Part Three: Beneath the Surface

Among the many discoveries made on the fourth of April, 1911, was that the soil of the Moon is an oily, gluey sludge, freely flowing along surfaces but deeply, stubbornly resistant to motion through itself. I may be among the few still living who first made that discovery, as I ascended the ladder out of the crater which our impact with the Lunar surface had dug.

The stone beneath our capsule was porous and crunched slightly under our boots as we alighted from within. As we had rehearsed, the first men out detached folding ladders from the curving surface of our capsule. We had expected three men to be necessary to swing the ladder to the crater’s rim, but although we were aware that the gravity on the Moon was far weaker than our own, we had been unable to practice with ladders as truly lightweight as ours now were. In the event, by the time I sprang the latches holding my assigned ladder in place, two others had already been thrown into position, each by the first man to grasp hold of it.

Six ladders studded the circumference of our tiny capsule. Two, I saw, had bent or been otherwise damaged in the descent, and could not be freed from their clamps. We had prepared for that, and rehearsed every combination of circumstances. The men assigned to the damaged ladders moved confidently to their alternative points of ascent.

I waited for assistance, unlike my counterparts, and together the three of us made short work of erecting the ladder. I was the first to rise over the crater edge; the effort needed to heave my space-suited body and its massive knapsack of equipment upward was shockingly meager. I nearly flew off the final rung, grasping it only at the last extremity so that I pivoted around my gloved hand, swinging toward the ground in an eerie, dreamlike slowness.

My arms and legs were not flailing in any way slowly, however. We had been warned that the Lunar soil would be as hot as a stove when we landed. Having a day equal to its year, that is, 28 days in duration, a given spot on the Moon was bathed in sunlight for 14 days at a time, followed by the equivalent period of night. Even in Earthly summer, the additional two or three hours of daylight raises the temperature quite significantly. One can imagine the effect of another five hundred hours on the hapless surface.

Our boot-soles were heavily insulated against contact with the frying-hot soil; we had tested them by walking crabwise, like ice-skaters, across red-hot slabs of steel fresh from the furnaces of Pittsburgh. But our entire space-suits could not be so thickened, not and allow us any freedom of movement; so we were cautioned to walk like fat men on a slippery sidewalk, in deliberate slow motion, so as not to fall over. For if we did, we would have to catch ourselves with our gloves, or fall full on our faces, sides or backs, all of which were unequal to the temperature they would suddenly encounter.

(Had we landed during the night, the case would be worse, for the soil would be colder than any place in Siberia. It was six of one, half a dozen of the other, with the added disadvantage that we would not be able to see each other, or the enemy.)

Thus it was by good fortune that I landed generally feet-downward. If the crater had been a foot deeper, I would have landed full on my back, which among other things held the mechanical chiller which kept my enclosure temperate, and also, my air-supply.

My feet broke the pale-amber crust and sank straight down into a bottomless volume of sticky, slippery dust, as dense and tenacious as oatmeal. Fortunately, I was not falling with my accustomed celerity, or I would have been buried in a trice. As it was, the rebounding viscous material took several distinct, agonizingly anxious seconds to close over my helmeted head.

"I can't breathe!" was my first thought. Panic shot through my spine.

But of course, my helmet was intact, still filled with oxygenated air. I could, in fact, breathe.

"I can't see!"

That much was true. The slippery dust had completely enclosed my helmet; its tempered-glass viewing plate showed solid black. Upon my wrist was a control to light my Edison lamp, mounted miner-wise upon my head. I manipulated the control back and forth; heat on my scalp testified that something was being activated, but no illumination did it shed.

My boots touched bedrock. Apparently I had been sinking for several seconds (at least; it seemed much longer, in the event) at an unknown rate. How far down was I? I wondered.

Not that it mattered, I thought. My oxygen supply was good for six hours, less the time it had taken to debus the capsule and fall into the dust. (My watch was, presumably, ticking away dutifully in my vest pocket, invisible even were I to hold it to my face, as the helmet’s glass and the watchglass curved in opposite directions.) So I had time to extricate myself, free of the drowner’s pitiless clock imposed by the volume of his lungs.

I jumped. The dust offered slighter resistance than water would have done, but presently I felt rock beneath my boots again. I tried harder, and even considered removing the mass of equipment that our planners, intoxicated by the weight-lessening potential of the Moon’s gravitation, had loaded upon all of us. But although I had no way of knowing how far I was jumping, there was no hint at all that I was nearing the surface. Dumping my impedimentia and leaping for freedom would remain an option, but I need not exhaust myself before pursuing other possibilities.

My boots were becoming cold.

I have said that fully half the weight on my back was an electro-chemical chiller, based on a British design. It was meant to counteract the blazing heat of the unfiltered Sun, and more so the torrid surface of rock baked for a week unbroken by night. But here, below the opacity of the dust, the Sun never intruded. The stone I stood upon might not have been warmed by daylight for thousands – perhaps millions – of years.

The cold that gripped my heart was only partially emotional, then.

The Sun heats by radiation, but heat transfers ever so much quicker by conduction, when a hot body is in direct contact with a colder one. The exact rate at which temperature equalizes, the hot becoming colder and the cold hotter, is a complex function of both bodies’ density, insulating properties, and chemical composition, as well as their sheer mass. In this case, my three hundred-odd pounds of flesh and machinery, kept through mechanical labor at seventy-two degrees, was in contest with the rocky mass of the Moon itself, incalculable millions of tons of dense, probably metal-rich rock, simmering at a temperature far, far below that of Polar ice.

I was heating the Moon. But the Moon was killing me.

I flexed my toes and ankles, denying the stiffness creeping upon them. I waved my arms; the dust did not impede them overmuch. I could walk, then, with some effort.

But where?

It seemed to me that the dust was, perhaps because of its exceptionally tiny particles, extremely slippery. Indeed, that first step turned into a glide, but fortunately the surface upon which I stood was uneven in the extreme. My foot fetched up on an outcrop and ceased its motion before I was precipitated onto my back.

My heart came close to its normal rate after a moment and I continued my line of reasoning. If the dust was indeed slippery, in some ways like a liquid, then it would resist being piled into hills. A volume of dust would, even under the gentle urging of the Moon’s weight, settle into a level surface.

But the rock underneath was under no such constraint. Indeed, I had proof under my boot (to the degree I could still feel it, for the biting cold had faded to an ominous numbness) that the surface was indeed subject to rises and falls. If I followed the rock uphill, it might break the surface of the dust at some point, or at least shallow enough that I could see where I needed to go.

I started out, feeling the way with a toe. My back foot slipped once, dumping me on my knee, but I did not tear my space-suit and was able to wrestle my load upright once more. The motion seemed to hold my gathering numbness at bay, although its replacement was tingling pain – far better than what awaited me in the dark, should my oxygen run out before I found escape!

Presently I concluded, by comparing front and back feet and their angles, that I was heading downhill rather than the reverse. I carefully, like the blind man I was, reversed myself and returned to my place of origin, or near enough. I knew that nearby was the crater our capsule had dug when it struck the Lunar surface; its walls definitely reached above the dust, and if I could locate it, I would know which way safety lay.

The crater was sharply sloped within, but without, it retained the lay of the land before we had arrived. I did not detect the gradual rise until the dust parted before my faceplate.

I was within a few paces of the crater’s edge. On the side facing me, it was cracked gravel and crumbly, pumice-like spongestone, with dust in every crevice. It was difficult to climb.

A helmeted head arose on the lip, and a jointed rope descended. Hidden hands hauled me to the edge, and I looked out at the Moon, squinting against the full daylight.

Where I had emerged, the dust was dark gray, almost black. The Sun had not baked the dust beneath the surface to the whiteness of the top. A surprising distance away was the larger dark spot I had made falling into the surface. Ridges of black and gray marked my laborious passage from that spot to this; evidently I had disturbed the dust enough that some of the surface fell and was mixed with the underlayers.

I also saw several other dark spots, widely scattered, around the ladders leading out of our crater. I divined at once that these were other soldiers, who like myself had leapt out from the crater wall and sunk over their heads.

No one man can carry all the equipment necessary to fire an artillery gun, even on the Moon. My particular load was surveying gear and ammunition (everyone had some ammunition to carry, and it was still by no means all we would have liked), not poles or lines. But others of our number, still within the crater, had these items. With poles to probe the dust and lines to tie about our own space-suits, rescuing our fellows before they suffocated seemed well within our power.

I looked about for anyone bearing the chevrons of rank. One fellow seemed to have the single bent stripe of a first-class private, but upon closer inspection I descried bits of red clinging to his sleeve above it, where the additional chevrons of a higher rank should have appeared. I brushed at my own chevron (I was a first-class private myself) with a gloved forefinger, and saw the red paint, so thickly applied back home, crumble like sand. The pigment, long dried though it was, had boiled in the vacuum like so much coffee-water.

The sergeant, or corporal, or whatever he was, gestured to us in the deaf-and-dumb sign language we all knew. I replied that several of our men were still stranded in the dust, but that we could easily retrieve them. He detailed me and another man to take some supplies and do so, while the majority of our half-battery set to unpacking and assembling our Lunar-specialized screw-guns.

I and the other fellow, about whom I knew nothing whatever save that his frame was tall and wide-shouldered, took up our poles and coils of line and ascended a ladder again. He had several stakes and a rock hammer, which would be helpful in anchoring our rescue-line, while I had had the presence of mind to retrieve a pneumatic line-thrower, intended for difficult mountaineering but superbly adapted to the present purpose. We decided (strictly speaking I should have ordered and he obeyed, my rank being higher, but the absence of the usual shouting of sergeants on the airless Moon had wonderfully cured our military habits in that regard) that he would probe with a pole, or several poles fastened together, until he encountered a body. He would maintain the contact, in case the man should move from his detected spot, while I fired the line-thrower at the spot, then used the line to convey myself hand-over-hand to our comrade’s position. If the trapped man could tie the rope around himself, so much the simpler, but we did not reckon on all of our fellows having an instant command of the situation. I did not know if my companion had been lost in the dust as I had, but given my experience I could well imagine that they might not be in the most collected frame of mind.

It was there on the crater’s rim, as we sorted out our things, that we beheld the sputtering lights descending from the sky. Each flare of brilliance made the falling star fall a bit slower; clearly, the newcomers were using combustion to slow their rate of descent. Equally clearly, no Earthly navy possessed the technical knowledge to do so to the degree the incomers demonstrated.

For the second time, the Martians were coming to invade a world held by men. They had very nearly beaten us to its surface, but we were here now, and however recent our arrival on the Lunar globe, here we meant to stay.