It looked like a miniature jungle of silver. There were glittering stalks, thread-thin, which rose delicately and branched; from the branches, leaves extended and drooped gracefully. The number of stalks could not be guessed. A space perhaps fifteen feet across contained the incredible foliage. There were hundreds of the moon plants, interwoven and intertangled. Some were three feet high, some five or six, and some were shorter. But they were sheer beauty. Flowers and foliage of infinite delicacy grew motionless beneath a mile-high cliff of blackness which fronted on a sea of stone.
"We take her out a way?" said Mike abruptly. Kenmore agreed. He took her arm and moved slowly out beyond the shadow of the cliff—out to where earthshine began again, and they could see the world from which all of them had come.
He cracked a vacuum flare and said sternly, "Sit down." Arlene obeyed, sitting on the sledge which held the air tanks. And the act of relaxation was so infinitely luxurious that she barely heard Mike say, "Give her an hour, huh? I'll go pick those things. She rates a bouquet." Arlene tried not to acquiesce by silence, but it was almost impossible to speak. She sat dully in the red, red glare of the flare. Its radiation was actually warm!
She was never quite sure how long she rested. Very probably she dozed and waked and dozed again, in such weariness that she was not aware of it. But she heard Mike's voice in her earphones, saying angrily, "There's gotta be a way to carry 'em!"
Then there was another long time, and Scandia was there before her. She saw something else, far away, but she was too tired for it to register. But Mike's mittened hands were filled with moondust, and across his outstretched arms were stalks of the impossible silver flowers. "Look quickly, Arlene. They'll be gone soon!"
Arlene said numbly, "They're beautiful, Mike! So beautiful!"
They were like gossamer, like the finest and most precious of lace. They were the most beautiful things that anyone had ever looked at. Moon flowers.
Arlene reached out and took them. Kenmore shone his chest lights on them.
She held them for just a moment, then a leaf—was not. Stalks vanished. Arlene clutched at them, startled, and they ceased to be. There was nothing left in her grasp. The shock of it brought her wide awake.
She stared, she looked down at the dust beneath her feet. Nothing.
"You get what they are, Joe?" asked Mike sharply, in her earphones. "It couldn't be anything else!"
"No," agreed Kenmore's voice. "It couldn't."
Arlene was confused, but now she was awake. She blinked and shook her head. Then she said queerly, "I've been—asleep and dreaming, I think. I thought there were—silver flowers. But that—that isn't a dream, is it?" She pointed. There was a moving light in the distance, down on the same surface where they stood. Mike yelped in relief and satisfaction, and Kenmore growled in relief.
It was a moon-jeep. It came with extraordinary silence up to where the vacuum flare burned crimson. It stopped. A bulky figure already swung down the rope ladder.
"Mike!" rumbled a new voice in the headphones. "Joe! You two crazy fools! Why didn't you keep talkin'? We've been goin' crazy, Haney and me! Trying to find your ship . . . If we hadn't run across your trail, we'd never have got to you!"
Arlene said politely, "Hello, Chief." Then she blacked out.
CHAPTER X. ABANDON THE LABORATORY
Joe Kenmore woke in the jeep that had picked him up with his companions. He found himself lying on its metal floor, being twitched this way and that as the jeep rolled at cruising speed over the gentle undulations of the Mare Imbrium. He smelled oil, and ozone, and hot metal. But also he smelled coffee.
He got to his feet, groggily. Arlene Gray lay on an improvised bunk in the rear of the cabin, still sleeping. The jeep, he knew, was headed for Civilian City. A very considerable number of hours had passed, but the lunar night still held. Earthshine bathed all that could be seen, but that was not very much in terms of scenery. Earth, overhead, now began to show the suspicion of a shadow at its western edge. It was now past full—corresponding to lunar midnight. It moved toward third-quarter, which was predawn on the moon.
"Food's a great invention," said Kenmore, as he moved past clutters of machinery in the jeep's cabin. "Give me some!"
Haney handed him a mug of coffee—one of those very special drinking mugs which had a great vogue on Earth, once, because they wouldn't spill liquid but could still be drunk from. Kenmore settled down on one of the folding seats for extra passengers. The same lean Haney began to build a sandwich, competently slapping down the slices of bread when the jeep's motion sent them floating in the air.
"Mike," said the dark-skinned chief amiably, "has been telling us about the doings over at the City."
Kenmore grunted assent. The chief, driving, said over his shoulder, "Plenty of trouble; How're you going to get that code stuff to the Laboratory—if it's as important as Mike says?"
"The Earthship," said Kenmore dourly, "has a crumpled landing fin and some cracked ports and the like. It's toppled over. It's got to be gotten aloft with that message-according to what I think Earth will say. That is probably impossible, but I'm working on it in my mind. If it has to be done—"
The chief was a Mohawk Indian. He said in mild derision, "If Big Chief Man-in-the-Moon says so, us braves will take a whack at it. Is it a bad smash?"
"Arlene walked away from it, which may mean anything."
The chief speculated amiably. "Is that order so important because they've got it figured out back on Earth that the gang in the Laboratory has gone nuts, or because it hasn't? Could be either."
Remote as it was, the Space Laboratory was as much in the minds of all of them as their own immediate situation. They were on the moon because of it, and Civilian City had been built and maintained to serve it. There was no civilian activity off the Earth which had not ultimately been devised for the purpose of making the Laboratory possible.
The moon-jeep rumbled on, over the dust-covered sea which once had been molten rock. Presently Mike Scandia awoke, and Kenmore pounced on him for exact and detailed information about the situation. Mike gulped coffee and told what he knew. It wasn't much more than he'd already indicated to Joe, but in the context of the Laboratory's purpose, it was appalling. A long, long distance away on the other side of the moon— a fifth as far away as Earth—was a minute, man-made object floating out in emptiness; it could not be seen from nearside on the moon. In this small, compartmented metal case, eight men lived in the greatest danger men had ever volunteered to face. The Space Laboratory was an atomic-energy workshop. It contained fissionable materials which could blast it and its occupants to radioactive gas at the temperature of the sun's very heart. No more than a moment's carelessness would be required to bring that about.
There was an energy-field which, in theory, should affect even neutrons; the mathematics of it were still largely speculative. There were facts yet to be discovered. If thus-and-so was the fact—why, power could be had for all the imaginable needs of Earth for all time to come; and nothing but power could be released. But if the fact was such-and-such—why, it was possible for any type of matter, though as thin as the gases in the vacuum of an electric-light bulb, to form a sun. In that case, the Laboratory's labors were futile or worse.
In any case, the experiments were dangerous, so the Laboratory hung in space, where the gravity of the moon was almost perfectly balanced by the orbital speed of the Laboratory around the Earth itself. It was a dead spot, some forty thousand miles out. Had there been only local attraction to consider, the Laboratory would have stayed there for all time. But solar gravitation entered into the picture, and once in two weeks—or four, or six—a-small rocket had to be fired to put the Laboratory back at the center of the dead space from which it had wandered.