Other Worlds Than These Read online

  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 lef
t a firm imprint in the surface.

  He gets hold of a landing leg and shakes the Surveyor. “Okay,” he calls up. “I’m jiggling it. It’s planted here.” There was a fear that the Surveyor might tip over onto the astronauts when they try to work with it. That evidently isn’t going to happen. Bado takes a pair of cutting shears from his carrier, gets hold of the Surveyor’s TV camera, and starts to chop through the camera’s support struts and cables. “Just a couple more tubes,” he says. “Then that baby’s mine.”

  He’ll finish up his Moonwalk, he figures, according to the timeline in the spiral-bound checklist on his cuff. He’ll keep on reporting his observations, in case anyone is listening. And then—

  And then, when he gets to the end of the walk, he’ll figure out what to do next. Later there will be another boundary, when his PLSS’s consumables expire. He’ll deal with those things when they come. For now, he is going to work.

  The camera comes loose, and he grips it in his gloves. “Got it! It’s ours!”

  He drops the camera in his carrier, breathing hard. His mouth is dry as sand; he’d give an awful lot for an ice-cool glass of water, right here and now.

  There is a shimmer, like heat haze, crossing between him and the Surveyor. Just like before.

  He tilts back and looks up. There is old Earth, the fat crescent. And a star, bright and unwavering, is crossing the black sky, directly over his head.

  It has to be the Apollo CSM.

  He drops the carrier to the dirt and starts jumping up and down, in great big lunar hops, and he waves, as if he is trying to attract a passing aircraft. “Hey, Al! Al Pond! Can you hear me?” Even without the LM, Pond, in the CSM, might be able to pick him up.

  His mood changes to something resembling elation. He doesn’t know where the hell Apollo has been, but if it is back, maybe soon so will be the LM, and Slade, and everything. That will suit Bado, right down to the lunar ground he is standing on. He’ll be content to have it all back the way it had been, the way it is supposed to be, and figure out what has happened to him later.

  “Al! It’s me, Bado! Can you hear me? Can you...”

  There is something wrong.

  That light isn’t staying steady. It is getting brighter, and it is drifting off its straight line, coming down over his head.

  It isn’t the CSM, in orbit. It is some kind of boxy craft, much smaller than a LM, descending towards him, gleaming in the sunlight.

  He picks up his carrier and holds it close to his chest, and he stays close to the Surveyor. As the craft approaches he feels an unreasoning fear.

  His kidneys send him a stab of distress. He stands still and lets go, into the urine collection condom. He feels shamed; it is like wetting his pants.

  The craft is just a box, on four spindly landing legs. It is coming down vertically, standing on a central rocket. He can see no light from the rocket, of course, but he can see how the downward blast is starting to kick up some dust. It is going to land maybe fifty yards from the Surveyor, right in the middle of Wildwood Crater. The whole thing is made of some silvery metal, maybe aluminium. It has a little control panel, set at the front, and there is someone at the controls. It looks like a man—an astronaut, in fact—his face hidden behind a gold-tinted visor.

  Bado can see the blue of a NASA logo, and a dust-coated Stars and Stripes, painted on the side of the craft.

  Maybe fifty feet above the ground the rocket cuts out, and the craft begins to drop. The sprays of dust settle back neatly to the lunar soil. Now little vernier rockets, stuck to the side of the open compartment, cut in to slow the fall, kicking up their own little sprays.

  It is all happening in complete silence.

  The craft hits the ground with a solid thump. Bado can see the pilot, the astronaut, flick a few switches, and then he turns and jumps the couple of feet down off the little platform to the ground.

  The astronaut comes giraffe-loping across the sunlit surface towards Bado.

  He stops, a few feet from Bado, and stands there, slightly stooped forward, balancing the weight of his PLSS.

  His suit looks pretty much a standard EMU, an Apollo Extravehicular Mobility Unit. There is the usual gleaming white oversuit—the thermal micrometeorite garment—with the lower legs and overshoes scuffed and stained with Tycho dust. Bado can see the PLSS oxygen and water inlets on the chest cover, and penlight and utility pockets on arms and legs. And there is Old Glory stitched to the left arm.

  But Bado doesn’t recognise the name stitched over the breast. WILLIAMS. There is no astronaut of that name in the corps, back in Houston.

  Bado’s headset crackles to life, startling him.

  “I heard you, when the LFU came over the horizon. As soon as I got in line of sight. I could hear you talking, describing what you were doing. And when I looked down, there you are.”

  Bado is astonished. It is a woman’s voice. This Williams is a goddamn woman.

  Bado can’t think of a thing to say.

  He didn’t find it hard to find himself a place in the community here, to gather a fake ID around himself. Computers were pretty primitive, and there was little cross-checking of records.

  Maybe, back home, the development of computers had been forced by the Apollo project, he speculated.

  He couldn’t see any way he was going to get home. He was stuck here. But he sure as hell didn’t want to spend his life tuning crummy 1960s-design radios.

  He tinkered with the Surveyor camera he’d retrieved from the Moon. It was a much more lightweight design than anything available here, as far as he could tell. But the manufacturing techniques required weren’t much beyond what was available here.

  He started to take camera components to electronic engineering companies.

  He took apart his lunar suit. In all this world there was nothing like the suit’s miniaturised telemetry system. He was able to adapt it to be used to transmit EKG data from ambulances to hospital emergency rooms. He sent samples of the Beta-cloth outer coverall to a fibreglass company, and showed them how the stuff could be used for fire hoses. Other samples went to military suppliers to help them put together better insulated blankets. The scratch-proof lens of the Surveyor camera went to an optical company, to manufacture better safety goggles and other gear. The miniature, high-performance motors driving the pumps and fans of his PLSS found a dozen applications.

  He was careful to patent everything he “developed” from his lunar equipment.

  Pretty soon, the money started rolling in.

  “Maybe I’m dreaming this,” Williams says. “Dehydration, or something... Uh, I guess I’m pleased to meet you.”

  She has a Tennessee accent, he thinks.

  Bado shakes the hand. He can feel it through his own stiff pressure glove. “I guess you’re too solid for a ghost.”

  “Ditto,” she says. “Besides, I’ve never met a ghost yet who uses VHF frequencies.”

  He releases her hand.

  “I don’t know how the hell you got here,” she says. “And I guess you don’t understand this any better than I do.”

  “That’s for sure.”

  She dips her visored head. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

  He holds up the carrier. “Sampling the Surveyor. I took off its TV camera.”

  “Oh. You couldn’t get it, though.”

  “Sure. Here it is.”

  She turns to the Surveyor. “Look over there.”

  The Surveyor is whole again, its TV camera firmly mounted to its struts.

  But when he looks down at his carrier, there is the TV camera he’s cut away, lying there, decapitated.

  “Where’s your LM?” she asks.

  “Taylor Crater.”

  “Where?”

  He describes the crater’s location.

  “Oh. Okay. We’re calling that one San Jacinto. Ah, no, your LM isn’t there.”

  “I know. I walked back. The crater’s empty.”

  “No, it isn’t,” she says, but there is a
trace of alarm in her voice. “That’s where my LM is. With my partner, and the Payload Module.”

  Payload Module?

  “The hell with it,” she says. “Let’s go see.”

  She turns and starts to lope back to her flying craft, rocking from side to side. He stands there and watches her go.

  After a few steps she stops and turns around. “You want a lift?”

  “Can you take two?”

  “Sure. Come on. What choice do you have, if you’re stuck here without a LM?”

  Her voice carries a streak of common sense that somehow comforts him.

  Side by side, they bound over the Moon.

  They reach Williams’s flying machine. It is just an aluminium box sitting squat on its four legs, with vernier rocket nozzles stuck to the walls like clusters of berries. The pilot has to climb in at the back and stand over the cover of the main rocket engine, which is about the size of a car engine, Bado supposes. Big spherical propellant and oxidiser tanks are fixed to the floor. There is an S-band antenna and a VHF aerial. There is some gear on the floor, hammers and shovels and sample bags and cameras; Williams dumps this stuff out, briskly, onto the regolith. Williams hops up onto the platform and begins throwing switches. Her control panel contains a few instruments, a CRT, a couple of handsets.

  Bado lugs his heavy tool carrier up onto the platform, then he gets hold of a rail with both hands and jumps up. “What did you call this thing? An LFU?”

  “Yeah. Lunar Flying Unit.”

  “I’ve got vague memories,” says Bado. “Of a design like this. It was never developed, when the extended Apollo missions were cancelled.”

  “Cancelled? When did that happen?”

  “When we were cut back to stop when we get to Apollo 17.”

  “Uh huh,” she says dubiously. She eyes the tool carrier. “You want to bring that thing?”

  “Sure. It’s not too heavy, is it?”

  “No. But what do you want it for?”

  Bado looks at the battered, dusty carrier, with its meaningless load of rocks. “It’s all I’ve got.”

  “Okay. Let’s get out of here,” she says briskly.

  Williams kicks in the main rocket. Dust billows silently up off the ground, into Bado’s face. He can see frozen vapour puff out of the attitude nozzles, in streams of shimmering crystals, as if this is some unlikely steam engine, a Victorian engineer’s fantasy of lunar flight.