Free A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke

had been built to take any reasonable punishment,
     and if
that
was out of action, it must have been some crack-up….
    The first problem would be to locate the wreck; that might be fairly easy, even if
     it was buried beneath a million tons of rubble. There were prospecting instruments
     and a whole range of metal detectors that could do the trick. And when the hull was
     cracked, the air inside would have rushed out into the lunar near-vacuum; even now,
     hours later, there would be traces of carbon dioxide and oxygen that might be spotted
     by one of the gas detectors used for pin-pointing spaceship leaks. As soon as the
     dust-skis came back to base for servicing and recharging, he’d get them fitted with
     leak detectors and would send them sniffing round the rock-slides.
    No—
finding
the wreck might be simple; it was getting it out that might be impossible. He wouldn’t
     guarantee that the job could be done for a hundred million. (And he could just see
     the C.A.’s face if he mentioned a sum like that.) For one thing, it was a physical
     impossibility to bring heavy equipment into the area—the sort of equipment needed
     to move thousands of tons of rubble. The flimsy little dust-skis were useless; to
     shift those rock-slides one would have to float moondozers across the Sea of Thirst,
     and import whole ship-loads of gelignite to blast a road through the mountains. The
     whole idea was absurd; he could understand the Administration’s point of view, but
     he was damned if he would let his overworked Engineering Division get saddled with
     such a Sisyphean task.
    As tactfully as possible—for the Chief Administrator was not the sort of man who liked
     to take ‘no’ for an answer—he began to draft his report. Summarised, it might have
     read: “(A) The job’s almost certainly impossible. (B) If it can be done at all it
     will cost millions and may involve further loss of life. (C) It’s not worth doing
     anyway.” But because such bluntness would make him unpopular, and he had to give his
     reasons, the report ran to over three thousand words.
    When he had finished dictation he paused to marshal his ideas, could think of nothing
     further, and added: “Copies to Chief Administrator, Moon; Chief Engineer, Farside;
     Supervisor, Traffic Control; Tourist Commissioner; Central Filing. Classify as Confidential.”
    He pressed the Transcription key. Within twenty seconds all twelve pages of his report,
     impeccably typed and punctuated, with several grammatical slips corrected, had emerged
     from the office Telefax. He scanned it rapidly, in case the Electrosecretary had made
     mistakes. She did this occasionally (all Electrosecs were ‘she’), especially during
     rush periods when she might be taking dictation from a dozen sources at once. In any
     event, no wholly sane machine could cope with all the eccentricities of a language
     like English, and every wise executive checked his final draft before he sent it out.
     Many were the hilarious disasters that had overtaken those who had left it all to
     electronics.
    Lawrence was halfway through this task when the telephone rang.
    “Lagrange II on the line, sir,” said the operator—a human one, as it happened. “A
     Doctor Lawson wants to speak to you.”
    Lawson? Who the devil’s that? the C.E.E. asked himself. Then he remembered; that was
     the astronomer who was making the telescopic search. Surely someone had told him that
     it was useless….
    The Chief Engineer had never had the dubious privilege of meeting Dr. Lawson. He did
     not know that the astronomer was a very neurotic and very brilliant young man—and,
     what was more important in this case, a very stubborn one.
    Lawson had just began to dismantle the infra-red scanner when he stopped to consider
     his action. Since he had practically completed the blasted thing, he might as well
     test it, out of sheer scientific curiosity. Tom Lawson prided himself, rightly, as
     a practical