OUTSIDE
Winston slid back the corridor door and led Trudy into a locker room, where empty space suits were hanging in a row, like a museum display of medieval armor. A hard plastic bench ran along the front of the lockers. Beyond its end, Trudy could see the heavy steel inner hatch of the airlock.
This is an initiation ritual, Trudy told herself as she slowly wormed her arms through the ribbed sleeves of the thermal undergarment for the space suit that Winston had picked out for her. Like hazing at a sorority or buying a round of beers first day on a new job, she thought. Here they take you out on the bare, airless surface of the Moon to see if you’ve got the guts to do it. That’s how you become one of them.
“You need a small size,” Winston said, leading her past several lockers, each containing an empty suit.
You can do this, Trudy told herself, trying to keep her fear from showing. You went outside at Selene and it was okay. Yeah, a sneering voice in her head countered. Outside. In a tour bus. A nice, comfortable, safe bus with twenty-some tourists. And even then you didn’t have the nerve to get out of the bus and walk on the surface, you just looked through the glass ceiling and focused on the Earth shining up there nice and bright.
It was dangerous outside, she knew. You could go through four-hundred-degree temperature swings just by stepping from sunlight into shadow. Hard radiation poured out of the sky. And meteors peppered the surface. I could get shot out there!
“Here,” said Winston, stopping at one of the lockers, “this one ought to fit you okay.”
Reluctant or not, she wriggled into the pants of the space suit and allowed Winston to help her slide the hard-shell torso over her head. Several other Farside employees had mysteriously shown up, grins on their faces, witnesses to the newbie’s initiation.
As Winston settled the life-support pack on her back and plugged in its connections to the suit, he asked mildly, “Trudy, are you sure you want to do this?”
“Sure,” she snapped, with a certainty that she didn’t feel at all. “Why not?”
“Okay.”
He pulled down a suit with his own name stenciled on its chest while a couple of the technicians who were standing nearby stepped up to check out Trudy’s space suit. Boots and gloves sealed. Backpack connected. One of them started to take the clear glassteel helmet off the shelf atop the locker, but Trudy pulled it out of his hands and lowered it over her own head. I can do that much for myself, she thought.
One of the bystanders, a sturdily built older woman, watched intently as Trudy turned the helmet on its neck ring until it clicked into place.
“Locked and loaded,” she murmured with an approving nod.
The woman seemed to be in charge. She carefully checked the suit’s radio reception, the servomotors that helped to bend the joints, the air circulation fans and heater. Trudy heard the faint gurgle of water circulating through the undergarment.
“Good to go,” the female technician said.
Winston was ready, too. He clumped in his suit’s heavy boots to the airlock hatch. Trudy followed a step behind him.
The big heavy hatch swung open and they stepped over its coaming into the airlock itself: a metal-walled chamber scarcely big enough for the two of them in their cumbersome suits. To Trudy it felt comfortably snug, safe, like a protective womb.
“Closing the inner hatch,” Winston said. Trudy heard his voice in her helmet speakers.
Once the hatch shut, the older woman’s voice said, “Pumping down.”
A pump started chugging away, but the sound quickly faded as the air was sucked out of the chamber. Trudy felt the vibration of the pump through the soles of her boots. We’re in vacuum now, she knew, her breath quickening. They’re pumping all the air out.
The vibration stopped and the display pad beside the outer hatch turned from amber to red.
“Ready for excursion,” Winston said.
Trudy nodded inside her helmet as she sucked in a deep breath. The air felt cold, dry.
“You’re clear for excursion,” said the woman’s voice.
“Opening outer hatch,” Winston said, as he reached a gloved hand to the display pad.
“Copy opening outer hatch.”
The hatch swung slowly, noiselessly open. Trudy saw an expanse of open, uneven bare ground. Not a bush or a blade of grass. Nothing can live out there, she told herself. Not unless you’re in a suit.
Winston stepped out onto the dusty ground and extended his arm, inviting Trudy to follow him.
Sealed inside the helmet, it was hard for Trudy to see her own booted feet. She tried to bend at the waist, but the suit’s joints were stiff, even with the servomotors assisting them. Carefully, she stepped over the hatch’s coaming and out onto the lunar regolith.
“You’re doing fine,” Winston encouraged.
I’m walking on the Moon! Trudy felt excited and scared all at the same time, like the first time she had done a parachute jump, back in California.
She kept her eyes on the ground. It was uneven, pockmarked with little craterlets and strewn with rocks from the size of pebbles to boulders as big as an automobile. Looking up warily, she saw that the horizon seemed strangely close, a hard slash across the ground where the world ended and the infinity of space began. No haze in the distance, she realized. No air.
This isn’t so bad, she told herself. Then she saw a structure a couple of dozen meters away. It looked like a shed made of thin honeycomb metal.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“The garage. We park the tractors in there. They’re both out now, towing the mirror across the mountains.”
Looking up cautiously, Trudy asked, “But where are the mountains? I thought we were surrounded by ringwall mountains.”
Winston’s radio voice answered, “They’re over the horizon in the direction you’re facing. You can’t see them from here—unless you turn around.”
She did, a slow full one-eighty turn, and saw the ringwall mountains rising over the airlock hatch. They looked tired, worn, their slopes gentle. Bunny slopes, she thought, if they had any snow on them. There seemed to be a road of sorts carved into the bare rock: switchbacking from the summit to the floor on which they stood.
“Those mountains have been eroded by several billion years of micrometeorite infall,” Winston was saying. “Sandpapered by those little dust motes flying in from space.”
“Yeah,” Trudy replied. No water to erode them. No rain or wind. But if a bullet-sized micrometeorite happened to hit me …
She tried to shake off her worries and at last worked up the courage to look up at the stars. There were thousands of them! Millions! Billions! Even through the heavy tinting of her helmet, Trudy could see them spangling the blackness of space, stretching out to infinity, staring down at her with ominous unblinking solemnity. So many stars! Trudy couldn’t make out any of the constellations she was so familiar with back on Earth: the profusion of stars blotted them out.
Then it hit her. The sky was empty! No Earth appeared up there, bright and friendly, the way it hung in the sky over Selene. Suddenly she was seven years old again, all alone, very frightened, all alone in the universe, staring at the cold empty sky, feeling as if she were falling upward into that unfeeling, remorseless infinite wilderness.
She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to fight down the panic that was surging through her.