It seemed to be working, but that was hard to tell in this small, pressurized hangar, with a confused jumble of heat sources all around it. The real test could come only out in the Sea of Thirst.
“It’s ready,” said Lawson presently to the Chief Engineer. me have a word with the man who’s going to run it.”
The C.E.E. looked at him thoughtfully, still trying to make up his mind. There were strong arguments for and against what he was considering now, but whatever he did, he must not let his personal feelings intrude. The matter was far too important for that.
“You can wear a space suit, can’t you?” he asked Lawson.
“I’ve never worn one in my life. They’re only needed for going outside–and we leave that to the engineers.”
“Well, now you have a chance of learning,” said the C.E.E., ignoring the jibe. (If it was a jibe; much of Lawson’s rudeness, he decided, was indifference to the social graces rather than defiance of them.) “There’s not much to it, when you’re riding a ski. You’ll be sitting still in the observer’s seat and the autoregulator takes care of oxygen, temperature, and the rest. There’s only one problem–”
“What’s that?”
“How are you for claustrophobia?”
Tom hesitated, not liking to admit any weakness. He had passed the usual space tests, of course, and suspected–quite rightly_that he had had a very close call on some of the psych ratings. Obviously he was not an acute claustrophobe, or he could never have gone aboard a ship. But a spaceship and a space suit were two very different things.
“I can take it,” he said at last.
“Don’t fool yourself if you can’t,” Lawrence insisted. “I think you should come with us, but I’m not trying to bully you into false heroics. All I ask is that you make up your mind before we leave the hangar. It may be a little too hate to have second thoughts when we’re twenty kilometers out to Sea.”
Tom looked at the ski and bit his lip. The idea of skimming across that infernal lake of dust in such a flimsy contraption seemed crazy–but these men did it every day. And if anything went wrong with the detector, there was at least a slight chance that he could fix it.
“Here’s a suit that’s your size,” said Lawrence. “Try it on– it may help you to make up your mind.”
Tom struggled into the flaccid yet crinkly garment, closed the front zipper, and stood, still helmetless, feeling rather a fool. The oxygen flask that was buckled to his harness seemed absurdly small, and Lawrence noticed his anxious glance.
“Don’t worry; that’s merely the four-hour reserve. You won’t be using it at all. The main supply’s on the ski. Mind your nose-here comes the helmet.”
Tom could tell, by the expressions of those around him, that this was the moment that separated the men from the boys. Until that helmet was seated, you were still part of the human race; afterward, you were alone, in a tiny mechanical world of your own. There might be other men only centimeters away, but you had to peer at them through thick plastic, talk to them by radio. You could not even touch them, except through double layers of artificial skin. Someone had once written that it was very lonely to die in a space suit. For the first time, Tom realized how true that must be.
The Chief Engineer’s voice sounded suddenly, reverberantly, from the tiny speakers set in the side of the helmet.
“The only control you need worry about is the intercom– that’s the panel on your right. Normally you’ll be connected to your pilot. The circuit will be live all the time you’re both on the ski, so you can talk to each other whenever you feel hike it. But as soon as you disconnect, you’ll have to use radio-as you’re doing now to listen to me. Press your Transmit button and talk back.”
“What’s that red Emergency button for?” asked Tom, after he had obeyed this order.
“You won’t need it–I hope. That actuates a homing beacon and sets up a radio racket until someone comes to find you. Don’t touch any of the gadgets on the suit without instructions from us–especially that one.”
“I won’t,” promised Tom. “Let’s go.”
He walked, rather clumsily–for he was used to neither the suit nor the lunar gravity–over to Duster Two and took his place in the observer’s seat. A single umbilical cord, plugged inappropriately into the right hip, connected the suit to the ski’s oxygen, communications, and power. The vehicle could keep him alive, though hardly comfortable, for three or four days, at a pinch.
The little hangar was barely large enough for the two dustskis, and it took only a few minutes for the pumps to exhaust its air. As the suit stiffened around him, Tom felt a touch of panic. The Chief Engineer and two pilots were watching, and he did not wish to give them the satisfaction of thinking that he was afraid. No man could help feeling tense when, for the first time in his life, he went into vacuum.
The clamshell doors pivoted open. There was a faint tug of ghostly fingers as the last vestige of air gushed out, plucking feebly at his suit before it dispersed into the void. And then. flat and featureless, the empty gray of the Sea of Thirst stretched out to the horizon.
For a moment it seemed impossible that here, only a few meters away, was the reality behind the images he had studied from far out in space. (Who was hooking through the hundredcentimeter telescope now? Was one of his colleagues watching, even at this moment, from his vantage point high above the Moon?) But this was no picture painted on a screen by flying electrons; _this_ was the real thing, the strange, amorphous stuff that had swallowed twenty-two men and women without trace. And across which he, Tom Lawson, was about to venture on this insubstantial craft.
He had little time to brood. The ski vibrated beneath him as the fans started to spin; then, following Duster One, it glided slowly out onto the naked surface of the Moon.
The low rays of the rising sun smote them as soon as they emerged from the long shadow of the Port buildings. Even with the protection of the automatic filters, it was dangerous to look toward the blue-white fury in the eastern sky. No, Tom corrected himself, this is the Moon, not Earth; here the sun rises in the west. So we’re heading northeast, into the Sinus Roris, along the track _Selene_ followed and never retraced.
Now that the low domes of the Port were shrinking visibly toward the horizon, he felt something of the exhilaration and excitement of all forms of speed. The sensation lasted only for a few minutes, until no more landmarks could be seen and they were caught in the illusion of being poised at the very center of an infinite plain. Despite the turmoil of the spinning fans, and the slow, silent fall of the dust parabolas behind them, they seemed to be motionless. Tom knew that they were traveling at a speed that would take them clear across the Sea in a couple of hours, yet he had to wrestle with the fear that they were lost light-years from any hope of salvation. It was at this moment that he began, a little late in the game, to feel a grudging respect for the men he was working with.
This was a good place to start checking his equipment. He switched on the detector, and set it scanning back and forth over the emptiness they had just crossed. With calm satisfaction, he noted the two blinding trails of light stretching behind them across the darkness of the Sea. This test, of course, was childishly easy; _Selene’s_ fading thermal ghost would be a million times harder to spot against the waxing heat of dawn. But it was encouraging. If he had failed here, there would have been no point in continuing any further.
“How’s it working?” said the Chief Engineer, who must have been watching from the other ski.
“Up to specification,” replied Tom cautiously. “It seems to be behaving normally.” He aimed the detector at the shrinking crescent of Earth; that was a slightly more difficult target, but not a really hard one, for it needed little sensitivity to pick up the gentle warmth of the mother world when it was projected against the cold night of space.
Yes, there it was–Earth in the far infrared, a strange and at first glance baffling sight. For it was no longer a clean-cut, geometrically perfect crescent, but a ragged mushroom with its stem lying along the equator.
It took Tom a few seconds to interpret the picture. Both Poles had been chopped off. That was understandable, for they were too cold to be detected at this setting of the sensitivity. But why that bulge across the unilluminated night side of the planet? Then he realized that he was seeing the warm glow of the tropical oceans, radiating back into the darkness the heat that they had stored during the day. In the infrared, the equatorial night was more brilliant than the polar day.