What if the repairman was waiting for me on the other side of the hatch? My heart raced.

I pulled myself, all forty pounds, over the torn outer skin, careful not to snag my suit. The skin tear was three feet high. The rucksack and I were four feet thick. I pulled back outside and slipped the sack off. Then I rolled my body into the space between the hulls, dragging the sack behind me in one hand. Lying there, I felt the Projectile’s up-and-down sound vibrating through my thighs and belly.

I waved my free hand toward the parasol. Nothing. “Howard? The hatch didn’t open.”

“—whole body.”

“You’re breaking up.” Part of me hoped he’d say, well, then, come on back down. Good try. Let’s go back to the LEM and fly home. But I knew what he meant. I wormed my whole body closer to the parasol, like low-crawling under barbed wire on the infiltration course.

The parasol moved.

Its panels shot back into its rim, like a dilating camera iris.

“Howard, you were right. It opened.”

“Jas… hull interferes…”

The open hatch yawned dark and wide enough to admit me or the rucksack but not both at once. Six feet farther inside a closed door like the first sealed the tube. An air lock. I’d either have to crawl headfirst, pushing the rucksack ahead of me, or back in and drag the sack behind me. If I backed in I could see whether the outer door closed behind me. I’d be pointed the right direction to get the hell out. The inner hatch should open automatically in response to me, like the outer hatch had. Space beyond the air lock would surely be wide enough for me to turn around.

Feetfirst it was.

I got shoulder deep through the hatch, dragging the rucksack with instruments, survival gear, and the pistol, and spoke once more. “Howard? I’m going in.”

Only a crackle came back over the radio. It joined with the oddly familiar up-and-down whoop I had been listening to for the last half hour. The passage was inches wider than my space-suited shoulders. I could barely move my arms. At least backing in like this I would be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel, the way back outside. Headfirst into darkness would have terrified me.

I wrestled the rucksack past the outer hatch, and it snapped shut.

I shrank back into the passage and felt with my boots. The inner hatch had opened. I wormed backward, over the inner-hatch lip, then tugged the rucksack toward me. I gathered myself on knees and elbows and let go of the rucksack straps.

In the instant my hands drew back inside the hatch lip, the inner hatch snapped closed and sealed me in the dark.

I couldn’t see. All I could hear was my own breathing and the unceasing, rising and falling whoop. I pressed my hands on the hatch. It didn’t budge. I pounded, as hard as I dared without risking rupturing my suit. I ran my hands over the walls around me. No doorknob. No lever. “Howard? I’m stuck in here!”

Not even static came back. The Projectile hull was not only tough, it was radioproof .

The rucksack lay a foot away, separated from me by a sealed hatch. In the sack lay a flashlight, a gun, food and water that could be taken through a helmet nipple, and all the equipment that was supposed to let me gather intelligence and bring it back. Those things might as well have been back on Earth.

This was like waking blind in a coffin. Another sound joined the Projectile’s familiar whoop. More rapid, wheezing.

It was me, panting and buried alive. I couldn’t move, and I couldn’t see. Claustrophobic panic boiled up in my brain.

I forced myself to think. The visor. The mirrored sunglass layer could be slid up. I moved it and could see again. My breathing slowed.

The tube I lay in wasn’t completely dark.

It was circular and crenellated like a drainage culvert. I could see, barely, because it was suffused in purple light that glowed from the walls. The light pulsed in time to the whooping. I twisted to look over my shoulder. My purple sewer pipe corkscrewed out of sight fifty feet ahead, but it was no wider than the air lock.

I had two options. Wait here and hope Howard or fate would open the hatch. Until my oxygen generator quit or I died of thirst or starved. Option two was I could wriggle, feetfirst, deeper into the Projectile. I might find wide spaces, useful information and a way out. Or I might blunder into something that would kill me.

I never could sit still.

The tube’s featureless walls were cut every fifty feet or so with slots maybe three feet tall and two fingers wide. Ventilation ducts? Ventilating what? There must be atmosphere in here. After all, there was an air lock. That meant something had been alive in here to breathe it. Or was still breathing. I wanted that pistol from the rucksack.

The second set of ventilating ducts caught my thigh for the second time. I worked my hand down to my thigh and felt a lump in my suit. The thigh pocket. I peeled back the Velcro flap and felt the object inside. The flare pistol! My heart leapt. I was armed, sort of.

I worked my hand up alongside my body until I held the flare gun in front of me. This meant I could shoot anything that tried to sneak up behind me, but anything ahead of me could slink up and bite my feet off before I knew it.

I backed another hundred feet down the tube, keeping my fingers out of the air-conditioning vents.

My feet seemed suddenly freer. I wriggled onward. Six feet later, my torso entered a right-angle intersection with a larger-diameter tube. The intersection allowed me room to turn headfirst. And to realize that I could crawl or duckwalk along the bigger tube.

I sat up in the intersection while purple light pulsed in time to the incessant whooping. I took stock. I was stranded in a labyrinth. The old suits had been retrofitted with up-to-date oxygen generators so I could breathe, indefinitely. I had no food. I had no water. That last wasn’t all bad, as my bladder kept reminding me. My only weapon was a seventy-year-old flare pistol with one big, fat, slow bullet. My mission depended on measuring things, but my measuring equipment sat back outside the hatch that had trapped me in here. This vessel was as big as Dubuque. It surely had more than one door. I’d just keep crawling until I found another one, or I figured out how to open the one where I came in.

As I traveled, if I couldn’t measure what was in here, maybe I could take samples. I reversed the flare gun in my gloved hand like a geologist’s pick and hammered the curved wall.

The gun butt bounced back like a tennis ball off concrete.

I shrugged. I’d just have to remember what I saw.

The wide tube was more likely to lead somewhere important, so I changed course.

I made better time in the big tube, which I thought of as Broadway. Twenty minutes of crawling and griping to myself about the state of my bladder later, Broadway widened into an oval room as tall and wide as a garage. Times Square. Its walls were studded with glowing ovals, green, not purple, and twiggy lumps that could be controls.

Hair stood on my neck. Somehow, I felt that I wasn’t the only living thing in here.

I froze in the doorway and squinted as my eyes adjusted. Doorway was as good a word as any.

Across the room a shadow twitched.

I should have been terrified. But the enormity of this moment of contact overwhelmed me. My skin tingled.

The shape was a banana, colored like a new one, green. But five feet long and maybe two feet across the middle. It was as featureless as a banana. No eyes, just white bulges on its head end, no mouth.

It squirmed, twisted into a question mark, on an oval pedestal that rose out of the floor. Its skin rippled, from the elevated end of its question-mark body to the tail end, like a toothpaste tube squeezing itself. Black goo oozed from the tail into the pedestal.