Stephen Baxter - Moon Six

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Moon Six

a novelette by Stephen Baxter

Foreword

The seeds for 'Moon Six' were a fragment of speculation about what kind

world we'd have if sf had never existed, and a NASA puff about the

spin-off possibilities of an Apollo space suit.

Moon Six

Bado was alone on the primeval beach of Cape Canaveral, in his white

lunar-surface pressure suit, holding his box of Moon rocks and sampling

tools in his gloved hand.

He lifted up his gold sun-visor and looked around. The sand was hard and

flat. A little way inland, there was a row of scrub pines, maybe ten

feet

tall.

There were no ICBM launch complexes here.

There was no Kennedy Space Center, in fact: no space programme,

evidently,

save for him. He was stranded on this empty, desolate beach.

As the light leaked out of the sky, an unfamiliar Moon was brightening.

Bado glared at it. "Moon Six," he said. "Oh, shit."

He took off his helmet and gloves. He picked up his box of tools and

began

to walk inland. His blue overshoes, still stained dark grey from lunar

dust, left crisp Moonwalk footprints in the damp sand of the beach.

Bado drops down the last three feet of the ladder and lands on the

foil-covered footpad. A little grey dust splashes up around his feet.

Slade is waiting with his camera. "Okay, turn around and give me a big

smile. Atta boy. You look great. Welcome to the Moon." Bado can't see

Slade's face, behind his reflective golden sun-visor.

Bado holds onto the ladder with his right hand and places his left boot

the Moon. Then he steps off with his right foot, and lets go of the LM.

And there he is, standing on the Moon.

The suit around him is a warm, comforting bubble. He hears the hum of

pumps and fans in the PLSS - his backpack, the Portable Life Support

System - and feels the soft breeze of oxygen across his face.

He takes a halting step forward. The dust seems to crunch beneath his

feet, like a covering of snow: there is a firm footing beneath a soft,

resilient layer a few inches thick. His footprints are miraculously

sharp,

as if he's placed his ridged overshoes in fine, damp sand. He takes a

photograph of one particularly well-defined print; it will persist here

for millions of years, he realises, like the fossilised footprint of a

dinosaur, to be eroded away only by the slow rain of micrometeorites,

that

echo of the titanic bombardments of the deep past.

He looks around.

The LM is standing in a broad, shallow crater. Low hills shoulder above

the close horizon. There are craters everywhere, ranging from several

yards to a thumbnail width, the low sunlight deepening their shadows.

They call the landing site Taylor Crater, after that district of El Lago

close to the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston - where he and Fay have

made their home. This pond of frozen lava is a relatively smooth, flat

surface in a valley once flooded by molten rock. Their main objective

for

the flight is another crater a few hundred yards to the west that

they've

named after Slade's home district of Wildwood. Surveyor 7, an unmanned

robot probe, set down in Wildwood a few years before; the astronauts are

here to sample it.

This landing site is close to Tycho, the fresh, bright crater in the

Moon's southern highlands. As a kid Bado had sharp vision. He was able

see Tycho with his naked eyes, a bright pinprick on that ash-white

surface, with rays that spread right across the face of the full Moon.

Now he is here.

Bado turns and bounces back towards the LM.

After a few miles he got to a small town.

He hid his lunar pressure suit in a ditch, and, dressed in his

tube-covered cooling garment, snuck into someone's back yard. He stole a

pair of jeans and a shirt he found hanging on the line there.

He hated having to steal; he didn't plan on having to do it again.

He found a small bar. He walked straight in and asked after a job. He

knew

he couldn't afford to hesitate, to hang around figuring what kind of

world

he'd finished up in. He had no money at all, but right now he was

clean-shaven and presentable. A few days of sleeping rough would leave

him

too dirty and stinking to be employable.

He got a job washing glasses and cleaning out the john. That first night

he slept on a park bench, but bought himself breakfast and cleaned

himself

up in a gas station john.

After a week, he had a little money saved. He loaded his lunar gear into

an old trunk, and hitched to Daytona Beach, a few miles up the coast.

They climb easily out of Taylor.

Their first Moonwalk is a misshapen circle which will take them around

several craters. The craters are like drill holes, the geologists say,

excavations into lunar history.

The first stop is the north rim of a hundred-yard-wide crater they call

Huckleberry Finn. It is about three hundred yards west of the LM.

Bado puts down the tool carrier. This is a hand-held tray, with an

assortment of gear: rock hammers, sample bags, core tubes. He leans

over,

and digs into the lunar surface with a shovel. When he scrapes away the

grey upper soil he finds a lighter grey, just under the surface.

"Hey, Slade. Come look at this."

Slade comes floating over. "How about that. I think we found some ray

material." Ray material here will be debris from the impact which formed

Tycho.

Lunar geology has been shaped by the big meteorite impacts which pounded

its surface in prehistory. A main purpose of sending this mission so far

south is to keep them away from the massive impact which created the

Mare

Imbrium, in the northern hemisphere. Ray material unpolluted by Imbrium

debris will let them date the more recent Tycho impact.

And here they have it, right at the start of their first Moonwalk.

Slade flips up his gold visor so Bado can see his face, and grins at

him.

"How about that. We is looking at a full-up mission here, boy."

They finish up quickly, and set off at a run to the next stop. Slade

looks

like a human-shaped beach ball, his suit brilliant white, bouncing over

the beach-like surface of the Moon. He is whistling.

They are approaching the walls of Wildwood Crater. Bado is going

slightly

uphill, and he can feel it. The carrier, loaded up with rocks, is

getting

harder to carry too. He has to hold it up to his chest, to keep the

rocks

from bouncing out when he runs, and so he is constantly fighting the

stiffness of his pressure suit.

"Hey, Bado," Slade says. He comes loping down the slope. He points.

"Take

a look."

Bado has, he realises, reached the rim of Wildwood Crater. He is

standing

on top of its dune-like, eroded wall. And there, planted in the crater's

centre, is the Surveyor. It is less than a hundred yards from him. It is

squat, three-legged frame, like a broken-off piece of a LM.

Slade grins. "Does that look neat? We got it made, Bado." Bado claps his

commander's shoulder. "Outstanding, man." He knows that for Slade,

getting

to the Surveyor, bringing home a few pieces of it, is the finish line

for

the mission.

Bado looks back east, the way they have come. He can see the big,

shallow

dip in the land that is Taylor, with the LM resting at its centre like a

toy in the palm of some huge hand. It is a glistening, filmy construct

gold leaf and aluminium, bristling with antennae, docking targets, and

reaction control thruster assemblies.

Two sets of footsteps come climbing up out of Taylor towards them, like

footsteps on a beach after a tide.

Bado tips back on his heels and looks at the sky.

The sky is black, empty of stars; his pupils are closed up by the dazzle

of the sun, and the reflection of the pale brown lunar surface. But he

can

see the Earth, a fat crescent, four times the size of a full moon. And

there, crossing the zenith, is a single, brilliant, unwinking star: the

orbiting Apollo CSM, with Al Pond, their Command Module pilot, waiting

take them home.

There is a kind of shimmer, like a heat haze. And the star goes out.

Just like that: it vanishes from the sky, directly over Bado's head. He

blinks, and moves his head, stiffly, thinking he might have just lost

the

Apollo in the glare.

But it is gone.

What, then? Can it have moved into the shadow of the Moon? But a little

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Stephen Baxter - Moon Six

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