Mcintosh picked up a cloth and wiped his wet forehead, running the cloth through his sandy hair. “Yes,” he said. “You’re right. If we check in too soon they’ll worry. Let’s make some tea.”
They removed their suits and brewed two steaming cups. They sat down and sipped the scalding fluid and slowly relaxed a little.
“You know,” said Fowler, “it’s right about now that I’m glad we have an independent water supply. Repurified stuff would begin to taste bad about now.”
Mcintosh nodded. “I noticed it a day or two ago. I think I’d have trouble if the water weren’t fresh.” And the two men fell silent thinking of Tilton and Beck.
Tilton and Beck had been the second pair of men on the Moon. Very little water was sent up in those days, only enough for make-up. Tiny stills and ion-exchange resins purified all body waste products and produced a pure clear water. Tilton and Beck had lived on that water for weeks on Earth and they, along with dozens of others, had pronounced it as fit to drink as spring water.
Then they went to the Moon. Two Earth-days after night fell Beck thought the water tasted bad. Tilton did, too. They knew the water was sweet and clean, they knew it was imagination that gave the water its taste, but they could not help it. They reached a point where the water wrenched at their insides; it tasted so foul they could not drink it. Then they radioed Earth for help, and began living off the make-up water. But Earth was not as experienced in emergency rocket send-offs in those days. The pleas for decent water for the men on the Moon grew weaker. The first rocket might have saved them, except its controls were erratic and it crash-landed five hundred miles from the dome. The second rocket carried the replacements, and when they entered the dome they found Tilton and Beck dead, cheeks sunken, skin parched, lips cracked and broken, dehydrated, dead of thirst. And within easy reach of the two dried-out bodies was twenty-five gallons of clear, pure—almost chemically pure —tasteless, odorless water, sparkling bright with dissolved oxygen.
Fowler and Mcintosh finished their tea and radioed in at check time. They announced that night had overtaken them. A new schedule was set up, one with far more frequent radio contacts. And immediately they set about their new tasks. No more trips far from the dome, no surveying. They broke the telescope from its cover and set up the spectrometer. Inside the dome they converted part of the drafting table to a small but astonishingly complete analytical chemical laboratory.
The planners of the Moon survey from the very beginning recognized that night on the Moon presented a difficult problem. So they scheduled replacements to arrive when the Moon day was about forty-eight hours old. Thus the men had twelve Earth-days of sunlight to get ready for the emotional ordeal of the long night. Such a system insured that the spaceship landed on the Moon in daylight and also allowed optimum psychological adjustment. Shorter periods of residence on the Moon were not feasible, since the full twenty-eight days were needed to prepare for the shuttle flight from Earth to the space station, from the space station to the Moon, and return. Then, too, at least one supply rocket a month had to be crash-landed within easy walking distance of the dome. The effort and money expended by the United States to do these things were prodigious. But future property rights on the Moon might well go to the nation that continuously occupied it.
Fowler looked up from adjusting the telescope and said, “Look at that, Al.” His arm pointed to the Earth brightly swimming in a sea of star-pointed blackness.
They saw the Western Hemisphere, white-dotted with clouds, and a brilliant blinding spot of white in the South Pacific off the coast of Peru where the ocean reflected the sun’s light to them.
Mcintosh said, “Beautiful, isn’t it? I can just about see Florida. Good old Orlando. I’ll bet the lemon blossoms smell good these days. You know, it looks even better at night than it does in day.”
Fowler nodded inside his helmet. “You know, we’ve certainly gone and loused up a good old tradition.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, picture it. A guy and his girl go out walking in the moonlight down there. They’d sigh and feel all choked up and gaze at the Moon. Now when they look up they know there’s a couple of slobs sprinting around up here. It must take something away.”
“I’ll bet,” chuckled Mcintosh.
Fowler dropped his gaze to the moonscape and looked around and said, “It sure looks different here at night.”
They studied the eerie scene. As always, it showed nothing but varying shades of gray, but now the tones were dark and foreboding. The sharp, dim starlight and soft earth-shine threw no shadows but spread a ghostly luminescence over ridge and draw alike. It was impossible to tell just where the actual seeing left off and the imagination began.
Fowler muttered, almost under his breath, “The night is full of forms of fear.”
“What?”
“The night is full of forms of fear. It’s a line I read some place.”
They looked around in silence, turning the ungainly space-suits. Mcintosh said, “It sure describes this place.”
Several Earth-days passed. The two men kept busy making astronomical observation and checking out some of the minerals collected during the long day. They made short trips out into the region around the dome but they took no samples; they let the scintillation counters built into their suits do the probing for hot spots as they simply walked around. And often while they were outside striding through the moondust on their separate paths, one of them would say, “How’re things?” And the other would say, “O.K., how’re things there?” The urge to hear a human voice rose powerful and often.
It was on one of these outside trips that their first real panic occurred. The two men were each about a hundred yards away from the dome and on opposite sides. Mcintosh did not notice a telltale slight dip in the dust where a shallow crack lay almost filled with light flourlike particles. His foot went in. He twisted and fell on his back so that his caught leg would bend at the knee and not wrench the knee-joint of the suit. He hit with a jolt; his forward speed added to the normal speed of fall. The impact was not great but it clanged loudly inside the suit. Mcintosh grunted, and said “damn,” and sat up to free his foot. Fowler’s voice sounded in his headphones. “You O.K., Mac?”
“Yeah,” said Mcintosh. “I fell down but I’m not hurt a bit. Things are fine.”
“Mac,” Fowler’s voice was shrill. “You O.K.?”
“Yes. Not a thing wrong. Just took a—”
“For God’s sake, Mac, answer me.” Fowler’s voice was a near scream, panic bubbling through it.
The fear was contagious. Mcintosh yanked his foot out of the crevice, leaped to his feet, and ran for the dome shouting, “What is it, Walt. What’s the matter. I’m coming. What is it?” And as he ran he could hear Fowler screaming now for him to answer.
Mcintosh rounded the dome and almost collided with Fowler coming in the opposite direction. The two slipped and skidded to a halt, clouds of dust kicking up around their feet and settling as fast as they rose. Once stopped, the two men jumped toward each other and touched helmets.
“What is it, Walt?” shouted Mcintosh.
“What happened to you?” came Fowler’s voice, choked, gasping. Mcintosh could hear it both through the helmet and through his headphones. It sounded hollow.
Mcintosh shouted again. “I took a little spill, that’s all. I told you I was all right over the set. Didn’t you hear me?”
“No.” Fowler was getting himself under control. “I kept calling you and getting no answer. Something must be wrong with the sets.”
“Yeah. It’s either your receiver or my transmitter. Let’s go in and check them out.”
They entered the dome together and removed their suits. They wiped the sweat from their faces and automatically started to make tea, but they stopped. Power was in short supply during the night and hot water had to be held to a minimum. So they checked the radios instead.
They went over Mcintosh’s transmitter first, since he had had the fall. They soon found the trouble. A tiny grain of silica had shorted a condenser in the printed circuit. It was easily fixed and then the transmitter worked again. They put on the suits and went outside. But the shock they suffered was not so easily remedied. And thereafter when they were outside they were never out of sight of each other.
Time went by. The looming loneliness of the brooding moonscape closed ever more tightly around them. Their surroundings took on the stature of a living thing, menacing, waiting, lurking. Even the radio contacts with Earth lost much of their meaning; the voices were just voices, not really belonging to people.
On Earth a man can be deep in a trackless and impenetrable jungle, yet there is a chance a fellow human being will happen by. A man can be isolated on the remotest of desert islands and still maintain a reasonable hope that a ship, or canoe, or plane will carry another human being to him. A man sentenced to a life of solitary confinement knows for certain that there are people on the other side of the wall.
But on the Moon there is complete aloneness. There are no human beings and—what is worse—no possibility of any human beings. And never before had men, two men, found themselves in such a position. The human mind, adaptable entity that it is, nevertheless had to reach beyond its boundaries to absorb the reality of perfect isolation.
The lunar night wore on. Fowler and Mcintosh were out spreading their dirty laundry for the usual three-hour exposure to Moon conditions before shaking the clothes out and packing them away ‘til they were needed again.
Fowler straightened up and looked at the Earth for a moment, then said, “Mac, did you ever eat in a diner on a train?”
“Sure, many times.”
“You remember how the headwaiter seated people?”
Mcintosh thought for a moment then said, “I know what you mean. He keeps them apart. He seats individuals at empty tables until there are no more empty tables; then he begins to double them up.”
“That’s it. He preserves the illusion of isolation. I guess people don’t know how much they need one another.”
“I guess they don’t. People are funny that way.”
They grinned at each other through the faceplates, although it was too dark to see inside the spacesuits. They finished spreading the laundry and went into the dome together. Both of them had recently come to realize a striking thing. If one of them died, the other could not survive. It was difficult enough to preserve sanity with two. One alone could not last an Earth-day. The men on the Moon lived in pairs or they died in pairs. And if Fowler and Mcintosh had thought to look at each other closely, they would have noticed a few incipient lines radiating from the eyes. Nothing striking, nothing abnormal, and certainly nothing as intense as the far look. Just the suggestion of a few lines around the eyes.