250,000 Miles From Home

The lights flickered as we landed on the rocky surface of the moon. Joshua grunted as it jostled us. Nixon simply acted as if we'd just parked a car. Nixon had been to space before to visit the ISS. He was a spacecraft engineer. He was in charge of the moisture meter, or MM, we'd brought with us. Joshua was my pilot. He'd also been to the ISS more than once. He was in charge of helping me land, take off, and keeping everything written down in a log. They're expertise was necessary. We donned our EMU's and set out for the lunar surface. Nixon held the MM in his hand, while Joshua and I pushed the Higher Tech Moisture Meter, or HTMM. It was almost shoulder height and rolled on large wheels. The handheld meter we'd brought to use was only able to detect moisture up to twenty feet underground, but the HTMM could up to one-hundred feet. It also, when powered with gasoline, moved on it's own to look for possible trails of underground water. It would save tons of time for those who came next, but they were still finishing tests. We walked for hours, looking for any signs of underground water, but we were running out of oxygen. We headed back to the pod, leaving the HTMM behind. It went on like this until our final day. We ran, to get as far as possible, but stopped in our tracks soon enough. In front of us was a crater filled with lunar ice. From it ran a river of underground water. We followed it as far as we could before running out of time. We hurried back to the pod, disappointed we hadn't seen more. Then, preparing for lift off, we headed home.