"Hey, Chuck," another technician, Lehman, broke in, "you could maybe get hurt that way."
"I doubt it," Cowalczk answered, "most of these were pinhead size, and they wouldn't go through a suit."
"It would take a pretty big one to damage a servo bearing," Cade commented.
"That could hurt," Cowalczk admitted, "but there was only one of them."
"You mean only one hit our gear," Lehman said. "How many missed?"
Nobody answered. They could all see the Moon under their feet. Small craters overlapped and touched each other. There was—except in the places that men had obscured them with footprints—not a square foot that didn't contain a crater at least ten inches across, there was not a square inch without its half-inch crater. Nearly all of these had been made millions of years ago, but here and there, the rim of a crater covered part of a footprint, clear evidence that it was a recent one.
After the sun rose, Evans returned to the lava cave that he had been exploring when the meteor hit. Inside, he lifted his filter visor, and found that the light reflected from the small ray that peered into the cave door lighted the cave adequately. He tapped loose some white crystals on the cave wall with his geologist's hammer, and put them into a collector's bag.
"A few mineral specimens would give us something to think about, man. These crystals," he said, "look a little like zeolites, but that can't be, zeolites need water to form, and there's no water on the Moon."
He chipped a number of other crystals loose and put them in bags. One of them he found in a dark crevice had a hexagonal shape that puzzled him.