The moon-jeep bumped crazily toward another route that would lead to the City. It threw up waves of powdery, slow-falling dust from the sides of its gigantic wheels, one of which was no longer round.
They heard the voice from the sky three times more, frantically calling for a landing-beam to guide it. The third time, the voice was very faint; the rocket was passing beyond the horizon.
The jeep sped on like a mad thing. Inside there were clankings and thumpings and the soft sighing sound of its engines. But outside, there was no sound at all.
CHAPTER III. DESERTED CITY
THE moon is a small world, its mountains tall. Therefore, when the moon-jeep came hurtling out of the last obstacle to sight, and the City was in line-of-sight below, the jeep was very high up indeed. The Apennines about it reached clutching, rocky fingers toward the stars, a full twenty thousand feet above the frozen lava sea that was the Mare Imbrium. In the pass, the jeep was three miles higher than the City. The vast, gently undulating mare reached out to a horizon which was no more than the place where stars began to shine. It was a seemingly limitless gray nothing—gray in the earthlight close below, but fading to utter blackness in the distance.
But there was no light where the City should be. Far, far out, Kenmore and Moreau could see a tiny winking splinter of brightness, but it was not the City.
"Call the City," panted Joe Kenmore. "Find out if the Earth-rocket got down safely!"
Moreau called; there was no answer. Their radio should reach the City; he called again, and again. There was no reply at all. The winking light far out on the mare could have answered, perhaps; but it disappeared as the jeep went hurtling down the tread-marked trail.
Sweat stood out on Kenmore's face as the radio remained obstinately silent. He could not see the City itself, of course. It was only three great dust-heaps, invisible a mile away. But there should be a light atop it; there should be glaring lights about the surfaced Earth-rocket as its cargo was unloaded and taken into the City's airlocks. There should be jeeps carrying burdens, and the chest lights of vacuum-suited figures moving about. But there wasn't.
"Stop calling!" snapped Kenmore, when they were two-thirds of the way down the pass. "Something's happened!"
Moreau clicked off the transmitter. The jeep plunged down the carefully surveyed way, marked by the wheels of other jeeps on other journeys through these mountains. There were places where sheer drops of thousands of feet awaited the incautious. There was a long, crazily sloping hillside which ended abruptly; one could survive the descent only if he passed between two jagged monoliths on which the top-surfacing of moondust had the ironic look of snow.
They reached the level, frozen sea of stone, where jeep trails in the dust showed the way. The twenty-foot wheels of the vehicle rolled erratically—one of them thumped violently—as Kenmore drove downward through the night.
They reached the great dust-heaps which were the City, and still there were no lights—no light atop the dome, none at the airlock. No jeeps even stood outside the City. There was nothing at all to indicate normal occupancy.
And there was no Earth-rocket.
Kenmore braked a hundred yards from the tunnel-like entrance to the. main dome's airlock. With Arlene Gray on his mind, he sweated, raged, and was numb with horror all at once. But Moreau said encouragingly, "If there had been true disaster, the domes would have collapsed. They have not."
True—the domes were intact, their conical shapes undisturbed. Moondust has a very small angle of repose, and if the inner bubble had collapsed, the cone itself would show the fact. Even filled with uneasiness for Arlene, Kenmore realized that nothing so drastic as complete destruction had come upon Civilian City.
He struggled into his vacuum suit, but Moreau was ready first. He crowded into the jeep's small airlock, and there was the clanking of the inner door and the thudding of the pump. Then the sound which was the opening of the outer door. Kenmore saw the jeep-lights' glare upon the dusty sea-surface, and on the square metal opening of the City's lock, and on upward-sloping flanks of impalpable gray dust. Moreau's shadow appeared, multiplied by the number of the lights. It was a group of shadows fanning out from his feet, all moving in jerky but precise imitation of each other.
Kenmore crawled into the lock. The pump began to thud, but he couldn't wait; he released the outer door, and it opened explosively. The air inside burst out, to be whipped away to nothingness. Kenmore swung down the rope ladder.
Moreau's voice—calm as usual—came in the helmet phone. "The lock-door is open. There are many footprints, all going out."
Kenmore moved to see. The immense loneliness a man feels in a vacuum suit on the moon was justified in a new fashion, now. To Joe, it was mingled with terror because of Arlene. Civilian City rose from the plain of the Mare Imbrium, some three miles from the foot of the Apennine range. And the lunar Apennines are spectacular. Now, in the curious reflected light from Earth, they looked like giant fingers reaching imploringly toward the sky. They were a jagged, tumultuous wall against the senselessly cheerful sky of stars. Earth shone brightly, impartially, upon them and upon the frozen sea. The Mare Imbrium was ever-so-gently less than perfectly flat; it had a bloom, a coating, which was a thin layer of moondust. The earthlight served to emphasize a man's loneliness on a world where men did not belong.
Kenmore reached the airlock, and Moreau pointed to more footprints. The powdered surface showed them clearly. There were many; too many. All moved outward.
The two went in and Moreau switched on the chest lights of his armor. He pressed the stud that should have closed the outer door; nothing happened.
Without a word, they hauled it shut by hand. Again Moreau struck the knob that should have opened the inner door; again nothing happened. Kenmore worked the manual handle—raging—and presently it yielded; there was a puffing of air. They entered the inner of the dome's double locks and closed the outer door. They opened the inner—and found themselves in absolute blackness. They were in the central air-space of the main dome of Civilian City, and no light glowed anywhere, save for those on the two vacuum suits; it was unthinkable.
The bubble under the dust-cone was very large. The floor was flat, of course. The air-space was a half-globe, three hundred feet across and a hundred and fifty high. It was circular, and around its rim were the ceilingless cubicles which provided office space and laboratory space and game areas, as well as merely furnishing arrangements for privacy, which was as needful as anything else. In the center were the Earth plants, which kept the air from smelling flat and stale, regulated humidity, and had some share in removing C02
But the room was dark. The plants had closed their blossoms, as if at night; their leaves drooped.
Kenmore swung around to look at a pressure gauge. There were a dozen about, each with its gong to give alarm if the pressure dropped a single ounce. The needles were far, far over into the red area, which meant that vacuum suits must be worn within the dome. The pressure was five pounds, when normal was fourteen point seven. Kenmore tapped one instrument and the needle fell to indicate four point eight pounds. The temperature was forty-eight degrees. The City had not cooled unduly. He swallowed.