Then nothing happened.
Pop made his way toward it in the skittering, skating gait one uses in one-sixth gravity. When he was within half a mile, an air-lock door opened in the ship's side. But nothing came out of the lock. No space-suited figure. No cargo came drifting down with the singular deliberation of falling objects on the Moon.
It was just barely past lunar sunrise on the far side of the Moon. Incredibly long and utterly black shadows stretched across the plain, and half the rocketship was dazzling white and half was blacker than blackness itself. The sun still hung low indeed in the black, star-speckled sky. Pop waded through moondust, raising a trail of slowly settling powder. He knew only that the ship didn't come from Lunar City, but from Earth. He couldn't imagine why. He did not even wildly connect it with what—say—Sattell might have written with desperate plausibility about greasy-seeming white crystals out of the mine, knocking about Pop Young's shack in cannisters containing a hundred Earth-pounds weight of richness.
Pop reached the rocketship. He approached the big tail-fins. On one of them there were welded ladder-rungs going up to the opened air-lock door.
He climbed.
The air-lock was perfectly normal when he reached it. There was a glass port in the inner door, and he saw eyes looking through it at him. He pulled the outer door shut and felt the whining vibration of admitted air. His vacuum suit went slack about him. The inner door began to open, and Pop reached up and gave his helmet the practiced twisting jerk which removed it.
Then he blinked. There was a red-headed man in the opened door. He grinned savagely at Pop. He held a very nasty hand-weapon trained on Pop's middle.
"Don't come in!" he said mockingly. "And I don't give a damn about how you are. This isn't social. It's business!"