Andie's Moon by Linda Newbery

was a suffragette – went to prison for it, more than once – very formidable lady, she must have been—”
    “Shh! Something’s happening –”
    Everyone watched the screen, listening, waiting. Andie thought of all the attention focused on these men – Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the two who were in the Eagle, and actually on the moon’s surface, while Michael Collins stayed in the command module. Poor him! To go all that way, and not make the final descent to the moon! It must be like not being picked for the netball team, only thousands of times worse. But what if it all went wrong, and he had to return to Earth alone? What if the other two, down on the Moon’s surface, couldn’t take off again, couldn’t get back to the command module? What if the first men on the moon were also the first to die there? They must be so brave, accepting the huge risks. Like the crew of Apollo 1, who had all died when their rocket exploded on the launch pad…
    Snatches of fuzzy conversation could be heard, or sometimes not quite heard, between the module and mission control at Cape Kennedy. Crackly voices – sounding far away, though certainly not a quarter of a million miles away – exchanged remarks and sometimes even jokes. It was Neil Armstrong whose voice had said calmly, “The Eagle has landed”, from what was now called Tranquillity Base, and who came slowly, blurrily into focus, as FIRST LIVE PICTURES FROM MOON came up on the screen. On leaving the capsule, he had lowered a TV camera, which was now – amazingly – sending back images! At first, Andie couldn’t tell what she was seeing; it looked like a snowy landscape with some sort of building in the foreground. Then she realized that it was a ladder, and a part of the spidery module, and that the large pale shape moving slowly down was Neil Armstrong himself, stepping carefully just like Dad had done when he wallpapered the lounge. “I’m at the foot of the ladder,” he said, speaking to them live from the moon – from the moon itself! “The surface appears to be very, very fine grained as you get close to it – it’s almost a powder.” He hesitated on the lowest step. “I’m going to step off the ladder.” A bigger drop, some fuzzing and blurring, and his voice again: “That’s one small step for man, a giant leap for mankind.”
    Everyone was talking at once. “That’s it! Man on the moon!”
    “Wow! Unbelievable!”
    “They’ve done it! They’re there!”
    “The moon’s a real place ! He’s standing on it –”
    “How must that feel? To stand where no human being has stood before, ever?”
    “Amazing! Incredible!”
    “ A man, he must have meant to say,” said Sushila. “One small step for a man, a giant leap for mankind. Doesn’t make sense, otherwise.”
    They all watched while Neil Armstrong collected samples of moon dust and rock. A few minutes later, Buzz Aldrin came carefully down the ladder, guided by Armstrong – bobbing like an inflated toy in the moon’s reduced gravity. And now the two were talking to each other: “Isn’t that something? Isn’t it fine?” It sounded so ordinary; they might have been on Brighton beach. Andie had expected them to say something more startling, something wise and wonderful. But what? Perhaps “Wow!” and “Unbelievable!” and “Isn’t that something?” were the best that could be done with words, when you saw something utterly astonishing. Perhaps a person standing on the moon wouldn’t quite be able to believe what they’d seen and done, till much later. Perhaps not ever.
    Neil Armstrong aimed his camera at what he called “the panorama”, the view from where he stood – the surface of the moon, pale, flat, pockmarked. But it wasn’t Andie’s moon. She had the odd feeling that her moon was somehow more real. Part of her longed to go back there, by herself.
    The two astronauts put up an American flag and posed beside it.
    “That doesn’t seem right,” Sushila said.