“Small Step”
by Larry Hodges
“I want that one!” Divid had signaled, pointing a tendril at the glowing dot. It was two hundred thousand years ago, shortly after they’d retired with just enough money saved to buy a developing universe. Maram had spent a day going through the aisles before picking out this one. From their point of view, outside the universe, it was just a tiny flicker of a point, sitting on a store shelf, floating inside a transparent force field that kept it in place. With the uniscope they’d been able to look inside and see the various universes on sale as they expanded and developed. Size, as well as mass and energy, were mere illusions, relative to the viewer. All universes, given enough time, are vast from the inside, but mere pinpricks from the outside.
From the inside, this universe was already nearly 14 billion years old, which was considered a good age for finding a home, with plenty of Population 1 stars and metallic content. They explored with the uniscope before finding the perfect quiet spot they could retire to, an airless moon with just the right gravity, orbiting a planet teeming with life, which would give them something to watch in their retirement years. It had to be perfect, for while it was simple transporting to the desired spot inside the tiny universe, the vast spaces inside made transporting back impossible. But why would they ever need to return? They lived off sunlight and moon dust, and spent much of their time in philosophical debates, reading, and watching the entertainment on the viewer. But mostly they cherished the hours they spent Earth-watching.
“They’ve discovered fire!” signaled Divid, wiggling his tendrils excitedly at his wife as he peered with one of his eyestalks through a 500-meter wide holographic telescope on the airless surface of the moon. He could only see short glimpses of the humans as they sat around fires—those speed demons, like all carbon life forms, lived life ten thousand times faster than silicon creatures. Earth-watching had been their primary hobby since they had retired and settled here 200,000 years ago.
“Fire’s been around long before now,” Maram signaled back, staring through her own giant telescope. “Lots of forest fires from lightning. And mankind has been making fires since before we arrived.”
“Yes, but now it’s widespread,” signaled Divid. “I’m scared—what if they learn spaceflight and come after us? Maybe we should freeze them now. “He waved his tendrils in panic.
Maram snapped a button, and her holographic telescope instantly retracted back into its projector in n-space. “Divid, my dear little Moondust, they still hunt with spears! By the time they evolve to spaceflight we’ll long be dead and gone.”
“Don’t say ‘dead’! You’re scaring me.” He flipped off his telescope. Glancing down with one of his eyestalks, he pushed with a foot a glassy basalt rock away and into a small nearby crater. During their discussion a week had gone by. Earth and its moon continued to relentlessly circle the sun every year, which to them was 52.6 minutes.
“Sorry, Moondust, but there’s nothing to fear.”
She was wrong. Over the next 125,000 years—12.5 years to the two elderly Seelees—humanity slowly, and then with incredible rapidity, advanced toward an inevitable showdown. It had become even more exciting the last hundred years—3.65 days for them—as the humans went through the industrial revolution and then developed cars and planes. They also saw the frightening nuclear flashes.
“What if they bring them here?” Divid signaled. “If they can split atoms, how long before they master basic rocketry? We need to freeze them before it’s too late!”
“My poor Moondust, we’re fully protected,” signaled Maram. “If they come here, they’ll set off the sensors, which will send up the shields, and we’ll have plenty of time to deal with them.”
“I don’t know. . .”
“Let’s go watch them. I wonder if they are building any more super-tall buildings?” The two were soon staring through their telescopes and exchanging playful eye nudges.
But there was a design flaw in the sensors—they only scanned for objects accelerating toward the surface, such as asteroids and meteors, not for ones slowing down for a controlled landing.
Nobody would ever know how much Buzz admired Neil. He truly did. And yet . . . when he watched the press fawning on him, it grated on him. That should be me, he thought. I should be the one taking the first step on the moon. As he’d pointed out, throughout the short history of the space program, beginning with Ed White’s spacewalk and on all subsequent flights, the commander of the flight—that was Neil—remained in the spacecraft, while his partner—that was Buzz—did the actual exploring. The Chicago Daily News and New Orleans Time-Picayune had even run premature headlines proclaiming that Aldrin would be the first man on the moon.
Heck, Buzz’s mom’s maiden name was even Moon! And Neil Armstrong? Neil A. was just Alien spelled backwards! Not exactly an appropriate name for one going to the lifeless moon.
But he could not compete. Neil Armstrong was the golden boy who looked the part—calm, quiet, and above all, well-liked. Buzz was merely incredibly competent. And Buzz’s balding head—he was only thirty-nine!—didn’t help either. Sure, NASA claimed the reason for the decision was that the Eagle’s hatch opened on Neil’s side, making it more efficient for Neil to exit first. Sure, Neil was the senior member, joining NASA a year before Buzz. But everyone knew the real reason.
Buzz had tried to convince Neil that he should be first, but again to no avail. The crushing fact was that history would remember Neil as the first man on the moon, with Buzz a distant, forgotten second.
Buzz had a doctoral degree in astronautics from MIT, Neil just a bachelor’s in Aeronautical Engineering from Purdue. Good grief. If you were a passenger on a spaceship, who would you want in charge, someone with a degree in actual spaceflight, or someone with a degree for flying airplanes?
Oh, how he envied Neil. And yet he liked the man, who was too likeable for his own good. And every time he thought that, he’d grit his teeth and feel even more discouraged.
But Buzz was a total professional. He kept his feelings bottled up even as he sat in the middle, atop the 364-foot, 5.8 million-ton Saturn V rocket, his media-ready competitor to his right, and poor Michael Collins to his left. Sometimes Buzz consoled himself with Mike’s plight. He’d be going all the way to the moon, only to orbit it without ever setting foot there, coming 99.98% of the way but coming up 50 miles short. So close, and yet so far.
It was July 16, 1969, and the countdown had begun. At 9:32 the rockets fired, and Apollo 11 had liftoff. Within seconds they had left Cape Canaveral behind. The three astronauts were pulled into their seats at four Gs.
“Good luck and Godspeed,” said Mission Control.
“Thank you very much,” said Neil. “We know this will be a very good flight.”
Buzz rolled his eyes at the bland statement by his fellow astronaut. He wondered if he’d have something more dramatic to say when he set foot on the moon. Or maybe Neil would stumble and fall, and the first man on the moon would hit it head-first.
Seventeen seconds up, Mike said, “The beast is felt. Shake, rattle, and roll! We are thrown left and right against our straps in spasmodic little jerks. It is steering like crazy, like a nervous lady driving a wide car down a narrow alley. . .”
But Buzz didn’t hear the rest of Mike’s poetic babble. They were barely out of Florida, but already his mind was on the moon.
The first stage burned for two minutes and forty seconds, taking them thirty-eight miles up. Then the first stage of the Saturn rocket was jettisoned, as was the escape tower and boost protection cover. This allowed the astronauts to finally see outside the cockpit window. And there it was, the moon!
The second stage burned for six minutes, taking them up to 115 miles. It jettisoned, and then the third stage fired. Eleven minutes and forty-two seconds after liftoff, they were in orbit, traveling at 17,400 miles per hour. The monitors showed the fearless Neil’s heart racing at 110 beats per minute, with Michael at 99. The excitable and acerbic Buzz was at 88. Who’s the calm and cool one?
They orbited the Earth one-and-a-half times. Then, guided by a 70-pound IBM computer with 74 kilobytes of memory, running at 2.048 MHz, they headed for the moon.Would the trip be like From the Earth to the Moon, that novel by Jules Verne, or were they more like Icarus, doomed to fly too high and have their wings melt?
“Did you see that!” Divid exclaimed, his tendrils in a frenzy. He was staring at the Earth. “They’re coming here!”
“Where?” asked Maram. She pushed a button and her holographic telescope appeared. Just in case, she reached for her time booster.
He pointed with a tendril. “There! We need to freeze them—now!”
“Relax, they’re just big, cute humans. Why would they want to hurt us? What are the chances that they’d just happen to land near us?” But it took some time for Maram to find the incoming rocket on her telescope. By the time she did, it was nearly there as the four days it took the ship to reach the moon and prepare to land was merely 34 seconds for them.
Divid reached for his time booster, tendrils and eyes quivering. “We’ve got to freeze them before they get here!” With a thought, they could freeze anything in the near vicinity, an ability evolved by their ancestors to defend against much faster carbon-based creatures, allowing them to temporarily stop time for their enemies as they slowly scurried away. The invention of time boosters greatly enhanced this ability.
“Maybe we should wait, see what they want,” suggested Maram. “If they land anywhere near—unlikely—we’ll just go underground. Don’t be so fraidful, my Moondust!”
“We can’t wait!” Divid signaled. But the time booster fell from his shaking tendrils and slowly dropped to the ground, at 1/6 the speed of something falling on Earth. To the Seelee, that was lightning fast, and it would have taken him five hours to reach down and pick it up.
Even without the booster, they could freeze time for the ship with their natural time-freezing abilities, or put up the shields. But before either could react, one of its landing struts smashed into Divid as it landed.
Neil piloted the ship toward the infamous spot in the Sea of Tranquility that had so beleaguered NASA astronomers. There’d been reports of a pair of iridescent USOs—Unidentified Seen Objects. They were barely visible, about five hundred meters wide. When reports of the sightings came to NASA, they’d bottled it up under the guise of national security, using a combination of bribes and blackmail. Buzz had heard stories of stubborn amateur astronomers who had suddenly disappeared.
With Mike in orbit in the Columbia, the command module, Buzz and Neil were in the final seconds before landing in the Eagle. To save on weight, the aluminum walls of the lunar module were only 1/20th of an inch thick, so thin you could poke a pencil through it. It was like being in a shark tank made of aluminum foil, with hungry great whites circling about. Astronaut Jim McDivitt had called it a “tissue paper spacecraft.”
They would report that the initial landing area was too rocky to land, and that Neil had maneuvered about, looking for a flatter landing spot. Actually, he was looking for the exact spot they’d pinpointed where the pair of ghostly images had been seen. With help from the ship’s own IBM computer—this one with only 64 KB memory—Neil succeeded. As they touched down, they had less than 20 seconds of fuel left.
“Houston, Tranquility Base here,” said Neil. “The Eagle has landed.”
Again, Buzz thought, such bland words. What would he say when he actually stepped on the moon? We’re here?
The two were scheduled for a four-hour rest period before exploring the moon on foot. But as Buzz explained, “Telling us to try to sleep before the EVA was like telling kids on Christmas morning they had to stay in bed until noon.” They were given permission to start their exploration early.
They had numerous pre-Extra Vehicular Activity tasks to complete, which took about four hours. Buzz would later explain, “We felt like two fullbacks trying to change positions inside a Cub Scout pup tent.”
Eventually they were both in their PLSS’s—Portable Life Support Systems. They depressurized the cabin. Then Neil stood and laboriously stepped to the hatch. He opened it, and what little air remaining inside shot out. Then he jammed through the hatch and began his way down the ladder.
Buzz was tempted to burst through the door and jump to the ground first. He’d never fly for NASA again, but he’d be first to step on the moon, and nobody could ever take that away from him. His name would be etched as the first on the moon. Forever.
Instead, he kept to his seat. This was it, the biggest moment in human history, and he was stuck inside while Neil took that first step. He realized his heart had begun to race and the medics back on Earth would see that on their instruments; he had to calm down. But that was easy. With red-hot anger, your heart races, and you can barely think straight. With cold anger, your heart slows, and you think clearly, whether to prepare to be the second on the moon or to plot revenge. No, he thought, that would be childish. Neil was a great man and deserved the honor. Neil was his friend.
But oh, how he resented Neil at that moment, the biggest in human history.
Half a billion people on Earth watched on live TV as Neil made his way down the ladder. Buzz had dreamed about this for so long he could feel each moon-shaking footstep as if it were his own.
Neil said, “I’m going to step off the LM now.” As the cameras rolled, he stepped onto the moon. “That’s one small step for. . .”
Everything froze.
Maram stood next to the body of Divid, shattered into pieces under the ship’s leg. Her own tendrils drooped. They’d been joined as one since shortly after childhood. What was one when half of it died? It was her fault—she’d ignored Divid’s warnings to freeze the humans. And now he was dead.
Dead. The word was so final. Her guilt would live with her always. She wanted to crush these humans, make them pay, make them suffer—
The huge alien shot out of the ship. Maram reflexively pushed down on the time booster button. With her own innate ability magnified by the device, and with no time to do a more measured response, she stopped time throughout the universe. The time booster was linked to the outside via quantum entanglement, and so instead of needing to freeze a volume nearly 100 billion light years wide, it simply froze the pinprick-sized universe from the outside. She, and the immediate area around her, were of course immune. Several of her eyes lit up, illuminating the area.
The universe, outside of her immediate area, became the blackest of blacks, with its light frozen. Even the light from her eyelights froze on contact with the stopped time. She slowly made her way to the huge being, the time field about her moving with her, until she was next to it.
What should she do with this creature that had killed her partner?
To better know the creature, she’d needed to scan it. To do that, she’d need to start up time again. She mentally focused on just the alien, so only time around it would resume. Then, with the scanner running, she started time up, but only for the long fraction of a second it took to do the scan.
“. . .a. . .” said the creature before she froze it again.
The results from the scanner were fascinating. “These beings are so fragile!” she exclaimed. All she had to do was puncture its spacesuit and it would die. A life for a life.
She crawled close and extended a silicon tendril. One thrust, and then she could stand back and watch the air shoot out of the creature’s suit, and the creature would thrash about until it died. It would be dead within a minute, almost instantly to Maram.
And then what? Spend the rest of her life on the desolate moon, with the dead body of her mate, watching a boring, frozen Earth?
She decided to explore the alien ship. The door was open with a ladder leading up to it, so going inside wasn’t a problem. She started up time for the ship, but only for a split second so she could scan it. The scanner detected the alien’s partner. In theory, there was no reason why alien beings would also have partners, like the Seelee, but she had trouble imagining such a lonely existence. Her tendrils shuddered as she realized her own fate.
After some quick mental calculations, she again started up time just for the ship and the area around it, but left both aliens frozen, one inside the ship, the other standing outside, with the rest of the universe also still frozen. Then she clambered up the ladder, pulling herself up one rung at a time with her tendrils, and then entered the ship. The frozen alien, similar in shape to the one outside, sat in a chair.
She found the ship’s computer and scanned it. So primitive! How could beings build spaceships and travel to other worlds while running and navigating their ships with such simplistic devices? They might as well have done the calculations on their tendrils. Two arms with five tendrils each, she noted.
From the computer she quickly learned their written language. What a mess it was, with contradictions and redundancies, similar to pre-civilization Seelee languages. Why hadn’t they made logical adjustments and then have everybody learn the new version? She also learned they had a spoken language, but of course that involved detecting vibrating air waves, which were far too fast for a Seelee.
She found a pad of paper and a pen. She had questions.
One second Buzz was sitting in his chair, listening on his suit’s radio to Neil’s commentary while waiting his turn as the forgotten number two, and the next, there was a pad of paper and a felt-tip pen on his lap. Where had that come from? It seemed to have materialized instantly.
There was something neatly written at the top of the paper. It said:Why are you here? Please write your answer. Tap on wall when done.
He stared at the words, his hand shaking. Then he realized that Neil had stopped talking, in mid-sentence, after saying, “That’s one small step for–” What was going on?
Laboriously in the small space and in his 180-pound suit—about 30 pounds on the moon, but with the same inertia as on Earth—Buzz got up and went to the open door to the moon.
“Beautiful view,” he said. But he didn’t have time to enjoy it. Outside, where Neil had been standing, was instead just a black silhouette, standing absolutely still. It stood just as Neil had, on the dusty, rock-strewn moon, and seemed about the right shape, but was the blackest of blacks. What had happened to Neil? Nearby was another blackness, dome-shaped, a little more than waist-high to Neil. The whole area was dim, as if the light from the sun were blocked, with just the ship lights illuminating the area.
Should he radio Earth? They’d think he was crazy. He went back to his seat, sat down, and stared at the paper. He wouldn’t say anything about the message, but just say that Neil—good, reliable Neil—had turned into a black statue on the moon. But of course they would already know something was wrong since they and half a billion others were listening in and would have heard him stop talking in mid-sentence.
“Houston, we have a problem.” The time lag for a signal to go from the moon to Earth and back again was about 2.5 seconds. He waited for an answer, but there was nothing. “Houston, do you read?” Still silence. “Mike, are you there?” Still no answer. Perhaps the radio was damaged. But it had been working just minutes before. Should he go out and check on the statue that might be Neil? But he knew his orders; if there was an unknown danger outside, he wasn’t to risk himself until the problem was known. If he went out, whatever had happened to Neil might happen to him, and those on Earth would never know what had happened.
He stared down at the paper. Something had written it, and the odds were it had something to do with Neil’s condition. He felt like he was seeing a ghost, with his heart now beating faster than Neil’s ever had.
He finally wrote out an answer just below the first message.
We come in peace to explore. Who wrote this?
He put it on the console in front of him and stared at it, deep in thought. Then, as instructed, he tapped on one of the sturdier parts of the wall to indicate he was done.
Suddenly the pad of paper shifted a bit to the side, with a new message written under his.
I am an alien to you from far away. When you landed you killed my partner. I have frozen time except for us. I will not allow you or your race to kill me.
Buzz felt like a meteor shower had hit him. First contact? They’d killed an alien? Time was frozen? An alien was threatening humanity? It was too much. It took a few minutes to get his head together and his now Neil-like heartbeat to get back to normal.
Buzz wrote:I am sorry. It was an accident. Why can’t I see you? He tapped on the wall again.
A split second later: I am silicon based. Carbon-based life lives 10,000 times faster. I freeze time for you while I am in your ship to write my messages. I am outside protected from you by an area of stopped time. Look outside. I will lift time shield for short time so you can see me.
Buzz grabbed his camera and moved back to the hatch. The black statue that seemed to be Neil still stood there. Standing next to him, where there had been a black dome before, was the motionless alien.
Buzz clicked a picture, then stared at it. After a few seconds the alien disappeared again behind the black dome—of stopped time? But the image of the being remained in his mind. It was hemispheric, flat on the bottom, curved on top, teal-blue, with four thin legs—each about a foot long—spaced around the bottom perimeter. Its body was also about one foot tall, with about two dozen yellow tendrils sprouting out the top, each about two feet long. Half of them had thin, finger-like appendages at the tips. The other half widened at the tips into weird, reddish eyes, most of them staring at him or the ship.
They are going to go crazy back on Earth when they see the picture, Buzz thought. He went back to his seat and sat down.
The paper shuddered, and new words appeared.
You are a threat to me.Why should your race be allowed to continue?
The words were like a bolt of lightning. Allowed to continue?
Why indeed? And did the alien mean “continue” in the sense of starting up time again, or actually extinguishing the human race?
He wrote: We are not a threat to you. Why are you threatening us?
The response: You killed my partner. From 240,000 miles away you hit bullseye. Not an accident.
He wrote: We detected an anomaly here. That’s why we chose to land here. We didn’t know you existed.
The response: Maybe. You have Earth. Moon is ours. Mine. We paid for this universe. You have nuclear bombs. Move too fast. Major threat. Cannot allow continued threat.
What did the alien mean by these statements? He wrote: What will you do? Keep us frozen in time forever?
The response: I will freeze time for your planet and you. Light hitting it will freeze and accumulate. Then I will start your time again. Accumulated photons will shoot inward and burn up your planet and you.
Buzz could barely read the words in his trembling hands.This was the most awkward form of communication ever and the fate of humanity depended on it . . . and him. How should he respond?
But there was something wrong with the physics here. He wrote: You cannot freeze light. The photons would bounce off the time-stopped area.
The response: You can if you have super-slowed time at its edges, and fully and fundamentally understand a photon’s deep inner workings. Do you?
I thought we sort of did, Buzz sighed. But not really. Like we thought we understood physics and then, one by one, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg,Schrödinger, Dirac, Feynman, and others had come along and destroyed that illusion. And so humanity was doomed unless he could convince this alien otherwise.
He wrote: You can have moon. We will stay away. I will make it happen.
The response: Can you guarantee that humans will not come to the moon again?
Buzz started to write an answer but paused. There was no way he could guarantee this. The alien probably knew this. If he wrote yes, it would know he was lying. What if this were a test?
It had to be.
He wrote:I cannot guarantee what others will do. I guarantee only that I will do what I can to stop our space program.
The almost instant response: Not good enough.
Buzz once again stared at the answer. He was bargaining for humanity’s existence. What should he write? What could he say to save the human race?
Then another word appeared on the paper: Sorry.
It couldn’t end this way. Buzz grabbed at the paper and scribbled furiously. He finished by underlining his words . . . and then froze.
Maran felt bad for the alien, but she had no choice. To keep things simple, she kept the universe frozen except for the local sun and the area directly between that and the frozen earth, and the even narrower band between the sun and the area around the frozen alien spacecraft and the frozen alien outside, allowing photons to smash into and accumulate around the targets.
The light buildup around the Earth and the two humans and their spacecraft began; she could almost feel the growing heat, just waiting for her to start up their time again so the uncountably growing number of photons could shoot inward and turn them into cinders. But what else was she to do? This was her retirement world, and these way-too-fast aliens with nuclear bombs were dangerous. Besides, who had killed first?
She opened up her holographic telescope and stared at the Earth, allowing enough light to flow into the areas she viewed so she could see. Much of the planet was covered in clouds; she’d picked a bad time to freeze it. But she found a city that was clear and zoomed in. All the people were frozen. A human was walking what she now realized was a dog. Another rode a bicycle. Cars were in the street. Small humans—children—played in a park with a ball.
All still.
All boring.
All soon to die.
She shut the telescope down and stared with half her eyestalks at where the Earth was, but with no light reflecting off it, it wasn’t visible. Sighing, she walked a slow circle about the alien spaceship. She stopped to stare into the eyes of the alien standing outside the ship, allowing enough light to go in so she could make out his features. Such flat eyes! How could they look about with eyes set into their heads like that?
She came to a stop outside the open doorway into the ship, her eyestalks waving about and tendrils rubbing against each other. Finally she climbed back inside.
She found Buzz frozen as she’d left him, sitting in his chair in front of the paper they’d been conversing on. There were new words at the bottom, words after her own last message of Sorry. She reread the words.
We come in peace. Do you?
We did come in peace! We were here before your kind knew the concept. We only wanted peace, and then you came and killed Divid. My poor Moondust! Okay, maybe it was an accident, but that didn’t change the fact that these humans were dangerous.
But why did she believe that? Had she started with fear and false data—that they had killed Divid on purpose—and come to a conclusion that she desperately wanted to keep, because of her fear? It was Divid’s fear that she had ignored, and that had led to his death.
She waved a tendril about in frustration, accidentally pushing it against something sticking out of the wall, which broke off—some sort of primitive circuit breaker? But they had broken something far worse. Furiously, she grabbed the paper and wrote a response: We came in peace. You broke it.
But what was the point? The alien would never read it. Unless. . .
This close, she didn’t even need the booster, and the human hadn’t been frozen long enough for enough light to have built up around him to affect him much. With a thought, she unfroze Buzz. He shot into motion, 10,000 times her speed, as she realized in horror that she had hadn’t left the ship and was at the full mercy of this creature. Before, she had waited outside until she felt the vibration of his wall tapping, and then froze time around him before coming inside to write her messages. She quickly refroze time, knowing the alien had been free around her for literally hours of its time.
Then she read its new message.
The alien appeared as if out of nowhere, sitting on the console next to the paper. He also felt a sudden heat, as if he were under a biting August sun, but it passed quickly.
He stared at the alien for a time and thought he could barely make out some motion of the dozen eyestalks. The large black pupils in each of the reddish eyes all stared at him. He reached out and gently touched the creature’s skin, which seemed leathery though it was hard to tell through his thick gloves.
There was also a new note: We came in peace. You broke it.
He wrote: We did not mean to. His words were simple but inside he was a supernova. The alien was a direct threat to all of humanity. Should he kill it now, while he had the chance? He wasn’t sure how—It didn’t seem to have a neck, with what could be called its head just an extension of the thick body. He could use a screwdriver as a stabbing weapon against the threatening yet now defenseless creature. Or perhaps just tear off its tendrils and eyestalks. Yuck.
There had to be a better way. But how was he going to get humanity out of this, short of cold-blooded murder? Maybe the alien was testing him, and if he threatened it, it would leap into action and kill him and everybody else. Okay, not likely. But at least it helped him rationalize not killing the alien. That was not a part of his training.
Two hours went by before there was a response. Then the alien disappeared and there was a new note: We came to retire. Watching humans on frozen Earth boring. Retirement now lonely.
He wrote: How can you watch humans on Earth? You would need huge aperture, at least several hundred meters, and something to adjust for atmospheric disturbances.
The response: Holographic telescopes that expand to any size needed. Multidimensional reflecting holograph technology make possible. Computer analyzes incoming light and adjusts for atmospheric scatter.
He wrote: I’d love to have that technology.
An instant later a small bar with several dials on it appeared in his hand, and another message: My partner no longer needs this. What can you do to keep humans away from moon?
This was it. The culmination of human history, whose very existence depended on his negotiating skill with an alien intelligence with the power of God over them. This definitely was not part of his training. He had to convince the alien that humans, after landing on the moon, would now abandon it. And why not? Now that they had reached the moon, going back would be just reaching for past glory rather than striving for new triumphs. It was time to go boldly where man had not gone before—Mars. Forget the moon; leave it to the alien.
He wrote: There are more moon landings planned for the next 3.5 years. None will land near here. I will use my position to stop moon program after that. This is something I can do.
The response: You said you couldn’t guarantee this.
What could he say to that? That he’d been wrong? That he’d re-analyzed the situation? There had to be a way. If the alien was a cold, analytical machine-like intelligence, then they were doomed. He had to be authentic and real and hope it had the same emotions as humans—emotions like pity, hope, and friendship.
He scribbled rapidly: My name is Buzz Aldrin, and God Damn It, I will use all the pull I have as one of the two who landed on the moon to God Damn It make sure it doesn’t God Damn It happen again.
He stared at his own note for a moment and smiled before setting it down. He stuck the felt-tip pen in his pocket and then tapped on the wall as usual. Once again, the response seemed instant.
I am not completely certain what your words mean. But I understand your intent. Let us exchange information on ourselves and our races and then separate, for now, in friendship.
Soon afterwards the alien unfroze the Earth and the rest of the universe, and the human standing outside was able to continue his statement as half a billion watched and listened.
“. . . man, one giant leap for mankind.”
Maram watched as Buzz’s ship took off, hoping it would be the last, or at least one of the last. She walked over to the flag they had planted and pushed it over. Then she gathered up rocks in her shaking tendrils and covered Divid’s body.
Unfreezing Earth without burning itup had been complicated. There had been too many photons frozen around it. She’d had to keep much of this built-up light frozen, only gradually unfreezing it so that it would shoot harmlessly inward. Only a few astronomers noticed the small increase of heat coming off the sun from the buildup of photons around it, but they attributed it to some sort of solar flare.
Sometimes, in the ensuing years, she’d refreeze the universe just so she could find Buzz. She’d zoom in on his house until she found him in one of the frozen images. When she started up time again she’d try to follow him with the telescope, but that rarely worked as he was just a blur that quickly moved out of sight. But one time, she found him in his backyard . . . looking back. She waved a tendril at him, and then he was gone.
Buzz fulfilled his promise. With the picture of the alien and its writing on the notepad as evidence, he convinced the leaders of NASA about the alien, and the “No Moon” policy was the first thing incoming presidents learned after taking the oath of office. Other countries with developing space programs were also apprised of the situation—and, when necessary, the CIA would sabotage, blackmail, or bribe to stop any potential trips to the moon. And so Apollo 17, in December of 1972, was the last moon landing. After that Buzz began pushing to go to Mars. There were no Seelee there.
There was an apparent leak about the alien on the moon but that was laughed at and forgotten. Ironically, while no one believed the alien conspiracy theory, there were plenty about whether they had ever actually gone to the moon. Buzz and his fist made news when the latter made first contact with a pushy conspiracist’s face, one of Buzz’s prouder moments and famously recorded on YouTube. But the alien on the moon? That mostly stayed secret.
Sometimes he would go out in his backyard on a cloudless night when no one else was around and bring out his souvenir—the tube the alien had given him—and he was grateful NASA did not know what it was so they hadn’t confiscated it. The holographic telescope would open up to the size needed, and then he’d zoom in on the moon. After all, wasn’t astronomer just an anagram for moon starer? He’d explore its surface as no one had ever done before, or ever would if they fulfilled their promise to the Seelee. Other times he’d go back to look at their original landing site. The flag had fallen over, presumably from the engine exhaust during takeoff, though Buzz suspected the alien might have had something to do with it. And often, there on the surface, was the alien looking back, like a birdwatcher on the moon. Knowing that he was just a flicker to it, one time he stayed and stared through the telescope for eight and a half hours, long enough for the alien to see him for what would be about three seconds of their time. In excruciating slow motion, he watched as it stared back, and over the course of three hours it slowly waved a tendril at him.
Poor Neil. He was the most famous astronaut in history. But he was also the guy who flubbed his first words on the moon. And it was so unfair—Neil swore up and down that he’d said it correctly, and he was right: “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” But as the alien had explained, it had briefly started time for Neil to scan him, and so when he said “a,” the rest of the universe was frozen, so the word was not picked up—the radio waves making up the word just bounced around the unfrozen area around Neil and then died out. Without the missing “a” his message made no sense. But people—well, most—weren’t stupid and knew what he’d meant to say.
As for Buzz, he no longer resented Neil. Sure, Neil was the first, but so what? We are an insignificant race living in a vast and nearly empty universe that’s just a tiny pinprick on a shelf somewhere. First, second, one hundredth, who cares? Let’s explore this vast unknown while we can. We’ve done the moon; let’s move on to Mars and beyond.
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Larry Hodges, of Germantown, MD, is an active member of Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association, with over 200 short story sales and four SF novels. This is his fourth story in Abyss & Apex. He’s a graduate of the Odyssey and Taos Toolbox Writers Workshops, a member of Codexwriters, and a ping-pong aficionado. As a professional writer, he has 21 books and over 2200 published articles in 180+ different publications. He’s also a member of the USA Table Tennis Hall of Fame, and claims to be the best table tennis player in SFWA, and the best science fiction writer in USA Table Tennis!!! Visit him at www.larryhodges.com.
