Templin said, “We’re going to get some more power!”
CULVER SAID tightly over Templin’s shoulder, “You realize, of course, that this is going to get us in serious trouble with the Security Patrol if they find out about it.”
“We’ll try to keep that from happening,” said Templin. “Now don’t bother me for a minute.” His hands raced over the controls of the lumbering freight rocket. Underneath them lay the five-acre crater where they had crash-landed the day before after Olcott’s attack. Templin killed the forward motion of the rocket with the nose jet, brought the nose up and set the ship down gently on the thundering fire of its tail rockets.
“Secure,” he reported. “Are the crew in pressure suits? Good. Get them to work.”
Culver sighed despondently and hurried off, shouting orders to the crew. Templin eased himself into his own suit. A hundred yards away lay the abandoned rocket-launching sites that had devastated a score of cities in the Three-Day War. Templin stepped out of the airlock and hastened after the group of pressure-suited men who were already investigating the ruined installation.
Culver waved to him. His voice over the radio was still disgusted as he said, “There’s the pile, Temp; this is your last chance to back out of this crazy idea.”
“We can’t back out,” Templin told him; “we need power. We can generate power with our own uranium, if we take this atomic pile back with us and start it up again. Maybe it’s illegal, but it’s the only way we can keep the mine going for the next week—and I’m taking the chance.”
“Okay,” said Culver. He gave orders to the men, who began to take the ten-year-old piece of equipment apart. In their ray-proof miners’ suits, they were in no danger from the feeble radioactivity still left after the pile had exploded. But Templin was, and so was Culver; their suits were the lighter surface kind, and they had to keep their distance from the pile itself.
A nuclear-fission pile is an elaborate and clumsy piece of apparatus; it consists of many hundreds of cubes of graphite containing tiny pieces of uranium, stacked together, brick on brick, in the shape of a top. There are cadmium control-strips for checking the speed of the nuclear reaction, delicate instruments that keep tabs on what goes on inside the structure, heavy-metal neutron shields and gamma-ray barriers and enough other items to stock a warehouse.
Looking it over, Culver grumbled: “How the devil can we get that heap of junk into the rocket?”
“We’ll get it in,” promised Templin. He bent down clumsily to pick up a rock, crumbled it in his gauntleted fist. It was like chalk. “Soft,” he said. “Burned up by atomic radiation.”
Culver nodded inside his helmet. “Happened when the pile blew up, during the War.”
“No. It’s like this all over the Moon, as you ought to know by now.” Templin tossed the powdered rock away and brushed it off his space-gauntlets. “There’s something for you to figure out, Culver. I remember reading about it years ago, how the whole surface of the Moon shows that it must have been drenched with atomic rays a couple of thousand years ago. The shape of the craters—the fact that the surface air is all gone—the big cracks in the surface—it all adds up to show that there must have been a terrific atomic explosion here once.”
He glanced again at where the miners were disassembling the pile. “I kind of think,” he said slowly, “that that accounts for a lot of things here on the Moon. For one thing, it might explain what became of the Loonies, after they built their cities—and disappeared.”
Culver said, “You mean that you think the Loonies had atomic power? And—and blew up the Moon with it?”
Templin shrugged, the gesture invisible inside the pressure suit. “Your guess,” he said, “is as good as mine. Meanwhile… here comes the first load of graphite bricks. Let’s give them a hand stowing it in the rocket.”
ONCE THE JOB of setting up the stolen plutonium pile was complete, Templin began to feel as though he could see daylight ahead. There was a moment of hysterical tension when the pile first began to operate with uranium taken from the mine—a split-second of nervous fear as the cadmium safety rods were slowly withdrawn and the atomic fires within the pile began to kindle—but the safety controls still worked perfectly, and Templin drew a great breath of relief. An atomic explosion was bad enough anywhere… but here, in the works of a uranium mine where the ground was honeycombed with veins of raw atomic explosive, it was a thing to produce nightmares.
After two days of operation the power-packs were being charged again and the mine was back in full-scale operation. Culver, seated in the office and looking at the day’s production report, gloated to Templin, “Looks like we’re in the clear now, Temp. Two hundred and fifty kilos of uranium in twenty-four hours—if we can keep that up for a month, maybe Terralune will begin to make some money on this place.”
Templin blew smoke at the white metal ceiling. “Don’t count your dividends before they’re passed,” he advised. “The Mark VII is still out of operation—we won’t be able to start any new shafts until we get a replacement for it, so our production is limited to what we can get out of Gallery Eight. And besides—we took care of our power problem for the time being, all right, but what about taking care of the man who caused it?”
“Man who caused it?” repeated Culver.
“Yeah. Remember what Bligh said—that was sabotage. The leads were short-circuited deliberately.”
“Oh.” Culver’s face fell. “We never found out who the missing miner was, either,” he remembered. “Do you—”
THE TELETONE buzzed, interrupting him. When Templin answered, the voice that came out of the box was crisply efficient. “This is Lieutenant Carmer,” it said. “Stand by for security check.”
“Security check?” said Templin. “What the devil is that?”
The voice laughed grimly. “Tell you in just a moment,” it promised. “Stand by. I’m on my way up.”
The teletone clicked off. Templin faced Culver. “Well?” he demanded. “What is this?”
Culver said placatingly, “It’s just a formality, Temp—at least, it always has been. The Security Patrol sends an officer around every month or so to every outpost on the Moon. All they do is ask a few questions and look to see if you’ve got any war-rocket launching equipment set up. The idea is to make sure that nobody installs rocket projectors to shoot at Earth with, as they did in the Three-Day War.”
“Oh? And what about our plutonium pile?”
Culver said sorrowfully, “That bothers me, a little. But I don’t think we need to worry, because we’ve got the thing in a cave and so far they’ve never looked in the caves.”
“Well,” said Templin, “all right. There’s nothing we can do about it now, anyhow.” He sat down at his desk and awaited his callers.
It only took a minute for the lieutenant to reach the office. But when the door opened Templin sat bolt upright, hardly believing his eyes.
The first man in was a trim, military-looking youth with lieutenant’s bars on his shoulders. And following him, wearing the twin jets of a Security Patrol vice-commander, was the dark, heavy-set man with whom Templin had tangled in Hadley Dome, and whose ship had attacked them on the flight to the mine. Joe Olcott!
4
THE LIEUTENANT closed the door behind his superior officer and marched up to Templin. He dropped an ethergram form on Templin’s desk. “My inspection orders,” he said crisply. “Better look them over and see they’re all right. I take it that you’re the new boss around here.”