Culver, watching Templin idly, saw the abrupt beginnings of a commotion behind him. The eight workmen who were clustered around the Mark VII suddenly dropped their tools and began to stampede toward them, puffy arms waving wildly and soundlessly.
“What the devil!” ejaculated Culver. Templin glanced up.
Then they felt it, too. Through the soles of their metal-shod feet they felt a growing vibration in the rock. Something was happening—something bad. They paused a second, then the workmen in their panicky flight came within range of their suit radios and they heard the words, “Cave-in!”
Templin straightened up. Ominously, the cracks in the wall were widening; there was a shuddering uneasiness in the feel of the rock floor beneath them that could mean only one thing. Somehow, the rock-slide that had wrecked the Mark VII earlier was being repeated. Somewhere beneath their feet a hole in the rock was being filled—and it might well be their bodies that would fill it.
Cursing, Templin jumped aside to let the panic-stricken workmen dash by. Then, half-dragging the paralyzed Culver, he leaped for the monorail car to the surface. They were the last ones on, and they were just barely in time. The stampeding miners had touched the starting lever, and the monorail began to pick up speed under them as they scrambled aboard.
Looking dazedly behind as the monorail sped upward, Templin saw the roof of the tunnel shiver crazily, then drop down, obliterating the wrecked Mark VII from sight. Luckily, the cave-in spread no farther, but it was a frightful spectacle, that soundless, gigantic fall of rock.
And all the more so because, just as the roof came down on the digging machine, Templin saw a figure in pressure suit and opaque miner’s helmet dash from the back of the machine to a sheltering cranny in the gallery wall. The man was trapped; even if there had been a way to stop the monorail and go back for a rescue try, there was no way of getting to him, through the thousands of cubic yards of rock that fell between, in time to save a life…
UP IN THE office, Templin was a caged tiger, raging as he paced back and forth. His stride was a ludicrous slow-motion shamble in the light gravity, but there was nothing ludicrous about his livid face.
He stopped and whirled on Culver. “Eight men down in that pit—and only seven of them got out! One of our men killed—half a million dollars worth of equipment buried—and why? Because some fool okayed the digging of a shaft directly over an underground cave!”
Culver shifted uncomfortably. “Wait a second, Temp,” he begged. “I swear to you, there wasn’t any cave there! Take a look at the sound-ranger graphs yourself.”
Templin dragged in viciously on a cigarette. He exhaled a sharply cut-off plume of smoke, and when he answered his voice was under control again. “You’re right enough, Culver,” he said. “I’ve looked at the things. Only—there was a cave there, or else the miner wouldn’t have fallen through. And how do you explain that?”
The door to the office opened and the personnel clerk stuck a worried head in. “I checked the rosters, Mr. Templin,” he said.
Templin’s jaw tensed in anticipation. “Who was missing?” he asked.
“That’s the trouble, sir; no one is missing!”
“What!” Templin stared. “Look, Henkins, don’t talk through your hat. There were eight miners down in that pit. Only seven came out. I saw one of them left behind, and there isn’t a doubt in the world that he’s still there dead. Who is it?”
The clerk said defensively, “I’m sorry, Mr. Templin. There are four men in the powerplant, five guards patrolling the shaft and area and two men on liberty at Tycho City. Every one of them is checked and accounted for. Everybody else is right here in the building.” He went on hastily, before Templin could explode: “But I took the liberty of talking to one of the miners who was down there with you, Mr. Templin. Like you, he said there were eight of them. But one man, he said, wasn’t part of the regular crew. He didn’t know who the odd man was. In fact—” Henkins hesitated—“he thought it was you!”
“Me? Oh, for the good Lord’s sake!” Templin glared disgustedly. “Look, Henkins, I don’t care what your friend says—that man was part of the regular crew. At least he was a miner from this project—he had an opaque miner’s helmet on; I saw it myself. You find out who he was, and don’t come back here until you know.”
“Yes, Mr. Templin,” said Henkins despairingly, and he closed the door gently behind him.
Templin threw away his cigarette. “I would give five years’ pay,” he said moodily, “to be back on Mercury now. There I didn’t have any troubles. All I had to worry about was keeping from falling into lava pits, and staying within sight of the ship.”
Culver leaned back against the steel wall of the office. “Sounds fun,” he said.
A buzzer sounded. Wearily Templin spoke into the teletone on his desk. “Hello, hello,” he growled.
The voice that came out was the worried voice of Sam Bligh. It said, “Trouble, Templin. Something’s happened to our energy reserves. The power leads are short-circuited. Can’t tell what caused it yet—but it looks like sabotage.”
THE GIANT parabolic mirrors were motionless as Culver and Templin approached them, pointed straight at the wide disk of the Earth hanging overhead. The two men glanced at them in passing, and hastened on to the low-roofed power building. Bligh was waiting for them inside. With a sweep of his arm he indicated the row of power meters that banked the wall.
“Look!” he said. “Every power pack we had in reserve—out. There isn’t a watt of power in the project, except what’s in the operating condensers.” Templin followed the direction of his gesture, and saw that the needle on each meter rested against the “zero” pin.
“What happened?” Templin demanded.
Bligh shrugged helplessly. “See for yourself,” he said. He pointed to a window looking down on the generating equipment buried beneath the power shack itself. “Those square contraptions on the right are the mercury-laminate power packs. The leads go from the generators to them; then we tap the packs for power as we need it. Somehow the leads were cut about five minutes ago. Right there.”
Templin saw where the heavy insulated cables had been chopped off just at the mixing box that led to the packs. He looked at it for a long moment, eyes grim. “Sabotage. You’re right, Bligh—that couldn’t be an accident. Who was in here?”
Bligh shook his head. “No one—as far as I know. I saw no one. But there wasn’t any special guard; there never is, here. Anyone in the project could have come in and done it.”
Culver cut in, “How long will the power in the condenser last?”
“At our normal rate of use—half a day; if we conserve it—a week. By then the sun will be high enough so that the mirrors will be working again.”
“Working again?” repeated Templin. “But the generators are working now, aren’t they?”
Bligh hesitated. “Well—yes, but there isn’t enough energy available to make much difference. The Moon takes twenty-eight days to revolve, you know—that means we have fourteen days of sunshine. That’s when we get our power. At ‘night’—when the sun’s on the other side—we turn the mirrors on the Earth and pick up some reflected light, but it isn’t enough to help very much.”
Templin’s face was gaunt in concentration. He said, “Order the project to cut down on power. Stretch out our reserves as much as you can, Bligh. Culver—get a crew ready on one of the freight rockets.”
Culver raised his brows. “Where are we going, Temp?”