A Fall of Moondust

“I don't believe,” grumbled Captain Anson, “that they've played anything later than the nineteenth century.”

“Oh yes they have,” corrected Jules Braques, as he made some infinitesimal adjustment to his camera. “They did Khachaturian's 'Sabre Dance' just now. That's only a hundred years old.”

“Time for Duster One to call again,” said the Radio Officer. The cabin became instantly silent.

Right on the second, the dust-ski signal came in. The expedition was now so close that Auriga could receive it directly, without benefit of the relay from Lagrange.

“ Lawrence calling Selene. We'll be over you in ten minutes. Are you O. K.?”

Again that agonizing pause; this time it lasted almost five seconds. Then:

“Selene answering. No change here.”

That was all. Pat Harris was not wasting his remaining breath.

“Ten minutes,” said Spenser. “They should be in sight now. Anything on the screen?”

“Not yet,” answered Jules, zooming out to the horizon and panning slowly along its empty arc. There was nothing above it but the black night of space.

The Moon, thought Jules, certainly presented some headaches to the cameraman. Everything was soot or whitewash; there were no nice, soft half tones. And, of course, there was that eternal dilemma of the stars, though that was an aesthetic problem, rather than a technical one.

The public expected to see stars in the lunar sky even during the daytime, because they were there. But the fact was that the human eye could not normally see them; during the day, the eye was so desensitized by the glare that the sky appeared an empty, absolute black. If you wanted to see the stars, you had to look for them through blinkers that cut off all other light; then your pupils would slowly expand, and one by one the stars would come out until they filled the field of view. But as soon as you looked at anything else—phut, out they went. The human eye could look at the daylight stars, or the daylight landscape; it could never see both at once.

But the TV camera could, if desired, and some directors preferred it to do so. Others argued that this falsified reality. It was one of those problems that had no correct answer. Jules sided with the realists, and kept the star gate circuit switched off unless the studio asked for it.

At any moment, he would have some action for Earth. Already the news networks had taken flashes—general views of the mountains, slow pans across the Sea, close-ups of that lonely marker sticking through the dust. But before long, and perhaps for hours on end, his camera might well be the eyes of several billion people. This feature was either going to be a bust, or the biggest story of the year.

He fingered the talisman in his pocket. Jules Braques, Member of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, would have been displeased had anyone accused him of carrying a lucky charm. On the other hand, he would have been very hard put to explain why he never brought out his little toy until the story he was covering was safely on the air.

“Here they are!” yelled Spenser, his voice revealing the strain under which he had been laboring. He lowered his binoculars and glanced at the camera. “You're too far off to the right!”

Jules was already panning. On the monitor screen, the geometrical smoothness of the far horizon had been broken at last; two tiny, twinkling stars had appeared on that perfect arc dividing Sea and space. The dust-skis were coming up over the face of the Moon.

Even with the longest focus of the zoom lens, they looked small and distant. That was the way Jules wanted it; he was anxious to give the impression of loneliness, emptiness. He shot a quick glance at the ship's main screen, now tuned to the Interplanet channel. Yes, they were carrying him.

He reached into his pocket, pulled out a small diary, and laid it on top of the camera. He lifted the cover, which locked into position just short of the vertical—and immediately became alive with color and movement. At the same time a faint gnat-sized voice started to tell him that this was a special program of the Interplanet News Service, Channel One Oh Seven—and We Will Now Be Taking You Over to the Moon.