Pale summits and rocky protuberances were pretty much what he would have expected. But there was more. Much more.
The entire plain was covered with a curling, coiled profusion of plants and vines and grasses.
The other gamers and NPCs had gathered around the windows, gazing out on the display.
So far, he saw nothing that looked like a tree, or the beginnings of one. But there were cactus-like plants, and young bushes, and the infancy of a grassland.
The ship’s Captain had completed a series of movements near the door. Scotty now saw a rectangular gate in the middle of their inner door, because the Captain had screwed it open. Into the rectangle he inserted a cage containing two white mice, extending them by means of some apparatus a foot or two beyond the door, into the central air chamber.
The Captain closed his eyes, seemed to offer a prayer, and pulled a lever. With a series of clanks and groans, the outer door opened (poof!) and lunar sunlight flooded into the airlock.
The window was wide enough for four gamers to peer down into the chamber, and Scotty made sure he was one of them. The mice were eating seeds at the bottom of their cage, completely unaware of the fact that they were the first Earth creatures in many years to breathe lunar air.
After a minute, the Captain closed the external door. Then gingerly, he opened the internal one.
The air had a sterile, grassy smell, like the first spring after a cleansing frost, and just a whiff of spent gunpowder. “Volunteers?” he asked, and a forest of hands sprang up.
Mickey and Maud Abernathy, Angelique Chan, Wayne and Ali hustled themselves to the front of the line, and the others applauded their courage. Scotty thought about it for a moment, decided that Xavier wouldn’t dare pull a lethal Gotcha! at the beginning of the game, and went to stand beside his charge. The six of them were ushered into the airlock. The Captain handed Angelique a furled Union Jack. “Do us proud!” he said. And the door closed behind him.
This isn’t real… this isn’t real…, he licked his lips, and found both tongue and lips to be dry. He had spent too long on the Moon to be able to take anything that looked and sounded like an airlock with anything save complete sobriety.
The outer door slid open.
Wayne took a deep sniff and said: “Good, there’s air here.” Angelique rammed a discreet elbow into his ribs, and stepped past him down the ramp. Scotty’s feet touched “lunar” soil for the first time.
And now the confusion was total. Scotty knew his eyes could be fooled, but not his proprioception. And every muscle in his body, and all of his joints, said that he was under one-sixth gravity. He was on the Moon. The general contour of the ground was lunar. He had seen it for himself. But plants? Grass? A whorl of leaves and blossoms, covering the slopes as far as his eyes could see?
Impossible.
His eyes said it couldn’t be the Moon. His body said differently. He fought to keep his equilibrium. He looked up. The sky was pale, filled with clouds. Thank God. If there had been a night sky up above him, blackness and stars, he might have dropped down a deep, dizzy hole.
But the impossible tableau both disoriented and steadied him.
He reached out to touch. Certainly, this was all visual field manipulation…?
No, it wasn’t. He touched a nearby plant, half thinking that his fingers would pass right through the leaf, and was pleased to feel the pebbled texture. He bent, and sniffed: a hint of mint. Marvelous.
Behind them, the Cavorite sphere was buried to its equator in greenery. The door opened again, and another clutch of gamers and NPCs exited. Asako Tabata rolled out last, although he supposed that she could have emerged first, considering that she had her own independent air supply.
Angelique Chan threw her shoulders back, posing for invisible cameras beneath the deep blue of a lunar sky. She planted her Union Jack into the ground. “I claim the Moon for Great Britain,” she said, to unanimous applause.
“All of this,” Ali said. “It has to grow, and feed, and mate-whatever it is going to do, in fourteen days.”
Wayne examined the soil, then stood and gazed out at the horizon. “I have a suspicion that our sense of time might be distorted here.”
Mickey and Maud Abernathy exchanged a brief glance. “Yes, that would make sense. We need to be careful not to let night fall before we return to the ship,” Maud said.
“And I can see just how an accident like that could happen,” Mickey said.
So could Scotty. If they couldn’t trust their subjective sense of time passage, they could end up breathing vacuum.
“What now?” Scotty asked.
Ali grinned at him. “What now?” he asked. “And now… this!”
And without another word, Ali crouched and exploded up into the air. He went up ten, fifteen… twenty feet, sailing in a stupendous arc before he glided back down once again.
Scotty stared. In all his time on the Moon, he had never really done that. He had been so worried about not looking like a stupid tourist or a greenhorn in front of his wife or their coworkers. Where was the simple joy!
How had he cheated himself?
When hyper-competitive, all-business Angelique Chan leaped into the air, sailing like a ballet dancer in slow motion, higher and farther than any Bolshoi prima ballerina had ever dreamed of…
Scotty threw caution to the wind, gathered himself and jumped.
The ground receded below him, a half-dozen gamers staring up at him in stunned surprise… and then suddenly the air was filled with bouncing, bounding gamers, sheer joy in stupendously magnified motion.
Lunies didn’t do this because there was never enough room. Somersaults, handsprings, flying kicks and jumps that made world-class martial artists out of neophytes, Olympic gymnasts from couch potatoes.
Even Asako was gunning her capsule around like a little go-cart, tearing up plants and dirt as she spun and raced about.
The redheaded guide was airborne, too.
And then Angelique screamed: “Where the hell is our sphere?”
In a moment, Scotty’s joy bled out through his fingers and toes, and a sick sinking feeling hit him like a fist in the belly.
It took him three bounces to slow himself down to a walk, and then stand still. All about him, up to his knees, were the red and pink flowers, covering a plain as far as the eye could see.
No sphere. The other gamers were bouncing to a halt as well, and now the nine of them stood in a rough circle, scratching their heads.
“Damn,” Wayne said. “I’d swear it was right over there, to the left. South?”
“I have no idea. What in the world…?”
Angelique closed her eyes, her expression tight with disgust. “We were so busy jumping for joy that we lost track of where we were,” she said. “We lost the sphere. Just like in the original story. Dammit!” She smacked her fist into her palm. “I should have known.”
“What do we do?” Ali asked. “Spread out? Search?”
She shook her head. “We won’t find it. They didn’t.”
Scotty searched his memory, trying to find a wisp of the Wells book, but couldn’t. He unearthed a vague memory of a BBC production, and one of an old herky-jerky stop-motion movie-not one of Harryhausen’s best-but those traces couldn’t be trusted. Could anything? Dammit, why hadn’t he kept up his reading more faithfully?
“What do we do?” Scotty asked.
Angelique held up her hand. “Wait. What’s that sound?”
For a moment he wasn’t sure what the Lore Master was talking about. Her slender, aristocratic Chinese face was intense, momentarily resembled a painting he once saw in the Louvre of a Buddhist nun in prayer.
The air was thin, and slightly cool. There, faintly, the sound of a weak wind fluttering its way through the flowers. What was that? The ground shook… not a single thump like something heavy tumbling down, but almost like a drum stroke.