Phase Space (51 page)

We considered taking the Rovers, but it wouldn’t have been an easy drive for either of us – even supposing the ‘other’ Rover had worked at all. And we would have been separated, too far apart to help each other. We just decided to get back home as soon as we could.

Not that it was too clear to me what we’d do when we got there. That old LM wasn’t exactly a field hospital. But we could have brought the two guys home, I guess; the LM was designed to carry a couple of hundred pounds of Moonrock off the surface, and we could have crammed two extra guys into the Command Module, the ferry that was waiting in orbit to bring us home.

I guess.

The truth is we didn’t think that far ahead. We just had to help those guys. What else were we going to do?

I do remember looking back at the Rover, though –
our
-Rover – and looking at all the rocks we’d already collected, that now we wouldn’t be able to bring on home. We were bringing back something unutterably strange, but we wouldn’t be able to complete our mission.

It took us an hour to make it back to the LM. The surgeons insisted we stop for breaks along the way, letting ourselves cool down, sipping water out of the mouthpieces in our helmets. And so on.

It was hard work. I spent most of it staring down at my footing. The dust was like powdered charcoal. The surface was like walking on crisp, frozen snow, or maybe on a cinder track. I remember thinking that whatever came out of this, these would be the last steps I’d take on the Moon.

Well, we got back to Tycho Base, our landing site. And that was when we got our next shock.

Because the LM had gone.

At least, the ascent stage had, the cabin that would have carried us back to orbit. Only the truncated base remained. Neither of us spoke, if I recall, and nor did the capcom. What could you say? Without that LM we weren’t going home.

I remember limping around that site, still supporting my copy, just looking. I could see Rover tracks and footprints converging on the truncated base of the Lunar Module. The LM itself was the centre of a circle of scuffed regolith, littered with gear, two thrown-out backpacks, urine bags and food packs, lithium hydroxide canisters and LM armrests, the detritus of three days of exploration, all of it just thrown out at the end of the stay, as we would have done. Somebody here had been and gone before us.

The LM was surrounded by glittering fragments, for its foil insulation had been split and scattered by the blast of the departed ascent-stage’s engine. And there was a new ray system, streaks of dust which overlaid the footprints. But the gold insulation on the descent stage was discoloured, and in some places it had split open and peeled back. Joe tried to smooth it back with his gloved hand, but it just crumbled under his touch. The bird was evidently thoroughly irradiated, and remarkably dusty. The paint had turned to tan, but it was uneven, and when you looked more closely you could see tiny micrometeorite pits, little craters dug into the paintwork.

That LM had suddenly gotten old.

I remember looking up, looking for the Earth. Well, that was still there. And I saw a single, glittering star in the blackness, far above my head. It was the Command Module, in its two-hour lunar orbit, waiting to carry us home. Except we couldn’t reach it, without a LM.

I wasn’t afraid. It was all too strange.

… And then I heard our capcom yammering in my ear, telling me the surgeons were very concerned, I had to quit goofing off and get Joe into the LM.

Joe?

Well, I looked around. And I found I wasn’t propping up some ghostly shadow of myself, but old Joe. Our two copies had gone, as if they’d never been, and it was Joe’s backpack I was hooked up to. And when I turned again, there was the LM, intact once more, gold and silver and black, gleaming and glistening, good as new.

I looked at Joe, and Joe looked at me, and we didn’t say a word.

I guess you know the rest of the story.

As far as the world was concerned, Joe had taken a pratfall doing a dumb stunt, seeing how high he could jump in the one-sixth gravity, and snafued his suit, and I’d had to rescue him, walk him back to the LM on my backpack. That was what everybody else remembered; it’s what the video records and even our voice transcripts show. I’ve seen the images myself. He falls with a dreamy slowness, like falling underwater. He has time to twist around, the stiff suit making him move as a unit, like a statue.

Except it didn’t happen that way. That’s just the way reality knit itself back together around us. You see?

Well, we didn’t argue. We managed to get back into the LM, pressure up, and we prepared for an emergency launch.

We had time to think about it, in the three days it took to get back to Earth, and afterwards, in the long debriefings and all the rest.

I’ll tell you what I concluded – though I don’t think Joe ever agreed with me.

We’re in some sort of Quarantine.

The early Moonwalkers were put in quarantine when they got back to Earth, just to be sure there were no bugs to hurt us here on Earth. So maybe we’re seen as infectious, or even dangerous, like in that movie with the big robot – what was it called?

But it might be benevolent. Think about it. Maybe They cherish us. Maybe They cherish our art and religion and literature and stuff, and don’t want to swamp us with their giant galactic civilization until we’re ready. Maybe They are even protecting us from the real bad guys.

So They just hide it all. We’re in some kind of shell. What we see around us isn’t completely real; ‘reality’ is doctored, a little or a lot, as if we’re in some giant Program, a virtual reality as you’d call it today, showing us what’s best for us to see. But beyond the painted walls of our fake sky, the glittering lights of the interstellar cities light up the dark.

Walking on the Moon, we walked into a glitch in the Program. That was all.

That all seemed plausible to me, even back then. We didn’t know about virtual reality. Believe me, though, we had computer glitches. At least it was a rational explanation.

What Joe believed, in the end, he never told me. He knew he could never tell the truth – as I couldn’t – even though the subtle blaming for a screwed mission began even before we hit the Pacific. Even though old Joe came back carrying the can for a snafu, even though his pride hurt more than he could say, he kept his peace.

And now he’s taken his secret with him.

There was one more thing, Peter. I never discussed this, even with Joe.

On the way back I participated in a spacewalk between Earth and Moon. I wasn’t fully outside. My job was to be a lifeguard if you will. I was to monitor our Command Module Pilot’s actions as he collected data cartridges from the outer hull, and I held his lifeline, his tether which controlled communications and oxygen and restraint. I was to haul him back if he got into trouble.

So Ben floats out, starts hand over hand back to the Service Module. The Earth’s off to the right, probably about a two o’clock low, just a little thin sliver of blue and white. And then I spin around, and there’s this enormous full Moon, and it was – I mean it was overwhelming, that kind of feeling. And you could see Tycho, you could see Tranquillity, all the major features, and it just felt you could reach out and touch ’em. No sensation of motion at all. And everywhere else you looked was just black.

About fifteen minutes into this, with Ben doing his work nice and easy, I glanced at the Earth. And I saw ships in orbit.

Not little tin cans like ours. Giant golden ships. I had no sense of threat at all. Just watchfulness.

Next time I looked, those ships had gone, and there was the Earth, just a beautiful blue crescent, the loveliest thing.

It wasn’t meant to happen, you see. It was just a glitch in the Quarantine Program. A bug. They just weren’t ready for us to fly to the Moon so soon. They hadn’t ordered the virtual-reality upgrades from Central Supplies in Andromeda, wherever. We just pushed it too far, and we got ourselves mixed up with other copies, or echoes, of ourselves. We crossed tracks, for a few hours.

But it turned into a test for us, for how we’d react to such strangeness. A test I liked to think we passed. I think that’s why They showed Themselves to me.

Enough. Peter, I should let you go to your family. You decide what to do with what I told you. I just wanted you to know.

Wait until you see the Missing Man. Look out for the way that wing man peels off. I asked for him. Good pilot. Not so good as your father.

There was one in every class, Sheila Pal had observed. With experience she had come to be able to spot him – and usually it
was
a him – the moment she walked in to face a new group.

And so it was now as she arrived on this chill January night at a draughty high school in Aylesbury, for the first of her six Tuesday evening sessions. The classroom was fitted with the standard rows of desks and a white board, and the walls were covered to chest height by the project work of the room’s regular thirteen-year-old occupants.

It was a course she’d called
Einstein for Relative Beginners.
She was sponsored by the Workers’ Educational Association, a voluntary organization which put on cheap courses on a variety of subjects aimed, in theory, at those who had missed out on education in the past. The ‘Workers’ tag was a hangover from earlier in the century; now most of the courses were vocational or aimed at improving job-related skills – interview techniques, for instance – and the WEA was pretty squarely directed at the unemployed, who could take the courses for free. But there was still room for more academic or offbeat items, such as Sheila’s Einstein course.

There was a good turnout, for such an obscure and off-putting subject: a first glance, as she unloaded her notes, registration forms and props, revealed ten or twelve pupils, mostly men, mostly of retirement age.

And there, of course,
he
was: perhaps forty years old – about her own age, Sheila thought gloomily – with black hair thinning and unclean-looking, hunched in a corner, isolated even from this newly formed group. He had a thick, well-used notebook resting on top of his bulky coat. His gaze was on her already, but with none of the polite interest of the others, rather with an unhealthy eagerness.

She suppressed a sigh. Almost certainly he was just another run-of-the-mill obsessive who would be no real
threat.
He would just want her attention as he aired pet theories about space and time and the nature of reality – or, God forbid, UFOs. It was an occupational hazard for the science teacher in these post-rational times.

Summoning up a smile, she started to hand out registration forms.

He waited until the end of the class, when the other students had gone, before approaching her. It was harmless enough, as it turned out. He just pressed a letter into her hands: full of capitals, crudely pencilled on lined sheets, in some places the lettering pressed so hard the point had pushed through the paper.

Sheila collected up her materials and hurried out. She couldn’t avoid the encounter, but she didn’t want to be alone with this man. She climbed into her car, locked the doors, and pulled out.

She drove home, to her flat in a village on the outskirts of Milton Keynes. She left her teaching materials in the car; everything was on unofficial loan from the OU and she had to take it all back the next day anyway.

Her flat was a small, somewhat poky place, but her landlady was friendly, and the village was without street-lighting: on frosty winter nights – like tonight – the sky was crowned by stars. When she looked up, she immediately made out Orion’s powerful figure astride the night.

After a bath and a cup of tea, she glanced over the letter.

It was about UFOs.

… Suddenly I realized I was being levitated to a height of a hundred and sixty feet. There were beings in the air with me. They were floating, as I was. They looked like babies, I thought, or perhaps monkeys, with grey skin, oversized heads, huge eyes, and small noses, ears and mouths. Their ship was golden. But its shape was distorted, as if I was looking through a wall of curved glass, and so were the aliens themselves. They seemed to have difficulty staying in one place. They could pass through the walls of their craft at will, like ghosts. They even passed through my body.

They took hold of my arms, and pulled me towards the wall of their ship. I looked for my mother on the ground below, but I could no longer see her. I passed into the wall as if it was made of mist; but I had a sense of warmth and softness.

I was in a cylindrical room. I was enclosed in a plastic chair with a clear-fitted cover. The cover was filled with a warm grey fluid. But there was a tube in my mouth and covering my nose, through which I could breathe cool, clean air. A telepathic voice in my mind told me to close my eyes. When I did so I could feel pleasing vibrations, the fluid seemed to whirl around me, and I was fed a sweet substance through the tubes. I felt tranquil and happy. I kept my eyes closed, and I seemed to become one with the fluid.