“True, but you’d still have to find them in the dark,” Richard retorted. “And there are some of them. To tell you the truth, I don’t really know why they built these ships without signs on the doors or in the hallways. The other thing I told you was made up, although I can navigate through the ship in the dark.”
“Ah. Well, we will return with those parts,” Max promised, ending the conversation. They had to get back to their ship. Richard disappeared back into the ship as Max and Mark climbed the long ladder to the tube door to return to the garden.
Chapter Twelve
Max stepped onto the dirt floor of the garden, breathing in the fresh air. The ship in the bottom of the tunnel had noticeably stale, but still breathable, air. No one else was in sight, except for Mark who was still climbing the ladder.
“Where do you think everyone went?” asked Mark upon reaching the top.
“Probably back to the Pak tribes cavern. It isn’t that far from here,” Max said, untroubled at their solitary welcoming back to the surface.
“Did they leave a note?”
“None that I can see,” Max replied, looking around. “We could look around the garden, perhaps they just wandered off.”
After a few moments of running the length of the garden, no signs of the rest of their group could be found, nor was any kind of note or indication of where they went or why could be found either. They had simply left for some unknown reason.
“They’ll probably be back sooner or later. Let’s go get those parts in the mean time,” said Max.
They walked out through the large open door, into the underground roadway. The bus was still sitting where Wallace had parked it. They did not see their friends out here either. Not being overly concerned about the absence, Max and Mark prepared to go back into the vacuum of the land of the dead on the surface of the Moon, which they now though of to be only a small satellite. It made sense, since the Moon lacked a higher level of gravity common among most planets due to their large size.
They used the closest airlock, which lifted them to the surface near the area where they first entered the underground tunnels. Since this was a different airlock lift, they arrived slightly father away from the ship, although it still would take less time to get to the ship from this airlock than it would have taken to go back to the airlock that they first entered the underground complex from, since they would have also needed to travel deeper into the Moon to get to it.