The Past Through Tomorrow Read online

  Johnny looked at the deadly stuff. “Into your suit and out of here, son,” he said aloud. “I wonder what Towers will say?”

  He walked toward the rack, intending to hang up the hammer. As he passed, the Geiger counter chattered wildly.

  Plutonium hardly affects a Geiger counter; secondary infection from plutonium does. Johnny looked at the hammer, then held it closer to the Geiger counter. The counter screamed.

  Johnny tossed it hastily away and started back toward his suit.

  As he passed the counter it chattered again. He stopped short.

  He pushed one hand close to the counter. Its clicking picked up to a steady roar. Without moving he reached into his pocket and took out his exposure film.

  It was dead black from end to end.

  3

  PLUTONIUM TAKEN INTO the body moves quickly to bone marrow. Nothing can be done; the victim is finished. Neutrons from it smash through the body, ionizing tissue, transmuting atoms into radioactive isotopes, destroying and killing. The fatal dose is unbelievably small; a mass a tenth the size of a grain of table salt is more than enough—a dose small enough to enter through the tiniest scratch. During the historic “Manhattan Project” immediate high amputation was considered the only possible first-aid measure.

  Johnny knew all this but it no longer disturbed him. He sat on the floor, smoking a hoarded cigarette, and thinking. The events of his long watch were running through his mind.

  He blew a puff of smoke at the Geiger counter and smiled without humor to hear it chatter more loudly. By now even his breath was “hot”—carbon-14, he supposed, exhaled from his blood stream as carbon dioxide. It did not matter.

  There was no longer any point in surrendering, nor would he give Towers the satisfaction—he would finish out this watch right here. Besides, by keeping up the bluff that one bomb was ready to blow, he could stop them from capturing the raw material from which bombs were made. That might be important in the long run.

  He accepted, without surprise, the fact that he was not unhappy. There was a sweetness about having no further worries of any sort. He did not hurt, he was not uncomfortable, he was no longer even hungry. Physically he still felt fine and his mind was at peace. He was dead—he knew that he was dead; yet for a time he was able to walk and breathe and see and feel.

  He was not even lonesome. He was not alone; there were comrades with him—the boy with his finger in the dike, Colonel Bowie, too ill to move but insisting that he be carried across the line, the dying Captain of the Chesapeake still with deathless challenge on his lips, Rodger Young peering into the gloom. They gathered about him in the dusky bomb room.

  And of course there was Edith. She was the only one he was aware of. Johnny wished that he could see her face more clearly. Was she angry? Or proud and happy?

  Proud though unhappy—he could see her better now and even feel her hand. He held very still.

  Presently his cigarette burned down to his fingers. He took a final puff, blew it at the Geiger counter, and put it out. It was his last. He gathered several butts and fashioned a roll-your-own with a bit of paper found in a pocket. He lit it carefully and settled back to wait for Edith to show up again. He was very happy.

  He was still propped against the bomb case, the last of his salvaged cigarettes cold at his side, when the speaker called out again. “Johnny? Hey, Johnny! Can you hear me? This is Kelly. It’s all over. The Lafayette landed and Towers blew his brains out. Johnny? Answer me.”

  When they opened the outer door, the first man in carried a Geiger counter in front of him on the end of a long pole. He stopped at the threshold and backed out hastily. “Hey, chief!” he called. “Better get some handling equipment—uh, and a lead coffin, too.”

  “Four days it took the little ship and her escort to reach Earth. Four days while all of Earth’s people awaited her arrival. For ninety-eight hours all commercial programs were off television; instead there was an endless dirge—the Dead March from Saul, the Valhalla theme, Going Home, the Patrol’s own Landing Orbit.

  “The nine ships landed at Chicago Port. A drone tractor removed the casket from the small ship; the ship was then refueled and blasted off in an escape trajectory, thrown away into outer space, never again to be used for a lesser purpose.

  “The tractor progressed to the Illinois town where Lieutenant Dahlquist had been born, while the dirge continued. There it placed the casket on a pedestal, inside a barrier marking the distance of safe approach. Space marines, arms reversed and heads bowed, stood guard around it; the crowds stayed outside this circle. And still the dirge continued.

  “When enough time had passed, long, long after the heaped flowers had withered, the lead casket was enclosed in marble, just as you see it today.”

  Gentlemen, Be Seated

  IT TAKES both agoraphobes and claustrophobes to colonize the Moon. Or make it agoraphiles and claustrophiles, for the men who go out into space had better not have phobias. If anything on a planet, in a planet, or in the empty reaches around the planets can frighten a man, he should stick to Mother Earth. A man who would make his living away from terra firma must be willing to be shut up in a cramped spaceship, knowing that it may become his coffin, and yet he must be undismayed by the wide-open spaces of space itself. Spacemen—men who work in space, pilots and jetmen and astrogators and such—are men who like a few million miles of elbow room. On the other hand the Moon colonists need to be the sort who feel cozy burrowing around underground like so many pesky moles.

  On my second trip to Luna City I went over to Richardson Observatory both to see the Big Eye and to pick up a story to pay for my vacation. I flashed my Journalists’ Guild card, sweet-talked a bit, and ended with the paymaster showing me around. We went out the north tunnel, which was then being bored to the site of the projected coronascope.

  It was a dull trip—climb on a scooter, ride down a completely featureless tunnel, climb off and go through an airlock, get on another scooter and do it all over again. Mr. Knowles filled in with sales talk. “This is temporary,” he explained. “When we get the second tunnel dug, we’ll cross-connect, take out the airlocks, put a northbound slidewalk in this one, a southbound slidewalk in the other one, and you’ll make the trip in less than three minutes. Just like Luna City—or Manhattan.”

  “Why not take out the airlocks now?” I asked, as we entered another airlock—about the seventh. “So far, the pressure is the same on each side of each lock.”

  Knowles looked at me quizzically. “You wouldn’t take advantage of a peculiarity of this planet just to work up a sensational feature story?”

  I was irked. “Look here,” I told him. “I’m as reliable as the next word-mechanic, but if something is not kosher about this project let’s go back right now and forget it. I won’t hold still for censorship.”

  ‘Take it easy, Jack,“ he said mildly—it was the first time he had used my first name; I noted it and discounted it. ”Nobody’s going to censor you. We’re glad to cooperate with you fellows, but the Moon’s had too much bad publicity now—publicity it didn’t deserve.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Every engineering job has its own hazards,” he insisted, “and its advantages, too. Our men don’t get malaria and they don’t have to watch out for rattlesnakes. I can show you figures that prove it’s safer to be a sand-hog in the Moon than it is to be a file clerk in Des Moines—all things considered. For example, we rarely have any broken bones in the Moon; the gravity is so low—while that Des Moines file clerk takes his life in his hands every time he steps in or out of his bathtub.”

  “Okay, okay,” I interrupted, “so the place is safe. What’s the catch?”

  “It is safe. Not company figures, mind you, nor Luna City Chamber of Commerce, but Lloyd’s of London.”

  “So you keep unnecessary airlocks. Why?”

  He hesitated before he answered, “Quakes.”

  Quakes. Earthquakes—moonquakes, I mean. I glanced at the curving w
alls sliding past and I wished I were in Des Moines. Nobody wants to be buried alive, but to have it happen in the Moon—why, you wouldn’t stand a chance. No matter how quick they got to you, your lungs would be ruptured. No air.

  “They don’t happen very often,” Knowles went on, “but we have to be prepared. Remember, the Earth is eighty times the mass of the Moon, so the tidal stresses here are eighty times as great as the Moon’s effect on Earth tides.”

  “Come again,” I said. “There isn’t any water on the Moon. How can there be tides?”

  “You don’t have to have water to have tidal stresses. Don’t worry about it; just accept it. What you get is unbalanced stresses. They can cause quakes.”

  I nodded. “I see. Since everything in the Moon has to be sealed airtight, you’ve got to watch out for quakes. These airlocks are to confine your losses.” I started visualizing myself as one of the losses.

  “Yes and no. The airlocks would limit an accident all right, if there was one—which there won’t be—this place is safe. Primarily they let us work on a section of the tunnel at no pressure without disturbing the rest of it. But they are more than that; each one is a temporary expansion joint. You can tie a compact Structure together and let it ride out a quake, but a thing as long as this tunnel has to give, or it will spring a leak. A flexible seal is hard to accomplish in the Moon.”

  “What’s wrong with rubber?” I demanded. I was feeling jumpy enough to be argumentative. “I’ve got a ground-car back home with two hundred thousand miles on it, yet I’ve never touched the tires since they were sealed up in Detroit.”

  Knowles sighed. “I should have brought one of the engineers along, Jack. The volatiles that keep rubbers soft tend to boil away in vacuum and the stuff gets stiff. Same for the flexible plastics. When you expose them to low temperature as well they get brittle as eggshells.”

  The scooter stopped as Knowles was speaking and we got off just in time to meet half a dozen men coming out of the next airlock. They were wearing spacesuits, or, more properly, pressure suits, for they had hose connections instead of oxygen bottles, and no sun visors. Their helmets were thrown back and each man had his head pushed through the opened zipper in the front of his suit, giving him a curiously two-headed look. Knowles called out, “Hey, Konski!”

  One of the men turned around. He must have been six feet two and fat for his size. I guessed him at three hundred pounds, earthside. “It’s Mr. Knowles,” he said happily. “Don’t tell me I’ve gotten a raise.”

  “You’re making too much money now, Fatso. Shake hands with Jack Arnold. Jack, this is Fatso Konski—the best sandhog in four planets.”

  “Only four?” inquired Konski. He slid his right arm out of his suit and stuck his bare hand into mine. I said I was glad to meet him and tried to get my hand back before he mangled it.

  “Jack Arnold wants to see how you seal these tunnels,” Knowles went on. “Come along with us.”

  Konski stared at the overhead. “Well, now that you mention it, Mr. Knowles, I’ve just finished my shift.”

  Knowles said, “Fatso, you’re a money grubber and inhospitable as well. Okay—time-and-a-half.” Konski turned and started unsealing the airlock.

  The tunnel beyond looked much the same as the section we had left except that they were no scooter tracks and the lights were temporary, rigged on extensions. A couple of hundred feet away the tunnel was blocked by a bulkhead with a circular door in it. The fat man followed my glance. “That’s the movable lock,” he explained. “No air beyond it. We excavate just ahead of it.”

  “Can I see where you’ve been digging?”

  “Not without we go back and get you a suit.”

  I shook my head. There were perhaps a dozen bladder-like objects in the tunnel, the size and shape of toy balloons. They seemed to displace exactly their own weight of air; they floated without displaying much tendency to rise or settle. Konski batted one out of his way and answered me before I could ask. “This piece of tunnel was pressurized today,” he told me. “These tag-alongs search out stray leaks. They’re sticky inside. They get sucked up against a leak, break, and‘ the goo gets sucked in, freezes and seals the leak.”

  “Is that a permanent repair?” I wanted to know.

  “Are you kidding? It just shows the follow-up man where to weld.”

  “Show him a flexible joint,” Knowles directed.

  “Coming up.” We paused half-way down the tunnel and Konski pointed to a ring segment that ran completely around the tubular tunnel. “We put in a flex joint every hundred feet. It’s glass cloth, gasketed onto the two steel sections it joins. Gives the tunnel a certain amount of springiness.”

  “Glass cloth? To make an airtight seal?” I objected.

  “The cloth doesn’t seal; it’s for strength. You got ten layers of cloth, with a silicone grease spread between the layers. It gradually goes bad, from the outside in, but it’ll hold five years or more before you have to put on another coat.”

  I asked Konski how he liked his job, thinking I might get some story. He shrugged. “It’s all right. Nothing to it. Only one atmosphere of pressure. Now you take when I was working under the Hudson—”

  “And getting paid a tenth of what you get here,” put in Knowles.

  “Mr. Knowles, you grieve me,” Konski protested. “It ain’t the money; it’s the art of the matter. Take Venus. They pay as well on Venus and a man has to be on his toes. The muck is so loose you have to freeze it. It takes real caisson men to work there. Half of these punks here are just miners; a case of the bends would scare ‘em silly.”

  “Tell him why you left Venus, Fatso.”

  Konski expressed dignity. “Shall we examine the movable shield, gentlemen?” he asked.

  We puttered around a while longer and I was ready to go back. There wasn’t much to see, and the more I saw of the place the less I liked it. Konski was undogging the door of the airlock leading back when something happened.

  I was down on my hands and knees and the place was pitch dark. Maybe I screamed—I don’t know. There was a ringing in my ears. I tried to get up and then stayed where I was. It was the darkest dark I ever saw, complete blackness. I thought I was blind.

  A torchlight beam cut through it, picked me out, and then moved on. “What was it?” I shouted. “What happened? Was it a quake?”

  “Stop yelling,” Konski’s voice answered me casually. “That was no quake, it was some sort of explosion. Mr. Knowles—you all right?”

  “I guess so.” He gasped for breath. “What happened?”

  “Dunno. Let’s look around a bit.” Konski stood up and poked his beam around the tunnel, whistling softly. His light was the sort that has to be pumped; it flickered.

  “Looks tight, but I hear— Oh, oh! Sister!” His beam was focused on a part of the flexible joint, near the floor.

  The “tag-along” balloons were gathering at this spot. Three were already there; others were drifting in slowly. As we watched, one of them burst and collapsed in a sticky mass that marked the leak.

  The hole sucked up the burst balloon and began to hiss. Another rolled onto the spot, joggled about a bit, then it, too, burst. It took a little longer this time for the leak to absorb and swallow the gummy mass.

  Konski passed me the light. “Keep pumping it, kid.” He shrugged his right arm out of the suit and placed his bare hand over the spot where, at that moment, a third bladder burst.

  “How about it, Fats?” Mr. Knowles demanded.

  “Couldn’t say. Feels like a hole as big as my thumb. Sucks like the devil.”

  “How could you get a hole like that?”

  “Search me. Poked through from the outside, maybe.”

  “You got the leak checked?”

  “I think so. Go back and check the gage. Jack, give him the light.”

  Knowles trotted back to the airlock. Presently he sang out, “Pressure steady!”

  “Can you read the vernier?” Konski called to him.

&nb
sp; “Sure. Steady by the vernier.”

  “How much we lose?”

  “Not more than a pound or two. What was the pressure before?”

  “Earth-normal.”

  “Lost a pound four tenths, then.”

  “Not bad. Keep on going, Mr. Knowles. There’s a tool kit just beyond the lock in the next section. Bring me back a number three patch, or bigger.”

  “Right.” We heard the door open and clang shut, and we were again in total darkness. I must have made some sound for Konski told me to keep my chin up.

  Presently we heard the door, and the blessed light shone out again. “Got it?” said Konski.

  “No, Fatso. No…” Knowles’ voice was shaking. “There’s no air on the other side. The other door wouldn’t open.”

  “Jammed, maybe?”

  “No, I checked the manometer. There’s no pressure in the next section.”

  Konski whistled again. “Looks like we’ll wait till they come for us. In that case— Keep the light on me, Mr. Knowles. Jack, help me out of this suit.”

  “What are you planning to do?”

  “If I can’t get a patch, I got to make one, Mr. Knowles. This suit is the only thing around.” I started to help him—a clumsy job since he had to keep his hand on the leak.

  “You can stuff my shirt in the hole,” Knowles suggested.

  “I’d as soon bail water with a fork. It’s got to be the suit; there’s nothing else around that will hold the pressure.” When he was free of the suit, he had me smooth out a portion of the back, then, as he snatched his hand away, I slapped the suit down over the leak. Konski promptly sat on it. “There,” he said happily, “we’ve got it corked. Nothing to do but wait.”

  I started to ask him why he hadn’t just sat down on the leak while wearing the suit; then I realized that the seat of the suit was corrugated with insulation—he needed a smooth piece to seal on to the sticky stuff left by the balloons.