Stephen Baxter: Voyage

Holding on to 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 on the Moon, 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 his ridged overshoes in fine, damp sand. He took a photograph of one particularly well-defined print; it would persist there 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 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. And to change direction you have to step out to the side and cut back a little bit. Like a football player. Moving your arms around doesn’t lift your feet off the surface. We’re not quite that light-footed…”

There was a pressure in his kidneys. He stood still and let go, into the urine collection condom; it was like wetting his pants. Well, Neil might have been the first man to walk on the Moon. But I’m the first to take a leak here.

He looked up. A star was climbing out of the eastern sky, unblinking, hauling its way toward the zenith, directly over his head. It was Apollo, waiting in orbit to take him home.

Armstrong peeled away silver plastic and read out the inscription on the plaque on the LM’s front leg. “First, there’s the two hemispheres of the Earth. Underneath it says, ‘Here Man from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.’ It has the crew members’ signatures and the signature of the President of the United States.”

They unfurled the Stars and Stripes. The flag had been stiffened with wire so it would fly there, without any wind.

The two of them tried to plant the pole in the dust. But as hard as they pushed, the flagpole would only go six or eight inches into the ground, and Muldoon worried that the flag would fall over in front of the huge TV audience.

At last they got the pole steady and backed away.

Muldoon set off on some more locomotion experiments.

He tried a slow-motion jog. His steps took him so high that time seemed to slow during each step. On Earth he would descend sixteen feet in the first second of a fall; on the Moon, he would fall only two. So he was suspended in each mid-stride, waiting to come down.

He started to evolve a better way of moving. He bent, and rocked from side to side as he ran. It was more of a lope than a run: push with one foot, shift your weight, land on the other.

He was breathing hard; he heard the hiss of water through the suit’s cooling system, the pipes that curled around his limbs and chest.

He felt buoyant, young. A line from an old novel floated into his mind: We are out of Mother Earth’s leading-strings now…

The capcom’s voice startled him.

“Tranquillity Base, this is Houston. Could we get both of you on the camera for a minute, please?”

Muldoon stumbled to a halt.

Armstrong had been erecting a panel of aluminum foil that he unrolled from a tube; the experiment was designed to trap particles emanating from the sun. “Say again, Houston.”

“Rog. We’d like to get both of you in the field of view of the camera for a minute. Neil and Joe, the President of the United States is in his office now and would like to say a few words to you.”

The President? Goddamn it, I bet Neil knew about this.

He heard Armstrong say formally: “That would be an honor.”

“Go ahead, Mr. President. This is Houston. Over.”

Muldoon floated over to Armstrong and faced the TV camera.

Hello, Neil and Joe. I’m talking to you by telephone from the Oval Office at the White House. And this certainly has to be the most historic phone call ever made. I just can’t tell you how proud we all are of what you have achieved. For every American, this has to be the proudest moment of our lives, and for all people all over the world, I am sure they, too, join with Americans in recognizing what a feat this is. Because of what you have done, the heavens have become part of man’s world…

What Muldoon mostly felt as Nixon rambled on, in his oddly unstructured way, was impatience. He and Armstrong had little enough time there as it was — no more than two and a half hours for their single moonwalk — and every second had been choreographed, in the endless sims back in Houston, and detailed in the little spiral-bound checklists fixed to their cuffs. Nixon’s speech hadn’t been rehearsed in the simulations, though, and Muldoon felt a mounting anxiety as he thought ahead over the tasks they still had to complete. They would have to skip something. He could see them returning to Earth with fewer samples than had been anticipated, and maybe they would have to skip documenting them, and just grab what they could… The scientists wouldn’t be pleased.

He would like to have gotten a sample of one of those glittering fragments in the crater bottoms, or one of the crystals. There just wouldn’t be time.

Muldoon didn’t really care about the science, if truth be told. But he felt a gnawing anxiety about completing the checklist. Getting through your checklist was the way to get on another flight.

With these thoughts, some of the lightness he’d enjoyed earlier began to dissipate.

…For one priceless moment, in the whole history of man, all the people on this Earth are one. One in their pride in what you have done, and one in our prayers that you will return safely to Earth.