Free One Was Stubbron by L. Ron Hubbard Page A

rocket upstairs!

CHAPTER THREE
    Moon Meeting
    S TARK death was the moon. No halftones, no softness. Black and white. Knife-edged peaks and sharp rills . Hot enough to fry iron. Cold enough to solidify air. Brutal, savage, dead. Strictly Mussorgsky .
    A place you wouldn’t want to go on a honeymoon, Angel decided.
    For all of Dawson’s growling they had not hit the target exactly. Slavinsky had drawn a big lampblack X below the USSR on a plateau near Tycho but the ship had hit nearly eight miles from it.
    Hit was the word, for if they had not landed in pumice some thirteen feet thick things would have been dented. The abrasive dust had risen suddenly and drifted down with an unnatural slowness.
    For a week they had been lying around in the padded cabin, experiencing spacesickness, worn out from accelerations and decelerations, living on K and D and C rations and cursing the engineers who had drawn such a thoroughly uncomfortable design.
    Angel had sent off the pilot rocket as ordered, filled with the recording rolls, but he had added a few succinct notes of his own which he hoped the engineers would take to heart. Such things as the way air rarefied up front on the takeoff and nearly killed Boyd.
    Such things as drinking bottles that wouldn’t throw water in your face when you got thirsty. Such things as straps to hold you casually down when your body began to wander around and helmets to keep your head from cracking against the overhead when you got up suddenly and found no gravity.
    But for all the travail of the past week the Angel was bright-eyed and expectant. It was balanced off in his mind whether he would kill Slavinsky by slow fire or small knife cuts.
    For Angel had very far from enjoyed being cheated of the glory of being the first man to fly to the moon and he distinctly disliked a man who would make a slave country of the United States. Prejudiced perhaps, but the Angel believed America was a fine country and should stay free.
    Boyd raked up three packages, tying a line and a C-ration can, buoy-like, upon it. Whittaker got a port open, inside pane only, and looked at the scenery.
    He turned and spat carefully into another can—experience had taught him, this trip—and then put on his space helmet, screwing the lucite dome down tight. He glanced at his companions.
    Angel was having some trouble getting into his suit because of his hair, but when he had managed it he led the way to the space port. The three of them crawled over the supplies and entered the chamber, shutting the airtight behind them.
    They checked their air supplies and then their communications. Satisfied, they let the outer door open. With a swoosh the air went out and they began their vacuumatic lives.
    It was thirty feet down but they didn’t use the built-in rungs. Angel stepped out into space and floated down like a miniature spaceship to plant his ducklike shoes deep into the soft pumice. Boyd followed him. Whittaker, carrying debris in the form of cans and bottles in his hugely gloved hands, came after.
    As though on pogo sticks the three small ships bounced around to the rear of the spaceship. Boyd threw the three packages down and stamped them into the pumice. Whittaker scattered the debris around the one can which was the real buoy marker.
    The discarded objects floated in slow motion into place and lay there in the deathly stillness.
    They looked around and their sighs echoed in their earphones, one to the other. No tomb had ever been this dead.
    They were landed in a twilight zone, thanks to Dawson. And if their suits—rather, vehicles—had not been so extremely well insulated they would already be feeling the cold.
    The sky was ink. The landscape was a study in Old Dutch cleanser and broken basalt. A mountain range thrust startlingly sharp and high to the west. A king-size grand canyon dived away horribly to their south. A great low plain, once miscalled a sea, stretched endlessly toward Tycho.
    Two miles