The screens were still on. Out there all was dark, and a wealth of stars was in the purple-black sky. They seemed larger and brighter. Wolden touched a knob and the stars on the screen before them slowly grew larger and larger. “An astronomer’s paradise,” he said to Odin. “Look closely and you can see Centauri’s binary suns. Here, with no refraction, a small telescope can do as well as the best that your people have made. There is no telling what your large ones could do. Ah, the riddles that could be answered.”
Odin shrugged. Like almost everyone else, he had often fancied how it would be to land on the moon. Now he was here, and the surface of the moon was blacker than the blackest night he had ever seen. Moreover, there had been no change in gravity. The Nebula had been built to take care of that.
As though sensing his thoughts, Wolden began to explain. “We are less than fifty miles from a spot where the earth could be seen. Not over a degree below the curvature. In fact, if the moon were full, there would be a bit of light here, for a strong light playing upon any globe always lights up over half of it. We are not far from the Heroynian Mountains and the Bay of Dew. Just a few miles within that other side of the moon which none of your people have ever seen before.”
Odin remembered Jules Verne’s account of a volcano spouting its last breath of life in that zone, but out there was nothing but the dark and the stars that smoldered like sapphires, rubies, and diamonds upon a black velvet sky. There were no shadows. The darkness was solid, as though it had frozen there since old and no spark had ever invaded it.
“Be patient, my friend,” Wolden had sensed his thoughts again. “Before long, you will see more of the moon than men have ever known. We sent a smaller ship into space. Remember! Our scientists are here. In a place beyond your dreams. Look. They are coming now.”
Wolden was adjusting the screen again. Far off, something like a long jointed bug with a single glaring light in its head was crawling toward them.
It drew nearer. Jack Odin saw that it was no more than a huge caterpillar tractor with several cars attached, armored and sheathed with sort of a bellows-type connection at each joint. As it neared the Nebula, it played its light around so that Odin got his first glimpse of the moon. Barren, worn, cindered. An ash-heap turned to stone. Puddles and splashes shaped like great crowns, as though liquid rock had congealed at the very height of its torment. Needles of rock, toadstools of rock, bubbles of rock, and glassy sheets of rock—this was the surface of the moon.
Then the crawling tractor with its cars lumbering along behind it on their endless tracks was below them and playing its single light upward.