In a few weeks, feeling among the electors had become clear enough to worry the government, and produce a rather more conciliatory tone. It was conceded that a British Moon Station might be considered, if the estimates were satisfactory. The prodigious size of the estimates which were produced, however, came as a shock which sharpened the divided opinions.
At this point, the Americans took a kindly hand. They had apparently changed their views on the value of Moon Stations, and, having done so, felt that it would be advantageous for the West to have two such stations to the rival’s one. Accordingly, they offered to advance a part of the cost, and supply much of the equipment. It was a generous gesture.
‘Good old Uncle Sam,’ said Troon, when the offer was announced. ‘Still the genial patron with two left feet.’
He was right. There was a considerable body of opinion to demand: ‘Whose Moon Station is this supposed to be, anyway?’
Nevertheless, the number of noughts to the cost remained intimidating.
Presently there was a rumour in circulation that the wrong kind of thinking - to put it at its least slanderous - was going on at high levels, and that there was actually in existence a scheme by which a station could be established at a cost very considerably under half the present estimates; and that Troon (you know, son of Ticker Troon) thought well of it.
Troon had waited, quietly.
Presently, he found himself again invited to high places. He was modestly surprised, and could not think how the proposal came to be connected with his name but, as a matter of fact, well, yes; he did happen to have seen a scheme.... Oh no, it was quite an error to think it had anything to do with him, a complete misunderstanding. The idea had been worked out by a man called Flanderys. It certainly had some interesting points. Yes, he did know Flanderys slightly. Yes, he was sure that Flanderys would be glad to explain his ideas....
The American and Russian expeditions seemed, in so far as their claims had ever been sorted out, to have arrived on the moon simultaneously; the former landing in Copernicus, the latter in Ptolemy - both claiming priority, and both consequently announcing their annexation of the entire territory of the moon. Experience with the Satellite Stations had already shown that any romantic ideas of a pax coelestis should be abandoned but, as each expedition was highly vulnerable, both concerned themselves primarily with tunnelling into the rock in order to establish strongholds from which they would be able to dispute their rights with greater confidence.
Some six months later, the smaller British expedition set down in the crater of Archimedes, with the Russian six hundred miles away beyond the Apennine Mountains to the south, and the American four hundred miles or so to the north-east. There, in contrast with their intensively burrowing neighbours, they proceeded to establish themselves on the surface. They had, it was true, one drilling-machine, but this, compared with the huge tunnelling engines of the others that had cost a good many times their weight in uranium to transport, was a mere toy which they employed in sinking a series of six-foot diameter pits.
The Flanderys Dome, essentially a modification of Domes used in the Arctic for some years, was a simple affair to erect. It was spread out on a levelled part of the crater floor, coupled with hoses, and left to inflate. With only the light gravity of the moon weighing down its fabric, the outer casing was fully shaped at a pressure of eight pounds (Earth) per square inch, at fifteen it was perfectly taut. Then the contents of the various rockets and containers went into it through the airlocks, or the annuli. The air regenerating plants were started up, the temperature controls coupled, and the work of building the station inside the dome could begin.
The Americans, Troon recalled, had been interested. They reckoned it quite an idea for use on a moon where there did not happen to be any Russians about; but on one where there were, they thought it plain nuts, and said so. The Russians themselves, he remembered with a smile, had been bewildered. A flimsy contrivance that could be completely wrecked by a single, old-fashioned H.E. shell was in their opinion utter madness, and a sitting temptation. They did not, however, yield to the temptation since that would almost certainly precipitate untimely action by the Americans. Nevertheless, the presumption of a declining Power in arriving to settle itself blandly and unprotected in the open while two great Powers were competing to tunnel themselves hundreds of feet into the rock was a curious piece of effrontery. Even a less suspicious mind than the Russian could well have felt that there was something here that was not meeting the eye. They instructed their agents to investigate.
The investigation took a little time, but presently the solution forthcame - an inconvenient clarification. As had been assumed, the pits that the British had been busily drilling at the same time that they built their station into the Dome were missile-shafts. This was similar to the work being done by the other two parties themselves - except that where the Americans also used pits, the Russians favoured launching ramps. The more disturbing aspect of it came to light later.
The British system of control, it appeared, was to use a main computing-engine to direct the aim and setting of any missile. Once the missile had been launched, it was kept on course by its own computer and servo systems. The main computer was, unlike the rest of the station, protected m a chamber drilled to a considerable depth. One of its more interesting features was that in certain conditions it was capable of automatically computing for, and dispatching, missiles until all were gone. A quite simple punched-card system was used in conjunction with a chronometer; each card being related to a selected target. One of the conditions which would cause this pack of cards to be fed to the computer was a drop in the station’s air-pressure. Fifteen pounds per square inch was its normal, and there was allowance for reasonable variation. Should the Dome be so unfortunate, however, as to suffer a misfortune sufficient to reduce the air-pressure to seven pounds, the missile-dispatching mechanism would automatically go into action.
All things considered, it appeared highly desirable from the Russian point of view that the Flanderys Dome should not suffer any such misadventure.
During the years that had intervened between the establishment of the station and his succeeding to command of it, Troon had taken part in a number of expeditions. Some, such as that which had visited the Apennines, had consisted of fourteen or fifteen men travelling with their supplies on tractors, surveying, mapping, photographing as they went; spending their sleeping periods in small Flanderys Domes holding several men, where they could remove their pressure-suits to eat and attain some degree of comfort. Others, ranging further, were two-, three-, or four-man trips on jet- borne platforms. Tractor operations were limited by the huge cracks which radiated from the crater to form impassable obstacles, many of them more than a hundred miles in length and a mile wide. The cracks were at most times awesome clefts of unknown, inky depth. Only when the sun was overhead, or shining up their length, was one able to see the rocky debris which choked them several miles below, and it was only at such times that the geologists, turned selenologists, were able to take their jet- platforms down, and make their brief notes while the light lasted.
Troon, who had rapidly become something of a selenologist himself, had nursed from the time of the landing an ambition to see and record something of the moon’s other side. According to rumour, the Russians had, within a year of their arrival, sent an ill-fated expedition there, but the truth or otherwise of the report remained hidden by the usual Slav passion for secrecy. It was one of Troon’s regrets that exploration would have to wait on further development of the jet-platforms, but there was no reason to think that the invisible side held any surprises; photographs taken from circling rockets showed no more than a different pattern of the same pieces - mountains, ‘seas’, and craters innumerable.
The regret that exploration must fall to someone else was no more than minor; most of what he had wanted to do, he had done. The establishment of the Moon Station was the end to which he had worked, manoeuvred, and contrived. He had given Flanderys the idea of the Dome, and helped him to work it out; and, when that looked like being rejected for its vulnerability, he had briefed another friend to produce the solution of automatic reprisals which they had called Project Stalemate. It was better, he had thought then and still thought, that the affair should appear to be a composite achievement rather than a one-man show. He was satisfied with his work.
He had almost reconciled himself to handing over the command in another eight months with the thought that the station’s future was secure, for, however much it might be grudged as a charge on the armed forces, the discovery of rare elements had given it practical importance, the astronomers attached great value to the station, and the medical profession, too, had found it useful for special studies.
But now there had come this war, and he was wondering whether that might mean the end of all the Moon Stations. If this one survived, would there be the wealth, or even the technical means, left to sustain it when the destruction was finished? Was it not very likely that everybody would be too busy trying simply to survive in a shattered world to concern themselves with such exotic matters as the conquest of space...?
Well, there was nothing he could do about that - nothing but wait and see what the outcome was, and be ready to seize any opportunity that showed.
And it was still possible that there might be no one left on the moon by the time it was over. The signs were that the two giants had felled one another already. One could do no more than hope that the threat of Project Stalemate would continue to ward off attack by the Russian Satellite Stations - if they were still in working order.... After all, the descent of some seventy fission and fission-fusion bombs on one’s country would seem, even though that country was spread over one-sixth of the habitable globe, to be a heavy price to pay for the destruction of one small Moon Station ... Yes, given luck, and some sense of relative values in the enemy’s mind, the British Moon Station still had quite a chance of survival....
Troon got up, and walked out from behind the rock. He stood for some moments, a lone scarlet figure in the black and white desert, looking at his Moon Station. Then, picking his path carefully between the missile-pits, he made his unhurried way back to it.
At the end of dinner he asked if he might have the pleasure of the doctor’s company at coffee in his office. Looking at her over the rim of his cup, he said:
‘It would seem to have worked.’
She regarded him quizzically through her cigarette smoke.
‘Yes, indeed,’ she agreed. ‘Like a very hungry bacteriophage. I felt as if I were watching a film speeded up to twice natural pace.’ She paused, and then added: ‘Of course, I am not familiar with the usual reactions of Commanding Officers who have been suspected of treason and stood in some danger of lynching, but one would not have been surprised at a little more - er - perturbation....‘
Troon grinned.
‘A bit short on self-respect?’ He shook his head. ‘This is a funny place, Ellen. When you have been here a little longer your own sense of values will seem a little less settled.’
‘I have suspected that already.’
‘But you still need to get the measure of it. My immediate predecessor once said: “When I am on this singularly un-heavenly cinder, I make it an invariable rule to assume that the emotional content of any situation is seventy-five per cent above par.” I don’t know how he arrived at the seventy-five, but the principle is entirely right. You know, you yourself weren’t far off sharing the general opinion this morning - it gave you a sense of the dramatic, an angle for the feeling of tension, and helped to relieve the boredom of the place. You would not have felt like that at home; and I should not have behaved as I did, at home; but here, the occasions for standing firm, and for bending, are different. Technically, I am the C.O., with all the authority of the Crown behind me, and because of that we preserve certain forms; in practice, my job is more like a patriarch’s. Sometimes rank and regulations have to be invoked; but we find it better to use them as little as we can.’
‘I have noticed that, too,’ she agreed.
‘We realized when we came here that there would be particular problems, but we could not foresee all of them. We realized that we’d need men able to adapt to life in a small community, and because they would be restricted almost all the time to the station, we had them vetted for claustrophobic tendencies, too. But it did not occur to anyone that, out here, they would have to contend with claustrophobia and agoraphobia at the same time. Yet it is so; we are shut in, in a vast emptiness - it made a pretty grim mental conflict for a lot of them, and morale went down and down. After a year of it the first Station-Commander began to battle for an establishment of women clerks, orderlies, and cooks. His report was quite dramatically eloquent. “If this station,” he wrote, “is required to keep to its present establishment then, in my considered opinion, a complete collapse of morale will follow in a short time. It is of the utmost importance that we take all practical steps which will help to give it the character of a normal human community. Any measures that will keep this wilderness from howling in the men’s minds, and the horrors of eternity from frost-biting their souls, should be employed without delay.” Good Lyceum stuff, that, but true, all the same. There was a great deal of misgiving at home - but no lack of women volunteers; and when they did come, most of them turned out to be more adaptable than the men. And then, of course, the patriarchal aspect of the C.O.’s job came still more to the fore. It is no sort of a place for a disciplinarian to build up his ego; the best that can be done is to keep it working as harmoniously as possible.
‘I have been here long enough to take its pulse fairly well as a rule, but this time I slipped up. Now, I don’t want that to happen again, so I’d be glad of your further help to see that it doesn’t. We’ve dislodged this particular source of trouble, but the causes are still there; the frustrations are still buzzing about, and soon they are going to find a new place to swarm. I want the news early, the moment they look as if they have found it. Can I rely on you for that?’