The long-duration moon crawler Clarkeville contained just two and a half interior levels, with less than two hundred cubic meters of living space, but the clever use of adjustable partitions and VR surfaces made it seem more like a micro motel than a hi-tech mobile home.
Each of its eight wheels had independent suspensions and drive motors. A radiator-cooled nuclear reactor extended from the aft boom at a 45 degree angle.
For weeks the international crew of six had navigated a series of wave-like ridges on the lunar farside, climbing and descending the steep flanks as the world tilted. Large rocks littered the canyon floors. The crawler was capable of great feats of contortion.
When night fell, they maneuvered by radar.
Finally they parked in a crowded boulder field and waited for the lunar dawn.
First light was reflected off a mountain ridge, filling the valley with an ethereal glow. The panoramic camera took a while to spot the anomaly. One of the long shadows seemed different.
At first, the crew thought it was another prank.
Two months ago, Mission Control had used the scanning laser of a surveyor satellite to project an image on their forward observation window of a pirate ship sailing across the cratered plain. On another occasion they had arranged a surprise flyby of an Earth-transfer shuttle, engines blazing at the low point of its orbit.
How had they pulled this off?
The nearest manmade debris was a crashed Luna 14 propulsion stage 93 kilometers to the southeast.
The navigator activated the spotlight.
The object looked like an eternal feature of the landscape. A hollow wheel almost two meters in diameter, composed of sixty-eight identical segments.
"Red Alert," the commander ordered. Interior doors clicked shut, and the crawler's suspensions unlocked. Coolant pipes hummed as the reactor powered up.
Seconds later, a blinding sliver of sunlight appeared over the ridge. Subsurface microphones picked up static as the rocks expanded.
It took an hour to go from darkest night to fierce slanted daylight.
The strange wheel was flexing slightly, twisting to the side. Then it began to roll unsteadily, throwing up some dust.
As long as the sun kept shining, it would keep rolling.
Something this fragile shouldn't be moving at all. Two segments seemed damaged, and might be expelled from the wheel soon. Other, smaller segments would expand like foam mushrooms to replace them.
In a well-choreographed maneuver, Clarkeville's long robot arm reached out in the low gravity and snipped a piece from a damaged wheel segment. The wheel never changed course.
They were looking at a machine that was also alive, raising the specter of geometric replication.
This probably wasn't the only such object on the moon. Clarkeville had encountered the anomaly in the first three months of its mission. At the implied density level, assuming the wheels reproduced every five years, they would only need a century to fill the lunar surface with similar copies.
The shocking results from the spectroscanner and microscopes took another hour to gather.
Each radiation-hardened wheel segment had folded itself from paper-thin, autolithographic polymers and shape memory alloys with embedded solar collectors, with a razor sharp shovel edge to scoop up the regolith.
Such a device could conceivably have been created with the electromechanical technologies of the nineteen sixties. Only the godlike software skills had been missing at the time. Of course they were still missing today. The first embryonic wheel might have been dropped off by an early Surveyor lander.
The crew finally admitted that, for the first time in human history, something impossible had happened.
This was not some incredible prank using brilliant special effects. Anyone smart enough to have created a new lifeform using 1960s technology had to control Earth now.
Whatever happened next, would happen soon.
On board the crawler, the mission commander closed his eyes and waited.
Comment Page
Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
Buy the book
Read chapters