Thank you, Mr. Perkins, Mother said, I suppose that's best though perhaps I had better stay behind with him.
'Perrin' is the name, Mr. Perrin said mildly. It won't be necessary. The hostess will take good care of him.
Why do adults talk in front of kids as if they couldn't understand English? They should have just shoved him into the coffee shop. By now the runt knew he was being railroaded. He looked around belligerently. I go, too, he said loudly. You promised me.
Now Baby Darling, Mother tried to stop him. Mother Dear didn't tell you But she was just whistling to herself; the runt turned on the sound effects.
You said I could go where Dickie went; you promised me when I was sick. You promised me you promised me and on and on, his voice getting higher and louder all the time.
Mr. Perrin looked embarrassed. Mother said, Richard, you'll just have to deal with your child. After all, you were the one who promised him.
Me, dear? Dad looked surprised. Anyway, I don't see anything so complicated about it. Suppose we did promise him that he could do what Dickie does we'll simply take him along; that's all. Mr. Perrin cleared his throat. I'm afraid not. I can outfit your older son with a woman's suit; he's tall for his age. But we just don't make any provision for small children.
Well, we were all tangled up in a mess in no time at all. The runt can always get Mother to running in circles. Mother has the same effect on Dad. He gets red in the face and starts laying down the law to me. It's sort of a chain reaction, with me on the end and nobody to pass it along to. They came out with a very simple solution I was to stay behind and take care of Baby Darling brat!
But, Dad, you said I started in.
Never mind! he cut in. I won't have this family disrupted in a public squabble. You heard what your mother said.
I was desperate. Look, Dad, I said, keeping my voice low, if I go back to Earth without once having put on a spacesuit and set foot on the surface, you'll just have to find another school to send me to. I won't go back to Lawrenceville; I'd be the joke of the whole place.
We'll settle that when we get home.
But, Dad, you promised me specifically
That'll be enough out of you, young man. The matter is closed.
Mr. Latham had been standing near by, taking it in but keeping his mouth shut. At this point he cocked an eyebrow at Dad and said very quietly, Well, R.J. I thought your word was your bond?
I wasn't supposed to hear it and nobody else did a good thing, too, for it doesn't do to let Dad know that you know that he's wrong; it just makes him worse. I changed the subject in a hurry. Look, Dad, maybe we all can go out. How about that suit over there? I pointed at a rack that was inside a railing with a locked gate on it. The rack had a couple of dozen suits on it and at the far end, almost out of sight, was a small suit the boots on it hardly came down to the waist of the suit next to it.
Huh? Dad brightened up. Why, just the thing! Mr. Perrin! Oh, Mr. Perrin here a minute! I thought you didn't have any small suits, but here's one that I think will fit.
Dad was fiddling at the latch of the railing gate. Mr. Perrin stopped him. We can't use that suit, sir.
Uh? Why not?
All the suits inside the railing are private property, not for rent.
What? Nonsense Rutherford is a public enterprise. I want that suit for my child.
Well, you can't have it.
I'll speak to the Director.
I'm afraid you'll have to. That suit was specially built for his daughter.
And that's just what they did. Mr. Latham got the Director on the line, Dad talked to him, then the Director talked to Mr. Perrin, then he talked to Dad again. The Director didn't mind lending the suit, not to Dad, anyway, but he wouldn't order Mr. Perrin to take a below-age child outside.
Mr. Perrin was feeling stubborn and I don't blame him, but Dad soothed his feathers down and presently we were all climbing into our suits and getting pressure checks and checking our oxygen supply and switching on our walkie-talkies. Mr. Perrin was calling the roll by radio and reminding us that we were all on the same circuit, so we had better let him do most of the talking and not to make casual remarks or none of us would be able to hear. Then we were in the airlock and he was warning us to stick close together and not try to see how fast we could run or how high we could jump. My heart was knocking around in my chest.
The outer door of the lock opened and we filed out on the face of the Moon. It was just as wonderful as I dreamed it would be, I guess, but I was so excited that I hardly knew it at the time. The glare of the sun was the brightest thing I ever saw and the shadows so inky black you could hardly see into them. You couldn't hear anything but voices over your radio and you could reach down and switch off that. The pumice was soft and kicked up around our feet like smoke, settling slowly, falling in slow motion. Nothing else moved. It was the deadest place you can imagine.
We stayed on a path, keeping close together for company, except twice when I had to take out after the runt when he found out he could jump twenty feet. I wanted to smack him, but did you ever try to smack anybody wearing a spacesuit? It's no use.
Mr. Perrin told us to halt presently and started his talk. You are now in the Devil's Graveyard. The twin spires behind you are five thousand feet above the floor of the plain and have never been scaled. The spires, or monuments, have been named for apocryphal or mythological characters because of the fancied resemblance of this fantastic scene to a giant cemetery. Beelzebub, Thor, Siva, Cain, Set He pointed around us. Lunologists are not agreed as to the origin of the strange shapes. Some claim to see indications of the action of air and water as well as volcanic action. If so, these spires must have been standing for an unthinkably long period, for today, as you see, the Moon It was the same sort of stuff you can read any month in Spaceways Magazine, only we were seeing it and that makes a difference, let me tell you.
The spires reminded me a bit of the rocks below the lodge in the Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs when we went there last summer, only these spires were lots bigger and, instead of blue sky, there was just blackness and hard, sharp stars overhead. Spooky.
Another ranger had come with us, with a camera. Mr. Perrin tried to say something else, but the runt had started yapping away and I had to switch off his radio before anybody could hear anything. I kept it switched off until Mr. Perrin finished talking.
He wanted us to line up for a picture with the spires and the black sky behind us for a background. Push your faces forward in your helmets so that your features will show. Everybody look pretty. There! he added as the other guy snapped the shot. Prints will be ready when you return, at ten dollars a copy.
I thought it over. I certainly needed one for my room at school and I wanted one to give to anyhow, I needed another one. I had eighteen bucks left from my birthday money; I could sweet-talk Mother for the balance. So I ordered two of them.
We climbed a long rise and suddenly we were staring out across the crater, the disaster crater, all that was left of the first laboratory. It stretched away from us, twenty miles across, with the floor covered with shiny, bubbly green glass instead of pumice. There was a monument. I read it:
HERE ABOUT YOU ARE THE MORTAL REMAINS OF
Kurt Schaeffer
Maurice Feinstein
Thomas Dooley
Hazel Hayakawa
G. Washington Slappey
Sam Houston Adams
WHO DIED FOR THE TRUTH THAT MAKES MEN FREE
On the Eleventh Day of August 1984
I felt sort of funny and backed away and went to listen to Mr. Perrin. Dad and some of the other men were asking him questions. They don't know exactly, he was saying. Nothing was left. Now we telemeter all the data back to Luna City, as it comes off the instruments, but that was before the line-of-sight relays were set up.