Snowball

By Alastair Mayer

In the distant future, aliens find mankind's footprints and hardware on the Moon, and a strangely changed Earth. What do they make of it all?

This story originally appeared in print in the anthology Footprints, edited by Jay Lake and Eric T. Reynolds, from Hadley Rille Books (July, 2009).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alastair Mayer
• Release date: Jan 31, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458177384

Alastair Mayer

Alastair Mayer was born in London, England and raised in Canada. He now makes his home in Colorado. He is an experienced pilot and scuba diver and a former contributing editor at Byte Magazine. Alastair is a member of SFWA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America), and his stories have appeared in Analog magazine and several anthologies.

Book preview

Snowball

by Alastair Mayer

Copyright © 2010, Alastair Mayer. All rights reserved.

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Snowball first appeared in Footprints, Hadley Rille Press, July 2009

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Table of Contents

Author’s Introduction

Snowball

Afterword

Author’s Introduction to Snowball

This story first appeared in the anthology Footprints, edited by Jay Lake and Eric T. Reynolds, from Hadley Rille Books, July 2009. The premise of the anthology is that, long after humans have gone, our footprints and hardware (and yes, some trash) will remain relatively undisturbed on the surface of the Moon. What might alien visitors make of these remains?

I took that premise rather literally, and also took a stab at explaining why we may not be here then. The Apollo flashbacks are interpolated from NASA transcripts of the actual missions.

I'm rather pleased with how this turned out; it was my first story sale.

SNOWBALL

The exploration ship LifeSeeker came out of warp again just inside the inner edge of the Oort Cloud. It paused a while, scanning, then made a few short warp jumps in different directions, extending the standard scan to locate planets by their parallax. The crew noted a bright planet within the star’s habitable zone—the distance at which water could, though perhaps not would, exist in liquid form—and jumped LifeSeeker as close to it as the they dared before continuing in under