Read Ebook: Stay off the Moon! by Jones Raymond F Finlay Virgil Illustrator

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Ebook has 320 lines and 14899 words, and 7 pages

Six hours before moonfall, activities in the tracking center accelerated and the tension increased. There was no question of hitting the moon; the landing had to be made safe for the cargo of instruments.

Jim Cochran watched the operators during this period. He told himself he didn't understand it, but he had actually learned a great deal of electronics during the past two years. He had had to in order to design and operate a chemical laboratory 240,000 miles away.

Abruptly, the braking command was given and the ship began to fall out of orbit towards the planned landing in the Sea of Rains. On the screens, the images swelled as the ship plummeted faster. In one corner could be seen the spring-loaded extension legs, like those of some great spider. It seemed impossible that these could cushion the violent shock of landing.

The sudden surge of a retro rocket and the blast of moondust blinded the television eye, but there was a sense of crazy, rocking, rolling motion. Then the eye went dead.

Jim almost cried out. The ship couldn't have crashed.

An operator quickly switched controls and the screens came alive again. He turned a dial slowly. The camera eye moved. It swept the craggy horizon and the nearby floor of the Sea of Rains. Others had seen this before, but it was the first time for Jim. He found himself pushing forward, drinking in the sight eagerly.

"The moon--the moon--" he said softly to himself. But the others heard it and they understood.

Signals were sent across space to collapse the landing legs and unfold the sides of the instrument cone like the leaves of a flower. The Prospector lay exposed to the environment for which it was built. Slowly, in response to other signals, the worm-screw drives, which had been retracted against the body of the vehicle, turned through an arc and lowered to the surface. Locked in position, the drive screws began turning slowly. The vehicle moved off the now-useless landing support and became an entity of its own.

The ungainly arms of the solar cells automatically oriented toward the sun; the antennas pointed toward earth. The scanning cameras in the turret of the Prospector took control of the video circuits and the turret slowly turned as the vehicle moved across the face of the moon. The landing support remained behind and slowly dwindled like some useless wreckage.

There was sudden pandemonium in the tracking center control room. The operators laid down their headsets and began pounding each other on the back, while ear-splitting Indian yells filled the air. Jim and Sam found themselves beating each other on the arms and yelling senselessly.

"We made it!" Sam cried. "We made it! We got your little old laboratory up there for you!"

There were hours of testing and calibration yet to be done before the Prospector could be used for its primary mission. Hundreds of electronic circuits had to be checked to see that they survived the takeoff and landing without becoming distorted or inoperative.

Jim went home for the rest of the night. When he returned the next morning Sam reported that all circuits were go, and the Prospector was his.

He had operated the laboratory in the Prospector many times, either on a mock-up or from this control panel while the Prospector was in the hangar. But he couldn't keep the faint tremor from his hand as he reached for the first control that would manipulate the machine on the moon.

The drill had been extended to operating position, but the head had not yet been energized. Jim touched it to the fine dust of the floor of the Sea of Rains. The drill went quickly to a depth of eighteen inches in the dust before it struck something firmer.

"That kills the theory about eighty feet of that stuff, anyway," said Sam as he read the instruments.

Jim was not interested in depth at this time. He fed some of the surface material into the laboratory and set the controls to run the preprogrammed analysis. They waited minutes; then the analysis began to appear in cryptic symbols on a paper tape.

Jim glanced at it and frowned.

"What's the matter? Isn't it working right?" Sam asked anxiously.

Jim hesitated. "It indicates the presence of several silicates, some carbonates, and a high percentage of oxides. These are mostly of sodium, calcium, and iron, as you might expect. But there's something wrong with your calibration. The atomic and molecular characteristics aren't coming through right."

"The boys ran checks on the standard samples aboard the Prospector last night," said Sam. "The results tallied exactly. I'll show you the tapes."

Jim waited, puzzled, while Sam brought up the check tapes. When he saw them, he shook his head. "There's a standard calcium carbonate sample carried aboard the Prospector. Here's a calcium carbonate picked off the surface. You can see the difference yourself. The nominal analysis is the same, but the atomic weights and the energy levels are just slightly different. That doesn't make sense unless your circuits are out of calibration."

"Let's run another standard sample," said Sam.

Within a few minutes the calibration check had been repeated. Jim held up the tape. Sam peered over his shoulder. "Just like the first one," said Sam. "Nothing's wrong with the circuits. Maybe you've got some new stuff there, that's never been identified before."

"That's hardly possible," said Jim. "There aren't any new elements in the places where sodium and calcium and silica are supposed to be. Yet, I don't understand how this can be. If the atomic weights are different, and the energy levels are different, they have to be different elements. It doesn't make sense."

"Well, why don't we push on," said Sam, "that is, if you've completed the surface sampling in this spot. Some samples at lower depths may give other indications."

Jim agreed. He drove the drill deeper into the face of the moon. At ten-foot intervals he removed samples and ran them through the analyzer. The results were the same down to the hundred-foot level. All results showed common chemical elements with slightly variant atomic characteristics.

After six hours, Jim stood up from the console and shook his head wearily. "It's no good, Sam. There's something wrong that I can't put my finger on. If it isn't in the circuits, I don't know where it is. But these readings just aren't right. There's no use going deeper until we find out where the error is."

Sam's face was somber. "There just isn't any error. There can't be. Unless it was made by whoever put the moon together--"

"Please make a complete check of every analyzer and telemetry circuit tonight, and we'll try again tomorrow. I want to think about this."

He thought about it, and he dreamed about it. And along about three o'clock in the morning he sat bolt upright in bed and stared at the dim moonlight on the opposite wall of the bedroom.

It wasn't possible, he told himself audibly. It just wasn't possible!

Mary stirred and leaned on one elbow beside him. "What's the matter. Are you having nightmares?"

"Yeah--yeah, I guess I am. I'll be back in a minute, honey." He got up and padded to the door. "I've got to make a phone call."

"At this time of night?"

But Jim was gone. He turned on the hall light and dialed Sam's number. After a long time Sam answered sleepily.

"Wake up!" said Jim. "I've just figured it out!"

"Who the devil--? Oh, it's you, Jim. Figured out what? Do you know what time it is."

"Do you know the results of your calibration re-check?"

"How would I know that? I've got the night crew on it, but I didn't ask them to report to me in the middle of the night. Go back to bed, and let's talk about it in the morning."

"They're not going to find anything wrong, Sam."

"I could have told you that."

"But the elements of the moon are different--and there's only one explanation."

"What?"

"Think about it a minute, Sam. We take a spectrograph of the sun, and we find the same elements that are here on earth. We turn it on Alpha Centauri and find the same thing. We turn it to the farthest stars we can find that give enough light to record by. Always the same. Calcium is calcium, whether it's on the earth or on a star a half billion light years away."

"So?" Sam's voice was tired, and he sounded as if he was listening only because Jim was too good a friend to tell to go to hell for calling in the middle of the night.

"So? So what?" Sam repeated.

"So we go to the moon," said Jim, "and all of a sudden calcium isn't calcium, and the sodium on the moon isn't the same as the sodium on earth and on the sun and on Alpha Centauri and the stars a half billion light years away. Don't you see what that means!"

"No, I guess not," said Sam dully. "Maybe in the morning--"

"I'll get dressed and come over," said Sam.

Mary made chocolate and toast, and they sat around the kitchen table thinking and talking of the awesome implications of Jim's theory.

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