Suddenly, rockets poured out flame, and the burning flares were flung crazily everywhere by the blast. A cloud of scattered dust arose, and the rocket fumes were whipped away to nothingness; then the great ship leaped upward for the sky. In seconds it was merely a moving white-hot flame which grew smaller and smaller.
But there wasn't any rocket roar; there is never any sound on the moon.
. . . And a long time later, with the pallid, mottled grayness of the moon and its mountains far below—a very long time later—Kenmore pointed. At the edge of solidity, where the stars ceased to shine, there was a speck of light. It was as far as anybody could possibly see even from many miles aloft. It was a bright, warm, brilliant dot of light at the very edge of the horizon. It was sunshine on a remote and unnamed peak.
"That's sunrise," said Kenmore somberly. "Unfortunately it's only a fact. It's not a symbol of good times coming."
CHAPTER XII. THE MAD ONES
THE SHIP continued to float upward. It was almost a shock when Kenmore closed all the port shields and dimmed the stars to specks. Arlene protested a little, and he said, "Wait!" The Earthship rose and rose. Presently Kenmore turned. He nodded to Arlene. "Now watch!"
She gazed out the thickly shielded port. For moments she saw nothing at all. Then there were dots of bright light at the edge of the horizon. They increased in number; they multiplied in size and. brilliance. And then the sun came into view.
It was gigantic against the shadow-speckled edge of the moon; great streamers reached out from the edge of its disk. There were even dark places—sunspots—which were really furious and unthinkably huge storms in its photosphere. The ship went up and up again, and the lighted areas of the moon joined together—but there were still vast shadows of the ring mountains at the dawn line—and Arlene saw the moon from the most remarkable angle from which it can be seen. There is no sight in the solar system quite as unearthly, quite as dazzling, quite as strange, as the view of the moon's surface when one rises from its night into its dawn.
Arlene caught her breath. And Kenmore fired a drive rocket to set the ship on course toward the farside.
It was not really much later when Moreau began to point out the larger of the craters which bore names, to Arlene. He indicated a peculiar valley, one apparently carved by a racing planetoid which grazed the moon and gouged out a valley eighty miles long and five miles wide, and then apparently kept on out to limitless space. He showed her the immense, straight streaks of white which puzzled Earth astronomers for so long, and had so absurdly simple an explanation when men examined them in situ. He pointed out that very tiny crater which is quite stark and barren when the sun first strikes, and becomes filled with mist as daylight grows stronger.
"Mist!" protested Arlene. "It's not possible!"
"Moon-fog," said Moreau gravely. "Ask Joel"
Kenmore spoke over his shoulder as he checked his course for height and velocity.
"Worse than an ordinary fog. It's a dry fog!"
Which it was. There was a special type of surface material there—neither Kenmore nor Moreau could remember the mineral, and Moreau was irritated with himself—which the alternations of day heat and night cold had broken into dust particles even finer than the dust of the lava seas. Where ordinary moondust is like talcum, the dust particles in this particular crater and in half a dozen other places were really microscopic in size. This dust had a photoelectric property which gave it an electric charge when the sunlight struck it. In the small gravity of the moon, and with the intense light of the sun, the particles repelled each other like charged pith-balls. The result was a fog, a mist, a cloud of electrified dust that rose slowly from the surface. It was a cloud sustained by electrostatic fields, instead of air.
"And believe it or not," said Moreau, "there are sometimes lightning-strokes in it!"
Arlene wouldn't believe that until Kenmore agreed. He hadn't been in this particular crater, but he had walked into a moon-fog on one occasion. His suit had been charged, and the dust particles had clung to it in thick masses. They formed tufts; it was like moss or whiskers growing from every part of the vacuum suit. When Joe Kenmore went back to his jeep, the discharge of static electricity could have punctured his suit if he hadn't known suitable measures to take.
Then there was the official boundary between nearside and farside, which divides the moon into two not-quite-equal halves, since four-sevenths of the moon can be seen from Earth, at one time or another. Moreau pointed out to Arlene the craters and the mountain chains that had no names on the older maps of the moon, because they were on farside. He told her the results of international squabbling, by which the invisible side of the moon is solemnly divided into sectors, with divers nations having the privilege of honoring national heroes by naming things after them. Not more than fifty or sixty people out of all the Earth's more than two billion had ever seen those named features, and even fewer cared about the names.
But the farside surface, in time, began to grow remote. The ship was drawing away, going out. Arlene had a peculiar sinking feeling when she realized that Earth was no longer visible; it was hidden on the other side of the moon. She had a sensation of homelessness which was much worse than she'd felt in Civilian City. To be on the moon was thrilling, while Earth was always right overhead; but to be where Earth was invisible was a shattering experience. Arlene barely heard Moreau's lecture on the fact that the moon is egg-shaped, with the big side toward Earth, so that the horizon is less than two miles away on farside.
The ship drove on, and the unfamiliar farside dwindled. From a great expanse of sunlit, pock-marked aridness, it became a gibbous globe, because night was moving round one edge. It grew smaller, and smaller—but Earth did not reappear. Which seemed very strange, because by the time the ship drew near to the Laboratory, the moon itself was a round thing only a little larger than Earth as seen from Civilian City.
Actually, the Earth as seen from nearside is the size of a twenty-five cent piece thirty inches from one's eye; the farside of the moon seen from the Laboratory was the size of the same coin twenty inches away—the moon from Earth is the size of a quarter ten feet distant. And here, for the first time, Arlene felt the loneliness which space-travelers have to endure. She was in a rocket-ship and there was absolutely nothing in sight that she had ever seen before. The great and flaming sun was strange; it was not the familiar orb that had lighted sunshiny days on Earth. It was a ball of hellfire, spreading slow-moving tentacles into space. The moon was unfamiliar; the central dark splotch on the farside made it impossible for her to consider it the moon she'd known. And Earth was hidden.
Arlene's teeth chattered.
But there was activity about her before she could yield to panic. The chief was at the radar, his bronze hands amazingly deft. Moreau was strapped in by the computer. When the chief called readings from the nearest-object radar dial, Moreau punched keys and curtly relayed the results to Kenmore.
"Hm . . ." said Kenmore. "A little deceleration is called for."
He swung the ship end for end, and Arlene gulped as the whole cosmos swung in great half circles about her. Kenmore said, "Deceleration coming. Five—four—three-two—one—"
There was weight. Not great weight. Not intolerable weight. But it lasted, and lasted, and lasted.
Kenmore pressed a button, and something fled away into the vastness in which all things were strange.