Comet's Burial
by RAYMOND Z. GALLUN
"Who hasn't heard about such prints?" Copeland growled laconically."There's no air or weather here to rub them out—even in eternity.Thanks for showing a fresh-arrived greenhorn around..."
Copeland was nineteen, tough, willing to learn, but wary. His widemouth was usually sullen, his grey eyes a little narrowed in a face thatdidn't have to be so grim. Back in Iowa he had a girl. Frances. But lovehad to wait, for he needed the Moon the way Peary had once neededthe North Pole.
Earth needed it, too—for minerals; as an easier, jump-off point tothe planets because of its weak gravity; as a place for astronomicalobservatories, unhampered by the murk of an atmosphere; as sites forlabs experimenting in forces too dangerous to be conducted on a heavily-populatedworld, and for a dozen other purposes.
Young Copeland was ready for blood, sweat, and tears in his impulseto help conquer the lunar wastes. He sized up big, swaggering JessBrinker, and admitted to himself that this man, who was at least tenyears his senior, could easily be a phony, stalking suckers. Yet, Copelandreserved judgment. Like any tenderfoot anywhere, he needed anexperienced man to show him the ropes.
He already knew the Moon intimately from books: A hell of silence,some of it beautiful: Huge ringwalls. Blazing sunlight, inky shadow.Grey plains, black sky. Blazing stars, with the great blurry bluish globeof Earth among them. You could yearn to be on the Moon, but youcould go bats and die there, too—or turn sour, because the place was[56]too rough for your guts.
Afield, you wore a spacesuit, and conversed by helmet radiophone.Otherwise you lived in rooms and holes dug underground, and sealedup. The scant water you dared use was roasted out of gypsum rock.The oxygen you breathed was extracted from lunar oxides by a chemicalprocess. Then air-rejuvenator apparatus reseparated it from the carbon-dioxideyou exhaled, so that you could use it over and over.
Copeland had read the tales: With that kind of frugality as the priceof survival, lunar prospectors could turn selfish to the point of queerness.Afraid somebody might follow them to their mineral claims, they'dtake more pains to leave as little spoor as possible than a fox beingtracked by dogs.
"Speaking of how footprints last around here," Copeland remarked forthe sake of conversation, "I understand you've got to be careful—stickto high ridges, and to parts of the flat maria where there's no old volcanicash or dust of thermal erosion."
"Guys who do that are misers and old women, kid," Brinker scoffed."Hell—it sure ain't because they're modest that they're so cautious!Me—I do things right."
He lifted a foot from the dust beside the path, revealing the markof the spec