City on the Moon

He settled the helmet and said swiftly, "Jake! Check the other domes!"

He made sure that Arlene's faceplate was ready to be closed on an instant's notice, and said grimly to Moreau, "Watch the ceiling. If it starts down, more air's being lost somewhere we haven't caught. You can hold it, probably, with air from the air tank. But if you need to get out, do so. The airlock's a good refuge for the time being."

He ran to the main dome. There were three gaping holes in its plastic ceiling, and a still-glowing signal rocket flamed where it was caught in a metal girder forty feet up. Mike Scandia swarmed up another girder, plastic mending sheets dangling from him, to close a leak. The chief made his way to another. Haney—vacuum-suited—fastened three long rods together. A patch waited. Haney speared the bottom of a wastebasket with his lengthened rods, spread the patch over the open end, jumped to the top of a privacy-partition and thrust the patch into place where it was too high to be jumped to and could not be reached from a girder. It stuck, held there by what air pressure remained.

Kenmore realized that the thin, clanging sound that came' through his helmet was the pressure-alarm gongs. But the air situation was actually under control by now.

Kenmore made for the power dome and found a slash five feet long where a rocket had pierced the plastic at an acute angle. Three men in vacuum suits worked on it. They were scared, but they had run away once; now they knew better. They worked to save the City as a way of saving themselves.

Then Kenmore allowed himself to fly into. a rage. A man had needed only to notch a certain number of signal rockets to send a small expanding flame before them, and he'd been able to puncture the City's domes at will. And he'd be outside . . .

A race back to the main dome. Its pressure gauges were far into the red, but Haney was down on the floor again and Mike and the chief were descending. Kenmore snapped, on his talkie, "I'm going out after the man who did this!"

He streaked for the airlock, and heard the chief grunt as if he'd landed from a height that was extreme even for one-sixth gravity.

Haney said, "With you, Joe!" and Mike's voice came sputtering:

"I'm on the way, too!"

But Kenmore was out-of-doors first; he emerged into the incredible spectacle of a lunar dawn. The peaks to westward glowed with an incandescent glare. The lava bay on which the City was built still lay deep in shadows; but sunshine smote the tips of the Apennines, and there was a radiance of reflected light everywhere. One could almost be persuaded that there was an atmosphere to give so softly illumined an effect. Earth, near the zenith, was now less than at the half and would presently diminish to the smallest of crescents, with a dull-red completing line of light to prove that it remained a sphere.

Kenmore paid no heed to any of this. His eyes went to the moon-jeeps. There were not many, as yet; only a part of the City's population was back. The returned vehicles were parked near the airlock, and Kenmore uttered an inarticulate sound of fury. There were no tracks under them. There was what seemed to be a mist about them and among them. And there are no mists on the moon save in bright sunshine and where photoelectric substances lie on the surface. Those mists are dust-clouds, supported in emptiness by electrostatic repulsion from charged particles like themselves. This was something else.

He made for the jeeps at the highest speed that moon-gait could give him. When he arrived, he found that a few minutes sooner he might have prevented the damage, and a few minutes later he might have failed to notice it. The parked jeeps stood motionless, thinly veiled in a whitish mist which was moondust now drifting back downward to make a smooth, untrodden layer on the surface of the bay. It only needed seconds to make sure. The air valve—by which a man outside might hook onto a jeep's air tanks—was broken off. It was standard practice for men working outside to breathe by long hoses from the jeep, that carried them. It always left two hours' breathing in the suit tanks. But now those hose connections were broken off.

The tanks had poured out their contents in a whistling stream, and the dust was already settling again. In five more minutes, only the absence of footmarks in the new-settled stuff would have given warning. If the returned fugitives had fled again, this time they would have suffocated.

The figures of Haney and the chief, and the minute figure of Mike, emerged into the morning. Kenmore called out to them by talkie, explaining what had taken place. Mike darted back into the City to give warning, so that nobody—however panicked would take refuge in a jeep. Haney and the chief went racing around to the back of the City, to look for the saboteur's work there.

And then cries came in Kenmore's helmet phones from vacuum-suited figures within the City. He rushed; he was through the locks in seconds. He'd heard Arlene scream . . .

She'd been in the air dome. He plunged for that. A girder of the air dome had collapsed and half the ceiling sagged. A part was down to the floor, crushing hydroponic racks beneath it. Two figures dragged desperately at a third, caught under the descending ceiling with yards upon yards of moondust above it. Kenmore threw over the air-tank emergency valve by the lock. Great masses of expanding air rushed in. The descending ceiling wavered and retreated—a little—and he leaped forward and helped to drag, pushing at the sagged roof-stuff with one foot as he hauled with both arms.