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 realises 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 got 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 realises.
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 specialised 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 could 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 recognises 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?
But how can Bado not have seen him, seen the boxy LM ascent stage lift up into the sky? And besides, the regolith would be marked by the ascent stage’s blast.
And, he realises dimly, there would, of course, be an abandoned descent platform here, and bits of kit. And their footsteps. His thoughts are sluggish, his realisation coming slowly. Symptoms of shock, maybe.
The fact is that save for his own footfalls, the regolith is as unmarked as if he’s been dropped out of the sky.
And meanwhile, nobody in Houston is talking to him.
He is ashamed to find he is crying, mumbling, tears rolling down his face inside his helmet.
He starts to walk back west again. Following his own footsteps—the single line he made coming back to find the LM—he works his way out of Taylor, and back to the rim of Wildwood.
Hell, he doesn’t have any other place to go.
As he walks he keeps calling, for Slade, for Houston, but there is only static. He knows his signal can’t reach Earth anyway, not without the LM’s big S-band booster.
At Wildwood’s rim there is nothing but the footfalls he left earlier. He looks down into Wildwood, and there sits the Surveyor, glistening like some aluminium toy, unperturbed.
He finds his dropped carrier, with the spilled tools and bagged rocks. He bends sideways and scoops up the stuff, loading it back into the carrier.
Bado walks down into Wildwood, spraying lunar dust ahead of him.
He examines the Surveyor. Its solar cell array is stuck out on a boom above him, maybe ten feet over the regolith. The craft bristles with fuel tanks, batteries, antennae and sensors. He can see the craft’s mechanical claw where it has scraped into the lunar regolith. And he can see how the craft’s white paint has turned tan, maybe from exposure to the sunlight. There are splashes of dust under the vernier rocket nozzles; the Surveyor is designed to land hard, and the three pads have left a firm imprint in the surface.