He joined the little group huddled around the port. In front of them stretched a dun and lifeless floor, breaking into jagged hills a few miles beyond them. It was hot, glaring hot, under the oblique rays of the sun, and utterly still. The earth was not in sight; they had dropped over the rim into the unknown side in the last minutes of the impromptu landing.
Instead of the brassy sky one might expect over such a scene of blistering desert desolation, a black dome of night, studded brilliantly with stars, hung over it. At least, thought Morrie, his mind returning to his problem in navigation, it would be hard to get lost here. A man could set a course by the stars with no trouble.
“When are we going out?” demanded Art.
“Keep your shirt on,” Ross told him and turned to Cargraves. “Say, Doc, that was sure a slick landing. Tell me- was that first approach just a look around on manual, or did you feed that into the automatic pilot, too?”
“Neither one, exactly.” He hesitated. It had been evident from their first remarks that neither Ross nor Art had been aware of the danger, nor of his own agonizing indecision. Was it necessary to worry them with it now? He was aware that, if he did not speak, Morrie would never mention it.
That decided him. The man- man was the word, he now knew, not “boy” -was entitled to public credit. “Morrie made that landing,” he informed them. “We had to cut out the robot and Morrie put her down.”
Ross whistled.
Art said, “Huh? What did you say? Don’t tell me that radar cut out — I checked it six ways.”
“Your gadgets all stood up,” Cargraves assured him, “but there are some things a man can do that a gadget can’t. This was one of them.” He elaborated what had happened.
Ross looked Morrie up and down until Morrie blushed. “Hot Pilot I said, and Hot Pilot it is,” Ross told him. “But I’m glad I didn’t know.” He walked aft, whistling Danse Macabre, off key again, and began to fiddle with his space suit.
“When do we go outside?,” Art persisted.
“Practically at once, I suppose.”
“Whoopee!”
“Don’t get in a hurry. You might be the man with the short straw and have to stay with the ship.”
“But . . . Look, Uncle, why does anybody have to stay with the ship? Nobody’s going to steal it.”
Cargraves hesitated. With automatic caution, he had intended always to keep at least one man in the ship, as a safety measure. On second thought there seemed no reason for it. A man inside the ship could do nothing for a man outside the ship without first donning a pressure suit and coming outside. “We’ll compromise,” he said. “Morrie and I — no, you and I.” He realized that he could not risk both pilots at once.
“You and I will go first. If it’s okay, the others can follow us. All right, troops,” he said, turning. “Into your space suits!”
They helped each other into them, after first applying white sunburn ointment liberally over the skin outside their goggles. It gave them an appropriate out-of-this-world appearance. Then Cargraves had them cheek their suits at twice normal pressure while he personally inspected their oxygen-bottle back packs. All the while they were checking their walky-talkies; ordinary conversation could be heard, but only faintly, through the helmets as long as they were in the air of the ship; the radios were louder.
“Okay, sports,” he said at last. “Art and I will go into the lock together, then proceed around to the front, where you can see us. When I give you the high sign, come on out. One last word: stay together. Don’t get more than ten yards or so away from me. And remember this. When you get out there, every last one of you is going to want to see how high you can jump; I’ve heard you talking about it. Well, you can probably jump twenty-five or thirty feet high if you try. But don t do it.
“Why not?” Ross’s voice was strange, through the radio.