He crossed the chart-room, and, unlocking a cupboard at the farther end, dragged forth the three suits of vacuum armor. They were of simple design, made of heavy rubber cloth and surmounted by copper helmets resembling those worn by divers. Each wearer carried a cylindrical tank, supported upon the shoulders, for his supply of liquid air.
"The first thing,” continued Burke, "is to load up our knapsacks.”
Bennie and Atterbury assisted him in unclamping the cover of one of the large retainers that supplied the Ring with fresh air. In appearance, it was not unlike a gigantic milk-can, and caused Burke to remark,
"I pity anyone who tried to steal that milk!”
Atterbury produced a metal ladle from the closet, while Bennie unfastened the tops of the cylinders, and Rhoda held her breath as she peered into the big retainer as the engineer thrust the ladle into its mysterious contents, which gave out dense clouds of white smoke.
"Hot stuff!” he grinned. "Look out!”
"Hot nothing!” replied Bennie. "It’s over three hundred degrees below Fahrenheit!”
Bennie held the cylinder for Atterbury, while the latter attempted to pour it in through a funnel, but, in spite of all his care, some of the liquid fell upon the floor with a hiss like that of water dropping upon a red-hot stove.
"What makes it smoke like that?” asked Rhoda. "Of course, I know it isn’t hot!"
"Condensed moisture,” explained Bennie. "We never could have made this trip without it!”
With the greatest caution, they finally succeeded in filling all the cylinders, and Burke and Atterbury started to don their vacuum armor. Bennie was about to do the same, when he noticed an expression of disappointment on Rhoda’s face.
"You go!” he said. "I’ve got to fix up something inside. Go out along with the others and look around. I’ll take my turn when you come back. You won’t want to stay long, I guess!”
"Oh, thanks!” she cried. "I do want to see what the moon is like!”
The men had by this time got into their strange costumes, but Rhoda found the arrangement of her skirts more or less complicated and was forced to retire to the galley, where she finally adjusted her attire to lunar requirements. Then, all four of them rolled the huge cylinder of uranium into the air-lock, and Atterbury closed and fastened the inner air-tight door behind them. They stood crowded together for a moment in that confined space, like divers in a divingbell, unable to speak to each other, and fully mindful of the fact that they were about to essay an experiment in physics never before attempted or even conceived of - the entry of a human being into a perfect vacuum.
Atterbury made a gesture of inquiry, and the others nodded their helmets. He raised one hand in warning and placed the other upon a valve in the outer door and pressed it quickly down. With a shriek, the air in the lock rushed through the valve into space, and their suits swelled perceptibly from the pressure of the contained air, as if pulled outward from their bodies by some invisible force. They stood motionless for several minutes to accustom themselves to their strange environment, making futile grimaces at one another through the glass of their helmets. Then Rhoda was startled by a curious fluttering or palpitation just above the top of her head—a sort of metallic twitter like that which might be expected to emanate from a mechanical bird—and she turned a startled face toward Burke, who only grinned in response and pointed to the escape-valve upon his own helmet. Then she remembered that he had previously explained to her how the vitiated air inside the helmets must needs escape in order to give place to the new fresh air liberated by the supply-tanks. But, in spite of her knowledge that this fluttering was due simply to a necessary device, she never heard it without a momentary tremor of fear—a sudden conviction that her soul was unexpectedly starting upon the Great Adventure.
The air-lock having emptied itself of its contents, Atterbury now released and opened the outer door and lowered a small metal landing-stage, from which hung the steel ladder. Then, with some difficulty, owing to the clumsiness of their new garments, the two men climbed down upon the tufa - Iike surface of the moon, while Rhoda remained watching them curiously from above. Apart from the puffing-out of the rubber suit, she experienced no new sensations, for she breathed with perfect ease, and the sunlight, falling full upon her body, warmed her through and through.
Down below, Atterbury and Burke at first amused themselves by experimenting with the force of lunar gravitation, so much less than that of the earth, and jumped hither and yon—distances of fifteen and twenty feet at a single bound, like mountain-goats leaping from crag to crag. Once having accustomed themselves to their surroundings and their loss of gravity, they climbed up the great tripod and commenced to rig the block and tackle with
which they planned to hoist the fresh uranium cylinder to the top of the skeleton tripod and replace their now exhausted supply of
fuel.
It was clear to Rhoda that this process could conceivably, and in fact probably, have been performed while the Ring was in flight, but she shuddered at the thought of her two friends climbing about on the outside of their machine while in transit at a velocity twenty miles per second, however imperceptible that velocity might have been. Suppose one of them had fallen? Like the shadow of a lost soul, he would have followed the Ring in its journey among the stars—since, moving at the same speed as the machine through space at the moment of his fall, there would have been nothing to alter his relation to it, and, like a satellite—a true satellite, indeed—he would have flown along beside, or after it, until the tractor was started again and he had been left behind alone in the abyss of space! But here they could quite safely conduct their operations - in fact, as easily as safely—for the uranium cylinder now weighed but one-sixth of what it had weighed upon the earth, and the block and tackle could be handled without difficulty.
Leaving the men thus engaged, Rhoda descended the ladder and started off on a walk, feeling her way gingerly along until she could accommodate her muscles to her reduced weight. All about her lay what might have been the ruins of a Selenite civilization metamorphosed by the magic of erosion. Giant monoliths, like pillars, lay tumbled here and there in suggestive juxtaposition with giant blocks of porous stone which might have served as bases for such pillars, as the steps of a lunar temple, or even as an altar to some unknown god.
The great solitary pinnacle which she had noticed through the chart-room window especially excited her curiosity, and, as it seemed but a short distance away, she first photographed it and then decided to study it at closer range—to determine the cause of such a stalagmite formation under the open sky. The possibility of having any trouble in finding her way back to the Ring did not occur to her, since every object in the moonscape was defined with a truly unearthly brilliancy, snow-white on the light side and almost jet-black upon the other.
Out of the inky curtain of the sky, the sun glared through a circular rent, like a beam through a hole in the roof of some dark garret. Where it fell, everything was dazzling bright, but in the shadow was the darkness of the Styx. If was like walking across a lava field by full moonlight. Thus, it seemed easy enough to mark the high lights of the vicinity and to find one’s way around.
Clearing from four to eight feet at a stride, Rhoda quickly crossed the plain to where the pinnacle stood like a lofty minaret, found that it could be easily climbed by a gently sloping ridge, and, without apparent exertion, gained the top and sat down on the very crest. Below her lay the Ring, its windows gleaming yellow in the startlingly white light, inclining slightly on its side in almost the center of the plain. Having photographed it, she turned her eyes in the other direction. Everywhere, as far as she could see, the lunar surface was spotted with craterlets, large and small, surrounded by circular ridges of jagged rock, and bristled with spires and pinnacles. It reminded her vividly of the white, dried shell of a sea-urchin with a few lingering bristles still adhering to it, such as are found so plentifully on the seashore. To what, owing to the sun's position, ought to be the north, her view was cut off by a towering range, beyond which she could glimpse the white peak of a high mountain—Copernicus, probably—and believing this range to be not more than a few miles away, she resolved to utilize the time while the men were at work in trying to get a photograph of the moon’s most superb natural feature.