The device with the readout began to sweep and search.
Calmly, he punched coordinates into the grasshopper. The LPCS would help him find the package. He was relieved to see that it was still communicating, for otherwise there would have been no chance of finding it in this wasteland of rifts and chasms. The electronic systems were all working, so the problem must be mechanical. A burst of propulsion, and the grasshopper lifted and accelerated. If he wasn’t to lose height he constantly had to create lift, while the nozzles twisted and turned to steer him. A flyer like the grasshopper was by its nature limited to a certain radius, but it was an advantage here that there was no air to provide lift for winged flyers – it meant that there was also no atmospheric pressure to brake the hopper once it got started. It had a top speed of eighty kilometres an hour, and the little round tanks could carry it an astonishing distance.
The signal was reaching him from just six kilometres away. Here in the shadow of the crater wall he was as good as blind, and totally dependent on the weak cones of light from his headlamps, racing ahead as though trying to lose him. Only the hopper’s radar system kept him from colliding with cliff edges or overhangs. A good distance away, the sunny expanses of the lowland plain met the sharp black line of the mountain shadow, and high above him blinding sunlight capped the peaks of the crater ridge. The tracks of the Lunar Express had a way back swung off between the cliffs to the next valley and the gentle plain that led up to the heights of Peary. The package should long since have been under way there of its own accord, but its signal called to Hanna from the other direction entirely, deep in the crater base.
He choked back his lift. The grasshopper lost height, its fingers of light showing deeply rutted rock. Huge sharp-edged blocks of stone reared up around him, unnerving indications that an avalanche had thundered down into the valley here not long ago – no, not thundered, had tumbled down in utter silence – then the landscape levelled off and the receiver told him that he had reached his destination. Just a few more metres.
Hanna activated the braking jets and peered about with his headlamps for a place to land. Obviously he hadn’t reached the foot of the crater wall here. The surface below was still too rubble-strewn and fissured to set the grasshopper down safely. By the time he had finally found a halfway level stretch, he was forced to hike back, leaping and sliding, a kilometre and a half, constantly at risk of losing his balance and slicing open his spacesuit on the razor-sharp blocks of stone all around. The beam from his helmet lamp wandered aimlessly over heaps of colourless rubble. Several times he had to fight for balance, raising clouds of the fine powdery moon dust, charged with static that made it cling stubbornly to his legs. Gravel leapt out of his path, uncannily alive, and then the ground below him simply stopped and the light was drowned in featureless blackness. He halted where he was, switched off the helmet lamp, opened his eyes wide and waited.
The effect was overwhelming.
A billion points of light in the Milky Way above him. No light pollution from any artificial source. Only the grasshopper far behind, a glowing dot marking its position. Hanna was as alone on the Moon as a human being could ever be. Nothing that he had ever experienced came even close, and for a while he even forgot his mission. That membrane that divides a human being from the experiential universe around him melted away. He became bodiless, at one with the non-dual world. All things were Hanna, all things were at rest within him, and he was within all things. He remembered a sadhu, a monk, telling him years ago that if he wished, he could drink the Indian Ocean dry at one gulp, a claim that Hanna had found cryptic at the time. And now he was standing here – was he standing? – drinking in the whole universe.
He waited.
After a while the hoped-for change set in, and the darkness proved less impenetrable than he had feared. There were photons travelling within it, reflected from the sunlit crater wall opposite that lunged upward from the plain. His surroundings took shape like a photograph in a bath of developing fluid, more a matter of intuition than perception, but it was enough to reveal that what he had thought to be a slope at his feet was only a sinkhole, which he could get round with just a few steps. He switched the headlamp back on. The spell was banished. He had come back to his senses and set out, keeping an eye on the computer display screen, so deep in concentration that he only saw the object when he was practically on top of it.
A heavy rod, rearing upwards!
Hanna tottered, dropping his toolkit and receiver. What was that? The beacon was at least 300 metres out! The thing had almost shattered his visor. Cursing, he began to work his way around it. A little later he knew that it was no fault of the beacon’s. This heap of scrap was irrelevant. It was a four-legged transporter crate, its tanks burnt out, lying on its side and partially hidden by rubble. His mission had been to fetch the contents, what the organisation called the package, the part of the delivery that was actually sending the signal, and bring it to the pole.
But the package wasn’t here.
It had to be further down.
When he finally found it, jammed in between boulders, it was a sorry sight. Parts of the side panel had opened up and legs and nozzles sprouted from within, some of them twisted or snapped. Fuel tanks clung to the underbelly like fat insect eggs. Obviously the package had begun to unfold and come to life as it had been designed to do, in order to make its way to deployment, when something unforeseen had happened.
And suddenly Hanna knew what that had been.
His eyes drifted over to the brightly lit peaks. He had no doubt that right from the start, the landing unit had set down too close to the crater’s edge. Not a problem in itself. The designers had built in extra tolerances, including for the event that the carrier and its package crashed in the crater. The mechanical parts were supposed to be protected for as long as it took for the sensors to report that it was in a stable position, or give any other indication that the landing had been successful. After which the package was supposed to separate from the undercarriage, unfold its legs once it was at rest, and scuttle away. Obviously the sensors had made their report, but at the very moment the limbs were unfolding, parts of the uphill slope had slipped, carrying the robot along with it. The onrushing rocks had shattered its extremities, and the package had lost all mobility.
Moonquake?
Possibly. The Moon was nothing like the calm and placid place that had once been thought. Laymen might not believe it, but there were frequent tremors. Enormous variations in temperature built up tensions which discharged themselves in massive quakes, and the gravitational pull of sun and Earth could tug at deep-lying strata of the moonrock, which was why Gaia had been built to withstand quakes topping 5 on the Richter scale. Hanna inspected the damaged axles and nozzles, wanting to leave no possibility untried. After twenty sweaty minutes of wrestling with the wreck, he had to concede that there was no fixing it. The loss of some of the spider legs might have been overcome, but the unwelcome fact was that one of the jet nozzles was partially torn away, and another was nowhere to be seen.
The best-laid plans of mice and men, thought Hanna. First there had been Thorn’s accident, and then this. All this should have been his job. He should have taken care of the package a year ago, but Thorn’s corpse was drifting out there somewhere in the universe.