"Don't worry!" he said sourly when he saw Cochrane's eyes upon him. "I won't waste any time! I'll find my man and get to work at once. Just let me get back to Earth...."
There were more clankings—the jeep-bus sealing off from the rocket. Then the vehicle stirred. The landscape outside began to move.
They saw Lunar City as they approached it. It was five giant dust-heaps, from five hundred-odd feet in height down to three. There were airlocks at their bases and dust-covered tunnels connecting them, and radar-bowls about their sides. But they were dust-heaps. Which was completely reasonable. There is no air on the moon. By day the sun shines down with absolute ferocity. It heats everything as with a furnace-flame. At night all heat radiates away to empty space, and the ground-temperature drops well below that of liquid air. So Lunar City was a group of domes which were essentially half-balloons—hemispheres of plastic brought from Earth and inflated and covered with dust. With airlocks to permit entrance and exit, they were inhabitable. They needed no framework to support them because there were no stormwinds or earthquakes to put stresses on them. They needed neither heating nor cooling equipment. They were buried under forty feet of moon-dust, with vacuum between the dust-grains. Lunar City was not beautiful, but human beings could live in it.
The jeep-bus carried them a bare half mile, and they alighted inside a lock, and another door and another opened and closed, and they emerged into a scene which no amount of television film-tape could really portray.
The main dome was a thousand feet across and half as high. There were green plants growing in tubs and pots. And the air was fresh! It smelled strange. There could be no vegetation on the rocket and it seemed new and blissful to breathe really freshened air after days of the canned variety. But this freshness made Cochrane realize that he'd feel better for a bath.
He took a shower in his hotel room. The room was very much like one on Earth, except that it had no windows. But the shower was strange. The sprays were tiny. Cochrane felt as if he were being sprayed by atomizers rather than shower-nozzles until he noticed that water ran off him very slowly and realized that a normal shower would have been overwhelming. He scooped up a handful of water and let it drop. It took a full second to fall two and a half feet.
It was unsettling, but fresh clothing from his waiting baggage made him feel better. He went to the lounge of the hotel, and it was not a lounge, and the hotel was not a hotel. Everything in the dome was indoors in the sense that it was under a globular ceiling fifty stories high. But everything was also out-doors in the sense of bright light and growing trees and bushes and shrubs.
He found Babs freshly garmented and waiting for him. She said in businesslike tones:
"Mr. Cochrane, I asked at the desk. Doctor Holden has gone to consult Mr. Dabney. He asked that we stay within call. I've sent word to Mr. West and Mr. Jamison and Mr. Bell."
Cochrane approved of her secretarial efficiency.