“Tersten!” she cried. “Are you all right?” The wavelength diffracted around the edge. If he hung there, it was only about a meter below. She got no response. The seething gibed.
She turned her head more than her body toward Mswati behind her. His beltflash cast a pool of undiffused light at his feet. Through a well-nigh invisible helmet it dazzled her, made him a shadow against the starlit gray of the mountainside. “Come here,” she ordered. “Carefully, carefully. Take hold of my staff.”
“Yes,” he acknowledged. Though she hadn’t been leading the climb, she was the team captain. The expedition was her idea. Moreover, she was a Survivor. The others were in their twenties or thirties. Beneath all the informality and fellowship, they bore a certain awe of her.
“Stand by,” she said when he reached her. “I’m going ahead to look. If more crumbles, I’ll try to spring back, and may well fall off the ledge. Be prepared to brake me and haul me up.”
“No, I will go,” he protested. She dismissed that with a chopping gesture and set off on hands and knees.
It was a short crawl, but time stretched while she felt her way forward. On her right a cliff went nearly sheer into a nightful abyss. Flexible as skin, tough as armor, her space-suit wouldn’t protect her against such a fall. Vision searched and probed. Sensors in the gloves told her more through her hands than they could have learned naked. At the back of her mind, it annoyed that she should be aware of sweat-smells and dry mouth. While the suit recycled air and water, at the moment she was overloading its thermostat and capacity for breaking down wastes.
The suface held. The ledge continued beyond a three-meter gap. She made out pockmarks near the break in it. So, she thought—she must not agonize over Tersten, not yet—once in the past a shotgun meteoroid shower had struck here. Probably radiation spalling then weakened the stone further, turning that section into an unforeseeable trap.
Well, everybody had said this undertaking was crazy. The first lunar circumambulation? To go clear around the moon on foot? Why? You’ll endure toil and hardship and danger, for what? You won’t carry out any observations a robot can’t do better. You won’t gam anything but a fleeting notoriety, largely for your foolishness. Nobody will ever repeat the stunt. There are gaudier thrills to be had in a sensorium, higher achievements among the computers.
“Because it is real,” was the best retort she found.
She came to the edge and put her head over. On the horizon a sliver of rising sun shone above a crater. It turned desolation into a jumble of light and dark. Her helmet saved her eyesight by immediately stopping the glare down to a dull gold. Elsewhere it stayed clear. Her heart thuttered. Tersten dangled beneath her, limp. She loudened radio reception and heard snoring breath.
“He’s unconscious,” she reported to Mswati. Examining: “I see what the trouble is. His line caught in a crack on this verge. Impact jammed it in tight.” She rose to her knees and tugged. “I can’t free it. Come.”
The young man joined her. She rose. “We don’t know how he’s injured,” she said. “We must be gentle. Secure the end of my line and lower me over the side. I’ll clasp him and you haul us both in, me on the bottom to absorb any shocks and scrapes.”
That went well. Both were strong, and, complete with spacesuit and backpack full of intricate chemistries, a person weighed only some twenty kilos. While he was in her arms Tersten opened his eyes and moaned.
They laid him out on the ledge. Waiting till he could speak, Svoboda gazed west. The heights dropped down toward a level darkness that was Mare Crisium. Earth hung low, daylit part marbled white and blue, unutterably lovely. Memories of what it had once been struck like a knife. Damnation, why did that have to be the one solitary planet fit for humans?
Oh, the lunar cities and the inhabited satellites were pleasant, and unique diversions were available there. She was more at home in them than on Earth, actually—or, rather, was less an exile. Their people, such as these her comrades, sometimes thought and felt much as people used to think and feel. Though that too was changing. On which account you scarcely ever heard talk about terraforming Mars and Venus any longer. Now when it could be done, hardly anybody was interested.