Then the vehicle stirred. The landscape outside began to move.
They saw Lunar City as they approached it. It was five giant dust-heaps,
from five hundred-odd feet in height down to three. There were airlocks
at their bases and dust-covered tunnels connecting them, and radar-bowls
about their sides. But they were dust-heaps. Which was completely
reasonable. There is no air on the moon. By day the sun shines down with
absolute ferocity. It heats everything as with a furnace-flame. At night
all heat radiates away to empty space, and the ground-temperature drops
well below that of liquid air. So Lunar City was a group of domes which
were essentially half-balloons--hemispheres of plastic brought from
Earth and inflated and covered with dust. With airlocks to permit
entrance and exit, they were inhabitable. They needed no framework to
support them because there were no stormwinds or earthquakes to put
stresses on them. They needed neither heating nor cooling equipment.
They were buried under forty feet of moon-dust, with vacuum between the
dust-grains. Lunar City was not beautiful, but human beings could live
in it.
The jeep-bus carried them a bare half mile, and they alighted inside a
lock, and another door and another opened and closed, and they emerged
into a scene which no amount of television film-tape could really
portray.
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