Richard clenched his eyes shut. He didn’t dare breathe. After a few seconds, though, he opened one eye. He found that this was too difficult to do and opened his other eye too. Nothing bad seemed to be happening – he wasn’t being sucked out into space, he wasn’t explosively decompressing – so he let out his breath all at once. He was suddenly reminded of when he was a child and he took swimming lessons. He would dive as deep as he could and see how long he could hold his breath. Then, when he couldn’t handle it any longer, he would swim up to the surface and let all his breath out at once.
Considering his current situation, Richard was surprised at how clear the memory was – he hadn’t been in a swimming pool since he was 7 years old. He missed it.
Richard stared at the landscape around him. Again with the staring, he thought. He looked at his feet. They weren’t going to move themselves. He looked up again. Here goes nothing, he thought, and stepped off the doorstep.
Still, nothing bad had happened, so he took another step. And another. Before he knew it, he was walking across the surface of the moon – away from the relative safety of the cabin. It was nothing like the films he always saw on television, where it was hard to walk and the low gravity made each step a relative bound. Whatever kept him from asphyxiating must be making his gravity more normal – that is, normal the way it is on earth.
Richard didn’t know where he was going – he just knew that if he was to ever get home, he had to leave the cabin. He looked back at it. It was still the way he had left it – the door was open, and as near as he could tell, the fire was still burning in the fireplace. He shook his head and turned back to where he was going – wherever it was. “Never look back,” his father had always said. Now was as good a time as ever to remember that.
