The two figures in vacuum suits looked very small as they labored in the huge and brightly lighted dome. They looked absurd. The building was out of all proportion to their size. But on the moon, a building has to be larger than one on Earth, to shelter a corresponding number of people. Moon buildings have not only to contain the people, but all the out-of-doors that on Earth serves to grow food and purify the air they breathe.
Very shortly, a pattern began to appear in the manner of the sabotage. Each leak Kenmore found was a neat slash in the plastic, cutting through to the dust outside. The dust was so finely divided that it would flow like a liquid. Air could go out, but no dust appeared inside. There was still some air pressure within, and it became apparent that the sabotage had been done with such deliberation that it had become routine. Where a partition of one of the privacy cubicles touched the side wall of the dome, a razor blade had been thrust behind the corner and a slash made. There was one slash at the bottom, a few inches from the floor; there was another at the top, just a couple of inches higher than it was quite convenient for Kenmore to reach.
Presently he stopped using the foam; he knew where to look. He said evenly, "One man did all this. He got systematic about it."
Arlene watched, after that. Kenmore worked on, until he had gone completely around the vast enclosure. He said angrily, "It ought to be tight now! I don't like the idea of a man doing a job like this, as if he had all the time there was!"
His earphones almost bellowed at him.
"We go on the air," snarled the voice of Cecile Ducros, "in just five minutes! Where are you, Kenmore! Come at once!"
Arlene heard the summons, too. She grimaced and went with Kenmore through the lock into the dome of the hydroponic gardens. There was a camera set up, and a beautifully lighted set—lurid with flowers from the troughs—and Cecile Ducros was pacing up and down, deliberately getting the feel of the light gravity, with a cold intentness and absorption.
She looked up and snapped, "You remain in your vacuum suit. Arlene, you also! You come on after seven minutes. You will be on for four." She looked balefully at Moreau. "The specimens! The ingots! Get them!" She snapped at Pitkin: "One sound from you during the broadcast and I'll strangle you personally!"
It was remarkable, and it was insane to be preparing the equivalent of a normal studio broadcast in the evacuated, leaking buildings of Civilian City, with a history of past cold-blooded sabotage, with recriminations and controversy to come. But Cecile Ducros did it.
Lezd, the electronics man, worked the television camera himself. He performed the feat with nonchalance and matter-of-fact skill. The lights were perfect. A sweep-second hand went around and around. Cecile Ducros watched it, with the camera trained on her. And suddenly she was smiling a sleepy, heavy-lidded, mysterious sort of smile at the camera lens and speaking with a very delicate intensification of accent.
"How do you do? Thees is your leetle Cecile Ducros, and I speak to you tonight from the moon. We grounded her-re—or should I say we mooned?—some hours ago, and I have been charmed, I have been fasceenated, I have been ravished by what I see! Look! These blossoms!
They gr-row here, and they purify the air. Look-look- look-look!"
She swept her arms to guide her audience's eyes. Then she smiled upon Moreau, and at the cue he ambled fatuously into the camera's range. "Here is someone who leeves here—a man een the moon! Eet would be charming to walk in the earthlight with heem!" She sighed. "Ah, I am so susceptible!"
Kenmore and Arlene, standing just off the set, could see the whole of it—the beautifully calculated tricks by which Cecile appeared so charming, the perfect timing with which she shifted moods, the seeming spontaneity with which she appeared to think of calling onstage Captain Osgood, who had skippered the Earthship up to the moon, and the deftness with which she admired the wonderful navigation—or was eet astrogation, Capitaine? What was the word for steering a sheep in space? —the wonderful skeel with wheech the sheep had been brought to rest so perfectly . . .
She dismissed him, then called on Kenmore and Arlene, and explained that they had been out-of-doors, walking in the earthlight. Then she shifted position—with the camera following her—and there were specimens of lunar rock-formations, and a great boulder of quartz rock with wire-gold in it. Her eyes grew wide as she told of the mines where such things were found. And these, she explained excitedly, were ingots of gold! So many! They were worth thousands of thousands of dollars back on Earth!
But the charmeeng thing was also the lightness with wheech one walked on the moon!
Then there was another background, and Cecile Ducros showed how anyone—anyone at all—could toe-dance upon the moon, and she lifted her skirts to show the justly famous gams and did no less than twenty-two entrechats in one graceful leap. She reminded them that Nijinsky himself had done no more than ten on Earth, but weeth science to come to the aid of woman, she had visibly surpassed him. . . .
It was an amazing performance. It seemed that she called at random upon members of a well-populated city to grace her production, yet there were exactly eight people in the whole settlement besides herself and Arlene. She beautifully canceled out all rumors and made ridiculous any that might be started in the future, about an operation to force the abandonment of the City, as a ruthless act of Americans to force non-Americans off the moon. It was a strictly professional job.
When she smiled that same sleepy smile at her audience back on Earth, and looked wistful because she was leaving them, and then called Moreau back into camera range and looked up at him and sighed, "Ah, I am so susceptible!" and then signed off—why, up to that moment she had been convincing enough to carry even Kenmore and the others along with her.
But when the camera clicked off, she said vieiously,
"Now, who was it that tried to kill me? What villains..."
And having completed her broadcast, she allowed herself the luxury of a full-scale tantrum.
Kenmore grimly took over the communicator in the main dome. He heard only part of the very fine example of artistic temperament which a thoroughly scared woman allowed herself, when she could afford it—and not before. He got Earth. Then he got Major Gray at Bootstrap, which was the Earth terminal for all space activities—the space platform and the moon. Major Gray happened to be Arlene's father, and the fact had probably determined Arlene's choice as a companion for the television star. She would have been indoctrinated on matters of security; she would see that Cecile Ducros was discreet.
There was a scrambler on the audio beam, of course. Even the sound portion of the visicast had been scrambled on the moon and unscrambled back on Earth before being passed on to the television networks. It was possible to talk confidentially. Kenmore savagely told Gray just what had happened.
Major Gray uttered one explosive word and then said coldly, "She's safe now?" He meant Arlene.
"Now, yes," said Kenmore shortly. "But she should come back to Earth right away!"
There was an interval of something over three seconds between the end of a comment to Earth, and the beginning of Gray's reply. It took half that time for the radio waves to reach Earth, and half again for the beginning of the reply to get to the moon.