I drifted back to my equally comfortable passenger chair and pulled the harness back on there as well.I drifted back to my equally comfortable passenger chair and pulled the harness back on there as well. "You have one minute to secure positions," K'meh announced, "before we detach from the hyperdrive module for descent to the lunar surface. Please make sure you are all strapped in securely." The actual landing took only fifteen minutes more. Although I had put off thinking about it for the past couple of days, now that we were actually coming close to Tycho Base my anxiety level was increasing with every diminishing meter. I tried to relax. It had been, for me, centuries since I had last spoken to Victoria Stoneman face-to-face. I looked down at my hands, still perfectly smooth and relatively untouched by age or effort. I knew Victoria's wouldn't be the same. The Kanga came to a gentle, perfect touchdown on the lunar terrain. Although I had always been an avid reader of "science fiction," and had been a member of a spacefaring race for nearly fifty years, this was my first visit to Earth's moon, that object that had hung overhead for so much of my youth. We were lowered into a receiving bay, and then the entire platform started to move across the bay, apparently on some sort of giant truck. The same philosophy that had led to the development of the huge tractor- carriages that hauled space vehicles out to their launch pads apparently had been adapted for use on Luna. The truck pulled into a smaller bay, and airlock doors double-sealed behind us. There was a delay as air was pumped into the airlock, and then the doors in front opened, leading us to a pressurized maintenance bay filled with a large collection of uniform spacecraft, none of which were ever intended for atmospheric flight. |