Whatever it was, it was much too large to have been sent from earth. The moonquake intensified as the thing moved closer. It passed directly overhead, eclipsing the sun and plunging the entire crater into an unnatural darkness. The footprints began to shake apart and disintegrate in the vibrating sand. As the quaking blossomed into a deep rumble, the stiff wire sewn into the bottom seam of the American flag began to wobble back and forth. A single grain of sand tumbled down the edge of a footprint, then another, and another. Like a night watchman with his tongue cut out, the small device struggled hour after hour to sound the alarm as the rumbling grew. But the moon’s extremes of heat and cold had disabled its radio transmitter within days of it first being planted.

The machine’s sensors shot awake and began to scream their warning to the scientists on earth. The electric needles inside the seismometer skittered to life. But it grew steadily, inexorably, into a tremble. For many hours, it was nothing more perceptible than the disturbance caused by the fluttering of a moth’s wings at a distance of a thousand paces. Gradually, an infinitesimal churning began to engulf the area. Nothing, not a single grain of sand, had moved in all the years since the earthlings’ departure.īut something was beginning to change. Only enough time to turn and run for safety. Marooned deep in a sea of silence, the spot had the creepy aspect of a long-ago picnic which had come to an abrupt and terrifying end, as if there had been no time for the visitors to pack up their belongings. At the eye of this flower stood the gleaming Lunar Landing Platform, a four-footed framework of tubes and gold foil which looked like a jungle gym on a hastily abandoned campground. Seen from high above, they formed a pattern in the sand like a large, misshapen daisy. Their decades-old footprints marched fifteen paces out toward the horizon in every direction before turning back to the center of the camp. Armstrong and Aldrin had taken one giant step for man, and left behind a ton of garbage for moonkind. When they left, they jettisoned everything deemed nonessential for the ride back home. This equipment, carelessly scattered around an area the size of a baseball infield, had been imported by the astronauts of Apollo 11, the first two humans to set foot on the moon. The entire site was littered with debris: scientific experiments and the cartons which had carried them, the unused plastic bags used to gather soil samples, and a handful of commemorative trinkets.

Hammered into the lunar surface were the sensor rods of a seismometer, a square box capable of detecting the crash of a sea-sized meteor at a distance of fifty miles, and on the far side of the camp, an American flag waving proudly in a nonexistent breeze. On the horizon, a curved sliver of the bright earth was rising into the sky, the vivid blue of its oceans a stark contrast to the colorless valley. Two sets of footprints were etched into the powdery gray soil surrounding the landing site, each one as freshly cut as the day it was made. The sea of tranquillity was an eerily still wasteland, a silent crater-shaped outdoor tomb of ashes and stone.

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