The great meteorite that blasted out Tycho Crater had been richer in iron and nickel than most of its kind. Fragments lay far-scattered, shallowly buried under the regolith. The larger ones, chondrules fused together by the impact, thus became ore deposits such as are rare on weatherless basaltic Luna. When expanding operations demanded a Nearside base in the southern hemisphere, they were a major reason to site it in Tycho.
Dagny Ebbesen was helping build it when her boss sent her to the Rudolph lode. “We’ve promised the workers better quarters, you know,” Petras Gedminas explained. “It will be a standard assembly, but you will get experience in directing a job.” He paused. “No. We are far from the stage at which any task is standard. Expect the unexpected.”
His warning was unnecessary. In the course of two years, Dagny had learned it well. A habitations engineer, no matter how junior, must needs be quite a bit of everything.
Three daycycles after she reached the mine, about one-tenth of a Lunar day, the disaster happened.
A field van had newly rolled in. Calling ahead, the driver identified himself as Edmond Beynac, homebound from an expedition with his assistant. They would like a little rest and sociability before going on. Dagny was eager to meet the geologist. His reports had been important to construction, showing where the rock could be trusted, in what ways and how much. Moreover, his discoveries and analyses had changed several ideas about the entire globe. And then the adventure of it, roving and beholding where no human had ever trod!
The hour was 2130, mid-evenwatch. Her gang worked around the clock, sleeping in relays, to finish before the sun got so high that heat and radiation kept them inside full-time. Someday, she thought, technology would remove that handicap. (Yes, and it would do something about the damned, clinging, allbegriming dust.) Weariness nagged at her bones. However, at twenty-two years of age, under one-sixth Terrestrial gravity, she could ignore it. She could lose herself in what she did and what she sensed.
Her project was still a jumble of excavations, frameworks, life-support and power systems half installed, men and machines intricately busy. High-piled supplies dwarfed the shelters. Some distance off, the original camp clustered in domes and beehives, not much larger; most living space was underground. There the centrifuge stood idle. The miners were at rest, except for two or three who kept watch over the equipment that did the heavy labor, digging, breaking, and loading. That was two kilometers eastward, almost at the horizon. Sun, shadow, and upflung dust-haze obscured it; occasionally a piece of metal flashed.
The slim pylons of the funicular lifted clear to sight. In double file, widely separated, they marched from the pit, passed within a hundred meters of her, and vanished beyond the southwestern rim of vision. Their cable strands made thin streaks across the sable overhead. A gondola had just been filled with ore and winched aloft to hang by its suspension. The cable was set in motion again. The gondola started its journey through heaven like a spider dangling from a strand. It was off to deliver its burden to the builders of Tychopolis, who would refine and use the metals. They in their turn sent back what the crews here needed. This was the most economical means of bulk transport, given the shortage of vehicles and ruggedness of the crater floor.
Rugged indeed: hillocks, shelves, boulders, pockmarks, cracks, clefts, a confused and darkling plain. Behind the mine, the uppermost ramparts of a ringwall segment hove into view. The sun having barely cleared them, they remained featurelessly black, their shadow a tar pool. Everywhere else, lesser shadows fingered stone. Stars were drowned in the glare. Soiled white spacesuits, bright-colored badges and tags, scuttled tiny amidst huelessness.
Earth, though, Earth ruled the northern sky. Waned slightly past half phase, the curves of it limned a blue and white marbling, an ocherous blur that was land, a luminance that lingered for a moment after you looked away from it as a dream may linger when first you awaken. Earth was glory enough.
Below it dwelt quietude. Without air, sound dies aborning. Sometimes Dagny’s receiver conveyed a voice, but mainly work proceeded mute, skill set against time. Otherwise she heard air rustle in her recycler and nostrils, blood in her ears.
“Take over,” she told Joe Packer, her second, and went toward the field van. Cabin and laboratory, equipped to travel hundreds of kilometers without recharge and sustain life for weeks, on its eight enormous tires it overtopped the main dome near which it had parked. As she approached, a ladder swung down to the ground, an outer valve opened. The new buildings would allow direct access, airlock to airlock, but as yet visitors must walk across to the entrance.
Dagny quickened her pace. Long since adapted, she moved in her spacesuit almost as easily as in a coverall, low-g lope, exultantly light. A similarly garbed figure appeared above the ladder. “Hi, there!” she called. “Welcome!”
The ground shook beneath her.
The violence went up through her boots and body like a thundercrash.
Almost, she fell. The stumble threw her glance at the sun. Her faceplate darkened to save her eyes and she saw its disc pale in a sudden blindness. She recovered her footing, sight flowed back, she stared northward.
A cloud rose high above yonder horizon. It climbed and climbed, roiled and sooty, thinning at the edges to gray, a smear across Earth. Sparks tumbled from it in long parabolas, as if stars fell.
Meteorite strike! Those were ejecta, flung rocks, shrapnel. Soldiers under fire cast themselves prone—No. When it came from the sky you were a smaller target on your feet. And you must not run.
The rearview display strip seized her mind. She spun on her heel for a direct look. Close to the pylon nearest her, the loaded gondola was swinging in ever wilder arcs. The column shuddered. Several meters beyond, a stone hit, spurted its own little dust cloud and gouged its own little crater. Another struck a boulder, glanced off, and skittered murderously low above the regolith.
The dust began to fall. Renewed blindness fell with it. Dagny felt impact after impact somewhere hard by. She stood fast and fumbled in a pouch after her scrub cloth. Perhaps it was to stave off panic that there passed through her: Power joints in spacesuits were fine, took the curse off interior air pressure, but when would the engineers develop tactile amplifiers for the gloves and let you properly feel what you were doing?
The Moon accelerates objects downward slowly, but has no atmosphere to hinder them. Within a minute, sixty mortal seconds, the local bombardment had ended and she could wipe her faceplate clean.
Relief flooded her in a wave, a sob, a looseness in the knees as if she would fall on them. Nothing worse than dust seemed to have reached the camp or the mine. Well, of course the odds had always favored that, else this operation would have been impossible, though nobody expected anything so big to strike in any given vicinity, not for hundreds or thousands of years—Her gaze traveled onward and stopped. She strangled a scream.
The pylon stood warped. The cable held but was drawn line-taut and immobile, the engine at this end surely badly damaged. The gondola lay on its side, three meters distant. Its mad gyrations had unhooked it and strewn its load afar. Metallic chunks were piled and tumbled throughout Dagny’s worksite.
Somebody cried out, a hoarse and jagged noise of agony. It broke a hammerstruck silence; suddenly the radio band clamored. Dagny switched her transmitter to full power. “Hold on!” she made her voice go overriding. “Shut up! We’ve got rescue to do!”
Meanwhile she bounded back to the scene. A dim part of her wondered how she dared take charge, she who’d never met anything like this. Classes and simulations at the academy felt unreal. But the leadership, the duty was hers.
Then she was too busy for doubts or fears.
“Names, by the numbers.” They snapped in her earphones, one after the next. Janice Bye sprawled dead, her helmet split open, her face ghastly under the long sunlight. Two people appeared to be in shock, slumped useless and shivering. And Joe, Joe Packer was on his back, right leg buried under a heap of heavy chunks.
Dagny knelt beside him. After the first animal shriek he had gone silent, apart from the gasping breath. His skin looked more gray than brown, studded with sweat that sparkled like dew. Against it his eyeballs stood appallingly white around dark irises and dilated pupils. Did Earth tinge them faintly blue? Dagny caught both his hands in hers. “How are you, Joe?” The question came forth steady.
He fought for the same control. “Like I’m choking,” he mumbled. “Doesn’t hurt … much … any more … but dizzy and—uh-h—”
The spacesuit leg must have been ruptured, she decided, probably at the knee joint. Air would have gushed out, more than the reserve tank could replenish, before enough gunk oozed free and hardened to plug a hole that size. Oxygen-starved on top of trauma, his heart might fail at any instant.
“Greenbaum, fetch an air bottle and coupling,” Dagny snapped. You had to tell everybody exactly what to do, or they’d fall over each other’s feet. “Royce, Olson, see to Etcheverry and Graf,” the shock cases. “The rest of you, crowbars, spades, get this junk off of Joe. Carefully!”
“Bloody ’ell, ’ere, stand aside,” she heard. It was a rumbling bass, startlingly like Anson Guthrie’s but the English accented. In her rearview she saw the speaker loom above her. Behind him another man carried something. They must be the geologists. Nobody from the main camp or the mine could have made it here this fast.
You couldn’t let just anybody prong in. “What do you want?” Dagny demanded.
“Sacre putain de l’archeveêque anglais! Sat man, ’e weell die wissout air. Get from se way.’ The newcomer stooped, grabbed her by the upper arms, lifted her and set her aside.
Dagny swallowed anger. Edmond Beynac, had to be him, should know better than she how to handle this kind of emergency. And, yes, his companion bore a tank with an attachment. From their elevation at the ladder head they’d probably seen what was happening, figured what was likely needed, and immediately gotten it. Christ, that was quick thinking.
The two men hunkered down on either side of Packer and went deftly to work. “Greenbaum, never mind, come on back and help,” Dagny remembered to call.
Presently Beynac straightened. The crew were gathered with their tools. Two men started to shift rock. “Not like sat, imbeciles!” Beynac roared. “God damn! You could roll pieces down onto ’im. Comme ci.” He plucked a bar from the nearest hand and demonstrated.
Yes, Dagny thought, things did behave differently on Luna, lower gravity meant less frictional force and—She heard a mutter of resentment. “Obey him,” she commanded. “He’s straw boss now.”
Evidently the men at the pit had received orders to stay and cope with the damage there, but the first ones from camp were arriving. Dagny went to get them organized. When she returned to Packer, he had been freed and lay in Beynac’s arms.
“I take ’im to my van and geeve first aid,” the geologist told her. “Per’aps sen se médecins—se physicians, sey can save ’is leg.” Not waiting for an okay, he bounded off across the crater floor.
They were four who gathered in the main office. It belonged to Miguel Fuentes, chief of operations at Rudolph. Dagny Ebbesen was there as a co-ordinate supervisor and Edmond Beynac had been invited for his expertise. The fourth was Anson Guthrie. He spoke from Earth via his image in a teleset on the table.
Officially he had no business here. The mine, like Tychopolis and almost everything else on Luna, was the undertaking of an international consortium under UN supervision. But Fireball was the principal contractor to all the consortiums, and not only for space transport services. Besides, this was an informal preliminary assessment.
“The government inquiry will drone on for months and set the taxpayers back more than the repairs will cost,” he predicted. “What we can hope for today is to reach the same conclusions it will, and lay our plans accordingly.”
“What plans must we make?” Fuentes asked. “A meteorite that large was a freak to start with, and then it purely chanced to slam down close to where people were. We can’t let an accident like that stop us, can we? Or are the politicians really so stupid?”
He made the three-finger Wait signal in the direction of the hologram, and all held their peace while radio waves passed through space and back again. Dagny grew aware of how small the room was, how crowded with apparatus, relieved merely by a couple of garish pictures stuck on the walls—Florida scenes, she guessed, their lushness pathetic in this place. The air recycler had developed a collywobble of some kind, which gave the flow whirring from the ventilator a faint metallic reek. She longed to be outside.
“Politicians aren’t necessarily any stupider than the rest of us, including corporate chairmen of the board,” Guthrie said. “I’ve studied the immediate reports. That rock wasn’t so big nor so near that it should’ve done the harm it did. Obviously it found a design flaw; but we thought we’d engineered for the worst-case scenario, didn’t we? What got overlooked? If we can figure that out pronto, and how to correct it, we’ll know what to tell the commission. Then it can fart around as much longer as it wants; we’ll meanwhile be doing what’s needed.” He rubbed his chin. “You’re the folks on the spot. Got any ideas?”
Dagny looked across the table at Beynac. She noticed that she enjoyed doing so. He was about thirty, she guessed, very little taller than her but powerfully built, with long head, square face, straight nose, prominent cheekbones, stiff brown hair, green eyes. Not what you’d call handsome, no. But how he radiated masculinity.
With care, because their previous encounter suggested he might have a short fuse, she said, “You’re the geologist, Dr. Beynac. Could the local rock have unusual properties?”
“It does not,” he declared. “I investigated the area myself, two years ago. When the deposit was found, a student of mine, a good young man, he studied more precisely. If we had seen possible trouble, we would have warned.” Free of extreme stress, he spoke English with an accent mostly in the vowels and the lilt.
“Of course,” she said. “What I mean is seismic-type waves. How do they transmit hereabouts?”
“Hein? Moonquakes are negligible, of scientific interest only.”
“I know. But I’m wondering how the shock wave from the impact might have arrived.”
“Not enough to knock anything down,” he snorted. “You saw.”
Dagny bridled. “Yes. I also saw what did get wrecked. Forces had to cause that. Where’d they come from? The impact. How’d they get here? Through the ground.” Impulsively: “That should be obvious enough for anyone.”
He didn’t explode. Instead, his gaze grew intent and he murmured, “You have a hypothesis?”
“Fancy word for a wild-ass guess,” Dagny admitted. “Still, I have been thinking. How’s this sound?” She addressed Fuentes as well, and especially Guthrie. “A resonant frequency set that particular pylon vibrating. This in turn sent a wave along the cable and made the gondola pendulum. If there was a rock layer down below that reflected the shock, the impulse would be repeated and the oscillations go crazy.”
Beynac sat bolt upright. “Pardieu!” he exclaimed. “I sink per’aps—” He leaned back, eyes half closing. “Perhaps. Let me too now think if this is possible. A transverse component—” He withdrew into his brain.
“The probability is ridiculous,” Fuentes objected. “The system would have to have had the exact suitable loading and configuration at that exact moment.”
Dagny nodded. “Sure. What I’m proposing is a worse case than anybody imagined. It’s just that I haven’t got any better idea. Do you? They’ll have to collect data, and run lab tests and computer models, to check it out. But maybe today Dr. Beynac can tell us whether it’s worth checking.”
Guthrie’s words cut across her last few. “By damn, my guess is that you’ve got hold of its tail! Good for you, lass!” His grin and wink added: How I wish I could brag you up, granddaughter mine. “And if you’re right, why, we needn’t worry. I could draw a hundred royal flushes in a row before those conditions repeated.”
Beynac stirred, reopened his eyes, and growled, “Not true, mister.” Himself unwilling to wait out transmission lag, he went straight on: “This especial accident, yes, I must do an analysis, but I believe today that Miss Engineer Ebbesen is basically correct. However, I am interested in meteoritics. That object was a member of the Beta Taurid Swarm. Orbital precession is making it once more, after centuries, a menace. Other strikes may well kill people in other ways. Take this that has happened for a warning. In every month of June, close down tops de operations from sunrise to sunset.”
Fuentes stiffened. “Wait a minute! Do you realize what kind of burden that would be?”
Beynac shrugged. “Pft! I am a scientist. I shall make my honest recommendation. The costs they are your department.”
Deferential, not obsequious, Fuentes signalled a pause for Guthrie.
The lord of Fireball smiled his oddly charming smile. “Gracias,” he said. “I’d been fretting about that on my own for a spell. Do me a favor and don’t stampede into a press conference, okay? We’ll assemble our facts and figures and calculations, and then go public. It’s that important. Major strikes are a threat to Mama Earth herself. The dinosaurs learned that the hard way; and if the Tunguska object had hit a few hours later than it did, it would’ve taken out most of Belgium.”
Beynac regarded the image with a freshened respect. Guthrie continued: “It could be that the human race makes a profit off the Rudolph smashup. We may get sentiment for a space patrol to track meteoroids, and deflect or destroy the dangerous ones.” He laughed. “Fireball will bid on the contract.”
Beynac surprised Dagny when he said, soft-voiced, “Another reason for humans on the Moon.”
Reasons already aplenty, swirled through her.
Energy. Criswell solar collectors going up around the globe, to beam to Earth electric power clean and cheap and well-nigh limitless.
Science. Astronomy on Farside, a stable platform, a planet-sized shield against radio interference and light pollution. Chemistry, biology, physiology, agronomy under conditions unique and enlightening. Who could foretell how much more?
Industry. Today, small specialties. Ultimately, gigantic factories of every kind, with no surrounding vulnerable biosphere, their products easily launched for the mother world in aerodynamic containers that descended gently to destination. Or sent into deeper space—
Astronautics, building the fleet and homeporting the ships, at least until humankind had struck roots elsewhere. And so the future. Yes, Luna was poor in heavy elements, airless, waterless; but wealth of that kind waited unbounded in the asteroids and comets, along with the day when no more need be torn out of living Earth.
Adventure, discovery, deeds to do and songs to sing.
“We’ll swing it!” she cried.
Heat rushed into her face. This was a business meeting. Why hadn’t she felt such a childish outburst rising, and stopped it? Fuentes, that very proper man, looked the least bit embarrassed. Guthrie’s image hadn’t yet had time to show reaction. She foresaw him chuckling indulgently and moving the conversation onward. Beynac—Beynac’s gaze had come to rest on her. And now he himself smiled. “Good for you, mademoiselle,” he said.