Bridge To The Moon: The Return

(In which it’s time for our well-travelled Earthling to head for home.)

Great-great-great-great-great-great-granddad: I had mixed feelings about it being time to head back home to Earth. I was both happy and sad to be leaving the Moon. I didn’t know if I would ever return, and, as things have turned out, two hundred odd years later, I haven’t as yet - I probably never will now. At the same time, I was glad to be heading home.

At Lunar-Earth station we boarded the train heading back to Earth, and went through the previous journey in reverse. We moved out of the station some way, stopped, the train got clamped to the track, and the track started moving along the Moon bridge, (or the Earth bridge, from the perspective of someone on the Moon). We started climbing into the sky at a shallow angle, with our destination - the Earth - visible in the sky above us. Before long we started climbing steeply, heading more or less directly towards the Earth. We stopped again at L1, where most of us went space-walking in zero gravity again.

I’m sure I’ve never seen any more amazing sight in my life than when I happened to just find myself hanging there in space - in nothing - on a little thread: a lustrous azure jewel, slowly turning, showing its brilliancies, to one side; and a surprisingly large, silver-grey, somewhat pock-marked, but somehow still beautiful, boulder hanging in the nothingness to the other side; and the Moon train on the Moon bridge, at the ends of our little threads; and a scattering of weird paraphernalia just hanging around, not so far off in the perspective of space. And later that same day we got back to Earth!

Although we had the most spectacular view out the windows, it felt anti-climactic sometimes on the journey back home. It was good to have a group of friends to be with - I guess they provided some kind of psychological grounding or stability, sort of like a family. I remained friends with some of them for a very long time.

Of course there were all the same fun things to do on the train on the return journey, as on the trip out to the Moon, but some of my friends and I just hung out together, having food and drinks in one of the observation cars, talking about our adventures and our lives, while watching the approaching Earth.

When I got back down to Earth, I remember feeling very heavy until I got used to Earth gravity again! I also remember looking up to that new friend so far above in the sky, and, remembering something the Apollo astronaut Gene Cernan said, (although I think he was looking down at the Earth from the Moon, rather than up at the Moon from the Earth), I held up my thumb, and completely covered the Moon with it. The Moon was still there in my mind, in my memory, in my heart. I moved my thumb out of the way and saw the proof of its continued, long existence up there. I was connected with it now forever in my heart. It had claimed me in part, but of course so had planet Earth - much more strongly than its little, shiny satellite.

The Moon has always been something dreamy to Earth people, but I’d been up there, in its near-vacuum, in its fiery hot days and its freezing cold nights, although largely unaware of the temperatures or the dangers, protected by the extraordinary advances of our technology. We’d kind of been playing with the Moon as far as danger is concerned - almost not feeling how close to an agonising death we would be if our technology should fail - seeing the Moon’s marvels, which in many cases were humans’ marvels, but mostly the marvels of our nearby neighbourhood in this huge universe. I was so happy I’d been to visit it, but I was so loving being back on our little turquoise jewel.

The End

(You can read the whole story here: https://vocal.media/fiction/bridge-to-the-moon)