“Kalmus must have destroyed the set,” Rock said gravely.
“We know where to find them now, though,” Shep said with satisfaction.
Rock went to the chart files and dug through the celestial maps for one of Luna. He checked the position as given them by Leo.
“The place is near Archimedes in Mare Nubium,” Rock pointed out. “Get out your pencils and take a seat at the calculators, boys; we’ve got some navigation figuring to do!”
The velocity and orbital figures were worked out. Then the directions were computed in the mechanical brain and fed into the autopilot. The chemical braking rockets were switched in after the ship had turned about-face. No terrestrial landing was ever made with atomic rockets because of radioactive contamination of the ground.
The boys strapped down and braced for the agony of deceleration. It was a cumbersome job, clad as they were in space gear.
As the ship decelerated, Rock focused his hurting eyes on the prism overhead. The filter cut out the over-all glare of reflected sunlight from Luna’s boiling-hot surface, but the harsh blacks of dead shadow and the whites of naked sunlight were still painfully vivid. He watched the shimmering heat vapors, the miles and miles of gray pumice, heaped in waves in some places so that it resembled a gigantic sea whose motion has been suddenly stilled. Finally the great curving mouth of Archimedes began to enlarge and grow in prominence. The crater’s high, rugged walls filled the square of Rock’s prism.
Later he felt that easy, reassuring bump of the tripod fins that told him they had landed safely.
“Everybody O.K.?” Rock asked, looking around.
Johnny was pale and the others were a little groggy (they’d had to hit a deceleration of 7 G’s in order to stop the ship in time), but all attested to being alive, if shaky. Rock went over to the port to study their surroundings.