Phase Space (50 page)

It was as we drove out at the start of our second EVA – our second day on the Moon, the second of our three – that we found the tracks. I know what you’re thinking.
What
tracks? There was no report of tracks in our TV transmission, or our radio transmission, or in the debriefing, or the still photographs. Nevertheless, they were there.

Peter, I know there’s a kind of a stigma that hung over your father, for the rest of his life, after that mission. You don’t have to deny it. A sense of failure, right? A sense that he was a little reckless with that jump you’ve seen so many times on video, that fall that smashed up his backpack, the way we had to limp back to the LM and come hurrying home with half our objectives lost, a twenty-million-buck mission screwed up by one guy fooling around on the Moon.

Well, I can tell you it wasn’t like that – not like that at all. But it’s something only your father and I knew, up to now. Today, now that old Joe is going to his grave, I want you to know the truth. And I want you to think about it, when you see that old Missing Man up in the sky this afternoon.

If you want to know where we were, look up at a new Moon, and look for the chin of the Man, the highland area there. You might see a dimple, a bright pinpoint; I’m told some kids can see it with the naked eye. That’s Tycho Crater. A hole in the ground fifty miles across, big enough to swallow LA.

And that’s where we walked, in 1973.

The sky’s black, you know, but the ground is brightly lit, as if lit by floodlights on the floor of some huge theatre. A theatre stage, yeah. You lope across the surface, in the light of that big white spotlight that’s the sun. And with every step you kick up the dust from under your feet, and it goes flying out in straight lines, just glimmering once in the flat sunlight, before falling back.

It was our second day. Our first day had been good, full of solid work. But morning is a week long, on the Moon. So I knew I had another bright morning, here on the Moon, stretching ahead of me.

And today we were going climbing, up into the foothills of Tycho’s central peak. I whistled as I went to work.

The Lunar Rover, yeah. Now that car was one terrific toy. It comes to the Moon folded up like a concertina against the side of the LM. To deploy it you pull on a pair of lanyards, and the chassis lowers slowly, like pulling down a drawbridge. Then, suddenly, wire-mesh wheels pop out from the four corners, complete with orange fenders.

It worked just fine. We loaded up with our tools and our sample bags and what-not, and off we set, two good old boys at home on the Moon. Joe – as commander, he was the driver – kept complaining about the lack of front-wheel steering, which for some reason wouldn’t work, so he had to rely on the rear steering. I was just thrown around, especially when Joe took a swerve. The ground was nothing but bumps and hollows, an artillery field, and every time we hit an obstacle one or two wheels would come looming off of the ground, throwing up huge rooster tails of black dust behind them.

It would have looked strange if there had been anyone around to see it, as we bounced our way over the surface of the Moon. The Rover is just a frame, with its wire wheels and fold-up seats and clusters of antennae and tool racks, and there’s the two of us, outsize in our shining white Moon suits, like two dough boys riding a construction-kit car.

It was tough work driving directly away from the sun. The shadows, even of the smallest fragments of regolith, were hidden, and the light just glared back like off a snow field. But if you looked away from the sun, you looked into shades of grey, darker and darker. And that was pretty much all the colours there were on the Moon, except for what we brought with us, and what we left at home. Black sky, grey soil, blue Earth.

I remember I was talking nine to the dozen about the geology, as we bounced along. I was trying to describe it for the guys in the back rooms, back in Houston. You never knew when some observation of yours was going to provide the key to understanding.

But Joe was somewhat graver. He always was. Your father was a good five years older than me, remember, and he’d been to the Moon once already, on an orbital LM test flight, while I was a rookie; and I guess he just let me chatter.

We got to the foothills and started to drive uphill. That Rover seemed to carry us without effort even under pretty steep hills. But I felt like I was about to slip out the back the whole time. And when we stopped, and I tried to get up, I could barely raise my suited body out of the seat. We were concerned that the Rover would run downhill, and in fact I could see one of its wheels was lifting off the surface. I just grabbed onto the Rover; it was so light I felt I could support it easily. We found an eroded old crater to park in, and when Joe drove it forward, there we were.

Well, we found the big two-hundred-yard crater that was our main sampling objective. We climbed up towards the rim. It was like walking over a sand dune. In that old suit it felt as if I was inside an inflated tyre. But the footing under my feet got firmer, slowly.

As I approached the crater rim I began to walk into a litter of rocks. They must have been dug out of the crater by the impact that formed it, and they had rained down here like artillery shells. But that was long ago. Now the rocks’ exposed faces were eroded, all but smoothed back into the surface from which they’d been dug out.

And so I climbed, chattering about the geology the whole way.

When I got to the crater itself I found it was maybe thirty yards deep, strewn with blocks ranging from a yard across to maybe fifteen yards.

I turned around. A few yards away I could see Joe, working through his checklist. His white suit glowed in the sunlight, except for his lower legs and boots, which looked as if they had been dragged through a coal scuttle. He moved stiffly, scarcely bending from the waist, and when he moved he tipped forward, like a leaning statue. But he was whistling, glowing in the light. We were happy up there. That’s how I’ll remember him, you know. Glowing on the Moon.

Anyhow, it was at that moment, at the rim of that crater, that I saw the tracks.

Rover tracks.

I took a couple of seconds to get my breath, to think about it.

Three-hundred-feet high, I was looking down at the mountain’s broad flank. It merged with a bright, undulating dust plain that swept away, just a sculpture of craters: craters on craters, young and sharp and cup-shaped overlying old and eroded and subtle. Beyond that I could see mountains thrusting up into space. All of this was diamond sharp, under a black sky. And out there in the middle of it all was a single human artefact: our lander, a gleaming metal speck.

Well, I looked for the tracks again. They were still there. They were still Rover tracks.

At first I thought they must be ours. I mean, whose else could they be? But I could see
our
tracks; they snaked back over the plain to the lander.
These
went west-east. In fact you could tell by the tread marks that the vehicle that had made these tracks was going to the east.

I kind of shivered.

I called to Joe. At first he didn’t believe me. I think he figured I might be in some kind of trouble, my suit overheating or some such. Anyhow, there were the tracks, large as life. And they still weren’t ours.

Through all this, we hadn’t said a word, and we were out of sight of the Rover’s TV camera. I remember we flipped up our gold sun-visors and we just looked each other, and we came to a silent decision.

We clambered down to the Rover. We told the Mission Control guy in charge of the camera where to point, and we told them to look for themselves. There they were, tracks on the Moon, made by a Lunar Rover that sure wasn’t ours. You could see them crystal clear in the TV images. I tell you, it was a relief to find that they saw them too, back in Mission Control.

Well, they debated for a time what to do, and we sat there and waited.

… If I looked at the ground, pocked and battered as it was, things didn’t seem so strange. If you’ve ever seen a freshly ploughed field, harrowed and very fine, and you know when it rains on it, it gives you that sort of pimply look – that’s what I called it, I called it a freshly ploughed field. It was dry as toast but it still had that appearance. Mundane, as you might say.

But whenever I looked up, there was the black sky above this glowing ground, and there was Earth, a brilliant blue crescent, a sight utterly unlike anything seen from the ground. It was electrifying, in moments, this realization of how far I’d come, of
where I was.

I remember thinking that just being up there, driving a car on the Moon, would be strangeness enough for one lifetime, without
this.

You might not believe it now, but some of the scientists wanted us to just ignore this wacko stuff and carry on with our timelined work. I felt a little of that anxiety too. We’d been rehearsing the science objectives for two years already, and we only had a few hours, and we might waste the whole damn thing if we followed some chimera, up here on the Moon. For example, maybe those tracks could have been made by a boulder that rolled down hill after a landslide. I mean, you could
see
that wasn’t so, but it was possible, I guess.

In the end, after maybe ten minutes, we got the order to go ahead and, well, to follow those tracks. And I remember how my heart thumped as we loaded up the Rover again, and turned right, to the east, and set off in a big flurry of black dirt.

Another rockin’ and rollin’ ride: grey surface as wavy as an ocean surface, black sky, blue Earth. We didn’t say much, on the way, following those crisp tracks. What was there to say?

I remember what I was thinking, though.

I’d always been fascinated by the notion of alien life. Well, I was in the space programme. It was a disappointment to me that by the time my mission rolled around – long before humans ever got there, I guess, in fact – it was clear to everybody that the Moon was dry as dust, and dead besides. We were going to the Moon for geology, not biology.

So I was getting pretty excited as we bounced along, following those tracks. Was it possible that we were in some kind of
2001
situation here, that we were after all going to find some kind of alien marker on the Moon, that those tracks we followed had been planted to lead us right there?

That isn’t quite what we found.

Towards the eastern end of the valley, as we come over a ridge, there’s this car. Immediately I can see it looks very similar to the Lunar Rover, and there are two figures in it. They didn’t seem to be moving. We stopped, maybe a half mile away, and just stared. I don’t know what I was expecting – a monolith? Bug-eyed green guys? – but not
that.

So we radioed Houston that we’d found this car, and we start to describe it. And they’re mystified, but they start to get excited, we’re excited. So we drove up to the other car, parked right alongside, and I got out and turned the TV on. I remember I wiped the lens clean of dust before I took the time to do anything else, but my heart was thumping like a jackhammer; the surgeons must have known, but it wasn’t the time to raise an issue like that.

The occupants of the other car, two astronauts just like Joe and me, just sat there, not moving.

Anyhow I ran over to the passenger side, and Joe went to the driver’s side. We just stood there, because by now we could see the two of them up close, and – you guessed it – the passenger’s suit had my name sewn on it, and the other guy’s had Joe’s.

And then my heart was pumping harder, because I reached over and pulled up the gold sun visor, and I was looking at myself.

What can you say about an experience like that? It was unreal. In those heavy pressure suits, you’re cut off anyhow. You can’t see too well because of the curving glass all around your head, and you can’t feel the texture of things because of your gloves. And there I was, looking out like a goldfish staring out of his bowl, staring at my own face.

But it wasn’t like a nightmare – it wasn’t like I was dead – whoever it was looked like me but it
wasn’t
me. And, of course, the other fellow looked like Joe.

And now I got the shock of shocks, because my guy, the copy of
me,
turns his head, inside his helmet, and opens his eyes, and looks straight at me.

Well, he looked terrible, as if he’d been sitting there some time, but he was obviously alive. He mouthed, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying.

So again we debated what to do, with each other, with Houston.

We didn’t know who these guys were, of course, or how they got there, or any of it. But here they were, obviously in trouble, and nobody else to help them but us.

So we helped them.

I took the other me, and Joe took his twin. You can just lift up a person, up there on the Moon, with a little effort. The other me moved like a big stiff balloon, and I plumped him down, upright in the dust. Then I hooked up the hoses from my backpack to his. It was an emergency procedure we’d rehearsed any number of times, in case one of our backpacks failed. And meanwhile Joe hooked up himself to his copy. Then I pulled my twin’s arm over my shoulder, and Joe did likewise, and we started to bounce our way down the hill and back to our LM.