hinged up to one side—it was hermetically sealed with rubber padding and had several layers of thermal insulation. Inside, in a space about the same size as the turret of a tank, there was a slightly modified sports-bike frame, with the pedals and just two gearwheels, one of which was neatly welded to the axle of the rear pair of wheels. The handlebars were ordinary semi-racers—they could turn the front wheels just slightly via a special transmission system, but I was told the necessity shouldn’t arise. Shelves, empty for the time being, protruded from the walls; attached to the centre of the handlebars was a compass, and attached to the floor was the green tin box of a radio transmitter with a telephone receiver. Set in the wall in front of the handlebars were the black spots of two tiny round lenses, like the spy holes in apartment doors; through them I could see the edges of the front wheels and adecorative mechanical arm. On the opposite wall hung the radio speaker, a perfectly ordinary square block of red plastic with a black volume control: the Flight Leader explained that in order to counter the sense of psychological isolation from the native land, all Soviet space vehicles received programmes broadcast from Moscow’s Beacon radio station. The large, convex external lenses were covered by blinkers above and at the sides, so that the moonwalker had something like a face, a crude and likeable face, like the ones they draw on melons and robots in children’s magazines.
When I first climbed inside and the lid clicked shut over my head, I thought I would never be able to stand being cooped up and cramped like that. I had to hang over the bicycle frame, distributing my weight between my hands on the handlebars, my legs braced against the pedals, and the saddle, which didn’t really support part of my weight so much as determine the position my body had to adopt. A cyclist bends over like that when he’s trying to get moving really fast—but at least he can straighten up if he wants to, whereas I couldn’t, because my back and my head were practically jammed against the lid. But then, after about two weeks of practice, when I began to get used to it, it turned out there was quite enough space in there to forget about feeling cramped for hours at a time.
The round spy-hole lenses were immediately in front of my face, but the lenses distorted everything so badly there was no way I could tell what was outside the thin steel wall of the hull. A small spot of the ground just in front of the wheels and a ribbed antenna were powerfully magnified in clear focus, but everything else wasdissolved into zigzags and blobs, as though I were gazing down a long, dark corridor through tears on the glass lenses of a gas mask.
The machine was fairly heavy, and it was hard to get it moving—I even began to doubt whether I would be able to power it across seventy kilometres of lunar desert. Just one turn round the yard was enough to make me really tired; my back ached and my shoulders hurt.
Every other day now, taking turns with Mitiok, I went up in the lift, then out into the yard, stripped down to my vest and underpants, climbed into the moonwalker, and strengthened the muscles in my legs by riding round and round the yard, scattering the chickens and occasionally running over one of them—not deliberately, of course; it was just that through the lenses there was no way to tell a huddled chicken from a newspaper, for instance, or a leg wrapping the wind had blown off the clothesline, and I couldn’t brake fast enough, anyway. At first Urchagin drove in front of me in his wheelchair to show me the way—through the lenses he was a blurred grey-green blob—but gradually I got the hang of it, so I could drive round the entire yard with my eyes closed. All I had to do was set the handlebars at a certain angle, and the machine went round in a smooth circle, coming back to its starting point. Sometimes I even stopped looking
When I first climbed inside and the lid clicked shut over my head, I thought I would never be able to stand being cooped up and cramped like that. I had to hang over the bicycle frame, distributing my weight between my hands on the handlebars, my legs braced against the pedals, and the saddle, which didn’t really support part of my weight so much as determine the position my body had to adopt. A cyclist bends over like that when he’s trying to get moving really fast—but at least he can straighten up if he wants to, whereas I couldn’t, because my back and my head were practically jammed against the lid. But then, after about two weeks of practice, when I began to get used to it, it turned out there was quite enough space in there to forget about feeling cramped for hours at a time.
The round spy-hole lenses were immediately in front of my face, but the lenses distorted everything so badly there was no way I could tell what was outside the thin steel wall of the hull. A small spot of the ground just in front of the wheels and a ribbed antenna were powerfully magnified in clear focus, but everything else wasdissolved into zigzags and blobs, as though I were gazing down a long, dark corridor through tears on the glass lenses of a gas mask.
The machine was fairly heavy, and it was hard to get it moving—I even began to doubt whether I would be able to power it across seventy kilometres of lunar desert. Just one turn round the yard was enough to make me really tired; my back ached and my shoulders hurt.
Every other day now, taking turns with Mitiok, I went up in the lift, then out into the yard, stripped down to my vest and underpants, climbed into the moonwalker, and strengthened the muscles in my legs by riding round and round the yard, scattering the chickens and occasionally running over one of them—not deliberately, of course; it was just that through the lenses there was no way to tell a huddled chicken from a newspaper, for instance, or a leg wrapping the wind had blown off the clothesline, and I couldn’t brake fast enough, anyway. At first Urchagin drove in front of me in his wheelchair to show me the way—through the lenses he was a blurred grey-green blob—but gradually I got the hang of it, so I could drive round the entire yard with my eyes closed. All I had to do was set the handlebars at a certain angle, and the machine went round in a smooth circle, coming back to its starting point. Sometimes I even stopped looking
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