Mcintosh grabbed for him. But with arms flailing, body twisting, feet groping, Fowler disappeared down the crevice. Mcintosh staggered behind him; his feet skidded on the ripples in the hard, slick basalt. He, too, bobbled to the lip of the crevice and toppled in.
Thirty feet down the crevice narrowed to a point where the men could fall no farther. Fowler was head down and four feet to Mcintosh’s left. They were unhurt but they began to worry when a few struggles showed them how firmly the slick rock gripped their spacesuits. The pilot of the spaceship, sealed in his compartment, could not help them. The two men they were to replace might be miles away. The radios were useless for anything but line-of-sight work. So they hung there, waiting for something—or nothing—to happen.
Fowler spoke first. “Say, Mac, did you get a chance to see what the Moon looks like before you joined me down here?”
“No. I had sort of hoped you’d noticed. Now we don’t have a thing to talk about.”
Silence, then: “This is one for the books,” said Fowler. “Can you see anything? All I can see is the bottom of this thing and all I can tell you is it’s black down there.”
“No. I can’t see out. I have a nice view of the wall, though. Dense, igneous, probably of basic plagioclose. Make a note of that, will you?”
“Can you reach me?”
“No. I can’t even see you. Can you—”
“What are you fellows doing down there?” A new voice broke into the conversation. Neither Fowler nor Mcintosh could think of an answer. “Stay right there,” the voice continued, with something suspiciously like a chuckle in it. “We’ll be down to get you out.”
The pinned men could hear a rock-scraping sound through their suits. Two pairs of hands rocked each man free of the walls. Mcintosh was the first to be freed and he watched with close interest the easy freedom of movement of the two spacesuited figures as they released Fowler, turned him right side up, and lifted him up to where he could support himself in the crevice. All four then worked their way up the slick walls by sliding their backs up one wall while bracing their feet against the opposite wall.
The two men led Fowler and Mcintosh around to the other side of the spaceship and pointed westward across Mare Imbrium. One of them said, “About half a mile over there behind that rise you’ll find the dome. About eight miles south of here you’ll find the latest cargo rocket—came in two days ago. The terrain is pretty rough so you’d better wait a few days to get used to the gravity before you go after it. We left some hot tea for you at the dome. Watch yourselves now.”
They all solemnly shook hands. The clunk of the metallic-faced palms of the spacesuit and the gritty sound of the finger, wrist, and elbow joints made hand-shaking a noisy business in a spacesuit.
Both Fowler and Mcintosh tried to see the faces of the two men they were replacing, but they could not. It was daytime on the Moon and the faceplate filters were all in place. Their radio voices sounded the same as they had on Earth.
Fowler and Mcintosh turned and carefully and awkwardly moved westward away from the ship. A quarter of a mile away they turned to watch it and for the first time the men had the chance to see the actual moonscape.
Pictures are wonderful things and they are of great aid in conveying information. Words and pictures are often adequate to impart a complete understanding of a place or event. Yet where human emotions are intertwined with an experience mere words and pictures are inadequate.
It might well be that on Earth there existed similar wild wastelands, but they were limited, and human beings lived on the fringes, and human beings had crossed them, and human beings could stand out on them unprotected and feel the familiar heat of day and the cold of night. Here there was only death for the unarmored man, swift death like nothing on Earth. And nowhere were there human beings, nor any possibility of human beings. Only the darker and lighter places, no color, black sky, white spots for stars, and the moonscape itself nothing but brilliant gray shades of tones between the white stars and the black sky.
So Fowler and Mcintosh, knowing in advance what it would be like, still had to struggle to fight down an urge to scream at finding themselves in a place where men did not exist. They stared out through the smoked filters, wide-eyed, panting, fine drops of perspiration beading their foreheads. Each could hear the harsh breath of the other in the earphones, and it helped a little to know they both felt the same.
A spot of fire caught their attention and they turned slightly to see. The spaceship stood ungainly and awkward with a network of pipes surrounding the base. The spot of fire turned into a column, and the ship trembled. The column produced a flat bed of fire, and the ship rose slowly. There was no dust. A small stream of fire reached out sideways as a balancing rocket sprang to life. The ship rose farther, faster now, and Fowler and Mcintosh leaned back to watch it. Once it cleared the Moon’s horizon it lost apparent motion. They watched it grow smaller until the fire was indistinguishable with the stars, then they looked around again.
It was a little better this time, since they were prepared for an emotional response. But now they were truly alone. Without knowing what they were doing, they drew closer together until their spacesuits touched. The gentle thud registered in each consciousness and they pressed together for a moment while they fought to organize their thoughts.
And then Mcintosh drew a long deep breath and shook his head violently. Fowler could feel the relief it brought. They moved apart and looked around.
Mcintosh said, “Let’s go get that tea they mentioned.”
“Right,” said Fowler. “I could use some. That’s the dome there.” And he pointed west.
They headed for it. They could see the dome in every detail; and as they approached, the details grew larger. It was almost impossible to judge distances on the Moon. Everything stood out with brilliant clarity no matter how far away. The only effect of distance was to cause a shrinking in size.
The dome was startling in its familiarity. It was the precise duplicate to the last bolt of the dome they had lived in and operated for months in the hi-vac chambers on Earth.
The air lock was built to accommodate two men in a pinch. They folded back the antennas that projected up from their packs and they crawled into the lock together; neither suggested going in one at a time. They waited while the pump filled the lock with air from the inside; then they pushed into the dome itself and stood up and looked around.
Automatically their eyes flickered from one gauge to another, checking to make sure everything was right with the dome. They removed their helmets and checked more closely. Air pressure was a little high, eight pounds. Fowler reached out to throw the switch to bring it down when he remembered that a decision had been made just before they left Earth to carry the pressure a little higher than had been the practice in the past. A matter of sleeping comfort.
“How’s the pottet?” asked Mcintosh. His voice sounded different from the way it had on Earth.
Fowler noted the difference—a matter of the difference in air density—as he crossed the twenty-foot dome and squatted to look into a bin with a transparent side. The bin bore the label in raised letters, Potassium Tetraoxide.
On Earth, water is the first worry of those who travel to out-of-the-way places. Food is next, with comfort close behind depending on the climate. On the Moon, oxygen was first. The main source of oxygen was potassium tetraoxide, a wonderful compound that gave up oxygen when exposed to moisture and then combined with carbon dioxide and removed it from the atmosphere. And each man needed some one thousand pounds of the chemical to survive on the Moon for twenty-eight days. A cylinder, bulky and heavy, of liquid air mounted under the sled supplied the air make-up in the dome. And a tank of water, well insulated by means of a hollow shiny shell open to the Moon’s atmosphere, gave them water and served in part as the agent to release oxygen from the pottet when needed.