by Hal Clement
Marie herself helped Aichi Yen out of his confusion by getting him to describe his present outdoor work, and this interested even Mrs. Suspee for a while. A physics student, Aichi had worked out what he hoped was an original computer technique for untangling meaningful radio signals from noise. He was going to give it a test in about a week, when there was to be an eclipse. He would be picking up signals from Earth and the Sun simultaneously, a mixture of complex natural and even more complex artificial waves, and would then spend several happy weeks with his records in the school computer lab. He had set up his receiving equipment in a small crater quite some distance from town so as to avoid still a third set of interference patterns.
“We’ll get you out to Aichi’s site when the action starts, Rick,” Talles put in. “I suppose you’re in a hurry to get outside, but if you can wait a few days there’ll be more to see and something really to do. I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen an eclipse of the Sun, and by waiting you can charge two batteries on one line. Besides, there are things I think you’ll want to see inside, like the mine where I work, and it will be handier for me if we take care of that first.”
“And maybe he can come to the school with some of us,” said Marie. “There are a lot of people there who don’t know as much about Earth as they think they do. Rick can straighten them out. All right, Rick?”
“Sure. I don’t mind the wait. How long a ride is it out to Aichi’s setup?”
Talles smiled. “It’s in Picard G, isn’t it, Aichi?”
“Picard GA, to be exact.”
“Yes. That’s about thirty miles, as I remember, but you don’t ride. The Footprints really meant it when they picked their name, even if it was two generations ago. You can walk that far, can’t you?”
“Oh, sure. It’s just that I didn’t think I’d be allowed to hike outside. I don’t have any experience with spacesuits, and I figured there’d be all sorts of regulations about who could go out in them.”
“There are,” admitted his uncle. “You’ll be competent, though, before you go out. That’s my responsibility,” he added hastily as he saw the worried look on the faces of two or three of his young guests. “I probably won’t be free to go, and you kids will be expected to keep an eye on Rick just as you would on any newcomer short on experience. But I won’t let him go unless I’m convinced he has the basic lessons thoroughly learned. So relax.” Aichi Yen and the others did relax, visibly. They had known for some days that the guest from Earth would accompany them outside, but they had been quite uneasy over who would be held responsible if he managed to kill himself. Jim Talles had been letting them stew in that pan out of curiosity, to see whether they would try to duck the load. He was, after all, one of their teachers even if he didn’t belong to the school department—he was the official adult adviser of the formally incorporated youth union known as the First Footprints.
“Great!” Rick enthused. “A badge for spacesuit competence will really mean something back on Earth. Which one is it?” For the first time he began examining in detail the pictorial and geometrical decorations of the others.
“There isn’t any for suits,” Aichi said quietly. “I don’t think there’s anyone on the Moon who isn’t competent about them—at any rate, no one over five or six years old.”
Marie took the edge off the remark. “I guess it’s sort of like umbrellas or raincoats on Earth,” she said. “Or maybe you can think of something that’s an even better example—maybe swimming. I suppose everyone can do that even if they don’t all have scuba ratings.”
“That’s not quite right.” Rick followed the change of subject gratefully. “A lot of people can’t swim, and there are six different water competence levels before you get to scuba, and a lot of others in watercraft management—” He held forth uninhibitedly until Marie exercised her tact once more.
All in all, it was a good evening. These Moon people seemed a pretty good bunch, Rick decided before he got to sleep.
The next few days confirmed that opinion. Rick spent two of them at the Wilsonburg school, where class routine was altered to make him the center of attention. He spent a day with his uncle in the mine that was the main reason for Wilsonburg’s existence. He passed a solid twelve hours with Jim Talles becoming familiar with spacesuits, until he could don one without hesitation or error, check it our properly, conduct emergency operations at reflex speed, and explain how electrical accumulators and Daly oxygen cartridges worked.
Talles had planned a further program to keep Rick occupied up to the time of the hike to Aichi’s site. But like so many plans, this one ran into trouble. An accident occurred in the mine.
Not a catastrophe. No one was killed. No one was even seriously endangered—except Rick. And he was nowhere near the place.
His danger arose from the fact that his uncle went on full-time emergency duty, and the schedule in the Talles household collapsed. His aunt had to work as usual but Rick had never gotten her hours straight. His mother continued her irregular round of visits and shopping trips. His young friends had their own rather tight schedules to keep. So Rick was left pretty much on his own.
As a result, he got his sleeping hours out of step with the planned starting time for the hike. And his mother, in one of her rare moments of firmness, insisted that if he didn’t get a good night’s rest before going, he wouldn’t go. She was unhappy about the trip anyway. The idea of her only child walking miles out on the Moon’s surface with only a few layers of fabric between him and vacuum frightened her even more than the bounce ride.
Rick was perfectly willing to sleep, but could not. He was like a six-year-old on Christmas Eve, embarrassed as he would have been to admit it. He went to bed, but had given up all hope of actually sleeping when he did doze off. When he woke up, of course, and looked at his watch, his first thought was to dig a hole in the ground and bury himself.
He was to meet the group at North-Down Lock at eight. The watch said five minutes to eight. And the place was an hour’s walk away.
II
IN THE hall outside his room Rick paused. There was no time to eat, he decided. The snack of a few hours before would have to last him. The group must be at the lock by now—maybe if he ran he would get there before they left. It might take a while to get the whole crowd into spacesuits. Running would have to be done carefully, he knew. It was dangerous in the tunnels tinder Moon gravity—especially so for someone with his background—and there were stringent laws about when and under what circumstances one could run within the settlement.
His stepmother never understood why he didn’t call the lock. For years afterward she would irritate him by returning to the subject and trying to make him explain. His uncle, of course, understood so well that he never even bothered to ask during the investigation later on.
In fact, Rick never even thought of the phone. Moving quietly and hoping that his aunt slept as soundly as his stepmother, he headed for the front door. For just an instant he was tempted to rouse his stepmother and ask why she had let him sleep so late; but that would have wasted time. He slipped into the corridor his Moon friends called a street and hopped, leaped, and skipped toward North-Down, awkwardly threading his way among the people.
He was not stopped for speeding, though several times he was the target of irritated frowns.
He would probably have made the trip in less than half an hour had he not mistaken a turn and wasted more than ten minutes getting back to the proper route. It was eight forty-five when he reached the recessed doorway that was one of the entrances to the North-Down Lock area.
Sensors responded to his arrival, triggering a flashing light—green, since there was safe pressure on the other side of the door. Rick, as he had been taught, flicked the “acknowledge reading” switch located high on the door frame. Then he activated the door switch itself. Despite the need for power economy, doors on the Moon that opened into areas even moderately likely to tap vacuum were motor-driven. The chamber Rick entered was not normally exha
usted; it was a sort of combined garage and locker room. However, it did have a large direct exit to the surface for getting out unusually large pieces of equipment. When so used it became an airlock chamber.
On every Moon-dweller’s mind there was always the possibility of leakage or outright valve failure in any outer room. Rick was aware of that threat, just as the school kids he had met a few days before had been aware of rain and cold on Earth. It was the Big Difference everyone was told about. But awareness was not the same thing as the reflective self-protection of a native.
With the door secured behind him—by a strictly manual latch, activation of which shut off a warning hell—he made his way to the main personnel exits. His fervent hope was that the group might still be there.
The place was empty. Even the lock chamber, visible through the transparent wall, was unoccupied. The outer door was closed, and the red light on its frame backing the green one at the inner seal signaled that the chamber was carrying normal pressure. This implied that the lock had last been used by an inbound person or group, a possibility that did not occur to Rick. To him it was clear only that his friends had left without him. He did not blame them. He knew that much to be done on the trip was too tightly scheduled to allow delay. But he was bitterly disappointed.
Just which mistake he made next is still being argued. The fact that he, or more accurately his stepmother, had fallen out of step with the Wilsonburg clocks was minor. In truth, Rick was actually eleven-and-a-quarter hours early for his meeting rather than forty-five minutes late. And for the worst mistake, still to come, it is hard to blame anyone but Rick alone. Pierre Montaux is blamed by many, including himself, for letting Rick get away with it, but . . .
PIERRE happened to be on duty at the locker room when Rick arrived. Hearing footfalls, the boy glanced back over his shoulder and saw the middle-aged attendant. They had never met before. Rick had had his suit check at another lock, and Pierre had not been on duty the only time the boy had been to North-Down to learn the layout.
“What are you doing here, lad?”
“Sir, I seem to have missed a group going out to Picard G. Could you tell me how long ago they left?”
Montaux shook his head, at the same time making the negative hand gesture habitual to people who spent much of their time in spacesuits. “I’ve just come on—been here less than five minutes. I was a little late getting to work myself.” For that, incidentally, no one ever criticized Montaux. He eyed the array of badges on Rick’s shirt, estimating his general competence level by the area they covered without actually reading any of them. After all, for anybody of Rick’s age to be unqualified was rare enough, and for anybody unqualified to try to go outside was unheard of. “How long ago would they have left?” Montaux asked.
“Only a few minutes. We were meeting here at eight.”
“Then they can’t be far ahead. If your suit is ready you can catch them easily. I’ll do your tightness checks.”
TO RICK’S credit, he never tried to blame Pierre for the misadventure on the strength of those remarks. Some people would have claimed that without Pierre’s suggestions, it never would have occurred to the boy to go out. But exactly that had previously occurred to Rick, and he never denied it. Probably the one biggest mistake, of course, was made when he walked silently to the numbered locker his uncle had told him would contain his suit, and pulled it out.
He donned it quickly and correctly under the attendant’s eye—and who, Jim Talles asked the world later, would have foreseen that the earlier training session thus would turn out to be a mistake?
If Rick had been slow or clumsy, if Pierre Montaux had had the slightest grounds for suspecting Rick Suspee never before had ventured into vacuum . . . But there was nothing to warn Pierre. The suit went on smoothly. It fitted correctly. Rick attached helmet and gauntlets properly, did the proper things to seal them. He made the proper signals to request tightness check, said the right things over the radio for the communications check. He strode over to the inner lock door, deftly operated the cycling switch, and waited until the inner light flashed green before opening the portal. There was nothing to show that he had not done it all a score, even a hundred, times before.
Montaux let him through, checked the manual seal on the inside after the door closed, and gestured a “proceed” through the transparent wall. The outer door’s light was now green. Rick operated its plainly labeled opening switch, went through, closed it, and disappeared from the sight of Pierre Montaux. And, for many hours, from the sight of mankind.
Rick felt uneasy, certainly. He knew that neither his mother nor his uncle would have approved. But it did not occur to him that the Footprints members might not approve either when he caught up with them; otherwise he might have turned back right then. It did not occur to him, either, that he was in any real danger. The crowd could not be far ahead, and the way would be plain enough. After all, he had spent hours with the maps in his uncle’s study. He could have drawn from memory one showing the way to Picard GA.
He looked around to orient himself. Wilsonburg lies mostly under the hills southeast of Taruntius X at about 51.3 degrees east and 7.6 north on the standard Lunar coordinate system. The nearest point of Mare Crisium is about fifty miles to the northeast. The North-Down Lock opens on the broad but irregular plain of Taruntius X; as the names imply, North-Middle and North-Up open higher on the slope bordering the same plain. From where he stood, Rick could see about ten miles across the slightly rolling and heavily dimpled surface to the western hills, and even farther to the northwest and almost around to north, where the same mass of hills that contained Wilsonburg rose to block the view. His path, he knew, lay to the north past the foot of those hills to a valley that led to Picard-G and which should be visible, if map contours meant anything, from where he stood.
Maybe it was, but so were several other notches and valleys. Choice would have to be made. He made the most obvious one, but first tried his communicator.
“Marie! Aichi! Any of the Footprints! Are you in range? Can you hear me?”
He waited only a few seconds. He had not really expected an answer. He would pick them up—or they would pick him up—when he got around the spur of the hills.
He looked about him once more for other direction criteria. The Sun was too high in the west—about fifty degrees—to be a precise guide, he judged. The same was true of Earth, which was too close to the Sun to be seen easily, anyway. The stars? He moved back into the shadow of the sheet-metal roof that kept direct sunlight from the “porch” of the lock and found that he could see the brighter ones. The Big Dipper looked just as it did from home, and the Pointers guided his eye downward and leftward to Polaris just above the horizon—of course! He was much closer to the Moon’s equator than Boston is to Earth’s. One of the notches in the far hills lay directly under the star, and Rick, after examining as well as he could the ground between himself and that distant valley, set out toward it.
EVELYN Suspee woke about nine-thirty with a feeling of guilt. She had meant to get Rick up in time for his trip. Finding that he had already gone, however, she put the matter out of mind. She did not mention his departure to Edna, who seemed too concerned about her husband’s absence at the mine, anyway, to worry about much else. As a result, no one missed Rick until he had been gone for eleven hours.
The Footprints group arrived at North-Down about a quarter to eight. No one knew quite what to do about Rick’s failure to show up. By their own standards anyone who missed an appointment “inside” had only himself to blame—it was different, of course, outside. After discussion and some grumbling, it was decided that maybe Rick’s tardiness was not his fault entirely, and that his home should be called to find out why he had skipped the expedition. Evelyn Suspee was in when the call arrived.
It took her several seconds to grasp that Rick was unaccounted for since leaving the Talles home. The realization had the principal effects of a firecracker—much noise but little else. Emerging from the
explosion of words, though, was Mrs. Suspee’s assumption that Rick was somewhere outside.
Marie D’Nombu, on the other end of the circuit, had not thought of any such possibility. She did not think it a likely one now that it had been suggested. In any case she felt sure that calming Mrs. Suspee was more important at the moment than eliciting mere truth.
“Wait, please,” Marie urged. Soothingly she continued, “Let’s say Rick did get here eleven or twelve hours early. Even so, I don’t see how he could possibly have been stupid enough to go outside by himself. Besides, they wouldn’t have let him. He must have realized his error about the time—probably then he wandered off into town. Maybe he hiked over to the mine to see what sort of trouble Chief Jim was having. We’ll call him—Rick could still be at the mine. More likely he’s simply lost somewhere in town. They didn’t start building tunnels on a nice regular plan here until a few of the early lodes had been followed pretty far, and a stranger can get mixed up pretty easily, I’d think.”
Marie’s words calmed Rick’s stepmother considerably. She had had trouble more than once herself finding her way back to the Talles unit from the shopping areas.
At Marie’s request, Mrs. Suspee called her sister to the screen. Edna had overheard most of the conversation and understood the situation. She assured Marie that Jim Talles was still at the mine and gave her his visiphone combination. The girl broke the connection and immediately called Talles.
It took several minutes to reach him. He was far out in one of the work tunnels, available through portable relay equipment. This had voice connection only; he could not see who was calling and did not at first recognize Marie’s voice.
The girl concisely reported the state of affairs. Talles’ first reaction was to worry more about Mrs. Suspee than his nephew. He agreed with Marie that the boy was probably somewhere inside Wilsonburg and was grateful for her efforts to convince the woman of that.