“Because if you land on your head and crack your helmet open, we’ll bury you right where you fall! Come on, Morrie. No, sorry — I mean `Art’.”
They crowded into the tiny lock, almost filling it. The motor which drove the impeller to scavenge the air from the lock whirred briefly, so little was the space left unoccupied by their bodies, then sighed and stopped. The scavenger valve clicked into place and Cargraves unclamped the outer door.
He found that he floated, rather than jumped, to the ground. Art came after him, landing on his hands and knees and springing lightly up.
“Okay, kid?”
“Swell!”
They moved around to the front, boots scuffing silently in the loose soil. He looked at it and picked up a handful to see if it looked like stuff that had been hit by radioactive blast. He was thinking of Morrie’s theory. They were on the floor of a crater; that was evident, for the wall of hills extended all around them. Was it an atomic bomb crater?
He could not tell. The moon soil did have the boiled and bubbly look of atom-scorched earth, but that might have been volcanic action, or, even, the tremendous heat of the impact of a giant meteor. Well, the problem could wait.
Art stopped suddenly. “Say! Uncle, I’ve got to go back.”
“What’s the matter?”
“I forgot my camera!”
Cargraves chuckled. “Make it next time. Your subject won’t move.” Art’s excitement had set a new high, he decided; there was a small school of thought which believed he bathed with his camera.
Speaking of baths, Cargraves mused, I could stand one. Space travel had its drawbacks. He was beginning to dislike his own smell, particularly when it was confined in a space suit!
Ross and Morrie were waiting for them, not patiently, at the port. Their radio voices, blanked until now by the ship’s sides, came clearly through the quartz. “How about it, Doc?,” Ross sang out, pressing his nose to the port.
“Seems all right,” they heard him say.
“Then here we come!”
“Wait a few minutes yet. I want to be sure.”
“Well — okay.” Ross showed his impatience, but discipline was no longer a problem. Art made faces at them, then essayed a little dance, staying close to the ground but letting each step carry him a few feet into the air — or, rather, vacuum. He floated slowly and with some grace. It was like a dance in slow motion, or a ballet under water.
When he started rising a little higher and clicking his boot heels together as he sailed, Cargraves motioned for him to stop. “Put down your flaps, chum,” he cautioned, “and land. You aren’t Nijinsky.”
“Who’s Nijinsky?”
“Never mind. Just stay planted. Keep at least one foot on the ground. Okay, Morrie,” he called out, “come on out. You and Ross.”
The port was suddenly deserted.
When Morrie set foot on the moon and looked around him at the flat and unchanging plain and at the broken crags beyond he felt a sudden overwhelming emotion of tragedy and of foreboding welling up inside him. “It’s the bare bones,” he muttered, half to himself, “the bare bones of a dead world.”
“Huh?” said Ross. “Are you coming, Morrie?”
“Right behind you.”
Cargraves and Art had joined them. “Where to?” asked Ross, as the captain came up.
“Well, I don’t want to get too far from the ship this first time,” Cargraves declared. “This place might have some dirty tricks up its sleeve that we hadn’t figured on. How much pressure you guys carrying?”
“Ship pressure.”
“You can cut it down to about half that without the lower pressure bothering you. It’s oxygen, you know.”
“Let’s walk over to those hills,” Morrie suggested. He pointed astern where the rim of the crater was less than half a mile from the ship. It was the sunward side and the shadows stretched from the rim to within a hundred yards or so of the ship.
“Well, part way, anyhow. That shade might feel good. I’m beginning to sweat.”
“I think,” said Morrie, “if I remember correctly, we ought to be able to see earth from the top of the rim. I caught a flash of it, just as we inverted. We aren’t very far over on the back side.”