It was now or never that a message would come from Grantline. He was supposed to be upon the Earthward side of the Moon. While Snap had rushed through with his routine, I searched the Moon's surface with our glass.
But there was nothing. Copernicus and Kepler lay in full sunlight. The heights of the lunar mountains, the depths of the barren, empty seas were etched black and white, clear and clean. Grim, forbidding desolation, this unchanging Moon. In romance, moonlight may shimmer and sparkle to light a lover's smile; but the reality of the Moon is cold and bleak. There was nothing to show my prying eyes where the intrepid Grantline might be.
And Snap's instruments, attuned for an hour now to pick up the faintest signal, were motionless.
"If he has concentrated any appreciable amount of ore," said Snap. "We should get an impulse from its rays."
But our receiving shield was dark, untouched. Our mirror grid gave the magnified images; the spectro, with its wave length selection, pictured the mountain levels and slowly descended into the deepest seas.
Yet in those Moon caverns--a million million recesses amid the crags of that tumbled, barren surface--the pin point of movement which might have been Grantline's expedition could so easily be hiding! Could he have the ore insulated, fearing its rays would betray its presence to hostile watchers?
Or might disaster have come to him? He might not be on this hemisphere of the Moon at all....
My imagination, sharpened by fancy of a lurking menace which seemed everywhere about the _Planetara_ this voyage, ran rife with fears for Johnny Grantline. He had promised to communicate this voyage. It was now, or perhaps never.
Six-thirty came and passed. We were well beyond the Earth's shadow now. The firmament blazed with its vivid glories; the Sun behind us was a ball of yellow-red leaping flames. The Earth hung, a huge, dull red half sphere.
We were within forty thousand miles of the Moon. A giant white ball--all of its disc visible to the naked eye. It poised over the bow, and presently, as the _Planetara_ swung upon its course for Mars, it shifted sidewise. The light of it glared white and dazzling in our windows.
Snap, with his habitual red celluloid eyeshade shoved high on his forehead, worked over our instruments.