His image faded. Kenmore turned away.
In seconds, he was faced by a furious Cecile Ducros. "What have you done? Arlene has just told me! And what shall I do? Meellions of people weel be waiting for my broadcast from the Space Laboratory! To promeese them reeches and happiness for. all their cheeldren through some great discovery! And you let those eediots destroy themselves and the Laboratory!"
"Those idiots," said Kenmore, "were trying to destroy Arlene and the rest of us."
"But what can I do?" demanded Cecile. "I have no broadcast! What deed I come here for? To broadcast! What can I do? Notheeng!"
Arlene shook her head at Kenmore from behind Cecile's back. Kenmore said coldly, "The chief suggested a spotter - station. Lezd is changing the set. Make up a pretty story about those interpid men who brave all the dangers of solitary life on the moon, to search the star-filled skies for little freight-rockets coming up from Earth."
She stamped her foot angrily, then her expression changed to one of surprise. She beamed. "Vairy good! I weel go talk to thees chief. But steel—eet was stupid to let those men destroy the Laboratory!"
She went away. Kenmore shrugged; he was numbed by the abrupt ending of all the things he'd planned to spend his life developing. Arlene shook her head.
"Poor Joel" she said sympathetically' "You feel that you've lost your job and there isn't anything else to work at! But there are tomorrows, even if not the ones you've been planning for! It might help if you got mad, Joe. Couldn't you work up a good, healthy wrath against the people who tried to blast a cliff down on you and Moreau?"
He shook his head. "Except that Moreau and I were of some use to you, I—almost would rather that they'd succeeded."
Arlene said angrily, "They tried to kill me, too! Doesn't that mean anything?"
She turned on her heel and left him. And he might have been stirred, except that he saw through her attempt to seem indignant. He knew that she was trying to arouse him to an interest in something besides the appalling fact that all his work and hopes were futile.
CHAPTER XV. A DUCROS PRODUCTION
He WENT heavily to the privacy-cubicle that was his own. He sat down on his cot—it took a perceptible interval between the moment when he willed to sit and the contact of his body with the object sat on—and tried to think out the matter of the sabotage, to pick out those who were guilty of it. They had, very probably, started off in a jeep with the rest of the fugitives, after sabotaging the City. Most likely they'd lost themselves from the jeep caravan and made the attack on Kenmore and Moreau. Quite possibly they'd also attacked spotter stations and casually murdered their occupants. They might have other plans, even now. Ultimately they'd turn up with a story which couldn't be disproved, and be returned to Earth as fortunate survivors of the disasters to the moon colony. But Joe Kenmore could not think clearly. He'd worked a highly improbable number of hours without any pause; when he relaxed, exhaustion took charge. He didn't realize that he had slept until suddenly there was the chief shaking him, a steaming cup of coffee in his hand.
"Broadcast coming up," said the chief, grinning. "I'm going to act. Haney, too. Arlene says you ought to watch."
It was painful to sit up, even in moon-gravity, but Kenmore did it. The chief handed him the coffee cup. "Arlene said to let you sleep, but we need some kind of studio audience."
Kenmore gulped the coffee. "Any of the jeeps back yet?"
"Some. Coming in one by one. Man! Are those guys scared! They saw themselves strangling or roasting. They want out. They crave to go back home!"
"Including the ones who did it all," said Kenmore. "Pretty, isn't it? But they have no more reason for sabotage. The Lab is smashed and the City will be abandoned. No need for any more murders."
"Except," said the chief, "that those guys might just love their work."
Kenmore stood up and followed the chief across the main dome and into the air-plant part of the City, where hydroponic tanks nourished vegetation to purify the air and at least partly feed the colonists. Cecile prepared her broadcast magnificently. There would be no script; there was no director. Lezd merely carried out her orders. From time to time, he offered suggestions. She accepted none; she appropriated them. Kenmore heard him make a mild suggestion about the orders of events in the coming production. She ignored him—five minutes later she repeated his suggestion in the form of a command.
From seeming chaos, presently order appeared. Lezd hung a curtain of plastic, dome-balloon material and tinted its surface blue. He set up a slide projector behind it and critically surveyed the projected image from the front. He had made a slide from pictures available in the City. The result was not convincing to the naked eye, but he nodded to Kenmore.
"It will look right to the camera," he said. "Cecile will appear in a vacuum suit and show the people of Earth what moon flowers are like. She will discover them. Fortunately, there is a photograph."
Kenmore said coldly, "Arlene is the only human being besides Mike ever to hold one in her hands!"
But what have facts to do with art?" asked Lezd. "Cecile is an artist!"
Cecile Ducros appeared in a vacuum suit with a special helmet Lezd had contrived for her. It would not be practical outside the domes—it was not airtight—but it was very becoming. She examined her own image in a monitor television screen Lezd had set up. She gave crisp, authoritative commands.
Broadcast time came; the monitor lighted, then went blank. And then Cecile Ducros' face appeared, wearing its heavy-lidded, mysterious smile.
She said sweetly, "How do you do? Thees ees your leetle Cecile Ducros, speaking from the moon. And now I speak in a special manner, because I am een a place remote from the Ceety—from a lonely station many, many miles away—a spotter station where two intrepeed men brave all the dangers of solitary life upon the moon, to search the star-filled skies for leetle freight-sheeps coming up from Earth."
She wore the phony vacuum helmet, with its phony faceplate lifted back. The camera view widened, and the set which had been built to represent the Space Laboratory appeared quite convincing as something else. Cecile explained the function and the loneliness of these isolated posts, where two men and a moon-jeep stayed for fourteen days in the appalling airless cold of a lunar night.
She showed a view from a spotter-station port. It was close to dawn on this part of the moon, she observed excitedly, and there—look! look! look!—were the faraway specks of sunshine on the very tallest mountains.
It was actually a projection, but even those present found it was difficult to believe that the camera lens did not point out at a desolate landscape, with mysterious mountains against the stars. Of course there was no movement anywhere.
Back to Cecile. She had Haney before a convincing operations board—a spare—and he mumbled awkwardly in answer to her questions. The chief swaggered into the scene and displayed remarkable histrionic ability. There were four spotter stations, he said splendidly, occupied only during the more-than-three-hundred-hours-long night of the moon. One man was supposedly always on duty, watching for the tiny radar pips which should be freight-ships coming to the moon with food and air. Cecile deftly extracted an anecdote or two about journeys through mountain passes with avalanches waiting to plunge down in slow motion. There was a story of the spotter station where the reserve air leaked out, and was lost. The chief told how they patched the leak, electrolyzed water into oxygen and hydrogen, and breathed that highly explosive mixture for six Earth-days, knowing that a single spark of static electricity would blow them and their station to atoms.