Johnny grunted. «Towers, what a prime stinker you are. You spoke of my family. I'd rather see them dead than living under a two-bit Napoleon like you. Now go away – I've got some thinking to do.»
Towers switched off.
Johnny got out his film again. It seemed no darker but it reminded him forcibly that time was running out. He was hungry and thirsty – and he could not stay awake forever. It took four days to get a ship up from Earth; he could not expect rescue any sooner. And he wouldn't last four days – once the darkening spread past the red line he was a goner.
His only chance was to wreck the bombs beyond repair, and get out – before that film got much darker.
He thought about ways, then got busy. He hung a weight on the sling, tied a line to it. If Towers blasted the door, he hoped to jerk the rig loose before he died.
There was a simple, though arduous, way to wreck the bombs beyond any capacity of Moon Base to repair them. The heart of each was two hemispheres of plutonium, their flat surface polished smooth to permit perfect contact when slapped together. Anything less would prevent the chain reaction on which atomic explosion depended.
Johnny started taking apart one of the bombs.
He had to bash off four lugs, then break the glass envelope around the inner assembly. Aside from that the bomb came apart easily. At last he had in front of him two gleaming, mirror-perfect half globes.
A blow with the hammer – and one was no longer perfect. Another blow and the second cracked like glass; he had trapped its crystalline structure just right.
Hours later, dead tired, he went back to the armed bomb. Forcing himself to steady down, with extreme care he disarmed it. Shortly its silvery hemispheres too were useless. There was no longer a usable bomb in the room – but huge fortunes in the most valuable, most poisonous, and most deadly metal in the known world were spread around the floor.
Johnny looked at the deadly stuff. «Into your suit and out of here, son,» he said aloud. «I wonder what Towers will say?»
He walked toward the rack, intending to hang up the hammer. As he passed, the Geiger counter chattered wildly.
Plutonium hardly affects a Geiger counter; secondary infection from plutonium does. Johnny looked at the hammer, then held it closer to the Geiger counter. The counter screamed.
Johnny tossed it hastily away and started back toward his suit.
As he passed the counter it chattered again. He stopped short.
He pushed one hand close to the counter. Its clicking picked up to a steady roar. Without moving he reached into his pocket and took out his exposure film.
It was dead black from end to end.
III
Plutonium taken into the body moves quickly to bone marrow. Nothing can be done; the victim is finished. Neutrons from it smash through the body, ionizing tissue, transmuting atoms into radioactive isotopes, destroying and killing. The fatal dose is unbelievably small; a mass a tenth the size of a grain of table salt is more than enough – a dose small enough to enter through the tiniest scratch. During the historic «Manhattan Project» immediate high amputation was considered the only possible first-aid measure.
Johnny knew all this but it no longer disturbed him. He sat on the floor, smoking a hoarded cigarette, and thinking. The events of his long watch were running through his mind.
He blew a puff of smoke at the Geiger counter and smiled without humor to hear it chatter more loudly. By now even his breath was «hot» – carbon-14, he supposed, exhaled from his blood stream as carbon dioxide. It did not matter.
There was no longer any point in surrendering, nor would he give Towers the satisfaction – he would finish out this watch right here. Besides, by keeping up the bluff that one bomb was ready to blow, he could stop them from capturing the raw material from which bombs were made. That might be important in the long run.
He accepted, without surprise, the fact that he was not unhappy. There was a sweetness about having no further worries of any sort. He did not hurt, he was not uncomfortable, he was no longer even hungry. Physically he still felt fine and his mind was at peace. He was dead – he knew that he was dead; yet for a time he was able to walk and breathe and see and feel.
He was not even lonesome. He was not alone; there were comrades with him – the boy with his finger in the dike, Colonel Bowie, too ill to move but insisting that he be carried across the line, the dying Captain of the
And of course there was Edith. She was the only one he was aware of. Johnny wished that he could see her face more clearly. Was she angry? Or proud and happy?
Proud though unhappy – he could see her better now and even feel her hand. He held very still.
Presently his cigarette burned down to his fingers. He took a final puff, blew it at the Geiger counter, and put it out. It was his last. He gathered several butts and fashioned a roll-your-own with a bit of paper found in a pocket. He lit it carefully and settled back to wait for Edith to show up again. He was very happy.
He was still propped against the bomb case, the last of his salvaged cigarettes cold at his side, when the speaker called out again. «Johnny? Hey, Johnny! Can you hear me? This is Kelly. It's all over. The
When they opened the outer door, the first man in carried a Geiger counter in front of him on the end of a long pole. He stopped at the threshold and backed out hastily. «Hey, chief!» he called. «Better get some handling equipment – uh, and a lead coffin, too.»
«Four days it took the little ship and her escort to reach Earth. Four days while all of Earth's people awaited her arrival. For ninety-eight hours all commercial programs were off television; instead there was an endless dirge – the Dead March from Saul, the Valhalla theme, Going Home, the Patrol's own Landing Orbit.
«The nine ships landed at Chicago Port. A drone tractor removed the casket from the small ship; the ship was then refueled and blasted off in an escape trajectory, thrown away into outer space, never again to be used for a lesser purpose.
«The tractor progressed to the Illinois town where Lieutenant Dahlquist had been born, while the dirge continued. There it placed the casket on a pedestal, inside a barrier marking the distance of safe approach. Space marines, arms reversed and heads bowed, stood guard around it; the crowds stayed outside this circle. And still the dirge continued.
«When enough time had passed, long, long after the heaped flowers had withered, the lead casket was enclosed in marble, just as you see it today.»
Gentlemen, Be Seated
It takes both agoraphobes and claustrophobes to colonize the Moon. Or make it agoraphiles and claustrophiles, for the men who go out into space had better not have phobias. If anything on a planet, in a planet, or in the empty reaches around the planets can frighten a man, he should stick to Mother Earth. A man who would make his living away from
On my second trip to Luna City I went over to Richardson Observatory both to see the Big Eye and to pick up a story to pay for my vacation. I flashed my Journalists' Guild card, sweet-talked a bit, and ended with the paymaster showing me around. We went out the north tunnel, which was then being bored to the site of the projected coronascope.
It was a dull trip – climb on a scooter, ride down a completely featureless tunnel, climb off and go through an airlock, get on another scooter and do it all over again. Mr. Knowles filled in with sales talk. «This is temporary,» he explained. «When we get the second tunnel dug, we'll cross-connect, take out the airlocks, put a northbound slidewalk in this one, a southbound slidewalk in the other one, and you'll make the trip in less than three minutes. Just like Luna City – or Manhattan.»
