Doc insisted on being the first out. He ran a loop of eighth-inch shielded warping line through the towing rings on the shoulders of his suit and grounded the shielding to the suit with a dab of welding metal.
"If I get stuck, Jon," his voice came tinnily through the phones, "haul me back with the winch. And whatever you do, watch the weld on your end of the shielding. There should be enough juice in it to keep it inert." Jon nodded, and Doc broke the seal on the outer door.
For a split-second the air glittered with pinpoints of light as the moisture in the air-lock solidified. Then the crystals blinked out as the further cold broke the solids into their separate gasses and dispersed them. Doc slowly descended the ladder to the ground. His voice kept up a steady drone, feeding information to Jon and to the recorders tuned in on the control panel.
"I am clear of the ship now, by about twenty meters. Surface seems to be a sort of metallic sand—granulated at least—but solid as steel. My relative weight seems to be about 1.5, with S-G unit at maximum. The area seems to be absolutely barren, without even a hummock or dune in sight. The.... Whup! There's one of those things—those spheres—just ahead, about thirty degrees off the ship's nose. Stand by—I'm coming back to the air-lock."
Jon swiftly hauled in the slack in the line, hand over hand, and pressed the winch control to feed the slack onto the drum.
"Hold it," came Doc's voice. "It's disappeared again. Whup! Now there's one over here on my right, at about a hundred meters. Spherical shape, black, about five and a half or six meters in diameter ... now it seems to be settling into the surface; assuming a hemispherical form.... Whup! Disappeared again! Reel me in, Jon. We've got to get some high-speed shots of this."
It never occurred to either of them that there was no point in making these recordings. Explocenter hand-picked its men, and insatiable curiosity was the first requisite. Quick judgment and moral stamina came next. And first, last, and always—'get it down on records'.
The Geiger clicked softly on the bulk-head and the needle of the accumulator was working toward the red area, but neither paused to consider these things now. They had made their try, exhausted their resources.
But in the back of their minds was the knowledge that within a few months a statistician at Explocenter would mark Explounit X-3 "missing", and at the end of the year two more names would be added to the column at Explocenter; that shaft of gray venustron that stood beside the main entrance, whereon was the long, long scroll of names. Simple monument to the men of Explocenter who never came back.