He considered the situation with a coldly critical intelligence. Now how would the great Holmes have tackled the problem? (It was characteristic of Tom that one of the few men he really admired had never existed.) He had eliminated the open Sea, so that left only one possibility. The dust-cruiser must have come to grief along the coast or near the mountains, probably in the region known as—he checked the charts— Crater Lake . That made good sense; an accident was much more likely here than out on the smooth, unobstructed plain.

He looked at the photographs again, this time concentrating on the mountains. At once, he ran into a new difficulty. There were scores of isolated crags and boulders along the edge of the Sea, any one of which might be the missing cruiser. Worse still, there were many areas that he could not survey at all, because his view was blocked by the mountains themselves. From his vantage point, the Sea of Thirst was far around the curve of the Moon, and his view of it was badly foreshortened. Crater Lake itself, for instance, was completely invisible to him, hidden by its mountain walls. That area could only be investigated by the dust-skis, working at ground level; even Tom Lawson's godlike eminence was useless here.

He had better call Earthside and give them his interim report.

“Lawson, Lagrange II,” he said, when Communications had put him through. “I've searched the Sea of Thirst —there's nothing in the open plain. Your boat must have gone aground near the edge.”

“Thank you,” said an unhappy voice. “You're quite sure of that?”

“Absolutely. I can see your dust-skis, and they're only a quarter the size of Selene.”

“Anything visible along the edge of the Sea?”

“There's too much small-scale detail to make a search possible. I can see fifty—oh, a hundred—objects that might be the right size. As soon as the sun rises I'll be able to examine them more closely. But it's night down there now, remember.”

“We appreciate your help. Let us know if you find anything else.”

Down in Clavius City , the Tourist Commissioner heard Lawson's report with resignation. That settled it; the next of kin had better be notified. It was unwise, if not impossible, to maintain secrecy any longer.

He turned to the Ground Traffic officer and asked: “Is that passenger list in yet?”

“Just coming over the telefax from Port Roris. Here you are.” As he handed over the flimsy sheet, he said inquisitively: “Anyone important aboard?”

“All tourists are important,” said the Commissioner coldly, without looking up. Then, in almost the same breath, he added: “Oh, my God!”

“What's the matter?”

“Commodore Hansteen's aboard.”

“What? I didn't know he was on the Moon.”

“We've kept it quiet. We thought it was a good idea to have him on the Tourist Commission, now that he's retired. He wanted to have a look around, incognito, before he made up his mind.”

There was a shocked silence as the two men considered the irony of the situation. Here was one of the greatest heroes of space—lost as an ordinary tourist in some stupid accident in Earth's backyard, the Moon.

“That may be very bad luck for the Commodore,” said the traffic controller at last. “But it's good luck for the passengers—if they're still alive.”

“They'll need all the luck they can get, now the Observatory can't help us,” said the Commissioner.

He was right on the first point, but wrong on the second. Dr. Tom Lawson still had a few tricks up his sleeve.

And so did The Reverend Vincent Ferraro, S. J., a scientist of a very different kind. It was a pity that he and Tom Lawson were never to meet; the resulting fireworks would have been quite interesting. Father Ferraro believed in God and Man; Dr. Lawson believed in neither.

The priest had started his scientific career as a geophysicist, then switched worlds and became a selenophysicist—though that was a name he used only in his more pedantic moments. No man alive had a greater knowledge of the Moon's interior, gleaned from batteries of instruments strategically placed over the entire surface of the satellite.

Those instruments had just produced some rather interesting results. At 19 hours 35 minutes 47 seconds GMT, there had been a major quake in the general area of Rainbow Bay . That was a little surprising, for the area was an unusually stable one, even for the tranquil Moon. Father Ferraro set his computers to work pinpointing the focus of the disturbance, and also instructed them to search for any other anomalous instrument readings. He left them at this task while he went to lunch, and it was here that his colleagues told him about the missing Selene.

No electronic computer can match the human brain at associating apparently irrelevant facts. Father Ferraro only had time for one spoonful of soup before he had put two and two together and had arrived at a perfectly reasonable but disastrously misleading answer.

CHAPTER 5