"Not more than sixty," agreed Mike hungrily. "Let's go!"
Arlene said very gently, "Joe—Mike—you're trying to spare me for as long as you can, but we've only two hours' supply of air. We can't travel sixty miles in two hours!"
"How long was it after the Earthship landed and lost air before I found you, Arlene?"
"But we had the ship's tanks to breathe from!" she protested.
"This ship is pretty well smashed," submitted Joe. "But I don't remember any signs that its tanks were cracked!"
Mike emitted an astonished grunt, and darted into the wreckage. Kenmore crawled in after him, his chest light burning. Presently Mike said into his suit microphone, "I guess you've got influence, Arlene."
She waited outside. She could see only that they worked furiously inside the wreck. Mike Scandia crawled somewhere and came back. There came the extraordinary sight of a flame burning in emptiness; it was on oxhydrogen torch, whose flame in a vacuum did not look much like flame on Earth. Dense white smoke poured from it, expanded madly, and then glistened as if it were a cloud of infinitesimal diamonds floating in emptiness. But this was something rarer than diamonds on the moon. Oxygen and hydrogen, burned together, yield water vapor. In the monstrous cold of night upon the moon, water vapor could exist only inches from the flame. The white clouds were tiny ice crystals drifting slowly, very slowly downward.
The torch cut swiftly; in no more than twenty minutes from the ship's landing, they had two reserve air tanks out on the dust of the lunar sea. The tanks looked huge, but they would have been peculiarly light even on Earth, because they'd had to be shipped so far where freight was so costly. But even that light weight was divided by six on the moon.
Wherefore, out of the ship, Kenmore had Arlene painstakingly top her tanks again, and he and Mike repeated the performance. They found a torn-away sheet of steel, and Kenmore hitched himself to it with a length of that highly special plastic rope which does not become brittle even at midnight outside Civilian City, and which is a part of normal vacuum-suit equipment. They started off.
"For this sort of traveling," said Mike kindly, "you go so, Arlene."
He showed her that eccentric moon-gait which many people never learn, even though they stay on the moon for months. It is derived from the loose-jointed shuffle of the practiced long-distance walker. It is useless in Civilian City, and most people travel outside only in jeeps. But those who work from the jeeps—whether at the mines or at retrieving freight missiles sent up from Earth—learn it of necessity.
Mike Scandia showed it to Arlene Gray. Moon-walking technique takes full advantage of the fact that one falls very slowly from a very small height. One moves forward, and bounces gently up, and floats. Then one descends very gently, while still moving forward, touches ground and gives a delicately adjusted touch to whatever is underfoot; one then bounces up and continues to move forward. It is rather like that kind of floating in which we sometimes move about in our dreams.
The three set out across the featureless and dust-covered sea. Kenmore got the sledge with the air tanks into the rhythm of his own motion, and they made a good eight miles an hour. They'd have made more but for their hourly stops to check air tanks. That was the purpose of vacuum flares Mike had made a dive back into the wreck to salvage.
When they'd traveled their first hour, there was still no break in the completely featureless moonscope. They were in the center of a gently undulating surface that was four miles in diameter; beyond was nothing. It was two miles to the horizon, where the plain dropped down out of sight and there were only the stars and the Earth overhead.
After an hour's journey, they stopped. Mike cracked a flare and set it on the bent steel sledge; it glared blindingly with a fierce red glare, providing its own oxygen for burning. It warmed the air tank—at least a little, so there was air pressure to refill the suit reservoirs.
At the second stop, it appeared that there were mountains far beyond the horizon ahead. They could see the peaks in silhouette against the stars. The red glare made a startling sight, illuminating as it did the figures of Kenmore and Arlene in identical vacuum suits, Mike in his cut-down, bulky outfit, the bright-metal air tank, and the wide expanse of carmine-lighted dust all around.
At the third stop, Kenmore ordered Arlene to sleep for an hour. She refused, and they went on.
Before the fourth hour of their journeying was over, they had reached mountains rising steeply from the stony sea. Mike and Kenmore consulted soberly. In the end, they turned northward and skirted the precipices, keeping to the gently rolling mare, and not venturing into the passes. It was a question of choosing north or south.
They did not dream of venturing into unexplored mountains. Rockslides and smothering avalanches of dust await the foot-traveler in any mountain area on the moon. One does not go among mountains, even in a moon-jeep, when it can be avoided. Especially one does not move about, at all, except in passes where all possible avalanches have been precipitated in advance by setting off one-pound charges of explosive, fired against the stone, not more than a mile apart.
So the three of them went northward under the looming cliffs. The spotter post they hoped to reach was serviced by its own moon-jeep, and all trails upon the moon remain forever. If they came upon the track of the moon-jeep to the spotter post, they could follow it safely.
Arlene was practically dead upon her feet. One-sixth gravity saves much energy, to be sure, but still a normal person needs to sleep. She had had considerably more of turmoil and excitement in the past twenty-four hours than anybody is apt to take in stride.
Presently she was stumbling, nearly blind with fatigue. After a long time, she heard the voices of the others in her headphones. They had stopped. The flicker of Mike Scandia's chest lamp had struck upon something which glittered metallically in the cliff.
Arlene roused from a stupor of exhaustion to hear Kenmore say sardonically, "Of course it's real. But it'll vanish if you go near."
Mike replied indignantly, "You're crazy! It's metal! There must have been people on the moon, once upon a time. They made it! Some of this stuff would drive those scientist guys crazy! I'm gonna pick some of it!" "It's a waste of time," insisted Kenmore. "I don't want to waste time. We have to think of Arlene!"
She roused. "I'm all right . . ." But she was desperately weary. "I'm quite all right . . ."
The two of them peered at her, and she realized that they were in the shadow of a monstrous cliff. Earthshine did not strike here; the blackness was absolute, save for the bright chest lights of the two men's vacuum suits. Her own lights burned whitely, too, though she did not remember turning them on.
They seemed to nod at each other. Mike said gently, "You need sleep, Arlene, but there's something not half a dozen other people have ever seen. Moon flowers. Look!"
Arlene looked. Before her rose the stark dark mass of a cliff that rose past estimate overhead. It was the terrible dead-black of a moon-cliff in shadow. But the beam of Mike's lamps shone upon a spot, quite low down, where metal shimmered and shone.