Moonfall by Jack McDevitt Page A

lamp came on and the exit door irised open. Charlie looked out at the lunar surface, a broken plain, etched in silver light. The sky was black, but filled with rivers of stars.
    She waited, letting him go first.
    “It’s magnificent,” he said. He stepped through the hatch. Out onto the regolith. The illumination, most of it anyway, was coming from Earth, which hung blue and white and very big almost directly overhead.
    “It’s about forty times brighter than a full Moon,” said Evelyn.
    The horizon looked close. Had there been natives on Luna, they would have known without any question they lived on a globe.
    There were no words. He’d seen the hologees many times, but they were nothing like this.
    Evelyn led him out to a rectangular area that had been cordoned off. It was about one hundred by fifty feet. A walkway had been built across it, a few inches above the surface. Here and there he saw footprints, each marked with a small post and a yellow tag. She showed him the names on the tags. They were all familiar, all well known: Sheila Davidson, who had commanded the first return mission to the Moon; Angela Mikel, the first woman to give birth on Luna; Ed Harper,who’d overseen most of the construction efforts. Evelyn pointed to an unbroken piece of ground. “I’d like you to step down onto the regolith,” she said.
    “Why?”
    “You belong here.”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “If you win in the fall, people will look at your prints centuries from now and remember the first president to walk on the Moon.”
    “If I lose?”
    She smiled. “We’ll take down the rope and run a roller over it.”
    He looked again at Earth, blue and warm and inviting in the black sky. “I can understand,” he said, “why people come out here and get religion.” And then with a rush of caution: “Can they hear me back inside?”
    “Every word, sir,” said the technician’s voice.
    “It’s okay,” said Evelyn. “Nobody’ll quote you.”
    “Good.” As Rick would have reminded him once again, it wouldn’t be the first time a spontaneous remark had sunk a candidacy. George Romney had faded after commenting on his return from Southeast Asia that he’d been brainwashed; Teddy Roosevelt had ruled himself out of a second term without stopping to think; and Mary Emerson was on the verge of becoming the first woman president when she told a reporter there were a lot of deadbeats on Medicaid.
    He stepped down onto the marked ground, trying to leave clear prints. It was gratifying to imagine people standing on this spot ages from now, pointing out to one another that Charlie Haskell had walked here. First president of the Space Age. It had a nice ring to it.
    It occurred to him that Evelyn was probably wondering whether his moonwalk was a political stunt. Something that would appear later in a campaign biography. But there wasnothing he could do about that. And Charlie wondered, not for the first time, whether his political career was worth all the hassle. He enjoyed the cut and thrust of politics, he loved winning, and he enjoyed being in a position to make things happen. But there was a price to be paid. He would never again be able to go out to a restaurant or run over to Wal-Mart without attracting a crowd.
    A fan in the back of his helmet changed pitch, adjusting to temperature or humidity.
    His one major political drawback was that he was a bachelor. The party believed the voters would not be comfortable without a first lady. That notion did not show up in surveys, but it was the common wisdom in a society that had become increasingly concerned about personal morals while only one marriage in six now stayed the course.
    The ground was gray and crumbly. The guidebooks maintained the Moon hadn’t changed much in three billion years or so. There was no volcanism on Luna, no climate, no wind to move things around. It was a world where nothing ever happened except occasionally it got plunked by a falling rock.
    He climbed