It lacked but a few hours of the seven days when Booker and Whitman felt the shudder that told them a rocket had crash-landed near by. They sat up and looked at each other, and it was apparent that Whitman had the most strength left. So Booker climbed into the spacesuit while Whitman lay down again. And Booker went out to the crashed rocket feeling strong from the fresh oxygen in the spacesuit. He scraped up pottet along with the silica dust and carried it in a broken container back into the dome. Whitman was almost unconscious by the time Booker got back and put water into the pottet. The two men lived. And by the time their replacements arrived the dome was again in as perfect condition as it had been. Except there was a different type of cover on the pottet bin.
* * * *
So Fowler and Mcintosh worked endlessly, ranging far out from the dome on their survey. The tension built up in them, for the worst was yet to come. The long Lunar day was fast drawing to a close, and night was about to fall, a black night fourteen Earth-days long.
“Well, here it comes,” said Mcintosh on the twelfth Earth-day. He pointed west. Fowler climbed up on the hummock beside him and looked. He saw the bottom half of the sun mashed by a distant mountain range and a broad band of shadow reaching out toward them. The shadow stretched as far north and south as he could see.
“Yes,” said Fowler. “It won’t be long now. We’d better get back.”
They jumped down from the hummock and started for the dome, samples forgotten. At first they walked, throwing glances back over their shoulders. The pace grew faster until they were traveling in the peculiar ground-consuming lope of men in a hurry under light gravity.
They reached the dome and went in together. Inside they removed their helmets and Mcintosh headed for the radio. Fowler dropped a hand on his shoulder and said, “Wait, Mac. We have half an hour before we’re due to check in.”
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 cla
nged 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.
* * * *
The night had only two Earth-days to run. Fowler and Mcintosh for the first time began to turn their thoughts to the journey home, not with longing, not with anticipation, but as a possibility of something that might happen. The actuality of leaving the Moon seemed too unreal to be true. And the cold harsh fact was that the rocket might not come; it had happened before. So though they dimly realized that in a mere four Earth-days they might leave the grim grayness behind, they were not much concerned.
A series of observations ended. Fowler and Mcintosh sipped hot tea, drawing the warmth into their chilled bodies. Fowler sat perched on one end of a bench. Mcintosh cupped the teacup in his hands and stood looking out at the lowering moonscape, wishing he could pull his eyes from it, too fascinated by its awfulness to do so. There was complete silence in the dome.
“Don.” The word came as a gasp, as though Mcintosh had called the name before he had completely swallowed a mouthful of tea.
Fowler looked up, mildly curious. He saw Mcintosh drop the teacup, saw it bounce off the floor. He saw Mcintosh straining forward, taut, neck muscles standing out, mouth open, one hand against the clear plastic.
“Don. I saw something move out there.” The words were shrill, harsh, hysteria in every syllable.
Fowler landed beside him in a single leap and looked, not out the window, but at his face. At the staring, terror-filled eyes, the drawn mouth. Fowler threw his arms around Mcintosh’s chest and squeezed hard and said, “Easy, Mac, easy. Don’t let the shadows get you. Things are all right.”
“I tell you I saw something. A sudden movement. Near that hillock but at a greater range and to the right. Something moved, Don.” And he inhaled a great shuddering gasp.
Fowler kept his arms around Mcintosh and looked out. He saw only the jagged dim surface of the Moon. For a long moment he looked out, listening to Mcintosh’s gasping breath, a chill fear slowly rising inside him. He turned his head to look at Mcintosh’s face again, and as he did he caught a flicker of motion out of the corner of his eye. He dropped his arms and jerked his head back to look out as Mcintosh screamed, ‘There, there it is again, but it’s moved.”
The two men, both panting, strained at the window. For a full minute they stood with every muscle pulled tight, gulping down air, perspiration prickling out of their scalps and running down over face and neck. Their eyes saw fantastic shapes in the sharp dim light but their minds told them it was imagination.
Then they saw it clearly. About one hundred yards straight out in front of the window a tiny fountain of moondust sprayed upward and outward from a glowing base that winked out as swiftly as it appeared. Like the blossoming of a death-colored gray rose, the dust from a handspread of surface suddenly rose and spread outward in a circle and just as suddenly fell back to the surface.
“What is it?” hissed Fowler.
“I don’t know.”
They watched, the tension so great that they shuddered. They saw another one, bigger, out farther and to the left. They watched. Another, small, in much closer, the brief white base instantly flashing through shades of deeper reds and disappearing.
“Spacesuits,” gasped Fowler. “Get into the spacesuits.”
And he turned and jumped to the rack, Mcintosh alongside him. They slipped into the cumbersome
suits with the swift smoothness of long practice. They twisted the helmets on.
“Radio O.K.?” said Mcintosh.
“Check. Let’s look.”
And the two jumped back to the window. The activity outside seemed to have stopped. They watched for six full minutes before they saw another of the dust fountains. After they saw it, they twisted their suits to look at each other. They were bringing themselves under control, trying to reason out a cause for what they saw.
“Any ideas?” said Mcintosh.
“No,” said Fowler. “Let’s try the other windows.”
They took up separate places at the two remaining windows.
“See anything?”
“Nothing. Just that hideous-looking terrain. I guess it’s all on the other— Wait. There’s one. Way out. I could just—”
Spectrum 5 - [Anthology] Page 23