Baxter, Stephen - SS - Moon Six.pdf - Stephen Baxter - przemosta

Moon Six

a novelette by

Stephen Baxter

This story first appeared in Science Fiction Age.

Foreword

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

of 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 on

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 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.

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 to 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

Baxter, Stephen - SS - Moon Six.pdf

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