by Maggie Allen
Doran rolled his eyes.
“Someday you may find yourself on the surface without a functioning field radio,” his teacher continued. “With no access to the Luna Positioning System, or LPS, how will you find your way home? Use a compass?”
They all laughed. The first thing colonists threw away when they got to the moon was their compass. The moon had no magnetic north pole. A compass on the moon pointed toward Earth, or to the closest magnetic source, like a motor. No help at all.
“I’ve been all over this mare since I learned to walk.” Doran kept checking p-suits. “And my radio’s never let me down.”
“Your father’s been lenient with you. Allowed you to take chances.”
“I think my father’s as careful as anyone, sir. Maybe more so, he...” Doran paused – no need to tell Mr. Jaqobi about that. “He’d never send me into danger. He knows how failsafe a field radio is, that’s all.”
“And he’s confident of his own ability to find you. He’s a fine navigator, with or without LPS, but he may not always be able to help you. Anyway, we’ve blocked radio reception for all of you, including LPS, until 1800 hours, plus the time it takes to drop each of you off.”
The emigreens all groaned as a lorry, a small open bus with balloon tires for driving in the soft moon dust, rolled up.
“We’ll set you off at different coordinates around the mare, but at the same distance from the school. To keep you from seeing where we go, the driver and I will affix blast shields over your visors before we leave and remove them as we set you off.”
He handed out a laminated paper. “This is a hand-drawn map of the mare with just the school and your drop-off position marked. But you won’t know which way to travel to get back here unless you know how to spot Earth in the full lunar sky and determine your orientation based on Earth’s position. In other words, you’ll have to find where north is.” He caught Doran’s eye.
“No problem, sir,” Doran said, looking confident.
“I hope not... for all of you. Everyone who gets back here before 1400 hours, plus your drop-off time, gets the highest mark, a 4. If you’ve studied, that should be easy. One point will be taken off for every hour, or portion of an hour, after that. Arrive here at 1601 hours, plus drop-off time, and you get 2 points. If you’re not back here at 1800 hours, plus drop-off, your points are zero. At that time the exercise is over and we’ll unblock your field radio and LPS. You can then contact us and find your way back, or request help.”
“What if we n-need help in a hurry?” Nedidi asked.
“The emergency frequency on your radio has not been turned off. If you have a serious problem, hit the panic button, and we’ll come get you. Just make sure it’s a genuine emergency, or you’ll get minus five instead of zero. You’re pretty safe, no matter what.”
“Pretty safe?”
“Most of you might think this exercise is too tough. But the moon is tough, and you’re going to live on it for the rest of your lives. We’re just trying to make sure those are long lives. Any questions?” He glanced around. “Safety Officer, have you finished your inspections?”
Doran slapped the last classmate’s air tank. “Check.”
“All right. Let’s go.”
Somewhere out on the mare Doran stood alone in full lunar, watching the lorry drive away.
Checking his heads-up display, he noted the drop-off time at thirty minutes past the hour. That meant he had to be back at school before 1430 in order to get the highest marks.
He stared at the plastic encased printout his teacher had just handed him. As promised, the map only showed his and the school’s relative positions and an arrow pointing north. Now he just needed to find which way north was and point the arrow at it, then he’d know which direction to head.
He imagined all the other students doing the same. Nedidi and Stan, who’d left the lorry separately before him, had no doubt figured it out already. He tucked the map into a suit flap and with an external joystick positioned the circular filter to cover the sun. This he knew how to do without reading the chapter. He locked it in, and the disk automatically blocked the sun no matter which way he turned.
Remembering Mr. Jaqobi’s instructions, he spotted the Earth in the black sky. In the brightness of the lunar noon he could see no other planets or stars. Now, what had his teacher said about knowing the position of Earth to determine north? The mother planet hung stationary in the sky as always, wavering only infinitesimally during the lunar month of 28.53 days. But that didn’t help Doran. He hadn’t had time to read the chapter that explained how the Earth’s position would help him find north.
Finally, he threw up his hands. “It’s no use!” Then he grinned. “But lucky for me, I don’t need to know.”
Doran’s dad, an engineer, had enabled his son’s field radio to home into a beacon at the family complex. Only Doran had this function. That’s why his dad never worried about him. His boy could just press a button and follow the signal home.
Doran activated the homing button, but after a brief moment of hissing his dad’s voice said, “Hi son. Sorry, but Mr. Jaqobi convinced me this exercise is important to your future safety. You have to learn to fend for yourself. I’ve deactivated the homing beacon. Now, observe the Earth and find your way back. I know you can do it.”
Inside his helmet, Doran’s mouth hung open. He closed it. “Dad? Then you should have let me study instead of keeping me out with that ice defroster half the night. Dad?” Then he realized his dad had prerecorded the message. “Burn-out! Now what am I going to do?”
He’d fail this test and be the big joke for the next week, or month. The first Lunarian can’t find his way home, they’d tease.
But wait, he’d been all over this mare for most of his life. He must recognize something.
The sun, plumb overhead, blazed down and he became aware of the whine and hiss of his suit’s water-cooling and ventilation system. If he ran out of power out here, he could fry. He scanned the horizon, circling on his feet. Nothing. He jumped as high as he could, almost two meters.
Nothing looked familiar. The mare’s surface was basically a plain with low mounds, rocks and small craters. Two people walking in opposite directions could pass within ten meters of each other and never know it.
The mare bore countless marks of all the folks who’d tramped and driven on it for decades. Without wind to erode them, they all looked the same. He couldn’t tell the tracks of his drop-off lorry from those made by the first lorry ever driven here.
Wait! Hadn’t he read something about using rock shadows to find your direction? Yeah, the sun rose in the east and set in the west, so any shadow would reveal north. He found a big rock, but it had no shadow. Space dust! It was full lunar. The sun shone down from high noon of the roughly two week lunar day. No shadows.
For the first time in his life Doran felt lost.
In desperation Doran picked a direction and started to shuffle, hoping to spot something he knew. But after an hour or so he stopped. Nothing. He might even be heading away from school. Better to stay put until 1830 hours when they’d contact him. Maybe he should go back to his starting position. It’d be less embarrassing than being farther from school.
Instead he headed for a flattened cone nearby. At least he could relax for a minute. He sat. And the cone caved in.
Moon gravity is one sixth of Earth’s, but the weight of his pressure suit made up for some of that. He straightened, holding his feet down. Obviously he’d fallen into a lava tube that might be anything from a few meters to a hundred meters deep. His descent rate would increase as he fell. In the pitch dark he couldn’t see the floor.
Doran positioned his arms to keep himself in an upright position and prepared to crash. Sweat ran down his face despite the cool/vent system. His suit could take a moderate beating, but things could go wrong, above all if he landed on his back, on the suit’s air tank. He’d prefer a belly flop, but feet first beat everything.
Doran’s fea
r of death ended when he hit bottom after a short drop. Landing on his feet, he bent at the knees to take up some of the impact. He ran a complete diagnostic and found no integrity breaches or software glitches. He took a deep breath and switched on his helmet lamp.
The lava tube lit up. As he suspected, no one had engineered this one. The walls and ceiling appeared uneven, but the floor was somewhat flat. About ten meters above he could see the opening he’d fallen through. Lucky.
The mound he’d sat on up there must have been a hornito, an opening in the roof of a lava tube. They formed back when the magma flowed and high pressure forced lava to ooze and spatter out onto the surface, forming a cone. Hornitos can be up to ten meters high. This one had never reached that size and must have been naturally thin on top.
He’d forgotten to watch out for that.
His spirits dropped. No way he could jump that high or make a mound tall enough to get out. His emergency signal could not send through solid rock. Neither Mr. Jaqobi nor even Doran’s father could find him down here. He’d moved away from his starting position, and all the other tracks up on the mare hid his footprints. The odds of finding him: one in a million, or less.
Not reading that chapter had endangered his life. Doran rechecked his CO2 scrubbers and oxygen level. The readouts showed about twelve hours of breathable air left. Water? More than he’d drink in that time. But he wouldn’t be drinking, or doing anything else after his oxy ran out.
He must find his way out of this lava tube. Right! Only two choices remained for him: go down this way, or that way. One direction would head uphill and open onto the surface, or be blocked by a cave-in, or get low enough to clamber out. The other would lead him deeper into the moon and certain death.
But which way?
He had to pick one. As far as his helmet lamp could reach, a hundred meters or so, they seemed equally promising. Or disappointing. With no possible reason to do so, Doran picked a direction and shuffled that way.
For the first kilometer he observed no difference, but he got the impression of going downhill – the wrong way. Luckily, the moon’s core was now smaller and cooler. No lava flows.
Doran still felt he was headed downhill. He considered turning around when he spied something on the floor ahead, at the limit of his light. He continued, and the object grew to a small heap. As he got closer, it revealed itself as a pressure suit. Someone else must’ve fallen down here. Maybe one of his classmates!
Doran hurried the last few meters, sank to his knees and turned the figure over. Through the helmet’s view plate, a shriveled older man’s face peered out. Due to the freezing temperature down here, the bacteria in his body took ages to decompose him. But in vacuum, all the moisture in his body had evaporated almost at once, leaving him mummified. Judging by the bulkier design of the moon suit – Doran had seen this type in the Hardware Museum – this guy had died more than a decade ago.
Doran turned his gaze to the ceiling. Almost a hundred meters above he saw a small light in the dark ceiling. A hornito, just like the one he’d fallen in. No one could make that fall uninjured, even in the moon’s low-grav. This poor old HomSap no doubt broke his back.
The height of the ceiling indicated Doran might be headed the wrong way. Had he gone deeper into the moon?
Every pressure suit sported at least one pouch for storing things. Doran emptied this man’s contents. He found some papers and a good topographical map with some handwritten marks on it. The map would prove handy if he ever got out of this tube, so he placed it in his own pouch.
He riffled through the papers. One displayed a picture of the dead man with his name, Alexsi Golaenski.
Wow. That old miner who went off prospecting 14 years ago, the year of Doran’s birth, and never came back. Wait until he told everyone! He froze. If I ever see them again – I could end up like old Alexsi here.
He inspected Alexsi’s suit in case he carried anything else of value but found nothing. The old miner’s air tanks rang empty when he tapped them. Then he searched the tube floor around him. In front of his suit, Alexsi had scratched an arrow in the dust. It pointed the same direction Doran was heading.
How could that be right? Wasn’t it downhill that way? But with no air, water or solar wind to disturb it, the arrow stood out firm and clear. Alexsi had drawn that arrow to help anyone else who got trapped down here – his last act of humanity. Doran stared at the strong, determined face in the helmet. The face of a man with confidence in what he did, always. This accident put an end to his life, but he had left a final message of hope to anyone who needed it.
Doran felt a bond with the old miner. They’d both made the same mistake, but one ended up dead, while the arrow he drew might save the other. Doran made up his mind. He trusted this old man.
“Alexsi, old friend, you may have saved my life, and I’m going to try to return the favor.” He stripped off the miner’s empty air tanks, radio, and other unnecessary equipment. Then he lifted Alexsi and got him into a fireman’s carry. The burden was not so bad, the lightened suit and the old miner together weighed no more than fifteen kilos. Doran glanced down at the arrow one more time, and then he headed the way it pointed.
For a few kilometers it still felt like he was going downhill, but then the tube seemed to rise and widen. In less than an hour Doran spotted a light in the distance. Ten minutes later he emerged from the tunnel into the harsh daylight of the full lunar.
He eased Alexsi to the ground and jumped for joy. “We made it out.” He patted the old helmet. “Way to go, HomSap!”
It would have been easier without the man, but to prepare for his freshman year at MIT on Earth in three years, Doran had been exercising with weights and using a centrifuge. An extra fifteen kilograms had made only a small difference so far, and the old miner deserved to go home. He’d paid for the ride by showing Doran the correct way out of the tube.
After admiring the view for a minute, Doran realized his situation remained critical. He could use the emergency radio frequency, but that meant admitting to being lost – something he didn’t want to do. He’d never hear the last of it. He still didn’t know his position or how to find Luna City. But maybe Alexsi did.
He got out the miner’s topographical map. The marks he’d made showed the route from L-City to the hornito he’d fallen into. They just needed to find that hornito, orient themselves, and then follow the map home.
Doran checked his readouts. The time showed 1433 hours. So, he’d already lost a test point, but who cared? He was bringing the old miner home. He heaved Alexsi back up, climbed to the top of the lava tube’s low mound and faced the way they’d come, but this time on the surface.
In the distance he made out the distinctive shape of a hornito. Not the right one, but he could follow the trail of hornitos back to the one had Alexsi fallen into. They only formed on top of a lava tube.
He shifted the miner to a more comfortable position. “Let’s go, buddy.”
In the tube they’d walked for an hour and thirty-some minutes before coming to the opening. He set a timer for that and shuffled toward the hornito in the distance. The horizon on the moon’s flat mare was about two and a half kilometers away, so more hornitos hove into view as he shuffled, helping him to backtrack the journey they’d made in the tube.
Just after his alarm went off, he spotted Alexsi’s collapsed hornito, but he didn’t want to go anywhere near it. The ground around it could be weak.
He eased Alexsi to the ground and looked around. To his left lay a sizable crater. Oval in shape, it boasted a tail of ejecta, darker soil from deeper in the moon. It had blown off to the right side, meaning the meteor that formed the crater had come in at an angle. He checked the map--a printed satellite photo--and found Alexsi’s last position mark next to the same crater. He must have made that mark minutes before he fell.
Doran positioned himself and the map to match the direction of the crater’s ejecta shadow and everything locked into place. North was that way!
He turned to face L-City, knelt, and drew an arrow in the sand and a big L-City for anyone else who might get lost out here. Hoisting Alexsi up, he started shuffling towards his school. He held the map in one hand so he could check it, marking off in his mind the prominent features he passed and making fine corrections to his course.
By 1700 hours, sweat was pouring from his body. In the direct sunlight his cooling and venting system had to work overtime. The weight of Alexsi around his shoulders now bore him down, but he kept going.
Six minutes later, the highest domes of Luna City hove into view as Doran came close to collapsing. The long trek with Alexsi’s extra weight had taken its toll, but he still refused to abandon the old miner. This close to L-City others could retrieve the body with no problem, but Doran wanted to be the one who brought him home.
“Almost home,” he murmured. “We’re going to make it, Alexsi.”
At 1845 hours Doran stood hunched in front of the school. It appeared deserted. He almost dropped the miner to the ground as he bent over to catch his breath.
In a few moments he straightened. “Hey, some reception, huh?” His voice rattled. “And after you’ve been gone for so long, Alexsi.”
But wait, someone peered out of the school’s window. Nedidi? Yes! Doran flashed him an OK sign, lifted Alexsi over his aching shoulders again, stumbled toward the Mark V Air Beam Hatch and cycled through.
Inside, all his classmates, some crying, tried to hug him. But Nedidi and Stan held them back as Doran dragged himself to a nearby table and laid Alexsi on it. Only then did Doran unlock and remove his helmet. A rush of fresh air and welcoming voices hit him.
“What’s wrong with you guys? Why are you all so happy to see me?”
Above the general roar of the class, Stan leaned in. “We thought we’d never see you again.”
“We knew you hadn’t studied. We thought you were lost or dead.” Nedidi wiped his nose. “It’s dangerous out there.”
