A Fall Of Moondust [antikvár]

To BE the skipper of the only boat on the Moon was a distinction that Pat Harris enjoyed. As the passengers filed aboard Selene, jockeying for window seats, he wondered what sort of trip it would be this time. In the rear-view mirror he could see Miss Wilkins, very smart in her blue Lunar Tourist Commission uniform, putting on her usual welcome act. He always tried to think of her as 'Miss Wilkins', not Sue, when they were on duty together; it helped to keep his mind on business. But what she thought of him, he had never really discovered. There were no familiar faces; this was a new bunch, eager for their first cruise. Most of the passengers were typical tourists - elderly people, visiting a world that had been the very symbol of inaccessibility when they were young. There were only four or five passengers on the low side of thirty, and they were probably technical personnel on vacation from one of the lunar bases. It was a fairly good working rule, Pat had discovered, that all the old people came from Earth, while the youngsters were residents of the Moon. i : , But to all of them the Sea of Thirst was a novelty. Be- i ; i i yond Selene's observation windows its grey, dusty surface marched onwards unbroken until it reached the stars. » ., . i i Above it hung the waning crescent Earth, poised for, ever i , ' ' . ' in the sky from which it had not moved in a billion years. Y'i ': .i The brilliant, blue-green light of the mother world flooded i i i' , this strange land with a cold radiance - and cold it was | i ( indeed, perhaps three hundred below zero on the exposed ( ' surface. (i^ j No one could have told, merely by looking at it, whether ¦ j i j! the Sea was liquid or solid. It was completely flat and i 'n V featureless, quite free from the myriad cracks and fissiures l| !/i,, that scarred all the rest of this barren world. Not a single Vj ' hillock, boulder or pebble broke its monotonous unifor- 1 mity. No sea on Earth - no mill-pond, even - was ever as i i': . '' calm as this. It was a sea of dust, not of water, and therefore it was