Free The Outward Urge by John Wyndham Page B

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