It was hard to imagine how the system could be improved or made more convenient. But sooner or later, Floyd guessed, it would pass away, to be replaced by something as unimaginable as the Newspad itself would have been to Caxton or Gutenberg.
There was another thought which a scanning of those tiny electronic headlines often invoked. The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be. Accidents, crimes, natural and man-made disasters, threats of conflict, gloomy editorials – these still seemed to be the main concern of the millions of words being sprayed into the ether. Yet Floyd also wondered if this was altogether a bad thing; the newspapers of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull.
From time to time the captain and the other members of the crew came into the cabin and exchanged a few words with him. They treated their distinguished passenger with awe, and were doubtless burning with curiosity about his mission, but were too polite to ask any questions or even to drop any hints.
Only the charming little stewardess seemed completely at ease in his presence. As Floyd quickly discovered, she came from Bali, and had carried beyond the atmosphere some of the grace and mystery of that still largely unspoiled island. One of his strangest, and most enchanting, memories of the entire trip was her zero-gravity demonstration of some classical Balinese dance movements, with the lovely, blue-green crescent of the waning Earth as a backdrop.
There was one sleep period, when the main cabin lights were switched off and Floyd fastened down his arms and legs with the elastic sheets that would prevent him from drifting away into space. It seemed a crude arrangement – but here in zero gravity his unpadded couch was more comfortable than the most luxurious mattress on Earth.
When he had strapped himself in, Floyd dozed off quickly enough, but woke up once in a drowsy, half-conscious condition, to be completely baffled by his strange surroundings. For a moment he thought that be was in the middle of some dimly lit Chinese lantern; the faint glow from the other cubicles around him gave that impression. Then he said to himself, firmly and successfully: "Go to sleep, boy. This is just an ordinary moon shuttle."
When he awoke, the Moon had swallowed up half the sky, and the braking maneuvers were about to begin.
The wide arc of windows set in the curving wall of the passenger section now looked out onto the open sky, not the approaching globe, so he moved into the control cabin. Here, on the rear-view TV screens, he could watch the final stages of the descent.
The approaching lunar mountains were utterly unlike those of Earth; they lacked the dazzling caps of snow, the green, close-fitting garments of vegetation, the moving crowns of cloud, Nevertheless, the fierce contrasts of light and shadow gave them a strange beauty of their own. The laws of earthly aesthetics did not apply here; this world had been shaped and molded by other than terrestrial forces, operating over eons of time unknown to the young, verdant Earth, with its fleeting Ice Ages, its swiftly rising and falling seas, its mountain ranges dissolving like mists before the dawn. Here was age inconceivable – but not death, for the Moon had never lived – until now.
The descending ship was poised almost above the line dividing night from day, and directly below was a chaos of jagged shadows and brilliant, isolated peaks catching the first light of the slow lunar dawn. That would be a fearful place to attempt a landing, even with all possible electronic aids; but they were slowly drifting away from it, toward the night side of the Moon.
Then Floyd saw, as his eyes grew more accustomed to the fainter illumination, that the night land was not wholly dark. It was aglow with a ghostly light, in which peaks and valleys and plains could be clearly seen. The Earth, a giant moon to the Moon, was flooding the land below with its radiance.
On the pilot's panel, lights flashed above radar screens, numbers came and went on computer displays, clocking off the distance of the approaching Moon. They were still more than a thousand miles away when weight returned as the jets began their gentle but steady deceleration. For ages, it seemed, the Moon slowly expanded across the sky, the sun sank below the horizon, and at last a single giant crater filled the field of view.
The shuttle was falling toward its central peaks – and suddenly Floyd noticed that near one of those peaks a brilliant light was flashing with a regular rhythm. It might have been an airport beacon back on Earth, and he stared at it with a tightening of the throat. It was proof that men had established another foothold on the Moon.
Now the crater had expanded so much that its ramparts were slipping below the horizon, and the smaller craterlets that peppered its interior were beginning to disclose their real size. Some of these, tiny though they had seemed from far out in space, were miles across, and could have swallowed whole cities.
Under its automatic controls, the shuttle was sliding down the starlit sky, toward that barren landscape glimmering in the light of the great gibbous Earth. Now a voice was calling somewhere above the whistle of the jets and the electronic beepings that came and went through the cabin.
"Clavius Control to Special 14, you are coming in nicely. Please make manual check of landing-gear lock, hydraulic pressure, shock-pad inflation."
The pilot pressed sundry switches, green lights flashed, and he called back, "All manual checks completed. Landing-gear lock, hydraulic pressure, shock pad O.K."
"Confirmed," said the Moon, and the descent continued wordlessly. Though there was still plenty of talking, it was all being done by machines, flashing binary impulses to one another at a thousand times the rate their slow-thinking makers could communicate.
Some of the mountain peaks were already towering above the shuttle; now the ground was only a few thousand feet away, and the beacon light was a brilliant star, flashing steadily above a group of low buildings and odd vehicles. In the final stage of the descent, the jets seemed to be playing some strange tune; they pulsed on and off, making the last fine adjustments to the thrust.
Abruptly, a swirling cloud of dust hid everything, the jets gave one final spurt, and the shuttle rocked very slightly, like a rowboat when a small wave goes by. It was some minutes before Floyd could really accept the silence that now enfolded him and the weak gravity that gripped his limbs.
He had made, utterly without incident and in little more than one day, the incredible journey of which men had dreamed for two thousand years. After a normal routine flight, he had landed on the Moon.
10 – Clavius Base
Clavius, 150 miles in diameter, is the second largest crater on the visible face of the Moon, and lies in the center of the Southern Highlands. It is very old; ages of vulcanism and bombardment from space have scarred its walls and pockmarked its floor. But since the last era of crater formation, when the debris from the asteroid belt was still battering the inner planets, it had known peace for half a billion years.
Now there were new, strange stirrings on and below its surface, for here Man was establishing his first permanent bridgehead on the Moon. Clavius Base could, in an emergency, be entirely self-supporting. All the necessities of life were produced from the local rocks, – after they had been crushed, heated, and chemically processed. Hydrogen, oxygen; carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus – all these, and most of the other elements, could be found inside the Moon, if one knew where to look for them. The Base was a closed system, like a tiny working model of Earth itself, recycling all the chemicals of life. The atmosphere was purified in a vast "hothouse" – a large, circular room buried just below the lunar surface. Under blazing lamps by night, and filtered sunlight by day, acres of stubby green plants grew in a warm, moist atmosphere. They were special mutations, designed for the express purpose of replenishing the air with oxygen, and providing food as a by-product. More food was produced by chemical processing systems and algae culture. Although the green scum circulating through yards of transparent plastic tubes would scarcely have appealed to a gourmet, the biochemists could convert it into chops and steaks only an expert could distinguish from the real thing.