"Maybe."
"You don't even like the priest!" Bok was almost shout- ing now, the fear-induced anger making his voice shrill, ugly. "You've been tripping all over yourself to stay clear of him whenever you're both inside the base."
Kinsman felt his jaw clench. So it shows. If you're not careful you'll tip them both off.
Aloud, he replied, "I'm going to look around. Give me an hour. Call Houston and give them a complete report; all they've got so far is a gap in the automatic record where the priest's last two check-ins ought to be. And stay inside the shelter until I come back." Or until a relief crew arrives, he added silently.
"You're wasting your time. And taking unnecessary risks. They'll ground you for sure." "Wish me luck," Kinsman said. A delay. Then, "Luck. I'll sit tight here." Despite himself, Kinsman grinned. I know damned well you'll sit tight there. Some survey team. One goes over the hill and the other stays in his bunk for two weeks straight. He gazed out at the bleak landscape surrounded by starry emptiness. Something caught in his memory.
"They can't scare me with their empty spaces," he 140 muttered to himself. There was more to the verse but he could not recall it.
"Can't scare me," he repeated softly, shuffling to the inner rim of the crater's ringwall. He walked very deliberate- ly, like a tired old man, and tried to see from inside his bulbous helmet exactly where he was placing his feet.
The barren slopes fell away in gently terraced steps until, many kilometers below, they melted into the cracked and pockmarked crater floor. Looks easy . . . too easy. Like the steps to hell. With a shrug that was weighted down by the lunar suit's backpack. Kinsman started to descend into the crater.
He picked his way across the gravelly terraces and crawled feet-first down the breaks between them. The bare rocks were slippery and sometimes sharp. Kinsman went slowly, step by careful step, trying to make certain that he did not tear the metallic fabric of his suit. His world was cut off now and circled by the dark rocks. Inside the vast crater he was cut off from the direct radio link with Bok; in the shadow of these terraced rock walls, he could not even make contact with the communications satellites orbiting over the Moon's equator. The only sounds were the creaking of the suit's joints, the electrical hum of the pump that circulated water through its inner lining, the faint wheeze of the helmet air blower. And his own heavy breathing. Alone, all alone. A solitary microcosm. One living creature in the universe.
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces.
Between stars—on stars where no human race is. There was still more to it: the tag line that he could not remember.
Finally he had to stop. The suit was heating up too much from his exertion. He took a marker beacon from the backpack and planted it on the broken ground. The Moon's gray rocks, churned by eons of infalling micrometeors and whipped into a frozen froth, had an unfinished look about them, as if somebody had been blacktopping the place but stopped before he could apply the final smoothing touches.
From a pouch on his belt Kinsman took a small spool of wire. Plugging one end into the radio outlet on his helmet, he held the spool at arm's length and released its catch. He could not see it in this dim light, but he felt the spool's spring fire the 141 antenna wire high and out into the crater.
"Father Lemoyne," he called as the antenna drifted slowly in the Moon's gentle gravity. "Father Lemoyne, can you hear me?"
No answer.
Down another flight. Kinsman told himself.
After two more stops and nearly an hour of sweaty descent, Kinsman got his answer.
"Here ..." a weak voice responded, "I'm here . . ."
"Where?" Kinsman snapped, every sense alert, all fa- tigue forgotten. "Do something. Make a light."
". . . can't . . ." The voice faded out.
