The dome checked out and by common consent both men swung to the radio, hungry for the reassuring sound of another human voice. Mcintosh tuned it and said into the mike, “Moon Station to Earth. Fowler and Mcintosh checking in. Everything in order. Over.”
About four seconds later the transmitter emitted what the two men waited to hear. “Pole Number One to Moon. Welcome to the network. How are you, boys? Everything shipshape? Over.”
Mcintosh glanced at Fowler and a vision of the crevice swam between them. Mcintosh said, “Everything fine, Pole Number One. Dome in order. Men in good shape. All’s well on the Moon. Over.”
About three seconds’ wait, then: “Good. We will now take up Schedule Charlie. Time, 0641. Next check-in, 0900. Out.” Mcintosh hung up the mike quickly and hit the switches to save power.
The two men removed their spacesuits and sat down on a low bench and poured tea from the thermos.
Mcintosh was a stocky man with blue eyes and sandy hair cut short. He was built like a rectangular block of granite, thick chest, thick waist, thick legs; even his fingers seemed square in cross section. His movements were deliberate and conveyed an air of relentlessness.
Fowler was slightly taller than Mcintosh. His hair and eyes were black, his skin dark. He was lean and walked with a slight stoop. His waist seemed too small and his shoulders too wide. He moved in a flowing sinuous manner like a cat perpetually stalking its prey.
They sipped the hot liquid gratefully, inhaling the wet fragrance of it. They carried their cups to the edge of the dome and looked out the double layer of transparent resin that served as one of the windows. The filter was in place and they pushed against it and looked out.
“Dreary looking place, isn’t it?” said Fowler.
Mcintosh nodded.
They sipped their tea, holding it close under their noses when they weren’t drinking, looking out at the moonscape, trying to grasp it, adjusting their minds to it, thinking of the days ahead.
They finished, and Fowler said, “Well, time to get to work. You all set?”
Mcintosh nodded. They climbed into their spacesuits and passed through the lock, one at a time. They checked over the exterior of the dome and every piece of mechanism mounted on the sled. Fowler mounted an outside seat, cleared with Mcintosh, and started the drive motor. The great sled, complete with dome, parabolic mirror, spherical boilers, batteries, antennas, and a complex of other equipment rolled slowly forward on great, sponge-filled tires. Mcintosh walked beside it. Fowler watched his odometer and when the sled had moved five hundred yards he brought it to a halt. He dismounted and the two of them continued the survey started months back by their predecessors.
They took samples, they read radiation levels, they ran the survey, they ate and slept, they took more samples. They kept to a rigid routine, for that was the way to make time pass, that was the way to preserve sanity.
* * * *
The days passed. The two men grew accustomed to the low gravitation, so they recovered the cargo rocket. Yet they moved about with more than the usual caution for Moon men. They had learned earlier than the others that an insignificant and trivial bit of negligence can cost a man his life. And as time went by they became aware of another phenomenon of life on the Moon. On Earth, in an uncomfortable and dangerous situation, you become accustomed to the surroundings and can achieve a measure of relaxation. Not on the Moon. The dismal bright and less-bright grays, the oppressive barrenness of the gray moonscape, the utter aloneness of two men in a gray wilderness, slowly took on the tone of a gray malevolence seeking an unguarded moment. And the longer they stayed the worse it became. So the men kept themselves busier than ever, driving themselves to exhaustion, sinking into restless sleep, and up to work again. They made more frequent five-hundred-yard jumps; they expanded the survey; they sought frozen water or frozen air deep in crevices, but found only frozen carbon dioxide. They kept a careful eye on the pottet, for hard-working men consume more oxygen, and the supply was limited. And every time they checked the remaining supply they remembered what had happened to Booker and Whitman.
A pipeline had frozen. Booker took a bucket of water and began to skirt the pottet bin. The bail of the bucket caught on the corner of the lid of the bin. Booker carelessly hoisted the bucket to free it. The lid pulled open and the canvas bucket struck a corner and emptied into the bin. Instantly the dome filled with oxygen and steam. The safety valves opened and bled off the steam and oxygen to the outside, where it froze and fell like snow and slowly evaporated. The bin ruptured from the heat and broke a line carrying hydraulic fluid. Twenty gallons of hydraulic fluid flooded the pottet, reacting with it, forming potassium salts with the silicone liquid, releasing some oxygen, irretrievably locking up the rest.
Booker’s backward leap caromed him off the ceiling and out of harm’s way. After a horrified moment, the two men assessed the damage and calmly radioed Earth that they had a seven-Earth-day supply of oxygen left. Whereupon they stocked one spacesuit with a full supply of the salvaged pottet and lay down on their bunks. For six Earth days they lay motionless; activity consumes oxygen. They lay calm; panic makes the heart beat faster and a racing blood stream consumes oxygen.
For four days slightly more than two thousand men on Earth struggled to get an off-schedule rocket to the Moon. The already fantastic requirements of fuel and equipment needed to put two men and supplies on the Moon every month had to be increased. The tempo of round-the-clock schedules stepped up to inhuman heights; there were two men lying motionless on the Moon.
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 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 v
oices 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.
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