The man sat in front of a large monitor, occasionally making notes on what he saw.
He was looking at the Luna surface. This was something he was expected to do for several hours every week. In truth, he was just plain bored. He didn’t share his feelings about how he felt with his colleagues. In this place, everybody around him was convinced that working in the NASA facility was the best thing since sliced bread! For him, he couldn’t understand how, after all that study and attaining degrees in three different areas of astronomical and scientific research, it had come down to this. His father had tried to talk him into taking on a partnership in his fruit packing business when he left school. But no, he wanted something more exciting. He wanted to be part of something that was ground-breaking. Packing fruit had never appealed more.
He had to admit that what he was seeing now was better than before. Then, he’d been looking at pictures that were taken during a moon landing. The last mission, apart from taking many samples, had set up a permanent camera on a high lamppost-like structure that gave a live feed of several square metres of surface where samples had been taken. The fact that he was looking at a small area of the moon in real-time was better than still photographs, but not a lot.
The image he was looking at was quite sharp and he could move the camera around on a universal joint, along with the ability to zoom in and out. He was in the process of measuring the dimensions of a range of small rocks when he came across a strange shape. Two things struck him about the thing. The first being that its shape, unlike the rocks, seemed to have some regularity about it and the second was the idea that it hadn’t been there a few moments ago.
Adjusting the image with the controls he had, he magnified the dark shape and brought it into focus. It looked to be round, with a faint pattern on it. He began to reason that it could be man-made and had been left behind by one of those that had gathered soil samples.
He was considering the possibility that it was a lid from a container or some sort of badge that had been dropped… when it moved!