Crag slept. He slept with the airlock closed and the cabin flooded with oxygen. He slept the sleep of the dead, a luxurious sleep without thought or dream. When he awakened, he ate and donned the pressure suit, thinking he would have to get more oxygen from the drone. He opened the hatch and scrambled out. The plain was light. The sun was an intolerable circle hanging at the very edge of the horizon. He blinked his eyes to get them used to the glare.
He studied the plain for a long time, then hefted the rifle and started toward Bandit before he remembered there was no Bandit. No Bandit? When he reached the top of the knoll, he knew he was right. Bandit unaccountably was gone. He searched the area in wide circles. The question grew in his mind. He found several twisted pieces of metal—a jagged piece of engine. Abruptly he found Richter.
He was dead. His suit hung limp, airless against his body. He stared at the object next to Richter. It was a moment before he recognized it as the rocket launcher.
"He forgot two things, Commander...."
Now he understood Richter's words. Now he knew the motive that had driven him onto the plain in the face of the rock storm. Richter had used the launcher to destroy Bandit, to destroy the murderer of Prochaska and Nagel. He marveled that Richter could have carried the heavy weapon. Once, before, he had watched two men struggle under its weight Richter must have mustered every ounce of his strength.
He looked at the fallen form for a long time. Richter had crossed his frontier. At last he turned and started toward Red Dog. Adam Crag, the Man in the Moon. Now he was really the Man in the Moon. The only Man. Colonel Crag, Commanding Officer, Pickering Field. General Crag of the First Moon expeditionary Force. Adam Crag, Emperor of Luna. He laughed—a mirthless laugh. Damned if he couldn't be anything he wanted to be—on the Moon.
The sun climbed above the rim of Arzachel transforming the vast depressed interior of the crater into a caldron of heat and glare. In the morning of the lunar day the rock structures rising from the plain cast lengthy black shadows over the ashy floor—a mosaic in black and white. Crag kept busy. He stripped the drones of their scant amount of usable supplies—mainly oxygen cylinders from Baker—and set up a new communication post in Red Dog. In the first hours of the new morning Gotch named the saboteur. Crag listened, wearily. Just then he wasn't interested in the fact that an alert intelligence agent had doubted that a man of 5' 5" could have been a star basketball player, as the Superintendent of the Maple Hill Orphanage had said. He expressed his feelings by shutting off the communicator in the middle of the Colonel's explanation.
The sun climbed, slowly, until it hung overhead, ending a morning which had lasted seven earth days in length. At midday the shadows had all but vanished. He finished marking the last of three crosses and stepped back to survey his work. He read the names at the head of the mounds: Max Prochaska, Gordon Nagel, Otto Richter. Each was followed by a date. Out on the plain were other graves, those of the crewmen of Bandit and Red Dog. He had marked each mound with a small pile of stones. Later it struck him that someday there might be peace. Someday, someone might want to look at one of those piles of stone. He returned and added a notation to each.