What was the use? He’d been over it all with Fats a dozen times before, and it never got him anywhere. Fats was a good rocket man, but he couldn’t stretch his imagination far enough to forget the hogwash the Reconstruction Empire was dishing out about the Destiny of Man and the Divine Plan whereby humans were created to exploit all other races. Not that it would do Fats much good if he did. Slim knew the value of idealism—none better.
He’d come out of college with a bad dose of it and an inherited fortune big enough for three men, filled with the old crusading spirit. He’d written and published books, made speeches, interviewed administrators, lobbied, joined and organized societies, and been called things that weren’t complimentary. Now he was pushing freight from Mars to Earth for a living, quarter owner of a space-worn freighter. And Fats, who’d come up from a tube cleaner without the help of ideals, owned the other three quarters.
Fats watched him climb out of the hold. “Well?”
“Nothing. I can’t fix it—don’t know enough about electronics. There’s something wrong with the relays that control the time interval, but the indicators don’t show where, and I’d hate to experiment out here.”
“Make it to Earth—maybe?”
Slim shook his head. “I doubt it, Fats. Better set us down on Luna somewhere, if you can handle her that far. Then maybe we can find out what’s wrong before we run out of air.”
Fats had figured as much and was already braking (he ship down, working against the spasmodic flutter of die blasts, and swearing at the effects of even the moon’s weak gravity. But the screens showed that he was making progress toward the spot he’d chosen—a ·mall flat plain with an area in the center that seemed unusually clear of debris and pockmarks.
“Wish they’d at least put up an emergency station out here,” he muttered.
“They had one once,” Slim said. “But nobody ever goes to Luna, and there’s no reason for passenger ships to land there; takes less fuel for them to coast down on their fins through Earth’s atmosphere than to jet down fcere. Freighters like us don’t count, anyway. Funny fcow regular and flat that place is; we can’t be over a mile up, and I don’t see even a meteor scar.”
“Luck’s with us, then. I’d hate to hit a baby crater and rip off a tube or poke a hole in the shell.” Fats glanced at the radio altimeter and fall indicator. “We’re gonna hit plenty hard. If—Hey, what the deuce!”
Slim’s eyes flicked to the screen just in time to see the flat plain split into two halves and slide smoothly out from under them as they seemed about to touch it; then they were dropping slowly into a crater of some sort, seemingly bottomless and widening out rapidly; the roar of the tubes picked up suddenly. Above them, the over-screens showed a pair of translucent slides closing together again. His eyes stared at the height indicator, neither believing nor doubting.
“Hundred and sixty miles down and trapped in! Tube sounds show air in some amount, at least, even up here. This crazy trap can’t be here. There’s no reason for it.”
“Right now, who cares? We can’t go through that slide up there again, so we go down and find out, T guess. Damn, no telling what kind of landing field we’ll find when we reach bottom.” Fats’ lack of excess imagination came in handy in cases like this. He went about the business of jockeying down the enormous crater as if he were docking at York port, too busy with the uncertain blast to worry about what he might find at the bottom. Slim gazed at him in wonder, then fell back to staring at the screen for some indication of the reason behind this obviously artificial trap.
Lhin scratched idly through the pile of dirt and rotten shale, pried a thin scrap of reddened stone out from where his eyes had missed it the first time, and rose slowly to his feet. The Great Ones had been good to him, sending a rockslide just when the old beds were wearing thin and poor from repeated digging. His sensitive nostrils told him there was magnesium, ferrous matter, and sulphur in abundance, all more than welcome. Of course, he’d hoped there might be copper, even as little as the end of his finger, but of that there seemed to be no sign. And without copper—
He shrugged the thought aside as he had done a thousand times before, and picked up his crude basket,
now filled half with broken rock and half with the lichenlike growth that filled this end of the crater. One of his hands ground a bit of rottenstone together with shreds of lichen and he popped the mixture into his mouth. Grace to the Great Ones who had sent the slide; the pleasant flavor of magnesium tickled his tongue, and the lichens were full-flavored from the new richness of the soil around them. Now, with a trace of copper,’ there would have been nothing left to wish for.
With a rueful twitch of his supple tail, Lhin grunted and turned back toward his cave, casting a cursory glance up at the roof of the cavern. Up there, long miles away, a bright glare lanced down, diffusing out as it pierced through the layers of air, showing that the long lunar day was nearing noon, when the sun would lance down directly through the small guarding gate. It was too high to see, but he knew of the covered opening where the sloping walls of the huge valley ended and the roof began. Through all the millennia of his race’s slow defeat, that great roof had stood, unsupported except for the walls that stretched out around in a circle of perhaps fifty miles in diameter, strong and more lasting than even the crater itself; the one abiding monument to the greatness that had been his people’s.
He knew without having to think of it that the roof was artificial, built when the last thin air was deserting the moon, and the race had sought a final refuge here in the deepest crater, where oxygen could be trapped and kept from leaking away. In a vague way, he could sense the ages that had passed since then and wonder at the permanence of the domed roof, proof against all time.
Once, as the whole space about him testified, his had been a mighty race. But time had worked on them, aging the race as it had individuals, removing the vigor of their youth and sending in the slow creepers of hopelessness. What good was existence here, cooped up in one small colony, away from their world? Their numbers had diminished and some of their skill had gone from them. Their machines had crumbled and vanished, unreplaced, and they had fallen back to the primitive, digging out the rocks of the crater walls and the lichens
they had cultured to draw energy from the heat and radioactive phosphorescence of the valley instead of sunlight. Fewer young were planted each year, and of the few, a smaller percentage proved fertile, so that their original million fell to thousands, then to hundreds, and finally to a few grubbing individuals.
Only then had they awakened to the danger of extinction, to find it too late. There had been three elders when Lhin was grown, his seed being the only fertile one. Now the elders were gone long years since, and Lhin had the-entire length and breadth of the crater to . himself. And life was a long series of sleeps and food forages, relieved only by the same thoughts that had been , in his mind while his dead world turned to the light and away more than a thousand times. Monotony had slowly killed off his race, but now that its work was nearly done, it” had ended. Lhin was content with his type of life; he was habituated, and immune to boredom.