Free One Against the Moon by Donald A. Wollheim

cords hung—all that was left of the parachute and its attachments—down to the scraped and battered white cylinder that was the cargo compartment. The compartment ended in a flat plate which bore only a few wires that had once connected it with the break-away mechanism of the last of the atomic blasting chambers. This alone was the load of the eight-story tower of energy which had been the Red Sands experimental rocket.
    Robin, without further delay, bent down to the cylinder and began to haul and push it entirely out of the water to the dry ground. He knew he could not afford to risk its loss. To his surprise, moving the rocket head was an easy task. It was extremely light and he found himself possessed of tremendous strength, tired and bruised and sore as he was.
    It was, he thought, as he pulled the rocket along, the Moon and its weak gravity. He would only weigh a sixth of his Earth weight here, so would the cargo head, yet he would have the muscles necessary for much more than that weight. He would literally be a superman here—if he could survive.
    Survival, he knew, would be the question. He didn't know whether even now he might be inhaling poison from the strange, thin sublunar air. He didn't know what mysterious radioactive rays might be bathing him with their baleful influence. He didn't know whether any of the vegetation in this cavern world would be edible.
    Having brought the cargo cylinder to a safe spot many feet from the water, Robin looked for the door that would open the animal compartment. He found it, forced it open. Inside were the two cages. Gently he reached in, unscrewed them from their holdings, and lifted them out.
    One of the monkeys was dead, probably killed by some of the jouncing the rocket had taken. The other, looking miserable, was clinging to the bars chattering. Robin looked at it, and the monkey looked back. The young man unlatched the cage, reached in, and took the little brown animal by the back of the neck. But the monkey made no effort to bite. Instead, it twisted around, grabbed Robin's arm, and hung tight.
    When his grip was released, the monkey scurried up Robin's arm and clung to his shoulder, recognizing the need for companionship after its frightening experiences.
    The rabbits had fared slightly better. One of them was dead, but the other three, while somewhat beaten around, were alive and sniffling their pink noses. Robin saw that there was very little food or water left for the animals.
    Here then was the means to test the Moon's capacity to produce food and drink. First, however, Robin decided he would build a pen for the rabbits. If he were lucky, he could breed them and have at least one source of food suited to his system.
    He went over to the nearest clump of ball-trees, looked them over, tested his strength on them. They broke easily and quickly when he grasped one by the trunk and pulled. He found that it could be splintered into shreds fairly rapidly and that inside the shell of the stalk was a mass of cottony matter.
    He shredded a number of the stalks, and then staked them out in the ground to make a small fenced pen, tying the whole together with one of the long cords hanging from the parachute nose. Into this makeshift pen, he released the three rabbits. He filled the cup from their cage with water from the river, placed it in the pen. The rabbits hopped over, sniffed, and drank. They seemed to suffer no ill effects.
    Robin broke open one of the ball-like growths from the tree, found it contained a substance resembling a combination of melon and potato. He offered some of this to the rabbits and after an interval they ate it and seemed to like it.
    The monkey was chattering away as Robin did this and suddenly scampered down and snatched a piece of the ball-food, stuffing it into its mouth. Robin had not wanted to use the little creature for a test but the damage was done. However, the monkey seemed to enjoy it.
    Robin sat down on the ground and watched. He felt