mike, breathing hard, "that were out of sight of land. But there's nothing but land. Joe?"
"We got down," said Kenmore.
Their surroundings, actually, were more lonely and more desolate than even the stark and tragic mountains of the moon. They could see for two miles in every direction before the flat surface curved down—and there was the horizon. Not that there was anything to see but the dust-covered, powdered mare surface; there was nothing. Literally nothing.
Kenmore stared carefully up at Earth. It hung huge and green and brilliant in the sky. It was not quite where it had seemed to be from the City; it slanted farther away from the very center of the sky. He said, "Hm. A degree of arc on the moon here is just a fraction over seventeen miles, instead of sixty-odd on Earth. Mike, how far has the Earth shifted from where it seems to be at the City?"
Mike squinted up; this was his business. As jockey of the Shuttle to the Space Laboratory, his journeyings-out were made on computations included in his flight orders. But his return trips to nearside, on Luna, were different. Normally, he had a radar beam to talk him down at the end of the run, but he knew where Earth should hang in the sky on the way. And of course Earth's icecaps and continents were much more serviceable than a compass. Now he said profoundly, "Hmmm. Let's sight it."
And they did, with markings in the dust and the height of Kenmore's helmet top to furnish data. Perhaps it was not a particularly sensible undertaking, from one point of view. They had something under two hours of breathable air in their tanks, and the number of inhabited places on the nearside half of the moon could be numbered on one's fingers, with some digits left over. But the ship had started out in a specific direction toward one of those places; they had headed back from catastrophe toward their starting point. And when a degree of arc is only seventeen miles, and Earth is there, hanging overhead for an object to sight from, the fixing of positions is much simpler than on Earth. Instead of a lunar or stellar observation, they took a terrestrial one. On Earth. When they had finished Kenmore said, "It could be as little as thirty miles away, Mike."