Other Worlds Than These

the lunar surface. An astronaut bounces around in front of it, like a white balloon. He—or she—is working at what looks like a surface experiment package, white-painted boxes and cylinders and masts laid out in a star formation, and connected to a central nuclear generator by orange cables. It looks like an ALSEP, but it is evidently heavier, more advanced.

But the LM isn’t alone. A second LM stands beside it, squat and spidery. Bado can see that the ascent stage has been heavily reworked; the pressurised cabin looks to be missing, replaced by cargo pallets.

“That’s your Payload Module, right?”

“Yeah,” Williams says. “The Lunar Payload Module Laboratory. It got here on automatics before we left the Cape. This is a dual Saturn launch mission, Bado. We’ve got a stay time of four weeks.”

Again he has vague memories of proposals for such things: dual launches, well-equipped long-stay jaunts on the surface. But the funding squeezes since ’66 have long since put paid to all of that. Evidently, wherever Williams comes from, the money is flowing a little more freely.

The LFU tips itself back, to slow its forward velocity. Williams throttles back the main motor and the LFU starts to drop down. Bado glances at the numbers; the CRT display evolves smoothly through height and velocity readings. Bado guesses the LFU must have some simple radar-based altimeter.

Now the LM and its misshapen partner are obscured by the dust Williams’s rocket is kicking up.

At fifty feet Williams cuts the main engine. Bado feels the drop in the pit of his stomach, and he watches the ground explode towards him, resolving into unwelcome detail, sharp boulders and zap pits and footprints, highlighted by the low morning sun.

Then vernier dust clouds billow up around the LFU. Bado feels a comforting surge of deceleration.

The LFU lands with a jar that Bado feels in his knees.

For a couple of seconds the dust of their landing cloaks the LFU, and then it begins to settle out around them, coating the LFU’s surfaces, his suit.

There is a heat-haze shimmer. “Oh, shit.”

Williams is busily shutting down the LFU. She turns to face him, anonymous behind her visor.

There wasn’t much astronomy going on at all, in fact, he found out when he looked it up in the libraries. Just a handful of big telescopes, scattered around the world, with a few crusty old guys following their obscure, decades-long projects. And all the projects were to do with deep space: the stars, and beyond. Nobody was interested in the Solar System. Certainly in nothing as mundane as the Moon.

He looked up at Moon Six, uneasily, with its bright, unscarred northwest quadrant. If that Imbrium meteorite hadn’t hit three billion years ago—or in 1970—where the hell was it now?

Maybe that big mother was on its way, right now.

Quietly, he pumped some of his money into funding a little research at the universities into Earth-neighbourhood asteroids.

He also siphoned money into trying to figure out what had happened to him. How he had got here.

As the last dust settles, Bado looks towards the centre of Taylor Crater, to where the twin LMs stood.

He can make out a blocky shape there.

He feels a sharp surge of relief. Thank God. Maybe this transition hasn’t been as severe as some of the others. Or maybe there hasn’t been a transition at all…

But Williams’s LM has gone, with its cargo-carrying partner. And so has the astronaut, with his surface package. But the crater isn’t empty. The vehicle that stands in its place has the same basic geometry as a LM, Bado thinks, with a boxy descent stage standing on four legs, and a fat ascent stage cabin on top. But it is just fifteen feet tall—compared to a LM’s twenty feet—and the cabin looks a lot smaller.

“My God,” Williams says. She is just standing, stock still, staring at the little lander.

“Welcome to Moon Four,” Bado whispers.

“My God.” She repeats that over and over.

He faces her, and flips up his gold visor so she can see his face. “Listen to me. You’re not going crazy. We’ve been through some kind of—transition. I can’t explain it.” He grins. It makes him feel stronger to think there is someone else more scared, more shocked, than he is.

He takes her through his tentative theory of the multiple Moons.

She turns to face the squat lander again. “I figured it had to be something like that.”

He gapes at her. “You figured?”

“How the hell else could you have got here? Well, what are we supposed to do now?” She checks the time on her big Rolex watch. “Bado. How long will your PLSS hold out?”

He feels embarrassed. Shocked or not, she’s cut to the chase a lot more smartly than he’s been able to. He glances at his own watch, on the cuff next to his useless checklist. “A couple of hours. What about you?”

“Less, probably. Come on.” She glides down from the platform of the LFU, her blue boots kicking up a spray of dust.

“Where are we going?”

“Over to that little LM, of course. Where else? It’s the only source of consumables I can see anywhere around here.” She begins loping towards the lander.

After a moment, he picks up his carrier, and follows her.

As they approach he gets a better look at the lander. The ascent stage is a bulbous, misshapen ball, capped by a fat, wide disk that looks like a docking device. Two dinner-plate-sized omnidirectional antennae are stuck out on extensible arms from the descent stage. The whole clumsy-looking assemblage is swathed in some kind of green blanket, maybe for thermal insulation.

A ladder leads from a round hatch in the front of the craft, and down to the surface via a landing leg. The ground there is scuffed with footprints.

“It’s a hell of a small cabin,” she says. “Has to be one man.”

“You think it’s American?”

“Not from any America I know. That ascent stage looks familiar. It looks like an adapted Soyuz orbital module. You know, the Russian craft, their Apollo equivalent.”

“Russian?”

“Can you see any kind of docking tunnel on top of that thing?”

He looks. “Nope. Just that flat assemblage at the top.”

“The crew must have to spacewalk to cross from the command module. What a design.”

An astronaut comes loping around the side of the lander, swaying from side to side, kicking up dust. When he catches sight of Bado and Williams, he stops dead.

The stranger is carrying a flag, on a pole. The flag is stiffened with wire, and it is clearly bright red, with a gold hammer-and-sickle embroidered into it.

“How about that,” Williams whispers. “I guess we don’t always get to win, huh.”

The stranger—the cosmonaut, Bado labels him—takes a couple of steps towards them. He starts gesticulating, waving his arms about, making the flag flutter. He wears a kind of hoop around his waist, held away from his body with stiff wire.

“I think he’s trying to talk to us,” Williams says.

“It’ll be a miracle if we are on the same frequency. Maybe he’s S-band only, to talk to Earth. No VHF. Look how stiff his movements are.”

“Yeah. I think his suit is semi-rigid. Must be hell to move around in.”

“What’s with the hula hoop?” Bado asks.

“It will stop him falling over, in case he trips. Don’t you get it? He’s on his own here. That’s a one-man lander. There’s nobody around to help him, if he gets into trouble.”

The cosmonaut is getting agitated. Now he hoists up the flag and throws it at them, javelin-style; it falls well short of Bado’s feet. Then the cosmonaut turns and lopes towards his lander, evidently looking for more tools, or improvised weapons.

“Look at that,” Bado says. “There are big funky hinges, down the side of his backpack. That must be the way into the suit.”