Culver flicked on a communicator and spoke into it briefly. He made four or five calls to different stations on the intercom set, then turned it off. “They’ll all be here in about five minutes,” he reported,
“Okay,” said Templin. He pointed to a map on the wall behind Culver. “What’s that?” he asked.
Culver turned. “That’s the mine and environs, Temp. Right here—” he placed his finger on the map—“is the living quarters and administration building, where we are. Here’s the entrance to the shafts. Power plant—that’s where the solar collectors are. You know we pick up sunlight on parabolic mirrors, focus it on a heat exchanger and use it to generate electricity. This over here is the oxygen plant.”
“You mean, we make our own oxygen?”
“Well, sort of. There’s a lot of quartz on the Moon’s surface, and that’s silicon dioxide, as you ought to know. We electrolyze it and snatch out the oxygen.”
Templin nodded. “What about this marking up on top of the map?”
Culver grinned. “That’s our pride and joy here, Temp. It’s an old Loonie city. Heaven knows how old—it’s all run down into the ground now. Must be a million years old, maybe, but nobody knows for sure. But the Lunarians, whoever they were, really built for keeps—some of the buildings are still standing. Want to go over and take a look at it later?”
Templin hesitated. “No, not today,” he said regretfully. “That’s pleasure, and pleasure comes later.”
There was a knock on the door. Culver yelled, “Come in,” and it opened. A middle-aged, worried-looking man came in.
Culver introduced him. “Sam Bligh,” he said; “Sam’s our power engineer.”
Templin shook hands with Bligh, then with half a dozen other men who followed him through the door. When all were gathered he stood up and spoke to them.
“My name’s Templin,” he said. “I’m going to be running this project for a while. I didn’t ask for the job, and I don’t want it, but I seem to be stuck with it. The sooner we begin producing, the sooner you’ll get rid of me.” He looked around. “Now, one at a time,” he said. “I want to hear your troubles…”
The conference lasted about an hour. Then Templin said his piece. “There’s going to be some ore brought out in the next twenty-four hours,” he said. “I don’t care what we have to do to do it, but we are going to ship at least one shipload of the stuff this week. And two shiploads next week, and three the week after, until we’re up to quota. That clear?” He looked around the room. The men in it nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s get going.”
3
TWENTY-FOUR hours later, according to the big Terrestrial clock that hung in the ebony sky, Templin stood space-suited at the portal of the mine and watched the first monocar-load of uranium ore come out. On the ground at his feet was a flat black box, the size of an overnight bag. When the hoist crews had unloaded the glittering fragments of ore and stowed them in the hold of a freight rocket, Templin said over the radio: “Hold it up, Culver; don’t send the monorail back down. I want to take another look at Gallery Eight.”
Culver, supervising the unloading, said, “Sure, Temp; I’ll tag along with you.” He sprang lightly into the monorail. Templin, picking up the black box, followed and they braced themselves for the acceleration.
As the car picked up speed, they hurtled down the winding mine tunnels, lighted only by the headlights of the car itself. Though there was no air to carry sound, they could feel the vibration of the giant wheels on the single metal track as a deep, shuddering roar. Then the roar changed pitch as the car’s brakes were set by the braking switch at the end of the line. The car slowed and stopped.
They got off and stepped down the rough-hewn gallery to where eight workmen were half-heartedly trying to clear the rock from the pinned Mark VII digging machine.
They stopped work to look at Templin. Templin said, “Go ahead, boys; we’re just looking around.” He moved toward the Mark VII, Culver following, studying the cave-in. Gallery Eight was seven hundred feet below the surface of the Moon, which meant that, even under the light gravity conditions prevailing on the satellite, there were many millions of tons of rock over their heads.
Frowning, Templin saw that there were strain-cracks on the tunnel walls—deep, long cracks that ran from floor to ceiling. They seemed to radiate from the point where the digging machine had been pinned down.
One of the workmen drifted over, watching Templin curiously. Templin glanced at the man, then turned to Culver. “Take a look at this,” he ordered.
Culver looked indifferently. “Yeah. That’s where the rock cracked and pinned down the machine.”
“Uh-uh.” Templin shook his head. “You’ve got the cart before the horse. Those cracks start at the mining machine. First the machine broke through, then the walls cracked.”
Culver gaped at him through the transparent dome of his pressure suit. “So what?”
Templin grinned, “I don’t know yet,“ he confessed; “but I aim to find out.”
He picked up the case he had been carrying, opened it. Inside was a conglomeration of instruments—dials, meters, what looked like an old-fashioned portable radio, complete with earphones. These Templin disconnected, plugging the earphone lead into a socket on his collar-plate that led to his suit radio.
Culver’s eyes narrowed curiously, then his expression cleared. “Oh, I get it,” he said. “That’s a sound-ranging gadget. You think—”
“I think maybe there’s something wrong below,” Templin cut in. “As I said yesterday, it looks to me as though there’s a rock fault underneath here. That machine broke through the floor of the tunnel. When you consider how light it is, here on the Moon, that means that there was one damn thin shell of rock underneath it. Or else—well, I don’t know what else it could be.”
Culver laughed. “You’d better start thinking of something, Temp. That floor was solid; I know, because I handled the drilling on this gallery, and I was pretty careful not to let the Mark Seven come in until I’d sound-ranged the rock myself. Look—I’ve got the graphs back in the office. Come back and I’ll show them to you.”
Templin hesitated, then shook his head. “You might have made a mistake, Culver. I—I might as well tell you, I checked up on you. I looked over the sound-ranging reports last night. According to them, it’s solid rock, all right—but still and all, the Mark Seven crashed through.” He bent down, flipped the starting switch on his detection device. “Anyway, this will settle the question once and for all.”
INSIDE THE satchel-like instrument, an electronic oscillator began sending out a steady beat, which was picked up by a sound-reflector and beamed out in a straight line. An electric “ear” in the machine listened for echoes, timed them against the sending impulse and in that way was able to locate very accurately the distance and direction of any flaw in the rock surrounding them.
The machine was sensitive enough to tell the difference between dry and oil-bearing strata of sand—it had been used for that work on Earth. And for it to recognize a cave in the solid rock of the Moon was child’s play. So simple, and so hard to mistake, that Templin avoided the question of how the first reports, based on Culver’s tests, could have been wrong. The machine could not be mistaken, Templin knew. Could the men who operated it have been treacherous?
Templin pointed the reflector of the instrument at the rock under the trapped Mark VII and reached for the control that would permit him to listen in on the tell-tale echoes from below.