A buzzer sounded on Ellen Bishop’s desk, interrupting her. She said, “Hello,” and a voice-operated switch turned on her communicator.
A man’s voice drawled, “Culver speaking. Shall I come up now?”
Ellen hesitated. Then she said, “Yes,” and flicked off the communicator. “That’s Jim Culver,” she explained. “He’ll be your assistant while you’re here.”
“That’s nice,” Templin said acidly. “Assistant to do what?”
The girl looked surprised. “Oh I didn’t tell you, did I? You’re going to manage the uranium mines at Hyginus Cleft.”
TEMPLIN OPENED his eyes wide and stared at her. “Look, Bishop,” he said, “I can’t do that. What do I know about uranium mines—or any other kind of mines?”
Before the girl could answer, the door opened. A tall, lean man drifted in, looked at Templin with mournful eyes. “Hello,” he said.
Templin nodded at him. “Get back to the question,” he reminded the girl. “What about these mines? I’m no miner.”
The girl said, “I know you aren’t. We’ve had three mining engineers on the project in eight weeks. Things are no better for them—in fact, things are worse; ask Culver.” She waved to the lean man, who was fumbling around his pockets for a cigarette.
Culver found the cigarette and nodded confirmation. “Trouble isn’t ordinary,” he said briefly. “It’s things that are—strange. Like machines breaking down. And tunnels caving in. And pieces of equipment being missing. Nothing that a mining engineer can handle.”
“But maybe something that you can handle.” Ellen Bishop was looking at Templin with real pleading in her eyes, the man from the Inner Planets thought. He said: “Got any ideas on who’s causing it? Do you think it’s just accidental? Or have you been having trouble with some other outfit, or anything of the sort?”
Ellen Bishop bit her lip. “Not real trouble,” she said. “Of course, there’s Joe Olcott…”
Joe Olcott. The name rang a fire-bell in Templin’s mind. Olcott… yes, of course! The chunky dark man in the corridor—the one he had knocked out!
He grinned abruptly. “I met Mr. Olcott,” he acknowledged. “Unpleasant character. But he didn’t seem like much of a menace to me.”
Ellen Bishop shrugged. “Perhaps he isn’t. Oh, you hear stories about him, if you can believe them. They say he has been mixed up in a number of things that were on the other side of the law—that he has committed all sorts of crimes himself. But—I don’t really believe that. Only, it seems funny that we had no trouble at all until Olcott tried to buy a controlling interest in Terralune. We turned him down—it was just a month or so after Dad died—and from then on things have gone from bad to worse.”
Templin stubbed out his cigarette, thinking. Automatically his fingers went to his pocket, took out another, and he blew out a huge cloud of fresh smoke. Then he stood up.
“I think I get the story now,” he said. “The missing pieces I can fill in later. You want me to take charge of the Terralune mines here on the Moon and try to get rid of this jinx, whatever it is. Well, maybe I can do it. The only question is, what do I get out of it?”
Ellen Bishop looked startled. “Get out of it? What do you mean?” she demanded. Then a scornful look came into her ice-blue eyes. “Oh, I see,” she said. “Naturally, you feel that you’ve got us at your mercy. Well—”
Templin interrupted her. “I asked you a question,” he reminded. “What do I get out of it?”
She smouldered. “Name your price,” she said bitterly.
“Uh-uh.” Templin shook his head. “I don’t want money; I want something else.”
“Something else?” she repeated in puzzlement. “What?”
Templin leaned across the desk. “I want to go back,” he said. “I want a whole fleet of rocket ships to go back to Venus with me…lots of them, enough to start a colony. There’s uranium on the Moon, and there are precious metals on Mercury…but on Venus there’s something that’s more important. There’s a raw planet there, a whole world just like the Earth with trees, and jungles, and animals. And there isn’t a human being on it. I want to colonize it—and I want Terralune Projects to pay the bill.”
Ellen Bishop stared at him unbelievingly, and a slow smile crept into her lips. She said, “I beg your pardon…Temp. All right. It’s a bargain.” She grasped his hand impulsively. “If you can make the uranium mines pay out I’ll see that you get your ships. And your colony. And I’ll see that you can take anyone you like on the Terralune payroll along with you to get started.”
“Sold,” said Templin. He released her hand, wandered thoughtfully over to the huge picture window that formed one entire wall of the girl’s room.
AT A TOUCH of his fingers the opaque covering on the window opened up like a huge iris shutter, and he was gazing out on the barren landscape of the Moon. The Dome was on the peak of Mt. Hadley, looking out on a desolate expanse of twisted, but comparatively flat, rock, bathed in a sultry dull red glow of reflected light from the Earth overhead. Beyond the plain was an awesome range of mountains, the needle sharp peaks of them picked out in brilliant sunlight as the Sun advanced slowly on them.
Culver said from behind him, “That’s what they call the Sea of Serenity.”
Templin chuckled. “Mare Serenitatis” he said. “I know. I’ve been here before—fourteen years ago, or so.”
Ellen bishop amplified. “Didn’t you know, Culver? Temp was one of Dad’s crew when the old Astra landed here in 1957. I don’t remember the exact order any more—were you the third man to step on the surface of the Moon, or the fourth?”
Templin grinned. “Third. Your father was fourth. First he sent the two United Nations delegates off to make it all nice and legal; then, being skipper of the ship, he was getting set to touch ground himself. Well, it was his privilege. But he saw me banging around the air lock—I was a green kid then—and he laughed and said, ‘Go ahead, Temp,’ and I didn’t stop to argue.” Templin sobered, and glanced at Ellen Bishop. “I’ve had other jobs offered me,” he said, “and some of them sounded pretty good, but I turned them down. Maybe it isn’t smart to tell you this, but there’s nothing in the world that could make me quit the company your father founded. Even though he’s dead and a debutante is running it now.”
He grinned again at her, and moved toward the door. “Coming, Culver?” he asked abruptly. The tall man nodded and followed him. “So long,” said Templin at the door, and closed it behind him without waiting for an answer.
2
THEY PUT on their pressure suits and stepped out of the lock onto the hard rock outside. Culver gestured and led the way to a small crater-hopping rocket parked a few hundred yards from the Dome. It was still eight days till sunrise, and overhead hung the wide, solemn disk of the Earth, bright enough to read by, big as a huge, drifting balloon.
Mount Hadley is thrust into the dry Sea of Serenity like an arrowhead piercing a heart. Like all the Moon’s surface it is bare rock, and the tumbled mountain ranges that lie behind it are like nothing on the face of the Earth. Templin stared around curiously, remembering how it had seemed when that first adventuring flight had landed there. Then he loped over the pitted rock after Culver’s swollen pressure suit.
Culver touched a key ring inset in the rocket’s airlock, and the door swung open. They scrambled aboard, closed the outer door, and Culver touched a valve that flooded the lock with air. Then they opened the inner door and took off their pressure suits.