aside.

Push ... kick.... The legs moved stiffly, like pipe joints. He reached above his head with the suit's clumsy arms and pushed. Slowly the suit scraped outward. He could feel only a soft, yielding resistance on his feet. A wild hope rose within him. Perhaps the dust was loosely-packed tenuous enough to tunnel through!

Then he was running in a waking nightmare. Running in molasses. A soft, yielding something was flowing around his feet—deadly, smothering stuff unseen in the pitch darkness. Panic seized him as first one leg and then the other became stuck fast.

Desperately he waved his arms until the suit's mechanical hands caught on the handwheel of the inner door. His wet palms slipped on the manipulators as he tried to apply pressure, to turn the wheel which refused to move.

He put every ounce of his strength into his arms—and gradually the wheel began to turn. Slowly at first, and then in a rush, the door plug moves aside.

He clung to the handwheel as an unseen force pushed down at him. Suddenly he felt his legs come free, as the cabin's outrushing air forced back the dust!

When the pressure lessened, he managed to squeeze the bulky suit through the inner door and into the now airless cabin; he fought the door back into place.

Safe!

Relief was as overwhelming as his panic had been. He stood there for a full minute, feeling nothing but joy and thankfulness that the dust could not come in after him. Then the sting of sweat flowing down his forehead and into his eyes swiftly brought him back to reality.

Safe, indeed!

For what?

He had hoped against reason that he could tunnel through the dust to the surface.

Perhaps he would soon have roasted to death in the sunlight, but he would at least have stood on the moon. The real moon—not this coffin where he was already dead and buried.

But wasn't he on the moon? Wasn't this what he had wanted, all his life? Wasn't this what he had come for?

What had he come for?

It was a question he had never really asked himself in the proper light, with the proper urgency. Others had asked it: 

 Prev. P 9/11 next