Free Captain Future 10 - Outlaws of the Moon (Spring 1942) by Edmond Hamilton

Sea of Glass. Blocked by the Patrol cruisers, they would have to chance the desert again.
    “Here’s our worst danger of discovery,” Captain Future warned. “We’ve got to hurry now.”
    They quickened their pace as they slogged out across the glaring desert. The white pumice was a yielding and crunchy underfoot as sand. Its glare and heat were perceptible even through their insulated space-suits.
    They had covered but a few miles before Curt uttered a sharp warning. A Patrol cruiser was swinging out from the peaks over the desert.
    “Got us!” cried Otho furiously. “There’s no place here to hide.”
    “Down in the pumice!” Curt ordered. “Throw, it over yourselves!”
    They caught his idea and flung themselves down. Swiftly they covered themselves with handfuls of the powdery white stuff. The Patrol cruiser swung past at low altitude, a half mile to the west. The fugitive scrambled up and went on. The foothill peaks of the Thompson Range soon dropped from sight behind them. The small size of the Moon made its horizons always curiously close. Curt Newton kept looking anxiously back, for he knew the search for them would go on strenuously.
    A thin line of intolerable brilliance lay on the horizon ahead. It grew into what seemed a dazzling lake of light, lying across their path. That curious area was so blinding that they could not look at it. It was the Sea of Glass whose corner they must cross, to reach the gorge that was their ultimate goal. They nerved themselves for the ordeal as they approached.
    The Sea of Glass was a large, roughly square area in which the lunar rock had somehow been fused into a glassy green obsidian. It was generally believed that ancient volcanic action had caused the phenomenon, though some planetographers held other theories. Whatever its origin, the Sea of Glass was a vast, glittering sheet that flung back the solar radiance blindingly.
    “Keep your eyes shut as much as possible,” Curt warned the Futuremen as they approached. “Stay close together, so we won’t get separated.”
    “I must have had my eyes shut all along into this mess,” Otho declared. “Lead on, Chief we might as well fry now as later.”
    Curt Newton had his own eyes almost closed as they stumbled forward onto the glassy, slippery surface of the great sheet. But the terrific reflection forced itself between his lids, and stabbed to his brain. And the heat was now so intense that even through the super-insulation of their spacesuits, it became intolerable. Only Grag and Simon were unaffected by it, though their artificial sight-organs were dazzled and blinded.
    Their feet slipped drunkenly on the smooth obsidian as they struggled on. Curt dared open his eyes only a trifle every few minutes, trying to keep the northwestward course. But his eyes were soon so stunned and bleared by the glare that he could see nothing. He had to lead onward, trusting to instinct to follow the right direction. The air inside his space-suit was like a furnace. His skin was parched, his mouth dry, his head aching. He was aware only of the slippery glass surface underfoot, the touch of his comrades as they all clung blindly together. Time became meaningless to his blurred brain, and he could not estimate how long they had been traversing this inferno.
    “I can’t see a thing,” came Otho’s choking voice. “Aren’t we near the end of it?”
    “There should be only a few miles more,” Curt answered quickly. “Keep together!”
    Blinded, his head pounding from the heat, he stumbled on with the others. Suddenly he realized he was walking on crunchy pumice again.
    “We’re through!” Curt cried. “We’ve crossed the Sea of Glass!”
    “I still can’t see anything!” Otho exclaimed hoarsely.
    It took many minutes for their blinded eyes to clear. They discovered themselves trudging over glaring white pumice desert again, a little off their northwestward course.
    Captain Future took their bearings, from the dark, sunken