First walk on the Moon

The following scene from Tendrils to the Moon shows the protagonist, Montgomery Ames, exploring the area around the landing site in Tsiolkovskiy Crater, the future location of the Moon colony. It was an important scene for me to get right, as it is Ames's and the reader's first exposure to the lunar surface. It's also a nice little character moment for Ames.

Ames’s breath fogged his faceplate as he topped a rise in the crater floor. He was running—or as close to running as he could get. At full speed, a single stride could cover 10 meters. The rebreather rig and oxygen cylinder made him top-heavy, making it difficult to keep his feet under him. He had to time his jumps just right to prevent sliding through the regolith. He felt the dirt crunch and compact under his boots, but of course he heard nothing due to the Moon’s lack of atmosphere.

He silently skidded to a stop on the downslope of the hill and flipped up his Sun visor. A shockingly bright, rolling plain spread out before him. He held a thumb-sized piece of basalt in his gloved hand. He had taken it from a hollow between an outcropping and the talus slope at the base of the mountain’s east shoulder. It was hard yet crumbly, like loose asphalt.

West of where he stood rose the summit pyramid, its east face rising imposingly from the crater floor, unlike anything Ames had seen before. Man could express the origins of terrestrial mountains in scientific terms, but they had not always been able to. None of the natural processes that shaped mountains on Earth were present here: no precipitation, no glaciers, no tectonic plates, no vegetation. Ames felt a strange kinship with pre-modern man, for whom the mountains of Earth held the same mystery as this mountain did for him now.

Ames giggled. He felt like a boy again, with a whole world at his fingertips waiting to be discovered, the rules yet to be written. A fresh start where anything was possible. That was Sheridan’s pitch when he hired him on. Now, he was starting to believe it.

I can’t wait for Jeremiah to see this, he thought.

Sheridan’s commanding voice came through the helmet speakers. “If you’re quite done, Mr. Ames. We have a lot of work to do.”

Ames glanced north. A group of six miniature, white figures milled in front of the Betelgeuse, moving in an out of cargo stacks, still bound by cord netting. One of the figures, Sheridan, spied him through the long lens on his camera. The Lunar Volatile Extractor looked like a miniature gable-roofed house. The device rode on a low, four-wheeled pull wagon next to a 2,000-liter aluminum tank.

The unreality of the setting astounded Ames. With no familiar points of reference, distance was impossible to gauge by sight. He held the rock piece at arm’s length. In his hand, it appeared to be half as tall as the ship. He reached out his other hand with his palm open, as if he could grasp the ship and his teammates like they were children’s toys. His hand closed over nothing.

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