The Wanderer

He had been half crouched in his suit, leaning back and supporting himself on one arm to get an easy view of Earth, which was halfway to his zenith. Now with a wrist-flick nicely gauged to the moon’s dreamy gravitation, he came fully to his feet and looked around him.

Starlight and ring-glow tinged with bronze the dark gray plain of dust, mouse-soft, a mixture of powdered pumice and magnetic iron oxide.

Back when Cromwell’s New Model Army ruled England, Hevelius had named this crater the Great Black Lake. But even in bright sunlight Don could not have seen the walls of Plato. That near-mile-high, circular rampart, thirty miles away from him moon-east, north, south, and west, was hidden by the curve of the moon’s surface, sharper than the earth’s.

The same close horizon cut off the bottom half of the Hut, only three hundred yards away. It was good to see those five little glowing portholes at the margin between the dark plain and the starfield — and near them, silhouetted by starlight, the truncated cones of the base’s three rocket ships, each standing high on its three landing legs.

“How’s the dark dark?” Johannsen’s voice softly asked in his ear. “Roger and over.”

“Warm and spicy. Suzie sends love,” Don responded. “Roger to you.”

“Outside temperature?”

Don glanced down at the magnified fluorescent dials beneath the view window. “Dropping past 200 Kelvin,” he replied, giving the absolute equivalent of a temperature of almost exactly 100 degrees below zero on the Fahrenheit scale still widely used in Earth’s English-speaking areas.

“Your SOS working?” Johannsen continued.

Don tongued a key and a faint musical ululation filled his helmet. “Loud and clear, my captain,” he said with a flourish.

“I can hear it,” Johannsen assured him sourly. Don tongued it off.

“Have you harvested our cans?” Johannsen next asked, referring to the tiny, rod-supported cannisters regularly put out and collected to check on the movements of moon dust and other materials, including radioactively tagged atoms planted at various distances from the Hut.

“I haven’t sharpened my scythe yet,” Don told him.

“Take your time,” Johannsen advised with a knowing snort as he signed off. He and Don were well aware that planting and harvesting the cans was mostly an excuse to get a man suited up and out of the Hut as a safety measure during times of greatest danger from moonquakes — when Earth and Sun were dragging at the moon from the same side, as now, or from opposite sides, as would happen in two weeks. Gravitational traction has been thought to trigger earthquakes, and so, possibly, moonquakes. Moonbase had not yet experienced anything beyond the mildest temblor — the pen of the seismograph keyed to the solid rock below the dust cushioning the Hut had hardly quivered; just the same, Gompert made a point of having a man outside for several hours each fortnight — at “new earth” and “full earth” (or full moon and new moon, if you stayed with the groundster lingo, or simply the spring tides). Thus if the unexpected did occur and the Hut sustained serious damage, Gompert would have one egg outside his basket.

It was just another of the many fine-drawn precautions Moonbase took for its safety. Besides, it provided a tough regular check on the efficiency of spacesuits and of personnel working solo.

Don looked up again at the Earth. The ring was glowing less lopsidedly now. He couldn’t make out a single feature of the inky circle inside, though he knew the eastern Pacific and the Americas were to the left and the Atlantic and the western tips of Africa and Europe to the right. He thought of dear, slightly hysterical Margo and good old neurotic Paul, and truly even they seemed to him rather trivial at the moment — nice little beetles scuttling under the bark of Earth’s atmosphere.

He looked down again, and he was standing on glittering whiteness. Not whiteness literally, yet the effect of a new-fallen Minnesota snow by starlight had been duplicated with devilish precision. Carbon dioxide gas, seeping steadily up through the pumice and oxide of Plato’s floor, had suddenly crystallized throughout into dry-ice flakes forming directly on the dust floor or falling onto it almost instantly.

Don smiled, feeling less inhumanly distant from life. The moon had not become a Mother to him yet, not by a long shot, but she was getting to seem just a little like a chilly Older Sister.

Balmy air sluiced the convertible carrying Paul Hagbolt and Margo Gelhorn and the cat Miaow along the Pacific Coast Highway. At almost regular intervals a weathered yellow roadsign would grow until it plainly said slide area or falling rock zone, and then it would duck out of the headlight beam. The highway traveled a generally narrow strip between the beach and an almost vertical, hundred-foot cliff of geologically infantile material — packed silt, sand, gravel, and other sediments, though here and there larger rocks thrust through.