I fought stiffly with it. I was on the manhole lip, a stupefied,
half-dead being. The snow was all about me. I pulled myself in. There
lurked within a little warmer air.
The snowflakes--the airflakes--danced in about me, as I tried with
chilling hands to thrust the valve in and spun it tight and hard. I
sobbed. “I will,” I chattered in my teeth. And then, with fingers that
quivered and felt brittle, I turned to the shutter studs.
As I fumbled with the switches--for I had never controlled them
before--I could see dimly through the steaming glass the blazing red
streamers of the sinking sun, dancing and flickering through the
snowstorm, and the black forms of the scrub thickening and bending
and breaking beneath the accumulating snow. Thicker whirled the snow
and thicker, black against the light. What if even now the switches
overcame me?
Then something clicked under my hands, and in an instant that last
vision of the moon world was hidden from my eyes. I was in the silence
and darkness of the inter-planetary sphere.