Ben Bova - Moonwar

From her perch in the driver’s seat she could see two pairs of bootprints clearly etched into the dark sandy ground. I won’t need an Indian guide to help me follow their trail, Edith told herself.

Doug followed Gordette’s boot prints, gleaming bright and new in the ancient regolith. The only sounds he heard were his own breathing and the comforting soft buzz of the suit’s air fans. He had stopped at the tractor to refill his air tank. Hunger gnawed at him but there was nothing he could do about that.

How much air does Bam have left in his suit? he wondered. How long can he roam around out here before he runs out?

Gordette’s trail seemed to meander, with no specific aim or purpose. Doug followed it around a house-sized boulder, never even thinking that Gordette could be lurking behind the rock, waiting to ambush him. He wasn’t. His boot prints skirted a worn old crater the size of a baseball diamond, and so deep that its bottom was lost in dense shadow. Meteroid must have come almost straight down to dig that one, Doug thought.

Soon, though, Gordette’s trail started to run beside a sinuous rille that snaked along the dusty ground like an arroyo in desert country. Doug remembered his first walk out on the Moon’s surface, his eighteenth birthday. With Foster Brennart. They had come across a rille that had suddenly spurted a ghostly cloud of gasses from deep within the lunar interior. Methane, ammonia, other volatiles. They had glittered in the sunlight like a billion fireflies.

Brennart thought it was a good omen, my first walk on the surface. Maybe it was, Doug thought. I could use a good omen now.

Suddenly Gordette’s boot prints ended. Disappeared. Doug stopped, puzzled. He backtracked a few steps, then saw that Gordette had climbed down into the shallow gully cut into the ground by the rille. Turning on his helmet lamp, Doug spotted faint boot marks heading along the bottom of the rille, some two meters below the surface on which he stood.

The prints still headed in the same general direction that Gordette had been following. Why’d he jump down into the rille? Doug asked himself. Was he afraid I’d follow him and he’s trying to hide his trail? The prints down inside the rille were faint, but still visible.

Staying on the surface, Doug followed the rille as it wound across the regolith. It could be dangerous down there, Doug told himself. The rilles are old fissures where gas from below ground had seeped out. The ground down there can be brittle as glass, and who knows what’s underneath it?

Edith trundled along in the tractor, trying to keep its speed down to the pace of a walking man. The trail of boot prints was easy to see, and she didn’t want Doug to know she following him. Not yet.

Once she thought she saw the curve of his helmet above the horizon, and she tromped on the tractor’s brakes. If I can’t see him, he can’t see me, she figured. And he sure can’t hear me coming after him, not out here in all this vacuum.

The nearness of the horizon bothered her. It didn’t look right. She knew, consciously, that the Moon was only a quarter of the Earth’s size and the horizon was therefore much closer than it would be on Earth. But still, at a deep, primitive level, it almost frightened her. As if there really was an edge to this barren, desolate world and she might drop off it.

Yeah, she told herself derisively, you’re right in there with Columbus’s crew. Sail on, babe. Sail on.

Doug didn’t realize he still had the suit-to-suit frequency on until he started hearing strange sounds in his earphones. Gasps? Moans? The sounds came through for a moment, then disappeared, like ghosts vanishing into thin air.

Very thin air, around here, he told himself.

The rille had been getting progressively deeper, sinking more than four meters below the crater floor, Doug guessed.

It was hard to tell, and almost impossible to see if Gordette’s boot prints were still marching along down there, even when he leaned carefully over the worn, rounded smooth edge of the rille to shine his helmet lamp on its bottom.

He came to a spot where a meteoroid had slammed into the ground just next to the rille, collapsing its side into a heap of rubble. Doug spent several minutes searching for bootprints; he found none. As far as he could see there were no prints on the other side of the narrow rille, either.

And the eerie sounds in his earphones had stopped, too.

I’ve overshot him, Doug told himself. He’s back behind me someplace. Down inside the rille. Hiding.

Slowly, bending over the edge of the rille to examine its bottom, Doug started backtracking. He couldn’t see the bottom of the arroyo, it was too deep for his helmet lamp to reach.

He stopped and listened. Nothing. Gordette had gone silent. Is he dead? Maybe what I heard was his last gasping for air.

With great reluctance, and more than a little fear, Doug carefully climbed down inside the rille, lowering himself slowly down as far as he could with his arms fully stretched, then letting himself slide the rest of the way down.

He felt the rough side wall grating against the chest of his suit. Couldn’t do this in a fabric suit, he thought. The cermet won’t tear. But he knew that grinding some dust or larger particles of grit into his suit’s joints could immobilize him as thoroughly as the Tin Woodsman caught in a monsoon rain.

Doug had never felt the panic of claustrophobia, but as he stood shakily inside the narrow rille he saw that the sky above him was nothing more now than a constricted slice of stars cut off on both sides by the steep black walls of the arroyo. Like the view from the bottom of a grave, he thought.

He took a step forward and his boot slid on the glass-smooth rock. He had to grab at both sides of the gully to keep himself from falling. Hardly any dust down here, he realized. This rille must be brand-new, maybe still active.

“New” and “active” were relative terms on the Moon, he knew. A new rille might have opened up only a few thousand years ago. Its activity might be a slight sigh of underground gas every century or so.

A cough. In his earphones Doug heard somebody cough. Couldn’t be anybody but Bam.

Slowly, moving cautiously along the slippery rock floor of the rille, both hands extended to touch its steep confining walls, Doug made his way forward.

Another cough, followed by a quick, desperate gasping.

“Bam!” he called into his helmet mike. “Bam, where are you?”

No response. Standing stock-still, Doug listened hard. Is he holding his breath? No, it’s just so faint I can hardly hear him.

Doug pushed along the slick arroyo and the sound of Gordette’s breathing grew louder. It sounded strained, labored, as if the man were in pain.

“I’m coming, Bam,” Doug called again. “I’ll be with you in a couple of minutes. Hang on.”

“Don’t…” Gordette’s voice was weak. It broke into a gasping cough.

“Save your breath. I’ll be there.”

“Careful… the ground… gives way…”

Doug scanned the ground before him in the light of his helmet lamp. It looked solid enough, glassy and slick, but solid rock. Yet he knew this volcanic vent might be no sturdier than a soap bubble.

More coughing from Gordette. He must be almost out of air, Doug realized. Got to get to him quickly.

The smooth rock floor ended abruptly, like a shattered pane of glass. Black nothingness yawned in front of Doug.

And clinging to the edge of the break like a ship-wrecked sailor desperately clutching a piece of flotsam, was the space-suited figure of Leroy Gordette.

He had one forearm hooked on the crumbling edge of the precipice, and the gloved fingers of his other hand. Doug could see the top of his helmet.