“When I was on the Moon, I couldn’t see Earth so well. Tranquillity Base was close to the Moon’s equator, and right at the center of the face of the Moon as you look at it. So Earth was directly above my head, and it was difficult to tip back in my space suit to see it.

“The sunlight was very bright, and, under a black sky, the ground was a kind of gentle brown. It looked like a beach, actually. I remember looking at Neil bounding around up there, and I thought he looked like a beach ball, human-shaped, bouncing across the sand. But the colors of the Moon aren’t strong, and the most colorful thing there was the Eagle, which looked like a small, fragile house, done out in brilliant black, silver, orange, and yellow…”

His attention had kept drifting from his words, to the hiss of warm rain on the school’s wooden roof, the coinlike faces of the children sitting cross-legged on the floor before him, the teacher’s odd, suspicious frown.

Once, his brief couple of hours’ walking on the Moon had been the most vivid thing in his mind, colorful as an Eagle on the flat, tan expanse of his memory. But in the endless goodwill tours which had followed the splashdown, he’d given all his little speeches so often, already, that he felt the phrases, the underlying memories, had gotten polished smooth, like pebbles. Eventually the tale would be rendered trivial by the retelling.

Hell, but I’m a long way from the Moon now. And with all these damn cuts I’m never going back. All I can do is talk about it. Damn, damn.

When he’d done, the Nepalese schoolkids had started to ask questions. The questions seemed strange to Muldoon.

“Who did you see?”

“Where?”

“On the Moon. Who did you see?”

“Nobody. There’s no one there.”

“But what did you see?”

Muldoon started to understand, he thought. Maybe his American-flavored images of beach balls and sand were too foreign for those kids, their level of education not what he’d been prepared for. He needed to be more basic. “There’s nothing there. No people, no plants or trees, no animals. Not even air, no wind. Nothing.”

The children looked at each other, apparently confused.

The rest of the talk, the questions, rambled into nothing.

At the prompting of the teacher — a slim girl — there was some polite applause for him, and he gave out little American flags and copies of the mission patch.

As he left the little schoolhouse, he heard the teacher say, “Now, you mustn’t listen to him. He’s wrong…”

Back in his hotel room, he’d started working his way through the mini bar.

It turned out that the Nepalese believed that when you died, you went to the Moon. Those kids had thought the spirits of their ancestors, their grandparents, lived up on the Moon, and Muldoon should have seen them when he was there. He’d been telling them there was no heaven. No wonder they had been confused.

He’d walked on the Moon. And then, in that corner of his own Earth, he’d been confronted by rows of kids in a wooden shack who were still being taught — despite his actual presence, despite his eyewitness account from the Moon itself — superstitious fairy tales.

It made the whole damn enterprise seem futile.

Just before coming over to JSC to do his capcom shift today, he’d gotten a package in the post. It was a script for a credit card commercial. Do you know me? Last year I walked on the Moon. That doesn’t help me though when I want to reserve an airline seat… Goddamn garbage.

It was for more money than he’d make in five years. He could only do it if he retired from the Agency.

Jill would surely welcome it. Jill wasn’t like some of the other wives. She didn’t have a military background; Jill had never gotten used to the flights, the dangers, the diluted bullshit that NASA doled out during a mission…

And the fact was, NASA was never going to let him go back to the Moon.

What if he did retire?

Maybe the moonwalker tag wouldn’t endure; maybe he wouldn’t be seen as a hero for much longer. The mood seemed to have turned even more against the program. There had even been criticism, in the press, about his and Armstrong’s conduct on the Moon. They’d spent too long on the ceremonials. They’d collected fewer rocks than hoped for. Most of the samples weren’t properly documented. They’d used the wrong camera to photograph their footprints, so they’d lost time and come home with less interesting photographs. They’d had to cut short the 3-D photography. Even the shots they’d taken in orbit were criticized, as being tourist shots of Earthrise, while the unexplored Moon whipped by beneath them.

Hell, it was hardly our fault. Nixon called us, not the other way around. And what can you do with all that science stuff? It was hardly idiotproof: too damn easy to make mistakes, when you only have a couple of hours, out of your entire life, to walk on the Moon…

He was already drinking too much, fighting off the depression, the deflation, with alcohol. He’d been just the same after his Gemini flight. A few years of this and he’d turn into some sad, paunchy slob telling war stories to anyone who’d listen, to increasingly blank faces.

He remembered, that day in Nepal, that he’d taken a nap. When he woke up, he needed the bathroom. He tried to float out of bed, and his torso went crashing to the floor, his legs wrapped up in a sheet. And then, when he’d shaved, he tried to leave the after-shave bottle floating in the air. It fell into the sink, smashing into big sharp chunks.

That evening in Nepal, he was to be guest of honor at a dinner at a swank, Western-standard restaurant a mile off. He had elected to walk, to clear his head of beer fumes. The road was rocky, badly made, and steep; he was, after all, in the foothills of the Himalayas there. He soon tired.

All along the side of the road as he walked, there were children, kneeling down. They all held candles and looked up at him, their round faces shining in the dusk light like images of the Moon.

It was an act of veneration.

They think I’m a god. A god, come to visit them.

They shouldn’t do this to people, damn it. They’d made him into a stranded moonwalker. He just wanted to walk on another glowing beach.

He tried to focus on what Michaels and Agronski were saying.

Michaels hauled his bulk out of his chair, and let his impressive, waistcoated gut hang over the polished table for a minute. “Gentlemen, let’s see if we can’t cut to the chase.”

He pulled a flip chart away from the wall. The first few sheets were covered with barely comprehensible notes relating to the Apollo 13 astronauts’ abandoned moonwalk checklists: “DOCUMENTED SAMPLE: select sample / place gnomon upsun of sample / sample gnomon [8,5,2] x sun / retrieve sample…” There was a peculiar poetry in the way technical people communicated with each other, he reflected.

On a clean page, he began to scribble. “Let’s see what we have here. How would we do this? What’s the minimum we have to do to get to Mars? I can see three strands of work for the short term. First, we’ll need flight tests of the nuclear rocketry. Second, we’ll have to man-rate the modules of the Mars ship itself, such as a lander. Finally, we’re going to have to get some experience of long-duration missions in space.” He listed the items quickly. “But, whether we go for the Space Shuttle, or for an uprated Saturn program, or both, you’re looking at maybe five years before a new launch system comes on stream. So for the time being we’re going to need to use the Saturn V to get by.” He eyed Agronski. “You know we’ve already announced the suspension of the Saturn V production line.”

“Of course.”

“Now, in addition to the moonshots, we have our Skylab program, which might have needed a couple of Vs. But a couple of months back we redirected the program; we’re going to revert to the wet workshop concept, which can be launched by a Saturn IB. So as of now our remaining Saturn Vs — seven of them built or in production, SA-509 through SA-515 — are dedicated to Apollo Moon missions.”