He hurried to the engine-room.
"Atterbury, give her more power!" he shouted.
The engineer threw a frightened glance at him.
"I'm at the last notch now. Look at the tractor! The inductor-tubes are white-hot!"
With a feeling of utter helplessness, Bennie returned to Rhoda, who was lying on the floor with her face pressed against the glass, and threw himself at her side; and she clung to him, like a terrified child, as together they looked down fearfully through the deadlight. The yellow surface of the moon, gleaming like a mass of jewels, was rushing up at them with sickening velocity. A few seconds more, and.. He turned away from the window.
"It's all up," he choked. "Good-by, Burke!"
Burke, standing rigid at the control, made no reply.
"We're slowing up; we're slowing up," whispered Rhoda suddenly. "Look, Bennie! That crater below us! It's not getting any larger!"
Bennie arose and framed the great circle of the crater in the rim of the dead-light.
"You're right!" he yelled exultantly. "We're hovering! We can land! Burke, shut down the power quick, and stand by to pick up your moorings!"
"I'm all ready," answered Burke, throwing over the rheostat
that controlled the current.
The Ring was hanging over a vast roc with small craters, furrowed with crevasses, and bristling with jagged ridges and grotesque turrets and pinnacles. In the glare of the sun, it shone dazzlingly white—like snow - so that it hurt their eyes, and Rhoda was forced to turn hers away.
"How high up are we?" inquired Bennie.
"The manometer doesn’t register," answered Burke. "There can’t be any atmosphere. We won’t be able to use it for landing— more’s the pity! Just have to judge by appearances. I think we’re hovering now—no—by George, we’re rising a little!" He advanced the lever of the rheostat another point. "Now we’re descending. This is about right, I reckon."
Slowly the Ring dropped toward the surface of the plain, Immediately below them was a small forest of pinnacles.
"For heaven’s sake, keep away from that!" shouted Bennie. "If you land there, you’ll spike the Ring on one of those things, just as if you were playing ringtoss. There’s a good place—that round, level spot about three hundred yards to the left."
"Trust me for a bull’s-eye!" laughed Burke, slanting the tractor, and the ground slid slowly off to one side until they were clear of danger and over the smooth patch, which looked as if it had been made to order for their purposes.
Up—up—nearer and nearer—came the lunar plain. The helium ray was now playing directly upon its surface, and throwing up great clouds of white dust, which, as the Ring sank closer to the ground, rose and completely enveloped it. Sight was no longer possible. They could not be more than two hundred feet above the surface. Beneath and above them, they could see only whirling clouds of white powder.
"Here goes for luck!" announced Burke, pulling back the lever.
They grasped the ropes tightly, standing on tiptoe for what seemed ages. Suddenly, the Ring struck with a noise like that of a giant sledge-hammer upon a boiler. The accompanying jar, however, was comparatively slight. Burke touched his forelock.
"We have arrove!" he remarked, with a grin. "All out for the moon! ’ ’
PART IV ON THE MOON
I
"We have arrove! All out for the moon!" repeated Burke, the would-be humorist. "Get ready for the quarantine officer!"
They all looked at one another incredulously. Save for the jar and the thunder of the blow when the Ring struck the moon’s surface, there was nothing to suggest or indicate that they were not still moving through space, except the minor facts that the
port-holes were curtained by a sitting cloud of white dust and that the deadlight was totally obscured. There was no motion now, but there had been no motion before. Their journey had been very much like that entertaining side-show at Coney Island, where the passengers on an imitation ship gain a vivid impression of mat de mer by sitting perfectly still while the shore, sea, and sky revolve topsyturvy about them. Yet, to quote the never-failing Burke, there they were!
But were they there? Wasn’t it all a mad sort of dream? Too much liquid air or something? Had they really ever moved an inch? Weren’t they still just roosting on the staging in the aerodrome at Washington, and stirring up a big dust with their old propeller? Rhoda was actually convinced, for the moment, that they had never started at all, and her illusion might have persisted had not Bennie called her attention to the fact that the dust cloud had suddenly subsided, dropping like a stone, owing to the complete absence of any supporting atmosphere, and leaving the sky clear and dark as on a winter’s night.
Through the now transparent window, the surface of the moon, blazing under the blinding rays of the sun, became instantly visible, like a desert at high noon. But what a desert! The Ring was lying in the center of a small, circular plain, rimmed by a coruscated rocky wall—a "craterlet” such as Rhoda and Bennie had studied through the great telescope at Georgetown. For some distance about the Ring’s circumference, the soft, porous rock composing the surface had been deeply eroded by the blast from the tractor and grooves and furrows of large size radiated from
the point where they had come to rest. Far from being level, the plain around the crater bristled with pinnacles and peaks of every
size and shape, suggesting stalagmites on the floor of a cave-
strange and grotesque creations of the erosion of prehistoric
winds.
Here and there, curious mounds and hillocks, presenting weird profiles, gave the place the appearance of being a gathering-spot or "council-rock” for selenite creatures turned by some unearthly spell to stone; while everywhere lay, in tumultuous confusion, huge slabs and blocks with ridges, walls, and hummocks, suggesting to Rhoda’s fanciful imagination vast lunar building-operadons suddenly interrupted by a cataclysm of nature. At a distance of something over three hundred yards, an isolated pinnacle rose to a great height, one side dazzling in the sun’s untempered light, the other shrouded in absolute darkness. Everywhere the plain was strewn with loose and scattered rocks and covered with a soft, white detritus.
It was a ghostly spectacle—this lunar crust—like a crowded cemetery in white moonlight, thrusting ghastly fingers toward the sky, populous yet silent. Rhoda shivered. Had men lived there, she wondered? Had strange beasts ever roamed and wallowed among the selenite undergrowth where now these stark forms raised themselves? Had the sweet air of life ever eddied among
these deathly rocks? Had birds once sung there, and insects buzzed and crawled? Would they, perhaps, find the imprint of some giant foot impressed upon the motionless dust? Her meditations were unceremoniously interrupted by Burke.
"We’ve no time to lose,” he announced briskly. "That uranium cylinder in the tractor must be nearly exhausted. It had never been operated before at its maximum power, and we overestimated its life—a serious error. There is an automatic signal that shows you when ninety per cent, of it is gone. See? Only two per cent left! I didn’t like the idea of going outside to replace it, though, while we were driving through space. Hope our liquid-air suits will work. We’ll be in a beastly fix if they won’t. We ought to have tested them in a vacuum, but there were too many things to do.”