The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke by Arthur C. Clarke Read Free Book Online

was more than twenty miles high. Daphne took off the glasses and watched the ship dwindle against the stars until, quite abruptly, it vanished. The motors had been cut off; they had done their work, and the great rocket would now coast as silently and effortlessly as a flying arrow on its months’-long journey to Mars.
    ‘Quite a sight, isn’t it?’ said Norman softly. ‘I think the fact that you can’t hear a sound makes it all the more impressive.’
    That was perfectly true. Daphne had now been on the Moon for three days, and she was still not used to the idea of living, as it were, on the frontier of a world totally different from anything she had ever known before.
    Inside the rabbit-warren of the Observatory there was air, constant temperature—and sound. Apart from the lessened gravity, one might have been on Earth. But she had only to climb one of the stairways leading to the look-out rooms on the surface—and then there was no doubt that she was on another world.
    Between her and the hostile lunar landscape was nothing more than a few inches of perspex, and the absolute silence of the Moon lay all around her like an almost palpable blanket. She was an alien here, an intruder in a world to which she did not belong. She felt as a water-spider must do when it ventures into a strange and treacherous element protected by its little bubble of air.
    Yet, whenever she could, Daphne liked to spend an hour here, simply looking out across the plain or trying to draw the mountains whose peaks were just visible in the west. Those distant summits, higher than almost any range on Earth, were now ablaze beneath the mid-afternoon sun, although above them the stars were shining brilliantly in the jet-black sky.
    Daphne had met Norman Phillips on the night of the dance, and had found him very useful as a guide. He was a young geologist (or selenologist, if one wanted to be accurate) who was not normally stationed at the Observatory but was on leave at the moment from the second lunar base, on the other side of the Moon. The fact that he was off duty gave him a considerable advantage over the other scientists, many of whom would have been quite willing to show Daphne round.
    Professor Martin approved of this arrangement, but had been inconsiderate enough to suggest that Michael be included in the party. This proposal had not been received by Norman with any great enthusiasm, especially when he found that Michael did all the talking and wanted to be shown how everything worked.
    As a result, the first few trips had been rather slow affairs and Daphne had become bored with technicalities. Fortunately, they had been able to jettison Michael at the Central Control Room, where he had attached himself to the Chief Engineer and since then had been seen only at mealtimes.
    Daphne had now sorted out her original chaotic impressions and had acquired a fairly clear picture of the Observatory. At any rate, she no longer got lost when she was alone. For almost twenty years men had been tunnelling and excavating here beneath the floor of the great crater, only a few miles from the spot where the first rocket had landed on the Moon.
    In the early days, the colonists had devoted all their efforts to the sheer problem of keeping alive. To avoid the fierce temperature changes between night and day, they had gone underground, leaving only their instruments on the surface. The setting up of the lunar base had been an achievement almost as great as the crossing of space itself. Air, water, food—everything had, in the early days, to be carried across the quarter-million-mile gulf from Earth.
    Soon, however, the Moon had started to yield its treasures as the survey parties uncovered its mineral resources. Now the colony could make its own air and for some years had been able to grow almost all its food supplies. Daphne had seen the strange underground ‘farms’ where acres of plants grew with incredible swiftness in a hot, humid atmosphere, beneath