Voyage Read Free Page A

to film his own egress. The camera watched him silently. He said, ‘Now I want to back up and partially close the hatch. Making sure I haven’t left the key in the ignition, and the handbrake is on …’
    ‘A particularly good thought.’
    ‘We’d walk far to find a rental car around here.’
    He was ten feet or so above the lunar surface, with the gaunt planes of the LM’s ascent stage before him, the spider-like descent stage below. ‘Okay, I’m on the top step and I can look down over the pads. It’s a simple matter to hop down from one step to the next.’
    ‘Yeah,’ Armstrong said. ‘I found it to be very comfortable, and walking is also very comfortable. Joe, you’ve got three more rungs and then a long one.’
    ‘I’m going to leave one foot up there and move both hands down to the fourth rung up …’
    It was routine, like a sim in the Peter Pan rig back at MSC. He didn’t find it hard to report his progress down the ladder to Houston.
    But once he was standing on
Eagle’s
footpad, he found words fleeing from him.
Morning on the Moon
:
    Holding onto the ladder, Muldoon turned slowly. His suit was a warm, comforting bubble around him; he heard the hum of pumps and fans in the PLSS – his backpack, the Portable Life Support System – and he felt the soft breeze of oxygen across his face.
    The LM was standing on a broad, level plain. There were craters everywhere, ranging from several yards to a thumbnail width, the low sunlight deepening their shadows. There were even tiny micrometeorite craters, zap pits, punched in the sides of the rocks littering the surface.
    There were rocks and boulders scattered about, and ridges that might have been twenty feet high – but it was hard to judge distance, because there were no plants, no buildings, no people to give him any sense of scale: it was more barren than the high desert of the Mojave, with not even the haze of an atmosphere, so that rocks at the horizon were just as sharp as those near his feet.
    Muldoon was overwhelmed. The sims – even his previous spaceflight in Earth orbit on Gemini – hadn’t prepared him for the strangeness of this place, the jewel-like clarity about the airless view, with its sharp contrast between the darkness of the sky and the lunar plain beneath, jumbled with rocks and craters.
    Holding the ladder with both hands, Muldoon swung his feet off the pad and onto the Moon.
    It was like walking on snow.
    There was a firm footing beneath a soft, resilient layer a few inches thick. Every time he took a step a little spray of dust particles sailed off along perfect parabolae, like tiny golf balls. He understood how this had implications for the geology: no atmospheric winnowing here, no gravitational sorting.
    In some of the smaller zap craters he saw small, shining fragments, with a metallic sheen. Like bits of mercury on a bench. And here and there he saw transparent crystals lying on the surface, like fragments of glass. He wished he had a sample collector. He would have to remember to come back for these glass beads, during the documented sampling later.
    His footprints were miraculously sharp, as if he’d placed hisridged overshoes in fine, damp sand. He took a photograph of one particularly well-defined print; it would persist here for millions of years, he realized, like the fossilized 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.
    Muldoon’s job now was to check his balance and stability. He did turns and leaps like a dancer. The pull of this little world was so gentle that he couldn’t tell when he stood upright, and the inertia of the PLSS at his back was a disconcerting drag at his changes of motion.
    ‘… Very powdery surface,’ he reported back to Houston. ‘My boot tends to slide over it easily … You have to be careful about where your center of mass is. It takes two or three paces to bring you to a smooth stop.