“I should hope you do. Isn’t that the ideal for an immigrant? I’m not the least bit tired. Hardly the least bit tired at any rate. What I am is a little cold.”
“Purely your imagination, Ben,” said Selene, firmly. “You just think you ought to feel cold because so much of you is bare. Put it out of your head.”
“Easy to say,” he sighed. “I’m walking well, I hope.”
“Very well. I’ll have you kangarooing yet.”
“And participating in glider races down the surface slopes. Remember, I’m moderately advanced in years. But really, how far have we come?”
“Two miles, I should judge.”
“Good Lord! How many miles of corridors are there altogether?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know. The residential corridors make up comparatively little of the total. There are the mining corridors, the geological ones, the industrial, the mycological.... I’m sure there must be several hundred miles altogether.”
“Do you have maps?”
“Of course there are maps. We can’t work blind.”
“I mean you, personally.”
“Well, no, not with me, but I don’t need maps for this area; it’s quite familiar to me. I used to wander about here as a child. These are old corridors. Most of the new corridors—and we average two or three miles of new corridors a year, I think—are in the north. I couldn’t work my way through them, without a map, for untold sums. Maybe not even with a map.”
“Where are we heading?”
“I promised you an unusual sight—no, not me, so don’t say it—and you’ll have it. It’s the Moon’s most unusual mine and it’s completely off the ordinary tourist trails.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve got diamonds on the Moon?”
“Better than that.”
The corridor walls were unfinished here—gray rock, dimly but adequately lit by patches of electroluminescence. The temperature was comfortable and at a steady mildness, with ventilation so gently effective there was no sensation of wind. It was hard to tell here that a couple of hundred feet above was a surface subjected to alternate frying and freezing as the Sun came and went on its grand biweekly swing from horizon to horizon and then underneath and back.
“Is all this airtight?” asked Denison, suddenly uncomfortably aware that he was not far below the bottom of an ocean of vacuum that extended upward through all infinity.
“Oh, yes. Those walls are impervious. They’re all booby-trapped, too. If the air pressure drops as much as ten per cent in any section of the corridors there is such a hooting and howling from sirens as you have never heard and such a flashing of arrows and blazing of signs directing you to safety as you have never seen.”
“How often does this happen?”
“Not often. I don’t think anyone has been killed through air-lack for at least five years.” Then, with sudden defensiveness, “You have natural catastrophes on Earth. A big quake or a tidal wave can kill thousands.”
“No argument, Selene.” He threw up his hands. “I surrender.”
“All right,” she said. “I didn’t mean to get excited.... Do you hear that?”
She stopped, in an attitude of listening.
Denison listened, too, and shook his head. Suddenly, he looked around. “It’s so quiet. Where is everybody? Are you sure we’re not lost?”
“This isn’t a natural cavern with unknown passageways. You have those on Earth, haven’t you? I’ve seen photographs.”
“Yes, most of them are limestone caves, formed by water. That certainly can’t be the case of the Moon, can it?”
“So we can’t be lost,” said Selene, smiling. “If we’re alone, put it down to superstition.”
“To what?” Denison looked startled and his face creased in an expression of disbelief.
“Don’t do that,” she said. “You get all lined. That’s right. Smooth out. You look much better than you did when you first arrived, you know. That’s low gravity and exercise.”
“And trying to keep up with nude young ladies who have an uncommon amount of off-time and an uncommon lack of better things to do than to go on busmen’s holidays.”
“Now you’re treating me like a tourist guide again, and I’m not nude.”
“At that, even nudity is less frightening than Intuitionism. ... But what’s this about superstition?”
“Not really superstition, I suppose, but most of the people of the city tend to stay away from this part of the corridor-complex.”
“But why?”
“Because of what I’m going to show you.” They were walking again. “Hear it now?”
She stopped and Denison listened anxiously. He said, “You mean that small tapping sound? Tap—tap— Is that what you mean?”
She ran ahead in slow, loping strides with the slow-motion movement of the Lunarite in unhurried flight. He followed her, attempting to ape the gait.
“Here—here—”
Denison’s eye followed Selene’s eagerly pointing finger. “Good Lord,” he said. “Where’s it coming from?”
There was a drip of what was clearly water. A slow dripping, with each drip striking a small ceramic trough that led into the rock wall.
“From the rocks. We do have water on the Moon, you know. Most of it we can bake out of gypsum; enough for our purposes, since we conserve it pretty well.”
“I know. I know. I’ve never yet been able to manage one complete shower. How you people manage to stay clean I don’t know.”
“I told you. First, wet yourself. Then turn off the water and smear just a little detergent on you. You rub it— Oh, Ben, I’m not going through it yet again. And there’s nothing on the Moon to get you all that dirty anyway.... But that’s not what we’re talking about. In one or two places there are actually water deposits, usually as ice near the surface in a mountain shadow. If we locate it, it drips out. This one has been dripping since the corridor was first driven through, and that was eight years ago.”
“But why the superstition?”
“Well, obviously, water is the great material resource on which the Moon depends. We drink it, wash with it, grow our food with it, make our oxygen with it, keep everything going with it. Free water can’t help but get a lot of respect. Once this drip was discovered, plans to extend the tunnels in this direction were abandoned till it stopped. The corridor walls were even left unfinished.”
“That sounds like superstition right there.”
“Well—a kind of awe, maybe. It wasn’t expected to last for more than a few months; such drips never do. Well, after this one had passed its first anniversary, it began to seem eternal. In fact, that’s what it’s called: ‘The Eternal.’ You’ll even find it marked that way on the maps. Naturally people have come to attach importance to it; a feeling that if it stops it will mean some sort of bad fortune.”
Denison laughed.
Selene said, warmly, “No one really believes it, but everyone part-believes it. You see, it’s not really eternal and it must stop some time. As a matter of fact, the rate of drip is only about a third of what it was when it was first discovered, so that it is slowly drying. I imagine people feel that if it happened to stop when they were actually here, they would share in the bad fortune. At least, that’s the rational way of explaining their reluctance to come here.”
“I take it that you don’t believe this.”
“Whether I believe it or not isn’t the point. You see I’m quite certain that it won’t stop sharply enough for anyone to be able to take the blame. It will just drip slower and slower and slower and no one will ever be able to pinpoint the exact time when it stopped. So why worry?”
“I agree with you.”
“I do, however,” she said, making the transition smoothly, “have other worries, and I’d like to discuss them with you while we’re alone.” She spread out the blanket and sat on it, cross-legged.