"What's Alexei doing?" I asked.
"I am disconnecting airlock," he called.
"But why? What if we have to get back in the pod?"
"We are not coming back to pod. It won't be here anyway. But if we did need to reenter, is another airlock package here by outside hatch." He slapped the hull of the pod.
Alexei pushed the bubble up against the cargo hull to force as much air into the main part of the inflatable as he could, collapsing and sealing each section of the tube in turn. When the tube was folded back into itself and all three connections were secure, he turned to the hatch of the cargo pod. He reached up and down at the same time and grabbed two levers matching the ones on the inside of the pod. He yanked them sideways and the slot in the hatch ring widened, releasing its grip on the circular ring of the airlock.
Then he worked the ring loose carefully. Once it was clear, he pushed it up against the wall of the inflatable, securing it with Velcro patches. The airlock sat alone on the barren Lunar soil, a big bulbous blob of air—like a single drop of water perched on a waxy leaf. We didn't have to worry about it blowing away, of course, but the ground wasn't very level, and if it started rolling downhill, it might start bouncing, and it coiuld go quite a distance. It might even rip or puncture.
But Alexei turned around, grinning. "Who wants to hold leash? Charles? Is good job for you, da?"
"Huh?"
"We take airlock with us. You never know when you might need a roomful of air. Waste not, want not, da?"
I was beginning to hate that. I wanted to waste something, just for spite.
He bounded over to me in that peculiar Lunar hop-skip of his. He trailed a length of flat ribbon, which he slapped onto one of the Velcro pads on the outside of my bubble suit. "There. You will bring plastic house. Is everybody ready to go? Hokay, we practice Luna walk. Pay attention, dingalings. Bounce on balls of feet like this, da? Not too high. Cannot walk in bubble, have to hop-skip, have to bounce. Looks easy, da? Is not. Is tricky. Alternate feet—bounce on one, bounce on other—hop-skip. No, Charles—keep hands in gloves. Helps keep bubble upside up. See bottom side? Extra thick—heavy on bottom to keep bottom side down. Bounce on padding, less risk to rip or puncture. Hold bubble upright by keeping hands in front gloves and bounce, hop-skip—watch, now!"
He came bounding toward me. He looked like a silver beetle trapped inside a glass onion. But he made very good time, bouncing and skipping across the dark silvery dust.
"You will learn quickly. But try not to fall down. You don't want to dust your bubble."
"Why not?"
"Because then everybody will know you are clumsy dingaling. They will know you are just arrive here." He turned away to see how Douglas and Mickey were doing. "Yes, just like that," he called. They were bouncing slightly on the balls of their feet, testing their weight in the soft Lunar gravity. They moved in slow motion—almost like dancers. I thought of Tchaikovsky and the "Waltz of the Flowers." No, the other one—the "Waltz of the Snowflakes." Only these snowflakes were silvery and danced inside giant transparent Christmas tree ornaments. We must have looked very silly, but at the same time beautiful in a Lunar kind of way.
"All right, everybody ready? Let us go. Take small steps first. Get used to Lunatic-walking. Learn to walk before learning to bounce. Follow me. Holler if I go too fast." He pointed southward and went bounding off. Douglas followed, little steps first, then as he felt more comfortable, he began taking bigger hops. Mickey looked back to me. "Come on, Charles—"
I took one last look at the bright blue marble of the Earth. It was directly behind us. And then I followed. The inflatable airlock came bouncing after me like an oversize balloon.
A WALK IN THE DARK
We didn't get very far—just to the top of the first hill. And it wasn't much of a hill. Alexei made us stop so he could check our re-breathers and our air supplies again. We were all fine, but if any of us had needed personal attention, he would have taken us into the inflatable so he could open our bubbles. Even if we didn't have the inflatable with us, he could have still joined any two bubbles together at their openings. But nobody needed immediate attention, and I was glad about that.
Once that was finished, Alexei turned and faced the distant cargo pod. From here it looked pitifully small in a very large landscape. Despite the nearness of the horizon, once you gained a little height, the moon could be a very large place.
As Alexei had told us, there were no footprints leading away from the pod—just occasional soft dimples in the Lunar dust where we'd bounced along. A skilled tracker would be able to follow the trail of depressions, but only if the dust was thick enough and the shadows were right.
"Might want to shield eyes," Alexei said, and did something to his PITA.
"Huh? Why?" That was Douglas.
"Watch." He pointed.
In the distance, the cargo pod shuddered. It jerked upright—then a flare of dazzling white appeared underneath it, and the cargo pod lifted away from the gray plain.
"What are you doing, Alexei?"
"I hide the evidence." The bright flame of the pod sputtered in the sky and went out. "It will come down again, thirty or forty klicks west of here. In darkest shadow, very rough terrain, very uneven. Hard to find, harder to get to. When trackers come looking for pod, maybe they will look in wrong place first, lose valuable time, da?"
I couldn't see the pod anymore. Either the skin of the bubble was too blurry, or the pod was too dark, or the sky was too black. Without the flame, it was gone.
I wondered if we'd feel the crash, or if it would bounce down again. Either way … we were truly alone on the moon now. I shuddered—and it wasn't just from the cold seeping up through my feet.
Mickey must have seen how scared I was. He took a half skip toward me, close enough to press his bubble against mine. He grabbed my hand and gave it a quick squeeze. Then he whispered, "Are you going to be okay, Charles?"
"Yes."
"You sure?"
"This isn't like the pod. We're on solid ground. I'll be fine."
"Do you want me to stay close to you, just in case?"
"Uh—if you want to."
"I'll do that."
"Okay."
"Thank you, Charles."
"You can call me Chigger."
Behind the goggles, under the silver poncho, it was hard to see what anyone was thinking, but Mickey's sudden bright smile was clear. "Thanks, kiddo."
"Hokay," said Alexei. "We go. Everybody, on the bounce—come, we must hurry—"
"How far is it?" I asked. "How long will it take to get there? Where are we going—?"
"Thirty klicks, give or take some. Six hours, maybe. We go catch train. No more talk. Use up oxygen. Follow me, this way—"
It wasn't that hard to hop-skip across the Lunar surface. It just took a little practice to find the right rhythm. After a bit, Douglas and I were just as good as Alexei and Mickey. The four of us bounced along like a bunch of Happy Flubbies from that god-awful kid show that Stinky used to like so much. For a while, Douglas and I were even shouting, "Boinng! Boinnnnng! Ba-boing-boinnngg!" with every bounce—at least, until Mickey started singing. "It's a small world, after all..." and Alexei threatened to puncture all of us.
But it was exhilarating great fun—it was kind of like skipping and kind of like hopping and kind of like flying, but mostly like nothing I'd ever done before. The feeling of speed and power and strength—it made me feel like Superman, like there was nothing I couldn't do. I started laughing and shrieking and giggling—so hard, I couldn't stop—
That's when Alexei called the first rest break, and the first thing he did was check my oxygen balance to see if I was getting too much or too little, or what. "You are too light-headed." He looked surprised to find that my rebreather settings were all fine, even allowing for the increased exertion of bouncing.
"I'm laughing because it's fun," I said. "You remember fun, don't you?"
"We have six hours to go, little di
ngaling." He frowned. "Will you still have laughter thirty klicks from now?"
"I bet I will," I promised. "You were right—I like Luna."
"Do not get overconfident!" he snapped at me. "Overconfidence kills. You will not make very pretty corpse—and I have no intention of dragging you across Luna for burial." Alexei was suddenly very unhappy and very grumpy. None of us had ever seen him this way before. Had he heard something on his radio?
He seemed to realize it himself; he turned back to me, and spoke in a gentler tone. "Just concentrate on being safe. Is too dangerous to have fun here. Hokay, break over. Pay attention—see tall rock to left, with head sticking up into sun? We head toward notch, just to right. We stay in shadow. Let's go—on the bounce."
After that, it wasn't as much fun. After the novelty wore off, it was just something to do. But there was a lot to see—and I wished we could just stop and look at stuff sometimes. Some of the rocks glittered, and I wanted to pick them up and take them with me, but we didn't have sample bags, and the first time I stopped, Alexei yelled at me again, so I didn't do that anymore.
To say that the scenery on the moon looks different is an understatement—kind of like saying the Titanic had a rough crossing. Everything on the moon is different. But it's the kinds of differences that are surprising. There's no wind or water erosion on the moon, so all the rocks look scruffier and the ground looks harder. It's hard to explain. You have to see it in person. Even pictures don't work.
Mostly we were in shadow. To the east, the sun was lurking just beneath the edge of a long broken rill. A couple of times we had to dart through streaks of sunlight, and once in a while, if we bounced too high, the sudden sideways glare felt like a hammer blast. A couple of times, Alexei said, "Gohvno!" and once he said, "Chyort!" which sounded even worse. I assumed it was in reaction to the intensity of the sunlight, but I didn't ask. It could have been anything. His dark mood was headed toward pure black.
Every fifteen minutes we stopped to rest for five, no matter where we were—unless it was in sunlight. I didn't ask why; it wasn't too hard to figure out. Our silvery ponchos could keep us warm against the cold Lunar night and they could reflect away some of the intermittent sunlight that hit us, but they couldn't cool us off in the direct glare of the sun.
Every time we stopped, Alexei checked my rebreather, and Mickey checked Douglas's. I protested that I could look at my own numbers, but both of them cut me off at the same time. Safety demanded that everyone check everyone else's settings.
By the time of our fourth rest break, it was pretty much routine. Mickey had taught Douglas and me how to read the rebreather displays, so now all four of us were checking each other at every stop. Alexei even showed us how to share our air in an emergency. The rebreathers had tubes that could connect directly through special valves on the front of the bubble suit. If someone needed air in a hurry, you could just plug right in. But you had to make sure the connection was secure or you could explosively evacuate your rebreather. "Useful only if you want to become a self-propelled object."
So far, our oxygen use was just about what Alexei had expected. We would have enough to get where we were going—if we didn't make any wrong turns, and if we didn't have to double back to go around something.
The problem was, the ground was getting rougher. We were approaching a place where two craters overlapped; the wall of one was broken by the wall of the other. The only way to get to where we were going would be to cross some very uneven terrain. But we had to do it. We had to get out of the crater we were in and onto the plain beyond.
Alexei finally admitted he was worried. But we already knew that. The more he studied the display on his PITA, the worse his language got. I asked Mickey if he knew what Alexei was saying, but all he would translate was, "Your mother was a hamster," which didn't make any sense at all.
Mickey stayed close to Douglas; I think he was worried about Stinky, but Douglas could reach back and squeeze Stinky's arm or his leg and report, "He's still warm. He's still breathing," and that was as good as we could hope for right now.
What we really hoped was that he wouldn't wake up until we got to where we were going. The train station, or whatever it was, Alexei had picked out.
For some reason, I wasn't scared anymore. I felt like I should have been, but I wasn't. We were off the Line, off the map, very far from anywhere safe, about as alone as we could be—and I felt fine.
I wondered if other people felt this same way on Luna—alone and free at the same time. The only sound was the sound of my breathing, and the distant noises of everyone else grunting across the ground playing through my earphones. The bitter cold of the ground tried to seep through the bottom of the bubble, but the poncho kept radiating, and the air in the bubble stayed just warm enough. The light from beyond the rill was bothersome, but my goggles adjusted themselves to block the worst of it. I felt fine.
I thought about that.
I should have been worried. I should have been scared. But I wasn't. Why not?
Because I was safe with Douglas? Maybe. That was part of it, I'm sure. But maybe it was more because there wasn't anyone else around to tell me what to do or where to go or who to be. It wasn't the silence outside that was so wonderful. It was the silence inside—the freedom from all those voices that weren't mine.
It was like when I used to go up in the hills away from the tube-town, so I could listen to my music. It wasn't just the music. It was the silence.
This was such a sudden realization, I stopped in mid-bounce. Wherever we finally ended up, it had to be a place where I could have silence every day. A place where I could listen to my own thoughts.
CLIMBING THE WALL
At the sixth rest stop, Alexei made us all eat half an MRE—the red one marked high-energy pack. It was made with lots and lots of high-energy stuff—like hydrogen, kerosene, Palmer-chips, and plutonium. It tasted exactly like its list of ingredients, only not as good.
At the seventh rest stop, Alexei tied us all together with a nylon cord. There was a loop on the front and back of each bubble, and he secured the line through both loops. He put himself in the lead, me directly behind, then Douglas, then Mickey bringing up the rear. The inflatable airlock bounced along behind Mickey.
We were heading uphill now, and the slope was getting steeper and trickier, He didn't want anyone slipping and bouncing away. "If you roll downhill and get big puncture and lose all your air," he told me as he secured the cord, "I will be very unhappy. It will ruin my whole day. So I keep you close. We go slowly now. No more bouncing. Just tiny hop-steps. Very careful."
I took his warnings to heart and stayed close behind him. A couple times, I stopped to look back—to see how Douglas was doing—and each time, he yanked me forward. I got the feeling he didn't want me to see how much trouble Douglas was having, climbing up the hill with Stinky on his back. Stinky couldn't have weighed more than four kilos, five at the most. But even five kilos starts to get heavy after a couple of hours. And Douglas had to carry supplies for both of them. I didn't think he was used to this kind of sustained exertion. But he didn't have much choice in the matter. Alexei couldn't do it—obviously. And Mickey's strength was questionable because of all the time he spent out of Earth's gravity. And besides, Stinky was our responsibility, not theirs.
But even with the frequent rests, I could see that Douglas's endurance was wearing thin. And we hadn't even gone a third of the way yet.
Halfway up the slope, it stopped being a slope and became a wall. Even worse, it was a wall in sunlight.
"Oh, chyort!" I said. "Why didn't we go around?"
"This is around," said Alexei. "Is not so bad as it looks. If you are fast." He was fumbling with a tool he had hung outside his bubble. I hadn't paid much attention before, but he had several pieces of external equipment hanging off his back. The one he selected now looked like a miniature harpoon gun—because that's exactly what it was.
It had a windup spring, and it fired a dart with an un
folding plastic grapple. A long lightweight cord hung from the dart in a flimsy-looking roll. Alexei studied the wall above, then hesitated and turned back to the display on his PITA. He zoomed in on the Lunological map and grumbled at the numbers. I could see him turning them over in his head—and coming to the conclusion that we really didn't have a choice in the matter anyway, we'd come this far, we didn't have the air to go back down and try another way, so it really didn't matter after all, did it?
"Hokay," he announced. "Let's see if Alexei is as clever as he brags." He hefted the dart gun and turned on its laser sight. Because there was no atmosphere, there was no dust to highlight the beam, so he had to track the red target dot up the wall above us and dance it around his aiming point. He was aiming at a broken shelf in the shadow of a tall outcrop. Above it was the sunlit portion of the wall. The range finder said the shelf was only fifteen meters up, but it looked a lot farther.
"Is not too bad," Alexei decided. "We will do this in two steps. First stop is shelf. Map says it is wide enough for all of us, and we will still be safe in shadow. Second stop will be harder. Longer climb, all in sunlight." He began winding up the spring in the dart gun. "But this will work," he said slowly, "if everybody follows direction. So pay good attention. We use first climb for practice. Learn to climb. We go up to first shelf, all of us. We catch breath, then we go—bing, bing, bing, bing—up to top and over, back into shadow quickly. You will have to move fast, very fast. Is longer climb, so you must keep moving. No time to admire view unless you wear sunblock two million. Any question?"
We all shook our heads.
"Douglas?" That was Mickey. "Do you want me to take Bobby? We can transfer him here—"
"No. I'll take him over the top. The other side is downhill, isn't it, Alexei?"
"Yes, other side is downhill. We go back to Lunar plain. Downhill, uphill, but nothing like this. Nothing too serious."
Bouncing Off the Moon Page 8
