The seconds ticked off, lengthening imperceptibly into minutes. Dave Johnson wondered if he dare take a quick look at his watch. He decided against it. He decided that his judgment of time had gone haywire. With beating hearts they waited. They waited, listening to the purring motors. They waited tensely for a long time before one of them spoke. Yolantis said, “I’m going to take a look, fellers.”
They heard him move. If the motors fired now, Chris would be pulverized—literally pulverized, “Thirty-one minutes,” they heard him mutter. Then Yolantis shouted out in terror. They found him at the main viewing-port. The ship was over clear ocean. They could see waves breaking, perhaps five thousand feet below. Harrison’s face was deathly pale. “The controls are locked,” he whispered. “The transmission from Earth must have gone all to hell. We’re on a downward glide.”
Should it be a quick death or a slow one? If they went in with the ship, they’d plummet instantly to the ocean bottom. If they launched the safety capsule, they’d probably be all right for a while. If the ocean was water, as it seemed to be, the capsule would float. They might be able to last out for a week or two. But it would come to exactly the same thing in the end. They had about five minutes to decide.
Perhaps they still had time to contact Earth? Pray to God that Earth could shift the controls at the very last minute.
Agent 38 watched the U.F.O. fall. He saw a small object, a capsule fastened to a parachute, break loose from it. Once he had found the correct transmission wave band and the right code, the U.F.O. had been almost absurdly easy to bring down. Exultantly, Agent 38 churned his huge whalelike body through the sea, the great transmitter in his head flashing electrical energy into the water.
There was very little salt in the water and his signals would travel a long way. Others would receive them and would come quickly to help him. Because of the eternal high cloud-cover, Agent 38 had never seen anything outside his planet. As he searched the waters methodically and rapidly, he found himself joyously wondering just what strange things he would find inside the capsule.
The Martians
The NASA budget in 1963 was something over 3.5 billion dollars. Twenty years later it was ten times more. Results justified the increase, not so much in spin-off to industry as in space itself. In the early days, a few prophets of disaster had openly stated their opinion, to the effect that no good of any kind would come out of the space program. By 1984 these dismal fellows had been given the lie. They were derided now as classic examples of fainthearted conservatism, the lack of broad vision which always seems to afflict the human species in some degree.
The first lunar mission achieved its objectives in 1973, only three years behind the original schedule. There were plenty of good reasons for this stretch-out. To begin with, the dust was really nasty stuff. It climbed all over you, head to toe, if you were unlucky enough to step into it. It climbed all over your equipment, into every crevice more than a few microns in size. The dust was like a liquid rising in a mass of capillary tubes, except that the forces were electrostatic, not surface tension. Unfortunately, the Moon has a lot of dust, so not too many places could be found where the first landing module might be safely set down. Indeed, the first pictures from the old Ranger project already showed only a few areas that appeared likely to be more or less free of dust. Later data from soft landings, some of them very soft, confirmed this. However, there were a few such areas, as it finally proved when the first men stepped gingerly out from their cabin. Everywhere around them was flat, hard ground, seemingly of dried-out mud.
The first landing didn’t do much more than that. Down onto the deck, a judicious peek outside, then quickly back to the lunar-orbit rendezvous. Although it had cost the best part of one hundred billion bucks, hardly anybody now doubted that it had been well worthwhile. There was the usual bitching, it was true, from the high-energy physicists, who were having difficulty in acquiring a single lone billion, but once high-energy physics moved under the control of NASA that particular moan soon died away. Getting all funds for science under a single agency began to seem more and more like a good idea. It kept things in perspective and in proportion. It was tidy. The N.S.F. was also moved over.
Since glamour was now off the gingerbread, the second lunar mission had perforce to make up in effectiveness what it lacked in sensationalism. It went to the Moon to work, to survey, to dig, and to probe. The crew on this occasion included both a scientist-astronaut and a scientist-passenger. Ironically enough, the second landing turned out far more sensationally than the first. The disaster was noticed by the men in the rendezvous vehicle. Everything was quite normal for the first two days, they said, then suddenly the landing station was gone. In its place a new crater had appeared about three hundred yards in diameter. The precise mechanism of the disaster was unclear at the time, for it must have happened while the rendezvous vehicle was orbiting on the far side of the Moon. Later research showed, however, that the second landing party had been the unfortunate victims of what came to be known as a “soda squirt.”
For a while there was discussion of cutting back the whole space program. But at length it was decided to press ahead with still greater vigor, in tribute to the space heroes, blown to perdition in some still-unexplained fashion.
Later missions very naturally proceeded with all due caution. It was discovered that ice lay below the dust and mud of the immediate surface of the Moon. There were huge glaciers shielded from space by the thin skin of dust. Wherever the skin was scraped away, the ice melted off into space very quickly. The temperature of the ice was found to increase with depth, which was natural, of course. This meant there must be liquid water low enough down. The water must be under pressure, a pressure generated by the weight of the overlying ice. Given any crack or hole in the solid glacier and, bingo, the water would stream explosively upward like an oil gusher. This was exactly what happened at places where the ice became exposed. More and more of the ice evaporated into space, until what remained became too thin to withstand the pressure of the liquid water below. So up came the water in a huge soda squirt. The water didn’t settle back, it simply fizzed off into space.
These events were watched by the later expeditions from a safe distance. The precaution was necessary, for the rush of the water was extremely violent. Usually it shot out at a speed of about one mile per second, over three thousand miles per hour, sufficient to blow a small crater. It was now easily understood how the hitherto mysterious chains of small craters had been formed; they were strung along the courses of underground rivers, they were the places where the water had managed to punch through to the surface. In the gaunt, gray world of the Moon, the emergence of billions of tons of water was a fantastic and wonderful event, not at all like a terrestrial geyser. It was the colors you were aware of, a blaze of color that filled the whole sky.
The next step was to use the Moon for developing the techniques needed in the conquest of Mars. A permanent lunar laboratory was established. The essence of the business was to achieve self-sufficiency with the aid of regenerative life-support systems. For energy in its grosser forms, an interesting multistage method was used. For a start, a compact nuclear reactor was transported from Earth. This was used to power small diameter boreholes through the ice. So long as the water was allowed up only in small quantities, through a carefully constructed pipe, the flow could be kept under control. The critical thing was pressure at the surface. Instead of the water being permitted to spurt out freely into a vacuum, the pressure was taken down in several stages, in each of which the speed of the water was adjusted to match a set of turbines. Getting everything right in the beginning was very tricky indeed. However, once the difficulties were past, abundant energy was available in practically a permanent supply. Technically it was hydroelectric power, but on the Moon the water flowed uphill, not downhill, as on the Earth.