City on the Moon
- Автор: Лейнстер Мюррей
- Серия: To the Stars #3
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «City on the Moon». Краткое содержание книги:
Kenmore found Arlene while missile-base technicians went to work on the Earthship. She smiled hopefully at him. "Anything—"
He picked her up and hugged hr. He swung her as extravagantly as a girl can be swung only on the moon. He babbled almost incoherently. Arlene freed herself.
"This is all very nice," she said breathlessly, "but what's happened?"
He managed to control himself. He told her. She stared. Then Cecile Ducros snapped, "My next broadcast! A magneeficent broadcast. Thees I must tell about!
Arlene, you shall go weeth Kenmore and tell me of eet, and the next broadcast weel be from witheen the returned sheep and I weel tell my listeners of the triumph of mankind!"
Kenmore grinned at Arlene. "Would you like to go along?"
"You're going, aren't you?"
There was no concourse of people to watch the Earthship take off. It was midmorning on the moon—the sun was four days high—and the surface of the mare was already hotter than boiling water. The sunlight itself had the virulence of the glare of an open furnace door. It could have been cooked by. So there was only the jeep from the missile base nearby, with its enormous heat reflectors looking like the headdress of a nursing nun, only forty-odd feet high and of glittering silver. The missile-base men withdrew into their jeep, and Thurston ascended the sun-heated ladder rungs to the ship's airlock. He went in.
Mike Scandia said grandly, via talkie in the shadow under the jeep, "Arlene, I gave you a bouquet once, when things looked pretty bad. Now I'm giving you another one, when things look pretty good for the Lunar Mining and Metals Corporation as soon as you get back. From the Board of Directors!"
In the shadow-space beneath the reflectors there were only harsh reflections of the incandescence outside. But Mike held out something in his mittened hand. And it was incredible. Where the moon flowers Arlene had seen before were silver, these were gold. They were infinitely intricate, of impossible delicacy, of breathtaking beauty. Mike held out a bouquet of slender stalks and branching leaves. They were inextricably intertwined. They had the seeming fragility of maidenhair fern, but they were golden, brightly shining—such things as would be dreamed of in fairy tales as suitable christening gifts for a princess.
Arlene stared at them. "Oh, beautiful! But, Mike—don't tell me they'll vanish!"
She almost wailed it, and the chief's chuckle came into the helmet phones.
"We argued about those moon flowers," he said comfortably. "They had to be mercury, of course. Mercury vapor made by sunshine of some kind of ore, condensing in shadow where they couldn't be just liquid because it was too cold. They had to be frost. Mercury frost. Snowflakes of mercury. Naturally they'd vanish when anybody came near to warm 'em! So Mike and Haney and me, we were out at the solar-heat mine, and we boiled some gold in front of a shadow-place to make sure. It couldn't happen except in low gravity but— pretty, ain't they?"
"They're lovely!" said Arlene, bright-eyed. "Lovely." "Use 'em," said the chief, "for a bridal bouquet when you and Joe get hitched up."
He stood back. He and Haney and Mike and Moreau watched from the shadow of the jeep as Arlene climbed to the airlock with Kenmore close behind her.
The jeep drew back and the four men trudged beneath it. Presently it stopped and they stared back at the tall Earthship, shining silver in a landscape of fire, with a star-speckled sky of purest black above it.
The Earthship spurted flame. It rose swiftly for the stars.
A long, long time later, Joe Kenmore said evenly, "You know how to do it, Arlene."
She nodded, and put her hand on his. The ship floated free, pointed away from both Earth and moon. There was no sound inside it. Thurston, new from Earth, watched composedly as Kenmore's and Arlene's hands hovered over the control which would start atomic rockets to low-power firing outside the hull.
"Five," said Kenmore. "Four. Three. Two. One. Fire!" Arlene pressed down on Kenmore's hand. There was a gentle rumbling, which ceased. There was a feeling of weight. Gentle weight. Kenmore pressed harder. The weight increased. He lifted his hand. It lessened. He pressed again, and the Earthship leaped ahead like a mettlesome horse . . .
Kenmore nodded, awed in spite of himself.
"It works," he said to Thurston. He sounded incredibly calm. "How much fuel is there?"
"A hundred hours at one gravity," said Thurston mildly. "Of course these are small rockets. We'll have bigger ones."
"We could go to Mars and back with these alone," said Kenmore very quietly. "Someday, now, we will reach the stars!"
Arlene said confidently, "Of course!"