took his arm and shook it urgently. “Sir Josiah, what is troubling you?”
He lifted his face from his hands. His expression was a mixture of anger and despair, and his eyes were pinpoints of blue in Moon shadows. “Ned, we are done for. Done for! To have come so far, to have endured so much, only to be betrayed by the folly of that pompous Danish idiot!”
“…To which Dane do you refer?” I asked cautiously.
“Hansen, of course, and his absurd breakfast-egg theory of the lunar shape. Look at it!” He shook a fist at the shattered landscape which loomed over us. “It’s as clear as day that the Moon is a perfect sphere after all, that the mass must be uniformly distributed, that the backside of the wretched world must be as devoid of air as the face!”
I stared up at the lunar desolation. There were sparkles and glints deep in the shadow of the fragments of the shattered land, showing the possibility of granite, perhaps, or quartz. Traveller’s sudden loss of spirit, I decided, stemmed not from despair or fear, but from a feeling of betrayal—by the Moon itself, by the Creator for having the temerity to design a world so unsuited to Traveller’s purposes, and even by this poor chap Hansen, who, of the three, was surely the most blameless!
Traveller lay back in his couch and stared up at the Moon, muttering.
I was bewildered. Even if the lunar landing was a fruitless exercise, I reflected, we had no choice but to continue with it; and only Traveller could bring our journey to a successful conclusion. But it was clear that Traveller had retreated into himself, and was, at this moment, quite incapable of piloting the craft.
I had to do something, or we should all be killed after all.
With some hesitation I reached out and touched his arm. “Sir Josiah, not long ago you accused me of lacking imagination. Now I feel obliged to identify the same fault in yourself. Was it not you who explained that, come success or failure, life or death, we should be in for some terrific fun?”
His face was heavily scored by Moon shadows, and for the first time since I had met him he looked his true age. He said quietly, “I had banked on Hansen’s crackpot theories, Ned. With the banishment of my hopes of finding water, I find little fun in the prospect of a certain death.”
He sounded old, frail, frightened and surprisingly vulnerable; I felt privileged to see behind the bluff mask to the true man. But at this moment I needed the old Traveller, the wild, the supremely confident, the arrogant!
I pointed above my head. “Then, sir, at least you have surely not lost your wonder! Look at that crater floor above us. We have discovered the mightiest feature on the Moon—a fitting monument to your achievements—and, if our story is ever told by future generations, they shall surely name it after the great Josiah Traveller!”
He looked vaguely interested at that, and he raised his beak of a platinum nose to the silver landscape. “Traveller Crater. Perhaps. No doubt some bastardized Latin version will be used.”
“And,” I said, “think of the impact which must have caused such a monstrous scar. It must have come close to splitting the damn Moon in two.”
He stroked his chin and inspected the huge crater with an appraising eye. “And yet it is scarcely possible to envisage a meteorite impact of such a magnitude… No, Ned; I suspect the explanation for that vast feature is still more exotic.”
“What do you mean?”
“Anti-ice! Ned, if that remarkable compound has been discovered on the surface of the Earth, what is to stop it being available on other planets and satellites?
“I envisage a comet-like body falling in to the Solar System, perhaps from the stars, largely or wholly composed of anti-ice. As the Sun’s heat touches it I imagine little pockets of the ice exploding, and the wretched body being twisted and spun this way and that.
“At last, though, blazing and glowing, it falls close to the Earth—only to find the inert form of Earth’s patient companion in its way.
“The detonation is astounding—as you say, almost enough to split the Moon in two. Crater walls roll across the tortured surface like waves across a sea. And one must imagine millions of tons of pulverized lunar rock and dust being hurled into space—with fragments of the original anti-ice comet embedded within it. And so, perhaps, some fragments reached even the surface of the Earth itself.”
I stared up at that desolate craterscape and shivered, imagining it superimposed on a map of Europe. “Then we must be grateful to the Moon that the comet never reached Earth, Sir Josiah.”
“Indeed.”
“And do you suppose the wretched Professor Hansen could have been right after all? Could there have been an air-covered area of the Moon—perhaps inhabited, but now laid waste by the anti-ice explosion?”
He shook his head, a little wistfully. “No, lad; I fear the good Dane was wrong all the way; for the geometry of the Moon itself does not support his egg-shape theory. Our chances of finding the water we need to save our lives remain negligible.”
In desperation I turned my face up to the darkling landscape over which we flew, inverted. So my diplomatic skills had succeeded in bringing Traveller out of his funk—but not to the extent that he might lift a finger to save our lives.
…And then I noticed once more, twinkling like a hundred Bethlehem stars, bright, glassy sparkles amid the tumbled lunar mountains. I cried out and pointed. “Traveller! Before you sink completely into despair, look above you. What do you see, shining in the last of the Sun’s rays?”
Again he rubbed his chin, but he looked closely. “It could be nothing, lad,” he said gently. “Outcroppings of quartz or feldspar—”
“But it could be water, frozen pools of it shining in the sunlight!”
He turned to me almost kindly, and I sensed he was about to launch into an extended lecture on the source of my latest misapprehension—and then, like the reappearance of the Sun from a cloudbank, his face lit up with determination. “By God, Ned, you could be right. Who knows? And it’s certain we will never find out if we let ourselves fall helplessly to that tumbled surface. Enough of this! We have a world to conquer.” And he grabbed his stovepipe hat out of the air and screwed it down over his cranium.
I was filled with elation. I said, “Will you resume the plan you have written in your little book?”
He looked down at the notebook still tied to his knee. “What, this? I have moped my way into too great a deviance from the schedule, I fear.” He tore the book from his knee and hurled it, spinning, into the shadows of the Bridge. “It is too late for calculation. Now we must pilot the
And he hauled back his levers; the anti-ice rockets roared, and I was hurled bodily to the deck.
The next several minutes were a nightmarish blur. Traveller kept the rockets shouting, and the deck of the Bridge—an uneven series of riveted plates—pressed into my face and chest. I could do nothing but cling to whatever purchase I could find—like the iron pillars which supported Traveller’s couch—and reflect that it was typical of Traveller to neglect utterly the well-being of those he was trying to save. Surely a delay of a few seconds to allow me to regain my seat in the Cabin would not have mattered one way or the other.
After some minutes the quality of the Moonlight seemed to change. The shadow of my head shifted and lengthened across the deck; and at last I was plunged into a darkness broken only by the dim glow of Traveller’s Ruhmkorff coils. I surmised that the ship had been turned around, so that our nose now pointed away from the Moon.
Then, blessed relief!—the motors reduced. Though the rockets continued to fire at a subdued level, it was as if a vast weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I cautiously pushed my face away from the floor, got to my hands and knees, and then to my feet—and surprised myself to find I was standing!
“Sir Josiah! We are no longer floating…”
He lay in his couch, lightly playing his control levers. “Oh, hullo, Ned; I’d quite forgotten you were there. No, we are no longer in free fall. I decided that boldness was the best course of action. So I launched us directly at the lunar surface, from which we were in any event a mere few thousand miles—”
“I was quite crushed against the plates.”
He looked at me in some surprise. “Were you? But the thrust was only a little more than a terrestrial gravity.” His look turned to sternness. “You have become weakened by the floating condition,” he said. “I warned you that you should maintain your exercise regime, as I have done; it is a wonder your bones, reduced to brittleness, did not crumble to dust.”
I framed a reply, which would have touched on the reasons for my abandonment of his routine—namely the
