Pat found this hard to believe, but he hoped that the Commodore was right. He knew that it was extremely difficult to judge weak accelerations, particularly when one was under stress. Hansteen was the only man aboard who could have had any experience of this; his verdict was probably correct—and was certainly encouraging.
“They may never have felt a thing on the surface,” continued Hansteen, “and they're probably wondering why they can't make contact with us. Are you sure there's nothing we can do about the radio?”
“Quite sure. The whole terminal block's come loose at the end of the cable conduit. There's no way of reaching it from inside the cabin.”
“Well, I suppose that's that. We might as well go back and let Radley try to convert us—if he can.”
Jules had tracked the overcrowded skis for a hundred meters before he realized that they were not as overcrowded as they should have been. They carried seven men—and there had been eight on the site.
He panned swiftly back to the raft, and by the good luck or precognition that separates the brilliant cameraman from the merely adequate one, he arrived there just as Lawrence broke his radio silence.
“C. E. E. calling,” Lawrence said, sounding as tired and frustrated as would any man who had just seen his carefully laid plans demolished. “Sorry for the delay, but as you'll have gathered, we have an emergency. There appears to have been another cave-in; how deep it is, we don't know—but we've lost physical contact with Selene, and she's not answering our radio.
“In case there's another subsidence, I've ordered my men to stand by a few hundred meters away. The danger's very slight-we hardly felt that last tremor—but there's no point in taking chances. I can do everything that's necessary for the moment without any help.
“I'll call again in a few minutes. C. E. E. out.”
With the eyes of millions upon him, Lawrence crouched at the edge of the raft, reassembling the probe with which he had first located the cruiser. He had twenty meters to play with; if she had gone deeper than that, he would have to think of something else.
The rod sank into the dust, moving more and more slowly as it approached the depth where Selene had rested. There was the original mark—fifteen point one five meters—just disappearing through the surface. The probe continued to move, like a lance piercing into the body of the Moon. How much farther? whispered Lawrence to himself, in the murmurous silence of his space suit.
The anticlimax was almost laughable, except that this was no laughing matter. The probe penetrated an extra meter and a half—a distance he could comfortably span without straining his arms.
Far more serious was the fact that Selene had not sunk evenly, as Lawrence discovered after a few additional probings. She was much lower at the stern, being now tilted at an angle of about thirty degrees. That alone was enough to wreck his plan; he had relied upon the caisson making a flush contact with the horizontal roof.
He put that problem aside for the moment; there was a more immediate one. Now that the cruiser's radio was silent-and he had to pray that it was a simple power failure-how could he tell if the people inside were still alive? They would hear his probe, but there was no way in which they could communicate with him.
But of course there was. The easiest and most primitive means of all, which could be so readily overlooked after a century and a half of electronics.
Lawrence got to his feet and called the waiting skis.
“You can come back,” he said. “There's no danger. She only sank a couple of meters.”
He had already forgotten the watching millions. Though his new plan of campaign had still to be drawn up, he was going into action again.
CHAPTER 27
When Pat and the Commodore returned to the cabin, the debate was still going full blast. Radley, who had said so little until now, was certainly making up for lost time. It was as if some secret spring had been touched, or he had been absolved from an oath of secrecy. That was probably the explanation; now that he was convinced that his mission was discovered, he was only too happy to talk about it.
Commodore Hansteen had met many such believers—indeed, it was in sheer self-defense that he had waded through the turgid literature of the subject. The approach was almost always the same. First would be the suggestion that “Surely, Commodore, you've seen some very strange things during your years in space?” Then, when his reply was unsatisfactory, there would be a guarded—and sometimes not so guarded-hint that he was either afraid or unwilling to speak. It was a waste of energy denying the charge; in the eyes of the faithful, that only proved that he was part of the conspiracy.
The other passengers had no such bitter experience to warn them, and Radley was evading their points with effortless ease. Even Schuster, for all his legal training, was unable to pin him into a corner; his efforts were as futile as trying to convince a paranoiac that he was not really being persecuted.
“Does it seem reasonable,” Schuster argued, “that if thousands of scientists know this, not one of them will let the cat out of the bag? You can't keep a secret that big! It would be like trying to hide the Washington Monument !”
“Oh, there have been attempts to reveal the truth,” Radley answered. “But the evidence has a way of being mysteriously destroyed—as well as the men who wanted to reveal it. They can be utterly ruthless when it's necessary.”
“But you said that—they—have been in contact with human beings. Isn't that a contradiction?”
“Not at all. You see, the forces of good and evil are at war in the Universe, just as they are on Earth. Some of the saucer people want to help us, others to exploit us. The two groups have been struggling together for thousands of years. Sometimes the conflict involves Earth; that is how Atlantis was destroyed.”
Hansteen was unable to resist a smile. Atlantis always got into the act sooner or later—or, if not Atlantis, then Lemuria or Mu. They all appealed to the same type of unbalanced, mystery-mongering mentality.
The whole subject had been thoroughly investigated by a group of psychologists during—if Hansteen remembered correctly—the 1970's. They had concluded that around the midtwentieth century a substantial percentage of the population was convinced that the world was about to be destroyed, and that the only hope lay in intervention from space. Having lost faith in themselves, men had sought salvation in the sky.
The flying saucer religion flourished among the lunatic fringe of mankind for almost exactly ten years; then it had abruptly died out, like an epidemic that had run its course. Two factors, the psychologists had decided, were responsible for this: the first was sheer boredom; the second was the International Geophysical Year, which had heralded Man's own entry into space.
In the eighteen months of the IGY, the sky was watched and probed by more instruments, and more trained observers, than in the whole of previous history. If there had been celestial visitors poised above the atmosphere, this concentrated scientific effort would have revealed them. It did nothing of the sort; and when the first manned vehicles started leaving Earth, the flying saucers were still more conspicuous by their absence.
For most men, that settled the matter. The thousands of unidentified flying objects that had been seen over the centuries had some natural cause, and with better understanding of meteorology and astronomy there was no lack of reasonable explanations. As the Age of Space dawned, restoring Man's confidence in his own destiny, the world lost interest in flying saucers.
It is seldom, however, that a religion dies out completely, and a small body of the faithful kept the cult alive with fantastic “revelations,” accounts of meetings with extraterrestrials, and claims of telepathic contacts. Even when, as frequently happened, the current prophets were proved to have faked the evidence, the devotees never wavered. They needed their gods in the sky, and would not be deprived of them.
“You still haven't explained to us,” Mr. Schuster was now saying, “why the saucer people should be after you. What have you done to annoy them?”
“I was getting too close to some of their secrets, so they have used this opportunity to eliminate me.”
“I should have thought they could have found less elaborate ways.”
“It is foolish to imagine that our limited minds can understand their mode of thinking. But this would seem
