A Fall of Moondust

“There's one very obvious method. Use this same technique at ground level. Go over the area with an infrared scanner. That will locate any hot spot, even if it's only a fraction of a degree warmer than its surroundings.”

“A good idea,” said Lawrence . “I'll see what can be arranged, and will call you back if I need any further information. Thank you very much—Doctor.”

He hung up quickly, and wiped his brow. Then he immediately put through another call to the satellite.

“Lagrange II? Chief Engineer, Earthside, here. Give me the Director, please.. .. Professor Kotelnikov? This is Lawrence .. .. I'm fine, thanks. I've been talking to your Doctor Lawson.. .. No, he hasn't done anything, except nearly make me lose my temper. He's been looking for our missing dust-cruiser, and he thinks he's found her. What I'd like to know is—how competent is he?”

In the next five minutes, the Chief Engineer learned a good deal about young Dr. Lawson; rather more, in fact, than he had any right to know, even over a confidential circuit. When Professor Kotelnikov had paused for breath, he interjected sympathetically: “I can understand why you put up with him. Poor kid—I thought orphanages hike that went out with Dickens and the twentieth century. A good thing it did burn down. Do you suppose he set fire to it? No, don't answer that—you've told me he's a first-class observer, and that's all I want to know. Thanks a lot. See you down here someday?”

In the next half-hour, Lawrence made a dozen calls to points all over the Moon. At the end of that time, he had accumulated a large amount of information; now he had to act on it.

At Plato Observatory, Father Ferraro thought the idea was perfectly plausible. In fact, he had already suspected that the focus of the quake was under the Sea of Thirst rather than the Mountains of Inaccessibility, but couldn't prove it because the Sea had such a damping effect on all vibrations. No, a complete set of soundings had never been made; it would be very tedious and time consuming. He'd probed it himself in a few places with telescopic rods, and had always hit bottom at less than forty meters. His guess for the average depth was under ten meters, and it was much shallower round the edges. No, he didn't have an infrared detector, but the astronomers on Farside might be able to help.

Sorry, no I. R. detector at Dostoevski. Our work is all in the ultraviolet. Try Verne.

Oh yes, we used to do some work in the infrared, a couple of years back—taking spectrograms of giant red stars. But do you know what? There were enough traces of lunar atmosphere to interfere with the readings, so the whole program was shifted out into space. Try Lagrange.

It was at this point that Lawrence called Traffic Control for the shipping schedules from Earth, and found that he was in luck. But the next move would cost a lot of money, and only the Chief Administrator could authorize it.

That was one good thing about Olsen; he never argued with his technical staff over matters that were in their province. He listened carefully to Lawrence 's story, and went straight to the main point.

“If this theory is true,” he said, “there's a chance that they may still be alive, after all.”

“More than a chance; I'd say it's quite likely. We know the Sea is shallow, so they can't be very deep. The pressure on the hull would be fairly low; it may still be intact.”

“So you want this fellow Lawson to help with the search.” The Chief Engineer gave a gesture of resignation. “He's about the last person I want,” he answered. “But I'm afraid we've got to have him.”

CHAPTER 9

The skipper of the cargo liner Auriga was furious, and so was his crew—but there was nothing they could do about it. Ten hours out from Earth and five hours from the Moon they were ordered to stop at Lagrange, with all the waste of speed and extra computing that implied. And to make matters worse, they were being diverted from Chavius City to that miserable dump Port Roris, practically on the other side of the Moon. The ether crackled with messages canceling dinners and assignations all over the southern hemisphere.

Not far from full, the mottled silver disc of the Moon, its eastern limb wrinkled with easily visible mountains, formed a dazzling background to Lagrange II as Auriga came to rest a hundred kilometers earthward of the station. She was allowed no closer; the interference produced by her equipment, and the glare of her jets, had already affected the sensitive recording instruments on the satellite. Only old-fashioned chemical rockets were permitted to operate in the immediate neighborhood of Lagrange; plasma drives and fusion plants were strictly taboo.