Rocket to Luna

The floor of the mare was covered with a dark gray pumice that stirred lazily as he pushed his heavy boots through it. It did not linger long above the ground. It was not lifted on gusts of wind because there was no wind. It was not held aloft in the air because there was no air. It drifted back as soon as they passed through it, silently, effortlessly.

A huge, barren, desolate wasteland seemed to spread around them endlessly.

That, and the silence. Almost a physical force, almost a part of the Moon, as much a part of the Moon as the pumice underfoot, the jagged, pointed rocks, the craters.

They walked on in silence, and then they seemed to stop as if a signal had been given. They stared around them, overwhelmed by the frigid silence. It was as if they had stumbled into a crypt, a dust-covered crypt as old as the universe, a crypt that defied invasion. There was a sense of timelessness here, an attitude of quiet resolution, as if the Moon had taken a solid stand and would not be budged from it.

And there was a feeling of changelessness, something that stirred in the silence to whisper, “I am now what I have ever been.”

The stillness was unnatural and eerie, and it sent a shiver of apprehension up Ted’s spine. He stared off to the distant jagged peaks that rose like splintered crowns beyond the horizon, crowns set with the brilliant stars as jewels.

To the people back on Earth, the Moon was a slice of lemon in the sky, a warm, pleasant-looking oval, a boy-and-girl moon, a moon for an autumn night with falling leaves.

The people on Earth were not confronted with the deathly silence, Ted thought, or the knowledge that a tear in a space suit could lead to almost immediate freezing. They didn’t know how heavy a helmet could become when it pressed down on your shoulders, nor did they know the queer feeling of watching tiny slivers of frost spearing the edges of your face plate.

To the people back on Earth, night was a comparatively short thing. You went to sleep with it, and it was gone in the morning, replaced by the cheering rays of the sun. If Ted had guessed correctly, night was just falling on the Moon. But “night” here was no rapidly passing thing. It took the Moon fourteen Earth days to pass from New Moon to Full Moon, and another fourteen days to complete the cycle. The “night” in other words, was a period of utter darkness and freezing temperatures approximately 336 hours long. When “day” came, it was sudden and sharp, like the unexpected sting of a bumblebee. The temperature shot up immediately, zooming from something like -250° Fahrenheit to a temperature near the boiling point of water! There was no such thing as dawn or twilight on the Moon. There was “night” and “day” and the line between them was a clean, swift one.

Ted almost smiled as he realized the only changeable thing on the Moon was the temperature.

Forbes suddenly stopped and faced the other men. “I think we ought to claim the old girl,” he said.

“Go on,” Dr. Phelps prompted.

“I’ve never claimed a moon before,” Forbes said. “What does one say?”

“Just say it,” Dr. Phelps put in.

Forbes seemed to concentrate for a moment while the satellite’s silence closed in around them. When he began speaking, his voice was strangely solemn.

“In the name of the United States of America on the planet Earth, we do hereby claim the Moon and everything on the Moon with God as our witness in this year of our Lord one thousand, nine hundred and eighty-three.”

They stood in silence for several moments, and then Forbes turned and began leading the way back to the ship. He suddenly stopped dead in his tracks and said, “There’s something George would want to try if he were out here with us.”

Without further preamble, he leaped into the air, rising high above the heads of the other men and coming down in a cloud of pumice some twenty feet away.

“Be careful,” Dr. Phelps warned. “This gravity can be tricky.”

“And the rocks are sharp,” Dr. Gehardt added.

“I’m all right,” Forbes assured them.

Ted thought back to the Academy classes again, remembering the many times Colonel York had gone over the gravity of Earth’s satellite.

He would stand in the front of the room, his beady eyes blinking.

“I can see by your blank expression,” he would say to the assembled class, “that you have no idea what this means. I will explain further, but only because I am a patient man. Gravity on the Moon’s surface is one-sixth that of Earth’s.” He would pause then and tap his riding crop as he studied his class. “Still no impression, eh?” Shouting, then: “That means that a man weighing 175 pounds on Earth would weigh 29 1/6 pounds on the Moon. That means that he could lift his center of gravity six times as high. That means he’d be able to jump long distances, lift heavy weights six times as easily. Does that penetrate, gentlemen?” A sigh, and a long pause. “Heaven protect us if any of you are the first men to land on the Moon!”