at the panoply of the stars. He wondered if he could recognize a
planet should one swing across his narrow field of vision, decided
that perhaps he might not be able to do so, so vast were the number of
stars present. He looked again at Earth, noticing that it had visibly
rotated on its axis. That meant that time had passed, a good deal of
it. Mentally he tried to calculate just how much. He was looking at
the Eastern Hemisphere now, or a corner of it. At least half a day, or
maybe a day and a half, or more. How could he tell how long he had been
asleep, how long unconscious?
He realized that he was tired, that his body still ached from the
painful take-off. He closed his eyes, and without actually wanting to,
fell asleep.
His sleeping body swung slowly to and fro in the tiny space, bumping
gently from one side to the other. As he slept he dreamed of falling,
dreamed of falling over huge endless cliffs, of dropping down strange
chasms, of being carried by huge birds and suddenly being dropped.
His subconscious mind would never give up the insistent awareness
that his body was falling. It was a certain thing that such would
be the dreams of anyone in space flight. The built-in machinery of
self-protection identifies a sense of loss of weight with the automatic
warning of a fall. Ten thousand thousand generations of climb from
primeval arboreal ancestry found the warning valid--no conscious
knowledge otherwise would ever shut off this instinctive alarm.
He awoke again with a start and a convulsive grasp for a tree branch.
But he shook off the sensation and rubbed his eyes. He took another
sip from the water flask, reached into the compartment below and took
one of the bananas. The monkeys were still in each other's arms, but
now asleep. The rabbits were nosing the corners of their cage as if
everything were perfectly normal.
He looked through his peephole and saw the Moon.
It was large, it was vast, it took up most of the view in his range.
It looked as close as the Earth had looked before. He looked upon the
stupendous moonscape with awe. It was the vision one strains to see
through a telescope. He had often paid a dime to look at it through
the six-inch telescope at the City Science Museum. This was the same
vision, but bigger and clearer, so very, very clear.
He could see only a small section of the Moon, but that was impressive.
A particularly rugged area of jagged mountains, huge craters, high
walled and wide bottomed, with long rills and ridges running across the
surfaces.
It shone white under the sun, with immensely black shadows breaking
it where the sun failed to penetrate. Yet there were more than whites
and grays and blacks here. He saw that without the atmosphere of Earth
there were other more delicate shadings. The sides of some mountains
had bluish and greenish tinges, and more than one crater bottom showed
a distinct faint tinge of pale green, or in other spots yellowish
blotches. And in one small spot he distinctly saw a mistiness of the
surface, saw that a faint fuzziness barred the clear sight of the
crater bottom.
He stared with wonder at the sight and the Moon slowly turned out of
his vision as the rocket turned. He looked away, deep in thought.
He had read enough about the Moon in his astronomical readings. He knew
the various theories, the latest conjectures. He knew that mistiness,
that evidences of clouding had been seen often by astronomers, but
the sight was nevertheless rare. No two astronomers ever happened
to be looking at the same place at the same time. It was always one
man's word, and it was never possible to predict such a thing, nor to
photograph it.
He knew that those men who made a special study of the Moon recognized
these things and had come to accept them as evidence that what was
once regarded as a dead world was not entirely dead. They had charted
these color shifts in certain spots, one or two areas could be
predicted well enough to occasionally be provable to others. Pickering
had seen many such color changes, had even attributed it to some sort
of fast-growing vegetation.
Robin remembered that it was now largely believed that the Moon had not
quite ceased its volcanic internal action. He recalled that astronomers
had begun to admit that the evidence of these bits of mist and the
further evidence of actual mapped changes in the Lunar topography had
proved that something was still warm and boiling within the crust of
Old Luna.
Then it occurred to Robin that if the Moon were that close to him, he
might really be falling upon it!
He peered out, saw again a section of Luna in view. It was close.
Evidently the nose of the rocket had indeed been propelled far beyond
Earth's atmosphere, beyond its gravitational grip. If the Moon had
been elsewhere, perhaps the rocket nose would have swung about and
eventually returned to fall upon the Earth, as Robin had originally
surmised. But by chance his orbit, that of the rocket nose in free
space, had cut too close to the body of the Moon. The rocket was
dangerously near to being seized in the grip of the Moon's gravity and
pulled down to it.
Robin mulled this thought over and realized that it was possibly the
truth. He glued his eye to the peephole and tried to determine where he
was.
After a while, he saw that the Moon was gradually increasing in size.
The rocket nose was definitely approaching the Lunar sphere. Because
the Earth no longer swung into view, Robin also realized that the
rocket nose must have reversed itself, must be heading moonward, must
be falling to the Moon!
It would fall faster and faster now, as its trip through space was
ending. It was held in the grip of a new world and would speed to its
final destruction like a meteoric bullet. It would be another meteor
blasting into the surface to flash instantly into powder!
_6. Target: Luna_
Now that Robin recognized the certainty that he would never return,
that he was a doomed man, a curious sort of change came over him. Up
to this time, he had been carefully suppressing his inner thoughts,
comforting himself with the hope that the trip would somehow end
up safely. Yet while his mind was dwelling on that thought to the
exclusion of others, his nerves had been under tension. He had felt
himself continually on the edge of breakdown, in proximity to screaming.
But Robin had been trained well. His life had never been a
particularly easy one and the crying had almost certainly got out of
his system during the days when as a little boy he had wandered through
a war-torn land hungry and homeless. Life in an orphanage, at best,
lacks much of the careful comforts of parents' hands, and those who had
come out of such upbringing learn strong self-control early, learn to
hold their jumping nerves in check at moments of tension and crisis.
Now that the conscious realization that a crash into the Moon was
inevitable had forced itself into acceptance, Robin felt a slipping
away of this tension. The die had been cast, the doubt had been
removed. He actually felt an easing of his mind, felt himself able to
take cooler estimate of his situation.
He curled himself up in his narrow, closetlike space as comfortably as
possible and thought the matter over. He was hungry again and still
thirsty and this time he ate the second candy bar without saving any.
At the rate of speed he was traveling, it could not be many hours more
before he flashed to a sudden, fiery, meteoric death. He turned that
thought over in his mind, while he drank some more water.
A meteoric end, he thought, to flash like a blazing firebolt, to crash
with the violence of an explosion against the dry, dusty surface of the
Moon. It might have been spectacular to observe, but he would never
know. He wondered if it would be seen from the Earth.
Suddenly, like an automatic switch being thrown on an electronic
relay, a memory shot into his thoughts. He was well-read in astronomy,
particularly on the subject of the Moon, and the thought that struck
him was this: _Astronomers did not see meteors crash into the Moon!_
They just didn't! And Moon observation under powerful telescopes
was most exact; if even fair-sized meteors hit the Moon with the
same explosive impact that they hit Earth, they would be seen beyond
question. Further, since the Moon was a companion of the Earth, and our
home planet was bombarded with countless meteors daily, the Moon must
be a target of a like number. Of course, the meteors that hit Earth
were almost entirely burned up by atmospheric friction long before
reaching the surface.
But the Moon apparently had no atmosphere ... there should have been
nothing to prevent them from constantly battering the face of the Moon
in a continuous, heavy rain of iron and rock. Lunar meteors should be
visible all the time. But they were not!
So ... what would really happen when his rocket hit the Moon?
Robin was tingling with strange excitement. Facing death as he was,
he knew that even at the moment of dying he would be rewarded with
at least one secret of the universe now unknown to men. What was the
secret? He wracked his brain trying to bring back to memory all that he
had read on that problem.
And he brought back the memory that during the past few years a growing
number of astronomers had begun to believe that the Moon was not
entirely without an atmosphere. It wasn't believed to have much of one,
but it had been pointed out that most meteors to hit Earth burn up at
least thirty miles high. And the atmosphere at that height on Earth was
very, very thin. So thin indeed that if the Moon had a belt of air only
that dense, it might not be particularly detectable from Earth, might
not make much difference from the surface--it was almost a vacuum so
far as living matter would be concerned--but it would suffice to burn
up meteors!
So it seemed likely that his rocket nose would be heated to
incandescence by the tenuous Lunar atmosphere and burn to ash long
before it touched the surface.... It wasn't a comforting thought--he
rather preferred the original conception of crashing.
Robin smiled grimly to himself. A dismal prospect, indeed. He had
somehow cherished the hope that at least some wreckage of his rocket
would be scattered about the surface, to be discovered some day by the
explorers of the future, perhaps hundreds of years later. They would
speculate upon it, perhaps trace it and in that way know that one Robin
Carew had, in death, been the first to reach the Moon.
But to burn up on high, even that faint honor would be denied him!
He looked again through the peephole. The Moon was close now, very
close. He looked down upon a heaving and fearful view--a vast sea of
glistening white, with streaks and patches of gray, and here and there
great gaping clefts of black. Huge ringed craters, their saw-toothed
mountain walls soaring into the sky--and craters upon craters, big ones
and little ones, broken ones, craters breaking into the boundaries of
others, little ones dotting the bottom of big ones, cracks and clefts
shooting from their bases; a ring of jagged mountains running across
the moonscape; areas of apparently flat plains.
The sun was directly overhead, for it was still full moon and the glare
was great, the shadows that mark the setting or rising of a Lunar day
not too obvious, stunted patches of jet blackness. But the Moon was
not entirely whites and grays, for indeed it was gently tinted in
spots with other colorations. He could see for himself that there were
greenish tints in some flat spots, yellowish and purpling areas. And
yes, there was even in one tiny patch in a crater floor a faint cloudy
mass, a mere haziness that indicated some sort of gaseous mist.
Robin drank in the scene, the view of another world, that world which
has dazzled the dreamers of Earth for thousands of years. These might
be his last moments, but he could not be denied the saturation of his
senses.
The rocket was fast heading down toward a point near the center.
The Moon was spreading out, filling the view, and the rocket's slow
rotation no longer brought anything into view but moonscape, a constant
shifting view, with wonders upon wonders moving into his eye's scope.
Robin drew back a moment, rubbed his arms, scratched his legs. He felt
himself tingling, wondered if it were his nerves. He felt itchy, hoped
his nerves would not give way. He thought to himself, I may have only
minutes now. I shall watch till the end. Then he heard a faint, faint
noise.
From somewhere there was a humming. The merest shadow of a hum,
and Robin listened to it, startled. The humming rose in pitch, it
was no dream, and as he sat, mouth open, amazed, there was a thin,
high-pitched screaming outside the rocket and he suddenly began to feel
hot.
Robin had but a second in which to think to himself, There's an
atmosphere and we're burning up, when there came a new sound. A sort of
_bloop_ from over his head, a snapping noise, and something seemed to
grab the rocket and jerk it upside down violently.
Robin was tossed in a sharp somersault, banging against the original
floor of his compartment in a jumble of arms and legs. He sat up and
realized that he was sitting--not floating--but actually sitting
_against gravity's pull_! He scrambled onto his knees, peeped through
his peephole.
The sky was back in view, the Moon was below the falling ship and he
could see the edge of a huge, circular orange mass above him, straining
and pulling. It was the parachute from the nose of the rocket. It was
the orange parachute designed to land the instrument nose and the test
animals safely in the New Mexico desert. And it had been set to open
automatically upon the pressure of air when falling.
There was an atmosphere around the Moon then ... a thin, thin one,
but the delicate detonator of the chute had functioned. The great
hemispheric mass of delicate nylon had opened, had found a purchase,
and was dragging the rocket back from a disastrous burn-out.
Robin breathed a sigh of relief, strained his eyes to see the moonscape
again. The rocket was still falling, mighty fast it seemed. He could
see the moonscape rise out, expand to fill the view. The rocket was
warm now, definitely still heating from the thin friction. It vibrated
and whistled but it swung in no breeze. It was moving too fast. In that
almost unnoticeable belt of tenuous air there would be no winds that
could deflect it. The parachute was open, but the air was not thick
enough to do more than slow it down too gradually for it to be saved.
It would, he realized, still crash into the surface with a deadly
force. It would hit like a shell from a cannon, and the explorers of
the far future would have their mysterious fragments of tooled metal to
speculate on.
Below him Robin saw the jagged mountain peaks reaching up for him
into the dark black sky. He scanned it, remembering his Moon books,
remembering the cold photos taken by distant Terrestrial cameras and
the careful diagrams and names given by men long dead. He was hitting
near the center of the Moon, a little above it, and the crater whose
walls were reaching up ... why he could even name it. He grinned wryly.
It would be Theophilus, and it seemed he would miss it, hit somewhere
near it in a bay of the so-called Sea of Tranquillity.
Rushing up toward him, Theophilus was no peaceful Greek ancient. It
was a barren, toothed, rocky edge, miles up, without the snow that
makes our mountains majestic, without a trace of the forests that
conceal a mountain's jagged sides, without even the gentle weathering
of rain and water.
And the Sea of Tranquillity--a dark, wrinkled plain that looked as if
it had gone through the agonies of torture ages past. The marks of
almost-vanished volcanoes on it, pale circular rings like pocks of
burst bubbles, rambling ridges, and ugly cracks, and here and there
domes rising gray out of the surface, like the tops of giant bubbles
working their way out of the dry and flaky crust.
Robin watched in dread fascination. He heard the whistling and
shrieking of the rocket like a demon in torment. He himself was burning
and itching as he was being baked, although he felt no fever. The
rocket was warm but getting no warmer. The topmost peak of Theophilus
was rushing up into his sky like a fast-growing stone geyser.
He watched it shoot up, saw it grow, saw the ground become clearer and
clearer, each ghastly detail spreading out, assuming three-dimension
reality. Now the peak was on a level with his eyes, now it was beyond
him, and he was in the last few seconds of his fall.
The rocket seemed to be slowing slightly. The atmosphere was possibly
getting a trifle thicker at the surface, enough to prolong the agony
a minute or two or three longer. Above him the parachute strained and
twisted. But still the rocket was falling too fast. It rushed down,
straining to complete its act of affinity with a new gravity, as if
tired of its brief period of interplanetary freedom, and anxious to
pledge allegiance to a new gravitational master.
Below, the moonscape was coming up fast. Robin could see well enough to
begin to speculate where exactly he would hit. There was a small circle
that must have been a crater scar. There were several dark lines that
might be a network of cracks. And there was a dome.
He remembered those domes. They had been quite a recent discovery too.
Not easily seen until latter-day instruments showed the surface of the
Moon dotted with these odd bumps. Their nature was still a mystery.
It looked as if Robin would find out the hard way what their
construction was. For now he was clearly heading directly for the
center of the one below him. A bubble-top pushing out from the plain,
hard and shiny like lava, glistening in the sun against the gray and
dusty surface of the plain around it.
Theophilus's wall was already on the horizon, high and towering. And
now Robin realized how terribly fast the rocket was still falling. The
mountain was a measuring stick and it was fearful.
There was a moment of dreadful suspense as the rocket raced to a bull's
eye on the upthrust center of the dome. The rounded surface rushed up.
Robin flattened himself against the padding, clutched his head in his
hands, and stiffened himself. The rocket hummed against the thin air,
it vibrated against the parachute, there was a terrible split second of
shock when the bullet-shaped structure of the rocket's cargo nose made
its contact with its Lunar target, and then a clap of sound in Robin's
ear like a blockbuster going off.
_7. The Honeycomb Place_
Robin had no time to wonder why he had not been instantly killed by the
crash, because the explosion on hitting the surface of the dome was
followed instantly by a tremendous roaring sound that surrounded the
entire rocket nose. This was in turn accompanied by a powerful pressure
on the rocket, which threw Robin against the nose-end cushioning and
held him there.
The pressure was not steady, changing as the roaring itself changed,
with sudden bursts of sound, convulsive shoves, and changes in pitch.
The rocket was being slowed by a terrific outward burst of gases,
gases that must have been imprisoned in a huge volcanic bubble whose
outermost surface was the dome, so mysterious to Terrestrial observers.
By bursting through the thin lava shell, Robin's rocket had released
these pent-up gases and was boring its way down on its still rapid
momentum against the pressure of this column of gas.
Robin did not know this at the time, though he figured it out later. At
the time, he had all he could do to keep himself from being battered
black-and-blue by the jolting rocket. He kept his head clutched tightly
in his arms, rode with the bumps and roars, and tried to keep his
breath from being knocked out of his lungs.
There was another violent shock and crack and again the rocket bounced
to a new flow of gases. It had slammed through one huge bubble,
breaking through the bottom shell only to burst into a lower pocket
of gas. The roaring subsided to a lower pitch as the new gases did
not find the near-vacuum of the surface that the first gas bubble had
opened upon. The rocket fell steadily, bursting through a third, and
then a fourth such bubble. It was clear that the surface of the Moon,
at least in that area, was a mass of congealed gas pockets, a honeycomb
of thin-walled lava bubbles, perhaps quite deep.
The rocket was almost entirely devoid of its original space momentum
by the time it hit the bottom of the last bubble, snapped the thin
crust, and fell through it. This time there was a sudden hissing around
the battered nose and a warmth began to flow through the body of the
rocket. It was enveloped in a belt of hot steam through which it fell
several hundred feet and then hit something with a loud splashing
noise. The sound vanished as the rocket sank deep into the new
substance, came to a halt, and bobbed back upward.
Robin had gotten hold of himself after the third bubble and was hanging
on, mentally trying to estimate what had happened. This last sound had
been familiar. It must have been water, and the bobbing back of the
rocket to the surface confirmed his views. He felt the rocket bounce a
couple of times and then subside to a gentle rocking and rolling.
Robin held on for a moment, getting his balance. In some ways the
new motion was more disturbing than all that had gone before--the
cylindrical body of the rocket, with its blunt end and its rounded
nose, was twisting and turning as only can be done by a bottle tossed
in a flowing stream. Robin tried to get hold of himself, orient himself
to the odd seasick motion, then managed to work his way to the peephole.
He could see nothing. Whatever was outside was without light. But it
sounded like water lapping against the sides, it felt like water's
forces, and the rocket seemed definitely to be afloat. Robin used his
flashlight, tried to direct its beam through the tiny camera outlet.
After a little manipulation he succeeded in getting some reflection
from outside.
It was water, and the rocket seemed to be floating rapidly along
on some sort of dark subterraneous tide. Robin sat back, puzzled.
Water--under the Moon?
He held on, still feeling a little dizzy, feeling dirty and itchy, but
suddenly beneath it all a little thrilled and pleased. He had survived
the crash by some miracle--he was on the Moon and alive! What next?
Next was quick to come. There was a sudden dip in the current and
the rocket tilted forward as it shot down a spillway, down a violent
decline on a raging torrent, sliding down an unseen waterfall for a
surprisingly long time, leveling out at a fast clip, sliding down new
tunnels through which the water raced, hitting the side of sharp turns
with occasional glancing blows, down more dips and falls, spinning
violently around in unseen whirlpools, and finally racing out on a fast
stream to gradually slow down and finally come to rest, gently bobbing.
Robin had been knocked around during this breathless ride and only
gradually did he realize it was over. Warily he raised his head from
where he was sprawled in his tiny closet-compartment and waited. But
the gentle bobbing continued.
He put his eye to the peephole and looked. There was a glow outside, a
grayish, pale glow, but he could see that the nose of the rocket was
somehow grounded on something dry while the tail was still in the water
rocking to the current.
He considered his next course of action for a few seconds. It seemed as
if he had a chance to escape from his vehicle at last. But escape to
what?
Was there air outside, wherever it was that he found himself? If there
were air, was it enough to sustain him? Might it not be poisonous or
utterly lacking in oxygen?
Well, Robin thought to himself, there isn't really any choice. If I
stay here, I'll starve to death or suffocate. If I go out, I may die
even sooner. But now or later, if it has to be, it won't make any
difference. Whatever the odds in favor of my being able to breathe
here, I've got to take them.
He twisted around, found the circular port through which he had
originally entered the rocket. He worked at it with his fingers,
realizing that it might be quite difficult to open. He worked away
the padding that lined the interior, found that it had an arrangement
that had automatically sealed it when closed. There was no handle on
the inside, for it had never been planned to be opened from that side.
However, there were several screws over a small plate, and Robin set to
work to unscrew them. He had a Boy Scout knife in his pants pocket--the
kind with several blades--and with the back of the biggest blade he
worked out the screws.