s will probably feel better in the
cool. Let's see."

* * * * *

We shot a searchlight beam out the window. There was a slight drop down
from the rock where we rested, then the sandy plain stretching out. Only
far off were those dark patches that looked like old seaweed on a
dried-up ocean bed, and might prove dangerous footing. The rest seemed
hard packed.

My heart was pounding as we went into the air-lock and fastened the
inner door behind us.

"We go straight out now," Garth explained. "Coming back, it will be
necessary to press this button and let the pump get rid of the
poisonous, air before going in."

I opened the outer door and started to step out, then realized that
there was a five-foot drop to the ground.

"Go ahead and jump," Garth said. "There's a ladder inside I should have
brought, but it would be too much trouble to go back through the lock
for it. Either of us can jump eight feet at home, and we'll get back up
somehow."

I jumped, failing to allow for the slightly greater gravity, and fell
sprawling. Garth got down more successfully, in spite of a long package
of some sort he carried in his hand.

Scrambling down from the cliff and walking out on the sand, I tried to
get used to the combination of greater weight and the awkward suit. If I
stepped very deliberately it was all right, but an attempt to run sank
my feet in the sand and brought me up staggering. There was no trouble
seeing through the glass of my helmet over wide angles. Standing on the
elevation by the _Comet_, his space-suit shining in the light from the
windows, Garth looked like a metallic monster, some creature of this
strange world. And I must have presented to him much the same
appearance, silhouetted dark and forbidding against the stars.

* * * * *

The stars! I looked up, and beheld the most marvelous sight of the whole
trip--the Great Nebula of Orion seen from a distance of less than one
hundred and fifty light-years its own width.

A great luminous curtain, fifty degrees across, I could just take it all
in with my eye. The central brilliancy as big as the sun, a smaller one
above it, and then the whole mass of gas stretching over the sky. The
whole thing aglow with the green light of nebulium and blazing with the
stars behind it. It was stupendous, beyond words.

I started to call Garth, then saw that he was looking up as well. For
almost half an hour