Darkness swallowed him. He fell only five feet the following second, and not much more than ten, the third. But that particular precipice was thousands of feet high; the pit into which he dropped was thousands of feet deep. His voice came very terribly to them for what seemed centuries, screaming as he fell.
His voice stopped in the middle of a shriek. If the fall had not killed him directly, his suit was torn or his helmet crushed. There was no point at all in going after his body—even if it could have been done.
"And now," said Kenmore savagely, "that other one!"
The other armored figure had stopped. It wrung its space-gloved hands. Those who converged grimly upon it heard whimperings in their headphones.
"We'll keep you alive," said Kenmore, very coldly indeed, "until you get back to the City and tell what you know. But we don't promise more than that!"
They heard sobbings and slavering sounds. The second fugitive wailed and wailed; then he turned and fled blindly, weeping in his ultimate despair and terror.
Moreau squeezed a signal rocket. The flare of red light jerked from his hand even as Kenmore grated a command against it. But it was two late; the signal rocket flew in an almost mathematically straight line, leaving its trail of lurid sparks. The fugitive fled in the crazy, clumsy leaps low gravity imposes upon panic The rocket seemed to miss him—to be headed past him five feet away.
But then the flame inside it reached the explosive at its head. There was a flare of sun-bright white light. No sound; no impact; nothing but a, sudden flash of intolerable brilliance, and a spouting cloud of moondust—and the fugitive was gone.
"And now," said Kenmore, his throat dry once more, "we'll see If Arlene's all right."
She was.
CHAPTER XVIII. THURSTON'S REACTION
IT SEEMED that all the future was cut and dried, and that there were to be no surprises. Arlene Gray was alive and unharmed, which was reason for rejoicing. But the enterprise, which—by Joe Kenmore's lights—meant a magnificent future for mankind seemed to be ended. No cause for joy here.
There was, to be sure, the fact that Major Gray had told Kenmore not to think too much in such terms, and that a Navy ship was heading for a lunar missile base. But this did not seem to matter. Anyhow, it would arrive after sunrise—when travel was not practical.
Meanwhile the matter of continued existence had to be handled, even though its purpose was frustrated. There was the return of the jeeps in which the inhabitants of the City had fled—a long time ago, it seemed now. They came in one by one, their air tanks refilled by the military, and their needed repairs made by missile-base personnel. When they learned of the destruction of the Laboratory, some of the returned men were visibly jubilant. Now they could return to Earth—not by their own fault—and they would never leave it again.
But some of them were aggressively on the defensive. They had run away, while Kenmore and others had met the emergency they fled from; so the fugitives did not show up well. They were insistently suspicious of Kenmore's behavior. Some muttered darkly that only he and the chief and Moreau really knew how the Laboratory came to be destroyed, and they might have reason not to tell the truth.
There was a time, indeed, when Kenmore and the others were considered highly doubtful characters. They'd known exactly what to do in the leaking City. How would they know how to meet an emergency like that unless they'd caused it?
Cecile Ducros stopped those murmurings by the add comment that she, at least, would not be alive but for Kenmore. She added, "Eet ees steel posseebeel for me to broadcast to Earth on the behavior of those who ran away, abandoning the City and the landing-beam apparatus." She should have died in a crash landing, because of their desertion; and certainly she'd have died afterward but for Kenmore's search for her in a jeep.
At this point, Joe Kenmore was a very admirable person again, because nobody wanted to offend Cecile. The inhabitants of Civilian City wanted to be presented on her next broadcast, and praised to viewers on three continents. They worked feverishly to attain this end, pestering Arlene, Lezd, and Cecile herself for a promise of praise as heroes. It followed, obviously, that they interfered a great deal with Arlene's natural desire to be with Kenmore in privacy.
She complained ruefully about the persecution, and he told her dourly that there'd be at least two weeks of it to come. It would be so long before the Earthship was ordered to take off—after sunset—to begin the evacuation of the City. Arlene would be among the first to go; he'd see to that. For himself, he foresaw a long period of uselessness—with further uselessness awaiting him on Earth until he had an entirely new plan for his and Arlene's future worked out. He did not think to mention the Navy ship on the way out, coming to the moon to land at a missile base. It seemed to have nothing at all to do with him.
Then he grudgingly gave of his time to a highly official inquiry into the sabotage of the City. The conclusion-accurate enough—was that all the sabotage so far experienced could have been made by the men who'd made the last attack, had carried off Arlene and had been destroyed in the mountains by their pursuers. It was considered that they'd done most of it, anyhow.
But Joe Kenmore hardly cared. He was not even interested when Mike Scandia, Moreau, the chief, and Haney enthusiastically volunteered to go out and make a movie of a solar-power mine for the next broadcast. The mines were interesting, but unimportant. A solar mirror concentrated blistering, unshielded sunshine to a focus the temperature of which was comparable to that of the sun itself. Turned on a moon-cliff, the focused sunlight would melt the most refractory stone to lava. Turned on a vein of metal ore, it not only smelted but could boil metal away as steam. But, controlled properly, it brought trickles of pure liquid metal pouring down into a waiting mold.
The mining process was the subject of the broadcast. Cecile, of course, appeared on the television screen to be at the mine itself. She explained vividly the way one traveled in daylight—when one must. One left the City in a jeep which ran swiftly through furnace heat to a place of shadow, where the jeep cooled off. Then another quick rush through the inferno which was the moon's surface in sunshine, and so to the mine itself. And the mine was merely a great sun-mirror beside a cliff, with a dust-covered sun-shelter for the jeep and those who operated the mirror.
It was an effective show. Cecile described the danger and the baking desolation with contagious shudders. She made it very clear why men were nocturnal on the moon. One could heat a vacuum suit against cold, but there was no way to cool it so that a man could live long in the sun.
But the City, itself, disapproved of the show. The returned refugees considered that she should introduce them all, one by one, to her watching audience on three continents on Earth.
Kenmore didn't even watch the production; he was sunk in gloom, dangerously close to apathy. When word came that the Navy ship had landed—the one that Major Gray had spoken of—he felt.no elation. Even the news that a jeep had been especially equipped with heat reflectors and refrigeration, to try to make a journey in daylight to Civilian City, did not arouse his interest.
The chief and Moreau came to him in some excitement. After the broadcast, they'd gone back to the solar mine. They had a wild idea of casting a rocket-ship in metal smelted on the moon—running the metal straight from the vein into a mold. It was to be its own cargo. The idea was practical enough in itself, but Kenmore saw the problem of getting such a vessel back to Earth. It could be lifted past the neutral point easily enough-past the point where the Earth's and the moon's gravities cancel each other. Then it would fall to the Earth of its own weight. But landing it . . .