He delivered this little lecture with the utmost fluency, and his companions, less versed in sky-lore than he, listened admiringly. Bull Mike grinned and patted the Japanese on the back.
"Never knew you to be stumped by anything yet," he cried. "No wonder the ancients used to be afraid that your people would conquer the world!"
Returning to the television, the three young men looked curiously at the new phenomenon in the heavens. They knew, of course, about the asteroids—fragments of exploded planets revolving just inside the path of mighty Jupiter—but this one, so far from its fellows, presented a different problem.
Leaving the atmospheric envelope, the ship sailed beyond danger of overheating from friction. Like a comet it rose through empty space. A glance from one port showed Earth at quarter-full, a warm, gleaming crescent that clasped a round globe of shadowy blue. Beside and beyond, glowed the white incandescence of the sun, its light intensified by the soft blackness of space. Jewel-like stars were scattered in all directions.
"If Commander Raws could only see us now!" said Bull Mike, boyishly delighted by a sense of freedom.
"If he could, he'd order us all into confinement," Sukune reminded him. "Eh, Neil?"
Before them hung the full moon. Toward this they laid their course and, after twelve hours' flight, they slowed down to drift like a vagrant bit of thistledown above the silent, dead valleys and mountain ranges. Once they dropped down and rested on the ashy surface of the satellite. In a few moments they were able to appreciate the depressed spirits that afflicted the occasional explorers of the lunar wilderness.
For, despite the heavenly-aspiring peaks, the abysmal depths, the far-reaching plains, there was a certain sameness about the moon's scenery. They could see no movement save the shadow of their own craft sliding along beneath them. No green of grass, no brilliant color of flowers showed. No creatures scampered, crept or flew. There was not so much as a heat-flurry in the atmosphere—for there was no atmosphere. Nothing but the glaring white of sun-drenched rock, the inky black of airless shade.
"I wouldn't live here for all the money in St. Louis," said Bull Mike. "As far as that goes, I couldn't."
"I don't see why not," argued Sukune. "Mars' two moons are smaller and rockier than this, and haven't any more air, water or natural comfort. Yet the Martians have built cities under glass domes; pumped in artificial air, and settled right down to keep house."