now.
No; there was someone who was definitely not amused. He became uncomfortably aware that Miss Morley was trying to catch his eye. Recalling his duties as skipper, he turned toward her and gave her a reassuring but rather strained smile.
She did not return it; if anything, her expression became even more forbidding. Slowly and quite deliberately, she looked at Sue Wilkins and then back at him.
There was no need for words. She had said, as clearly as if she had shouted it at the top of her voice: “I know what you've been doing, back there in the air lock.”
Pat felt his face flame with indignation, the righteous indignation of a man who had been unjustly accused. For a moment he sat frozen in his seat, while the blood pounded in his cheeks. Then he muttered to himself: “I'll show the old bitch.”
He rose to his feet, gave Miss Morley a smile of poisonous sweetness, and said just loudly enough for her to hear: “Miss Wilkins! I think we've forgotten something. Will you come back to the air lock?”
As the door closed behind them once more, interrupting the narration of an incident that threw the gravest possible doubts upon the paternity of the Duke of St. Albans, Sue Wilkins looked at him in puzzled surprise.
“Did you see that?” he said, still boiling.
“See what?”
“Miss Morley—”
“Oh,” interrupted Sue, “don't worry about her, poor thing. She's been eying you ever since we left the Base. You know what her trouble is.”
“What?” asked Pat, already uncomfortably sure of the answer.
“I suppose you could call it ingrowing virginity. It's a common complaint, and the symptoms are always the same. There's only one cure for it.”
The ways of love are strange and tortuous. Only ten minutes ago, Pat and Sue had left the air lock together, mutually agreed to remain in a state of chaste affection. But now the improbable combination of Miss Morley and Nell Gwyn, and the feeling that one might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb-as well as, perhaps, the instinctive knowledge of their bodies that, in the long run, love was the only defense against death—had combined to overwhelm them. For a moment they stood motionless in the tiny, cluttered space of the galley; then, neither knowing who moved first, they were in each other's arms.
Sue had time to whisper only one phrase before Pat's lips silenced her.
“Not here,” she whispered, “in the palace!”
CHAPTER 13
Chief Engineer Lawrence stared into the faintly glowing screen, trying to read its message. Like all engineers and scientists, he had spent an appreciable fraction of his life looking at the images painted by speeding electrons, recording events too large or too small, too bright or too faint, for human eyes to see. It was more than a hundred years since the cathode-ray tube had placed the invisible world firmly in Man's grasp; already he had forgotten that it had ever been beyond his reach.
Two hundred meters away, according to the infrared scanner, a patch of slightly greater warmth was lying on the face of this dusty desert. It was almost perfectly circular, and quite isolated; there were no other sources of heat in the entire field of view. Though it was much smaller than the spot that Lawson had photographed from Lagrange, it was in the right area. There could be little doubt that it was the same thing.
There was no proof, however, that it was what they were looking for. It could have several explanations; perhaps it marked the site of an isolated peak, jutting up from the depths almost to the surface of the Sea. There was only one way to find out.
“You stay here,” said Lawrence . “I'll go forward on Duster One. Tell me when I'm at the exact center of the spot.”
“D'you think it will be dangerous?”
“It's not very likely, but there's no point in us both taking a risk.”
Slowly, Duster One glided across to that enigmatically glowing patch—so obvious to the infrared scanner, yet wholly invisible to the eye.
“A little to the left,” Tom ordered. “Another few meters-you're nearly there—whoa!”
Lawrence stared at the gray dust upon which his vehicle was floating. At first sight, it seemed as featureless as any other portion of the Sea; then, as he looked more closely, he saw something that raised the goose-pimples on his skin.
When examined very carefully, as he was examining it now, the dust showed an extremely fine pepper-and- salt pattern. That pattern was moving; the surface of the Sea was creeping very slowly toward him, as if blown by an invisible wind.
Lawrence did not like it at all. On the Moon, one learned to be wary of the abnormal and unexplained; it usually meant that something was wrong—or soon would be. This slowly crawling dust was both uncanny and disturbing. If a boat had sunk here once already, anything as small as a ski might be in even greater danger.
“Better keep away,” he advised Duster Two. “There's something odd here—I don't understand it.” Carefully, he described the phenomenon to Lawson, who thought it over and answered almost at once: “You say it looks like a fountain in the dust? That's exactly what it is. We already know there's a source of heat here. It's powerful enough to stir up a convection current.”
“What could do that? It can't be Selene.”
He felt a wave of disappointment sweep over him. It was all a wild-goose chase, as he had feared from the beginning. Some pocket of radioactivity, or an outburst of hot gases released by the quake, had fooled their instruments and dragged them to this desolate spot. And the sooner they left it the better; it might still be dangerous.
“Just a minute,” said Tom. “A vehicle with a fair amount of machinery and twenty-two passengers—that must produce a good deal of heat. Three or four kilowatts, at least. If this dust is in equilibrium, that might be enough to start a fountain.”
Lawrence thought this was very unlikely, but he was now willing to grasp at the slimmest straw. He picked up the thin metal probe, and thrust it vertically into the dust. At first it penetrated with almost no resistance, but as the telescopic extensions added to its length, it became harder and harder to move. By the time he had the full twenty meters out, it needed all his strength to push it downward.
The upper end of the probe disappeared into the dust; he had hit nothing—but he had scarcely expected to succeed on this first attempt. He would have to do the job scientifically and lay out a search pattern.
After a few minutes of cruising back and forth, he had crisscrossed the area with parallel bands of white tape, five meters apart. Like an old-time farmer planting potatoes, he started to move along the first of the tapes, driving his probe into the dust. It was a slow job, for it had to be done conscientiously. He was like a blind man, feeling in the dark with a thin, flexible wand. If what he sought was beyond the reach of his wand, he would have to think of something else. But he would deal with that problem when he came to it.
He had been searching for about ten minutes when he became careless. It required both hands to operate the probe, especially when it neared the limit of its extension. He was pushing with all his strength, leaning over the edge of the ski, when he slipped and fell headlong into the dust.
Pat was conscious of the changed atmosphere as soon as he emerged from the air lock. The reading from The Orange and the Apple had finished some time ago, and a heated argument was now in progress. It stopped when he walked into the cabin, and there was an embarrassing silence while he surveyed the scene. Some of the passengers looked at him out of the corners of their eyes, while the others pretended he wasn't there.
“Well, Commodore,” he said, “what's the trouble?”
“There's a feeling,” Hansteen answered, “that we're not doing all we could to get out. I've explained that we
