Chapter II: Part 2

The two climbed into a car and drove to where the concrete dugout was located. Entering it they nodded to the communications men and other engineers already gathered. The major took his place at the firing panel. He looked at his timer, waited a few minutes. Gradually the small talk ceased and a hush fell over the little guiding post. The major reached for the firing button.

* * * * *

Back in the rocket, Robin opened his eyes. The first thing he noticed when his head cleared from the grogginess of his deep sleep was a slight hissing noise somewhere below him. The air felt different in his little compartment. Somewhere a thin stream of oxygen was escaping into the chamber.

He twisted around, felt about with his hands, located it. There was a thin line of holes along the seam of the padding underneath him. Now he heard other noises. Below him, a faint chattering, a scolding, the sound of something scratching. He put his ear down near the hole from where the air was issuing and listened.

Yes, he thought to himself, animals. Somebody put some animals in the space just below me. Sounds like monkeys' chattering. Must be where the air is coming from.

He had a headache. Bad air in here, he thought, and realized that had it not been for the animals being placed below him, he might have suffocated in that space. It was then that he fully realized what had happened--that he'd fallen asleep.

The animals hadn't been there when he had first climbed in. So he must have slept for several hours at least. He squirmed around, reflecting on it, still not quite gathering his drugged wits together. That meant that the men must have arrived and started work on this rocket again.

He thought this over, and a great uneasiness came over him. He strove to remember something urgent, something he knew he had to bring back to mind. Something about five o'clock and six o'clock.

Loading time, launching time. Yes! They were firing this rocket at six! But what time was it now? How long had he slept? He looked at the luminous dial of his watch but was chagrined to find it had run down and he'd forgotten to wind it.

He glanced rapidly around his little space, wondering how he could find out whether it was already day. Several glimpses of light hit his eyes. He saw that in three or four places there were tiny glass openings no larger than would admit a thick wire. He tried to look through one, but all he could see was blue sky. It was morning then.

He strained his ears for outside noises, truck engines, men talking. But there was not a sound from outside. Only the faint squeakings of the animals below him. He twisted around again to face the little round door.

It was padded on the inside, it had no handle there, nothing to get a grip on. He scrabbled in the padding with his fingers, reached the rim, and tried to push. There was no give. It was airtight, automatically sealed.

He pushed against it, wondered what to do. He squirmed around against the padding, lay back with his head against the cushioning on the opposite side, his back resting on the floor padding, and put his feet against the side of the little door. Thus braced he was all set to shove the strength of his legs against the door in an effort to push it outward.

He was about to do so when the rocket went off.

_4. Riding the Atoms_

Suddenly it felt as if a giant had placed his huge palm squarely on Robin's chest and was pushing him down. As he tried to exert pressure against the door, the counter pressure of the invisible hand increased. For an instant Robin was thunderstruck. Had he suddenly become weak? What was this?

His first emotion, that of amazement, changed in a split second to one of terror at his newly discovered weakness, and again from that to a feeling of stunned shock. There was no invisible hand! It was the rocket itself moving!

Without thinking, Robin struggled to rise, but his muscles could not obey him. In the first seconds the pressure on him was mild, he might have been able to move if he'd given some extra effort. But by the time his astonishment had worn off, the pressure had climbed beyond the limitations of the cramped space and his young muscles.

The rocket had started slowly as these great towering constructions do. The first blasts barely served to push it away from its launching guides. It seemed to tremble in every plate as if precariously perched upon the short, furious blast of yellow. Then the fiery tail lengthened as the tall, thin metal body rose slowly, lifted like a thin white pencil on the roaring cataract of burning gases.

Now it was its own length from the ground, now pushing up faster, giving in split seconds the curious impression that it might topple over at any instant. But the steady rise gained in speed, the rocket pushed away from its burning tail ever faster, the fire turned from yellow to blue, and within a few more blinks of the eye it was hurtling into the sky, vanishing into a dot, and then was beyond sight.

To Robin it seemed again as if a giant hand were pressing down. He felt it spreading over his body, felt himself being pushed relentlessly by superior weight against the matting of the compartment floor. His head was thrust down as if by a giant forefinger of this invisible monster leaning over him. Now it seemed as if the giant, in maniacal malice, was leaning his weight on his hand, pressing on Robin, trying to shove him through the floor if possible.

He gasped for breath, could barely catch it against the growing pressure on his chest. His eyes sank into their sockets and he tried to close them but found the effort too much.

All about him there was a roaring sound, a humming and thrumming, and now began a thin, piercing whistling, which was the air outside rushing past. The whistle rapidly increased to an ear-splitting shriek, then vanished, leaving eddies of unheard auditory vibrations. Robin tried to close his mouth, which had been forced open by the prying finger of pressure. He felt as if in another moment he must cave in, be squashed flat. His brain reeled dizzily, then suddenly a merciful blackness fell over him and he knew no more.

At that very moment, though he could no longer sense it, there was a click, audible through the length of the vibrating column of metal, and the first section snapped off. Its great fuel tanks, so full of volatile gases an instant before, had emptied themselves in a fury of chemical combustion. The automatic releases had loosened the whole bottom half, the main fuel section, thrust it into space to fall and shatter upon the desert miles below. At that same split second, another series of relays touched off the second firing section.

The new firing tubes blasted into action. Of a design different from those that preceded it, of a design new to the world of man, the experimental jet burst forth. For an instant it seemed as if the pressure had vanished in the rocket, for a split second the rocket stopped accelerating as it waited for the new impact. Then like a blast of lightning newly released from a storm, a shot of energy flashed through the racing metal body. The giant hand came down on everything within it with a firmness and power not sensed before.

There was a blast now emerging from the tail of the flying rocket something like that of an atomic bomb, but not quite. It was not an explosion, but an atomic reaction. It was a rocket flare of an intensity and heat beyond all the potential of mere chemical reactions. It was atomic fire, chained and harnessed to the tail of a rocket.

The thin white pencil, reduced in length, raced on into the dark stratospheric sky.

* * * * *

Back at Red Sands there was intense excitement in the control dugout. Major Bronck was racing around, anxiously yelling into telephones, watching the checkers, trying to keep track of everything happening at once.

At first the ascent had been neat and according to routine. The crew in the dugout, the radar crew at the main camp, and the one co-operating with them from White Sands itself were checking all right. Then in an instant all three almost lost touch as their objective nearly swooped out of range. The trackers fought to get it back in focus, and one by one finally caught it again, farther and faster than they had planned for.

"It's running wild!" was the way one startled crew chief told the major. "Going up and out like crazy!"

The crew on the tracking telescopes racing around the desert were calling in their story. Visually they had lost it completely. They had gotten a nice set of telescopic photos of the first phase, then they had failed to adjust quickly enough to the unexpected second phase. Now they were sweeping the sky desperately hoping to pick it up again, but without success.

Major Bronck called for a check on the last and surest guide. Among the instruments loaded in the nose of the rocket was a radio tone-signal sender. As a last resort, they should be able to pick up that signal from the rocket itself, confirm the story they were getting from their radar men. But the men at the radio listening posts reported no sound. And when the major asked if they had had it in the first place, the men admitted that they had not. There had never been any buzz on the ether from the rocket at all!

At that moment, the main Red Sands camp got on the phone. A voice from the commander's office wanted to know why the instruments had not been loaded. It seems that the man responsible for them had just turned up at camp. Jackson had reported his jacket stolen, his pass along with it.

Therefore the instruments for whose installation he had been charged with were still reposing in the camp! There had been a series of bungles, the major thought, as he tried to explain the situation. Obviously the rocket had not been checked as it should have been. Obviously whoever had calculated the course and power of the new fuels had erred very considerably.

"But we've still got it on radar. Yes, sir. We'll hold it. We'll definitely see where it comes down, sir."

The major listened, white-faced, to the commander's angry spluttering. "Yes, I know, sir. Top-secret stuff. But even if it lands a thousand miles away, we'll know, we'll spot it. Even if it managed to assume a satellite orbit, we could keep track of it. It's still going straight up. It might make an orbit. If it did, there'd be no chance of it coming down intact for foreign examination. It would probably circle the Earth a few times in a wild ellipse and then burn up in the atmosphere. We won't lose it."

But lose it they did. The radars held it for two hours more, until finally it was beyond even the limits of their extended capacities. It was going up, up, and out, and even at the last there was no sign of it slowing down enough to form an orbit.

When they finally checked it off as permanently lost, they knew they had witnessed the dawn of a new era. This rocket had assumed and passed the escape velocity. It was headed out into the trackless bounds of outer space. It would never return to Earth.

There was even speculation that its last known course might intersect the Moon's orbit. Opinion in Washington, after all the reports were in, was divided on that. But, in spite of the bungling, the rocket had proved a valuable point. From that day onward, rocketry in the United States took a new tack.

Robin Carew was dreaming. He was falling down an elevator shaft, falling swiftly floor after floor. Looking down at him from the space at the top of the high shaft was a gigantic face, leering at him while stretching a giant arm down the shaft trying to reach him.

In his dream he had the curious mixed-up feeling of wishing the giant could catch him and stop his fall and at the same time being afraid that the giant might be successful and crush him in his huge fingers. He was falling, falling, and squirm as he might, the bottom of this terrible shaft was nowhere in sight.

Robin thrashed around, trying to grab a cable, trying to catch one of the innumerable doors as they rushed past. He banged his hand against one, grabbed tight, jerked.

His eyes snapped open, his mind struggled to gain a grasp of where he was. Nothing seemed to make sense. It was dark and he was bumping around in a tiny, tight space. Yet somehow he couldn't get his feet down, he still was falling. Suddenly he felt dizzy and then became aware of the aches all over his body.

He stopped thrashing, let himself rest. He bumped against the tight side again, took the opportunity to stretch his body out straight and found he could not. He was touching both sides of the narrow space.

His eyes found the space not entirely dark. A faint trace of light showed from a couple of spots somewhere in the dark enclosure. He realized where he was. He remembered now the take-off, the pressure. Why, he thought with a shock, the rocket went off. And I'm in it! We must be falling back to the sands now. In a few minutes we'll crash and that will be the end.

He waited awhile, expecting to be snuffed out at any instant. But there was nothing. Just silence. And now a faint rustling sound where something was stirring and squeaking below him. The animals, he thought, are alive in the space below me.

Then it occurred to him that he was not falling back, but perhaps falling away. His mind, which had been numbed from the pain and pressure, began to reassemble what he knew about rockets. And consciously the thought formed--the sensation of free fall is the same as the sensation of weightlessness found in space rockets. He thought he was falling, but was it not just as likely that instead he was simply beyond gravity?

He felt himself over for broken spots, but somehow miraculously he had not been damaged. His eyes burned and he supposed they were bloodshot. A smear of stickiness around his face convinced him he'd suffered a nosebleed. But otherwise he was sound. He patted the jacket he wore and his hand encountered the cylindrical hardness of the flashlight he'd borrowed from the supply truck. He took it out, snapped it on.

The little padded compartment was the same, the door still tightly wedged. He turned the light carefully around it, saw that the faint break in the total darkness before had come from two tiny openings--glass insets. Probably, he thought, the openings for the instruments, possibly the lens spots for cameras.

He switched off his flashlight, put an eye to an opening. The spot of glass was thick but amazingly clear. He caught a glimpse of blue-black sky and a jagged line of misty gray and white, beneath which stretched the edge of a great brown-and-green bowl. He stared at it in puzzlement, watching it as it swung slowly away.

He realized that the rocket had developed a slow spin, that his viewing spot would gradually circle the region around him. And he realized that the great brownish bowl was the Earth.

From the darkness of the sky he realized that he must already be high in the stratosphere, possibly well beyond it. From the curvature of the horizon, he must be far up, several hundred miles, he guessed. And he could see that the curvature was increasing as he watched. The rocket was still traveling upward, traveling at an immense rate of speed. Its last rockets had blasted away and had left it with a heritage of unparalleled speed.

Robin screwed up his eyes again, mentally calculated. He revised his estimate of his height, doubled it, redoubled it. Why, he might be a thousand miles up, two thousand, perhaps many times that! How fast was he traveling?

He didn't know. He couldn't tell. He remembered the talk about atomic fuels he had overheard. Could it be that the inventors had miscalculated? Could it be that he was already in outer space, heading for the void, never to return to Earth?

He screwed his eye again to the outlet. In the short time since he'd first looked the sky had darkened. It was black, jet-black, and the stars were fiery points of white. The Earth now seemed like a ball, a vast ball whose fringes glowed with the pale mistiness of a sun-lit blanket of air. But where he was there was no air. He was beyond any atmosphere. No whistling of atmospheric friction was present in the length of the silent rocket.

And then a blinding white glow poked a piercing beam through the tiny eye-spot. It was the sun, unshielded, brilliant. In a moment the tiny ray vanished as the rocket continued its slow turning, but Robin in that instant had come to realize what had happened.

He was in outer space, beyond Earth, never to return. He was the first man to reach that untracked void that bounded on all the stars and suns of a universe. He was the first--but who would ever know? Who could ever hear of him, whose helpless body, imprisoned in its shining airtight shell, now seemed doomed to float unsuspected forever on the cosmic tides of interplanetary space?

_5. Fall Without End_

For a moment Robin felt dizzy again, and the falling sensation wracked him. It was the weightlessness, he knew. The sensation of being without weight was the same as that of being in free fall. And he was operating beyond the effects of gravity. Somehow the atomic rocket fuels had been far greater or far more effective than the inventors had calculated. He knew that they had never intended this rocket to be shot beyond Earth's grip--for if they had, they would not have loaded it with the test animals and they would not have placed a parachute-release arrangement in the nose.

However, it now occurred to him he might be wrong about this. He had seen the reference to the parachute on the loading chart, and he now remembered lettering indicating parachute on the body of the rocket just above the little entryway to the topmost cargo compartment. Still, perhaps there was no parachute there.

He squirmed around again, trying to get used to the nauseating sensation of free fall. He felt as if he had to exert conscious effort to keep his stomach from turning inside out. He felt an impulse to scream, to thrash his hands, and he had to remind himself that it was an illusion.

For a while he just rested, floating in the little space, bumping steadily against one wall or another, with barely inches to spare. The tiny burning sunbeam pierced through again and vanished. Robin looked through the peephole.

It was the dead black of outer space now, a black beyond conception, black with nothing in it to reflect. And against it an inconceivable array of brilliant points of light--the stars in numbers beyond any seen through the blanket of atmosphere. White, with some yellows and reds, and a few bluish ones here and there. The Earth moved again into sight and it was distinctly smaller--though still an impressively vast bowl--but beginning distinctly to resemble a monstrous globe in bas-relief, breathtakingly impressive with its living face, its shifting misty veil of air and water vapor.

Robin became aware that he was thirsty. Yes, and hungry too. He took stock of his situation. He felt through his pockets, came up with one of the candy bars he had taken. He hefted it thoughtfully. Should he eat it now or save it?

That raised the question he had been unconsciously avoiding. Save it for what?

If he was indeed heading for the boundless regions of space, then he was a doomed man. If he ate now, it would mean that starvation would come sooner. If he delayed, doled it to himself in small bits, it could only prolong the agony awhile, but would not the result still be the same?

There was the chance, the odd chance, that the rocket somehow might yet return to Earth. It might describe a circle, an arc, finally begin to fall back. If it did so, the parachute would operate and perhaps land Robin in safety.

Somehow it didn't seem likely to Robin, yet that chance existed. If so, it would have to return to Earth before a full starvation period could result in death. Robin had read somewhere that one could go without food for as much as thirty days, but without water for not more than seven or eight. If the rocket were describing an arc or a parabola, then it would surely start its return within less than that week's leeway.

With this in mind, Robin unwrapped the candy bar and ate it. The second one he would save as long as possible. But what about water?

The squeaking of the test animals broke in on his thoughts. Surely they must have been supplied with some sort of food for their flight? Robin switched himself around to face the floor and began to dig at the padding there. He managed to loosen it, pull it to one side, revealing the floor of the compartment. As he had hoped, it was not a metal plate. His own chamber, the one for the instruments, was not a section in itself but only part of a section paneled off by braced plasterboard. And what was more there were already holes drilled through it so that the air in both sections would be equalized.

This answered another question Robin had been trying to avoid. How was it the air was remaining fresh now, though it had gone stale while he was hiding? Apparently there was a small supply of oxygen operating automatically in the animal section that seeped through into the upper compartment too. Evidently once the rocket went into flight this started to work and would continue for the originally calculated period.

Robin dug his fingers into the openings and pulled. Gradually the plasterboard bent away and opened a space into the section below. He looked down, using his flashlight.

There were two cages below, well padded. In one, two little brown monkeys clung together floating just above the floor and looking terrified. They chattered when they saw him, but remained tightly locked in each other's arms. In the other, four small rabbits were placidly nibbling bits of lettuce, although one rabbit was upside down, another sideways on the side of the cage.

There were a couple of small boxes set in each cage, and Robin could see that they dispensed food and water to the animals at presumably regular intervals. Robin reached down next to the monkeys' cage and started to work loose the small water holder there. He found it slid out of place once he turned the holding bolt. As he drew the little flask upward, one of the monkeys made an effort to nip his finger, but he withdrew it in time.

The water flask drawn up into Robin's compartment made him feel better. This would make his stay a little more comfortable for a while. He felt sorry for the monkeys, who might go thirsty now, but he had a suspicion that the two little beasts were probably too hysterically frightened to eat or drink anyway. Robin wet his throat a little.

He looked back down, reached out, and investigated the food compartment. Sure enough, there were several bananas in the monkeys' food container. They would do also.

He glanced around the space below again. There were the oxygen tanks, set up with a timer, one gently hissing away. There also was a small heating unit with a thermostat that evidently kept the temperature in the animal division at a level--and almost certainly was doing the same for the whole section.

Robin grimaced to himself as he worked the padding back into place on the floor. He might manage to be quite comfortable for a while longer--a day or so more. While there's life, there's hope, he said to himself. Better check the parachute question, too, while I'm at it.

He reversed himself in a neatly executed weightless somersault and making what had once been his roof the floor, worked the padding out there. But here he was thwarted, for he found the rounded metal side of the section's nose. If there were a parachute, it obviously occupied its own compartment at the very tip of the rocket's nose.

He looked out the peephole from his upside-down perch, stared musingly at the panoply of the stars. He wondered if he could recognize a planet should one swing across his narrow field of vision, decided that perhaps he might not be able to do so, so vast were the number of stars present. He looked again at Earth, noticing that it had visibly rotated on its axis. That meant that time had passed, a good deal of it. Mentally he tried to calculate just how much. He was looking at the Eastern Hemisphere now, or a corner of it. At least half a day, or maybe a day and a half, or more. How could he tell how long he had been asleep, how long unconscious?

He realized that he was tired, that his body still ached from the painful take-off. He closed his eyes, and without actually wanting to, fell asleep.

His sleeping body swung slowly to and fro in the tiny space, bumping gently from one side to the other. As he slept he dreamed of falling, dreamed of falling over huge endless cliffs, of dropping down strange chasms, of being carried by huge birds and suddenly being dropped.

His subconscious mind would never give up the insistent awareness that his body was falling. It was a certain thing that such would be the dreams of anyone in space flight. The built-in machinery of self-protection identifies a sense of loss of weight with the automatic warning of a fall. Ten thousand thousand generations of climb from primeval arboreal ancestry found the warning valid--no conscious knowledge otherwise would ever shut off this instinctive alarm.

He awoke again with a start and a convulsive grasp for a tree branch. But he shook off the sensation and rubbed his eyes. He took another sip from the water flask, reached into the compartment below and took one of the bananas. The monkeys were still in each other's arms, but now asleep. The rabbits were nosing the corners of their cage as if everything were perfectly normal.

He looked through his peephole and saw the Moon.

It was large, it was vast, it took up most of the view in his range. It looked as close as the Earth had looked before. He looked upon the stupendous moonscape with awe. It was the vision one strains to see through a telescope. He had often paid a dime to look at it through the six-inch telescope at the City Science Museum. This was the same vision, but bigger and clearer, so very, very clear.

He could see only a small section of the Moon, but that was impressive. A particularly rugged area of jagged mountains, huge craters, high walled and wide bottomed, with long rills and ridges running across the surfaces.

It shone white under the sun, with immensely black shadows breaking it where the sun failed to penetrate. Yet there were more than whites and grays and blacks here. He saw that without the atmosphere of Earth there were other more delicate shadings. The sides of some mountains had bluish and greenish tinges, and more than one crater bottom showed a distinct faint tinge of pale green, or in other spots yellowish blotches. And in one small spot he distinctly saw a mistiness of the surface, saw that a faint fuzziness barred the clear sight of the crater bottom.

He stared with wonder at the sight and the Moon slowly turned out of his vision as the rocket turned. He looked away, deep in thought.

He had read enough about the Moon in his astronomical readings. He knew the various theories, the latest conjectures. He knew that mistiness, that evidences of clouding had been seen often by astronomers, but the sight was nevertheless rare. No two astronomers ever happened to be looking at the same place at the same time. It was always one man's word, and it was never possible to predict such a thing, nor to photograph it.

He knew that those men who made a special study of the Moon recognized these things and had come to accept them as evidence that what was once regarded as a dead world was not entirely dead. They had charted these color shifts in certain spots, one or two areas could be predicted well enough to occasionally be provable to others. Pickering had seen many such color changes, had even attributed it to some sort of fast-growing vegetation.

Robin remembered that it was now largely believed that the Moon had not quite ceased its volcanic internal action. He recalled that astronomers had begun to admit that the evidence of these bits of mist and the further evidence of actual mapped changes in the Lunar topography had proved that something was still warm and boiling within the crust of Old Luna.

Then it occurred to Robin that if the Moon were that close to him, he might really be falling upon it!

He peered out, saw again a section of Luna in view. It was close. Evidently the nose of the rocket had indeed been propelled far beyond Earth's atmosphere, beyond its gravitational grip. If the Moon had been elsewhere, perhaps the rocket nose would have swung about and eventually returned to fall upon the Earth, as Robin had originally surmised. But by chance his orbit, that of the rocket nose in free space, had cut too close to the body of the Moon. The rocket was dangerously near to being seized in the grip of the Moon's gravity and pulled down to it.

Robin mulled this thought over and realized that it was possibly the truth. He glued his eye to the peephole and tried to determine where he was.

After a while, he saw that the Moon was gradually increasing in size. The rocket nose was definitely approaching the Lunar sphere. Because the Earth no longer swung into view, Robin also realized that the rocket nose must have reversed itself, must be heading moonward, must be falling to the Moon!

It would fall faster and faster now, as its trip through space was ending. It was held in the grip of a new world and would speed to its final destruction like a meteoric bullet. It would be another meteor blasting into the surface to flash instantly into powder!

_6. Target: Luna_

Now that Robin recognized the certainty that he would never return, that he was a doomed man, a curious sort of change came over him. Up to this time, he had been carefully suppressing his inner thoughts, comforting himself with the hope that the trip would somehow end up safely. Yet while his mind was dwelling on that thought to the exclusion of others, his nerves had been under tension. He had felt himself continually on the edge of breakdown, in proximity to screaming.

But Robin had been trained well. His life had never been a particularly easy one and the crying had almost certainly got out of his system during the days when as a little boy he had wandered through a war-torn land hungry and homeless. Life in an orphanage, at best, lacks much of the careful comforts of parents' hands, and those who had come out of such upbringing learn strong self-control early, learn to hold their jumping nerves in check at moments of tension and crisis.

Now that the conscious realization that a crash into the Moon was inevitable had forced itself into acceptance, Robin felt a slipping away of this tension. The die had been cast, the doubt had been removed. He actually felt an easing of his mind, felt himself able to take cooler estimate of his situation.

He curled himself up in his narrow, closetlike space as comfortably as possible and thought the matter over. He was hungry again and still thirsty and this time he ate the second candy bar without saving any. At the rate of speed he was traveling, it could not be many hours more before he flashed to a sudden, fiery, meteoric death. He turned that thought over in his mind, while he drank some more water.

A meteoric end, he thought, to flash like a blazing firebolt, to crash with the violence of an explosion against the dry, dusty surface of the Moon. It might have been spectacular to observe, but he would never know. He wondered if it would be seen from the Earth.

Suddenly, like an automatic switch being thrown on an electronic relay, a memory shot into his thoughts. He was well-read in astronomy, particularly on the subject of the Moon, and the thought that struck him was this: _Astronomers did not see meteors crash into the Moon!_ They just didn't! And Moon observation under powerful telescopes was most exact; if even fair-sized meteors hit the Moon with the same explosive impact that they hit Earth, they would be seen beyond question. Further, since the Moon was a companion of the Earth, and our home planet was bombarded with countless meteors daily, the Moon must be a target of a like number. Of course, the meteors that hit Earth were almost entirely burned up by atmospheric friction long before reaching the surface.

But the Moon apparently had no atmosphere ... there should have been nothing to prevent them from constantly battering the face of the Moon in a continuous, heavy rain of iron and rock. Lunar meteors should be visible all the time. But they were not!

So ... what would really happen when his rocket hit the Moon?

Robin was tingling with strange excitement. Facing death as he was, he knew that even at the moment of dying he would be rewarded with at least one secret of the universe now unknown to men. What was the secret? He wracked his brain trying to bring back to memory all that he had read on that problem.

And he brought back the memory that during the past few years a growing number of astronomers had begun to believe that the Moon was not entirely without an atmosphere. It wasn't believed to have much of one, but it had been pointed out that most meteors to hit Earth burn up at least thirty miles high. And the atmosphere at that height on Earth was very, very thin. So thin indeed that if the Moon had a belt of air only that dense, it might not be particularly detectable from Earth, might not make much difference from the surface--it was almost a vacuum so far as living matter would be concerned--but it would suffice to burn up meteors!

So it seemed likely that his rocket nose would be heated to incandescence by the tenuous Lunar atmosphere and burn to ash long before it touched the surface.... It wasn't a comforting thought--he rather preferred the original conception of crashing.

Robin smiled grimly to himself. A dismal prospect, indeed. He had somehow cherished the hope that at least some wreckage of his rocket would be scattered about the surface, to be discovered some day by the explorers of the future, perhaps hundreds of years later. They would speculate upon it, perhaps trace it and in that way know that one Robin Carew had, in death, been the first to reach the Moon.

But to burn up on high, even that faint honor would be denied him!

He looked again through the peephole. The Moon was close now, very close. He looked down upon a heaving and fearful view--a vast sea of glistening white, with streaks and patches of gray, and here and there great gaping clefts of black. Huge ringed craters, their saw-toothed mountain walls soaring into the sky--and craters upon craters, big ones and little ones, broken ones, craters breaking into the boundaries of others, little ones dotting the bottom of big ones, cracks and clefts shooting from their bases; a ring of jagged mountains running across the moonscape; areas of apparently flat plains.

The sun was directly overhead, for it was still full moon and the glare was great, the shadows that mark the setting or rising of a Lunar day not too obvious, stunted patches of jet blackness. But the Moon was not entirely whites and grays, for indeed it was gently tinted in spots with other colorations. He could see for himself that there were greenish tints in some flat spots, yellowish and purpling areas. And yes, there was even in one tiny patch in a crater floor a faint cloudy mass, a mere haziness that indicated some sort of gaseous mist.

Robin drank in the scene, the view of another world, that world which has dazzled the dreamers of Earth for thousands of years. These might be his last moments, but he could not be denied the saturation of his senses.

The rocket was fast heading down toward a point near the center. The Moon was spreading out, filling the view, and the rocket's slow rotation no longer brought anything into view but moonscape, a constant shifting view, with wonders upon wonders moving into his eye's scope.

Robin drew back a moment, rubbed his arms, scratched his legs. He felt himself tingling, wondered if it were his nerves. He felt itchy, hoped his nerves would not give way. He thought to himself, I may have only minutes now. I shall watch till the end. Then he heard a faint, faint noise.

From somewhere there was a humming. The merest shadow of a hum, and Robin listened to it, startled. The humming rose in pitch, it was no dream, and as he sat, mouth open, amazed, there was a thin, high-pitched screaming outside the rocket and he suddenly began to feel hot.

Robin had but a second in which to think to himself, There's an atmosphere and we're burning up, when there came a new sound. A sort of _bloop_ from over his head, a snapping noise, and something seemed to grab the rocket and jerk it upside down violently.

Robin was tossed in a sharp somersault, banging against the original floor of his compartment in a jumble of arms and legs. He sat up and realized that he was sitting--not floating--but actually sitting _against gravity's pull_! He scrambled onto his knees, peeped through his peephole.

The sky was back in view, the Moon was below the falling ship and he could see the edge of a huge, circular orange mass above him, straining and pulling. It was the parachute from the nose of the rocket. It was the orange parachute designed to land the instrument nose and the test animals safely in the New Mexico desert. And it had been set to open automatically upon the pressure of air when falling.

There was an atmosphere around the Moon then ... a thin, thin one, but the delicate detonator of the chute had functioned. The great hemispheric mass of delicate nylon had opened, had found a purchase, and was dragging the rocket back from a disastrous burn-out.

Robin breathed a sigh of relief, strained his eyes to see the moonscape again. The rocket was still falling, mighty fast it seemed. He could see the moonscape rise out, expand to fill the view. The rocket was warm now, definitely still heating from the thin friction. It vibrated and whistled but it swung in no breeze. It was moving too fast. In that almost unnoticeable belt of tenuous air there would be no winds that could deflect it. The parachute was open, but the air was not thick enough to do more than slow it down too gradually for it to be saved.

It would, he realized, still crash into the surface with a deadly force. It would hit like a shell from a cannon, and the explorers of the far future would have their mysterious fragments of tooled metal to speculate on.

Below him Robin saw the jagged mountain peaks reaching up for him into the dark black sky. He scanned it, remembering his Moon books, remembering the cold photos taken by distant Terrestrial cameras and the careful diagrams and names given by men long dead. He was hitting near the center of the Moon, a little above it, and the crater whose walls were reaching up ... why he could even name it. He grinned wryly. It would be Theophilus, and it seemed he would miss it, hit somewhere near it in a bay of the so-called Sea of Tranquillity.

Rushing up toward him, Theophilus was no peaceful Greek ancient. It was a barren, toothed, rocky edge, miles up, without the snow that makes our mountains majestic, without a trace of the forests that conceal a mountain's jagged sides, without even the gentle weathering of rain and water.

And the Sea of Tranquillity--a dark, wrinkled plain that looked as if it had gone through the agonies of torture ages past. The marks of almost-vanished volcanoes on it, pale circular rings like pocks of burst bubbles, rambling ridges, and ugly cracks, and here and there domes rising gray out of the surface, like the tops of giant bubbles working their way out of the dry and flaky crust.

Robin watched in dread fascination. He heard the whistling and shrieking of the rocket like a demon in torment. He himself was burning and itching as he was being baked, although he felt no fever. The rocket was warm but getting no warmer. The topmost peak of Theophilus was rushing up into his sky like a fast-growing stone geyser.

He watched it shoot up, saw it grow, saw the ground become clearer and clearer, each ghastly detail spreading out, assuming three-dimension reality. Now the peak was on a level with his eyes, now it was beyond him, and he was in the last few seconds of his fall.

The rocket seemed to be slowing slightly. The atmosphere was possibly getting a trifle thicker at the surface, enough to prolong the agony a minute or two or three longer. Above him the parachute strained and twisted. But still the rocket was falling too fast. It rushed down, straining to complete its act of affinity with a new gravity, as if tired of its brief period of interplanetary freedom, and anxious to pledge allegiance to a new gravitational master.

Below, the moonscape was coming up fast. Robin could see well enough to begin to speculate where exactly he would hit. There was a small circle that must have been a crater scar. There were several dark lines that might be a network of cracks. And there was a dome.

He remembered those domes. They had been quite a recent discovery too. Not easily seen until latter-day instruments showed the surface of the Moon dotted with these odd bumps. Their nature was still a mystery.

It looked as if Robin would find out the hard way what their construction was. For now he was clearly heading directly for the center of the one below him. A bubble-top pushing out from the plain, hard and shiny like lava, glistening in the sun against the gray and dusty surface of the plain around it.

Theophilus's wall was already on the horizon, high and towering. And now Robin realized how terribly fast the rocket was still falling. The mountain was a measuring stick and it was fearful.

There was a moment of dreadful suspense as the rocket raced to a bull's eye on the upthrust center of the dome. The rounded surface rushed up.

Robin flattened himself against the padding, clutched his head in his hands, and stiffened himself. The rocket hummed against the thin air, it vibrated against the parachute, there was a terrible split second of shock when the bullet-shaped structure of the rocket's cargo nose made its contact with its Lunar target, and then a clap of sound in Robin's ear like a blockbuster going off.

_7. The Honeycomb Place_

Robin had no time to wonder why he had not been instantly killed by the crash, because the explosion on hitting the surface of the dome was followed instantly by a tremendous roaring sound that surrounded the entire rocket nose. This was in turn accompanied by a powerful pressure on the rocket, which threw Robin against the nose-end cushioning and held him there.

The pressure was not steady, changing as the roaring itself changed, with sudden bursts of sound, convulsive shoves, and changes in pitch. The rocket was being slowed by a terrific outward burst of gases, gases that must have been imprisoned in a huge volcanic bubble whose outermost surface was the dome, so mysterious to Terrestrial observers. By bursting through the thin lava shell, Robin's rocket had released these pent-up gases and was boring its way down on its still rapid momentum against the pressure of this column of gas.

Robin did not know this at the time, though he figured it out later. At the time, he had all he could do to keep himself from being battered black-and-blue by the jolting rocket. He kept his head clutched tightly in his arms, rode with the bumps and roars, and tried to keep his breath from being knocked out of his lungs.

There was another violent shock and crack and again the rocket bounced to a new flow of gases. It had slammed through one huge bubble, breaking through the bottom shell only to burst into a lower pocket of gas. The roaring subsided to a lower pitch as the new gases did not find the near-vacuum of the surface that the first gas bubble had opened upon. The rocket fell steadily, bursting through a third, and then a fourth such bubble. It was clear that the surface of the Moon, at least in that area, was a mass of congealed gas pockets, a honeycomb of thin-walled lava bubbles, perhaps quite deep.

The rocket was almost entirely devoid of its original space momentum by the time it hit the bottom of the last bubble, snapped the thin crust, and fell through it. This time there was a sudden hissing around the battered nose and a warmth began to flow through the body of the rocket. It was enveloped in a belt of hot steam through which it fell several hundred feet and then hit something with a loud splashing noise. The sound vanished as the rocket sank deep into the new substance, came to a halt, and bobbed back upward.

Robin had gotten hold of himself after the third bubble and was hanging on, mentally trying to estimate what had happened. This last sound had been familiar. It must have been water, and the bobbing back of the rocket to the surface confirmed his views. He felt the rocket bounce a couple of times and then subside to a gentle rocking and rolling.

Robin held on for a moment, getting his balance. In some ways the new motion was more disturbing than all that had gone before--the cylindrical body of the rocket, with its blunt end and its rounded nose, was twisting and turning as only can be done by a bottle tossed in a flowing stream. Robin tried to get hold of himself, orient himself to the odd seasick motion, then managed to work his way to the peephole.

He could see nothing. Whatever was outside was without light. But it sounded like water lapping against the sides, it felt like water's forces, and the rocket seemed definitely to be afloat. Robin used his flashlight, tried to direct its beam through the tiny camera outlet. After a little manipulation he succeeded in getting some reflection from outside.

It was water, and the rocket seemed to be floating rapidly along on some sort of dark subterraneous tide. Robin sat back, puzzled. Water--under the Moon?

He held on, still feeling a little dizzy, feeling dirty and itchy, but suddenly beneath it all a little thrilled and pleased. He had survived the crash by some miracle--he was on the Moon and alive! What next?

Next was quick to come. There was a sudden dip in the current and the rocket tilted forward as it shot down a spillway, down a violent decline on a raging torrent, sliding down an unseen waterfall for a surprisingly long time, leveling out at a fast clip, sliding down new tunnels through which the water raced, hitting the side of sharp turns with occasional glancing blows, down more dips and falls, spinning violently around in unseen whirlpools, and finally racing out on a fast stream to gradually slow down and finally come to rest, gently bobbing.

Robin had been knocked around during this breathless ride and only gradually did he realize it was over. Warily he raised his head from where he was sprawled in his tiny closet-compartment and waited. But the gentle bobbing continued.

He put his eye to the peephole and looked. There was a glow outside, a grayish, pale glow, but he could see that the nose of the rocket was somehow grounded on something dry while the tail was still in the water rocking to the current.

He considered his next course of action for a few seconds. It seemed as if he had a chance to escape from his vehicle at last. But escape to what?

Was there air outside, wherever it was that he found himself? If there were air, was it enough to sustain him? Might it not be poisonous or utterly lacking in oxygen?

Well, Robin thought to himself, there isn't really any choice. If I stay here, I'll starve to death or suffocate. If I go out, I may die even sooner. But now or later, if it has to be, it won't make any difference. Whatever the odds in favor of my being able to breathe here, I've got to take them.

He twisted around, found the circular port through which he had originally entered the rocket. He worked at it with his fingers, realizing that it might be quite difficult to open. He worked away the padding that lined the interior, found that it had an arrangement that had automatically sealed it when closed. There was no handle on the inside, for it had never been planned to be opened from that side. However, there were several screws over a small plate, and Robin set to work to unscrew them. He had a Boy Scout knife in his pants pocket--the kind with several blades--and with the back of the biggest blade he worked out the screws.

The panel off, he saw how the sealed gimbals worked, clicked them open and pushed open the door. It held tight for a moment, then popped open. There was a sudden drop in the pressure, Robin's ears popped, and he gasped for breath.

The air outside was lower in pressure than that inside the cargo nose of the rocket, which had been sealed at Earth level. But it was air and it was breathable. Robin drew in several deep lungfuls, savoring it.

It was oddly exhilarating, as if highly charged with oxygen. At the same time there was a smell of mold and dampness and a definite taste of sulfur and phosphorus like that just after a kitchen match has been lighted. Even so, the air was breathable.

Robin worked his head and shoulders through the narrow opening, slid forward and landed on hands and knees on the rocky surface. He got to his feet, looked around.

He was standing on the bank of a rushing stream of water, which was pouring out of a large gap in the side of a cliff. The cliff ran straight up, gently curving to form part of the ceiling several hundred feet overhead. The extent of this ceiling was impossible to determine--it was dark and obscure--but it seemed to Robin almost at once that he was in some sort of gigantic enclosed space--a vast cavern beneath the surface of the Moon, probably several miles beneath it.