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MOONCRASH organisation,” said Pat. “And, frankly, it wasn’t planned to deal with a situation
     like this. When a ship’s down on the Moon, it can be spotted very quickly from one
     of the satellites—either Lagrange II above Earthside, or Lagrange I over Farside.
     But I doubt if they can help us now; as I said, we’ve probably gone down without leaving
     a trace.”
    “That’s hard to believe. When a ship sinks on Earth, it always leaves
something
behind—bubbles, oil-slicks, floating wreckage.”
    “None of those apply to us. And I can’t think of any way we could send something up
     to the surface—however far away that is.”
    “So we just have to sit and wait.”
    “Yes,” agreed Pat. He glanced at the oxygen reserve indicator. “And there’s one thing
     we can be sure of—we can only wait a week.”
    Fifty thousand kilometres above the Moon, Tom Lawson laid down the last of his photographs.
     He had gone over every square millimetre of the prints with a magnifying glass; their
     quality was excellent—the electronic image intensifier, millions of times more sensitive
     than the human eye, had revealed details clearly, as it was already daylight down
     there on the faintly glimmering plain. He had even spotted one of the tiny dust-skis—or,
     more accurately, the long shadow it cast in the Earthlight. Yet there was no trace
     of
Selene
; the Sea was as smooth and unruffled as it had been before the coming of Man. And
     as it would be, in all probability, ages after he had gone.
    Tom hated to admit defeat, even in matters far less important than this. He believed
     that all problems could be solved if they were tackled in the right way, with the
     right equipment. This was a challenge to his scientific ingenuity; the fact that there
     were many lives involved was immaterial. Dr. Tom Lawson had no great use for human
     beings, but he did respect the Universe. This was a private fight between him and
     It.
    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,