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- Author: Raymond Z. Gallun
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By then they spent much of their time in torpid sleep.
Another difficulty was that it was getting harder to keep one's mind consistently on the same track. Space, tribulation, and the months, were having their blurring effect.
Often, Copeland spent many hours in wistful reverie about his girl, Frances, in Iowa. Sometimes he hated all people—on Earth, Moon, and everyhere, and didn't care what happened to them. On other occasions Brinker's basic desire to lessen the desolation of the lunar scene looked supremely good to him—as of course it always had, in principle. Then, briefly and perhaps madly, he was Brinker's pal, instead of yearning to beat him to a pulp.
His victory, now, was almost easy. Then all he had to do was wait[66] to be picked up; the ship was coming nearer. Through the now much-brightened glow of the comet, it had ceased to be a planetlike speck reflecting sunlight; and showed its actual form.
Confusion whirled in Copeland's head; hunger gnawed in him. Yet he looked down at Brinker—poor Brinker, beaten unconscious inside his spacesuit. Brinker had tried to fight lifeless dreariness. Copeland, weak of body and fogged of mind, was now close to maudlin tears. Dreariness was the enemy—here as elsewhere. He tried to think; his stubborn nature mixed itself with splinters of reason, and seemed to make sense.
His twenty months of suffering out here had to be used—mean something—didn't it? It couldn't be just a futile blank. You had to follow a thing started through to the end, didn't you? Brinker wanted to improve the Moon, which certainly needed that. Okay—finish the job that had gone so far. Damn desolation everywhere! Fight it! Smash it! Sudden rage made Copeland's thin blood pound. Dimly he realized that he was driven by the same dreariness-disease that motivated Brinker. So what? Who cared about smashed lunar equipment, after all. And beside experience, prison would be paradise.
Copeland fired a Martian rocket-launcher, aiming behind the ship. He saw the blaze of atomic fission. Jets flaming, the craft fled.
In his phones he heard a voice that he remembered: "That you, Brinker? Trying your father's trick, eh? Idiot! You'll kill yourself, or be executed. And now you even shoot!"
Fury at Krell clinched Copeland's decision. He did not answer him. But when Brinker woke up he said savagely, without friendship or forgiveness, yet with cooperation: "We're on the same side, now. Let's aim Brulow's Comet."
Concentrating was hard, but they had their instruments and calculators. Velocity, position, and course of both comet and Moon had to be coordinated to make them arrive in the same place at the same moment. It was a problem in astrogation, but a comet was not as easily directed as a space ship. Copeland had once thought that the necessary fine guiding couldn't be done. The jet-system they had rigged in that inconveniently whirling nucleus was crude.
But one thing was in their favor; they had ample time. They could adjust their course with the jets, check with instruments, and re-adjust—again and again. Copeland found himself doing the vital part of the job; he was better at math than Brinker.
They still had plenty of Martian food left—for what it was worth[67] to human insides. Perhaps unified purpose and action brightened their outlook a little, helping their bodies. They could never work very long—even in the almost total absence of gravity. But—at least—their weakness wasn't increasing now.
During those last four months they drove several ships away. Earth and Moon swelled to spheres, ahead. Brulow's Comet lengthened its tail under increased solar light-pressure. Intensified radiation made its shifting colors glorious.
Brinker and Copeland lined their gigantic missile up on its target as perfectly as they could. Fifty hours before the crash was due, they smashed most of the jets. The remaining ones they tried, feebly, to refit into their ship, meaning thus to escape.
More missiles were fired carefully—not to do damage, but to discourage the intruders; the latter were held at bay for another twelve hours. Copeland and Brinker left radio commands and threats unanswered, so it was hard for their opponents to get a fix on their position in the whirling nucleus.
Explosions blazed around them, but never very close. Masses of iron and stone were shattered and half vaporized, cooling subsequently to fine dust. The nucleus of Brulow's Comet expanded a bit under the battering that went on within it.
At an opportune moment, Copeland and Brinker clung to one of their jet-tubes and, gunning it very lightly, rode it from the central core-mass of the nucleus to a lesser meteor, and hid in a cleft. A dust-poll had concealed their change of position. And now, with so many other large meteors around them, they would be almost impossible to find.
They glimpsed the Patrol craft invading the heart of the comet. Men poured forth, struggling to set up jets in the hope of still deflecting this juggernaut from the Moon. But the comet was already much too close; before the setting-up was half completed it had to be abandoned. Still, the ships remained almost to the last.
Copeland wondered tensely if they'd ever go. His withered palms perspired.[68]
"We could still yell for help—have them take us off," Brinker suggested when they had left. He spoke by sound-channel contact.
The Moon loomed huge and ugly ahead. Copeland gave it a scared glance, and then laughed grimly. "Ironic, that would be," he snapped, "No—we've got this jet to ride, and we're still at liberty."
From space, lashed to the flaming propulsion tube, they saw the crash happen. It was a terrific spectacle. Copeland's hopes now had jagged cracks of worry. The comet seemed to move slowly, its coma flattening over the Moon's spaceward hemisphere. There were blinding flashes as the chunks of its nucleus bit into the lunar crust, their energy of velocity converting largely to heat. Then dust masked the region of impact. The comet's tail collapsed over the Moon like a crumbling tower.
Copeland gulped. He saw that Brinker had gone limp—fainted. Weakness was enough to cause that; but the fact of a plan carried out had a shock in it, too.
Copeland worked the jury-rigged controls of the jet, continuing to decelerate. At spotty intervals, under the terrible thrust of reducing speed, he was unconscious, too.
Weakened and spent, they could not even lift themselves against the slight lunar gravity for a while.
The darkness around them was Stygian. But as more dust settled, the sky cleared, and the normal stars of the lunar night blazed out. Their attention was drawn in one direction inevitably.
Red-hot lava glowed there, in scattered areas over what was clearly an extensive expanse of territory. White vaporous plumes spurted high above the ground, and against the sides of new-formed meteor-craters, a white layer was collecting.
Copeland staggered erect. "Frost and snow!" he stammered. "From volcanic steam! The first frost and snow on the Moon in a billion years! We've done it, Brinker! Brulow's Comet really did crack the thick lunar crust...."
He heard Brinker's grunt of premature enthusiasm.[69]
The Patrol picked them up hours later, wandering dazedly. They were emaciated ghosts of men—almost skeletons in armor. They gave their names, but didn't really come to their senses until the prison doctor in Tycho Station treated them, and they had slept for a long time.
"Don't worry, fellas. Relax," he said—with fury in his eyes.
Other faces were grim.
At the speedy trial in Tycho Station, sharp-featured Krell was among many who flung accusations.
"In the impact-zone itself—an area a hundred miles across—mining installations and machinery of tremendous value were utterly destroyed," he said. "But lesser damage extends to a far wider circle. Thousands of claims have been buried in dust, till much of the far lunar hemisphere will have to be resurveyed. Luckily, miners and explorers were warned in time, and sought safety. But the charge of wholesale vandalism—terrible enough—does not stand alone. These men are to be remembered as accused robbers and murderers."
In rebuttal, Brinker's defiance was a little uncertain, as if under so much blame, he had lost his assurance.
"Men who know the Moon know that its barrenness is poison, and not right for people!" he growled. "I tried to change it with Brulow's Comet—when I had no success by other means. Anyway, Copeland is blameless. I forced him to help me."
Embitted, there was no warmth in Copeland for his older codefendant and jinx. Still, even without Brinker's attempt to shield him, he would have been loyal.
"During all important parts of mine and Jess Brinker's joint project," he told the court, "I was in full agreement with his purpose."
Their attorney accomplished one considerable victory before these angry people. The charge of previous murders and robbery was barred; it was admitted that footprints were easy to duplicate, and that the presence of some bearing the names of the guilty was unlikely.
Brinker got fifty years in the mine-pits, and Copeland thirty.
"You always figured I might get you in a jam, didn't you, Cope?" Brinker said. "I'll keep trying to fix that."
Copeland had another recent jolt to brood over. A bunch of old letters from his Frances had been delivered to him. His inability to receive or answer any of them had brought the worst result. She had married another guy, and who could blame her?
Arne Copeland wanted to kill Brinker. Getting desolation-goofy, and dragging him into this mess.
But from Brinker's infuriating grin, Copeland caught a hot spark of hope, backed by reasoning.
Later, sweating in the penal mine-pits near Tycho Station, Brinker and Copeland still heard scraps of news.
Explorers moved back into the region where the comet had split the lunar crust. The rising columns of steam and gas were perhaps unspectacular phenomena in themselves. But there they were, ready to fill a tremendous need. The sleepy internal fires of the Moon were unlikely to be violent. Yet they would push vapors up to the surface here perhaps for centuries.
In balancing benefit against transient damage, was it necessary even to mention that deeper and richer mineral deposits had been laid bare for easy mining by the blast effect of the comet's downfall? All free men—good or bad, and of large or small holdings—were set to gain, Krell included. But better mines were a side-issue.
The prisoners soon heard how roofs of transparent, flexible plastic, brought in bundles like fabric, were being reared over that smashed-up region, to trap escaping volcanic vapors. One tentlike structure. Then another and another.
Here was ample water from volcanic steam, and vast quantities of carbon-dioxide from which ordinary air-rejuvenators could release breathable oxygen. Men who had lived so long in the lunar silence and barrenness, soon saw that these raw materials of life need not only be used locally, but could be piped anywhere.
"Folks have caught on, Cope," Brinker said. "They were a little desolation-balmy, too—hence on our side all the time. Now they'll feel better about my Old Man. There'll be more than one city, I'll bet—clusters of big, plastic air-bubbles, self-sealing against meteor-punctures, warmed inside at night by volcanic heat. It won't happen all at once, but it'll come. Seeds'll be planted, and houses built. Parts of the Moon won't look the same."
Krell's death was part of the turning tide. He was found in Tycho Station, head smashed by a boot-sole of metal; it was good that Brinker was in prison, because his name was printed into Krell's skull.[71]
Who did it? Neither Brinker nor Copeland cared very much. Some wronged stooge of Krell's, no doubt. Let the forces of law figure out the details.
Things got really
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