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Updated: June 6, 2025
I tried to assure myself that we could hold out that long. The brigand ship crossed the opposite crater rim. It dropped lower. It seemed poised over the crater valley, almost at our own level and less than two miles from us. Its searchbeam vanished. For a moment it hung, a sleek, cylindrical silver shape, gleaming in the Earthlight. Snap looked at me and murmured, "It's descending."
In the relatively dim Earthlight the moonscape was somehow softened, and yet the impossibly jagged mountains and steep cliffsides and the razor-edged passes of monstrous stone, these things remained daunting. It was like riding through a dream in which everything nearby seemed fey and glamorous, but the background was deathly-still and ominous. There were the usual noises inside the jeep.
I was hastily donning an Erentz suit. I added, "Let me out. I just got the idea Wilks is acting strangely." I laughed. "Maybe the Earthlight has touched him." With my helmet on, I went through the locks. Once outside, with the outer panel closed behind me, I dropped the weights from my belt and shoes and extinguished my helmet light. Wilks was still up there. Apparently he had not moved.
The moon-jeep clanked and rumbled onward. The hissing of steam was audible. The vehicle swung around a pinnacle of stone, and Cochrane saw the space-ship. In the pale Earthlight it was singularly beautiful. It had been designed to lure investors in a now-defunct promotion. It was stream-lined, and gigantic, and it glittered like silver.
There was as yet no sign of the brigand ship. With every stop for rest we searched the starry vault. The Earth hung over us, flattened beyond the full. The stars blazed to mingle with the Earthlight and illumine these massive crags of the Archimedes walls. But no speck appeared to tell us that the ship was up there.
I held her arm so that we had audiphone contact. "Anita, mine." "Gregg dear one!" Murmured nothings which mean so much to lovers! As we stood in the fantastic gloom of Lunar desolation, with the blessed Earthlight on us, I sent up a prayer of thankfulness. Not that the enormous treasure was saved. Not that the attack upon Grantline had been averted. But only that Anita was given back to me.
He stopped there, his great figure etched sharply by the Earthlight. I think he must have known that Coniston was the one who had fallen over the cliff, as my helmet and Coniston's were different enough for him to recognize which was which. He did not know who I was, but he did know me for an enemy. He stood now at the summit, peering to see where we had gone.
By a phenomenon exactly identical, the travellers could now see that portion of the Earth's surface which was unillumined by the Sun; only, as, in consequence of the different areas of the respective surfaces, the Earthlight is thirteen times more intense than the Moonlight, the dark portion of the Earth's disc appeared considerably more adumbrated than the Old Moon.
Miko could reach us so easily as we bounded away in plain view in the Earthlight of the open summit! We were caught, at bay in this little bowl. The camp was not visible from here. But out through the broken gully, a white beam of light suddenly came up from below. Haljan. It spelled the signal. It was coming from the Grantline instrument room, I knew.
They bounded apart, then together again. Crazily swaying, bouncing, striking the rail. They went together in a great leap off the platform onto the rocks, and rolled in a bright patch of Earthlight. First one on top, then the other. They rolled unheeding to the brink. Here, beyond the midway ledge which held the camp, it was a sheer drop of a thousand feet, on down to the crater floor.
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