A Fall of Moondust Read Online Free PDF Page A

route from the last reported position, one ski on either side of it, so that
     they sweep the widest possible band.”
    When the order had gone out, Davis asked unhappily: “What do you think could have
     happened?”
    “There are only a few possibilities. It must have been sudden, because there was no
     message from them. That usually means an explosion.”
    The Commissioner paled; there was always the chance of sabotage, and no one could
     ever guard against that. Because of their vulnerability, space-vehicles, like aircraft
     before them, were an irresistible attraction to a certain type of criminal. Davis
     thought of the Venus-bound liner
Argo
, which had been destroyed with two hundred men, women and children aboard—because
     a maniac had a grudge against a passenger who scarcely knew him.
    “And then there’s collision,” continued the Chief Engineer. “She could have run into
     an obstacle.”
    “Harris is a very careful driver,” said the Commissioner. “He’s done this trip scores
     of times.”
    “Everyone can make mistakes; it’s easy to misjudge your distance when you’re driving
     by earthlight.”
    Commissioner Davis barely heard him; he was thinking of all the arrangements he might
     have to make, if the worst came to the worst. He’d better start by getting the Legal
     Branch to check the indemnity forms. If any relatives started suing the Tourist Commission
     for a few million dollars, that would undo his entire publicity campaign for the next
     year—even if he won.
    The Ground Traffic officer gave a nervous cough.
    “If I might make a suggestion,” he said to the Chief Engineer. “We could call Lagrange.
     The astronomers up there may be able to see something.”
    “At night?” asked Davis sceptically. “From fifty thousand kilometres up?”
    “Easily, if her searchlights are still burning. It’s worth trying.”
    “Excellent idea,” said the Chief Engineer. “Do that right away.”
    He should have thought of that himself, and wondered if there were any other possibilities
     he had overlooked. This was not the first occasion he had been forced to pit his wits
     against this strange and beautiful world, so breathtaking in her moments of magic—so
     deadly at her times of peril. She would never be wholly tamed, as Earth had been,
     and perhaps that was just as well. For it was the lure of the untouched wilderness,
     and the faint but ever-present hint of danger, that now brought the tourists as well
     as the explorers across the gulfs of space. He would prefer to do without the tourists—but
     they helped to pay his salary.
    And now he had better start packing. This whole crisis might evaporate, and
Selene
might turn up again quite unaware of the panic she had caused. But he did not think
     this would happen, and his fear deepened to certainty as the minutes passed. He would
     give her another hour; then he would take the sub-orbital shuttle to Port Roris and
     to the realm of his waiting enemy, the Sea of Thirst.
    When the PRIORITY RED signal reached Lagrange, Thomas Lawson, Ph.D., was fast asleep. He resented the interruption;
     though one needed only two hours’ sleep in twenty-four when living under zero gravity,
     it seemed a little unfair to lose even that. Then he grasped the meaning of the message,
     and was fully awake. At last it looked as if he would be doing something useful here.
    Tom Lawson had never been very happy about this assignment; he had wanted to do scientific
     research, and the atmosphere aboard Lagrange II was much too distracting. Balanced
     here between Earth and Moon, in a cosmic tight-rope act made possible by one of the
     obscurer consequences of the Law of Gravitation, the satellite was an astronautical
     maid-of-all work. Ships passing in both directions took their fixes from it, and used
     it as a message centre—though there was no truth in the rumour that they stopped to
     pick up mail. Lagrange was also the relay station for almost all lunar