But the entrapped figure was Lezd; he was unconscious. The active figure were Pitkin and Moreau. Kenmore cried, "Arlene! Where is she?"
She must be under the rest of the collapsing plastic balloon, no longer stiffened by girders and burdened with dust outside. Cecile panted shrilly, "Somebody came in—through the wall! The roof fell down, and she —and she—"
It was patently impossible. To walk into the dust covering of a moon-city should be the same as to walk into a dust-lake. One should be overwhelmed, submerged, packed in dust as in quicksand. Kenmore raced back and opened the air valve fully. For a moment, the ceiling lifted to show all the expanse of floor. But there was a man-high tear in the plastic at ground level on the far side. The roof came down again near that monstrous leak.
And Kenmore's throat clicked. Arlene was not in the dome, either living or dead. All its floor had momentarily been visible. "Somebody—came through the wall!" insisted Cecile hysterically. "Somebody . . ."
And Kenmore saw that, too. Complete ruthlessness was behind this last attempt to destroy the already-doomed City. The trick was the same as that of the punctures. It couldn't have been done anywhere else. But when one thought about it, walking through a dust-lake, or a city's covering, would be quite as simple as sending a rocket through it. Signal rockets had a thrust of five pounds, earthweight; they burned for twenty seconds. A man could hold one reversed before him, its flame and fumes roaring ahead, and the blast would literally blow away any amount of the gossamer-weight moondust. More might slide down, but its sliding would be slow. A man could make his own tunnel if only he moved briskly and his signal rockets held out. And Arlene had been here, in her vacuum suit . . .
Kenmore roared commands as he ran to carry out his own part in them. The fate of the City was taken care of—if it mattered. The worst leaks were patched, save in the air dome. But Arlene had been carried away!
Moreau came swarming after him. Once outside, Joe Kenmore made a terrific leap, which carried him an incredible distance. He headed for the outside storage space where supplies were kept. The chief and Haney came soaring around the City's sagging mounds.
"There's a jeep beating it for the mountains!" snapped the Indian. "We saw it! Haney yelled for it to stop and it tried to run over him!"
Kenmore panted into his suit microphone and the chief swore—unintelligible words which had blue fire around their edges. Kenmore grimly inspected and tested the nearest jeep for sabotage beyond the loss of all its air stores. Moreau came panting with an armload of signal rockets. Mike came bouncing with magnesium marking-powder. The chief balanced a monstrous drum of air snow...
CHAPTER XVII. PURSUIT
It WAS the weirdest of scenes. The beginning dawn made the topmost peaks of the Apennines sheerly incandescent. The Mare Imbrium was not yet touched by light, yet the mountaintops tinted it strangely. There were figures soaring here and there in the preposterous leaps of men in a hurry in light gravity. A moon-jeep moved to one, and then to another, gathering them up with their burdens, and then sped—twinkling in the dawnlight—toward the rampart of stony monsters which were the mountains.
In minutes it crawled up the beginning of the pass, through which another jeep had fled—leaving the City presumably half-wrecked and all jeeps booby-trapped by empty air tanks. The mountains here rose four miles, straight up toward the stars and Earth. Their peaks were bathed in white-hot sunshine. Their valley were dark with the darkness of the Pit. Only the faintest of earthshine now came from the more-than-gibbous Earth. The jeep's multiple lamps glared ahead; all about, hung avalanches.
In the haste of loading, the jeep's cargo doors had been opened to emptiness, and closed again, and the inner doors to the cargo space opened to admit the men who'd leaped up into it with their burdens. It was effectively empty of air, and those inside it breathed from their suit tanks, which would supply them for no more than two hours. Yet its interior was not cold with the chill of outside, and the drum of air-snow bulged until the chief punctured its top; then there was a bubbling of liquid inside it. So the warmth of the jeep's interior gradually restored an atmosphere which was not yet breathable and utterly dry—but might presently grow thick enough to sustain life.
Moreau enlarged the opening in the air-snow drum, and gouged out masses of snow, which he zestfully mixed with magnesium marking-powder—which again he stuffed into the broken-off ends of signal rockets and sealed in. It was a singularly appropriate mixture for the end he had in view; this was the assembled explosive which had blasted a moon-cliff in the attempt to kill him and Kenmore earlier. This was the explosive used on the moon—magnesium powder in frozen air. The least spark would ignite the magnesium in its binder of solid air, melting enough air to permit a flame; then the whole mass would detonate in blinding, blue-white destructiveness. It had never been used in rockets before. The explosive-head rockets that Moreau prepared now would be the first missiles ever fired in anger on the moon.
But Arlene Gray was in the vehicle they must attack.
Kenmore had thought he knew the ultimate of futility, in the proposed abandonment of the moon and all efforts at space-voyaging. But now he felt a kind of helplessness which was literally maddening. The men he pursued were doomed, of course. They didn't know it, because nobody ever commits a crime unless he expects to dodge its consequences.
The men in the jeep undoubtedly believed that they had a perfect alibi. They could have been a part of the fugitive train away from the City in its first abandonment; and they might claim they'd gotten lost from it, had repaired their jeep themselves, and gotten back to the City to find the dome collapsed. They would anticipate that the site of the City would be visited by jeeps from the missile bases—which would have happened— and that they themselves would then be picked up and returned to Earth.
Their scheme was already shattered, but they'd involved Arlene in the consequences of their insanity. And this is the really ghastly part of all crime, thought Joe Kenmore: Criminals often injure others in destroying themselves.
Moreau, fashioning deadly weapons, said abruptly in the jeep, "Lezd must have grappled with whoever took Arlene. His air supply was turned off. We'd better remember that trick if we come to grips with these people."
There is an air-supply control at the neck of a vacuum suit. A man can change or stop the supply of air from his tanks, according to his work or his entrance into a dome or jeep, when he opens his faceplate. Somebody had contemplated hand-to-hand combat in a vacuum, and worked out a perfect tactic on the order of lunar judo; it would not have occurred to most men.
Mike Scandia ground his teeth. The chief and Haney stared out the ports, ahead. Kenmore drove fiercely. He couldn't imagine the destruction of the other jeep without destroying Arlene. The utmost to be hoped for was instant vengeance for her abduction—and that was futility. But he was filled with that rage which is in part pure horror at the wantonness of crime.
His jeep climbed the mountain pass with a reckless speed that nevertheless seemed to him a crawl. Miles above, needlesharp mountaintops groped skyward. They could see feeble earthlight about the jeep, at times. More often, now, there was stark blackness in which the lights of the jeep seemed to cast only pitiful small gleams.