ON THE MOON
I
"We have arrove! All out for the moon!" repeated Burke, the would-be
humorist. "Get ready for the quarantine officer!"
They all looked at one another incredulously. Save for the jar and the
thunder of the blow when the Ring struck the moon's surface, there was
nothing to suggest or indicate that they were not still moving through
space, except the minor facts that the port-holes were curtained
by a sitting cloud of white dust and that the deadlight was totally
obscured. There was no motion now, but there had been no motion before.
Their journey had been very much like that entertaining side-show
at Coney Island, where the passengers on an imitation ship gain a
vivid impression of _mal de mer_ by sitting perfectly still while the
shore, sea, and sky revolve topsyturvy about them. Yet, to quote the
never-failing Burke, there they were!
But were they _there_? Wasn't it all a mad sort of dream? Too much
liquid air or something? Had they really ever moved an inch? Weren't
they still just roosting on the staging in the aerodrome at Washington,
and stirring up a big dust with their old propeller? Rhoda was actually
convinced, for the moment, that they had never started at all, and her
illusion might have persisted had not Bennie called her attention to
the fact that the dust cloud had suddenly subsided, dropping like a
stone, owing to the complete absence of any supporting atmosphere, and
leaving the sky clear and dark as on a winter's night.
Through the now transparent window, the surface of the moon, blazing
under the blinding rays of the sun, became instantly visible, like
a desert at high noon. But what a desert! The Ring was lying in the
center of a small, circular plain, rimmed by a coruscated rocky
wall--a "craterlet" such as Rhoda and Bennie had studied through the
great telescope at Georgetown. For some distance about the Ring's
circumference, the soft, porous rock composing the surface had been
deeply eroded by the blast from the tractor and grooves and furrows of
large size radiated from the point where they had come to rest. Far
from being level, the plain around the crater bristled with pinnacles
and peaks of every size and shape, suggesting stalagmites on the
floor of a cave--strange and grotesque creations of the erosion of
prehistoric winds.
Here and there, curious mounds and hillocks, presenting weird
profiles, gave the place the appearance of being a gathering-spot or
"council-rock" for selenite creatures turned by some unearthly spell to
stone; while everywhere lay, in tumultuous confusion, huge slabs and
blocks with ridges, walls, and hummocks, suggesting to Rhoda's fanciful
imagination vast lunar building-operations suddenly interrupted by a
cataclysm of nature. At a distance of something over three hundred
yards, an isolated pinnacle rose to a great height, one side dazzling
in the sun's untempered light, the other shrouded in absolute darkness.
Everywhere the plain was strewn with loose and scattered rocks and
covered with a soft, white detritus.
It was a ghostly spectacle--this lunar crust--like a crowded cemetery
in white moonlight, thrusting ghastly fingers toward the sky, populous
yet silent. Rhoda shivered. Had men lived there, she wondered? Had
strange beasts ever roamed and wallowed among the selenite undergrowth
where now these stark forms raised themselves? Had the sweet air of
life ever eddied among these deathly rocks? Had birds once sung there,
and insects buzzed and crawled? Would they, perhaps, find the imprint
of some giant foot impressed upon the motionless dust? Her meditations
were unceremoniously interrupted by Burke.
"We've no time to lose," he announced briskly. "That uranium cylinder
in the tractor must be nearly exhausted. It had never been operated
before at its maximum power, and we overestimated its life--a serious
error. There is an automatic signal that shows you when ninety per
cent. of it is gone. See? Only _two_ per cent. left! I didn't like the
idea of going outside to replace it, though, while we were driving
through space. Hope our liquid-air suits will work. We'll be in a
beastly fix if they won't. We ought to have tested them in a vacuum,
but there were too many things to do."
He crossed the chart-room, and, unlocking a cupboard at the farther
end, dragged forth the three suits of vacuum armor. They were of simple
design, made of heavy rubber cloth and surmounted by copper helmets
resembling those worn by divers. Each wearer carried a cylindrical
tank, supported upon the shoulders, for his supply of liquid air.
"The first thing," continued Burke, "is to load up our knapsacks."
Bennie and Atterbury assisted him in unclamping the cover of one of the
large retainers that supplied the Ring with fresh air. In appearance,
it was not unlike a gigantic milk-can, and caused Burke to remark,
"I pity anyone who tried to steal _that_ milk!"
Atterbury produced a metal ladle from the closet, while Bennie
unfastened the tops of the cylinders, and Rhoda held her breath as she
peered into the big retainer as the engineer thrust the ladle into its
mysterious contents, which gave out dense clouds of white smoke.
"Hot stuff!" he grinned. "Look out!"
"Hot nothing!" replied Bennie. "It's over three hundred degrees below
Fahrenheit!"
Bennie held the cylinder for Atterbury, while the latter attempted to
pour it in through a funnel, but, in spite of all his care, some of the
liquid fell upon the floor with a hiss like that of water dropping upon
a red-hot stove.
"What makes it smoke like that?" asked Rhoda. "Of course, I know it
isn't _hot_!"
"Condensed moisture," explained Bennie. "We never could have made this
trip without it!"
With the greatest caution, they finally succeeded in filling all the
cylinders, and Burke and Atterbury started to don their vacuum armor.
Bennie was about to do the same, when he noticed an expression of
disappointment on Rhoda's face.
"_You_ go!" he said. "I've got to fix up something inside. Go out along
with the others and look around. I'll take my turn when you come back.
You won't want to stay long, I guess!"
"Oh, thanks!" she cried. "I _do_ want to see what the moon is like!"
The men had by this time got into their strange costumes, but Rhoda
found the arrangement of her skirts more or less complicated and was
forced to retire to the galley, where she finally adjusted her attire
to lunar requirements. Then, all four of them rolled the huge cylinder
of uranium into the air-lock, and Atterbury closed and fastened the
inner air-tight door behind them. They stood crowded together for a
moment in that confined space, like divers in a divingbell, unable
to speak to each other, and fully mindful of the fact that they were
about to essay an experiment in physics never before attempted or even
conceived of--the entry of a human being into a perfect vacuum.
Atterbury made a gesture of inquiry, and the others nodded their
helmets. He raised one hand in warning and placed the other upon a
valve in the outer door and pressed it quickly down. With a shriek,
the air in the lock rushed through the valve into space, and their
suits swelled perceptibly from the pressure of the contained air, as if
pulled outward from their bodies by some invisible force. They stood
motionless for several minutes to accustom themselves to their strange
environment, making futile grimaces at one another through the glass
of their helmets. Then Rhoda was startled by a curious fluttering
or palpitation just above the top of her head--a sort of metallic
twitter like that which might be expected to emanate from a mechanical
bird--and she turned a startled face toward Burke, who only grinned in
response and pointed to the escape-valve upon his own helmet. Then she
remembered that he had previously explained to her how the vitiated air
inside the helmets must needs escape in order to give place to the new
fresh air liberated by the supply-tanks. But, in spite of her knowledge
that this fluttering was due simply to a necessary device, she never
heard it without a momentary tremor of fear--a sudden conviction that
her soul was unexpectedly starting upon the Great Adventure.
The air-lock having emptied itself of its contents, Atterbury
now released and opened the outer door and lowered a small metal
landing-stage, from which hung the steel ladder. Then, with some
difficulty, owing to the clumsiness of their new garments, the two
men climbed down upon the tufa-like surface of the moon, while Rhoda
remained watching them curiously from above. Apart from the puffing-out
of the rubber suit, she experienced no new sensations, for she breathed
with perfect ease, and the sunlight, falling full upon her body, warmed
her through and through.
Down below, Atterbury and Burke at first amused themselves by
experimenting with the force of lunar gravitation, so much less than
that of the earth, and jumped hither and yon--distances of fifteen and
twenty feet at a single bound, like mountain-goats leaping from crag
to crag. Once having accustomed themselves to their surroundings and
their loss of gravity, they climbed up the great tripod and commenced
to rig the block and tackle with which they planned to hoist the fresh
uranium cylinder to the top of the skeleton tripod and replace their
now exhausted supply of fuel.
It was clear to Rhoda that this process could conceivably, and in
fact probably, have been performed while the Ring was in flight, but
she shuddered at the thought of her two friends climbing about on the
outside of their machine while in transit at a velocity of twenty
miles per second, however imperceptible that velocity might have been.
Suppose one of them had fallen? Like the shadow of a lost soul, he
would have followed the Ring in its journey among the stars--since,
moving at the same speed as the machine through space at the moment
of his fall, there would have been nothing to alter his relation to
it, and, like a satellite--a true satellite, indeed--he would have
flown along beside, or after it, until the tractor was started again
and he had been left behind alone in the abyss of space! But here they
could quite safely conduct their operations--in fact, as easily as
safely--for the uranium cylinder now weighed but one-sixth of what it
had weighed upon the earth, and the block and tackle could be handled
without difficulty.
Leaving the men thus engaged, Rhoda descended the ladder and started
off on a walk, feeling her way gingerly along until she could
accommodate her muscles to her reduced weight. All about her lay what
might have been the ruins of a Selenite civilization metamorphosed by
the magic of erosion. Giant monoliths, like pillars, lay tumbled here
and there in suggestive juxtaposition with giant blocks of porous stone
which might have served as bases for such pillars, as the steps of a
lunar temple, or even as an altar to some unknown god.
The great solitary pinnacle which she had noticed through the
chart-room window especially excited her curiosity, and, as it
seemed but a short distance away, she first photographed it and then
decided to study it at closer range--to determine the cause of such
a stalagmite formation under the open sky. The possibility of having
any trouble in finding her way back to the Ring did not occur to her,
since every object in the moonscape was defined with a truly unearthly
brilliancy, snow-white on the light side and almost jet-black upon the
other.
Out of the inky curtain of the sky, the sun glared through a circular
rent, like a beam through a hole in the roof of some dark garret. Where
it fell, everything was dazzling bright, but in the shadow was the
darkness of the Styx. It was like walking across a lava field by full
moonlight. Thus, it seemed easy enough to mark the high lights of the
vicinity and to find one's way around.
Clearing from four to eight feet at a stride, Rhoda quickly crossed
the plain to where the pinnacle stood like a lofty minaret, found that
it could be easily climbed by a gently sloping ridge, and, without
apparent exertion, gained the top and sat down on the very crest.
Below her lay the Ring, its windows gleaming yellow in the startlingly
white light, inclining slightly on its side in almost the center of
the plain. Having photographed it, she turned her eyes in the other
direction. Everywhere, as far as she could see, the lunar surface was
spotted with craterlets, large and small, surrounded by circular ridges
of jagged rock, and bristled with spires and pinnacles. It reminded her
vividly of the white, dried shell of a sea-urchin with a few lingering
bristles still adhering to it, such as are found so plentifully on
the seashore. To what, owing to the sun's position, ought to be the
north, her view was cut off by a towering range, beyond which she could
glimpse the white peak of a high mountain--Copernicus, probably--and
believing this range to be not more than a few miles away, she resolved
to utilize the time while the men were at work in trying to get a
photograph of the moon's most superb natural feature.
II
The reader may recall that, at the moment of the departure of the Ring
upon the preceding evening from the aerodrome at Georgetown, Bentham T.
Tassifer had ensconced himself on the roof of the limousine containing
his wife and the professional members of their party, and that, the
Ring having vanished upward into the air, Mrs. Tassifer suddenly
recalled the absence of her niece Rhoda, and, thrusting her head out
of the window, had anxiously inquired of the world in general and of
Bentham in particular what could have become of her.
"How should _I_ know?" snapped back her husband, whose attention had
thus, much against his will, been directed back to earth again. "How
should _I_ know? She went back to that machine, and I suppose she can't
get through the crowd."
"Well, I wish _I_ knew!" retorted his wife. "Some people don't have the
slightest sense of responsibility."
"Bah!" said Bentham to himself. Somehow, he felt infinitely superior
to his better half, roosting thus safely over her head, and fully
protected, not only by the distance separating them but by the
fact that the presence of the distinguished scientific gentlemen
inside would naturally have a restraining influence upon her tongue.
"Bah--snorty old woman!" he repeated, and felt in his pocket for a
cigar.
It was at this moment that the crowd suddenly gave expression to its
pent-up feelings in a roar of wonder and excitement. For several
minutes, twenty-odd thousand people had held their breaths in
amazement, as if fearful lest, should one of them speak, that flying
squirt of light would stop and fall--the magic spell broken! But now
that it was out of sight--vanished into the dark-blue zenith--and had
not dropped back, they vented their astonishment and admiration in a
mighty yell heard for miles. And then every man turned to his neighbor
to assure him that he had believed in Professor Hooker and his Flying
Ring right along, and that you could stake your bottom dollar on
everything coming out all right. On every hand could be heard such
fractional expressions of self-laudation as:
"I tole my wife only las' night--I says--"
"Sure you kin bet on him every time! I allus sed he had Teckla and
Thomas A. Edison beat a mile."
"What'd I tell yer, old top? Was I right now, or wasn't I--eh?" etc.,
etc.
Tassifer, having no companion upon the roof beside him, was compelled
to content himself with a _sotto-voce_ reiteration of his earlier
remarks of "By Gosh!" "Gee whiz!" and "Hookey!" Well, the little feller
had made good!
Bentham began to feel, somehow, as if he had had considerable to do
with the expedition--stood, in a sort of way, _in loco parentis_. He
remembered how he had been the first person to sight the Ring on the
golf-grounds of Chevy Chase and had protested about its landing there.
Also, he was the uncle--by marriage--of Miss Gibbs, who had assisted in
the necessary calculations in planning for the flight. He had actually
been in the Ring itself and bade its crew good-by only a few moments
ago. Why, he was one of the very few! He might even--if he had been
willing to be persuaded--have gone along.
Thus, arrogating to himself even more than his usual importance,
Tassifer viewed the crowd surging about the car with supreme
complacency. They were all making for the road now, as the throng makes
for the exits at a big football game, and the field was much less
congested than at the moment of the start of the machine. In fact, the
chauffeur began to indulge in preparatory noises around the front of
the car. There were practically no people left between the motor and
the barbed-wire entanglement in which the entrance to the field was
located. And yet there was no sign of Rhoda!
He scratched his nose thoughtfully. She couldn't possibly have got out
of the enclosure without seeing the car--it would have been a physical
impossibility. Then, where had she disappeared? Inside the aerodrome,
a half-dozen guards and workmen were piling up the collapsed timbers
of the staging. But he couldn't see a skirt anywhere. He wondered if
she could have been struck or injured by the falling debris? No; her
body would, in that event, be quite visible. He grew more and more
puzzled. She was either inside or outside the enclosure, he reasoned
closely--and she wasn't inside. She couldn't have got outside without
seeing him or being seen.
"I'm really worried about her," came Mrs. Tassifer's voice plaintively
from within the vehicle.
And then Bentham suddenly slapped his leg and uttered a whoop of
surprise, consternation, and baffled rage. With his right fist raised
in imprecation toward the Milky Way, the assistant solicitor of the
Department of Justice descended with astonishing agility to the ground
and thrust his head into the open window of the car.
"She's done it!" he yelled retributively.
"Done what?" demanded Mrs. Tassifer.
"Gone along with 'em! Up there!" He pointed vaguely in the direction
taken by the Ring.
"Oh," protested his wife, in a shocked tone, "she hasn't! She
_wouldn't_ have! Why, it wouldn't be proper--she, an unmarried woman,
alone with three strange men! I'd never be able to look any of my
friends in the face again. You must be mistaken, Bentham."
"Well, she has, all right!" he replied vindictively. "That's just
exactly what she's done. I always said she wasn't all there--rooms to
let--bats in her belfry--balmy on the crumpet. And now she's proved it!
I'm glad she isn't _my_ niece! All right, driver; you may start along."
III
Two hundred and forty thousand miles away, Rhoda, descending to the
lunar plain, strode rapidly in the direction of the ridge behind which
the summit had now disappeared, and, in the course of about twenty
minutes, found herself at the foot of a wall of impassable rock which
curved unexpectedly and fell away into a vast basin. Turning to retrace
her path, she discovered that the peak which she had climbed was no
longer visible and that she had lost all sense of direction. To the
north, to be sure, her passage was barred, but there was nothing to
indicate whether the Ring lay in any one of three directions. Puzzled
by the disappearance of the peak, she sprang blindly across the plain,
running back on what she fancied was the right course. But the Ring was
nowhere to be seen! It had vanished absolutely. And then she recalled
the fact that Bennie had told her that the supply of liquid air carried
in the cylinders of their vacuum armor would last not much over an
hour. Her wrist-watch told her that she had been wandering forty-five
minutes. She had only fifteen minutes more in which to find and return
to the Ring--a bare quarter of an hour in which she could support life
in this hostile environment. A horrible, suffocating death awaited
her--was clamped about her head!
The sweat started out upon her forehead. Above her head, the
escape-valve fluttered feebly, she imagined. What a death! Such a death
as Poe might have conceived! Already, she believed that she had some
difficulty in breathing. The sunlight seemed dimmer, somehow. Were her
ears singing? No; it was only the recurrence of the escape-valve's
twitter. She groaned, and the reverberation echoed in the helmet like
the roar of a lunar beast.
Sick with terror, she turned and scrambled on hands and knees up the
rocky sides of the crater until she stood upon the summit of the ridge.
There was no sign of the Ring anywhere--only the scarred, spiked plain,
with its white sepulchers of rock. Tears of self-pity burned in her
eyes; but she could not wipe them away, and they drained down her
cheeks and lips into her mouth. They would be looking for her--waiting
for her! What agonies would her lover now be suffering, searching that
dead, empty plain with his field-glasses for the shadow of the moving
thing which meant so much to him!
She found herself panting, and tried to control her bosom in the
belief that, by so doing, she could economize the breath of life.
Fifty minutes had now been consumed since she had left the Ring.
Perhaps it was only a short distance away--just there, or there--its
beckoning tripod hidden from her feverish gaze by the moon's curvature.
Only ten minutes left of life! How should she spend them? In vain
rushes for escape, like a dying bull? That would be fruitless. Better
to remain where her friends might perchance see her through their
glasses. The valve chirruped almost inaudibly. Only a few minutes
more--eight--seven! She must signal, wave something--her handkerchief!
Mechanically she felt for her pocket! Only the hard surface of the
vacuum armor. She stood upon the block of burnt porphyritic rock and
waved her arms wildly. These leprous cliffs, these whitened ridges were
like a charnel-house of white bones--her graveyard! The pinnacles were
waving back at her. She was dying! Was she already dead, perhaps? Had
her soul escaped through the valve, and was it now hovering over that
grotesquely clad thing that had been she? The woman who died on the
moon! The lady in the moon! Where had the lady come from? In a flying
machine.
The valve gave a last flutter, and her vision
clouded--brightened--glowed--until it almost blinded her. With a
stifled cry, she found herself on her feet, staring at a dazzling trail
of fire shooting into the black background of the sky. The Ring! It
rose like a rocket just in front of her--its sides gleaming like molten
metal toward and into the zenith--hesitated, hovered for a moment above
her head, and dropped swiftly downward toward her. Hardly conscious
of the action, she thrust the camera toward it and pressed the
bulb--obtaining the only photograph showing the Ring in actual flight.
She had no recollection of taking the picture, and sometimes she is
almost induced to believe that it was the result of some unearthly
agency--a Selenite "control"--sending through her a natural
demonstration and message to the inhabitants of the earth of conditions
on the moon with proof, otherwise unobtainable, that the Ring had been
there. For who shall say in what form the ultimate evolution of man
shall appear? And is it not at least conceivable that the superman or
supermind may dwell, a pure spirit, upon the moon--that there hovers
among those colossal ruins of what was once a planet teeming with life
a soul?
The camera dropped from her outstretched hands, and Rhoda staggered
toward where the Ring would land. Slowly it descended to the
ground--settling like a fiery bird to its nest--a lunar roc in Sinbad's
Valley of Bones--reducing the velocity of its fall by means of the
counter-force of the ray which, driving down upon the porous plain,
threw up great clouds and geysers of lava dust. These hurled high in
air, dropped almost immediately again to the surface--a dead weight in
a vacuum. But there was no sound--no wind. It might, for the absence
of physical phenomena, have been an optical delusion. Yet, as Rhoda
staggered, half fainting, toward that cloud of tumultuous matter, she
knew that there alone could she support life, receive into her lungs
once more that essential of all human existence--oxygen.
Would she arrive in time? Already, there was a dreadful pressure upon
her lungs, and she breathed, like an exhausted animal, in multitudinous
little gasps. Fierce pains shot through her head, and there was a
strange ringing in her ears and a contraction of the muscles in her
throat. The frozen carbonic acid in the dregs of the liquid air was
beginning to evaporate. The lunar landscape swam before her eyes like
the rush of a moonlit river--then suddenly faded. She had entered
the dust cloud raised by the Ring as it reached the surface. She
reeled--the yellow detritus enveloping her like a sand-storm. She was
like a fish swimming through a stratum of muddy water. Suddenly, the
sabulous drift sank at her feet, and she found herself lying prone
beside the Ring, with the steel ladder dangling from the landing-stage
and an armored figure preparing to descend. She waved her arms feebly
and shouted, and the figure waved in response to her gesture. A moment
more, and Burke had leaped down beside her and placed his helmet
against hers.
"Put your arms around my neck quick!" came vibrating through the
telephonic metal and glass. "Where have you been?"
She heard, but could not answer. Burke put his arm around her and
lifted her from the ground. How light she was! It gave him a shock.
Could it be that a human being was inside, or was he holding the empty
shell of the armor? Then, suddenly he felt her hand clutch his arm,
and, remembering the diminished gravity on the moon, scrambled up the
ladder with her clinging to his shoulders. It was not a moment too
soon. For, as they closed the outer door of the air-lock, everything
turned black and she lost consciousness. She came to, a few seconds
later, as Bennie, having unscrewed her helmet, yanked it from her
shoulders and dragged her inside the chart-room--pale, but still alive.
"I watched you from the top of the tripod," explained Atterbury, as she
handed back to him the whiskey-glass which she had emptied. "Saw you
climb up on that peak. No harm in that! But then you disappeared, and
I began to get nervous. So, as soon as we had finished our repairs, we
decided to follow you. Lucky we did!"
"You were just in time. Another five minutes would have been too late,"
she answered weakly. "But I had a great trip."
"You see," added Bennie, "we were afraid you might run out of air and
get lost, so we thought if we made a short flight in the same general
direction we should be nearer in case of accidents, and the Ring would
guide you back to us. Anyhow, our tractor is running strong again,
and we're all ready to start for Medusa--as soon as we have had our
breakfast."
"Or dinner," corrected Burke.
"Or supper," added Atterbury.
Rhoda smiled faintly.
"Will someone please tell me what time it is up here?" she asked
plaintively.
Bennie shrugged his shoulders.
"The days and nights on the moon are each three hundred and fifty-four
hours long--almost fifteen of our terrestrial days."
"My!" whistled Atterbury. "What do you suppose a day's pay amounts to?
I'd hate to be a labor-leader on the moon working for shorter hours!"
"Yes--trying to get a two-hundred-and-ninety-nine-hour day!" added
Burke.
"I suppose the Selenites had lunch at half after one hundred and
seventy-seven," commented Rhoda, carrying on the joke.
"That would be midday," assented Bennie. "But probably they had tea
along about two hundred and forty-five and a late supper around three
hundred and nineteen."
"Makes me hungry to think of it!" said Rhoda. "What's the matter with
tea now? I'm ravenous!"
She looked at her wrist-watch.
"Heavens--it's nearly nine hours since we left Washington!"
"And we've only come about two hundred and fifty thousand miles!"
groaned Burke.
"And with Medusa scorching toward the earth at ninety miles a second,
we ought to get busy!" ejaculated Bennie.
"But we surely can wait long enough for a cup of tea," urged Rhoda.
"Please, Mr. Atterbury, do hustle out the tea-things!"
While the kettle was getting ready to boil, Rhoda and Bennie stood by
the window and took a last look at the surface of the moon. But no
longer did she regard its tumbled monoliths, its spires, crests, and
craters either with interest or pleasure. On the contrary, her hand
sought Bennie's, and she shuddered as she gazed across that barren
plain where no human thing of itself could live.
"Thank God!" she murmured. "I should have hated to die out there, in
that vast cemetery--that Valley of Death."
He pressed her hand--now so warm, yet so cold only a few minutes before.
"Yes," he answered. "Yet, isn't it beautiful, with its blazing
lights and black-velvet shadows? We shall never see anything like it
again--unless we make another trip to the moon."
"The sun doesn't seem to move at all," she hazarded.
"It's because the days are so long," he replied. "The sun's motion
would be hardly perceptible on the earth if our days were ten times
longer than they are."
"But what nights!" she ejaculated.
"No longer--not so long as those near the terrestrial poles," continued
Bennie. "The earth stays always in the same spot in the sky, just
where we see it now as a huge crescent near the sun. As the sun sinks
toward the horizon, the earth waxes like the moon seen from the earth,
reaching its half-stage at sunset. Then, through the long lunar night
it grows, until, at seven of our days after sundown, it becomes full.
Then it wanes again, reaching the half at sunrise a week later. If we
had landed on the other side of the moon, the earth would have remained
invisible. If there were people living on the other side, they would
never see the earth--their moon--at all--"
"Unless they came over to this side for an excursion," interpolated
Rhoda.
"The earth would be worth their seeing, all right!" chuckled Burke.
"And think of the wonderful lunar light! I wish we could stay until
sunset and see the moon by earth-light."
"Tea is served!" called Atterbury, and they all gathered hungrily
around the chart-table.
"I bet we're the first folks that ever had tea on the moon," remarked
Burke.
"That's your one best bet!" retorted Atterbury. "Or ham sandwiches,
either!"