by John Rankine
‘It’s a calculated risk and we calculated it.’
‘Other problems may come up. It may be too late to go to Planet Ariel.’
‘You should have gone on the expedition, John. Something positive for you to think about.’
‘Maybe you’re right. I just hate waiting for answers.’
In the Eagle, Carter was flying low towards massed cloud. Paul Morrow said, ‘Thick cumulous rain cloud forming over the Taurus mountains.’
Carter said, ‘Not much evidence of rainfall down below.’
‘What do you expect, instant green fields?’
He called through to the passenger module, ‘How are you feeling back there?’
Sandra answered, ‘For me—air sick. That’s why I chose the space programme!’
Helena Russell was having equipment trouble, ‘This data transmitter’s beginning to sound like a primitive crystal set.’
The same problem was troubling Kano. He reported, ‘Computer can’t read much of this data. There’s too much interference.’
Defensively, Tanya who was filling in for Sandra, said, ‘I have all the filters in. It’s the best I can get.’
‘They must be approaching an electric storm. An atmosphere is a mixed blessing.’
Koenig moved to the vacant seat beside him, ‘I heard that. Not to me it isn’t.’
‘Communications are bad, Commander—back to the crackle and static of Earth.’
‘Keep them plotted. If you look like losing them, abort the mission.’
Carter was enjoying himself. Meeting the outriders of the storm he was using skills that had not been called on in space missions. He said, ‘Now this is really flying!’
His enthusiasm was not shared, Morrow saw the billowing hammerhead of a cumulo-nimbus and for his money it looked like a disaster. In the passenger module, Sandra and Helena were having a running fight with shifting cargo as the Eagle was thrown about.
Even Carter was finding that he now had to struggle to keep his Eagle airborne. He called control.
‘Hello Alpha. This is Eagle Two Eight. Severe turbulence on the run up to the Taurus Mountains. I’m going over the top.’
A jag of lightning flicked past the undercarriage. There was no response from Alpha and he tried again, ‘Hello Alpha. Hello Alpha. I’m not receiving you.’
There was no joy. In Main Mission, Koenig was on the same tack. ‘Eagle Two Eight. We are not receiving you. If you hear me, abort. This is an order. Return to base.’
He handed over to Tanya, ‘Keep trying.’
As she took over, saying again and again, ‘Eagle Two Eight. Come in Eagle Two Eight . . . ,’ he spoke to Kano, ‘Compute their position, exactly.’
Eagle Two Eight was putting on a display of virtuoso aerobatics that would have stolen a show. Flung around in violent updraughts, she was more often on her back than on an even keel. Carter was suddenly fighting for their lives and knew it. He called urgently to Morrow for more power, ‘We’re losing power. Main boosters.’
Morrow flipped a lever. There was no response. He said, ‘Malfunction. No main booster.’
‘Back up power!’
Morrow tried again, said bitterly, ‘Malfunction. No back up.’
Carter was looking incredulously at his console, ‘All systems out. Crash positions.’
Behind their backs, the air lock hatch sliced shut with a definitive click.
The Eagle was falling like a rock, plummeting down out of cloud cover into a swirling vortex of moon dust. Fighting to the last centimetre, Carter had partially levelled off as it made its landfall, grinding into a brand new dust dune like a mad mole, burying itself, with the dust storm building a drift around it, turning it into a bland feature of the dune itself.
CHAPTER FOUR
Tanya went right on calling, though with everybody else in Main Mission, she had given up any rational hope of getting an answer.
‘Come in Eagle Two Eight. Do you copy? Eagle Two Eight. Come in Eagle Two Eight . . .’
Koenig said, ‘Kano, I want every Eagle fuelled and ready for take-off. I want photographs. Every square centimetre on a five hundred kilometre radius of their last position.’
Bergman was at his elbow and got the next chore, ‘Look at it, Victor, make a plan of search. Twenty-seven zones.’ Without waiting for agreement, Koenig raised the medicentre and tapped impatiently until Bob Mathias appeared on the screen.
‘Mathias?’
‘Commander?’
‘Load medical supplies and rescue gear into Eagle One. You’re coming with me.’ Thinking aloud as much as speaking to Bergman, he went on, ‘To lose all contact at less than ten thousand kilometres. In this century! It just isn’t possible.’
Bergman said, ‘We’ve had to come to terms with space. In the process we’ve simply forgotten the hazards of normal atmosphere.’
Shocked out of holiday mood, the personnel of Moonbase Alpha heaved round with a will. Out of a seeming chaos, serviced Eagles rose to the launch pads and took off in a steady stream, heading out low over the lunar surface.
The storm had died away as quickly as it began. Eagle Two Eight was a camouflage job, buried in its drift with a couple of metres of girderwork and a cocked up tail pipe to mark its tomb.
The wall of cargo containers and technical gear stored behind the seats in the passenger module had broken loose and turned itself into a knee deep scatter of trash. Food spilled out of shattered containers and spoiled in the baking heat, water seeped from fractured tanks, moondust leaked in like sand in an hour glass.
Sandra had taken the biggest beating and was still out, dodgily balanced over the debris on the one serviceable stretcher. While Paul Morrow and Helena set it up and made her comfortable, Carter was stripped to the waist, glistening with sweat as he ripped panel after panel from the bulkheads to lay bare blackened and smoking circuitry.
Wiping his forehead with his arm, he looked round the wreck, ‘It’s every transistor. Every last bleeding condenser. There isn’t one not blown.’
Helena Russell said, ‘The lightning. It must have burned out every circuit. We are dependent on Alpha to find us.’ Even as she said it, she recognised the command responsibility and knew that as a plain fact it was no boost to morale. Paul Morrow’s face across the bier confirmed it. She was on Koenig’s home ground and she wished he was at hand. But as a working principle, she could see Morrow would be better on load.
‘Paul, give Alan a hand. Get air in here.’
He hardly heard, taking Sandra’s limp hand, he was looking at her face as though he could force a reaction by an effort of will. Helena said again, ‘Don’t worry. She’s going to be all right.’
Alan Carter said, ‘There are twenty-seven serviceable Eagles available for a search plan. A pound to a pinch of porridge not one of them’s still on the pad.’
Morrow stood up. It was all true. They were alive and that couldn’t be bad. Without a word, he joined Carter and began to hurl debris away from the main hatch.
Almost directly overhead, Koenig was turning his Eagle.
Mathias in the co-pilot seat said, ‘Right on the co-ordinates for the last radar contact, Commander.’
Leaving a vapour trail, Koenig made a long sweep, the moonscape was showing no trace. It was still not much of a New World and still the last place to be lost in.
Carter and Morrow had the hatch cleared to open, but the quick release gear had jammed solid. Morrow, streaked with sweat and dust wrenched out a seat rail and shoved it home in the manual locking union. As he threw his weight against it, there was a sharp crack and the weakened hatch burst inboard followed by a sliding wall of choking dust.
Grey clouds billowed around the module and Helena tore off her tunic to make a cowl over Sandra’s face.
Morrow, straggling thigh deep, hauled himself across to check that she was all right and then waded back to where Carter had hauled himself out onto the dune. There was a saucer depression where the moondust had fallen inside, but ot
herwise the Eagle was melding into cover.
Paul Morrow said, ‘Some camouflage job.’ But Carter had spotted the dying line of Koenig’s vapour trail and was going along the crest in a stumbling run, shouting, ‘We’re here. We’re here. Come back, you morons!’
As they watched, the vapour trail faded over the horizon. Morrow said, ‘We came to choose a site for the New Alpha. Looks like it has to be here.’
Certainly there were no contenders. They had moondust, a burrow and an achingly empty sky.
Grim faced, Koenig checked in at Main Mission. The hours of searching had made it clear enough that only blind chance was going to bring Eagle Two Eight to light. He leaned heavily on the back of Kano’s chair, ‘News?’
Kano shook his head, ‘They’ve ran out of daylight, Commander. The last Eagle’s coming in.’
‘Have them refuelled immediately.’
He went through into the command office where Bergman was poring over a chart. Doing his best to find something good in the day, Bergman said, ‘It’s looking promising, John. The moon is still curving in nicely towards an orbital path. Gravitational forces will continue to increase. The high point’s due in eight days.’
Koenig was in no mood for comfort. He had looked at moondust until his eyes ached and he was seeing Helena Russell somewhere down there. He said harshly, ‘The margins are too small. Our chances of going into orbit are no better than fifty-fifty. Right?’
On a direct question, the scientist had to nudge aside the optimist. Bergman spread his hands.
Koeing went on, ‘So. If we don’t make the orbit, conditions on the surface will deteriorate. And so fast that I don’t like to think about it. Where does that leave them?’
Working like maniacs, Carter and Morrow had brought some order into the wrecked interior but they had more to consider than judging odds on the orbit. Vital supplies seemed to have taken a selective knock. When Helena picked out the last container and found it vile smelling and penetrated by acid, it was the last straw for Carter, who was feeling guilty anyway about the crash.
Helena said, ‘Briassic acid. It smashed right through the life support systems.’
He wheeled round from the hatch, which he was trying to fix, looking angry. ‘Why was it allowed anywhere near the food?’
‘It wasn’t. It arrived in the stores section along with the main motor. We’re just lucky it didn’t explode right then.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Come on Alan,’ she took his arm and guided him into the command module hatch away from Sandra’s hearing, ‘Ease up a little will you? We have survival rations.’
Heavily sarcastic he said, ‘Oh sure! About a half pint of drinkable water. That’s great! It’s only sixty Celsius in the shade. What’s that going to do for Sandra with fractured ribs and a rising fever? She needs all the water she can get.’
Paul Morrow, squatting beside the stretcher heard it and waited for Helena’s reply. Still keeping it cool, she said, ‘All right. Then you make sure the next time they fly over, they can see us.’
Morrow was on his feet in a new burst of energy, ‘Let’s get some of this junk out of here. We have to lay out some kind of marker.’
They worked at it for an hour, humping containers out into the dust and hauling them in a line. The wind, which had dropped away was notching up again raising small spirals and driving tiny abrasive particles into their eyes and caking on their sweating skin. They had a half formed cross, but already the dust storm was blurring the outline with new drifts. Even Morrow conceded they had to stop. They crawled back into the dusty womb of the Eagle and sat speechless watching Helena, a doctor without a back-up service fall back to wiping her patient’s face with a tattered rag.
Riding the storm, on continuous mission, Koenig was not far off in a geographical sense, but he knew for a truth he might as well be back at his desk in Moonbase Alpha. Only high points of rock showed through the swirling dust. It was confirmed when he looked at Mathias’s face. They were wasting their time. Without a word, he made the course change and headed back, face set in a mix of despair and anger.
Helena Russell set out four beakers on a crate lid. It was colder and she had pulled on a space suit to conserve body heat. Moving clumsily, she opened a phial and dropped a tablet in each cup.
Alan Carter, cross legged, was flapping his arms to keep warm. Morrow took Sandra’s hand and put it to his cheek. He said, ‘She’ll die out here.’ It was unanswerable and Helena did not try. He went on, ‘Sixty Celsius all day and freezing at night. What chance does that give her?’
Carter stood up, fished a space suit out of the ruck and began to climb into it. He said abrasively, ‘You were the one. You rooted pretty hard for this crazy scheme of settling out here, instead of going down to the planet.’ He leaned towards Morrow as though accusing him of standing in the way, ‘I have this theory that down on Ariel the women are something fantastic.’
Reacting to the tone, Morrow said deliberately, ‘No one could reckon on a so-called top pilot flying into a cloud bank for kicks.’
Helena moved between them, ‘Let’s save all the aggression for the fight we’ve already got for survival.’ She measured water into the beakers and Morrow watching the level fall in the transparent container said, ‘Make it three.’
Carter looked at him and then at Sandra. ‘That’s right. I’ll go halves with Paul.’
Helena took a firm line, ‘Sandra won’t survive unless we do. Take your ration.’ Without waiting for an argument, she handed them each a cup. There was silence as they sipped it like some rare wine and Morrow touched Sandra’s hair. ‘There must be something we can do.’
‘Sure,’ Carter was still troubled by black bile, ‘we’ll just walk.’
He would have been more angry if he could have heard Kano’s report to the command office. Bergman and Koenig had a spread of air photographs and were doing a detailed search. Kano, knowing a messenger of gloom is never welcome for himself, said diffidently, ‘Eagle One Five is grounded, Commander.’
He was right to be cautious, Koenig’s snarl was full of menace, ‘Grounded?’
‘Apparent seizure of the lateral stabilisers. So far five Eagles have reported similar faults.’
Koenig’s shout had every head in Main Mission looking up towards the office. ‘We can’t afford faults! We spend months drifting in space and the Techs have no better thing to do than sit on their fat asses. Now, when we need every Eagle we can get, you say they have faults? No Eagle goes off search until I say. Tell those lousy Techs to get their fingers out!’
Nobody had seen him so angry. Kano backed off, said quietly, ‘Check, Commander.’
Bergman tried reason, ‘They’re breaking their necks in the Technical Section, John.’
‘So they should.’
‘Look, John, I hate to say this but you should face the possibility that we might not find them at all.’
It earned him a hard, angry stare and Koenig scattered the photographs, stood up and made for the hatch, ‘I’ll find them, Victor. I’ll find them.’
Picking up Mathias on the way, he slammed out to the pad and climbed into Eagle One, lifting it in a howl of acceleration.
Chancing his arm, Kano called from Main Mission, ‘Nice lift off, Commander. No systems malfunction indicated.’
Mathias scanning the co-pilot console was giving a thumbs up signal and Koenig answered control, ‘No problems here, Kano. I’m clearing Alpha on two four zero.’
Fractionally late, Victor Bergman, carrying a component from a grounded Eagle, called ‘Stop him, Kano! Bring him in.’
As if on cue, the auto crash alarm sounded out and they could see the nose of Eagle One take a dip. Koenig was getting no response from any control. He fairly spat into the communicator, ‘Doesn’t anything work any longer on this base?’
The Eagle was down, straddling the crater rim in swirling dust and Koenig was thumping the instrument spread with a balled fist, ‘Well?’
Bergman
answered, ‘Something in the atmosphere, coupled with incessant flying in fine dust. Together they’ve added up to a rapid corrosive effect. Your control systems simply seized.’
Koenig’s anger suddenly evaporated as he saw a new angle. ‘Something in the atmosphere? We’ve got that atmosphere now in every section of Alpha.’
‘Inside, the corrosion would be slower.’
He had lost his listener, Koenig was calling Kano.
‘Yes, Commander?’
‘I want windows replaced in every section of Alpha. Every air lock resealed. Re-pressurisation with our own atmosphere is to start as of now. Get to it.’ Before Kano could answer, he was back to Bergman, You say every Eagle has this?’
‘Check. But there’s one hopeful feature. Parts covered with that new graphite compound have escaped it. They have immunity to this corrosion.’
‘How long to strip down one Eagle and graphite every exposed surface?’
Bergman was glad to be able to say, ‘I have them started on it—technical estimate—three days.’
‘Make that two days and, Victor, that satellite, get it outside the section. Dump it on the surface.’
For the record, it was night in the passenger module of Eagle Two Eight but it could have been any time in a mind numbing cycle of pain and exhaustion. Sandra Benes moaned, checked it, biting her lips, opened her eyes. Morrow raised himself on one elbow, leaned over, touched her forehead.
The contact calmed her, she even managed a smile.
‘Paul?’
‘You’re getting better. You’re going to be all right.’
He reached for one of the beakers and held it for her while she drank. Gaining a little strength, she tried to sit up, but very gently, he restrained her.
‘I thought we’d found our new home.’
‘We have. Never doubt it. We have.’
‘But . . .’
‘Don’t try to talk, I’ll get you another drink.’
