Peace lets us meander. So, seventy years of peaceful meander after man landed on the moon we were making the crossing in this same primitive pud.
By day three, the moon’s white glow filled the viewport.
Metzger pointed at a gleaming flat to our lower right. “Mare Fecunditatis. The Sea of Fertility. It’s just a couple hundred miles from the dark side.”
“Why did it crash there?”
“Wouldn’t we like to know?” said Metzger. “That’s one question we want answered. No Projectile’s so much as sputtered on the way in before.”
I turned to Howard. He was unwrapping nicotine gum. This might be a tobacco-days spacecraft, but this flight was all nonsmoking.
“Howard, what’s the terrain like?” This question made me proud. A good Infantryman always knows METT— mission, enemy, terrain, and time.
“Flat. A lava flow covered in dust of unknowable thickness. We guess a few inches thick from the skid mark the Projectile cut on impact. It crash-landed oblique. That’s why it’s still in one piece.” Howard angled one palm above the other.
I’d already asked about the presumably nonexistent enemy, and I knew the mission was to poke our collective nose into this wreck. But I hadn’t asked about time. “How long do we have down there?” I didn’t know the answer, but I knew blasting off from the moon to rendezvous with the capsule was a critical, sophisticated game, even with forties ‘puters.
Howard shifted his gaze to Metzger.
Metzger shrugged. “Long enough.”
They knew more than they were telling me. I looked from one to the other. Metzger looked away.
Before I could get pissy with them over the secrecy, it was time to struggle into our extravehicular-activity suits while Metzger inserted Apollo into lunar orbit.
My EVA suit still reeked of ammonia inside. You’d think if they send you to save the world, they wouldn’t make you wear somebody’s stinking pajamas.
Metzger’s voice crackled inside my new helmet as he closed the hatch between us three, stuffed in the LEM, and the now-uninhabited Apollo. “Disengaging LEM.”
A faint thump disconnected us from our way home. Tang ate at my stomach lining.
The descent to the moon was slow. Since we had now strapped bouncing Howard to the LEM wall, I got to stand at the window and watch the Sea of Fertility rush up to greet us.
Flat as the sea looked from space, it spread cobble-strewn and undulating. We closed in, and I realized the cobbles were as big as Dumpsters. The last fifty feet our engine kicked up dust, so I saw nothing. Obviously, Metzger couldn’t, either. If we roosted on a boulder, the LEM could topple, tear out its insides, or just break something vital to us getting home. I clutched a stanchion and gritted my teeth.
Thump.
Just like that, we were down. Metzger made it seem cake.
Metzger ran system checks while Howard and I waited in a two-man line. Metzger had to operate the ship, and Howard was never the first to do anything physical. So I would be the first human to touch the moon since the days when major-league baseball used wooden bats.
As I waited I thought of something. “Metzger? How do we pee?”
“Use the little condom thingy in the leg. You hooked it up, didn’t you?”
Air bled from the lock.
“What thingy?”
“Sorry. Should’ve told you. Just hold it.”
He opened the hatch.
Before me another world, as dead and white as bones, stretched to a black horizon. I turned around, felt for the descent ladder’s first rung, then stepped into airless nothing cold enough to freeze helium.
I hopped off the bottom rang into the Sea of Fertility’s dust, then focused my vision on the object a half mile away.
Peeing my pants was the least of my worries.
Chapter Eighteen
Howard lowered my gear rucksack on a synlon rope. I shuffled aside, tripped on a rock, and nearly fell.
I yelped. Falling would kill me if a rock punctured my suit. My coordination sucked after three weightless days, and, even with suit and gear, I only weighed forty pounds.
Howard’s knees wobbled as he backed down the ladder, and I steadied him as he planted his feet in moondust.
“My God. Missus Hibble’s geek is an astronaut.”
So was Missus Wander’s.
I spent ten seconds in mental back-patting while I looked up at the LEM, jumbled boxes papered in gold foil. My escape from the moon depended on discarded Christmas wrap on legs.
I pointed past the LEM’s spider leg. Howard’s mirrored helmet faceplate turned where I pointed.
A hundred yards from us ran the brink of a shallow canyon as wide as a shopping mall. Its edge was strewn with jagged boulders like plowed-up refrigerators. The canyon ended a half mile away. At least, that’s what the distance looked like to me. The moon’s smaller than Earth. The horizon’s closer. They briefed me that the curvature distorts perception. Whatever the distance, my heart pounded.
At the canyon’s end the Projectile rose. We couldn’t know how much of it had burrowed beneath the surface. What we saw was a blue-black dome bigger than a football stadium. Spiral whorls creased its surface like a metallic snail shell.
Howard examined it through binoculars fitted with a rubber hood that fit against his faceplate. “It skidded in here at ten thousand miles an hour, but it seems intact. I was counting on a hull rupture to get you in.”
“In? Inside ?” I pointed at the Projectile.
He lifted the rucksack and strapped it to my back.
Metzger’s voice came from aboard the LEM. “Take care, Jason.”
Howard and I skirted the canyon the Projectile plowed when it skidded in. There was no telling how unstable the disturbed lunar surface could be.
My brief Earthside lessons in moon shuffling at one-sixth my weight clicked in after a hundred fumbling yards. Still, sweat soaked my long Johns in minutes.
Howard clumped and bounded, his hoarse panting roaring in my earpiece. “Flex your knees before you land, Howard. Like jumping rope.”
“I never jumped rope. Worst mistake of my life.”
I looked at the sky. Earth hung before me, blue streaked with gray soot clouds and a quarter million miles away. Was this the worst mistake of my life?
Waiting for Howard took forever. We wound around bus-size boulders just as craggy and uneroded in three billion airless, waterless years as the ones the Projectile had gouged from the substrate days ago. Howard kept stopping and thrusting his faceplate against boulders, muttering about vesicles and rhyolite. On one such detour, he stepped on a smooth spot that turned out to be a dust-filled pothole and sank to his chest. After I hoisted him out, I leashed him to me with synlon cord around our waists so he had to follow my footsteps.
Finally, we stopped and looked up at the derelict fifty yards in front of us. The exposed part of the Projectile rising above us could have been a domed stadium, skinned iridescent blue-black. That it had moved seemed incredible, but spiral scratches scored its flanks. It had been rotating like a passed football when it hit, scraped but barely torn by a ten-thousand-mile-per-hour crash. I whistled.
Howard breathed. “Holy Moly.”
As soon as we got off this rock I was giving Howard expletive lessons.
Something keened in my ears, a repeating whine, high-pitched, then low.
