This etext was produced from Analog Science Fact & Fiction September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
The launch carrying themail, supplies and replacementseased slowlyin toward the base,keeping the bulk of theMoon between itself and Earth. CaptainEbor, seated at the controls, guidedthe ship to the rocky unevenground with the easy carelessness oflong practice, then cut the drive, gotto his walking tentacles, andstretched. Donning his spacesuit, heleft the ship to go over to the domeand meet Darquelnoy, the base commander.
An open ground-car was waitingfor him beside the ship. The driver,encased in his spacesuit, crossed tentaclesin a sloppy salute, and Ebor returnedthe gesture quite as sloppily.Here on the periphery, cast formalitieswere all but dispensed with.
Ebor stood for a moment andwatched the unloading. The cargocrew, used to working in spacesuits,had one truck already half full. Thereplacements, unused to spacesuitsand, in addition, awed and a bitstartled by the bleakness of this satellite,were moving awkwardly downthe ramp.
Satisfied that the unloading wasproceeding smoothly, Ebor climbedaboard the ground-car, awkward inhis suit, and settled back heavily inthe seat to try to get used to gravityagain. The gravity of this Moon wasslight, of course—barely one-sixththe gravity of the Home World ormost of the colonies—but it stilltook getting used to, after a longtrip in free-fall.
The driver sat at the controls, andthe car jerked into motion. Ebor,looking up, noticed for the first timethat the dome wasn’t there any more.The main dome, housing the staff andequipment of the base, just wasn’tthere.
And the driver, he now saw, wasaiming the car toward the nearbycrater wall. Extending two of hiseyes till they almost touched theface-plate of his helmet, he could seeactivity at the base of the crater wall,and what looked like an air-lock entrance.He wondered what hadcaused the change, which had obviouslybeen done at top speed. Thelast time he’d been here, not verylong ago, the dome had still been intact,and there had been no hint ofany impending move underground.
The driver steered the car into theopen air lock, and they waited untilthe first cargo truck had lumbered inafter them. Then the outer doorclosed, the pumps were turned on,and in a minute the red light flashedover the inner door. Ebor removedthe spacesuit gratefully, left it in thecar, and walked clumsily through theinner door into the new base.
A good job had been done on it,for all the speed. Rooms and corridorshas been melted out of the rock, thefloors had been carpeted, the wallspainted, and