The same close horizon cut off the bottom half of the Hut, only three hundred yards away. It was good to see those five little glowing portholes at the margin between the dark plain and the starfield — and near them, silhouetted by starlight, the truncated cones of the base’s three rocket ships, each standing high on its three landing legs.

“How’s the dark dark?” Johannsen’s voice softly asked in his ear. “Roger and over.”

“Warm and spicy. Suzie sends love,” Don responded. “Roger to you.”

“Outside temperature?”

Don glanced down at the magnified fluorescent dials beneath the view window. “Dropping past 200 Kelvin,” he replied, giving the absolute equivalent of a temperature of almost exactly 100 degrees below zero on the Fahrenheit scale still widely used in Earth’s English-speaking areas.

“Your SOS working?” Johannsen continued.

Don tongued a key and a faint musical ululation filled his helmet. “Loud and clear, my captain,” he said with a flourish.

“I can hear it,” Johannsen assured him sourly. Don tongued it off.

“Have you harvested our cans?” Johannsen next asked, referring to the tiny, rod-supported cannisters regularly put out and collected to check on the movements of moon dust and other materials, including radioactively tagged atoms planted at various distances from the Hut.

“I haven’t sharpened my scythe yet,” Don told him.

“Take your time,” Johannsen advised with a knowing snort as he signed off. He and Don were well aware that planting and harvesting the cans was mostly an excuse to get a man suited up and out of the Hut as a safety measure during times of greatest danger from moonquakes — when Earth and Sun were dragging at the moon from the same side, as now, or from opposite sides, as would happen in two weeks. Gravitational traction has been thought to trigger earthquakes, and so, possibly, moonquakes. Moonbase had not yet experienced anything beyond the mildest temblor — the pen of the seismograph keyed to the solid rock below the dust cushioning the Hut had hardly quivered; just the same, Gompert made a point of having a man outside for several hours each fortnight — at “new earth” and “full earth” (or full moon and new moon, if you stayed with the groundster lingo, or simply the spring tides).