Outside, Armstrong was moving about with what looked like ease, bouncing across the beachlike lunar surface like a balloon. His white suit gleamed in the sunlight, the brightest object on the surface of the Moon, but his lower legs and light blue overshoes were already stained dark gray by dust.

Muldoon couldn’t see Armstrong’s face, behind his reflective golden sun visor.

He checked the time. It was fourteen minutes after the commander’s egress.

“Neil, are you ready for me to come out?”

Armstrong called back. “Yes. Just stand by a second. First let me move the LEC over the edge for you.”

Armstrong floated about the LM, pushing aside the LEC, the crude rope-and-pulley lunar equipment conveyor which Muldoon had been using to pass equipment down to his commander on the surface.

Muldoon turned around in the evacuated cabin and got to his knees. He crawled backwards, out through the LM’s small hatch, and over the porch, the platform which bridged to the egress ladder fixed to the LM’s front leg. The pressurized suit seemed to resist every movement, as if he were enclosed in a form-fitting balloon; he even had trouble closing his gloved fingers around the porch’s handles.

Armstrong guided him out. “Okay, you saw what difficulties I was having. I’ll try to watch your PLSS from underneath here. Your PLSS looks like it’s clearing okay. The shoes are about to come over the sill… Okay, now drop your PLSS down. There you go, you’re clear and spidery, you’re good. About an inch of clearance on top of your PLSS.”

When he got to the ladder’s top rung, Muldoon took hold of the handrails and pulled himself upright. He could see the small TV camera, which Armstrong had deployed to film his own egress, sitting on its stowage tray hinged out from the LM. The camera watched him silently. He said, “Now I want to back up and partially close the hatch. Making sure I haven’t left the key in the ignition, and the handbrake is on…”

“A particularly good thought.”

“We’d walk far to find a rental car around here.”

He was ten feet or so above the lunar surface, with the gaunt planes of the LM’s ascent stage before him, the spiderlike descent stage below. “Okay, I’m on the top step, and I can look down over the pads. It’s a simple matter to hop down from one step to the next.”

“Yeah,” Armstrong said. “I found it to be very comfortable, and walking is also very comfortable. Joe, you’ve got three more rungs and then a long one.”

“I’m going to leave one foot up there and move both hands down to the fourth rung up…”

It was routine, like a sim in the Peter Pan rig back at MSC. He didn’t find it hard to report his progress down the ladder to Houston.