The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  "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."

  "OK. 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 vapor 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.

  The basin of Wildwood Crater falls away. The lift is a brief, comforting surge.

  Williams whoops. "Whee-hoo! What a ride, huh, pal?" She takes the LFU up to maybe sixty feet, and slows the ascent. She pitches the craft over and they begin sailing out of Wildwood.

  The principles of the strange craft are obvious enough to Bado. You stand on your rocket's tail. You keep yourself stable with the four peroxide reaction clusters, the little vernier rockets spaced around the frame, squirting them here and there. When the thrust of the single big downward rocket is at an angle to the vertical, the LFU goes shooting forward, or sideways, or backward across the pitted surface. Williams shows him the hand controls. They are just like the LA4's. The attitude control moves in clicks; every time Williams turns the control the reaction rockets will bang and the LFU will tip over, a degree at a time. The thrust control is a toggle switch; when Williams closes it the lift rockets roar, to give her a delta-vee of a foot per second.

  "These are neat little craft," Williams says. "They fly on residual descentstage propellants. They've a range of a few miles, and you can do three sorties in each of them."

  "Each?"

  "We bring two. Rescue capability."

  Bado thinks he is starting to see a pattern to what has happened to him.

  In a way, the presence of the camera in his carrier is reassuring. It means he isn't crazy. There really have been two copies of the Surveyor; one of which he's sampled, and one he hasn't.

  Maybe there is more than one goddamn Moon.

  Moon One is the good old lantern in the sky that he and Slade touched down on yesterday. Maybe Slade is still back there, with the LAD. But Bado sure isn't. Somehow he stumbled onto Moon Two, the place with the Surveyor, but no LM. And then this Williams showed up, and evidently by that time he was on another Moon, Moon Three, with its own copy of the Surveyor. And a different set of astronauts exploring, with subtly different equipment. As if traveling to one Moon isn't enough.

  He thinks about that strange, heat-haze shimmer. Maybe that has something to do with these weird transfers.

  He can't discuss any of this with Williams, because she hasn't seen any of the changes. Not yet, anyhow.

  Bado clings to the sides of the LFU and watches the surface of the Moon scroll underneath him. There are craters everywhere, overlaid circles of all sizes, some barely visible in a surface gardened by billions of years of micrometeorite impact. The surface looks ghostly, rendered in black and white, too stark, unmoving, to be real.

  He knew he was taking a risk, but he took his lunar rocks to a couple of universities.

  He got laughed out of court. Especially when he wouldn't explain how these charcoal-dark rocks might have got from the Moon to the Earth.

  "Maybe they got blasted off by a meteorite strike," he said to an "expert" at Cornell. "Maybe they drifted in space until they landed here. I've read about that."

  The guy pushed his reading glasses farther up his thin nose. "Well, that's possible." He smiled. "No doubt you've been reading the same lurid speculation I have, in the popular science press. What if rocks get knocked back and forth between the planets? Perhaps there are indeed bits of the Moon, even Mars, to be turned up, here on Earth. And, since we know living things can survive in the interiors of rocks-and since we know that some plants and bacteria can survive long periods of dormancy-perhaps it is even possible for life to propagate itself, across the trackless void, in such a manner."

  He picked up Bado's Moon rock, dubiously. "But in that case I'd expect to see some evidence of the entry of this rock into the atmosphere. Melting, some glass. And besides, this rock is not volcanic. Mr. Bado, everyone knows the Moon's major features were formed exclusively by vulcanism. This can't possibly be a rock from the Moon."

  Bado snatched back his rock. "That's Colonel Bado," he said. He marched out.

  He gave up, and went back to Daytona Beach.

  The LFU slides over the rim of Taylor Crater. Or San Jacinto. Bado can see scuffed-up soil below him, and the big Huckleberry Finn Crater to his left, where he and Slade made their first stop.

  At the center of Taylor stands an LM. It glitters like some piece of giant jewelry, the most colorful object on the lunar surface. An astronaut bounces around in front of it, like a white balloon. He-or she-is working at what looks like a surface experiment package, white-painted boxes and cylinders and masts laid out in a star formation and connected to a central nuclear generator by orange cables. It looks like an ALSEP, but it is evidently heavier, more advanced.

  But the LM isn't alone. A second LM stands beside it, squat and spidery. Bado can see that the ascent stage has been heavily reworked; the pressurized cabin looks to be missing, replaced by cargo pallets.

  "That's your Payload Module, right?"

  "Yeah," Williams says. "The Lunar Payload Module Laboratory. It got here on automatics before we left the Cape. This is a dual Saturn launch mission, Bado. We've got a stay time of four weeks."

  Again he has vague memories of proposals for such things: dual launches; well-equipped, long-stay jaunts on the surface. But the funding squeezes since '66 have long since put pay to all of that. Evidently, wherever Williams comes from, the money is flowing a little more freely.

  The LFU tips itself back, to slow its forward velocity. Williams throttles back the main motor and the LFU starts to drop down. Bado glances at the numbers; the CRT display evolves smoothly through height and velocity readings. Bado guesses the LFU must have some simple radar-based altimeter.

  Now the LM and its misshapen partner are obscured by the dust Williams' rocket is kicking up.

  At fifty feet Williams cuts the main engine. Bado feels the drop in the pit of his stomach, and he watches the ground explode toward him, resolving into unwelcome detail, sharp boulders and zap pits and footprints, highlighted by the low morning sun.

  Then vernier dust clouds billow up around the LFU. Bado feels a comforting surge of deceleration.

  The LFU lands with a jar that Bado feels in his knees.

  For a couple of seconds the dust of their landing cloaks the LFTJ, and then it begins to settle out around them, coating the LFU's surfaces, his suit. There is a heat-haze shimmer. "Oh, shit."

  Williams is busily shutting down the LFU. She turns to face him, anonymous behind her visor.

  There wasn't much astronomy going on at all, in fact, he found out when he looked it up in the libraries. just a handful of big telescopes, scattered around the world, with a few crusty old guys following their obscure, decades-long projects. And all the projects were to do with deep space: the stars and beyond. Nobody was interested in the Solar System. Certainly in nothing as mundane as the Moon.

  He looked up at Moon Six, uneasily, with its bright, unscarred north-west quadrant. If that Imbrium meteorite hadn't hit three billion years ago-or in 1970-where the hell was it now?

  Maybe that big mother was on its way, right now.

  Quietly, he pumped some of his money into funding a little research at the universities into Earth-neighborhood asteroids.

  He also siphoned money into trying to figure out what had happened to him. How he got here.

  As the last dust settles, Bado looks toward the center of Taylor Crater, to where the twin LMS stood. He can make out a blocky shape there.

  He feels a sharp surge of relief. Thank God. Maybe this transition hasn
't been as severe as some of the others. Or maybe there hasn't been a transition at all ... But Williams' LM has gone, with its cargo-carrying partner. And so has the astronaut, with his surface package. But the crater isn't empty. The vehicle that stands in its place has the same basic geometry as an LM, Bado thinks, with a boxy descent stage standing on four legs, and a fat ascent stage cabin on top. But it is just fifteen feet tall-compared to an LM's twenty feet-and the cabin looks a lot smaller.

  "My God," Williams says. She is just standing, stock still, staring at the little lander. "Welcome to Moon Four," Bado whispers. "My God." She repeats that over and over.

  He faces her, and flips up his gold visor so she can see his face.

  "Listen to me. You're not going crazy. We've been through some kind of-transition. I can't explain it." He grins. It makes him feel stronger to think there is someone else more scared, more shocked, than he is.

  He takes her through his tentative theory of the multiple Moons.

  She turns to face the squat lander again. "I figured it had to be something like that."

  He gapes at her. "You figured?"

  "How the hell else could you have got here? Well, what are we supposed to do now?" She checks the time on her big Rolex watch. "Bado. How long will your PLSS hold out?"

  He feels embarrassed. Shocked or not, she's cut to the chase a lot more smartly than he's been able to. He glances at his own watch, on the cuff next to his useless checklist. "A couple of hours. What about you?"

  "Less, probably. Come on." She glides down from the platform of the LFU, her blue boots kicking up a spray of dust.

  "Where are we going?"

  "Over to that little LM, of course. Where else? It's the only source of consumables I can see anywhere around here." She begins loping toward the lander.

  After a moment, he picks up his carrier, and follows her.

  As they approach he gets a better look at the lander. The ascent stage is a bulbous, misshapen ball, capped by a fat, wide disk that looks like a docking device. Two dinner-plate-sized omnidirectional antennae are stuck out on extensible arms from the descent stage. The whole clumsy-looking assemblage is swathed in some kind of green blanket, maybe for thermal insulation.

  A ladder leads from a round hatch in the front of the craft, and down to the surface via a landing leg. The ground there is scuffed with footprints.

  "It's a hell of a small cabin," she says. "Has to be one man."

  "You think it's American?"

  "Not from any America I know. That ascent stage looks familiar. It looks like an adapted Soyuz orbital module. You know, the Russian craft, their Apollo equivalent."

  "Russian?"

  "Can you see any kind of docking tunnel on top of that thing?"

  He looks. "Nope. Just that flat assemblage at the top."

  "The crew must have to spacewalk to cross from the command module. What a design."

  An astronaut comes loping around the side of the lander, swaying from side to side, kicking up dust. When he catches sight of Bado and Williams, he stops dead.

  The stranger is carrying a flag, on a pole. The flag is stiffened with wire, and it is clearly bright red, with a gold hammer and sickle embroidered into it.

  "How about that," Williams whispers. "I guess we don't always get to win, huh."

  The stranger-the cosmonaut, Bado labels him-takes a couple of steps toward them. He starts gesticulating, waving his arms about, making the flag flutter. He wears a kind of hoop around his waist, held away from his body with stiff wire.

  "I think he's trying to talk to us," Williams says.

  "It'll be a miracle if we are on the same frequency. Maybe he's S-band only, to talk to Earth. No VHF. Look how stiff his movements are."

  "Yeah. I think his suit is semi-rigid. Must be hell to move around in."

  "What's with the hula hoop?" Bado asks.

  "It will stop him falling over, in case he trips. Don't you get it? He's on his own here. That's a one-man lander. There's nobody around to help him, if he gets into trouble."

  The cosmonaut is getting agitated. Now he hoists up the flag and throws it at them, javelin-style; it falls well short of Bado's feet. Then the cosmonaut turns and lopes toward his lander, evidently looking for more tools, or improvised weapons.

  "Look at that," Bado says. "There are big funky hinges down the side of his backpack. That must be the way into the suit."

  Williams lifts up her visor. "Show him your face. We've got to find some way to get through to this guy."

  Bado feels like laughing. "What for?"

  The light changes.

  Bado stands stock still. "Shit, not again."

  Williams says, "What?"

  "Another transition." He looks around for the tell-tale heat-haze flicker.

  "I don't think so," Williams says softly. "Not this time."

  A shadow, slim and jet-black, hundreds of feet long, sweeps over the surface of Taylor Crater.

  Bado leans back and tips up his face.

  The ship is like a huge artillery shell, gleaming silver, standing on its tail. It glides over the lunar surface, maybe fifty feet up, and where its invisible rocket exhaust passes, dust is churned up and sent gusting away in great flat sheets. The ship moves gracefully, if ponderously. Four heavy landing legs, with big spring-load shock absorbers, stick out from the base. A circle of portals glows bright yellow around the nose. A huge bull's-eye of red, white, and blue is painted on the side, along with a registration number.

  "Shit," Bado says. "That thing must be a hundred feet tall." Four or five times as tall as his lost LM. "What do you think it weighs? Two, three hundred tons?"

  "Direct ascent," she says.

  "Huh?"

  "Look at it. It's streamlined. It's built for landing on the Moon in one piece, ascending again, and returning to Earth."

  "But that was designed out years ago, by Von Braun and the boys. A ship like that's too heavy for chemical rockets."

  "So who said anything about chemical? It has to be atomic. Some kind of fission pile in there, superheating its propellant. One hell of a specific impulse. Anyhow, it's that or antigravity-"

  The great silver fish hovers for a moment, and then comes swooping down at the surface. It flies without a quiver. Bado wonders how it is keeping its stability; he can't see any verniers. Big internal flywheels maybe.

  As the ship nears the surface, dust comes rushing across the plain, away from the big tail like a huge circular sandstorm. There is a rattle, almost like rain, as heavy particles impact Bado's visor. He holds his gloved hands up before his face, and leans a little into the rocket wind.

  The delicate little Russian lander just topples over in the breeze, and the bulbous ascent stage breaks off and rolls away.

  In the mirror of his bedroom he studied his graying hair and spreading paunch. Oddly, it had taken a while for him to miss his wife Fay.

  Maybe because everything was so different. Not that he was sorry, in a sense; his job, he figured, was to survive here-to earn a living, to keep himself sane-and moping after the unattainable wouldn't help. He was glad they'd had no kids, though.

  There was no point searching for Fay in Houston, of course. Houston without the space program was just an oil town, with a big cattle pasture north of Clear Lake where the Manned Spacecraft Center should have been. El Lago, the Taylor housing development, had never been built.

  He even drove out to Atlantic City, where he'd first met Fay, a couple of decades ago. He couldn't find her in the phone book. She was probably living under some married name, he figured. He gave up.

  He tried, a few times, to strike up relationships with other women here. He found it hard to get close to anyone, though. He always felt he needed to guard what he was saying. This wasn't his home, after all.

  So he lived pretty much alone. It was bearable. It even got easier, as he got older.

  Oddly, he missed walking on the Moon more than anything else, more than anything about the world he'd lost. He k
ept reliving those brief hours. He remembered Slade, how he looked bouncing across the lunar sand, a brilliant white balloon. How happy he'd seemed.

  The silver ship touches down with a thump, and those big legs flex, the springs working like muscles.

  A hatch opens in the ship's nose, maybe eighty feet from the ground, and yellow light spills out. A spacesuited figure appears, and begins rolling a rope ladder down to the surface. The figure waves to Bado and Williams, calling them to the ship.

  "What do you think?" Bado asks.

  "I think it's British. Look at that bull's-eye logo. I remember war movies about the Battle of Britain ... Wherever the hell that's come from, it's some place very different from the worlds you and I grew up in."

  "You figure we should go over there?" he asks.

  She spreads her hands. "What choice do we have? We don't have an LM. And we can't last out here much longer. At least these guys look as if they know what they're doing. Let's go see what Boris thinks."

  The cosmonaut lets Williams walk up to him. He is hauling at his ascent stage. But Bado can see the hull is cracked open, like an aluminum egg, and the cosmonaut's actions are despairing.

  Williams points toward the silver ship, where the figure in the airlock is still waving at them.

  Listlessly, the cosmonaut lets himself be led to the ship.

  Closer to, the silver craft looks even bigger than before-so tall that when Bado stands at its base he can't see the nose.

  Williams goes up the ladder first, using just her arms, pulling her mass easily in the Moon's shallow gravity well. The cosmonaut takes off his hoop, dumps it on the ground, and follows her.

  Bado comes last. He moves more slowly than the others, because he has his tool carrier clutched against his chest, and it is awkward to juggle while climbing the rope ladder.

  It takes forever to climb past the shining metal of the ship's lower hull. The metal here looks like lead, actually. Shielding, around an atomic pile? He thinks of the energy it must take to haul this huge mass of metal around. He can't help comparing it with his own LM, which, to save weight, was shaved down to little more than a bubble of aluminum foil.