Earthlight (Arthur C. Clarke Collection) Page 12

89

  of Wagnall's teleprinter. It was a standard Signals form, but there was one non-standard item about it. It carried the crim­son banner of Priority.

  Wagnall read it aloud, his eyes widening as he did so.

  URGENT TO DIRECTOR PLATO OBSERVATORY DISMANTLE ALL SURFACE INSTRUMENTS AND MOVE ALL DELICATE EQUIPMENT UNDERGROUND COM­MENCING WITH LARGE MIRRORS. RAIL SERVICE SUS­PENDED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. KEEP STAFF UNDERGROUND AS FAR AS POSSIBLE. EMPHASIZE THIS PRECAUTIONARY REPEAT PRECAUTIONARY MEASURE. NO IMMEDIATE DANGER EXPECTED.

  "And that," said Wagnall slowly, "appears to be that. I'm very much afraid my guess was perfectly correct."

  It was the first time that Sadler had ever seen the entire Observatory staff gathered together. Professor Maclaurin stood on the raised dais at the end of the main lounge—the traditional place for announcements, musical recitals, dramatic interludes and other forms of Observatory entertainment. But no one was being entertained now.

  "I fully understand," said Maclaurin bitterly, "what this means to your programs. We can only hope that this move is totally unnecessary, and that we can start work again within a few days. But obviously we can take no chances with our equipment—the five-hundred and the thousand-centimeter mirrors must be got under cover at once. I have no idea what form of trouble is anticipated, but it seems we are in an unfor­tunate position here. If hostilities do break out, I shall signal at once to both Mars and Venus reminding them that this is a scientific institution, that many of their nationals have been honored guests here, and that we are of no conceivable military importance. Now please assemble behind your group leaders, and carry out your instructions as swiftly and efficiently as possible."

  The director walked down from the dais. Small though he was, he seemed still more shrunken now. In that moment, there was no one in the room who did not share his feelings, how­ever much they might have inveighed against him in the past.

  90

  "Is there anything I can do?" asked Sadler, who had been left out of the hastily drawn-up emergency plans.

  "Ever worn a spacesuit?" said Wagnall.

  "No, but I don't mind trying."

  To Sadler's disappointment, the secretary shook his head firmly.

  "Too dangerous—you might get in trouble and there aren't enough suits to go around, anyway. But I could do with some more help in the office—we've had to tear up all the existing programs and go over to a two-watch system. So all the rotas and schedules have to be rearranged—you could help on this."

  That's what comes of volunteering for anything, thought Sadler. But Wagnall was right; there was nothing he could do to help the technical teams. As for his own mission, he could probably serve it better in the secretary's office than anywhere else, for it would be the operational headquarters from now on.

  Not, thought Sadler grimly, that it now mattered a great deal. If Mr. X had ever existed, and was still in the Observa­tory, he could now relax with the consciousness of a job well done.

  Some instruments, it had been decided, would have to take their chance. These were the smaller ones, which could be easily replaced. Operation Safeguard, as someone with a penchant for military nomenclature had christened it, was to concentrate on the priceless optical components of the giant telescopes and coelostats.

  Jamieson and Wheeler drove out with Ferdinand and col­lected the mirrors of the interferometer, the great instrument whose twin eyes, twenty kilometers apart, made it possible to measure the diameters of the stars. The main activity, however, centered round the thousand-centimeter reflector.

  Molton was in charge of the mirror team. The work would have been impossible without his detailed knowledge of the telescope's optical and engineering features. It would have been impossible, even with his help, if the mirror had been cast in a single unit, like that of the historic instrument that still stood atop Mount Palomar. This mirror, however, was built from more than a hundred hexagonal sections, dovetailed together

  91

  Into a great mosaic. Each could be removed separately and carried to safety, though it was slow and tedious work and it would take weeks to reassemble the complete mirror with the fantastic precision needed.

  Spacesuits are not really designed for this sort of work, and one helper, through inexperience or haste, managed to drop his end of a mirror section as he lifted it out of the cell. Before anyone could catch it, the big hexagon of fused quartz had picked up enough speed to chip off one of its corners. This was the only optical casualty, which in the circumstances was very creditable.

  The last tired and disheartened men came in through the air­locks twelve hours after the operation had commenced. Only one research project continued—a single telescope was still following the slow decline of Nova Draconis as it sank toward final extinction. War or no war, this work would go on.

  Soon after the announcement that the two big mirrors were safe, Sadler went up to one of the observation domes. He did not know when he would have another chance to see the stars and the waning Earth, and he wished to carry the memory down into his subterranean retreat.

  As far as the eye could tell, the Observatory was quite un­changed. The great barrel of the thousand-centimeter reflector pointed straight to the zenith; it had been swung over to the vertical to bring the mirror cell down to ground level. Nothing short of a direct hit could damage this massive structure, and it would have to take its chances in the hours or days of danger that lay ahead.

  There were still a few men moving around in the open; one of them, Sadler noticed, was the director. He was perhaps the only man on the Moon who could be recognized when wearing a spacesuit. It had been specially built for him, and brought his height up to a full meter and a half.

  One of the open trucks used for moving equipment around the Observatory was scuttling across toward the telescope, throwing up little gouts of dust. It halted beside the great circular track on which the framework revolved, and the spacesuited figures clambered clumsily aboard. Then it made off briskly to the right, and disappeared into the ground as it

  92

  descended the ramp leading into the airlocks of the garage.

  The great plain was deserted, the Observatory blind save for the one faithful instrument pointing toward the north in sub­lime defiance of the follies of man. Then the speaker of the ubiquitous public-address system ordered Sadler out of the dome, and he went reluctantly into the depths. He wished he could have waited a little longer, for in a few more minutes the western walls of Plato would be touched by the first fingers of the lunar dawn. It seemed a pity that no one would be there to greet it.

  Slowly the Moon was turning toward the sun, as it could never turn toward the Earth. The line of day was crawling across the mountains and plains, banishing the unimaginable cold of the long night. Already the entire westward wall of the Apennines was ablaze, and the Mare Imbrium was climbing into the dawn. But Plato still lay in darkness, lit only by the radiance of the waning Earth.

  A group of scattered stars suddenly appeared low down in the western sky. The tallest spires of the great ring-wall were catching the sun, and minute by minute the light spread down their flanks, until it linked them together in a necklace of fire. Now the sun was striking clear across the whole vast circle of the crater, as the ramparts on the east lifted into the dawn. Any watchers down on Earth would see Plato as an unbroken ring of light, surrounding a pool of inky shadow. It would be hours yet before the rising sun could clear the mountains and subdue the last strongholds of the night.

  There were no eyes to watch when, for the second time, that blue-white bar stabbed briefly at the southern sky. That was well for Earth. The Federation had learned much, but there were still some things which it might discover too late.

  Chapter XIV

  the observatory had settled down for a siege of indefinite duration. It was not, on the whole, as frustrating an experience as might have been expected. Although the main programs had

  93

  been interru
pted, there was endless work to do in reducing results, checking theories, and writing papers, which until now had been put aside for lack of time. Many of the astronomers almost welcomed the break, and several fundamental advances in cosmology were a direct outcome of this enforced idleness.

  The worst aspect of the whole affair, everyone agreed, was the uncertainty and lack of news. What was really going on? Could one believe the bulletins from Earth, which seemed to be trying to soothe the public while at the same time preparing it for the worst ?

  As far as could be observed, some kind of attack was expected, and it was just the Observatory's bad luck that it was so near a possible danger point. Perhaps Earth guessed what form the attack would take, and certainly it had made some preparations to meet it.

  The two great antagonists were circling each other, each unwilling to strike the first blow, each hoping to bluff the other into capitulation. But they had gone too far, and neither could retreat without a loss of prestige too damaging to be faced.

  Sadler feared that the point of no return had already been passed. He was sure of it when the news came over the radio that the Federation Minister at the Hague had delivered a vir­tual ultimatum to the government of Earth. It charged Earth with failing to meet its agreed quotas of heavy metals, of de­liberately withholding supplies for political purposes, and of concealing the existence of new resources. Unless Earth agreed to discuss the allocation of these new resources, she would find it impossible to use them herself.

  The ultimatum was followed, six hours later, by a general broadcast to Earth, beamed from Mars by a transmitter of aston­ishing power. It assured the people of Earth that no harm would befall them, and that if any damage was done to the home planet it would be an unfortunate accident of war, for which their own government must take the blame. The Fed­eration would avoid any acts which might endanger populated areas, and it trusted that its example would be followed.

  The Observatory listened to this broadcast with mixed feel­ings. There was no doubt as to its meaning, and no doubt that the Mare Imbrium was, within the meaning of the Act, an

  94

  unpopulated area. One effect of the broadcast was to increase sympathy for the Federation, even among those likely to be damaged by its actions. Jamieson in particular began to be much less diffident in expressing his views, and had soon made himself quite unpopular. Before long, indeed, a distinct rift appeared in the Observatory ranks. On the one side were those (mostly the younger men) who felt much as Jamieson did, and regarded Earth as reactionary and intolerant. Against them, on the other hand, were the steady, conservative individuals who would always automatically support those in authority without worrying too much about moral abstractions.

  Sadler watched these arguments with great interest, even though he was conscious that the success or failure of his mis­sion had already been decided and that nothing he could do now would alter that. However, there was always the chance that the probably mythical Mr. X might now become careless, or might even attempt to leave the Observatory. Sadler had taken certain steps to guard against this, with the co-operation of the director. No one could get at the spacesuits or tractors without authority, and the base was therefore effectively sealed. Living in a vacuum did have certain advantages from the Security point of view.

  The Observatory's state of siege had brought Sadler one tiny triumph, which he could very well have forgone and which seemed an ironic commentary on all his efforts. Jenkins, his suspect from the Stores Section, had been arrested in Cen­tral City. When the monorail service had been suspended, he had been in town On very unofficial business, and had been picked up by the agents who had been watching him as a re­sult of Sadler's hunch.

  He had been scared of Sadler, and with good reason. But he had never betrayed any state secrets, for he had never possessed any. Like a good many storekeepers before him, he had been busy selling government property.

  It was poetic justice. Jenkins' own guilty conscience had caught him. But though Sadler had eliminated one name from his list, the victory gave him very little satisfaction indeed.

  The hours dragged on, with tempers getting more and more frayed. Overhead, the sun was now climbing up the morning

  95

  sky and had now lifted well above the western wall of Plato. The initial sense of emergency had worn off, leaving only a feeling of frustration. One misguided effort was made to or­ganize a concert, but it failed so completely that it left every­one more depressed than before.

  Since nothing seemed to be happening, people began to creep up to the surface again, if only to have a look at the sky and to reassure themselves that all was still well. Some of these clandestine excursions caused Sadler much anxiety, but he was able to convince himself that they were quite innocent. Eventually the director recognized the position, by permitting a limited number of people to go up to the observation domes at set hours of the day.

  One of the engineers from Power organized a sweepstake, the prizewinner to be the person who guessed how long this peculiar siege was going to last. Everybody in the Observatory contributed, and Sadler—acting on a very long shot—read the lists thoughtfully when they were complete. If there was anyone here who happened to know what the right answer might be, he would take care to avoid winning. That, at least, was the theory. Sadler learned nothing from his study, and finished it wondering just how tortuous his mental processes were becoming. There were times when he feared that he would never be able to think in a straightforward fashion again.

  The waiting ended just five days after the Alert. Up on the surface, it was approaching noon, and the Earth had waned to a thin crescent too close to the sun to be looked at with safety. But it was midnight by the Observatory clocks, and Sadler was sleeping when Wagnall unceremoniously entered his room,

  "Wake up!" he said, as Sadler rubbed the sleep from his eyes. "The director wants to see you!" Wagnall seemed an­noyed at being used as a messenger boy. "There's something going on," he complained, looking at Sadler suspiciously. "He won't even tell me what it's all about!"

  "I''m not sure that I know either," Sadler replied as he climbed into his dressing gown. He was telling the truth, and on the way to the director's office speculated sleepily on all the things that could possibly have happened.

  96

  Professor Maclaurin, thought Sadler, had aged a good deal in the last few days. He was no longer the brisk, forceful little man he had been, ruling the Observatory with a rod of iron. There was even a disorderly pile of documents at the side of his once-unsullied desk.

  As soon as Wagnall, with obvious reluctance, had left the room, Maclaurin said abruptly:

  "What's Carl Steffanson doing on the Moon?"

  Sadler blinked uncertainly—he was still not fully awake— and then answered lamely:

  "I don't even know who he is. Should I?"

  Maclaurin seemed surprised and disappointed.

  "I thought your people might have told you he was com­ing. He's one of the most brilliant physicists we have, in his own specialized field. Central City's just called to say that he's landed—and we've got to get him out to Mare Imbrium just as soon as we can, to this place they call Project Thor."

  "Why can't he fly there? How do we come into the picture?"

  "He was supposed to go by rocket, but the transport's out of action and won't be serviceable for at least six hours. So they're sending him down by monorail, and we're taking him on the last lap by tractor. I've been asked to detail Jamieson for the job. Everyone knows that he's the best tractor driver on the Moon—and he's the only one who's ever been out to Project Thor, whatever that is."

  "Go on," said Sadler, half suspecting what was coming next.

  "I don't trust Jamieson. I don't think it's safe to send him on a mission as important as this one appears to be."

  "Is there anyone else who could do it?"

  "Not in the time available. It's a very skilled job, and you've no idea how easy it is to lose your way."<
br />
  "So it has to be Jamieson, it seems. Why do you feel he's a risk?"

  "I've listened to him talking in the Common Room. Surely you've heard him, too! He's made no secret of his sympathies with the Federation."

  Sadler was watching Maclaurin intently while the director was speaking. The indignation—almost the anger—in the little man's voice surprised him. For a moment it raised a fleeting

  97

  suspicion in his mind: was Maclaurin trying to divert atten­tion from himself?

  The vague mistrust lasted only for an instant. There was no need, Sadler realized, to search for deeper motives. Maclaurin was tired and overworked: as Sadler had always suspected, for all his external toughness he was a small man in spirit as well as in stature. He was reacting childishly to his frustration: he had seen his plans disorganized, his whole program brought to a halt—even his precious equipment imperiled. It was all the fault of the Federation, and anyone who did not agree was a potential .enemy of Earth.