by Rick Chesler
Caitlin tore her eyes from the vivid moonscape outside her window. She glanced back at her passengers. They were seated in a circle around the perimeter of the LEM, mostly quiet since leaving the Command Module. Was it the realization that they were about to land on a planetary body other than Earth, Caitlin wondered, or was it just that they were all sick of each other already after two days in close confinement?
With the comm loops thick with pre-descent chatter buzzing in the background (Caitlin listened for Ray’s voice but hadn’t heard him since they went into lunar orbit), Martin Hughes wordlessly pointed out a mountain range to no one in particular. Asami Imura glanced around the circle, and when it seemed no one else had anything to say, offered, “Many people think of the moon as a flat boring place, maybe with some craters, but in reality it’s home to mountains that are taller than our Mount Everest on Earth. Some of them are high enough, and at the right latitude such that they are never exposed to darkness. Peaks of Eternal Light.”
Presently, Blake Garner dropped into the Lunar Module and took his seat in the circle, the last to do so. “Be nice to put some solar panels up there, eh?” he said, dropping into the conversation as well. “Endless energy!” Then, to Suzette, his videographer: “You filming? Did you get that? I want to remember that.” She nodded.
Asami glared at her. “Why don’t you stow that thing now so one of us doesn’t get hurt?” In reply, Suzette swung the camera’s lens her way.
“Doctor Imura, esteemed selenologist, how about if you tell us your thoughts as we orbit the moon, only minutes from descending on an alien world. Any insights so far?”
Asami was caught off guard by the serious question. She knew Suzette could edit out the line about getting hurt and just cut in with the question and awkward hesitation.
“Well,” she began, “the moon—”
Suzette lowered her camera and put the lens cap on.
“—has had several geological forces acting on it, including volcanic activity, which…” Asami trailed off, stopping when she saw that Suzette was no longer filming.
“Forget it,” Suzette said, reaching behind her to put the camera into a storage compartment. “No one wants to hear it.”
Asami’s mouth dropped open in disbelief.
“I do. I’d like to hear it,” Martin Hughes said.
The marketing veep shot him a withering stare. “We have a couple more minutes where I could have done it, but Safety Queen here’s giving me a hard time. It was just for some B-roll stuff anyway, nobody wants to hear that crap.”
Asami unclipped her seat harness. “I’ve had it with you.” She started to stand up before the weightlessness made that difficult.
Dallas’ voice came over the intercom. “We are go for Lunar Module separation in T-minus two minutes.”
Blake held a hand out toward Asami in a stopping motion and shook his head. The selenologist resumed her seat. They were approaching the calculated point along their orbital path where their descent needed to begin if they were to end up at the target landing zone with minimal travel distance.
“Better sit back down,” Suzette said under her breath.
“What?” Asami leaned forward in her seat. “Blake, I didn’t sign on to be abused by your crew.”
Caitlin swiveled her command seat around to face the passengers. She’d read enough articles on the psychology of space travel to know that arguments such as these could be symptomatic of claustrophobia, agoraphobia, fear of the unknown and general stress. “Enough! After we land, you’ll all get to stretch out a bit and eat. For now, we need you to sit back in your seats and relax.”
Blake nodded his agreement, as did James Burton.
“Prepare for lander separation,” Paul intoned.
“Let’s light this candle,” Dallas replied.
“Lunar Module, this is Command Module: You are go for descent burn.”
They felt a rumbling surge, powerful but less so than the main rocket for Earth liftoff, and then the LEM departed from the rest of the spaceship.
“Have fun down there,” Paul said. “I’ll leave a light on for you.”
9 | Landing
Caitlin Swain sat close beside Dallas Pace in the lunar lander’s control alcove as they powered toward the moon at a shallow angle. “Sat” wasn’t really the right term though, because they descended with their backs toward the lunar surface, the current view out their window looking up and away from the moon into the black void of outer space. For most of the lander’s descent, Dallas relied on an autopilot function preprogrammed with their landing site coordinates to keep them on course and to maintain a proper descent rate.
“Descent orbit insertion complete,” Dallas announced, glancing at his instrumentation. “Descent engine cutoff in three…two…one…” The main descent engine was about to shut down, allowing the LEM to fall with lunar gravity until they were much closer to the lunar surface and the descent engine fired again, this time as a “brake.” This procedure was necessary both to conserve fuel and to reduce their speed as they approached the lunar surface.
Caitlin raised her eyebrows when zero came and went but the roar of the main engine remained. She turned to look at Dallas who wore a puzzled expression. Caitlin had known him long enough to know he was a brilliant man—an astronaut as well as a medical doctor—and it wasn’t often that he appeared puzzled by anything.
The comm loops exploded with chatter at the same time as a pair of red lights lit up on the console. Dallas was talking into his comm unit while pointing at a button on Caitlin’s side of the console: Internal comm shutdown, hit it, we need to talk in private. Caitlin tapped it just before she heard someone say the words “program alarm.”
She fought against a creeping fog of panic at the same time she saw Dallas’ logic. It was the least she could do. All it did was cut the passengers out of the comm loops so they couldn’t hear what was going on, but right now that was crucial. The last thing they needed was a panic onboard, and Blake would be furious to find out that Burton became privy to a Lunar Module Incident because she took her sweet time throwing the passenger comm kill switch.
Dallas took his transmitter offline and leaned in close to Caitlin without ceasing to manipulate the controls in front of him. “Something’s wrong with the lunar landing guidance system.”
Then, into his mic, he said, “Command Module, this is Lunar Module, commencing manual descent engine shutdown, over.” Dallas’ hands operated the controls with almost robotic precision, and in a few seconds Caitlin felt their craft decelerate as it became much quieter.
“Altitude 50,000 feet,” Dallas said into his comm unit.
“That’s way lower than we should be for descent engine cutoff,” Caitlin said. They were still dropping down to the moon, now pulled by its gravity alone. They remained oriented upward, staring out into space.
Dallas touched Caitlin’s arm, not a gesture of comfort or affection, but a signal he wanted her undivided attention. “Caitlin, listen. That lightning hit must have disabled the LEM’s landing guidance. We only did diagnostics on the Command Module because the comm failure was a symptom there. I think maybe we should abort.”
Caitlin took a deep breath as she considered this, staring into the pitch-blackness. They had the ability to jettison the descent engine and use the ascent engine—which ran off of a separate control program from the landing sequence—to hightail it back up to Paul in the orbiting Command Module. There would be no moon landing, but they’d all get back to Earth alive.
She slammed her fist onto the console in frustration. “For all we know there’s something wrong with the ascent engine control program, too!” She knew Dallas didn’t need her to spell out the implications for him. If the ascent stage engine burned too long, as the descent stage just had, they would miss the Command Module and go rocketing off into space without enough fuel to return to either lunar or Earth orbit. They’d die in the LEM when their oxygen ran out, drifting through the eternal vacuum of space
in their metal coffin, possibly for years, until they burned up in some distant orbit.
Dallas bit his lip, a habit he had when in deep concentration. “It’s either that or I land us manually.”
Caitlin looked him in the eyes. He appeared as competent as ever. He wasn’t panicking, his decision-making was solid. Land us manually. She exhaled deeply. His training had largely been on how to utilize the autopilot function to land, not to actually fly all the way down.
“For God’s sake, Dallas,” she whispered. She had no more words for the situation. Dallas understood it at least as well, and probably better, than she did.
“35,000 feet,” Dallas said. They were now the same distance above the moon that commercial airliners flew above Earth.
Caitlin knew Dallas had been an Air Force test pilot before joining NASA, but still, that was two careers ago. She flashed on the lunar surface pockmarked with craters and scarred by mountains. Their selected landing site was a vast, flat plain—the same one Black Sky had already landed on—but they had veered off course.
Then Caitlin heard Ray’s voice over the comm channels, urgently discussing something about a descent trajectory with another Controller. The impulse to return to Earth was unbearably strong. The urge to abort was powerful. But if there was one thing Caitlin feared above all else, it was suffocating in this cramped vehicle while she told Ray she loved him over a damn comm unit. No way. I’d rather blow up on lunar impact.
She spoke rapidly. “If we land, we’ll be able to troubleshoot the ascent stage before we take off again.”
Dallas nodded immediately, urging the conversation on while eyeing his gauges. “Right, exactly. If we land.”
“Can you do it?”
“I think so.”
“Then let’s go for it.”
“Switch on the landing radar, please, and call out our altitude at regular intervals.”
Caitlin smiled as she carried out his command. Dallas was one cool cucumber. She heard the hiss of the attitude thrusters as the spacecraft rolled about its vertical axis, putting them in a normal sitting position with respect to the lunar surface.
“10,000 feet, we should be in braking phase!” Caitlin said. And then she looked out the window where she now looked down on the world of the moon.
“Mountain!”
“I have it on radar.” A mountain top passed below them and to the north, a reminder that they could crash here, just like flying a small airplane on Earth, like the Cessna she owned back home.
For the next thirty minutes, Dallas carried out the precise order of operations with which the LEM’s autopilot had been painstakingly programmed by a team of engineers. Adjusting the ship’s altitude this way and that, initiating the braking sequence where the main descent engine had to be fired for just the right amount of time to counter the LEM’s rate of descent, all the while monitoring their speed, position and systems status. Even the comm loops remained mostly quiet. There was nothing anybody else could do.
“1,000 feet,” Caitlin said.
She peered into the dark depths of a crater, the ground dropping out beneath them until their little capsule whizzed over the crater’s rim and emerged back over flat ground.
“500 feet!”
“Landing phase,” Dallas announced. “Fuel?”
“One minute remaining!”
Dallas’ hands raced across the controls as he engaged thrusters to adjust their position. They needed to land upright on the LEM’s footpads. To reach the surface in any other position would be catastrophic.
“200 feet. Thirty seconds.”
“And…” Dallas burned the last of the descent engine’s fuel to slow their fall. Caitlin watched in horror as she saw the grayish soil rush up at her, swirls of lunar dust displaced by the engine’s thrust.
“Contact!” Dallas said as they hit the ground.
Caitlin’s head was pitched forward in a whiplash motion, but not all the way into the console in front of her. It reminded her of the time as a teenager when she plowed her Jetta into a car stopped at a light, at about twenty miles per hour. It was a hard landing, but blessedly short of a full-on crash.
Dallas shut down the engine and other flight systems.
“Lunar Module to Mission Control: we have touchdown.”
The moon dust dissipated around their craft while excited cheers burst through the comm loops. They both had their first look out the window. They had landed on somewhat uneven ground, the LEM canted slightly to one side, but it was a lot better than coming down on the side of a crater or on top of a mountain, where they could roll all the way down.
Caitlin leaned over and gave Dallas a hug. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me just yet,” Dallas said, looking at their lunar position display. “Let’s see where we are first.”
“I’ll handle that, you take a break.” Caitlin consulted the display and compared it to their stored landing point.
She frowned. “We’re a mile away from our designated touchdown coordinates, and unfortunately that puts us closer than we should be to Black Sky’s landing site.” The rival space outfits had an agreement with one another—a formal, signed agreement—to share the large optimal landing site, but at a minimum distance away from each other at all times. This landing mishap put them much closer to Black Sky’s territory than they should be according to that agreement. “Blake’s not going to be happy,” Caitlin summed up.
Dallas pursed his lips, concentrating. “Let’s see, what could we say? Solar winds blew us off course?” They both laughed, blowing off some steam, until they each felt a hand on their shoulders.
“Excellent job! A tad bumpy, but here we are! Are we free to move about the cabin?” Blake Garner grinned at the astronauts, not yet aware of what had transpired.
Dallas turned around. “You bet,” he managed. He was too exhausted to attempt an explanation just yet.
Blake walked from the control alcove, once again under the influence of gravity, back to the passengers. He raised his arms in a sweeping motion toward the two windows on either side of the LEM.
“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the moon! Shall we step outside?”
10 | One Small Step
Once James had donned his spacesuit and triple-checked the oxygen gauge, he stared hard at the door to the lunar module, suddenly overcome by trepidation. Maybe he’d simply watched too many science fiction movies as a teenager, but gazing out the window, the moon looked about as inviting as a swimming pool filled with razor blades under a rubbing-alcohol rain.
There’s no air out there.
But then, there was no air when he and his wife Deana went scuba diving off the coast of Grand Cayman on the vacation they took to celebrate their 25th anniversary. Was this really all that much different than that?
Yes, James. Yes, it is. This isn’t the azure Caribbean with white sand beaches under coconut palms a short swim away. It’s the goddamn moon. A gray world where no life can exist at all.
At least that was the expert opinion of every known scientist on Earth. But Blake seemed to have been hinting otherwise. And why else would he have an exobiologist along, such an expensive seat to fill for someone not already on Blake’s payroll? He supposed it could be simply to confirm that there is indeed no life on the moon.
The thought that no one really knew much about whatever was up here—out there— scared the hell out of him, too. The comm channels crackled to life with the voices of the other passengers as one by one, they got into their suits and spoke into their radios.
“Suzette,” Blake said over the common channel. “I want you out the door first.”
“Really? I thought you’d prefer the honor.”
“Nonsense. I need you to capture my first steps and words on video for posterity.”
“Can’t you do that while I stand on the steps of the lunar module?”
“No, I want the ship in the background.”
Behind his helmet, Burton rolled his eyes. Martin, meanwh
ile, was paying the entire scene no mind, just staring up at the starry void.
Asami came up beside James with a smile that could melt glass. Burton wondered if Blake had told her to flirt with him a little, to butter him up? He wouldn’t put it past him. At the same time, he wasn’t above needing a little inspiration. Had it not been for the two helmets, he’d have been inclined to ask for a good luck kiss. Well, probably not, but what does it really matter now?
“Careful out there, Mr. Burton. But don’t forget to have fun!” She gave his shoulder a pat and stepped aside to give him plenty of room to make his exit.
He thanked her, although “be careful” was just about the last thing he wanted to hear. He’d have been much happier with, “Go on, you big wuss. There’s nothing whatsoever to worry about. It’s as safe as an English garden out there.”
The hiss of the hatch opening reminded James of his wife’s cat, Grey Skies, back on Earth. A fine temperament for a feline, but he made that startling sound any time James accidently stepped on his fluffy gray tail during one of his middle-of-the-night jaunts to the kitchen.
James walked slowly to the edge and looked out onto the moon. The moon! Blake was down there already, standing about ten feet away from the LEM, carefully positioning himself for Suzette’s camera. About ten more feet behind him, Suzette aimed her video device toward Blake and the ship. In the LEM, Martin and Asami waited patiently for James to get some balls and leave the capsule.
He looked back out onto the moon once and stared down the ladder, thinking of Neil Armstrong’s first descent. He instantly felt the hair on his forearms stand on end. One rung at a time, he told himself.
He dangled a foot over the side and took a leap of faith. His momentum carried his next foot over, and he suddenly feared tumbling like an idiot down the stairs, perhaps cracking his helmet open in the process. Wouldn’t that be ironic, he couldn’t help but think, visualizing a sensational news headline. FAA Safety Administrator Killed on Moon Due to Own Carelessness. Wonderful. People would love that, too. He reminded himself why he was here. Just go through the experience and report back. He’d heard there was already a 68-year-old woman signed up to ride on the second flight once Outer Limits got clearance. If she could do it...
