PART IV

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!"