Meanwhile, he had a toehold on life here, if conditions within his sublunar cavern did not change. But they were changing ... and not for the better.
[9. From Stone Age to Iron Age]
When he woke up one morning Robin was vaguely aware of something different. He opened his eyes to the dark interior of his cave-home and lay there on his bed of padding from the cargo chamber. For a while he rested quietly in that pleasant half-sleep of awakening after a good rest. Unconsciously his hand moved down searching for a blanket, but of course there was none. He'd never needed one before.
He unconsciously groped again for the blanket, then opened his eyes wide and sat up. There was a slight chill in the air at that! Now he noticed the monkey, asleep, curled up tightly against his leg. That was odd because previously the little fellow had slept outside. What had brought him in?
Robin got up and Cheeky, as Robin had named his friend, woke up instantly and leaped to his shoulder. "What's the trouble, fellow?" asked Robin, patting him on the head. Then the young man left the cave and looked around. At first nothing seemed greatly changed. The temperature had dropped a few degrees, no doubt about it. Yet there was no special draft, no break in the bubble walls to account for it.
He looked at the plants and then realized that some of them were beginning to change color. A grayness was creeping in subtly. The balls of Moontree fruit, which had been his chief sustenance, were showing signs of wrinkling and had either already shriveled or were beginning to.
Robin glanced around sharply, looked into his notebook calendar. He calculated the days that had passed. When his rocket had crashed the Moon had been full. This meant it was high noon of a Lunar day on the surface above. But a Lunar day lasted about a Terrestrial month—twenty-eight days to be exact. When the sun was at its height, the temperature of the surface crust was to be measured as high as 240 degrees Fahrenheit. By sunset it might be down to 160 degrees, but immediately after sunset it would drop with great speed and shortly begin to go as low as a hundred below zero and continue to drop for yet another hundred degrees.
And Robin had perhaps been in his sublunar cavern for ten or maybe twelve days. The sun had set above, the Lunar night was there. Though the cavern was insulated by the best sort of insulation in the universe—a honeycomb of several miles between the surface and itself—a honeycomb in many cases consisting of sealed bubbles, some near vacuums—there was bound to be a gradual loss of the stored-up heat from the long Lunar day. It might take a while for this to become noticeable, especially in view of the obviously warm volcanic action from the unseen areas near the core of the Moon below, yet there it was.
So now Robin knew that the Lunar day did have a counterpart here, that there would be monthly seasons in his cavern and that he was facing a winter that might last ten days more.