Free Nightmare at the Book Fair by Dan Gutman Page B

anything went wrong—and a lot of things could go wrong—we would never see him again. We would never see anybody again.
    There was a tunnel at one end of the command module. Neil opened the hatch and the three of us crawled through the tunnel into the lunar module, which they called Eagle . It wasn’t easy. Our suits were bulky, and the tunnel was barely wide enough to squeeze through. But eventually we made it. Buzz sealed the hatch that separated the command module from the lunar module.
    The Eagle was sort of an ugly thing that looked a little bit like a spider, with exposed wires and pipes. It wasn’t streamlined as you would expect a spaceship to be. Buzz told me it didn’t need to be streamlined because the moon has no atmosphere to slow it down.
    They sat in front of the big instrument panel, which even had a gauge to indicate Neil’s heart rate. It was steady at seventy-seven beats per minute.
    We were orbiting about sixty miles above the moon. During the thirteenth orbit, a voice from Houston crackled over the radio.
    “You are go for separation, Columbia.”
    Neil pushed a button, and I felt a bump. The Eagle had separated from Mike’s command module. Out the window, I could see the command module drifting a few yards away. We were floating, if you can call moving at 3,700 miles per hour floating. Neil’s heart rate had jumped to eighty-five beats per minute.
    “Fire descent rocket,” Buzz said, and suddenly we were moving away from the command module and toward the surface of the moon.
    “How does it look?” radioed Mission Control.
    “The Eagle has wings,” Neil replied. “The burn was on time.” His heart rate was at ninety-six.
    “Listen, baby,” Mike’s voice said over the radio, “things are going just swimmingly, just beautiful.”
    Neil’s heart rate jumped to 110. He had to pilot the Eagle 300 miles across the moon, dropping down in a long curve from 50,000 feet. We were upside down. I couldn’t see the moon.
    Green lights blinked the number 99 on the computer display. That meant Neil had five seconds to decide if he wanted to go ahead and attempt a landing or return to the command module. His heart rate was 125. He pressed the PROCEED button.
    “ Eagle , Houston,” said a voice in the speaker. “You are go to continue power descent.”
    “Twenty-one thousand feet,” Buzz told Neil. We were going fast now.
    “Fifteen thousand…ten thousand…seventy-two hundred feet,” Buzz reported. “Landing site five miles ahead.”
    We were going to land on a part of the moon called the Sea of Tranquillity. It had been mapped out from photos taken on previous unmanned flights, and it was chosen because the surface was smooth.
    We were slowing down. Neil was at the controls, but a computer was controlling the landing at this point. It automatically turned Eagle upside down into landing position. I could see the surface of the moon now. There were hills, ridges, and lots of craters.
    We were dropping twenty feet per second. Neil’s heart rate was 135.
    How did they know the moon’s surface was solid, I wondered. What if it was like deep snow, and the Eagle would just sink into it? I guessed that previous missions had shown that wouldn’t happen. I didn’t want to bother them with questions. Not now.
    We were five hundred feet over the surface of the moon, directly over the landing site.
    “Not good!” Neil suddenly said urgently, shaking his head. His heart rate was 147.
    “Large crater,” Buzz said, “about the size of a football field. Filled with boulders and rocks.”
    They didn’t have to explain it to me. If we landed on a steep tilt or on one of those boulders, we might tip over. Even if we didn’t tip over, we would be pointing at the wrong angle when it was time to blast off the moon. Either way, we would die.
    Neil flipped a switch and grabbed the joystick.
    “I’m going to look for another parking spot,” he announced.
    “Ninety seconds, Eagle ,” said Mission