Better-but nowhere near capable of doing a lift. “Two minutes,” Sampson said. “Are you ready back there?”

“I don’t know.”

He twisted and faced me. “Eva-Lynne, seal your helmet.”

With a speed that astonished me, Eva-Lynne did as she was ordered. Then Sampson turned halfway toward me and began speaking in a voice so low I could barely hear him without my helmet open. “I know all about your phone call and your friend, Skalko. But she doesn’t. Want to see the look on her face when she hears you sold us all out?”

I felt a sudden, and all-too familiar, surge of anger.

“Now!” Sampson said.

My hand found the tiller, and we lifted.

Because we had taken off earlier than planned, we sailed toward a Moon we couldn’t see. With his telescope, Sampson claimed to be able to see a dull sliver limning the nightside, but I couldn’t. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s out there.”

“I’ll just have to take your word for it,” I told him.

The day-long flight would have been intolerable if we’d had to stay strapped in. Fortunately, the airlock behind the two rear seats provided a certain amount of room-and privacy.

We all needed it, especially Eva-Lynne. But I also crawled inside the lock, primarily to get away from Sampson. I understood the rationale for his nastiness in forcing me to lift. He must have known that I needed a strong emotional charge, however brief, to channel. But I didn’t like him for it. Perhaps it was his general air of smug superiority; perhaps it was just knowing he had a tool he could use against me again.

Perhaps it was the nagging feeling that we were doomed because the lucky Commander Dearborn had somehow managed to miss the trip, and we were left with the man who would always be in the right place at the wrong time. I spent the entire flight from the Earth to the Moon feeling like a man who has just been told he has months to live.

I dozed for a fitful couple of hours, and woke to find the Moon not only visible, but growing in size.

“Looks like we’re here,” Eva-Lynne said.

I had no difficulty getting in the proper mood to make the braking lift: the sheer spectacle of seeing the lunar landscape provided all the adrenaline I needed. To my mind, we were falling lower and lower, going faster and faster, about to crash into a bleak world of mountains, craters and rocks. The craters themselves were filled with smaller craters as well as giant boulders-

I made the braking lift; Sampson followed with a series of bursts from the main engine, and we began our descent.

I wish I could say I saw it, but with Quicksilver in a wings-level, nose forward position, only Sampson could see the lunar surface. Eva-Lynne and I saw nothing but the black sky of lunar night, until, at that last instant, the sunlit peaks of the dark gray mountains appeared. “Thirty seconds,” Sampson told us. (He was giving us-not to mention Dearborn and the rest of poor Tominbang’s team back on Earth-a terse commentary the whole way down.)

At the last moment, it seemed that we were traveling far too fast. Sampson announced, “Contact!”

And we scraped to a stop, rocking for a moment, as if on the edge of a cliff, then settling gently.

We had reached the Sea of Storms. “Please be advised,” Sampson radioed, “we have arrived.” I realized that Eva-Lynne had been clutching my hand the entire time.

No warning lights glared on Sampson’s console. We heard no unusual sounds. So we stayed, our time on the lunar surface necessarily limited. After all, in Tominbang’s vision, we were merely pathfinders demonstrating that it was possible to reach the Moon-and return safely. Sampson had the simple task of erecting Tominbang’s communications array, whether or not our unfortunate backer ever used it.

In the original plans, Dearborn would have done the work, with Tominbang’s assistance. Now it was up to Sampson and me.

Within an hour, Sampson emerged from the airlock, stepping onto the surface and uttering one simple word: “Wow”.

He went for a short scout while, with Eva-Lynne’s help, I repressurized the airlock and moved inside with the array package. “Sure you don’t want to come out?” I said.

“Very sure. This is close enough for me.”

Mission rules dictated that one of us had to remain inside Quicksilver. Eva-Lynne had volunteered: I don’t believe she had a great deal of faith in her hastily-modified pressure suit. (In fact, once she landed, she unzipped it, and eventually shed the whole thing.)

She gave me a kiss, then closed the inner hatch.

Once the air pressure had bled down, I opened the outer hatch and hauled myself out. Moving was incredibly difficult, not because of lunar gravity (which, thanks to the heavy suit, felt the same as Earth gravity to me). I slid rather than climbed down the side of Quicksilver, and fell to my knees in the lunar soil. I saw the slightest puff of gray dust, which settled instantly.

“Oh, beautiful,” Sampson said, sarcastically.

I thought at first he was referring to my inelegant first steps, but instead he was looking at the undercarriage of Quicksilver:

A shiny gash ran from back to front. The cause was obvious… a small, rounded rock that rose about a foot higher than the otherwise flat, soft lunar soil around it. “Did that do any damage?”

“Hard to tell,” Sampson said, getting on his hands and knees and trying to look under the vehicle. “There’s a stain on the skin of the ship, but that could have been there before landing, or even before we took off.”

Sampson’s attitude suggested a man who was confronted with, at worst, a flat tire. I envied that, as I stared at what could only be a fuel leak, knowing we needed to fire the main engine before I could perform a lift that would send us flying back to Earth. “What do we do?” I said, trying not to sound as terrified as I felt.

He was back on his feet, bouncing toward the array package I had dropped. “Complete the mission. We’ll deal with the other problem in its turn.”

“It’s too bad this had to happen,” Sampson said abruptly, about halfway through the construction of Tominbang’s array. Just when I thought he was going to address our problem, he continued: “If the damn Takisians hadn’t arrived, this would be the biggest story on the planet! ‘Man on the Moon’! Can you imagine? Thousands of people would be listening on the radio. We might even have television here.

“And we would just be the first. There would be other landings, too. Scientists would come up here. Even tourists. Once the human race proved it could do something like this, it would never turn back!”

I could have argued with him: I wasn’t too sure that the human race “would never turn back”. We’d “turned back” every chance we got.

Or I could have told Sampson that a certain mobster in southern California agreed with him completely. But all I said was, “If the Takisians hadn’t come, neither of us would be here.”

So we completed our mission, performing an hour of pointless work under the glare of a naked sun. Only when we were starting back toward Quicksilver did I pause to attempt to appreciate the fact that I could die in a place no humans had ever visited. I remember thinking it was an honor I would rather have done without.

Eva-Lynne would die, too, which made it even worse.

As Sampson loped ahead of me, I stopped and, using my boot, wrote the following in the soil: “Cash + Eva-Lynne”. I wondered how long it would be before human eyes saw it. If they ever saw it.

Sampson was already back at his controls when I emerged from the airlock. He acted as if everything were fine. “Strap in, gang. No sense hanging around longer than we have to.”