Adrift on the Sea of Rains (Apollo Quartet1)

by Ian Sales

  We don’t need 20,000 lb of fuel, Bartlett points out. We only need enough for the TEI burn.

  Again, Curtis quotes figures from memory: The CSM is 66,871 lb fully loaded, the SPS has 20,500 lbf thrust. You need a 203 second burn for TEI.

  See, says Bartlett. Our LM will be maybe one-fifth that. As long as we can get the delta vee for TEI from the DPS—

  It’s too heavy, Alden repeats.

  He reaches for one of Curtis’ manuals and opens it to the back. He takes hold of a blank page, looks questioningly at Curtis, and gestures removing the page from the binder. Curtis nods warily. Alden rips out the page; Curtis winces. Alden pulls a pencil from a pocket and, brow furrowed, begins jotting down equations and solving them.

  The others watch him. They sit in silence and watch as Alden fills a page with closely-written maths.

  Peterson leans close. He thinks some of the equations might look familiar. He sees Δv and ve and Isp, and he remembers a classroom at the Johnson Space Center and some pencil-neck with pocket-protectors and a blackboard covered in alphabet soup.

  No one says a word for the fifteen minutes it takes Alden to work through his calculations. When he finishes, he looks up from the piece of paper, and his distant gaze cannot hide his disappointment.

  Well? demands Peterson.

  Alden shakes his head heavily. That 3,500 lbf, he says, is not going to get us more than 6,000 feet per second with all that weight.

  Lunar escape velocity, quotes Curtis, is 7,800 feet per second.

  Goddamn, says Fulton.

  So why not leave the DPS in situ? asks Scott.

  Hot damn, says Fulton. That could work.

  We don’t need most of the descent stage, Scott says, so we can save weight by leaving some of it behind like a launch cradle.

  Alden frowns. He takes another blank page from the manual—without asking for permission from Curtis—and sets about recalculating specific impulses, weights, thrusts and lunar escape velocity. He does so quicker than previously, but still it takes almost ten minutes. He nods slowly as he solves the final equation, and says, It adds up; we can do it.

  We can do what, exactly? asks Peterson.

  We can use the DPS to get the ascent stage into lunar orbit, explains Fulton. Then we use the APS for the TEI burn. You only got 10,000 lb of LM. You can easy get the delta vee.

  You can’t throttle the APS, Bartlett argues. It’s 3,500 lbf or nothing.

  It’s about the delta vee, not the thrust, replies Fulton.

  The numbers, Alden says to Bartlett, don’t support your solution. The only way to get to 60,000 feet is using the DPS.

  Bartlett stiffens, and his features adopt a look of stubborn intensity. He is used to getting his own way; Alden is never wrong. And Bartlett knows it.

  Goddamn it, he says. We need the throttle for the TEI.

  It won’t work if you can’t get into orbit, Alden insists. He slides his two pages of algebra across the table to Bartlett. You check my numbers, he says. There is no suggestion in his tone that the calculations might contain a mistake. Alden wants Bartlett to check his figures to see for himself the truth of Alden’s solution.

  Bartlett continues to argue, but Peterson knows Alden has already won. Bartlett is just saving face: he can see the others’ expressions, he knows they expect him to fold. To bow out with a final zinger to leave him the last word. They have all seen it before. It is the way Bartlett operates.

  Okay, José, Bartlett says, I guess we’re on our way.

  The joke, an old one when Peterson qualified for the astronaut corps, prompts wan smiles.

  Curtis opens a manual and flips through pages to a cutaway of the LM’s descent stage. He points to each of the fuel tanks, and says, We pull these out and re-fill them with salvaged fuel. Then we cut here, here, here and here, and loosen these bolts here, so when the DPS fires it lifts right out of the descent stage.

  Bartlett pulls the manual to him from under Curtis’ hand, ignoring the other man’s hurt look. Peterson thinks about intervening but then decides this is too important.

  We’re going to have put in some bracing, Bartlett says. Or this thing’s going to fold like a cheap sofa.

  Now that they have all agreed on a way to get into lunar orbit, the discussion moves onto the next stage of the journey: how to get to LEO. Modifying an ALM is something they can do with their hands. It is real. They have a workshop, they have tools. They may be aviators but they are also practical men: happiest when they are using their hands—control stick in one, throttle in the other. They fly by feel as much as by instruments.

  But getting their modified ALM from lunar orbit to LEO is not something they can do with a wrench or a screwdriver. They can’t even rely on the ALM’s Primary Guidance Navigation Section to do the hard work for them: those fifty-five switches, forty-five circuit breakers and thirteen indicators can only be used to land an ALM on the Moon and, later, fly it to Lunar Orbit Rendezvous with a CSM, as per flightpaths programmed into the LM Guidance Computer. Perhaps they can reprogram it; they certainly cannot rewire it—the wires are so fine, using spacesuit gloves they’d just break them. They will have to calculate manually when to light the APS for TEI, and for how long, and where in the LM’s orbit about the Moon they must light it. And they must do it exactly right in order to hit a target eight thousand miles in diameter 250,000 miles away.

  How the hell do I navigate? asks Peterson.

  They look at him.

  I? says Bartlett.

  Goddamn right, replies Peterson. Who you think was going?

  On your own? asks Scott. The ALM can fly four into orbit.

  It’s three days to Earth, Peterson says. We put the consumables for that aboard and we’re going to be close to the weight limit. One man is safer.

  We should draw straws, complains Neubeck.

  You should obey goddamn orders, snaps Peterson.

  You’ve got the optical telescope, says Scott, deflecting the argument. You use that. We’ll have to do some number-crunching on the computer here to get you the values to input on the DSKY, but the LGC should handle it.

  Peterson had flown the ALM that brought him to Falcon Base down from lunar orbit to Mare Imbrium. In truth, he’d had little to do—the Lunar Module Guidance Computer had done everything. He’d kept his hand by the hand controller, but he’d not needed to take over.

  It’s been a year since he abdicated his command, but Peterson feels the mantle of leadership settle once again on his shoulders. They might resent his decision to fly the mission himself, but they are looking at him now and it’s clear he is in charge. He organises them in teams.

  Alden, who knows the maths, and Curtis, who has memorised the manuals, will calculate the variables for TEI and Earth Orbit Insertion. They will also draw up a list of the verbs and nouns Peterson will need to pilot the mission.

  Peterson, because he has the most EVA experience, McKay and Fulton will salvage the fuel tanks from the ALMs on the Sea of Rains. Bartlett, Neubeck and Scott will build the equipment needed to transfer fuel from those tanks into something they can use to refuel the ALM Peterson will fly.

  While Alden gets started on the calculations, Bartlett, Scott and Curtis help Peterson, McKay and Fulton into their spacesuits. It is crowded in the suiting up area, especially with three of them in bulky A7LBs, but no one complains. They are doing something; they have something to do. Peterson is ready first, his polycarbonate helmet locked on, LEVA in place, his PLSS on his back and hoses plugged into the connectors on his torso. He steps over the coaming into the airlock, turns about clumsily and watches as both McKay and Fulton have their helmets lowered onto their heads and the locking rings twisted into place.

  Outside on the lunar surface, Peterson hurries ahead. All this is second nature to him, the lunar jog, leaping from one foot to the other, graceful despite the bulk of his backpack. McKay struggles to keep up, but his breathing is not enough to trigger the microphone so he appears to suffer in silence. F
ulton has gone in the other direction, to fetch the LRV. They will need it to drag the tanks back to Falcon Base.

  At the garden of descent stages, Peterson halts before the first ALM. Dust puffs out around his feet and then drops abruptly to the ground. It occurs to him that he will finally learn which of these gold-skirted machines landed here first. They need to check every one, and one of them has that plaque on its leg. But for now…

  He reaches up and begins to strip the gold mylar from the descent stage’s side.

  Peterson hung beneath the belly of a North American B-70 Valkyrie, strapped into the cockpit of his Lockheed Martin SR-91 Aurora, five minutes away from being launched on a high-speed high-altitude reconnaissance flight over the USSR. According to his instruments, the B-70 was flying at Mach 2.5 at 60,000 feet but the SR-91’s mission would take Peterson and his reconnaissance systems operator to hypersonic speeds and three times that altitude, far out of range of Soviet interceptors like the MiG-25 Foxbat. This was Peterson’s first flight in the SR-91 but he’d spent hundreds of hours in the simulator and he knew his way round this cramped cockpit with a familiarity that made him long for the simplicity of his F-108D Rapier—or even the Habu, the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, he’d been flying until last year. If it wasn’t for the buffeting, this could be another simulator run, another chance for him to out-think the guys running the computers, as if there weren’t enough opportunities for something to go wrong anyway with an aircraft like this, which flew so high and so fast. Nor were the Soviets going to sit and watch him as he flew over them at Mach 6, they were going to try and bring him down, send up interceptors, though they had nothing capable of speeds greater than Mach 3.6, at least both NATO and the Pentagon thought so, but there was always the chance they’d rolled out some super-black interceptor in the last few months. The USSR had nothing like the SR-91, that much was certain—the details of the Aurora’s Pulse Detonation Wave Engine were so secret not even Peterson knew how it worked, although the first time he’d seen the aircraft’s distinctive “doughnuts on a rope” jet exhaust it had come as a shock since it resembled nothing he’d ever seen before, and he could almost believe the lame-ass disinformation USAF had put out about flying saucers and aircraft reverse-engineered from UFOs which had crashed at Roswell back in 1947. There was not much Peterson could see from the SR-91’s office, as his only view of outside was provided by a television screen on his instrument panel, and the small periscope he’d use for landing this bird. Since he’d climbed into the SR-91 back on the ground back at Groom Lake, he’d been going through one checklist after another, keeping himself busy as the aircraft was carried up into the air and north to the pole and his launch point, which had just been reached according to the B-70’s commander, who told him to prep for release. So Peterson put one hand to his stick and the other to the throttle, and stared so hard at the TV screen his vision blurred until he was looking at an impressionist landscape of clouds lit by a pointillist sun. His reconnaissance systems operator, “rizzo”, seated behind him in a sealed compartment of his own, began counting down the moment until separation and, as the moment grew closer, it struck Peterson that for all the artificiality of this sealed cockpit, in which he sat in his S1030 pressure suit, and its televised view of the sky outside, this was a real mission—if an interceptor shot him down, if a missile got him, he couldn’t just raise the canopy and walk away laughing and joking. At that moment, the rizzo called out, Now; the SR-91 shook, there was a loud “clunk”, and Peterson felt his stomach lurch upwards as the plane plummeted; but the TV screen still showed only that placid sea of cirrostratus. Clear, the B-70 commander told him, and the rizzo confirmed that the mothership had banked and was climbing for the return flight to Nellis AFB. Peterson ignited the PDWE, pushed the throttle forward, and gently brought the stick back; and there was a kick in his back and acceleration pressed him into his encapsulated ejection seat, fiercer than anything the F-108D or the Habu could have pulled, and he heard his rizzo let out a grunt over the intercom. His instruments told him they were approaching Mach 6 and were already over one hundred twenty thousand feet as they arced over the North Pole, and crossed the Arctic Ocean towards the Kara Sea. They were firmly in the mission envelope now, flying hypersonic thirty-five miles above the ground, halfway to space, the TV screen as dark as night, but he was on autopilot and would be all the way south one thousand eight hundred miles into the USSR. The Soviets were up to something near Saratov, but the last two satellites to over-fly the area had been shot down by Soviet hunter-killer birds, and the Pentagon didn’t want to risk another one—not that the SR-91 had a much lower price-tag than a spy satellite, but it was easier to get into the air. At two hundred thousand feet they started on their loop down to the Caspian Sea, which would take them back up over Poland and Norway, and over Saratov his rizzo says, Wow look at all them birds; and Peterson himself can see on the PIR display lines and lines of Tupolev Tu-22KP Blinders on the dispersal areas at Engels Air Force Base. A week later, those Tupolevs were flying south, and they sent Peterson off again from Groom Lake to find out what they were up to, and he watched as the Tu-22KPs repeatedly flew across Georgia and Azerbaijan and into northern Iraq, where they fired their As-4 Kitchen anti-radiation missiles in support of a ground invasion. Peterson went back a number of times and from on high he witnessed the Soviet tanks rumble into the oilfields near Mosul and Kirkuk, the clashes between the Turks and the Soviets on the border near Silopi and the Habur frontier gate, and even the NATO forces clearing the area of Kurds and putting them in camps. It got nasty down there, though from two hundred thousand feet up all he could see were fires and thick black smoke, battlefield wreckage and sprawling bases of Soviet troops. They sent up MiG-25s each time, but the interceptors topped out at eighty thousand feet and Peterson could only grin and wonder why they even bothered.

  Peterson stands at the commander’s position in the ALM and gazes out at the lunar surface. Etched across the window is the LPD, reticulations and markings graded in feet, as if life on the Moon can be subjected to measurement. And then he thinks: the days and months of isolation, the miles he has ranged across Mare Imbrium and the foothills of the Apennines. He has counted every moment and every footstep, and though he cannot remember their number, he has indeed measured his exile here.

  That ends now.

  Fifty feet away stand eight figures in white spacesuits dusted with dark grey. As he watches, one figure bounces slowly up a couple of feet and then back down. Another, feet wide, one arm out from his side, raises a hand to his golden visor in a salute. Peterson is reminded of a photograph from the old Apollo days, and he wonders if that picture led him to his current situation. He tries to remember, but the memory has long since been lost: what did he think back then? That he too wanted to visit that dead world, to stand in that gray sand beneath that black sky?

  For the past two years, he has done just that on a daily basis.

  That ends now.

  It is time to go. Everything has been checked and checked again. Alden and Peterson have spent hours entering data into the PGNS and AGS. Alden has also provided him with a cue card for the flight. He has aligned the ALM’s inertial guidance platform using Polaris as a referent. Though the ALM’s guidance computer has a program for the flight, Program 12, Powered Ascent, he cannot use it as it controls the APS and he will be flying with the DPS. There is, unsurprisingly, no program to use the Descent Propulsion System for an ascent. For the seven and a half minutes he is in flight, he must rely on the accumulated velocity, altitude rate and altitude displayed on the DSKY, and he must fly by hand so they match the figures Alden has written on the cue card.

  This is it, I guess, he says.

  He has pressurised the ALM’s cabin and he is wearing his helmet and gloves. He has attached the waist restraints, but he knows they are unnecessary. Though he has never experienced an ascent from the lunar surface—this will be his first—he has heard they are as smooth and gentle as an elevator ride.


  Master Arm on, he says, flicking the switch.

  He flicks down DES PRPLNT ISOL VLV to FIRE, followed by he PRESS - DES START. If they have not recharged the helium pressurisation system for the DPS correctly, they will all die here on the Moon.

  One month it took them to decant sufficient fuel from the LM Trucks’ descent stages and fill the cylindrical tanks in the ALM in which he now stands. Two tanks of fuel and two of oxidizer, each holding 67.3 cubic feet of salvaged Aerozine 50 and dinitrogen tetroxide. One month, and so many setbacks. One month, and Fulton will be forever scarred on one arm where some Aerozine 50 spilled and burned him.

  I’ve got a light on tank one, he says; tank two is good.

  Scott is acting as capcom for this launch. He says, We’re ready when you are.

  Peterson holds out his gloved hands, palms down and fingers splayed. He is an excellent pilot, but he is not the best of them at Falcon Base. That would be Neubeck, but Peterson was not going to let that slacker fly this mission. It has been a long time since Peterson flew anything—not just the two years trapped here on the Moon, but even before that he had time only to keep up his hours. This ascent will be the most difficult flight he has ever flown, and he wonders if he is up to it.

  If he is not, his men will die. He cannot allow that to happen.

  Master Arm off, he says. Engine Arm to Descent.

  He sets the manual throttle control to one hundred percent and puts one gloved hand about the Thrust/Translation Hand Controller. He sets the PGNS to Program 99. The index finger of his other hand hovers over the MANUAL ENGINE ON button.

  It occurs to him this is Armstrong’s historic moment in reverse: Peterson is making history by leaving the Moon. He should say something suitable, but his mind is a blank. After two years, he is finally heading home. A sudden knot of pain forms in his chest, and he closes his eyes and tries to ignore the sharp and jagged thing that has replaced his heart. But is this ache prompted by his destination, and the certainty of loss it signifies; or is it for his departure and the men he leaves behind? He refuses to see his mission as abandoning them. He is doing what every good commander should, he is going to save them.