But David Lester was lost and vague, his food almost untouched. "I—I don't know!" he stammered.
Scared and embittered further by this bad sign, Frank turned to Helen. "And how are you?" he asked hopefully.
"I am all right," she answered, without a trace of encouragement.
She was in jeans, maybe she was eighteen, maybe she was Rodan's daughter. Her face was as reddened as a peasant's. It was hard to tell that she was a girl at all. She wasn't a girl. It was soon plain that she was a zombie with about ten words in her vocabulary. How could a girl have gotten to this impossible region, anyway?
Now Frank tried to delay Lester's inevitable complete crackup by encouraging his interest in their situation.
"It's big, Les," he said. "It's got to be! An expedition came here to investigate the Moon—it couldn't be any more recently than sixty million years ago, if it was from as close as Mars, or the Asteroid Planet! Two adjacent worlds were competing, then, the scientists know. Both were smaller than the Earth, cooled faster, bore life sooner. Which sent the party? I saw where there rocket ship must have stood—a glassy, spot where the dust was once fused!... From all the markings, they must have been around for months. Nowhere else on the Moon—that I ever heard of—is there anything similar left. So maybe they did most of their survey work by gliding, somehow, above the ground, not disturbing the dust... I think the little indentations we saw look Martian. That would be a break! Mars still has weather. Archeological objects wouldn't stay new there for millions of years, but here they would! Rodan is right—he's got something that'll make him famous!"
"Yes—I think I'll have a devil-killer and hit the sack, Frank," Lester said.
"Oh—all right," Frank agreed wearily. "Me, likewise."
Frank awoke naturally from a dreamless slumber. After a breakfast of eggs that had been a powder, Lester and he were [p. 63] at the diggings, sifting dust for the dropped and discarded items of an alien visitation.
Thus Frank's job began. In the excitement of a hunt, as if for ancient treasure, for a long time, through many ten hour shifts, Frank Nelsen found a perhaps unfortunate Lethe of forgetfulness for his worries, and for the mind-poisoning effects of the silence and desolation in this remote part of the Moon.