"That's the trouble. You've done nothing but live in the lab since the Prospector landed. So we're not going home. Sam and Alice are having a good time. You dance with Alice next, and make her think you're enjoying it!"
So Jim didn't go to bed at all, but he was at the lab by five in the morning. The night crew were still at work. He had steered them away from the analyses he was doing so they were unaware of the shattering results he had found.
He took over the controls, and resumed work alone.
There was no doubt about it. If any of the methods they were using were accurate, then he had discovered almost indisputable proof that some living tissue existed five hundred feet below the surface of the moon.
Since the laser drilling head sealed the walls of the hole with a coating of frozen lava, it was necessary to probe horizontally for samples. Small extension drills, capable of reaching five feet on either side of the hole, were carried in the head for this purpose.
Jim lowered the head through the last twenty feet of its drilling limit. Every six inches he sent the horizontal probes to their limits. The tell-tale chemicals existed at every point. He computed the volume he had probed, and felt numb.
By the time Sam had shown up, Jim had withdrawn the probe to the surface and was moving the Prospector slowly across the moon's surface.
Sam saw the motion on the television screen. "Where are you going? I thought we were going to check out the hole we were in."
"It's been checked," said Jim. He hesitated. His original plan had been to move the Prospector a distance of fifty feet and probe again to the five-hundred-foot level. Then, decisively, he pressed the control that kept the Prospector moving. He stopped it a hundred feet from the previous hole and began the long, tedious job of drilling again to the limits of the Prospector's equipment.