“Maybe we shouldn’t talk so much,” Garry advised. “It uses up more oxygen, and I don’t think we have a surplus of it.”
They slogged silently through the gray dust in the bouncy, light-footed motion that they had become accustomed to by now. Every once in a while Garry would glance about him at the forbidding countryside of this dead world. Sight of the desolation chilled his soul. He wondered at first why this was so. Then he supposed that it must be because there was so much absolute deadness all about. For nothing could live in the numbing cold and the boiling-hot temperatures that came to this landscape periodically. No, he and Patch were the only living creatures from one horizon to the other, and this fact was enough to give anyone the shivers.
Finally Garry broke the long silence.
“Patch, do you notice we’re able to move along easier now?” he asked.
“It’s because the dust is thinning out, isn’t it?” Patch replied. “But I see the rocky country up ahead that the captain was telling us about.”
“Yes,” Garry said, “and from the way he talked, it’s going to be plenty rugged getting through there.”
They increased their speed, now that the going was easier.
Garry stole a look at the big green jewel of earth afloat in the black sea of space, for it alone seemed to lend an air of friendliness and security to the otherwise lonely, sinister surroundings. The walls of Hornfield Crater about them were jagged as sharks’ teeth as they reached up into the darkness. The stars seemed to Garry like sparkling snowflakes dusted across the entire vault of the sky. The nebulae were like misty clouds, and there was the long arch of a great comet crossing just above the horizon and standing out remarkably because of its being so different from everything else in the whole visible sweep of the heavens.
After a few hours of steady hiking, Patch suggested that they take a short break to rest and eat. Garry was ready for the same.
Garry checked their map and compared the markings on it to their true surroundings. “We seem to be still on course, Patch,” he said.