When he got to the ladder’s top rung, Muldoon took hold of the handrails and pulled himself upright. He could see the small TV camera, which Armstrong had deployed to film his own egress, sitting on its stowage tray hinged out from the LM. The camera watched him silently. He said, “Now I want to back up and partially close the hatch. Making sure I haven’t left the key in the ignition, and the handbrake is on…”

“A particularly good thought.”

“We’d walk far to find a rental car around here.”

He was ten feet or so above the lunar surface, with the gaunt planes of the LM’s ascent stage before him, the spiderlike descent stage below. “Okay, I’m on the top step, and I can look down over the pads. It’s a simple matter to hop down from one step to the next.”

“Yeah,” Armstrong said. “I found it to be very comfortable, and walking is also very comfortable. Joe, you’ve got three more rungs and then a long one.”

“I’m going to leave one foot up there and move both hands down to the fourth rung up…”

It was routine, like a sim in the Peter Pan rig back at MSC. He didn’t find it hard to report his progress down the ladder to Houston.

But once he was standing on Eagle’s footpad, he found words fleeing from him. Morning on the Moon:

Holding on to the ladder, Muldoon turned slowly. His suit was a warm, comforting bubble around him; he heard the hum of pumps and fans in the PLSS — his backpack, the Portable Life Support System — and he felt the soft breeze of oxygen across his face.

The LM was standing on a broad, level plain. There were craters everywhere, ranging from several yards to a thumbnail width, the low sunlight deepening their shadows. There were even tiny micrometeorite craters, zap pits, punched in the sides of the rocks littering the surface.