A Fall of Moondust Read Online Free

daytime,
     when the sun blasted it with heat and light, it lost much of its magic. But now it
     belonged to the kingdom of fantasy, as if it had come from the haunted brain of Edgar
     Allan Poe. Ever and again one seemed to glimpse strange shapes moving at the edge
     of vision, beyond the narrow range of the lights. It was pure imagination, of course;
     nothing moved in all this land except the shadows of the sun and earth. There could
     be no ghosts upon a world that had never known life.
    It was time to turn back, to sail down the canyon into the open sea. Pat aimed the
     blunt prow of
Selene
towards the narrow rift in the mountains, and the high walls enfolded them again.
     On the outward journey he left the lights on, so that the passengers could see where
     they were going, besides, that trick of the Night Ride would not work so well a second
     time.
    Far ahead, beyond the reach of
Selene
’s own illumination, a light was growing, spreading softly across the rocks and crags.
     Even in her last quarter, Earth still had the power of a dozen full moons, and now
     that they were emerging from the shadow of the mountains she was once more the mistress
     of the skies. Everyone of the twenty-two men and women aboard
Selene
looked up at that blue-green crescent, admiring its beauty, wondering at its brilliance.
     How strange, that the familiar fields and lakes and forests of Earth shone with such
     celestial glory when one looked at them from afar! Perhaps there was a lesson here;
     perhaps no man could appreciate his own world, until he had seen it from space.
    And upon Earth, there must be many eyes turned towards the waxing Moon—more than ever
     before, now that the Moon meant so much to mankind. It was possible, but unlikely,
     that even now some of those eyes were peering through powerful telescopes at the faint
     spark of
Selene
’s floodlights as it crept through the lunar night. But it would mean nothing to them,
     when that spark flickered and died.
    For a million years the bubble had been growing, like a vast abscess, below the root
     of the mountains. Throughout the entire history of Man, gas from the Moon’s not-yet-wholly-dead
     interior had been forcing itself along lines of weakness, accumulating in cavities
     hundreds of metres below the surface. On nearby Earth, the Ice Ages had marched past,
     one by one, while the buried caverns grew and merged and at last coalesced. Now the
     abscess was about to burst.
    Captain Harris had left the controls on Autopilot and was talking to the front row
     of passengers when the first tremor shook the boat. For a fraction of a second he
     wondered if a fan blade had hit some submerged obstacle; then, quite literally, the
     bottom fell out of his world.
    It fell slowly, as all things must upon the Moon. Ahead of
Selene
, in a circle many acres in extent, the smooth plain puckered like a navel. The Sea
     was alive and moving, stirred by the forces that had woken it from its age-long sleep.
     The centre of the disturbance deepened into a funnel, as if a giant whirlpool was
     forming in the dust. Every stage of that nightmare transformation was pitilessly illuminated
     by the earthlight, until the crater was so deep that its far wall was completely lost
     in shadow, and it seemed as if
Selene
was racing into a curving crescent of utter blackness—an arc of annihilation.
    The truth was almost as bad. By the time that Pat had reached the controls, the boat
     was sliding and skittering far down that impossible slope. Its own momentum, and the
     accelerating flow of the dust beneath it, was carrying it headlong into the depths.
     There was nothing he could do but attempt to keep on an even keel, and to hope that
     their speed would carry them up the far side of the crater before it collapsed upon
     them.
    If the passengers screamed or cried out, Pat never heard them. He was conscious only
     of that dreadful, sickening slide, and of his own attempts to keep the cruiser from