Moonquest: A Tale of Diversity and Bravery

The last of the crew made it to the airlock. Icy moon dust clung to my legs, clinging to my boots and the bottom of my coveralls. I coughed up a bit of phlegm, which I spit out into my hand.

"Lutz, get that hatch closed!" Jens yelled from the other side of the open lock.

The German-accented voice replied with a gruff "Yes, sir," as he wrestled with the heavy door. He grunted and puffed as he closed the door behind us. We were safe now; we had survived the landing. And we had found something incredible...

You see, we weren't just on any moon. The Moon, our Moon! It was just as we had left it when man walked on its surface for the first time in history! There were footprints everywhere in the regolith!

"Gandalf! Get to work!" Jens shouted from across the hallway. "Go find those samples so we can be back inside before our life support runs out." Jens was always the type of guy who wanted everything done yesterday - or at least before this month's supply shipment arrived - but he knew what he was talking about when it came to space travel. The old man was a crackerjack when it came to engineering and chemistry, and if he told me we had to be outside no longer than absolutely necessary then I believed him.

I turned around and headed down the hall toward what must have been the living quarters of whatever alien race lived here thousands of years ago. They must have been short because their ceiling was only half as tall as ours, but they must have been stronger than us else they would not have survived all these years on such a hostile world. Their furniture was strange looking - more like piles of rocks they arranged into shapes than anything else - but they seemed to have some pretty good taste in art; there were lots of nice paintings hanging on their walls.

I found a room that could only be their kitchen - or maybe some sort of lab? They had all kinds of strange machines, most with knobs and dials that didn't seem to serve any purpose beyond looking cool, although one did look like it could make food like this microwave back home.

Speaking of home... My wife is going to kill me for being gone for so long without calling her or sending postcards or anything like that. But hey, duty calls and stuff like that, I'm sure she'll understand... Right? ... Probably not. Well, maybe she'll forgive me once we're back on Earth and she sees all these cool things we brought back... But probably not. Oh well; nothing I can do about that right now anyway!

* * * *

"Did you find something useful?" Lutz asked me as he sat at his own desk in his room back aboard our ship docked at LEO ("low earth orbit"). He pointed his handheld scanner at what looked like an irregular black block of material on his desk while scanning it with his device. A holographic image formed next to him in midair: a three dimensional rendering of what looked like a primitive computer chip with tiny wires connecting all sorts of cryptic looking components together in ways that didn't seem to make sense.

"Oh yeah," I responded as I picked up another object - also black - from my desk: an oddly shaped piece of metal that looked more like a sculpture than anything else; it felt cold and hard in my hands and perfectly smooth despite being covered by some kind of dirt or dust coating that made it seem rough around its edges otherwise. "I don't know how much these are worth yet," I continued while polishing off some remaining grime from its surface with my sleeve, "but they sure are interesting!"

Lutz chuckled softly at my enthusiasm: "Don't let Jens hear you say that," he warned me calmly while still intently observing his device's display screen, "he'd have your head." He readjusted his glasses before continuing: "But they probably are more valuable than you think; this computer chip is very primitive indeed... But if someone were willing to pay enough money for it then I suppose we could get them interested in paying even more money for this thing here..." He pointed at one corner of his device's hologram display where a small section began flashing red periodically; whatever part of the object he pointed at it seemed interested in analyzing contained traces compounds unlike anything he had ever seen before... And whoever paid for these things was likely someone who would want access to those compounds somehow...