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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 realizes, 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 a squat, three-legged frame, like a broken-off piece of an 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
of 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 to 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 thought knocks out that one:
the geometry, of sun and Moon and spacecraft, is all wrong.
And anyhow, what was that heat haze shimmer? You don't get heat haze where there's no air.
He lowers his head. 'Hey, Slade. You see that?'
But Slade isn't anywhere to be seen, either; the slope where he's been standing is smooth, empty.
Bado feels his heart hammer.
He lets go of the tool carrier it drifts down to the dust, spilling rocks and he lopes forward. 'Come
on, Slade. Where the hell are you?'
Slade is famous for gotchas; he is planning a few that Bado knows about, and probably some he doesn't,
for later in the mission. But it is hard to see how he's pulled this one off. There is nowhere to hide, damn
it.
He gets to where he thinks Slade was last standing. There is no sign of Slade. And there aren't even any
footsteps, he realizes now. The only marks under his feet are those made by his own boots, leading off a
few yards away, to the north.
And they start out of nothing, it seems, like Man Friday steps in the crisp virgin Moon-snow. As if he's
stepped out of nowhere onto the regolith.
When he looks back to the east, he can't see the LM either.
'Slade, this isn't funny, damn it.' He starts to bound, hastily, back in the direction of the LM. His clumsy
steps send up parabolic sprays of dust over unmarked regolith.
He feels his breath getting shallow. It isn't a good idea to panic. He tells himself that maybe the LM is
hidden behind some low ridge. Distances are deceptive here, in this airless sharpness.
'Houston, Bado. I gets some kind of situation here.' There isn't a reply immediately; he imagines his radio
signal crawling across the light-seconds' gulf to Earth. 'I'm out of contact with Slade. Maybe he's fallen
somewhere, out of sight. And I don't seem to be able to see the LM. And '
And someone's wiped over our footsteps, while I wasn't looking.
Nobody is replying, he realizes.
That stops him short. Dust falls over his feet. On the surface of the Moon, nothing is moving.
He looks up at the crescent Earth. 'Ah, Houston, this is Bado. Houston. John, come in, capcom.'
Just silence, static in his headset.
He starts moving to the east again, breathing hard, the sweat pooling at his neck.
He rented an apartment.
He got himself a better job in a radio store. In the Air Force, before joining NASA, he'd
specialized in electronics. He'd been apprehensive that he might not be able to find his way around
the gear here, but he found it simple almost crude, compared to what he'd been used to. They
had transistors here, but they still used big chunky valves and paper capacitors. It was like being
back in the early '60s. Radios were popular, but there were few TVs: small black and white
gadgets, the reception lousy.
He began watching the TV news and reading the newspapers, trying to figure out what kind of
world he'd been dropped in.
The weather forecasts were lousy.
And foreign news reports, even on the TV, were sent by wire, like they'd been when he was a kid,
and were often a day or two out of date.
The Vietnam war was unfolding. But there'd been none of the protests against the war, here, that
he'd seen back at home. There were no live TV pictures, no colour satellite images of soldiers in
the mud and the rain, napalming civilians. Nobody knew what was happening out there. The
reaction to the war was more like what he remembered of World War Two.
There really was no space programme. Not just the manned stuff had gone: there were no
weather satellites, communication satellites. Sputnik, Explorer and all the rest just hadn't
happened. The Moon was just a light in the sky that nobody cared about, like when he was a kid.
It was brighter, though, because of that big patch of highland where Imbrium should have been.
On the other hand, there were no ICBMs, as far as he could tell.
His mouth is bone-dry from the pure oxygen. He is breathing hard; he hears the hiss of water through the
suit's cooling system, the pipes that curl around his limbs and chest.
There is a rational explanation for this. There has to be. Like, if he's got out of line of sight with the LM,
somehow, he's invisible to the LM's radio relay, the Lunar Communications Relay Unit. He is linked to
that by VHF, and then by S-band to the Earth.
Yeah, that has to be it. As soon as he gets back in line of sight of the LM, he can get in touch with home.
And maybe with Slade.
But he can't figure how he can have gotten out of the LM's line of sight in the first place. And what about
the vanished footsteps?
He tries not to think about it. He just concentrates on loping forward, back to the LM.
In a few minutes, he is back in Taylor Crater.
There is no LM. The regolith here is undisturbed.
Bado bounces across the virgin surface, scuffing it up.
Can he be in the wrong place? The lunar surface does have a tendency to look the same everywhere...
Hell, no. He can see he is right in the middle of Taylor; he recognizes the shapes of the hills. There can't
be any doubt.
What, then? Can Slade have somehow gotten back to the LM, taken off without him? [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]