“So, you saw the way it went,” said Benny. “So where is it?”

Eddie stared out across the desolate lunar landscape, hoping he might catch a glimpse of the reel of tether material. “Well, it rolled that way,” he said, pointing, “but round, rolling things tend to curve as they roll. It could have gone either to the left or the right. Also, it’s probably covered by a dune of moon dust by now. It may be completely hidden from sight.”

“Let's hope not,” said the Swede. “That would be a rather ignominious end to our mission. Let's split up, then. You go left, I’ll go right.”

Eddie nodded, forgetting that the other man couldn't see his face, and the two men walked slowly away from the shuttle, kicking every mound of dust they passed on the way.

It took them nearly twenty minutes to find it. They went over the same ground time and again, staring at every boulder, looking into every depression, kicking every mound of dust until Eddie found himself close to despair. He was haunted by the fantasy that it might be irretrievably lost and that they might have to abandon the mission for such a stupid, mundane reason. Would everyone back on Earth be furious when they returned in defeat, or would they just laugh? A laughter that would follow them to the grave and that would be their legacy for centuries to come?

Then, as he was going over a patch of land he could have sworn he’d gone over at least twice before, the toe of his boot connected with something solid buried in the dust, and when he looked closer he saw that the swirling wind had excavated a deep depression in the dust on the downwind side, leaving a smooth curve of aluminium exposed to the gloomy lunar twilight. He reached down to grasp hold of it, lifted, and to his relief the reel rose into sight, dust swirling away in the brisk wind. “Found it!” he cried.

The ground shook again as Benny came loping over. Another moonquake. Not as bad as the first but still worrying. Eddie found himself wondering just how thick the slab of land they were standing on now was. A hundred kilometres? Less? And beneath it, magma. Way hotter than its melting point, spreading heat into the solid rock above and steadily melting it. Magma that was considerably less dense than the soIid rock above. The time it took for the magma below to move out of the way was the only thing preventing this last slab of solid ground from sinking faster than it was.

Eddie forced his mind to stop thinking about it, otherwise he was likely to flip out as Susan had done. He wondered how she was doing, still tied to her seat. Did she regret what she'd done? Was she being consumed by shame and guilt? Or did she still want to sabotage the mission and was just waiting for the opportunity to break free so she could wreak havoc?

“Okay, me and Paul can handle this now,” said Benny. “Go get him and go fix the mass amplifier.”

“If it can be fixed,” said Eddie, heading back to the shuttle. “It's the circuit board that worries me the most. I may have to steal some components from something else.”

“Do whatever you have to do,” said Paul. “So long as we can still fly the ship.” He had appeared at the airlock door and he helped Eddie climb in as he jumped up. “Don’t untie her,” he warned. “No matter how reasonable she seems.”

“Understood,” replied Eddie, going through into the cabin and then kicking himself up to the cockpit. Susan was still where they'd left her, he saw. Sitting in her seat, her arms by her sides, tied to the support struts by zip ties. A length of electrical cord was wrapped around her chest, holding her to the back of the seat. Her helmet faced forward. He couldn't see If she was looking at him or what the expression on her face was.

“Hey, Susan,” he said. “How you doing?”

“About as well as could be expected,” she replied flatly. “My scalp itches, and I won’t be able to scratch it for over two days.”

“You think you got it bad,” Eddie replied. “I’ve got cooling fluid sloshing around my feet. I'm going to have trenchfoot by the time we get home.”

“Count yourself lucky,” she said. “They experimented a few years back with putting APA in the water, to make it less viscous, so the pump could be smaller and use less power. They abandoned the idea when they found it gave you cancer. You've got nothing but nice clean water sloshing around your tootsies.”

“I hear a drill through the heart can be quite bad for you as well.”

“I'm sorry about that.”

Eddie opened the casing of the mass amplifier and peered in, frowning at the damage. “Did you know what you were doing when you did this? Were you just out of your mind?”

“Would it make you feel better if I said I was?”

“I just want to know if you'd still try to kill me if you could.”

“If it would stop the mission, yes.”

“Even though millions would die down on Earth?”

“This isn't our real life, Eddie. This is just a test, to see who's worthy to join God in Heaven. That's where our real life is. Nobody really dies, don’t you see? Killing someone isn't really such a terrible crime, because you're not ending that person. You're just sending them on somewhere else.”

“Some people, you might be sending them on to Hell.”

“If that’s what they deserve.”

“Do you think that’s what I deserve? Do you think I deserve to be tortured for all eternity?”

“That's for God to decide. You know your own heart better than I do.”

She's mad, Eddie decided, a shiver of fear running down his spine. And what was really scary was that there were millions more like her down on Earth, even now, in the second half of the twenty first century. People who, on the outside seemed like perfectly normal, sensible people but who genuinely believed that some of the people around them deserved to be tortured forever. You could argue forever that the early Christians had had no concept of Hell, that the fire and brimstone and devils with pitchforks was an idea that had only arisen in recent centuries, but a great many modern Christians believed it anyway. Believed that there were good people around them who would not only suffer in Hell forever, but who actually deserved it, for the ‘crime’ of believing something different. Eddie glanced over Susan again, and gave silent thanks that she was safely tied to her chair.

He tried to put her out of his mind and began carefully detaching the damaged circuit board. The HEK17 chip was completely destroyed, he saw, but he was pretty certain there would be a compatible one in the secondary navigation system. They’d have to do without a backup for their trip back home. Everything else that needed replacing was pretty standard and could be found in just about any piece of electrical equipment, including the drill that had caused the damage in the first place. He nodded to himself. He could do this, he thought. Give him a couple of hours and the mass amplifier would be as good as new.

☆☆☆

Susan watched him from the privacy of her spacesuit helmet, knowing that her face was hidden from him by the darkness. It gave her a strange feeling of safety and security, as if she were hiding. She tested the zip ties holding her arms. With so many layers of material covering her body she could barely feel them, and she thought there might be a little give in them if she worked on them for a while. They were sunk into the folds of her spacesuit, which was a problem, but if she pulled on them just right while Eddie wasn’t looking, she might eventually be able to get one fold under the tie, then another.

She looked up at Eddie. His attention was now focused entirely on the mass amplifier, his prisoner forgotten. She tensed up and went to work.

☆☆☆

“I had an idea about the dust in the crater,” said Benny as they dragged the Skyhook cable out of its round casing, hand over hand like old time sailors adjusting the rigging of a tall ship. They'd wedged the reel between two large rocks, to prevent it from simply following them across the lunar surface.

It was hard work. Dust had gotten inside the bearing assembly, a mechanism that had been designed to operate in the vacuum of open space and which, therefore, had no protection against anything that might get in and jam it. There was also no way to disassemble the reel and gain direct access to the flat M5 ribbon coiled up inside. They had no choice, therefore, but to just pull it out, the bearing vibrating and squealing horribly, occasionally seizing up and needing a good jerk to get it moving again, all the while dreading that the mechanism might jam up completely, leaving them with not enough cable to do the job and with no option but to return to the shuttle for cutting gear. The only cutting gear they had, though, was, again, designed for use in vacuum, and Benny had no idea how it would behave in the exotic mix of gases that comprised the moon's atmosphere.

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They were leaving the cable lying in loops and curls on the lunar surface for the time being, but it was so light that whenever the wind gushed the entire length of it would be caught up and pulled off to the east in a great loop, except for the end that Paul had pinned under another large rock. They were planning to leave the other end in the reel for now, therefore, in case the wind carried the whole thing away, leaving them able to do nothing but watch helplessly as the salvation of mankind was carried over the distant horizon and out of sight.

“What idea?” asked Paul.

“When Eddie found this thing,” said Benny, indicating the reel. “I should have thought of it earlier. I've been to the beach often enough. I've seen what happens to the sand when the water swirls around a large boulder.”

“It carves out a depression in the sand,” said Paul, looking up hopefully. “But we'd need quite a large boulder to make a depression big enough. We need an area of bedrock at least a metre across, entirely free of dust.”

“I was thinking of a pile of small boulders,” replied Benny. “Or a wall, rather. If we could gather up enough of these small boulders...” He gestured at the rocks littering the landscape all around. “...and pile them up into a wall about a metre high and three or four metres long... That should be enough in this wind, with the gravity being so low. The downwind side would have to be almost sheer, though, for it to work. There were dry stone walls surrounding the fields near where I used to live, I used to watch the farmers building them. I'm pretty sure I could do the same.”

“Have we got time? The lava gets here in just six hours now, that's assuming the forecast is still accurate.”

“It takes as long as it takes. How much more of this thing is there, you think?”

“It’s a thousand...” The cable snagged again and Paul gave it another hard jerk to free it. “It's a thousand metres long.” He looked around at the great loops and coils of it lying on the moon's surface, its uppermost loops fluttering in the wind. “We're probably about half way there...” It snagged again and Paul pulled again, but this time without success. Benny added his strength to that of the other man and they both pulled together. Another half metre emerged reluctantly from the slot in the reel’s outer edge, but then it stopped again, with a firmness that told both men that they'd gotten all they were going to get of the precious material.

“I'm pretty sure we got more than half,” said Benny. “If the reel was transparent, we could see how much there still was in there.”

“Is that enough?” asked Paul. “We could cut the reel open, try to get more out.”

“If we had less, I'd say yes,” replied the Swede. “Time is our enemy, though. We still have so many things to do. I think we should make do with what we've got.”

“I agree.” The wind was picking up, pulling more forcefully at the thin, flat ribbons of material. Both men had to brace themselves to keep from being pushed back by it. Paul saw that there was a fuzziness around everything he was seeing through his visor as the wind-blown dust scoured its outer surface. If they’d had to spend a whole day out here, he thought it likely that his vision would have been completely obscured before the end of the mission. “Maybe we should have left it in the reel until we had the crater sorted out,” he said.

“The more dust got in, the sooner the bearings would have seized up,” the Swede replied. “Another couple of hours and we might not have got any at all out of it. As it is, we have five hundred metres, maybe more. That should be plenty.”

Paul nodded. “I'm just worried it’ll get tangled, that’s all.”

“It can't get tangled. One end’s still in the reel, the other's trapped under that boulder. You need a free end for a tangle to form.”

Paul had never thought about it that much, or at all really, and so he simply nodded his agreement. He checked the boulder one last time, to make sure the free end wouldn’t pull loose while they were away, then followed Benny towards the crater.

There were several small boulders already there, and Paul was pleased to see that they all had depressions in the dust on their downwind sides, made by the wind swirling around them. The two men silently got to work, wandering around, picking up boulders and carrying them over to sit beside the largest, the one they'd chosen to be the foundation of their wall. They just left them in a pile at first, but when they had enough Benny began sorting them by size and shape and laid the largest of them in a line to be the foundation of his wall. The rocks were sharp and irregular, never having been eroded by wind or rain in all the millions of years they'd lain on the moon's surface, and they locked together well, almost as if they'd been meant to be assembled. Benny hummed a tune to himself as he worked, and as the wall grew it began to have the desired effect, the depression in the dust growing until they could see a small, exposed spot of bare bedrock on which tiny specks of dust spun and danced like midges.

“Where's all this dust coming from, anyway?” mused Paul as he returned with another three rocks cradled in his arms. “Why hasn't it all been blown away by now and dumped into the magma ocean?”

“I suspect it comes from the magma ocean,” replied Benny without looking up from his work. “The wind here is mild compared to what it is elsewhere. Across most of the moon it’s supersonic. The wind is actually blowing faster than the speed of sound. It must be whipping the molten rock up into a wild froth, and the spray carried up into the air solidifies and turns to dust. We'll know for certain when the scientists back on Earth analyse it, but you can already see that it’s black. The colour of basalt.”

“It's hard to see any colours in this gloom,” said Paul. He flicked his eyes up to the top, left hand corner of his visor display where the time was being displayed in glowing green numbers. No time to stop and chat. He turned and walked back across the surface of the moon to find more boulders.

An hour later, Benny’s wall was large enough to create an area of bare bedrock a metre across on its downwind side. “There's still dust blowing around down there,” said the Swede, though. “We’ll never get it completely clean. The moment we spread glue, dust will stick to it and completely cover it.”

“Not if we hold the plate right next to the wall while we spread the glue on it. The wall should protect it. Then we slap it down on the bedrock quickly, before the dust can get on it.”

“The bedrock's not completely flat. I wish we had time to grind it flat.”

“Me too, but there should be enough contact between the plate and the bedrock to take the strain.”

Paul allowed himself to fall forward onto his hands, then ran his hand over the bedrock to feel its texture. It was rougher than he'd realised. He could feel bumps and depressions in it, but there was nothing they could do about that. It would either hold or it wouldn't.

“Yeah, it’s not too bad,” he said as Benny helped him back to his feet. No point worrying the other man. “Let's go get the plate.”

☆☆☆

Thirty minutes later, the plate was in place. A round disc sixty centimetres across with a round loop welded to it. Glue peeped out from under it all around its edge, already hard, and when Paul pulled on the loop it felt as solid as a rock. Paul had brought the end of the tether with him, after discovering that it was, after all, possible for a line anchored at both ends to get tangled. With his thick, clumsy gloved hands there was no way he could untie the knot, and so they could only try to come to terms with the fact that they had a hundred metres less of the tether than they thought they’d have.

He passed it through the loop, tying it in place and pulling it tight. “I thought you might do two half hitches,” said Benny. “Something simple and reliable.”

“An anchor bend is better,” replied Paul, giving it a final tug. “Don't want it coming undone at the wrong moment.” He stared at the knot for a while longer. He gave the tether another tug, gave the plate another tug. He knew that, once they left the crater, they would never be coming back. If there was a problem with the anchor point, they had this one chance to fix it. He gave the tether one more tug, just for luck. “That look okay to you, Ben?” he asked.

“It's as good as we can get it,” the Swede replied. “If we had the right equipment, we could do a better job. If we had more time before the lava arrives. If we'd had more time to prepare beforehand, like five or ten years...”

“Yes, but we didn't. The question is, is there anything we can do, here and now, to anchor it better?”

“No, my friend. I don’t believe there is.”

Paul nodded, then gave a heavy sigh. “Okay then. Let’s get the other end connected to the shuttle.”

☆☆☆

Connecting the other end of the tether to the shuttle was much easier. An attachment point had been made for it before they'd left the space station, between the three main engine nozzles. Paul threaded the tether through the eyelet, pulled it through and knotted it. “It's funny,” he said. “We have the power of Gods to rearrange the celestial bodies of the solar system, and we're going to be doing it with what is, basically, a knotted length of string.”

Benny smiled in the privacy of his helmet at the irony of it. “We've got four hundred metres of tether between the two knots,” he said, having paced it out on the way back. “It’ll take an object that high above the ground about twenty two seconds to fall that far, in the moon's gravity.”

“But we have to allow time for the engines to reverse our downwards motion before we hit the ground,” said Paul. “I did some calculations on the trip out. How often we'd have to turn the mass dampener on and off depending on the length of tether we ended up with. I can't remember what the figures were for four hundred metres, but we’ll be turning it on and off quite frequently, I know that. If it burns out before we’re done, we’re screwed.”

“One thing that’s certain is that it'll have to be turned on rather longer than off,” said Benny. “Also, the engines will be firing continuously. We cannot turn them on and off that frequently, so we’ll be wasting a lot of fuel.”

“Can't be helped,” replied Paul. “What worries me is that, with the mass dampener on longer than it's off, there won't be enough time for what’s shot up to come back down again. By the time we finish the burn, we’ll probably be towing an expanding cloud of debris rather than a single soIid moon.”

“It’ll pull itself back together when we’re done mucking around with it. I would imagine that the moon’s going to be a spectacular place for a while, but whatever happens will be four hundred thousand kilometres away from the Earth. That should be far enough that it'll be nothing more than a glorious spectacle back home without posing any kind of a risk to anyone on the ground. The risk will all be to us. We're going to be, at most, a mere four hundred metres away from the most incredibly violent place in the solar system, and occasionally much closer than that.”

“Yes, we'll have a rather singed tail when we return to the space station,” said Paul. “If we get back...”