Chapter IV: Part 4

It was necessary to wait. McCauley was a tiny, glistening object in emptiness, a desperately long way from the equally glistening Platform. He turned slowly, foolishly, as he floated. Away off against a background of stars--but the sun moved momentarily nearer its edge--there was a shape that now was not quite half of a circle of brilliant light, and more than half of a circle of darkness like that of the Abyss. It did not look like Earth. It had not the least appearance of a world in which human beings lived and moved and breathed and loved and died. It was a monstrosity whose details changed their shape as half minutes and quarter minutes went by. And continually and implacably the darkness spread over more of it.

Randy's voice came desperately.

"Hurry, Sammy! Give it to me and get back into the cabin. We won't have time to wait our turns at the air lock.... Right! Now get back in the cabin!"

"How am I doing now, Randy?" McCauley asked calmly. "How's my line of motion?"

"I don't like it!" said Randy fiercely. "It's off to one side! Sammy just brought me all the extra space ropes. He tied them together inside. I'm checking them now. There are four of them."

McCauley said:

"I hate to seem overanxious, but how much will I miss the Platform by?"

"Too much," answered Randy bitterly. "What have you got left that you can throw away to steer by?"

"Eighty pounds of mass," said McCauley with composure. "But I have to wait until the last second."

Silence again. Darkness covered three-quarters of the Earth's strange disk. It was not the darkness of a night on Earth, with trees and plants and men as darker shapes against starlit or moonlit ground or sea. It was the blackness of nothingness, of annihilation.

"You can't stay out much longer, Randy," McCauley said. "I'll have to try it."

"There's the moon," said Randy hoarsely. "I can see by that, ... maybe."

Again silence. The shape which was Earth became the thinnest of crescents. The sun blazed fiercely almost at its outer rim.

The sun turned orange, crimson, ruby-red. It ceased to be a circle. One edge blacked out. It was half blacked out. It was gone.

McCauley wriggled in the harness outside his space suit. He spoke deliberately.

"I'm going to take all the deep breaths I can, Randy. I'll even let a little extra pressure into my suit. Then I'll take off my last air tank and try to steady myself with its jet of air. Then I'll put it under my feet and jump against it, toward you. Now listen! If anything goes wrong, it won't be your fault! Understand? Don't take any crazy risks. If I go on past the Platform, get into the cabin fast before the cold comes! That is my order! I expect you to obey it!"

"Cripes, Ed!" Randy's voice broke.

McCauley bled air into his suit. He breathed deeply and fast, saturating his lungs with oxygen. He removed the tank and then spent precious seconds stripping away the harness that had held tools and extra equipment to his suit.

He jetted away the air. In the utter silence that was the universe, the whistle of escaping compression was conducted to his gloved hands and so to the remaining air inside his space suit. He used the jet with infinite care. The tank tugged briefly and his random body rotation stopped. He saw the Platform, almost incredibly dim in the moonlight.

He jumped against the mass of the air tank and harness together. In seconds he could see that he was moving closer toward the silvery, spidery framework in the moonshine. He kept himself still. Nothing he could do now would add anything to his chance for life, and exertion would lessen the time left before he suffocated for lack of air.

He relaxed by an iron effort of will. He had gambled. He could win or he could lose. But he must keep the calmness of a man who sees the stakes down and waits for the outcome.

The Platform was no more than a hundred and fifty yards away. No more than a hundred.

He would miss it. He would pass sixty feet or more beyond its outermost edge. Randy would undoubtedly try to throw him the space ropes he'd tied together. The odds were enormously against his being able to catch them.

He said nothing. If Randy thought that he'd run out of air before he reached the point nearest the Platform, he would reproach himself less; he'd believe he couldn't have done anything, anyhow.

Fifty yards. Twenty. He saw glittering metal only sixty feet away. But there was no conceivable action he could take to move himself that sixty feet.

Then something dark came toward him. It grew larger. It was Randy, plunging out from the girders with a hundred and twenty feet of space rope trailing behind him, made fast to a firmly bolted beam.

He collided with McCauley. McCauley felt him gripping fiercely. He felt Randy clinging to him savagely against the jerk of the rope which must tighten presently.

The jerk came, violent and abrupt.

Randy gasped in relief. He took away one space-suited arm to haul at the space rope that had checked McCauley's slow drift past to nothingness.

"Very nice work, Randy," said McCauley composedly, "but you took an awful chance."

They bumped against the substance of the Platform--one square metal tube some three inches by five.

"Can you hold on?" demanded Randy, panting. "I'll give you one of my air tanks!"

They were out at the farthermost limit of the framework of the Space Platform. McCauley's faceplate began to frost now, with the loss of heat to the darkness.

"Make it fast," said McCauley. "We want to get in out of the cold."

Fumblings. Clatterings. McCauley heard Randy's teeth chatter, which might be cold or might be reaction from the terror he'd felt on McCauley's account.

"Right!" McCauley said suddenly. He felt air blowing past his face. Randy's extra tank was connected. "I'm all set now. Let's get headed for the cabin."

"Hold it!" said Randy angrily. "You tie a space rope to yourself and loop it around a beam! Do you want to take a chance on slipping away? Maybe there is only one chance in ten thousand of getting lost, but there's no need to take that!"

"Okay, boss," said McCauley. "I shoulda known better."

Hardly more than seconds later he was sliding toward the cabin, Randy following close behind. He came to a joint where three of the beams came together. He unlooped his space rope from the near side, looped it around beyond the joint, crawled over, and slid again.

The cold came fast, but they would make it. Already his mind was at work on a matter that bothered him. He was in charge of the building of the Platform. That meant that he had to think about the feelings of the men under him. Randy was all right. He'd done a good job, and he knew it. But Sammy Breen was different. He was a very young officer, and he felt right now that he'd blundered and imperiled a senior officer--practically killed him, in fact--and he'd be in a state of almost hysterical self-abasement. Not a good state for young officers to be in.

When McCauley squirmed out of the air lock, young Sammy Breen looked at him. He was deathly white and utterly ashamed.

"Hm," said McCauley ruefully. "Sammy, I think I'll have to report myself for incompetence. When a second man's standing by while somebody does a tricky job, he ought to be sure that his space rope can't slip. I didn't. I doggone near got you killed, Sammy. I'm sorry."

Sammy Breen made an inarticulate sound. Then Randy came out of the air lock.

"For the love of Heaven, Sammy!" he said, scolding. "It's your trick to fix food! We've got less than an hour for eating before the sun comes back. And you haven't even got the stuff heating up! What kind of a cook are you, anyhow?"

Sammy swallowed. He swallowed again. Neither McCauley nor Randy mentioned the late so nearly complete disaster. Randy was kidding him. McCauley made a joke of it, too.

Sammy put the food on to thaw and heat. He struggled to become worthy of the companionship of men like McCauley and Randy Hall. Presently he swallowed and said accusingly:

"You characters were late for dinner. Don't blame me if it's cold!"

He looked anxiously at them. He hoped....

McCauley grinned at him. Randy laughed. They laughed together. Lieutenant Sammy Breen felt wonderfully good. And he would be very careful hereafter.

_4_

(There was high adventure on the moon when it was first colonized.
Men faced various ways of dying--all of them unpleasant--and
found that simply staying alive was a great satisfaction and a
full-time occupation. Because of this spirit--which is that of true
adventure--there came to be bases where hydroponic gardens
freshened the air and men took continued living as a matter of
course. This, obviously, was not adventure. So problems arose. Men
began to be moved by other motives than the zest they'd known at
first. But there were still a great many ways of getting killed on
the moon. So there came a time when Colonel Ed McCauley had to
insist that certain men under his command put first things first,
as adventurers do, and not act for the gratification of their
problem personalities.)

Traveling at moon gait, which is the standard travel pace on Earth's big moon, McCauley had ten of the last twenty miles behind him when he saw the sledge trail in the dust. He frowned at it and looked over to the west. He saw Earth, blue-green and glamorous, hanging as usual in the lunar sky just above the edges of the ring mountains. But Earth was always just there. He squinted at the sun through the faceplate of his helmet. It was a trifle over ten degrees above the horizon and it moved across the black, star-speckled sky at half a degree per hour. In twenty hours, then, lunar night would fall. And here was the sledge track that said that the relay unit for Repeater Two, carrying word to and from Farside and the rest of the human race, had passed this way en route to be set up; but the lack of returning footprints said that the men with it had not come back.

Repeater One was already in place and ready to operate. Repeaters Three and Four had also been put in position by men from faraway Farside Base. Repeater Two was necessary to bring Farside Base into communication with the rest of the cosmos. Two weeks of lunar night with no word from outside the base and not even Earth to look at in the sky--this would not be good for the men on Farside.

McCauley stopped. He'd been moving in that swooping, semi-flying fashion which the lesser lunar gravity allows. He stared at the trail. No, the men had not come back. Yet he'd ordered a party of two to set up the relay unit. It was to be put into place on the very tip of a mountain that was now away below the horizon. There it would be in line of sight of Repeater One, which was relatively near, and Repeater Three, which was farther away but which in turn could relay signals to Four, which was farthest away of all. From Four, the relayed messages would go on to Farside Base. When all this was accomplished, the Grimaldi Base ten miles distant could communicate with Farside through Repeaters One, Two, Three, and Four, and with Earth by line-of-sight transmission; so Farside could communicate with Earth and through Earth Relay with all the other moon bases--in short, with all humanity. But Two should have been up and in operation by now.

McCauley shook his head impatiently inside his space helmet. He'd been away from his command for thirty hours, during which he'd traveled twenty miles on foot, at moon gait, to Gerritson Bay. It wasn't a bay, of course, but an intrusion of now-frozen lava into the mountainous country here at the edge of the moon's earthside surface. He'd been met by a moon jeep and had traveled seven hundred miles over a _mare_--one of the dark areas that were once thought to be seas but actually were dry and level--to the main lunar base near Hipparchus. He'd had a one-hour conference with the base commander there, trying to work out something to prevent the first murder on Earth's big satellite. The conference was unsatisfactory. He'd come back to Gerritson Bay and now he'd covered ten of the twenty remaining miles to Grimaldi Base. When he reached Grimaldi the excessively irritating problem of a murder in the making was still unsolved, and now in addition there was the failure to complete placing the relay at the site of Repeater Two. The sledge ought to be in its place on the peak which was invisible from here, and the men who'd set it up should have returned. They hadn't.

He flipped on his space radio and said curtly:

"McCauley calling relay placing party. Come in!"

There was no answer. He called again and again. Then he called Grimaldi Base. Again no answer. He was out of radio contact with all humanity on the moon--even his own base ten miles away--though by switching frequencies he could raise Earth Relay a quarter million miles farther away. The men with the moon sledge might only be behind a mountain wall or anywhere in any direction below the horizon, but radio communication on the moon is limited to line-of-sight because there is no air and hence no layer of ions to bounce radio signals down behind obstacles or around the moon's curvature.

McCauley started off again, fuming. Moon gait is a highly specialized form of travel. In one-sixth gravity a man can cover ten miles an hour over rough ground if he knows the trick of the gait and the trail is marked. He travels in slow-motion giant steps, with something of the effect of an extremely deliberate ballet. He begins with a leap up and forward, and he rises slowly and deliberately while soaring ahead. At mid-leap he is six feet higher than at take-off. Then he descends slowly and with dignity, touches ground and strides at the same time, and bounds up and ahead once more. There are long seconds between steps and long yards between strides. When a person is used to it, moon gait is almost restful. Some people even find it familiar. They've dreamed of such effortless half flight in their sleep.

Now, though he was disturbed, McCauley made two miles with no other known cause for worry than the lateness of the two men who'd placed the relay and the prospective killing he'd had on his mind before. He passed between precipices and over dust-strewn stone and through winding defiles. The two men should be back....

Then he spotted something. Abruptly he raised his arms and extended both feet before him. He came down to the ground and stopped short. Then--not soaring this time--he walked back to an object on the trail.

It was an air tank, exactly like the two tanks at the back of his own space suit. It had been dropped from the moon sledge. It would hold air for one man for three hours.

Men driving a moon sledge would wear one tank on their space suits for safety, and they'd shed one for lightness. They'd breathe from the much larger tanks on the sledge itself while they traveled. Spare and extra tanks like this would ride on the sledge. It was not easy to imagine that it had dropped. One man would go on ahead of the sledge and one would follow. It was hard to believe that the second man would not notice the loss of an air tank. Air tanks were life. True, a sledge party always had more air than was needed for any expected journey--a good margin for emergency--but this tank could cut the margin for this journey seriously.

McCauley growled to himself. He knew the calculations for placing the relay. The mountain beyond the horizon was an eight-hour journey by sledge--the horizon on the moon is only two miles away instead of eight. Breathing from the sledge, the men would arrive with one tank on their suits untapped, another, also untapped, to be mounted; and an extra tank for good measure. When they'd put the sledge in place and aired its beams and set up the nondirectional auxiliary antennae, they'd start back with two full tanks each and another one for reserve. They'd make better time coming back--six hours, no more. And each man had a full six hours on his back, and there were three additional hours in the extra they'd take turns carrying. It was ample margin. But now the spare tank was left behind. There was no margin.

McCauley tried to lift the tank. But it had lain in the shadow of a boulder, out of the sun's fierce glare--on moon dust, radiating heat away toward the stars. It had cooled off to the temperature of a shadow, two hundred and forty degrees below zero. It was frozen. The air was liquid air. The tank was more brittle than glass was.

It slipped, striking the boulder. It cracked and broke. A glistening liquid poured out and evaporated instantly. Where it fell into shadow, part of it froze and then vanished more quickly than any earthly frost.

McCauley growled again. Air was precious on the moon. But there was no use crying when it was spilt. He turned around and began his journey again. He had good reason to worry now.

He was a singular, slow-motion soaring figure in a polished silvery space suit. Where there was a rise in the ground, he came smoothly up from behind it, the glaring sun glowing on his space armor. Extending one leg in what might pass as a version of a choreographer's arabesque, he came down on the extended foot and stepped on it, floating gently upward and forward swiftly in a continued series of seeming flights. He went through winding passes where the sledge trail was plain in the dust below him, he soared across preposterous areas strewn with boulders the size of apartment houses. Once, going through a narrow gap in the wall of an unnamed crater--a very small one, barely two miles across--he passed a spot which showed that the two men had changed places. The one in advance had gone to the rear, and the one who'd been behind now led the way.

It was just beyond the farther wall of the crater that he saw the second air tank, dropped in the trail.

It could not possibly be an accident. A moon sledge has racks for carrying air tanks. It was conceivable that a tank could have slid out and been lost unnoticed. But it was starkly inconceivable that it could have happened twice.

McCauley raged suddenly. He knew what had happened, he knew why it had happened, he knew who was involved. He flipped the base-frequency switch.

"Holmes! Kent! Come in!" he snapped. "Grimaldi Base, come in! Holmes! Kent! Come in! Grimaldi Base, come in!"

He did not try to pick up the second air tank. Instead, he increased his speed over the fantastic landscape of riven stone and upthrust rock. He went faster, floating twenty and thirty yards at a bound and calling angrily into the eternal silence about him. This higher speed was not particularly safe. A stumble on any of his landings could have meant a nasty crash and possibly a smashed helmet plate. But he raged on. He'd just traveled nearly a quarter of the way around the moon to try to effect the quiet and nonspectacular prevention of a murder. Now he found his trouble wasted, his precautions nullified, and the operation of his base imperiled. Moreover, the welfare of the men on Farside was threatened drastically. They might have to go through an entire lunar night, two weeks long, without any contact with other human beings.

Long, long minutes of speeded-up moon gait went by, the suit radio sending out snapped calls for Holmes and Kent to answer or, failing them, for Grimaldi Base to reply.

He was less than five miles from the base when he got an answer to his call. He'd climbed gradually to a high plateau which now dropped downward again so that what seemed an infinity of explosion-scarred desolation lay before him. He was in line of sight of Grimaldi.

"Grimaldi answers," said a voice in his helmet phones. "Grimaldi answers. Over."

Words fairly burst from McCauley's lips, though the rhythm of his twenty- and thirty-yard leaps remained unbroken.

"How in the blistering Gehenna," he rasped, "did Holmes and Kent get out of the base together? What fool sent them off?"

The voice in his headphones jerked a little.

"Why--it was your order, sir! A relay from Earth came in. Holmes was on monitor duty. He wrote down the order, sir. You ordered him and Kent to take the sledge with the relay unit for Repeater Two and set it up where it belonged, sir."

McCauley almost strangled in his wrath.

"Have they got there yet?"

"No, sir. They should use it to report that it's operating, sir. They haven't."

"When they do," rasped McCauley, "tell them that I specifically order them to stay in communication with you until I get there! Absolutely no excuse will be accepted for failure! I'm less than five miles off. I should get there in a quarter of an hour--twenty minutes at the outside. They think they're smart, but they've slipped up this time! Tell them that!"

"Y-yes, sir."

The headphone clicked.

McCauley uttered some profane words in the close confines of his space helmet. Back at Lunar Base he'd laid the matter of Holmes and Kent before the commanding officer, who was the ranking officer on the moon. Kent was an able young officer, transferred to Space Service from the Air Force. Holmes was also an able young officer, who'd been a submariner before he transferred to the equally confining Space Service. They'd known each other back on Earth and somehow--nobody knew how--a bitter and inveterate enmity had sprung up between them. Perhaps a girl was at the root of it, but if so, neither of them won her. Perhaps, by this time, the initial cause of their hatred had nearly or completely ceased to matter. Enmity does not often last unless things occur that can feed and strengthen it. It is normal for two young men to quarrel furiously and be ready to kill each other. But if they are separated long enough, their hatred usually dies away to acute dislike. In time the dislike fades to mere aversion or they may forget their anger altogether. But this happens when there is nothing to sustain and increase the quarrel.

On the other hand, if they come across each other often enough, and more especially if they try to harm each other, what could have begun as mere indignation and contempt can build up into a blind and murderous fury at the mere sight or thought of each other. How it started does not matter then. McCauley suspected that this was the case with Kent and Holmes.

Swinging up and soaring ahead, touching ground with precision at each landing and swinging up again to strange, wingless flight, McCauley muttered to himself.

They'd been assigned to his command. Not knowing--then--he'd introduced them. They spoke with great politeness but did not shake hands. Settling down to the routine and tedium of a six-man base, it became evident that there was something wrong. There was no overt trouble, but there was strain. It showed in a thousand trivial ways. When a party went out on an errand which required traveling for days in roasting sunlight, cased in space suits that were almost as confining as strait jackets, under conditions which rasped the nerves and tried the tempers of everybody, Holmes and Kent very nearly caused disasters.

Hatred blazed between them. When their records arrived at Grimaldi Base, McCauley realized that the beginning of this hatred could not matter any more. They'd hated each other so long and so bitterly that if they were asked the reason they'd have panted about something done yesterday or last month or last year--and perhaps never have gotten back to the beginning. They might even have forgotten it. But there was a strangeness in their enmity. They did not simply want disaster and misfortune to befall each other. They hungered to be disaster, they thirsted to be misfortune, each for the other. And somehow there was a demoniac pride involved. In the days of the duello there would have been a simple and normal solution. They would have met in stately fashion with swords or pistols, and they would have fought to the death under the eyes of seconds and witnesses, and somehow it would have been appropriate.

But such things were impossible now. The code of the duello was outmoded. So when McCauley read the records and reports on the two men--because a commanding officer needs to know the men who serve under him, and the more dangerous the service the better he needs to know them--he knew that the first case of murder on the moon was in the making. Since they couldn't fight formally, as in olden times, what must happen would amount to murder.

There'd been an automobile accident at Earth Base of the Space Service. It looked very much as if it were deliberate, as if Holmes and Kent had contrived it by agreement between themselves so that one was bound to be killed. Both were hurt. Neither died. Then there was the time when Kent was found with a rifle in his hand and a bullet wound in his shoulder, ignoring the wound and passionately pursuing a hunt for--so he said--a deer. He explained that the wound was an accident. The records showed that Holmes was hunting in the same area at the same time. They showed that he had a slight flesh wound--made by a bullet. Both Holmes and Kent gave totally unconvincing accounts of their wounds, and each denied that he had been wounded by the other. Their stories did not satisfy their commanding officer. He transferred them to other units, and in his confidential comment on their records--comment they would never see--he said that he believed they'd arranged a duel in deer-hunting country with big-game rifles, contrived so the one who was killed would seem to be the victim of a hunting accident. It could not be proved, but he believed it.

There were other memos. Neither Holmes nor Kent had a mark against him except in connection with the other man. Yet no commanding officer--certainly none on the moon--would want either man in his base after having read the records. The moon is too small for men who carry their enmities with them into space.

And McCauley had both men--able men, capable men, desirable men except for their mutual hatred. He'd traveled a quarter way around the moon to have one or both of them transferred out of Grimaldi Base before they could arrange another covered-up duel which would leave one dead and the other a murderer. But his effort had been futile. They couldn't be transferred out immediately. They couldn't be gotten out, for it was too close to sunset. They couldn't be gotten away at all during the lunar night. And now they were out on Farside where there could be no witnesses and the grave of a murdered man could never be found.

McCauley arrived, raging mad, at the small, grubby, dust-insulated dome that was Grimaldi Base. No report had come in from Kent or Holmes. McCauley was bitterly sure that they'd gone out to the blasted moonscape firmly resolved that only one of them would return. Somehow, in the illimitable emptiness of which the fiftieth part had never been seen by men, somehow, under the black, star-studded sky with the setting sun casting mile-long shadows of utter blackness and absolute cold, McCauley knew that they would have some sort of fight in which one must die.

But they were Space Service officers. Before they had that fight they would set up the relay that would give Farside Base a connection to Grimaldi, and so to Earth, and so by Earth Relay to every other human being on the moon. They would do their duty as Space Service officers before they did murder.

Stooping, McCauley came out of the air lock into the base.

"I want all the facts about Kent and Holmes!" he snapped.

"No word from them yet, sir," said the communications officer. "But we've picked up clickings, sir, which might be the unit being put into operation. But Holmes and Kent have two beams to align, sir, besides the all-direction antennae. They may be checking with Farside, sir, to make sure the relay beam is pointed right to that base."

McCauley stripped off his space suit.

"They're in more trouble than they know," he growled. "They lost two air tanks off their sledge."

The communications officer's mouth dropped open.

"But Colonel, sir.... They couldn't! They need those tanks to get back with!"

"Exactly," McCauley snapped. "Route the relay's local-antenna and suit-radio frequencies in to me. I'll take the messages."

He stamped through the cramped and shabby little base to the minute compartment set aside for the Base Commander's office. It was approximately four feet by six. He settled down in the one chair, glowering. Automatically he glanced at the dials that reported conditions at the base. Outside temperature facing sun, 198°. Shadow temperature, minus 205°. Inside barometric pressure, 30.02 inches. Inside temperature, 72°. Carbon monoxide, 28 parts per million. Carbon dioxide, 1.8%. Oxygen, 21.2%.

The physical state of the base was good. But there were two men out on Farside who lacked two tanks of air they needed to get back. Although it was their intention that only one of them should return, they'd outsmarted themselves. Neither could get back, now.

A clicking from a loud-speaker. A wavery voice:

"Calling Grimaldi Base! Calling Grimaldi! Call...."

"Calling Repeater Two," said McCauley. He was very grim. "Calling Repeater Two!"

"... rimaldi Ba...." Silence, then suddenly: "Hello!"

It was Holmes' voice. McCauley recognized it.

"Holmes!" he said curtly. "You two fools have committed suicide! You dropped one air tank off the sledge. Remember? That meant that only one of you could get back, and you and Kent could decide later which one it would be. But Kent kicked an air tank off, too! Now who's coming back?"

There was a startled silence.

"You heard me!" said McCauley savagely. "There were three tanks on that sledge. They'd bring you both back with air to spare. But you threw one away, and Kent threw one away, and so there's one left. It's six hours' travel back to here, and you've air for two men for four and a half!"

Again silence. McCauley could envision the scene at Repeater Two, to which his voice was transmitted by precisely the system of beam relay used on Earth to carry telephone messages across continents without wires. There would be two bulky, space-suited figures atop an irregularly level space from which the ground fell away on every side, a drop of thousands of feet. They would be in glaring sunlight from the lowest of low-hanging suns. Where it struck the metal of their space armor they would glitter blindingly. Where there was shadow, there would be the blackness of the pit. Overhead there stretched a black sky with a thousand million stars, and around and below them there would be long, angular, parallel ribbons of shadow with sharply defined sides and with beginnings but no ends. And there would be the moon sledge with the relay built solidly upon it, its runners chocked with stony debris so it would not slide or topple. There would be the two bowl-shaped beam reflectors, one pointing back to Repeater One--itself a moon sledge wedged in place upon a mountain--and the other to remoteness and to wildness and to night.

"You could come back as you went," said McCauley. "You could bring back the sledge, breathing air from its tanks on the trip. But if you did that, Farside would be out of communication during the coming night. That would have to be explained."

Again it seemed that he could see the faraway, motionless figures of the two men listening over their suit radios to the voice twice relayed before it could reach their ears.

"I would have to explain," said McCauley grimly, "that Lieutenants Kent and Holmes intended to murder each other, and each one threw away an air tank he expected the other man to use--but he expected to have plenty of air for himself! I would have to explain that Farside was isolated because two would-be murderers had outsmarted themselves and didn't have the guts to face the consequences!"

Kent's voice came from a speaker. He spoke from that distant mountain peak toward which darkness crept steadily.

"Look here, sir." His tone was defiant.

"If that sledge is brought back," said McCauley angrily, "I'll court-martial whoever comes back with it, even the two of you! If one of you comes back, there'll be a court of inquiry. Maybe you've worked out a pretty story of an accident for the survivor to tell. But you can't use it now, because I found the air tanks you threw away! If one of you comes back, the inquiry will end in a court-martial and a murder verdict!"

Holmes' voice, stiff and steady, was as defiant as Kent's had been.

"I take it, sir, that you're advising neither of us to come back. Very well, sir! We've a little matter to settle between us. We can settle that and the one who's left...."

"If neither of you comes back," rasped McCauley, "the inquiry into your deaths will inform an interested world that two officers--and supposedly gentlemen--of the Space Service were actually two smart, snide, shabby killers who overreached themselves! The Service will be proud to have it known that its officers try to murder each other by throwing away each other's air tanks. The Service will be very, very proud!"

The irony of the last words was corrosive.

"Sir...." The two voices spoke together, outraged and despairing. "Sir," panted Kent's voice, alone. "We'd no idea of anything like that, sir! We've always hated each other, but...."

His voice ended in a gulp. McCauley growled. A young officer can be very much of a fool, of course, but he can be desperately solicitous for the honor of the Service to which he is attached. McCauley spoke with icy precision.

"I am not concerned with your lives or your hatreds or your intentions. I am concerned with the good name of the Space Service. I order you both to come back here. Alive. Together. You will start immediately!"

A dazed silence. Then Kent said:

"But--you don't want us to bring the sledge...."

"And we haven't--" this was Holmes--"we haven't enough air to get back! How can we do it, sir?"

McCauley relaxed in his small cubbyhole of an office. Very privately he drew a breath of relief. But his tone remained stern.

"You will head for Repeater One. If you remember, my voice goes from the base here to Repeater One where it is relayed to Repeater Two. If I chose the proper frequency it would go on through Three and Four to Farside. Can you think of any advantage in being at Repeater One instead of Two?"

A long pause. Then Holmes' voice, dubious:

"It's nearer the base, sir. No more than three hours' travel, if that much. We could make it on one tank of air apiece, sir, and have the extra one for margin. We could make it to base from there, sir, if we were there. But we're not, and it's three hours' travel from here! We'd get there...."

"You _would_ get there?" demanded McCauley ominously. "Or you _will_ get there?"

"_Will_, sir." But the young officer's voice was bewildered.

"For your information," said McCauley curtly, "the Repeater One relay unit is exactly like the relay unit at Repeater Two. I may add that it is in bright sunshine, but will not be so indefinitely."--This was because McCauley remembered an air tank which had lain in shadow until its metal shivered brittlely when struck and the air inside it was a liquid. "It was carried to its position and mounted exactly as the relay for Repeater Two was. Now figure it out for yourself! If you still don't understand when you get to it, call me from there. Now get moving! Sunset's not far away."

He clicked off his microphone, but left the receiving unit on. The relay at Repeater Two would pick up suit-radio speech and relay it back, the pickup being from its all-direction antennae. McCauley heard mumblings. Then, very distinctly, Holmes spoke.

"Understand, I'm going to cooperate with you, getting to Repeater One, but that doesn't mean I like you any better!"

Kent said resentfully:

"I figured you'd have to fight me for the air to get back with. And you pulled the same trick on me! But we'll manage eventually...."

More mutterings. Then:

"Cripes! Let's get going!"

There were those peculiar noises which a microphone inside a space suit picks up and transmits. Breathings. Clankings. Sometimes the squeak of metal sliding on metal.

McCauley listened. Presently the noises faded and ceased. The two young space-suited officers had descended the mountain to where they were not in line of sight of the relay, and consequently it could not pick up their suit-radio communications to relay back to McCauley.

The communications officer tapped on the office door.

"We're through to Farside Base, sir," he reported. "The relay system's working splendidly. Farside just asked for an Earth Relay link to Lunar Base."

"Give it to 'em," said McCauley succinctly.

He waited, listening. He had Repeater One as well as Two set so it would retransmit any local pickup on helmet-phone frequency, but it was half an hour before anything but the peculiar singing murmurs of empty space came from the loud-speaker. Then he heard heavy breathing.

He heard a colloquy between Kent and Holmes, far away in the lunar mountains. They were evidently climbing somewhere, and part of the climb necessarily took them through deep shadow, where the temperature of the rock was down to night temperature. Their space suits could handle the cold for a certain length of time, but the teeth of one of the men were chattering before he came out into sunlight at the end of the climb.

McCauley heard Holmes say sarcastically:

"I needed that last pull. Want me to thank you for it?"

Kent's voice snapped as he answered Holmes.

"I did it solely because McCauley would court-martial me if I came in alone!"

A pause, then the remote, transmitted sound of space shoes on stone. Holmes spoke.

"There's a way I can kill you easily. All I need do is get myself killed."

He laughed without mirth, and Kent said bitterly, "Go ahea--" Then there was silence.

The communications officer brought McCauley a message from Lunar Base congratulating Grimaldi Base for completing the communications link between the two hemispheres of the moon.

"All right. Forget it," McCauley said.

He continued to listen. An hour went by. Then, without warning, there came an explosive "Look out!" There was a crash and then panting. Kent's voice rasped, "Have you gotten killed?" Holmes answered through clenched teeth. "Not yet. But how will I get out of here?" More clankings; more words, painstakingly devoid of solicitude on the one hand, or any amiable emotion such as gratitude on the other. McCauley could visualize exactly what was going on from the words. Holmes had fallen into a pothole, one of innumerable such mantraps scattered at random everywhere.

Kent got him out. Holmes grunted to indicate that he could do without more help. That was that. Minutes later, McCauley heard Kent say dourly:

"Three hours to Repeater One? We're over three hours now. How's your air?"

"All right," Holmes snapped. "When we get to that level place, we'll split the extra tank."

McCauley fretted. He could not know how far or how fast the two men were moving, off in that deadly waste of obstacles. Three hours had seemed a fair estimate. But plainly they'd had trouble.

Their voices cut off before they reached a spot where they could divide the air in the tank that had to be shared.

Then silence, for a long, long time. When McCauley heard any sound again, it was Holmes angrily calling to Kent, demanding that he say whether he needed help or not. And then for a full half hour McCauley listened to the sharp-voiced, sometimes abusive exchanges between the two. Kent had touched the keystone of an unstable rock slope. It gave way under him and went whirling downward in one of those infrequent, slow-motion moon avalanches that are unimaginable until one has seen them. Kent checked himself on the edge of a precipice over which the rolling stones fell in utter silence until after tens of seconds they struck and split, still noiselessly.

He could not get away. It was dangerous to help him, lest another avalanche be started. McCauley, listening, sweated as he glanced at a clock. But Holmes was helping Kent.

Later--much later--he heard clatterings and Kent's voice said snappishly:

"Well, here's Repeater One. McCauley said to come here. What do we do now? I've air for fifteen minutes more."

Holmes tried to speak, but couldn't. There were clankings.

"Doggone you," Kent snarled shrilly, "you cheated on the air! You didn't split even! Cripes!"

Then he panted, and suddenly there was a hissing sound, and gasps. McCauley's hands were tightly clenched as the sounds came to him from both faraway space-suit microphones. But at the hissing sound he relaxed.

A little later Holmes' voice came, astonished.

"That was it! He said that the relay here was exactly like the relay at Repeater Two. It's a sledge, and it was brought here by two men--and it has air tanks that they breathed from while they traveled! Kent, you hooked me to the air. The pressure's way up! We can refill our suit tanks and the spare!"

Kent said waspishly:

"So I noticed. Get your tank full-up and let me have my share.... McCauley said to call him from here if we needed to. What say?"

"McCauley can go to blazes!" rumbled Holmes. "It's not two hours from here to the base. If we fill up on air, we can get there before sunset. To heck with McCauley!"

In the commanding officer's cubbyhole at Grimaldi Base, McCauley relaxed again in his chair. His expression went from strain to contentment. He reached over and flipped off the receiver.

* * * * *

The deep, dark, abysmally black night had fallen. Low down at the western horizon Earth hung, blue-green and glamorous, just above the crests of many ring mountains. It was a little past first quarter, and it gave only the faintest of light to the tortured and splintered rock formations outside Grimaldi Base. When Earth was full, there would be bright earthlight on the moon, and the moon's surface would look much stranger than any painter of fantastic pictures could imagine.

Inside the base, McCauley was going toward his office when a hand touched his arm. It was Kent. He looked forbidding and grim.

"I'd like to speak to you, sir," he said formidably.

McCauley waved him into the tiny office and closed the door.

"What's it all about?" he asked. He touched a switch and a desk light glowed. He touched another, but nothing in particular seemed to happen. "I've forgotten," he said mildly, "any unpleasant things I may have felt it necessary to say a few hours ago."

"It's Holmes, sir," said Kent, his lips tightly pressed together. "He didn't play fair, sir. When we split that extra air tank he cheated on it. He gave me more than he took himself. And when I was stuck with an avalanche ready to finish me any second, he...."

His voice rose shrilly. He complained bitterly that Holmes had saved his life at least four times.

"He had to," McCauley pointed out. "I said I'd court-martial whichever of you came in, if one came in alone."

"That's the devil of it," said Kent bitterly. "He didn't do it that way! He didn't do it grudgingly. Doggone him, he made me ashamed! If it weren't that I'm hanged if I'll ask any man to overlook things like I've done to him--and he's done to me--if I wouldn't be asking him to overlook so much, I'd...."

McCauley waited. But Kent did not finish. Instead he said savagely:

"As a matter of self-respect, sir, I have to report that Holmes ought to be commended officially for several acts beyond the call of duty, sir--and for a man he hates and who has hated him. That's all, sir!"

He turned to go out.

"Hold it!" McCauley spoke sharply. "You will listen to something. This is an order!" He threw a switch and said: "I recorded your recommendation, Kent. But you will listen to this!"

There was that minute whirring noise a tape recorder makes when it's beginning its run. Kent stiffened. A voice came out of a speaker. But it was not Kent's voice, it was Holmes'. And Kent, staring, heard Holmes saying stiltedly and urgently that Kent had behaved in a highly admirable manner that rated official commendation. He'd risked his life for Holmes on several occasions, and if it weren't that he wouldn't ask any man to forgive him things like he'd done to Kent....

McCauley snapped off the recorder. The sound ceased.

"Holmes came in here first," said McCauley dryly. "His and your recommendations will have due attention. And I'm not going to suggest that you go and shake hands with him, but I think he might like it."

Kent's mouth opened and closed.

"B ... but ..." he stammered.

"Get out of my office!" roared McCauley. "I've got work to do!"

_5_

(It seemed there wasn't much left to do in the way of space
pioneering. There was a Space Platform, and there were bases on the
moon, and drone ships had been out to Mars and sunward past Venus.
There were new and better fuels, and the problem involving the Van
Allen belts of highly charged atomic particles seemed to have been
solved. It looked as if the rest of the job of conquering space
would be just plain, slogging hard work of a strictly routine
nature. This process would be improved a little, and that would be
developed a little further, and progress toward the stars would be
made by inches. But things never work out simply. There is always
something unexpected and usually disastrous turning up. Just when
things looked brightest, somebody worked out the causes of solar
flares and devised a way to predict them. It looked like a neat and
unimportant triumph of pure theory. But when it was closely
examined, it meant that the end of all space travel was
approaching.)

They called Colonel Ed McCauley back from the moon when Doctor Bramwell peevishly refused to go along with the Venus shoot unless the assigned crew was fired and replaced by more respectful men. The top brass felt that McCauley might be able to get along with Bramwell and get the job done. It was a highly necessary job. There was a sun-flare maximum coming up, but if the Bramwell-Faraday screen could be improved enough, it might not matter. Men might continue to occupy the Space Platform, and activities at the bases on the moon might continue. All the men now in space might not have to return to Earth to stay until the flares died down--if they ever did. In effect, if the Bramwell-Faraday screen could be built up to adequate strength, man's conquest of space might continue. If the screen couldn't be built up, space travel must stop.

And Doctor Bramwell was the key man in the project. He'd devised the screen in the first place, and was more likely to be able to improve it than anyone else. But he was not an amiable person. So, since he was a civilian and couldn't be given orders, when he said peevishly that he would not go along with the original crew, the men first assigned to the Venus shoot were removed--swearing luridly--and Colonel Ed McCauley came back from the moon to see what he could do.

He had one interview with Bramwell, and was very respectful. Part of the respect was genuine, and part was diplomacy. Bramwell did have one of the two or three best brains on Earth, but his personality gave McCauley reason to be disturbed.

After the interview he consulted higher-ranking officers. He did not think Bramwell was psychologically qualified to take part in the Venus shoot. He thought the scientist would do better work if he stayed home and directed somebody on the ship by tight-beam radio. McCauley spoke forcefully. But Bramwell happened to have a near-monopoly of the kind of brains that were required. And the psychological factor that made McCauley doubtful made the doctor as temperamental as any prima donna. The high brass knew all the reasons for McCauley's protest. But if Bramwell felt himself pushed aside, he'd sulk. If he sulked, he wouldn't do his best work. And his best work was an essential. So McCauley was ordered to make do with Bramwell somehow.

McCauley shrugged dubiously. He asked for Major Randy Hall to be assigned as his second-in-command. Randy gloated when his appointment came through, but McCauley shook his head gloomily.

"There's no reason to feel good about it," he told Randy dourly, in the almost completed Venus ship. "I'll be glad if you go along, but that's not the idea. You're appointed to be the man who'll be fired if Bramwell demands it."

Randy blinked. The cramped, inconvenient, gadget-filled interior of the Venus ship looked glamorous, when you thought of where it was going and what had to be done in it.

"The fact is," said McCauley, "--and the big brass knows it--the fact is that Bramwell's scared. He's terrified at the idea of going out into space. But he's ashamed to admit it. He'd rather die than let anyone know he's in a panic. He's probably trying to keep from admitting it even to himself. So he's making trouble to delay the moment of truth. He's trying to keep from facing the fact that he either has to go or else admit he won't."

"He's afraid of going?" asked Randy incredulously.

"Just as some people are afraid of heights, or spiders, or income-tax forms," said McCauley distastefully. "There's nothing disgraceful about being scared. If he'd only admit it, he could fight it or accept it. In either case he'd be all right. But he insists to himself that he's not only a brainy man but a normally courageous one. So he insists he'll go, and he won't let anybody go in his place, but he can't make himself believe he'll go. So he sets up all sorts of obstacles--crazy ones--ridiculous ones. He doesn't realize it, but he may subconsciously be trying to postpone the shoot until it's too late to make it. If that happens he won't have to face the fact that he's scared."

Randy grimaced.

"And you expect me...."

"To keep him busy," said McCauley. "Try to fix things so that it'll be take-off time before he realizes it. Keep him away from me so he can't pick a quarrel and insist that I be fired. Make yourself the one he'll insist he can't stand, when what he can't stand is the trip."

Randy grimaced again.

"You're a rat," he said resignedly. "But suppose I charm him so he doesn't insist that I be thrown out?"

"Fine!" said McCauley. "There'll be a crew of only two, with him as the third. I'd rather have you than anybody else. But Bramwell's devising excuses for refusing to go. You could be one excuse."

"I'll polish some apples," said Randy, "and fearlessly mixing metaphors, I'll beard him in his den. Maybe I can get so popular he won't want anybody fired."

"Good luck to you," said McCauley skeptically. "You'll need it!"

He plunged into the remaining preparations for the shoot, and Randy went to take over the job of keeping Bramwell from meeting the various people who passionately wanted to have nothing to do with him.

The basic problem the Venus shoot was to attack was at once simple but apparently hopeless. From time to time the sun displays "flares"; these are violent upsurgings of its photosphere, not in the nature of sunspots but somehow associated with them. A flare may begin without obvious warning and in fifteen minutes become monstrously violent, throwing off highly ionized fragments of molecules at the highest speeds material particles can attain. Some of these particles, in time, reach Earth; magnetic storms and auroral displays are the consequences of their arrival. They are harmless to people who live at the bottom of the planet's ocean of air.