The Gods Themselves

"I promised you an unusual sight-no, not me, so don't say it-and you'll have it. It's the Moon's most unusual mine and it's completely off the ordinary tourist trails."

"Don't tell me you've got diamonds on the Moon?"

"Better than that."

The corridor walls were unfinished here-gray rock, dimly but adequately lit by patches of electroluminescence. The temperature was comfortable and at a steady mildness, with ventilation so gently effective there was no sensation of wind. It was hard to tell here that a couple of hundred feet above was a surface subjected to alternate frying and freezing as the Sun came and went on its grand biweekly swing from horizon to horizon and then underneath and back.

"Is all this airtight?" asked Denison, suddenly uncomfortably aware that he was not far below the bottom of an ocean of vacuum that extended upward through all infinity.

"Oh, yes. Those walls are impervious. They're all booby-trapped, too. If the air pressure drops as much as ten per cent in any section of the corridors there is such a hooting and howling from sirens as you have never heard and such a flashing of arrows and blazing of signs directing you to safety as you have never seen."

"How often does this happen?"

"Not often. I don't think anyone has been killed through air-lack for at least five years." Then, with sudden defensiveness, "You have natural catastrophes on Earth. A big quake or a tidal wave can kill thousands."

"No argument, Selene." He threw up his hands. "I surrender."

"All right," she said. "I didn't mean to get excited… Do you hear that?"

She stopped, in an attitude of listening.

Denison listened, too, and shook his head. Suddenly, he looked around. "It's so quiet. Where is everybody? Are you sure we're not lost?"

"This isn't a natural cavern with unknown passageways. You have those on Earth, haven't you? I've seen photographs."

"Yes, most of them are limestone caves, formed by water. That certainly can't be the case of the Moon, can it?"

"So we can't be lost," said Selene, smiling. "If we're alone, put it down to superstition."

"To what?" Denison looked startled and his face creased in an expression of disbelief.

"Don't do that," she said. "You get all lined. That's right. Smooth out. You look much better than you did when you first arrived, you know. That's low gravity and exercise."

"And trying to keep up with nude young ladies who have an uncommon amount of off-time and an uncommon lack of better things "to do than to go on busmen's holidays."

"Now you're treating me like a tourist guide again, and I'm not nude."

"At that, even nudity is less frightening than Intuition-ism… But what's this about superstition?"

"Not really superstition, I suppose, but most of the people of the city tend to stay away from this part of the corridor-complex."

"But why?"

"Because of what I'm going to show you." They were walking again. "Hear it now?"

She stopped and Denison listened anxiously. He said, "You mean that small tapping sound? Tap-tap- Is that what you mean?"

She ran ahead in slow, loping strides with the slow-motion movement of the Lunarite in unhurried flight. He followed her, attempting to ape the gait.

"Here-here-"

Denison's eye followed Selene's eagerly pointing finger. "Good Lord," he said. "Where's it coming from?"

There was a drip of what was clearly water. A slow dripping, with each drip striking a small ceramic trough that led into the rock wall.

"From the rocks. We do have water on the Moon, you know. Most of it we can bake out of gypsum; enough for our purposes, since we conserve it pretty well."

"I know. I know. I've never yet been able to manage one complete shower. How you people manage to stay clean I don't know."

"I told you. First, wet yourself. Then turn off the water and smear just a little detergent on you. You rub it- Oh, Ben, I'm not going through it yet again. And there's nothing on the Moon to get you all that dirty anyway… But that's not what we're talking about. In one or two places there are actually water deposits, usually as ice near the surface in a mountain shadow. If we locate it, it drips out. This one has been dripping since the corridor was first driven through, and that was eight years ago."

"But why the superstition?"

"Well, obviously, water is the great material resource on which the Moon depends. We drink it, wash with it, grow our food with it, make our oxygen with it, keep everything going with it. Free water can't help but get a lot of respect. Once this drip was discovered, plans to extend the tunnels in this direction were abandoned till it stopped. The corridor walls were even left unfinished."

"That sounds like superstition right there."