One Against the Moon

by Donald A. Wollheim

Suddenly all was still. The whistling of the wind, the roar of the current as it struck him, had vanished. Only the sucking and rushing of the oxygen in his own helmet could be heard. He was outside, on the surface of the Moon at last!

The gap opened from the wall of a cliff. Above him, the cliff soared to become a mountainous edge of a deep, wide crater. He turned his head, but Peter was impatient. He felt the pull of the cord, turned and followed Peter, who was moving away from the crater wall in long, low strides, strides that ate up distance like an Earthly giant in seven-league boots. Robin adjusted his pace, followed closely.

For a while he forgot his personal danger and simply gazed around at the fabulous moonscape. The crater's other wall was maybe a dozen miles away, but the thin air—the almost indetectably tenuous air that clustered at the bottom of this crater made the distance seem nothing. He could even make out details of the far edge.

And yet this section of the Moon was in the night-time. The sun had passed it by. It should have been dark, pitch-dark, by the logic of the interplanetary space. Yet it wasn't. Everything instead was bathed in a cold greenish-blue light that covered the surface like the glow of a half-dozen full moons.

He looked up. Directly in the center of the sky overhead was the source of the radiation. A great glowing ball of green and blue and white, a ball with a misty aura surrounding it, a globe that struck Robin instantly as familiar. It was the Earth. The home world, seen in all its glory, a giant full-moon Earth, continents and islands clearly outlined, a glory of pale colors, poles agleam with dazzling white ... it was a sight that momentarily stopped Robin in his tracks, hypnotized with wonder.

The cord pulled him out of it, and on he dashed, looking about him in the pale Earthlight.

The surface was thick with cosmic dust, here and there the rounded domelike surface of a congealed volcanic bubble. Cracks crossed and crisscrossed the surface, and Peter and he had to bound across many of them. He saw rising slightly above the surface a long rill of whitish substance, racing across the crater bottom. With a start he realized that that must be the glasslike roof of the great cleft he had so recently escaped from.

Above, the sky was nearly black and myriad stars shone bright from the distance. The outlines of the surrounding mountains walled in the two boys as if they were pygmy boxers in a gargantuan ring.

Robin was forcing the air from his nostrils, allowing the oxygen to rush into his lungs. He began now to feel the first faint chill of surrounding space. He realized that it must already be nearly a hundred and fifty below zero on the surface, probably even much more than that. He had to keep moving, keep moving.

But it was getting colder. He felt the cold penetrate him as his suit radiated the warmth that was in it. Now he wondered what was happening outside. Something was obscuring his view. Was it mist he was passing through?