Moondust by Andrew Smith Page B

“far” side, sometimes dark, sometimes light when it’s facing the sun – where, to this day, no one has trodden. Like the moons of other planets, our Moon has a proper name, too. She’s called Luna.
    What
does
it feel like to stand there? How extraordinary to think that only nine people on Earth right now could know the answer. And that one of them is so close by.
    Always that peculiar mix of apprehension and excitement at walking into a roomful of people I don’t know.
    It’s a light, warm Friday morning and the airy commonroom being used to greet and register “Seeding Spirit in Action” delegates is buzzing. Afterwards, I’ll try to recall who was there and mostly am left with a milky impression of Indian prints and open-neck shirts and smiles which bob about the room at varying heights, like bees tending flowers on a hedgerow. Nice people. On white Formica tables lie books and magazines and lots of leaflets with affirmative headings like “Celebrate” and “Yes!” and “We are explorers …” – the latter being a slick number decorated with beautiful people and butterflies and photos of IONS’s new “international campus,” which sits on 200 picturesque acres just north of San Francisco, because things have looked up in the past decade.
    A flyer catches my eye. It says:
    MEET the MAN!
Reception with

Dr. Edgar Mitchell

Founder, Institute of Noetic Sciences

Fundraiser for IONS

Saturday 5 PM, Fox Hall
    I pick one up and the woman behind the table beams. “Oh, yes, you’ve gotta come and meet Edgar. Such a special man. He smokes roll-ups, you know.”
    What?
    And suddenly he’s here.
    Did I expect a fanfare and a shaft of light? No. I’m not sure what I expected. What I
hadn’t
anticipated was this sense of disorientation, which will turn out to be common among people seeing the lunar astronauts for the first time, and in this instant I understand how strange my project is. The undertaking we associate Mitchell and his tiny cadre with may have ended abruptly thirty years ago, but it has never been equalled since – in fact, with every passing year it has come to seem more eccentric and incredible. Science has advanced and technology leapt forward at a dizzying rate, but in this one domain, Deep Space,
their
domain, there has been … nothing. So while the world has changed, we have changed, the pictures and deeds of the Moonwalkershave remained ever present, yet frozen definitively in the imagination as they were then, making sight of them as they are now a shock. It’s like Dorian Grey in reverse: they have a real age and a Moon age and your first impulse is to stamp your feet and cry, “How dare you be
old
!” Thinking about this reaction later, I flush with embarrassment.
    For the man in front of me
is
old. He’s seventy-one, about five foot nine, with still-dark short hair, ruddy skin and a very modest paunch. He’s wearing khaki trousers and a dark green, logoless, vaguely eastern-cut short-sleeve shirt and has entered with an attractive, Latin-looking woman of roughly his Moon age, who turns out to be his current partner, Anna. His wire-rimmed spectacles and the curiously unmemorable parameters of his face are familiar, but the creeping estrangement of flesh from bone means that I wouldn’t have recognized him in the street. He moves easily, but there’s nothing commanding in his stance and he doesn’t seem to waste words or emotion as IONS officials slowly note his presence and move to greet him, which they do warmly. There’s a hesitancy in his smile, a sense of containment about him. In these moments, he looks shy.
    And yet the instant he stands at the front of a lecture room, looks up and starts to speak, the years fall away like ice from a rising Saturn rocket. Today is given to five “pre-conference institutes,” which run concurrently between 10 AM and