I stood and gaped. Uneven rolling surface, broken rocks, jagged lumpy outcrops. A rising wall of mountains off to one side. And everywhere–stark silence! We really were on the moon!
Wow!
Whatever else happened, I didn't care. Dad had kept his promise, even if he wasn't here, and I was suddenly filled with a rush of hot feelings. I wanted to thank him. He should have been here. He deserved to be here. And for a moment, I wished he werehere–I wished I had someone to share this with.
Wowwas insufficient.
This was … the moon!
Did Luna affect everyone this way?
And then I started laughing. I suddenly knew why Alexei was so crazy. I understood what it meant to be a Lunatic.
WUNDERSTORM
We must hurry." Alexei's voice was loud in my ears. It sounded like he was directly behind me; the sound in my earphones was processed to come from the same direction as the broadcast signal, the only audio cues possible on the moon. I turned around to see him sealing the inner hatch of the cargo pod. That was it, the door was shut, we weren't going back. He bounced himself across the bubble to the opposite side–to the other airlock portal.
As he began opening the first zipper, he asked, "Who goes first? Mickey, do you want honor? Or you, Charles? Do you want to be first dingaling on moon?"
"Huh? Me?" I looked around. Maybe he meant some other Charles … ?
Douglas said, "Go ahead, Chigger. If you want."
"Uh–" I was about to say no, I wanted Mickey to go first, but I didn't want to look afraid either. "Okay," I gulped. Before I could change my mind, Alexei pulled me to the outer portal; it was identical to the one we'd just come through, only still folded up tight.
"Is close fit," he said. "I walk you through it, one step at a time. No fear, da?"
" Da."
"Good. Now we open one zipper, one zipper only–like so, da?Nothing more. Not yet." Very carefully, very slowly, he unsealed the first section of the tube. As the first air puffed into it, it inflated outward. "You step into tube now, Charles. No fear, okay?"
"Okay." I stepped carefully forward. It was hard to walk while wrapped in a personal bubble–I had to bounce more than walk, but maybe I could do this, with a little practice.
Alexei pushed me into the tube. I almost filled it. "Hokay, ready? I zip you up now. Watch how I do this. I pat out as much air as possible. Waste not, want not. You want tube tight around you please." He locked the zipper into place and I was sealed in the tube.
"Now turn around and face next zipper, Charles. Unzip it just like I show you. Just like that, da.Very good."
The next section of the tube puffed out like the previous one. I stepped into it and began pulling it close to me. As I zipped up the section behind me, I tried hard to keep the plastic close and push as much air as possible back into the tube. "Very good, Charles!" Alexei's voice came mostly through the earphones now.
As soon as the second zipper was locked in place, I turned around to the third and last one. This was it.One more step and I'd be alone on the Lunar surface. For a moment, I hesitated …
"Go ahead, Chigger. You can do it." That was Douglas. I was glad he said that.
"Is good now, little dingaling. Open last zipper."
I swallowed hard. The seal was just in front of my face. All I had to do was grab it, unclick it from its safety catch, and pull it down. But it was more difficult than I thought. Sitting on my head, the monkey suddenly hugged me close. Did it understand? It patted the top of my head three times. Just like Douglas sometimes did.
Well, if even the monkey believed in me …
I pulled the zipper down–
–and my bubble puffed out around me. I was in a two‑meter balloon. My ears popped at the sudden change in pressure. The tube spit me out like a watermelon seed, and I bounced across the Lunar surface, screaming in shock–then laughing in hysterical relief. It wasfunny.
"Don't go bouncing!" Alexei and Mickey both screamed at once. "Stay where you are. Wait for us."
"I'm not doing it on purpose!" I shouted back. I turned around to look at them. I was farther away than I thought. Ten meters, at least. I could see how small the cargo pod was–and the inflatable airlock too.
That was a scary moment–not because I worried that we were in any danger, but because for the first time I was separatedfrom everything else. I was aloneon the moon.
I still had my hands in the gloves of the bubble suit. I went down on one knee and reached out to touchthe ground. Armstrong had been right–it wassoft and powdery! Strong tears of emotion started welling up in my eyes. Luna!
The monkey patted me on the head again, three more times. Just like Douglas. So it wasn't an accident.
I stood up and looked around, being careful not to face the glare from the northeastern horizon, where the sun was just creeping over the edge of a rill. It would be creeping over that rill for a long time. Sunrise on the moon was fourteen times longer than sunrise on the Earth.
More to the north, there was something large and bright and bluein the black sky. The Earth.
How beautiful it was.
Half of it was cloaked in shadow, the other half was gleaming with day. Beneath the streaks of white cloud, I could make out the eastern shoreline of Africa. That big lumpy shape was Madagascar, wasn't it? I thought about all the horrors we'd left behind; they must be raging across the planet even now. But it looked so peaceful from here–how could anything on that soft blue world be horrible? It looked so fragile. For a moment, I regretted leaving. If I'd spoken one word differently, we could have all been home by now–
Home in a cramped tube. With Mom yelling at us. And the wind whistling overhead. And the whole house vibrating like an organ pipe.
No. I wouldn't have traded this moment for anything.
The moon.
I wished I could have said something more meaningful, but it all just came out as a single syllable– wow.
I'd seen people talk about this on television–that sense of awe that you feel whenever you arrive on a new world. Ferris, the most famous astronaut of all, said it best. "It doesn't matter how many previous landings you've made. Every landing is different, and every time, you're filled with a flood of so many different emotions at once, so powerful and so profound, that the only word that comes close to describing it is wunderstorm."
Once he came to our school and he talked about the first landing on Mars. He compared it to looking at a landscape by van Gogh– Wheatfield with Crows.The first time you look at it, what you see is startling, and then it's even more startling, and then as you start to look at it closely, you realize just how startling it really is. The light is different–not wrong, different.And after a bit of puzzling, you begin to realize that this is an uncompromising vision; it isn't going to meet you halfway. You have to go all the way there or not at all. You have to surrender to it, because you can't change it. And then, only when you accept it on its own terms, can you see how beautiful it really is.