“April twenty-eighth,” said Nita’s mother.
“Mr. Callahan?”
“July seventh,” said Nita’s father.
“Neets, how big a circle?”
“Half a second,” Nita said. “Brighter,” she said to her manual. Its pages began to glow softly in the dark. “Okay, here we are. Four of us… about a cubic foot of air for each breath. Allow for excitement — say thirty breaths a minute. Times four…” She turned to another page. “Start,” she said, and heard over her shoulder her mother’s quick intake of breath as the page Nita had opened to abruptly went blank. “Print one two zero times four.” A set of characters appeared. “Okay, print four eight zero times twenty… Good, print nine six zero zero divided by three… Great. Cubic meters… uhh … Oh, crap. Kit, what’s the volume of a cylinder again?”
“V equals pi times r squared times the height.”
“That’s it. Now how did I do this before?” Nita chewed her lip a little, thinking. “Okay,” she said to the book, “print three point one four one seven times, uh, three zero.” A figure flickered at her. “No, that is not a number,” she said to the book. “Times three zero, and don’t get cute with me… Okay. Print square root parenthesis three two zero zero divided by nine four point two five one close parentheses. Great. End. Kit? Make it thirty-six feet wide.”
“Got it,” Kit said. “Mrs. Callahan, would you stand on this string, please? And whatever happens, don’t go near the edge of the circle after I close it.” He started to walk around them all, using Mrs. Callahan and the long knotted string as a compass. “Neets? Come check your name. And theirs; they can’t do it—“
She stepped over to the circle and made sure that the Speech-characters describing herself and her parents were correct, then glanced over Kit’s too for safety’s sake. Everything was in order. Kit finished the circle he was making in the sand, closed it with the figure-eight design called a wizard’s knot, and stood up. “All set,” Nita said.
“Then let’s go.” He opened his book; Nita went looking for the page in hers on which the spell was written. “It’s a ‘read’ spell,” Nita said to her mother and father. “That means it’s going to be a few moments before it takes. Don’t say anything, no matter what you feel or see or hear. Don’t move, either.”
“You might want to hang on to each other,” Kit said. Nita gave him a wry grin; there had been occasions in the past when the two of them, terrified out of their wits, had done just that. “Ready?”
“Go ahead,” said Nita’s father, and reached out and pulled Nita’s mother close.
Nita and Kit looked at each other and began slowly to read out loud. The strange, listening stillness of a working spell began to settle in around the four of them, becoming more pronounced with every word of the Speech, as the Universe in that area waited to hear what would be required of it. The wind dropped, the sound of the surf grew softer, even the breakers in the area became gentler, flatter, their hiss fading to a bare whisper…
The sense of expectation, of anticipation, of impatient, overwhelming potential grew all around them as the silence grew… slowly undergoing a transformation into a blend of delight and terror and power that could be breathed like air, or seen as a shading now inhabiting every color, a presence inhabiting every shape.
Nita raised her voice into the stillness unafraid, speaking the words of the spell formula, barely needing to look at her book. The magic was rising in her, pouring through her with dangerous power. But with the sureness of practice she rode the danger, knowing the wonder to which it would bring her, reveling in her defiance of her fear. And in more than that: for Kit was across the circle from her, eyes on hers, matching her word for word and power for power — peer and friend and fellow-wizard, afraid as she was, and still willing to dare, for the delight of what lay on the other side of the magic—
Almost through, Nita thought, exulting. Her words and Kit’s wound about one another, wove together, binding the spell tighter around the circle-squeezing air in, squeezing power in, pushing inward with such force that the circle and its contents had no choice but to be somewhere else than they were.
Almost — Nita matched her words to Kit’s with a laugh in her voice, rushing him, finding that she couldn‘t rush him because he had already matched pace to keep up with her— She laughed at being anticipated so. Faster and faster they went, like two kids seeing who could say the Pledge of Allegiance faster, as all around them the silence began to sing with inturned power, the air shimmered and rang with force like a gong ringing backward, soft at first, then louder, though without sound, without breaking that silence — a hiss, a murmur, an outcry of something about to happen, a shout of inner voices, a silent thunderclap. And the last not-sound, so loud it unmade the world around them and struck them deaf and blind—
Then true silence again, with darkness above and whiteness below — but not the same darkness or whiteness as on the beach.
“We’re here,” Nita whispered. “Mom, Dad, have a look around. Don’t go near the edges of the circle.”
“Be careful how you move,” Kit said. “You only weigh a sixth of what you usually do. If your muscles overreact you could bounce right out of the circle. I almost did, first time.”
Nita watched her mother and father stare around them. She swallowed— partly out of reflex, for her ears were ringing in the silence that surrounded them now. That was to be expected; this stillness was more total than anything experienced on Earth. Her other reason for swallowing was more practical. The sudden transfer to one-sixth gravity tended to upset your stomach unless you were used to it.
Her father was staring at the ground, which had changed from wet beach sand to a mixture of grayish gravel and pebbles, and rocks the size of fists or melons, all covered with a gray-white dust as fine as talc. But Nita’s mother was staring up at the sky with a look of joy so great it was pain — the completely bearable anguish of an impossible dream that suddenly comes true after years of hopeless yearning. Tears were running down her mother’s face at the sight of that sky, so pure a velvet black that the eye insisted on finding light in it where light was not — a night sky set with thousands of stars, all blazing with a cold fierce brilliance that only astronauts ever saw; a night sky that nonetheless had a ravening sun standing noonday high in it, pooling all their shadows black and razor-sharp about their feet.
Nita was blinking hard herself to manage the stinging of her eyes; she knew how her mother felt. “Over there, Mom,” she said very quietly. “Off to the left. Look.”
“Off to the left” was a steep slope that plunged down and down to a deep chasm, filled with absolute blackness ungentled by the presence of air. On the far side of the chasm stretched a flat, rocky plain that seemed to stop too soon, running up against a horizon abnormally close. Out on the plain, not too far away, a dazzling squarish glow of gold sat on four spidery legs. Some thirty yards from the bright platform on legs stood a silvery pole with an American flag standing out from it, held straight by a rod running through the top of it: a necessity — for here where it stood, no wind would ever stir it.
“No,” Nita’s father said, his voice hushed. “Impossible. Tranquillity Base—“
“No,” Kit said, his voice soft too. “That’s going to be a tourist attraction in a few years, when they build the Hilton there — so we don’t go down there for fear of leaving footprints where somebody might find them. This is from Apollo 16. See over there?” He pointed past the abandoned first-stage platform of the LEM Orion at the first Lunar Rover, which sat parked neatly beside a boulder — a delicate-looking little dunebuggy, still in excellent condition, used only once by a couple of astronauts from Pasadena for jaunts to Stone Mountain, on which the four of them stood.