The broken, shaggy ramparts of the giant crater rose above us. We
toiled upward, out of the foothills, clinging now to the crags and
pitted terraces of the main ascent. An hour had passed since we turned
from the borders of Mare Imbrium. Or was it two hours? I could not
tell. I only know that we ran with desperate, frantic haste.
Anita would not admit that she was tired. She was more skillful than I
in this leaping over the broken rock masses. Yet I felt that her
slight strength must give out. It seemed miles up the undulating
slopes of the foothills with the black and white ramparts of the
crater close before us.
And then the main ascent. There were places where, like smooth black
frozen ice, the walls rose sheer. We avoided them, toiling aside,
plunging into gullies, crossing pits where sometimes, perforce, we
went downwards, and then up again. Or sometimes we stood, hot and
breathless, upon ledges, recovering our strength, selecting the best
route upward.
In tumbled mass of rock, honeycombed everywhere with caves and
passages leading into impenetrable darkness, there were pits into
which we might so easily have fallen; ravines to span, sometimes with
a leap, sometimes by a long and arduous detour.
Endless climb. We came to the ledge with the plains of the Mare
Imbrium stretching out beneath us. We might have been upon this main
ascent for an hour; the plains were far down, the broken surface down
there smoothed now by the perspective of height. And yet still above
us the brooding circular wall went up into the sky. Ten thousand feet
above us.
"You're tired, Anita. We'd better stay here."
"No. If we could only get to the top--the ship may land on the other
side--they would see us."
There was as yet no sign of the brigand ship. With every stop for
rest we searched the starry vault. The Earth hung over us, flattened
beyond the full. The stars blazed to mingle with the Earthlight and
illumine these massive crags of the Archimedes walls. But no speck
appeared to tell us that the ship was up there.
We were on the curving side of the Archimedes wall which fronted the
Mare Imbrium to the north. The plains lay Like a great frozen sea,
congealed ripples shining in the light of the Earth, with dark patches
to mark the hollows. Somewhere down there--six or eight thousand feet
below us now--Miko's encampment lay concealed. We searched for lights
of it, but could see none.
Had Miko rejoined his party, left his camp and come here like
ourselves to climb Archimedes? Or was our assumption wholly wrong:
perhaps the brigand ship would not land near here at all!
Sweeping around from the Mare Imbrium, the plains were less smooth.
The little crater which concealed the Grantline camp was off in the
crater-scarred region beyond which the distant Apennines raised their
terraced walls. There was nothing to mark it from here.
"Gregg, do you see anything up there?" She added, "There seems to be a
blur."
Her sight, sharper than mine, had picked it out. The descending
brigand ship! A faintest, tiny blur against the stars, a few of them
occulted as though an invisible shadow were upon them. A growing
shadow, materializing into a blur--a blob, a shape faintly defined.
Then sharper until we were sure of what we saw. It was the brigand
ship. It was dropping slowly, silently down.
We crouched on the little ledge. A cave mouth was behind us. A gully
was beside us, a break in the ledge; and at our feet the sheer wall
dropped.
We had extinguished our lights. We crouched, silently gazing up into
the stars.
The ship, when we first distinguished it, was centered over
Archimedes. We thought for a while that it might descend into the
crater. But it did not; it came sailing forward.