[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
of my hopes of finding water, I find little fun in the prospect of a certain death."
He sounded old, frail, frightened and surprisingly vulnerable; I felt privileged to see behind the bluff
mask to the true man. But at this moment I needed the old Traveller, the wild, the supremely
confident, the arrogant!
I pointed above my head. "Then, sir, at least you have surely not lost your wonder! Look at that
crater floor above us. We have discovered the mightiest feature on the Moon a fitting monument to
your achievements and, if our story is ever told by future generations, they shall surely name it
after the great Josiah Traveller!"
He looked vaguely interested at that, and he raised his beak of a platinum nose to the silver
landscape. "Traveller Crater. Perhaps. No doubt some bastardized Latin version will be used."
"And," I said, "think of the impact which must have caused such a monstrous scar. It must have
come close to splitting the damn Moon in two."
He stroked his chin and inspected the huge crater with an appraising eye. "And yet it is scarcely
possible to envisage a meteorite impact of such a magnitude... No, Ned; I suspect the explanation for
that vast feature is still more exotic."
"What do you mean?"
"Anti-ice! Ned, if that remarkable compound has been discovered on the surface of the Earth, what
is to stop it being available on other planets and satellites?
"I envisage a comet-like body falling in to the Solar System, perhaps from the stars, largely or
wholly composed of anti-ice. As the Sun's heat touches it I imagine little pockets of the ice
exploding, and the wretched body being twisted and spun this way and that.
"At last, though, blazing and glowing, it falls close to the Earth only to find the inert form of
Earth's patient companion in its way.
"The detonation is astounding as you say, almost enough to split the Moon in two. Crater walls roll
across the tortured surface like waves across a sea. And one must imagine millions of tons of
pulverized lunar rock and dust being hurled into space with fragments of the original anti-ice
comet embedded within it. And so, perhaps, some fragments reached even the surface of the Earth
itself."
I stared up at that desolate craterscape and shivered, imagining it superimposed on a map of Europe.
"Then we must be grateful to the Moon that the comet never reached Earth, Sir Josiah."
"Indeed."
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"And do you suppose the wretched Professor Hansen could have been right after all? Could there
have been an air-covered area of the Moon perhaps inhabited, but now laid waste by the anti-ice
explosion?"
He shook his head, a little wistfully. "No, lad; I fear the good Dane was wrong all the way; for the
geometry of the Moon itself does not support his egg-shape theory. Our chances of finding the water
we need to save our lives remain negligible."
In desperation I turned my face up to the darkling landscape over which we flew, inverted. So my
diplomatic skills had succeeded in bringing Traveller out of his funk but not to the extent that he
might lift a finger to save our lives.
...And then I noticed once more, twinkling like a hundred Bethlehem stars, bright, glassy sparkles
amid the tumbled lunar mountains. I cried out and pointed. "Traveller! Before you sink completely
into despair, look above you. What do you see, shining in the last of the Sun's rays?"
Again he rubbed his chin, but he looked closely. "It could be nothing, lad," he said gently.
"Outcroppings of quartz or feldspar "
"But it could be water, frozen pools of it shining in the sunlight!"
He turned to me almost kindly, and I sensed he was about to launch into an extended lecture on the
source of my latest misapprehension and then, like the reappearance of the Sun from a cloudbank,
his face lit up with determination. "By God, Ned, you could be right. Who knows? And it's certain
we will never find out if we let ourselves fall helplessly to that tumbled surface. Enough of this! We
have a world to conquer." And he grabbed his stovepipe hat out of the air and screwed it down over
his cranium.
I was filled with elation. I said, "Will you resume the plan you have written in your little book?"
He looked down at the notebook still tied to his knee. "What, this? I have moped my way into too
great a deviance from the schedule, I fear." He tore the book from his knee and hurled it, spinning,
into the shadows of the Bridge. "It is too late for calculation. Now we must pilot the Phaeton as she
was meant to be piloted with our hands, our minds, our eyes. Hold on, Ned!"
And he hauled back his levers; the anti-ice rockets roared, and I was hurled bodily to the deck.
The next several minutes were a nightmarish blur. Traveller kept the rockets shouting, and the deck
of the Bridge an uneven series of riveted plates pressed into my face and chest. I could do
nothing but cling to whatever purchase I could find like the iron pillars which supported Traveller's
couch and reflect that it was typical of Traveller to neglect utterly the well-being of those he was
trying to save. Surely a delay of a few seconds to allow me to regain my seat in the Cabin would not
have mattered one way or the other.
After some minutes the quality of the Moonlight seemed to change. The shadow of my head shifted
and lengthened across the deck; and at last I was plunged into a darkness broken only by the dim
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glow of Traveller's Ruhmkorff coils. I surmised that the ship had been turned around, so that our
nose now pointed away from the Moon.
Then, blessed relief! the motors reduced. Though the rockets continued to fire at a subdued level, it
was as if a vast weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I cautiously pushed my face away from
the floor, got to my hands and knees, and then to my feet and surprised myself to find I was
standing!
"Sir Josiah! We are no longer floating..."
He lay in his couch, lightly playing his control levers. "Oh, hullo, Ned; I'd quite forgotten you were
there. No, we are no longer in free fall. I decided that boldness was the best course of action. So I
launched us directly at the lunar surface, from which we were in any event a mere few thousand
miles "
"I was quite crushed against the plates." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]