It was just another of the many fine-drawn precautions Moonbase took for its safety. Besides, it provided a tough regular check on the efficiency of spacesuits and of personnel working solo.
Don looked up again at the Earth. The ring was glowing less lopsidedly now. He couldn’t make out a single feature of the inky circle inside, though he knew the eastern Pacific and the Americas were to the left and the Atlantic and the western tips of Africa and Europe to the right. He thought of dear, slightly hysterical Margo and good old neurotic Paul, and truly even they seemed to him rather trivial at the moment — nice little beetles scuttling under the bark of Earth’s atmosphere.
He looked down again, and he was standing on glittering whiteness. Not whiteness literally, yet the effect of a new-fallen Minnesota snow by starlight had been duplicated with devilish precision. Carbon dioxide gas, seeping steadily up through the pumice and oxide of Plato’s floor, had suddenly crystallized throughout into dry-ice flakes forming directly on the dust floor or falling onto it almost instantly.
Don smiled, feeling less inhumanly distant from life. The moon had not become a Mother to him yet, not by a long shot, but she was getting to seem just a little like a chilly Older Sister.
Balmy air sluiced the convertible carrying Paul Hagbolt and Margo Gelhorn and the cat Miaow along the Pacific Coast Highway. At almost regular intervals a weathered yellow roadsign would grow until it plainly said slide area or falling rock zone, and then it would duck out of the headlight beam. The highway traveled a generally narrow strip between the beach and an almost vertical, hundred-foot cliff of geologically infantile material — packed silt, sand, gravel, and other sediments, though here and there larger rocks thrust through.