His voice cut off as the arm about his throat grew tighter. The man with the pince-nez said generously, "You see, my dear young lady, that we cannot go back to Earth because of what we know. Each of us has the power to destroy mankind. Power corrupts. It is an axiom. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
"Look at us! We have the power to destroy each other, and we have done so. But some of us have taken measures so that nobody else may be destroyed. We have loosened our air supply into the ship. We breathe air six times denser than normal. We have breathed it for seventy-two hours. We cannot leave this ship. We would die of explosive decompression—of the bends. We cannot seize your ship, which has the means to return to the moon, because we would die the instant we entered it." Arlene said desperately, "But—we came up here to tell you about new orders."
"You tell us," said the man, beaming, "what we should do!"
"Let me report this," said Kenmore, "and have Earth figure out what's to be done. That's what you should do!" "Yes!" agreed Arlene. "That's what you should do!" The man with the expressionless eyes said abruptly, "No! We won't do it! We'll—"
A clamor arose. Arlene cringed from the sheer volume of their shouting voices. They saw it; they quieted.
"We are sorry," said the man with the pince-nez. "You can leave us now, and if you are careful, you can return to your ship. We could not go. We are grateful to you for coming to us. You are—everything we have not. But we beg you to go immediately."
A voice said indignantly, "You have told them too much! It is not safe for them to report so much!"
Moreau pushed the lock-door open. The chief thrust Arlene into it, and then backed into it, with Kenmore. Other voices took up the cry. "You told them too much!
They have learned more than it is safe for people to know."
Kenmore slammed the door for in-lock operation of the pumps. They throbbed; in time the suits became bouncy. Kenmore spoke into his talkie. "Watch my face, Chief!"
He cracked his faceplate, and gasped; then he nodded. The others opened their faceplates, one by one. The throbbing of the pumps went on. The pressure in the lock was lowering, and they were decompressing with it. Kenmore watched the airlock pressure gauge. Presently its needle stirred from its pin.
"Seal up!" he commanded harshly. "They're arguing back in there whether or not they told us too much! We've got to hurry! They've cracked up! They're not thinking straight!"
The outer lock-door could be opened; Kenmore opened it. The spaceship's lock was six feet away, across an abyss of stars. Moreau plunged across the gap and grabbed a handhold, and pulled on his space-rope, still linked to the others. But Kenmore and the chief, together, threw Arlene across the emptiness. They swarmed at the ropes holding the ships together. They dived for the opposite opening. Kenmore slapped the outer lock-door shut and pulled the emergency lever to open the inner door to the Earthship's cabin.
"How long have we, Joe?" asked Moreau shakily.
"Don't know," panted Kenmore, "—but they'll decide it! They're crackpots! They'll do the violent and dramatic thing!"
The inner door yielded. He swarmed out of the lock, calling behind him: "Get Arlene to a chair! I'm blasting off!"
The chief heaved her in the general direction of a chair. She caught it as Kenmore strapped himself feverishly into the control seat. He hadn't even opened his faceplate. He panted, "Get set! Five—four—three—two-one . . ."
There was intolerable weight. Arlene collapsed into the contour chair. She gasped for breath, with her chest and the bulky vacuum suit pressing fiercely down toward the mat behind her body. She saw the chief sink to his knees under the acceleration; she saw Kenmore straining to fire other and yet other rockets . . .
The Earthship turned about in mid-sky and plunged toward the moon. Its rockets poured out incredible masses of vapor as it strained to reach the highest possible speed at the earliest possible moment. Kenmore was firing the heaviest rockets the ship mounted, one after another, as fast as they burned out.
Then Kenmore slumped back to the control seat. The rockets burned on and burned on . . .
The last of them burned out; the ship went hurtling onward. Arlene felt ill from the release of pressure upon her, but the chief straightened out his body in weightlessness.
"Think we'll make it, Joe?" he asked heavily.
"I don't know," said Kenmore. "I daren't burn more rockets. We have to land."
Arlene gasped, "But what—what's the matter?"
"They're crazy," said the chief, in a vast calm. "They don't want their discovery to get back home to Earth. They've killed themselves to stop it. But they were scrapping over whether we'd been told too much before the airlock closed on us. Being crazy, they'll decide they did, and they'll try to kill us. And they've only got one way to do it."
Arlene ached all over, but she sat up. The Earthship floated in emptiness. It seemed motionless, but she knew better. After all that acceleration, it would be moving at a terrific rate. She saw the half-disk of the moon's farside ahead. This was the part of the moon that mankind had never seen before the Laboratory was set out in space. There was the dark blotch in its center about which scientists still dispute acrimoniously. It was cut in two by the shadow which was sunset.
But then, quite suddenly, it was not a half-disk any longer. It was a round, white, glaring platter of incandescence. Something behind the fleeing Earthship had blazed up with a violence which lighted the moon more brightly than the sun had ever done. The Laboratory had exploded; its staff, deciding that their visitors knew too much, had blasted their own ship. The monstrous flame could reach out and engulf the Earthship, if it flared out in time.
The four in the fleeing vessel waited to learn if they were about to die. More, they waited to learn if the moon itself might receive some morsel of disintegration that would make it detonate with the same monstrous violence.
Of course, if that happened, it didn't matter what happened to them . . .
CHAPTER XIV. ". . . WHAT FORGIVENESS?"
On THE WAY back toward the moon, there were things that could be done, but there was very little that Joe Kenmore found tolerable to think about. To him, the destruction of the Space Lab meant that hopes of a glorious future for humanity were abandoned. The surrender of hope meant an end to progress—utter stagnation—people dwelling in a state of apathy because there was nothing to strive for. He envisioned a slow descent back into an abyss of world-wide barbarism, because he was sure that only a dynamic society can be healthy.
There was the discovery made in the Lab, too; according to the strictest of scientific reasoning it was possible for the cosmos to be destroyed to the last least atom of its farthest star. This was still less tolerable for Kenmore to contemplate, because it followed that there was no meaning in meaning, no law in the laws of nature, no significance in the pattern of existence. Was not all of mankind's striving worse than futile, if someday some madman could destroy all reality? The human race has never lacked madmen. If such a thing could be done, he thought, someday assuredly it would. If a man could undo the act of creation by which the cosmos came to be . . .
So the journey back from the Laboratory was not a happy one. Kenmore piloted the ship with his brows knitted and total bitterness in his expression. Moreau made computations—totally unneeded—from the observations the chief made—no less unnecessarily. Only Arlene did not pretend to be absorbed in trivialities. She looked at Kenmore almost remorsefuly, because the effort at least to begin the conquest of space had filled all his mind and had been the substance of all his ambition. She was very sorry for Joe Kenmore.