One Against the Moon

by Donald A. Wollheim

He acted at once, carrying the rocket nose and its stuff to the cave, transferring his rabbits and their pen to a spot just outside the cave door. He would need a bowl for water and, using his screwdriver blade, he finally managed to detach the curved rocket nose and found himself in possession of a deep bowl. He took this down to the water, filled it and carried it back to his cave.

Already he began to feel cheerier. Nothing like work, he thought, to take your mind off your other problems. Suddenly he realized he was tired.

How long had he been at this? He did not know. Now he realized that with no sunrise or sunset visible in his underground world, he could not tell time. He looked at his wrist watch, but it had stopped running, of course. He decided to take a nap; he lay down and fell asleep.

When he woke up, he set his watch at eight o'clock, decided to consider this the beginning of a day. He found the notebook he'd carried in his back pocket, opened it, and set up his new calendar. Using the date of the rocket's take-off, he allowed five days as a probable estimate of the time passed since. He had no means of knowing how long he had been ill, he suspected it had been longer, but decided to let it stand. After arriving at the date, he made the time eight in the morning, laid out the times he expected to eat, to work, to sleep. He would try to live according to a full Terrestrial day, checking the passage of time by his watch.

He then listed all the things he expected would have to be done, and decided to check them off as he completed them. Next he ate breakfast from the fruit of the ball-tree. He spent the rest of that morning trying to find a means of making fire. He had some bits of steel from the rocket, and he tried to strike sparks on everything that resembled rock. After a search, he found some fragments of rock near the water that gave off a spark. Whether these were flints or not, he did not care, so long as they worked for him.

With this discovery he knew he would be free from worry about the problem of matches. His next problem was to secure a weapon. This solved itself rather fast with a bow and arrow. A long, flexible metal tube from the rear connections of the rocket, bent to make a bow when tied with a string of nylon cord, made a satisfactory twang when pulled. He made arrows out of the fibers of the Moontree stalks, and practiced shooting.

The next few days followed the same pattern. Robin enlarged his area of exploration, finding several other kinds of Lunar vegetation and a number of other insect-worms. He found several that were quite large, one as large as a squirrel. It was an odd thing, humping itself along in little bounds—a creature of a dozen ball-like segments, two of which had toothed mouths, although only the ball in front had an eye, a lidless orb set in the center of this ball. But the creature was fringed with the light-rod organs as the tiny worm-ants had been.

Robin tried to cook part of this creature but the monkey refused to touch it and he found it entirely unpalatable. On the other hand, he found that when he removed the little yellow balls from the top of the light stalks on the creature, they remained glowing—even as do the abdomens of fireflies. He therefore diligently set about catching a number of these Moonrats, as he named them, and making a lantern for himself by filling a glass tube with the glow organs. This worked out quite nicely when he experimented in his dark cave-home, emitting a clear, though pale, yellow light.

His rabbit had a nice litter at last, and Robin carefully saw that they were kept well supplied with food and drink. He would eat no more meat until there were several dozen adults, all breeding. But he felt that now he was assured of a source of clothing when his own would give out. He knew that eventually he would have to dress himself entirely in the products of his own ingenuity. His Earth clothes could last no more than a few years. He had already devised for himself an experimental pair of sandals from the rinds of the ball-tree fruit and the stalks of the Moontrees. They would do, and he carefully removed his shoes and put them away. When he had heavy exploring to do, or if and when he might try to reach the surface, he would need his good heavy leather shoes. Until then, the makeshift sandals would do.

For he knew that someday he would have to reach the surface. If and when the first astronauts arrived, they would not go below. They would probably never suspect the presence of these unseen areas beneath the crust, possibly not for many dozens of years. It would be on the surface that Robin would have to go to find rescue. That was the greatest problem he would have to solve. Against that terrible trip, he would have to conserve and plan.