"No meteorite," he said, getting to his feet. His voice was cold, dangerously low. Larkwell's face was grim. Nagel wore a dazed, almost uncomprehending expression. Richter looked thoughtful. Crag's face was an icy mask but his thoughts were chaotic. Fear crept into his mind. This was the danger Gotch had warned him of.
Richter? The saboteur? His eyes swung from man to man, coming finally to rest on the German. While he weighed the problem, one part of his mind told him a warhead was scorching down from the sides. Time was running out. He came to a decision. He ordered Larkwell and Richter to strip the pressure gear from Prochaska's body and carry it down to the plain.
"Well bury him later--after the warhead."
"I have every intention of being here," Crag said evenly.
The earth was a thin crescent in the sky whose light no longer paled the stars. They gleamed, hard and brittle against the purple-black of space, the reds and yellows and brilliant hot blues of suns lying at unimaginable distances in the vast box of the universe. Night still gripped Crater Arzachel with its intolerable cold, but a zodiacal light in the sky whispered of a lunar dawn to come. Measured against the incalculable scale of space distances the rocket had but a relative inch to cross. That inch was almost crossed. The rocket's speed had dropped to a mere crawl before it entered the moon's gravitational field; then it had picked up again, moving ever faster toward its rendezvous with destruction. Now it was storming down into the face of the land.
They buried Red Dog. Larkwell had improvised a crude scraper made of metal strips from the interior of Drone Baker to aid in the task. He attached loops of cable to pull it. Crag, Larkwell and Richter wearily dragged the scraper across the plain, heaping the ash into piles, while Nagel handled the easier job of pushing them over the edge of the rill.
The unevenness of the plain and occasional rock outcroppings made the work exasperatingly slow. Crag fumed but there was little he could do to rectify the situation. It took the better part of eight hours before the rill was filled level with the plain, with only the extreme end of the tail containing the airlock being left accessible.