Nightmare at the Book Fair (7 page)

Gradually, I began to notice that something felt different. My body felt heavier. Maybe I had eaten too much. But then the stuff that was floating around the cabin started settling to the floor.

“It’s the moon’s gravity,” Buzz told me. “It’s starting to pull us in.”

I didn’t even know the moon
had
gravity.

We were 38,000 miles away, Mike announced. I could sense that the three of them were getting excited. Our velocity had increased to 5,512 feet per second. But I had no sense of speed. It’s not like when you’re in a car and you see trees and houses and street signs whizzing past. There was nothing outside.

I spent a lot of time looking out the window at the moon. It was sometimes gray and sometimes brown, depending on how the sun’s rays were striking it.

Neil, Buzz, and Mike went over and strapped themselves into their seats, with serious looks on their faces.

“Prepare for engine burn,” Neil said.

They had told me they would have to fire the main rockets to slow the ship down so it would be captured by the moon’s gravity. Like everything else, it had to be done at the exactly correct moment.

“If the engine doesn’t fire for some reason, we’ll loop around the moon and come back to earth,” Buzz said.

“What if you fire it too long?” I asked.

“We crash into the moon,” he replied.

It was really tense for a few minutes, and then I felt the thrust of the engine jolting us into orbit around the moon. There was a general sense of relief in the cabin. Things must have gone according to plan.

We would be out of touch with Mission Control for thirty-three minutes as we swung around because the radio signals could not bend around the moon.

“
Apollo 11
, this is Houston,” the radio crackled, as soon as we popped out the other side. “How do you read? Could you repeat your burn status-report?”

“Reading you loud and clear, Houston,” Neil said. “It was like…perfect.”

We woke up the next morning, Sunday, July 20—to a lunar sunrise. First there was a thin white haze over the horizon, and then the sun blasted into view. It was a sight I’ll never forget. We ate breakfast (freeze-dried eggs, yum!), and Neil opened a closet and took out a bulky white space suit. It was the kind with the big helmet I had seen in pictures.

“It’s time,” he said to Buzz.

Neil and Buzz each climbed into their suits, and Mike helped them with the latches, oxygen hoses, and life-support backpacks.

“Good luck,” I said, a little disappointed that I wouldn’t be joining them.

“Good luck, nothing,” Neil said. “Trip, you’re coming with us.”

“You mean it?!” I asked.

“We might need your help down there,” Buzz said.

They had a third suit as a backup, and Mike helped me into it. It was a little big on me, but not too bad. Once I was all zipped up, Mike wrapped his arms around the three of us. He didn’t say a word, but I knew what he meant when I looked into his eyes. If anything went wrong—and a lot of things could go wrong—we would never see him again. We would never see
anybody
again.

There was a tunnel at one end of the command module. Neil opened the hatch and the three of us crawled through the tunnel into the lunar module, which they called
Eagle
. It wasn’t easy. Our suits were bulky, and the tunnel was barely wide enough to squeeze through. But eventually we made it. Buzz sealed the hatch that separated the command module from the lunar module.

The
Eagle
was sort of an ugly thing that looked a little bit like a spider, with exposed wires and pipes. It wasn’t streamlined as you would expect a spaceship to be. Buzz told me it didn’t need to be streamlined because the moon has no atmosphere to slow it down.

They sat in front of the big instrument panel, which even had a gauge to indicate Neil’s heart rate. It was steady at seventy-seven beats per minute.

We were orbiting about sixty miles above the moon. During the thirteenth orbit, a voice from Houston crackled over the radio.

“You are go for separation, Columbia.”

Neil pushed a button, and I felt a bump. The
Eagle
had separated from Mike’s command module. Out the window, I could see the command module drifting a few yards away. We were floating, if you can call moving at 3,700 miles per hour floating. Neil’s heart rate had jumped to eighty-five beats per minute.

“Fire descent rocket,” Buzz said, and suddenly we were moving away from the command module and toward the surface of the moon.

“How does it look?” radioed Mission Control.

“The
Eagle
has wings,” Neil replied. “The burn was on time.” His heart rate was at ninety-six.

“Listen, baby,” Mike’s voice said over the radio, “things are going just swimmingly, just beautiful.”

Neil’s heart rate jumped to 110. He had to pilot the
Eagle
300 miles across the moon, dropping down in a long curve from 50,000 feet. We were upside down. I couldn’t see the moon.

Green lights blinked the number 99 on the computer display. That meant Neil had five seconds to decide if he wanted to go ahead and attempt a landing or return to the command module. His heart rate was 125. He pressed the
PROCEED
button.

“
Eagle
, Houston,” said a voice in the speaker. “You are go to continue power descent.”

“Twenty-one thousand feet,” Buzz told Neil. We were going fast now.

“Fifteen thousand…ten thousand…seventy-two hundred feet,” Buzz reported. “Landing site five miles ahead.”

We were going to land on a part of the moon called the Sea of Tranquillity. It had been mapped out from photos taken on previous unmanned flights, and it was chosen because the surface was smooth.

We were slowing down. Neil was at the controls, but a computer was controlling the landing at this point. It automatically turned
Eagle
upside down into landing position. I could see the surface of the moon now. There were hills, ridges, and lots of craters.

We were dropping twenty feet per second. Neil’s heart rate was 135.

How did they know the moon’s surface was solid, I wondered. What if it was like deep snow, and the
Eagle
would just sink into it? I guessed that previous missions had shown that wouldn’t happen. I didn’t want to bother them with questions. Not now.

We were five hundred feet over the surface of the moon, directly over the landing site.

“Not good!” Neil suddenly said urgently, shaking his head. His heart rate was 147.

“Large crater,” Buzz said, “about the size of a football field. Filled with boulders and rocks.”

They didn’t have to explain it to me. If we landed on a steep tilt or on one of those boulders, we might tip over. Even if we didn’t tip over, we would be pointing at the wrong angle when it was time to blast off the moon. Either way, we would die.

Neil flipped a switch and grabbed the joystick.

“I’m going to look for another parking spot,” he announced.

“Ninety seconds,
Eagle
,” said Mission Control.

That meant we had ninety seconds’ worth of fuel. The lunar module couldn’t carry a lot of fuel, and most of it had to be saved so we could lift off from the moon later.

Neil pulled back on the stick and we skimmed over the big crater of rocks. He and Buzz were looking quickly left and right at the surface of the moon for a smooth area to land. So was I.

“Sixty seconds,” Mission Control said.

“Lights on,” Neil said, and the surface brightened up immediately.

“Over there!” Neil said, pushing the stick.

“Forward. Good,” Buzz said. “Forty feet, down two and a half.”

“Picking up some dust,” Neil said. “Thirty feet, two and a half down. Faint shadow. Four forward. Four forward. Drifting to the right a little.”

“Dead man’s zone,” Buzz said.

If we ran out of fuel here, we would be finished. We were four miles west of the target. Neil’s heart rate was 156.

“Thirty seconds,” Mission Control announced.

We were right over the moon. I could have jumped out the window at this height and landed on my feet. A blue light flashed. We were kicking up dust. There was a bump.

“Contact light,” Buzz said.

“Okay, engine stop,” said Neil. “Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The
Eagle
has landed.”

For the first time in history, human beings had landed on the moon.

And I was one of them.

The dust settled and I could see the surface. There were hills in the distance, maybe twenty or thirty feet high. Shallow craters, about the size of manhole covers, were all over the place. Some bigger. Looking up, I could see the earth. So far away.

I was anxious to get out and walk on the moon, but Neil and Buzz had things to do first. They checked over the
Eagle
to make sure it hadn’t been damaged by the landing. We had some food—bacon squares, sugar cookies, peaches, juice, and coffee. Finally, Buzz and I snapped on Neil’s helmet and strapped one of the life-support systems to his back. Buzz cautioned me to be careful. If something ripped or there was a tiny hole anywhere, Neil would suffocate instantly.

Neil opened the hatch and attached a TV camera to one of
Eagle
’s legs. Then he made the slow descent down the ladder. I watched out the window and could hear Neil’s words through the microphone in his helmet.

“I’m at the foot of the ladder,” he said. “The footpads are only depressed in the surface about one or two inches, although the surface appears to be very fine-grained as you get close to it. I’m going to step off the LEM now.”

There was no sound for a moment. It was so quiet. I couldn’t hear anything except for my own heartbeat. The sky was filled with stars, and it was a little strange because when you’re on the moon, they don’t twinkle. I had never really noticed that stars twinkle before. I guess it’s the earth’s atmosphere that makes them do that.

Neil put his left foot on the moon, and then he said the words I was waiting for. It would take exactly 1.3 seconds before the signal would reach billions of ears on earth.

“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

“Good line,” Buzz said.

“The surface is fine and powdery,” Neil continued, once both of his feet were on the moon. “I can pick it up loosely with my toe.”

When Neil gave us the go-ahead, Buzz and I strapped on our life-support backpacks and came out to join him.

“Be careful not to lock the hatch on the way out,” Buzz said in my ear.

“Good idea,” Neil added.

I climbed down the ladder and stepped off the footpad. Neil was right. The surface of the moon was powdery, sort of like the ashes in a charcoal grill after the coals burn out. I walked very carefully for my first few steps.

Then it hit me.

I was standing on the freaking moon!

I was the third person in history to walk on the moon!

I was the first kid on the moon!

Lunar gravity is one-sixth the gravity of earth. So if you weigh a hundred pounds on earth, it’s like seventeen pounds on the moon. When I jumped, I hung in the “air” for a moment. I wished I had a basketball. What a jump shot I would have on the moon.

Buzz discovered that the best way to move around was to hop with both feet, like a kangaroo. I tried it too. It was sort of like walking on a trampoline. With each hop, I kicked up a little moondust. It was easy to move, but hard to stop moving. You had to take a few extra steps at the end.

“Isn’t this fun?” Neil asked.

In the sun, the temperature was 234 degrees, and in the shade it was 279 degrees below zero. But I felt perfectly comfortable with the warm air pumped into my space suit. I pulled down the visor to cut the glare.

We had only about two hours of air and a lot to accomplish. Neil even had a checklist printed on a sleeve of his suit telling him what he had to do. So we got to work. We set up a second TV camera. We scooped up about fifty pounds of moon rocks and soil. We set up instruments for three scientific experiments. We planted the American flag. There’s no wind on the moon, so the flag had a wire in it to hold it out.

Last but not least, we took pictures, lots of pictures. Neil and Buzz were careful not to include me in any of the photos, because it would cause more than a few problems when they got home if anybody found out they had taken a kid with them.

There wasn’t a lot of time left. We had to leave. A lot of the cameras and other equipment we had brought to the moon would be left behind because we didn’t need it and we would have to be as light as possible to lift off from the moon. The bottom section of the
Eagle
would remain after we left. And our footprints would be there forever.

Before climbing the ladder back up to the
Eagle
, I took one last look over the lunar landscape. It was gray and bare, but somehow beautiful at the same time. As I put my foot on the first rung of the ladder, I noticed a small plaque attached to the leg of the
Eagle
. This is what it said….