The tour guide and the bus driver both checked out each tourist before they let the visitors climb down from the bus’s hatch onto the lunar regolith. Pancho’s helmet earphones filled with “oohs” and “lookit that!” as, one by one, the tourists stepped onto the ancient ground and kicked up puffs of dust that lingered lazily in the gentle gravity of the Moon.
“Look how bright my footprints are!” someone shouted excitedly.
The guide explained, “That’s because the topmost layer of the ground has been darkened by billions of years of exposure to hard radiation from the Sun and deep space. Your bootprints show the true color of the regolith underneath. Give ’em a few million years, though, and the prints will turn dark, too.”
For all the years she’d worked in space, Pancho had never been out on a Moonwalk. She found it fascinating, once she cut off the radio frequency that carried the tourists’ inane chatter and listened only to the prerecorded talk that guided visitors to the Ranger 9 site.
To outward appearances she was just another tourist from one of the three busloads that were being shepherded along the precisely-marked paths on the immense floor of Alphonsus. But Pancho knew that Martin Humphries was in one of the other buses, and her reason for being here was to report to him, not to sightsee.
She let the cluster of tourists move on ahead of her while she lingered near the parked buses. The canned tourguide explanation was telling her about the rilles that meandered near the site of the old spacecraft crash: sinuous cracks in the crater floor that sometimes vented out thin, ghostlike clouds of ammonia and methane.
“One of the reasons for locating the original Moonbase in Alphonsus’s ringwall mountains was the hope of utilizing these volatiles for—”
She saw Humphries shuffling toward her, kicking up clouds of dust as if it didn’t matter. It had to be him, she thought, because his spacesuit was different from the ones issued to the tourists. Not different enough to be obvious to the tenderfeet, but Pancho recognized the slightly wider, heavier build of the suit and the tiny servo motors at the joints that helped the wearer move the more massive arms and legs. Extra armor, she thought. He must worry about radiation up here.
Humphries had no name tag plastered to the torso of his suit, and until he was close enough to touch helmets she could not see into his heavily-tinted visor to identify his face. But he walked right up to her, kicking up the dust, until he almost bumped his helmet against hers. She recognized his features through the visor: round and snubby-nosed, like some freckle-faced kid, but with those cold, hard eyes peering at her.
Pancho lifted her left wrist and poised her right hand over the comm keyboard, asking Humphries in pantomime which radio frequency he wanted to use. He held up a gloved hand and she saw that he was holding a coiled wire in it. Slowly, with the deliberate care of a person who was not accustomed to working in a spacesuit, he fitted one end of the wire into the receptacle built into the side of his helmet. He held out the other end. Pancho took it and plugged into her own helmet.
“Okay,” she heard Humphries’s voice, almost as clearly as if they were in a comfortable room, “now we can talk without anyone tapping into our conversation.”
Pancho remembered her childhood, when she and some of the neighborhood kids would create telephone links out of old paper cups and lengths of waxed string. They were using the same principle, linking their helmets with the wire so they could converse without using their suit radios. This’ll work, Pancho thought, as long as we don’t move too far apart. She judged the wire connecting their helmets to be no more than three meters long.
“You worried about eavesdroppers?” she asked Humphries.
“Not especially, but why take a chance you don’t have to?”
That made sense, a little. “Why couldn’t we meet down at your place, like usual?”
“Because it’s not a good idea for you to be seen going down there so often, that’s why,” Humphries replied testily. “How long do you think it would be before Dan Randolph finds out you’re coming to my residence on a regular basis?”