Her suit was stiff. In this Shuttle EMU it was hard to bend, to lower her feet from rung to rung. She found it was easier to push off and just drop down to the next rung, and the next.

She let go of Henry’s hand.

She pushed away one last time, and her hands slid along the rail… and her feet thumped into Moon dust.

A little spray of dust — ancient pulverized rock, charcoal-black — lifted up around her feet, and settled back. Where it touched her clothing, it stuck.

She said: “We’re back. My God, we did it. We’ve come back to the Moon.”

She heard the sounds from Houston, whooping in her headset, some kind of broken-voiced response from Frank Turtle. But the words were remote and didn’t register.

She moved her foot around over the surface. The dust was soft, queasy, but she wasn’t sinking in too far. She took a few steps. A little cloud of dust tracked around her feet, falling back with neat, liquid grace. The dust seemed to have an affinity for her suit, for it clung to her blue overshoes and the fabric of her leggings, as if she was a magnet attracting iron filings.

She looked around.

She was standing on a textured plain — like a piece of the high desert around Edwards, she thought — and the ground glowed in the sunlight. But the sky remained utterly, unnervingly black. Nothing moved here. There was utter silence. She fought an impulse to turn around, to look to see who was creeping up behind her, in this horror-movie stillness.

She took a few more steps, experimentally.

She couldn’t walk, exactly; her legs wouldn’t bend far enough to let her. This Shuttle suit, meant for zero-G EVAs, was even worse than the old Apollo suits for stiffness. She could move in a kind of jog, rocking from side to side, but the low gravity let her travel further than she wanted to go.

And her balance was off. Her backpack pulled at her, and to compensate she leaned forward as she walked; she felt as if she might fall at any moment. She was somewhere between buoyant and heavy. Weight and mass had been redefined for her. It was more comfortable than either a full gravity or zero G: it had much of the buoyancy of microgravity but without that disconcerting lack of up and down. One-sixth G was weak, but enough to anchor her to the world.

But, when she was still, it was hard for her to tell when she was standing upright. The land was full of gentle rises, and there were no verticals here, no telegraph poles or trees or buildings. Something to do with the gentle tug of the Moon’s gravity on her inner ear, maybe.