Mindscan

It was exhilarating. I thought about what the launch attendant had said: people with artificial bodies are perfect for space exploration. Perhaps he was right, and—

Something hit me in the face, soft, scrunchy.

"What the—?"

It took me a moment to make things out in the dim green light, especially since the glowstick was now on the far side of Karen, meaning her body was casting weird shadows across my field of view. The thing that had hit me in the face was Karen's shirt.

I looked down — across — over — up — at her.

"Come on, Jake," she said. "We may never have another chance like this."

I thought back to the one previous time we'd done this: with the stress of the trial, we hadn't tried again. "But—"

"We'll doubtless return home on a regular transport," Karen said, "full of other people. But right now, we've got an opportunity that may never happen again. Plus, unlike most people, we don't have to worry about getting bruised."

Her bra was flapping up toward me now, a seagull in our emerald twilight. It was … stimulating, watching her move as she bent and twisted, taking off her pants.

I caught her bra, wadded it up, and sent it on a trajectory that would get it out of the way, then began to remove my own shirt, which quickly billowed around me as its buttons were undone. My belt was next, a flat eel in the air. And then my pants joined Karen's, floating freely.

"All right," I said, to Karen. "Let's see if we can execute a docking maneuver…"

38

We had to strap in again ten hours later, as the rocket decelerated for a full sixty minutes. Although most manned flights to the moon apparently went to something called LS One, we were going to land directly at Heaviside Crater.

The landing was done by remote control and there was nothing for us to see; the cargo hold had no window. Still, I knew we were setting down on our tail fins; Jesus at Cape Kennedy had quipped, "In the way that God and Robert Heinlein meant you to," but I didn't get it.

It was near the end of the lunar day, which lasted, as I'm sure that Smythe guy would say, a fortnight. The surface temperature apparently was a little over 100 degrees Celsius — but it's a dry heat. According to Dr. Porter, whom Smythe had consulted about this, we could manage ten or fifteen minutes out in the heat, not to mention the ultraviolet radiation, before we'd have a problem; the lack of air, of course, was a nonissue for us.

The cargo rocket didn't have an airlock, just a hatch, but it was easy enough to open from the inside; the same safety rules that existed for refrigerators also seemed to apply to spaceships. I hinged the door outward, and the atmosphere that had been carried along with us escaped in a white cloud.

We were inside Heaviside Crater, its rim rising up in the distance. The closest dome of High Eden was maybe a hundred meters away, and—

That must be it. The moonbus, a silvery brick with a blue-green fuel tank strapped to each side, sitting on a circular landing platform. It was attached to an adjacent building by a telescoping access tunnel.

The lunar surface was about twelve meters below my feet — far more than I'd want to fall under Earth's gravity, but it shouldn't be a problem here. I looked at Karen and smiled. There was no way for us to speak, since there was no air. But I mouthed the word "Geronimo!" as I stepped out of the hatchway.

The fall was gentle, and took what seemed like forever. When I hit — probably the first pair of Nikes ever to directly touch the lunar soil — a cloud of gray dust went up.

Some of it stuck to my clothes (static electricity, I presumed), but the rest filtered back down to the ground.

There were little meteor craters everywhere within this bigger crater: some were a few centimeters across, others a few meters. I turned around and looked up at Karen.

For a woman who had been frail a short time ago, who had had one hip replaced and had doubtless lived in fear of breaking the other, she was quite gutsy. With no hesitation, she copied what I'd done, stepping out of the hatch and beginning the slow descent to the ground.

She was carrying something tubular … of course! She'd remembered to grab the front section of the New York Times, and now had it rolled into a cylinder. It was astonishing not to see her hair billow upward, or her clothes ripple, but there was no air resistance to cause any of that. I took a few quick hopping steps to the right to give her plenty of room to land, and she did so, a big grin on her face.

The sky overhead was totally black. No stars were visible except the sun itself, which glowered fiercely. I reached out a hand, and Karen grasped it, and we took huge bouncing steps together, heading for High Eden, the place we were never supposed to see.