by Neil Clarke
Second: call for help. In this case, the nearest help was a quarter of a million miles over the horizon. She would need a high-gain antenna and a mountain peak with a view of Earth.
In its computer, Moonshadow had carried the best maps of the moon ever made. Gone. There had been other maps on the ship; they were scattered with the wreckage. She’d managed to find a detailed map of Mare Nubium—useless—and a small global map meant to be used as an index. It would have to do. As near as she could tell, the impact site was just over the eastern edge of Mare Smythii—”Smith’s Sea.” The mountains in the distance should mark the edge of the sea, and, with luck, have a view of Earth.
She checked her suit. At a command, the solar arrays spread out to their full extent like oversized dragonfly wings and glinted in prismatic colors as they rotated to face the sun. She verified that the suit’s systems were charging properly, and set off.
Close up, the mountain was less steep than it had looked from the crash site. In the low gravity, climbing was hardly more difficult than walking, although the two-meter dish made her balance awkward. Reaching the ridgetop, Trish was rewarded with the sight of a tiny sliver of blue on the horizon. The mountains on the far side of the valley were still in darkness. She hoisted the radio higher up on her shoulder and started across the next valley.
From the next mountain peak the Earth edged over the horizon, a blue and white marble half-hidden by black mountains. She unfolded the tripod for the antenna and carefully sighted along the feed. “Hello? This is Astronaut Mulligan from Moonshadow. Emergency. Repeat, this is an emergency. Does anybody hear me?”
She took her thumb off the TRANSMIT button and waited for a response, but heard nothing but the soft whisper of static from the sun.
“This is Astronaut Mulligan from Moonshadow. Does anybody hear me?” She paused again. ““Moonshadow, calling anybody. Moonshadow, calling anybody. This is an emergency.”
“—shadow, this is Geneva control. We read you faint but clear. Hang on up there’.’ She released her breath in a sudden gasp. She hadn’t even realized she’d been holding it.
After five minutes the rotation of the earth had taken the ground antenna out of range. In that time—after they had gotten over their surprise that there was a survivor of the Moonshadow—she learned the parameters of the problem. Her landing had been close to the sunset terminator; the very edge of the illuminated side of the moon. The moon’s rotation is slow, but inexorable. Sunset would arrive in three days. There was no shelter on the moon, no place to wait out the fourteen day-long lunar night. Her solar cells needed sunlight to keep her air fresh. Her search of the wreckage had yielded no unruptured storage tanks, no batteries, no means to lay up a store of oxygen.
And there was no way they could launch a rescue mission before nightfall.
Too many “no”s.
She sat silent, gazing across the jagged plain toward the slender blue crescent, thinking.
After a few minutes the antenna at Goldstone rotated into range, and the radio crackled to life. “Moonshadow, do you read me? Hello, Moonshadow, do you read me?”
“Moonshadow here.”
She released the transmit button and waited in long silence for her words to be carried to Earth.
“Roger, Moonshadow. We confirm the earliest window for a rescue mission is thirty days from now. Can you hold on that long?”
She made her decision and pressed the transmit button. “Astronaut Mulligan for Moonshadow. I’ll be here waiting for you. One way or another.”
She waited, but there was no answer. The receiving antenna at Goldstone couldn’t have rotated out of range so quickly. She checked the radio. When she took the cover off, she could see that the printed circuit board on the power supply had been slightly cracked from the crash, but she couldn’t see any broken leads or components clearly out of place. She banged on it with her fist—Karen’s first rule of electronics, if it doesn’t work, hit it—and reaimed the antenna, but it didn’t help. Clearly something in it had broken.
What would Karen have done? Not just sit here and die, that was certain. Get a move on, kiddo. When sunset catches you, you’ll die.
They had heard her reply. She had to believe they heard her reply and would be coming for her. All she had to do was survive.
The dish antenna would be too awkward to carry with her. She could afford nothing but the bare necessities. At sunset her air would be gone. She put down the radio and began to walk.
Mission Commander Stanley stared at the x-rays of his engine. It was four in the morning. There would be no more sleep for him that night; he was scheduled to fly to Washington at six to testify to Congress.
“Your decision, Commander,” the engine technician said. “We can’t find any flaws in the x-rays we took of the flight engines, but it could be hidden. The nominal flight profile doesn’t take the engines to a hundred twenty, so the blades should hold even if there is a flaw.”
“How long a delay if we yank the engines for inspection?”
“Assuming they’re okay, we lose a day. If not, two, maybe three.”
Commander Stanley drummed his fingers in irritation. He hated to be forced into hasty decisions. “Normal procedure would be?”
“Normally we’d want to reinspect.”
“Do it.”
He sighed. Another delay. Somewhere up there, somebody was counting on him to get there on time. If she was still alive. If the cut-off radio signal didn’t signify catastrophic failure of other systems.
If she could find a way to survive without air.
On Earth it would have been a marathon pace. On the moon it was an easy lope. After ten miles the trek fell into an easy rhythm: half a walk, half like jogging, and half bounding like a slow-motion kangaroo. Her worst enemy was boredom.
Her comrades at the academy—in part envious of the top scores that had made her the first of their class picked for a mission—had ribbed her mercilessly about flying a mission that would come within a few kilometers of the moon without landing. Now she had a chance to see more of the moon up close than anybody in history. She wondered what her classmates were thinking now. She would have a tale to tell—if only she could survive to tell it.
The warble of the low voltage warning broke her out of her reverie. She checked her running display as she started down the maintenance checklist. Elapsed EVA time, eight point three hours. System functions, nominal, except that the solar array current was way below norm. In a few moments she found the trouble: a thin layer of dust on her solar array. Not a serious problem; it could be brushed off. If she couldn’t find a pace that would avoid kicking dust on the arrays, then she would have to break every few hours to housekeep. She rechecked the array and continued on.
With the sun unmoving ahead of her and nothing but the hypnotically blue crescent of the slowly rotating Earth creeping imperceptibly off the horizon, her attention wandered. Moonshadow had been tagged as an easy mission, a low-orbit mapping flight to scout sites for the future moonbase. Moonshadow had never been intended to land, not on the moon, not anywhere.
She’d landed it anyway; she had to.
Walking west across the barren plain, Trish had nightmares of blood and falling, Sanjiv dying beside her; Theresa already dead in the lab module; the moon looming huge, spinning at a crazy angle in the viewports. Stop the spin, aim for the terminator—at low sun angles, the illumination makes it easier to see the roughness of the surface. Conserve fuel, but remember to blow the tanks an instant before you hit to avoid explosion.
That was over. Concentrate on the present. One foot in front of the other. Again. Again.
The undervoltage alarm chimed again. Dust, already?
She looked down at her navigation aid and realized with a shock that she had walked a hundred and fifty kilometers.
Time for a break anyway. She sat down on a boulder, fetched a snackpack out of her carryall, and set a timer for fifteen minutes. The airtight quick-seal on the food pack was desig
ned to mate to the matching port in the lower part of her faceplate. It would be important to keep the seal free of grit. She verified the vacuum seal twice before opening the pack into the suit, then pushed the food bar in so she could turn her head and gnaw off pieces. The bar was hard and slightly sweet.
She looked west across the gently rolling plain. The horizon looked flat, unreal; a painted backdrop barely out of reach. On the moon, it should be easy to keep up a pace of fifteen or even twenty miles an hour—counting time out for sleep, maybe ten. She could walk a long, long way.
Karen would have liked it; she’d always liked hiking in desolate areas. “Quite pretty, in its own way, isn’t it, Sis?” Trish said. “Who’d have thought there were so many shadings of grey? Plenty of uncrowded beach—too bad it’s such a long walk to the water.”
Time to move on. She continued on across terrain that was generally flat, although everywhere pocked with craters of every size. The moon is surprisingly flat; only one percent of the surface has a slope of more than fifteen degrees. The small hills she bounded over easily; the few larger ones she detoured around. In the low gravity this posed no real problem to walking. She walked on. She didn’t feel tired, but when she checked her readout and realized that she had been walking for twenty hours, she forced herself to stop.
Sleeping was a problem. The solar arrays were designed to be detached from the suit for easy servicing, but had no provision to power the life-support while detached. Eventually she found a way to stretch the short cable out far enough to allow her to prop up the array next to her so she could lie down without disconnecting the power. She would have to be careful not to roll over. That done, she found she couldn’t sleep. After a time she lapsed into a fitful doze, dreaming not of the Moonshadow as she’d expected, but of her sister, Karen, who—in the dream—wasn’t dead at all, but had only been playing a joke on her, pretending to die.
She awoke disoriented, muscles aching, then suddenly remembered where she was. The Earth was a full handspan above the horizon. She got up, yawned, and jogged west across the gunpowder-gray sandscape.
Her feet were tender where the boots rubbed. She varied her pace, changing from jogging to skipping to a kangaroo bounce. It helped some; not enough. She could feel her feet starting to blister, but knew that there was no way to take off her boots to tend, or even examine, her feet.
Karen had made her hike on blistered feet, and had had no patience with complaints or slacking off. She should have broken her boots in before the hike. In the one-sixth gee, at least the pain was bearable.
After a while her feet simply got numb.
Small craters she bounded over; larger ones she detoured around; larger ones yet she simply climbed across. West of Mare Smythii she entered a badlands and the terrain got bumpy. She had to slow down. The downhill slopes were in full sun, but the crater bottoms and valleys were still in shadow.
Her blisters broke, the pain a shrill and discordant singing in her boots. She bit her lip to keep herself from crying and continued on. Another few hundred kilometers and she was in Mare Spumans—”Sea of Froth”—and it was clear trekking again. Across Spumans, then into the north lobe of Fecundity and through to Tranquility. Somewhere around the sixth day of her trek she must have passed Tranquility Base; she carefully scanned for it on the horizon as she traveled but didn’t see anything. By her best guess she missed it by several hundred kilometers; she was already deviating toward the north, aiming for a pass just north of the crater Julius Caesar into Mare Vaporum to avoid the mountains. The ancient landing stage would have been too small to spot unless she’d almost walked right over it.
“Figures,” she said. “Come all this way, and the only tourist attraction in a hundred miles is closed. That’s the way things always seem to turn out, eh, Sis?”
There was nobody to laugh at her witticism, so after a moment she laughed at it herself.
Wake up from confused dreams to black sky and motionless sunlight, yawn, and start walking before you’re completely awake. Sip on the insipid warm water, trying not to think about what it’s recycled from. Break, cleaning your solar arrays, your life, with exquisite care. Walk. Break. Sleep again, the sun nailed to the sky in the same position it was in when you awoke. Next day do it all over. And again. And again.
The nutrition packs are low-residue, but every few days you must still squat for nature. Your life support can’t recycle solid waste, so you wait for the suit to dessicate the waste and then void the crumbly brown powder to vacuum. Your trail is marked by your powdery deposits, scarcely distinguishable from the dark lunar dust.
Walk west, ever west, racing the sun.
Earth was high in the sky; she could no longer see it without craning her neck way back. When the Earth was directly overhead she stopped and celebrated, miming the opening of an invisible bottle of champagne to toast her imaginary traveling companions. The sun was well above the horizon now. In six days of travel she had walked a quarter of the way around the moon.
She passed well south of Copernicus, to stay as far out of the impact rubble as possible without crossing mountains. The terrain was eerie, boulders as big as houses, as big as shuttle tanks. In places the footing was treacherous where the grainy regolith gave way to jumbles of rock, rays thrown out by the cataclysmic impact billions of years ago. She picked her way as best she could. She left her radio on and gave a running commentary as she moved. “Watch your step here, footing’s treacherous. Coming up on a hill; think we should climb it or detour around?”
Nobody voiced an opinion. She contemplated the rocky hill. Likely an ancient volcanic bubble, although she hadn’t realized that this region had once been active. The territory around it would be bad. From the top she’d be able to study the terrain for a ways ahead. “Okay, listen up, everybody. The climb could be tricky here, so stay close and watch where I place my feet. Don’t take chances—better slow and safe than fast and dead. Any questions?” Silence; good. “Okay, then. We’ll take a fifteen minute break when we reach the top. Follow me.”
Past the rubble of Copernicus, Oceanus Procellarum was smooth as a golf course. Trish jogged across the sand with a smooth, even glide. Karen and Dutchman seemed to always be lagging behind or running up ahead out of sight. Silly dog still followed Karen around like a puppy, even though Trish was the one who fed him and refilled his water dish every day since Karen went away to college. The way Karen wouldn’t stay close behind her annoyed Trish—Karen had promised to let her be the leader this time—but she kept her feelings to herself. Karen had called her a bratty little pest, and she was determined to show she could act like an adult. Anyway, she was the one with the map. If Karen got lost, it would serve her right.
She angled slightly north again to take advantage of the map’s promise of smooth terrain. She looked around to see if Karen was there, and was surprised to see that the Earth was a gibbous ball low down on the horizon. Of course, Karen wasn’t there. Karen had died years ago. Trish was alone in a spacesuit that itched and stank and chafed her skin nearly raw across the thighs. She should have broken it in better, but who would have expected she would want to go jogging in it?
It was unfair how she had to wear a spacesuit and Karen didn’t. Karen got to do a lot of things that she didn’t, but how come she didn’t have to wear a spacesuit? Everybody had to wear a spacesuit. It was the rule. She turned to Karen to ask. Karen laughed bitterly. “I don’t have to wear a spacesuit, my bratty little sister, because I’m dead. Squished like a bug and buried, remember?”
Oh, yes, that was right. Okay, then, if Karen was dead, then she didn’t have to wear a spacesuit. It made perfect sense for a few more kilometers, and they jogged along together in companionable silence until Trish had a sudden thought. “Hey, wait—if you’re dead, then how can you be here?”
“Because I’m not here, silly. I’m a fig-newton of your overactive imagination.”
With a shock, Trish looked over her shoulder. Karen wasn’t there. Karen had never
been there.
“I’m sorry. Please come back. Please?”
She stumbled and fell headlong, sliding in a spray of dust down the bowl of a crater. As she slid she frantically twisted to stay face-down, to keep from rolling over on the fragile solar wings on her back. When she finally slid to a stop, the silence echoing in her ears, there was a long scratch like a badly healed scar down the glass of her helmet. The double reinforced faceplate had held, fortunately, or she wouldn’t be looking at it.
She checked her suit. There were no breaks in the integrity, but the titanium strut that held out the left wing of the solar array had buckled back and nearly broken. Miraculously there had been no other damage. She pulled off the array and studied the damaged strut. She bent it back into position as best she could, and splinted the joint with a mechanical pencil tied on with two short lengths of wire. The pencil had been only extra weight anyway; it was lucky she hadn’t thought to discard it. She tested the joint gingerly. It wouldn’t take much stress, but if she didn’t bounce around too much it should hold. Time for a break anyway.
When she awoke she took stock of her situation. While she hadn’t been paying attention, the terrain had slowly turned mountainous. The next stretch would be slower going than the last bit.
“About time you woke up, sleepyhead,” said Karen. She yawned, stretched, and turned her head to look back at the line of footprints. At the end of the long trail, the Earth showed as a tiny blue dome on the horizon, not very far away at all, the single speck of color in a landscape of uniform gray. “Twelve days to walk halfway around the moon,” she said. “Not bad, kid. Not great, but not bad. You training for a marathon or something?”
Trish got up and started jogging, her feet falling into rhythm automatically as she sipped from the suit recycler, trying to wash the stale taste out of her mouth. She called out to Karen behind her without turning around. “Get a move on, we got places to go. You coming, or what?”
