Moon Dust

Oliver Saari

"Come in, Jessup.... Come in, Jessup ...." the voice said over and over.

He reached out blindly to push it away until the tearing pain in his side cleared his mind of smothering fog.

"I ... I...." he croaked.

The voice droned on unheeding for an interminable time, then:

"Jess!" it deafened him "Hey, Colonel! I've got him! He's alive! Jess-"

The voice of Colonel Markley broke in, "What happened, Jessup?" Then there was a deathly silence, a waiting.

"I ... I don't know," said Jessup. "It's dark out there-the bull's-eye's dark. Or maybe I can't see-"

He checked his voice as he sensed its rising pitch. His groping hand found the emergency switch, and the panel lights came on before him like round eyes in the dark.

"Jessup, what's wrong?" roared the colonel's voice. "You've been silent for an hour. We watched you land, but lost you and now we can't see you. Where are you?"

He asked himself the question, and the answer trickled slowly into his mind.... I'm in a very small, padded place. My head and side hurt like fire. All I can see are those owl-eyed dials....

There should be more to see than that.

His hand next felt what his eyes now saw: the plastiglass gleam of the bull's-eye only a few inches from his face. Beyond the transparency was a darkness like the bottom of a mine.

"I don't know where I am, Colonel," he said finally. "It's dark outside. I must have gone over the terminator."

He could sense the colonel waiting like a trapped hawk. There was only a three-second time-lag, but it seemed like more. It had made itself felt, like a growing sense of distance, all the way from the Station.

"You didn't cross over," insisted Markley's voice. "We saw you land a hundred miles safe in sunlight. Can't you even see the stars?"

The stars! Jessup strained his face toward the little round hole of transparency, and yet he saw nothing. He felt strange, idiotic words rising: "Someone's painted it black-I fell in a puddle of ink-"

"What's that?" shouted the colonel. "In God's name, man, talk sense!"

"I must have landed in a big shadow and fallen over," said Jessup. "That's why it's dark."

"Apparently you hit on your head," rasped Markley. "Look-pull yourself together! You're not in any shadow. You skimmed right into daylight in the middle of Nubium."

"You saw me land!" cried Jessup eagerly. "How did it look from up there?"

"You went down from the West," said the colonel, speaking fast. "Your jets started over the Altai Range. You sailed over Regio, apparently pretty high, and slanted in toward the edge of Pitatus. Your jets blinked out just about fifty miles north of that. That's all we saw."

"One of the steering vanes blew and she was going to spin-I had to cut the jets too high," said Jessup, his mind clearing rapidly. "Wait a minute, Colonel, I'll see what gives."

There was another interval of silence, underscored by the sound of his own labored breathing. He explored his body with his hands and found many sore spots but no obvious fractures. He loosened the harness and put his feet on the floor, bracing himself with his hands against the sides of the tiny cabin. He stood there for a minute, swaying, before he realized what was wrong.

The floor was down.

That meant the ship was resting on her tail structure. And so the bull's-eye above his head should have gleamed with cold stars and fiery sunlight!

He placed his hand against the tiny window and clicked on his wristlight. The inner and outer surfaces of the transparency glared back in double reflection. On the outside was a sooty deposit, like a greyish something dipped in candle smoke.

"First things first," he muttered aloud and started scanning the instruments.

The chronometer showed that Markley had exaggerated: he'd been out only ten minutes. And he was losing air! Sickeningly he visualized the mess that must be down below, the jets and undercarriage smashed and twisted.... Then Markley's voice interrupted his thoughts.

"Yes, yes, I see it-" the colonel was shouting at someone on the other end. Then his voice became low, hesitant, "Jess-we may have something here.... I'm looking at a photo of the spot you went down. I don't see your rocket, but there's a-a-uh, pit that looks different from the rest of the smallpox. Like a dent in a hill of sand. I'm afraid to say what it might mean!"

So that was it. Sand-no, volcanic ash! Of course they had known that parts of the moon would be covered with it. What they hadn't known-what even the Space Station's telescopes hadn't been able to tell them-was how soft the stuff was, and how deep. Jessup felt an ancient horror clutching at him-a horror that should have been totally foreign to the vast sweep of space.

He was buried alive.

"Like a stone in a puddle of mud," said Markley gloomily to White, the Station's Second. "Maybe we ought to be thankful; the stuff probably saved his life!"

"Saved him! What for, if he can't get out?"

The colonel shrugged his shoulders, his face an expressionless mask for his thoughts. White could sense the tortured anxiety of the older man. More than anyone, he had worked for and pushed Project Moon. He'd never really been a military man. Space was his driving mania. He'd risen to General once, but had been busted for plugging his conviction too hard.... And now-in the penultimate moment-this!

"How deep could he be and still send?" Markley asked of the man with the earphones.

"His signal's weak and distorted. Antenna might be damaged or partly under. At that, I don't know if a few feet of that dust would stop shortwave-"

"Might be fifteen feet," muttered Markley, his face gray and tired-looking. "God! Maybe he's still sinking!"

"Sir, we don't know that he's that deep," cautioned White. "I don't see how an impact could bury him like that."

"What do we know of the conditions?" moaned the colonel. "That stuff must be absolutely dry-and loosely packed. In the light gravity it probably flows like water-quicksand! I should have thought of it-"

"Jessup wants to know if there are any orders, sir," said the radioman.

The question might have been phrased with a semi-humorous bitterness, but the colonel answered seriously:

"Tell him to give us an estimate to the damage. Ask him if he thinks he can blast out."

As the radio man spoke into the microphone, White was suddenly struck with the irony of the situation. Here was the historic moment: they were talking to the first man on the moon. And what did it mean? Where was the thrilling revelation, the sense of triumph? A poor, blind man, buried under a mountain of dust....

"Jessup says he can't tell much yet about the ship," said the radioman. "He says to hold on."

"We'll be out of beam range in fifteen minutes," said Markley hollowly, his heavy shoulders hunched forward as if he were trying to reach his arms out to the sunken rocket.

White felt the same helplessness. They could not even stop the Station in its hurtling chase around the Earth. Soon the Moon would be lost from sight behind the vast, misty mass of the planet.

He became aware of the New Mexico beep-call, sounding furiously. He picked the phone up and listened to the angry, excited voice at the other end. Muttering an abject, unmeant apology, he handed the phone to Markley, who made an expression of distaste.

"Yes, General ... we're going out of range soon-can you hear him down there?... No! He didn't crack up. He's buried ... we can't tell yet ... yes, buried in the ash-volcanic ash or meteor dust, I don't know ... I don't know ... yes, General ... yes, sir!"

He slammed the receiver down.

"Do they get him at all?" asked White anxiously.

"Only a word here and there. They're going to try and clear the air a bit-widen his channel-put a crimp in somebody's T.V. If I hear one complaint, I'm dropping a bomb!"

"We're going out of range now," said Markley's voice in the earphones. "They hear you down below. Keep sending. And-good luck!"

Other voices in the background echoed, "Good luck, Jess!"

He had a vision of the Station's silver disc falling behind the bulging Earth as the voices quivered into silence. He stood there for a while, steadying himself with both hands braced on a pressure wheel.

"Think," he said aloud, reading from an absurd little cardboard sign in his mind.

And immediately he thought of the leak in the hull. What a stupid thing to forget!

Already the air-pressure gauge glowed a warning red.

With a swift, trained motion he poked the smoke button. White tendrils burst out and swirled eerily in the dim light. He watched anxiously as they converged near his feet and vanished, riding invisible currents of escaping air. There he found a bulge in the tough duralumin wall, evidence of a broken stanchion.

Quickly he broke out a rubberoid seal-pad and slammed it into place over the hole, pressing the edges firmly.... Again he pushed the smoke button, and this time the streamers hung uncertainly about. He found there were no more leaks!

He drew a deep lungful of the precious air and felt his muscles relaxing ... and felt a sudden, joyous hope. Since the welded seams of the cabin had held, perhaps even the power plant down below was intact. He had plenty of nuclear fuel; he needed only to get down there to repair the steering vanes, to refill the...