by Homer Hickam
Cernan looked once more at the gauges on the front of his suit. All the needles were pointing south. “Come on!” he said, scuttling back to the Rover. He unlatched the sample box and stowed the precious orange-coated drive tube inside. If the Rover held together, if the oxygen gauges were correct, and if they didn’t get lost on the way back, they could make it. There were a lot of ifs in that equation, too many for Cernan’s comfort. His fingers mentally crossed, he cranked up the juice as Schmitt climbed into his seat. Plumes of lunar dust from the Rover wheels erupted behind them as the last two men on the moon made a desperate run against the clock.
Marshall Space Flight Center, Building 4200, Huntsville, Alabama
Dr. Wernher von Braun was called from a meeting of his designers who were working on the new engines for the proposed space shuttle. He listened carefully to the caller, and went back to his meeting, wrapping it up quickly. He left work early, the first time in decades, and drove his Mercedes up the mountain called Monte Sano, which overlooked Huntsville.
Von Braun, a handsome man with silver-gray hair and a bulldog chin that made him look perpetually optimistic and determined, was actually quite tired. For three decades he had fought bureaucrats, cajoled politicians, and courted the public in his quest to get humankind to the moon. Now, after he had done all that he said he would do, his beloved adopted country was abandoning the triumph of the lunar explorations after a final flight. He had told everyone—the NASA administrator, Senator Vanderheld, who chaired the Science and Space Committee, even the President of the United States—that it was madness to quit, although he had carefully couched his arguments in terms of scientific benefits and simple economics. To help his argument he’d even agreed to transfer to NASA headquarters in Washington, reluctantly leaving Huntsville for the chilly environs of the capital city. But all of his arguments had been turned away, especially after Vanderheld had issued his committee’s recommendation to cancel Apollo. It was difficult, although von Braun had accepted the challenge, to debate with Vanderheld over the relative merits of spaceflight versus public housing, school lunches, veterans’ benefits, and farm subsidies. How was it possible to say that Apollo was more important than any of those things? Senator Vanderheld, although polite, was sincerely troubled by von Braun’s assertion that Apollo was like seed corn for the nation. From it, von Braun argued in his testimony before Vanderheld’s committee, many things might be derived, great and noble things, wealth not yet understood, a new world of not only things but possibilities. Vanderheld had sadly refuted point by point everything the great rocket scientist had said. “The business of the federal government is to see to the needs of the people, Doctor,” the senator had politely lectured von Braun. “Tomorrow will take care of itself only if wise choices are made today.”
Von Braun’s supervisors at NASA told him he should try to accept it. The director had even come up to him, put his arm over his shoulder, and said, “Be reasonable, Wernher. We’ve drunk the wine that has been given to us. And now the glass is empty.”
“But there is no reason to break the glass, is there?” von Braun had retorted. The director had shrugged, walked away, muttering. A NASA headquarters directive had ordered von Braun to shut down the Saturn V moon-rocket assembly line. Even the tooling that had built it was to be broken apart, sold as scrap. Apollo was over. Only the shuttle, now on the drawing boards, was left. By order of NASA headquarters the shuttle was to be designed so that it could only go into low earth orbit. It seemed almost deliberate that the moon had been put out of reach for a very long time.
Von Braun parked in front of a small brick cottage on a bluff that overlooked the city. Ursula Suttner answered the door. Von Braun kissed her cheek. “Are you well, Uschi?” he asked, holding her shoulders and searching her face. Ursula Suttner had come from Germany to marry her husband, Gerhard, von Braun’s chief aerodynamic engineer. She was younger than the other wives, most of whom had been with their husbands through the war. Ursula brushed a wisp of blond hair away from her forehead. “I am quite well, Wernher,” she said with a smile. “Please,” she said, indicating the living room, “they are waiting for you.”
Shouts of greeting from the living room brought von Braun inside. There he found Katrina, the Suttners’ ten-year-old daughter, lying on a rug watching the television coverage of the Apollo 17 flight. As her father beamed proudly, and her mother watched adoringly from the living room door, Katrina got up and ran to von Braun, hugging him around the waist. “Have you heard, Katrina?” von Braun asked her gently. “It wasn’t exactly what we plotted, I’m afraid.”
“Oh, Uncle, it’s even better. I saw what happened. Do you think he will find it? Do you think so, really?”
Von Braun knelt in front of the little girl, gently touching her hair. Katrina Suttner was the kind of child who could light up a room with her bright, optimistic intelligence. Von Braun was certain she was destined for greatness. “Yes, little one. If he is the man you think he will be, I believe he will.” Then he let her lead him to a chair so together they could watch the end of the exploration of the moon.
The next day von Braun was on an airplane, flying back to Washington, while his rocket team gathered at the Suttner house to watch Apollo 17 ’s final moments. The crew had made it back from Shorty Crater with their treasure of orange soil and geologists were licking their lips at the opportunity to see what they had actually found. There was a lick of flame at the base of the Challenger lunar module and then arcing debris flew away from it as it rose. The video camera attached to the Lunar Rover, abandoned by Cernan and Schmitt, tracked upward until the module and the men in it had disappeared into the black sky. Then it came slowly back to the abandoned lander and stared at the Challenger ’s truncated base.
Katrina looked around at the old Germans surrounding her. To her amazement many of them had tears streaming down their faces. “Do not be sad, Uncles,” she told them. “We will go back. I promise you we will.”
“If Katrina says it,” her father said, wiping away his own tears, “then it must be so.”
All the old men nodded solemnly. Ja, it must be so.
At the doorway Ursula Suttner put her hands to her face and turned away. A terrible premonition had reached her, come down as if from heaven, and turned her soul to ice.
30 YEARS LATER
DECIMATION
This I have known always: love is no more
Than the wide blossom which the wind assails,
Than the great tide that treads the shifting shore,
Strewing fresh wreckage gathered in the gales.
Pity me that the heart is slow to learn
What the swift mind beholds at every turn.
—Edna St. Vincent Millay, ”Pity Me Not”
LAUNCH MINUS 5 MONTHS, 13 DAYS, 14 HOURS, AND COUNTING...
PROMETHEUS
MEC Clean Room, Hangar 1-D, Cedar Key, Florida
“NASA is and always has been a subversive organization. Anything else you hear is a public relations lie,” Jack Medaris said.
Dr. Isaac Perlman looked at the ceiling of the big hangar and wagged his head from side to side, an indication of his doubt at his companion’s comment. “Subversive? Why, Jack, there’s never been a more conservative bureaucracy on this planet. It takes polls to see what it should do next. It lets politicians decide technical matters. You forget I went there first for my moon dirt. NASA just laughed at me. That’s why I hired you!”
Medaris and Perlman, dressed in clean-room regalia—white one-piece coveralls, puffy plastic hats, and latex gloves—were watching a dozen other similarly clothed men and women ministering to what looked to be a giant robot, two gangly arms akimbo, mounted on a go-cart. The doleful strains of Barber’s Adagio for Strings accompanied the technicians as they moved slowly and reverently around the machine’s oddly shaped pyramid of spheres, rods, and cables. Antennae protruded from each level of the machine. Its “arms” were actually two extendable and jointed booms. At the end of one of t
he booms was a digger, a rakelike device. The other arm had a grasping claw.
“I’ll grant you NASA as a bureaucracy is timid,” Jack said. “But what I’m talking about is its charter. NASA is supposed to develop the means to allow American citizens to leave the planet. Leave, Doc! What could be more seditious than that? If NASA ever does what it’s supposed to do, Americans are going to be flying all over the solar system. Where there’s Americans, there’s trouble. It’s in our nature to cause trouble, challenge authority, kick up our heels, and be ornery. You think it’s going to be any different in space? Just you wait. It’ll be a sight to behold!”
Perlman kept shaking his head. “No, no, no, Jack.” He laughed. “Nothing of the kind will ever be done. You’re talking about Americans the way they used to be. We’re too fat and happy now. No American is going to get in a rocket ship and take off into the wild blue yonder. Why, they’d miss Monday Night Football!”
Jack grinned. He enjoyed debating with Perlman. None of it was serious, just lighthearted philosophizing to offset the boredom of watching his engineers prepare for the final flight-readiness test of the robotic moon miner—Prometheus, as it was called. Jack owned the company that had built it, the Medaris Engineering Company, MEC for short. After the accident that had killed his wife, and the investigation that had resulted in his banishment from NASA, MEC had become the most important thing in Jack Medaris’s life. An invention of his called the sling pump, used in almost every liquid rocket tankage system in the world, had made Jack wealthy and MEC a very prosperous company. His people were paid accordingly. WE HAPPY FEW, read a banner over the entrance to the clean room. It reflected the fierce camaraderie of the company and the loyalty of its people to its founder.
As the test neared its critical phase, Perlman became visibly nervous, not surprising since he had paid Jack and MEC over thirty-one million dollars to build Prometheus. “Is it looking good?” Perlman worried.
“Very good, Doc,” Jack said, concentrating on the sensor data scrolling down a computer screen.
“It’s got to work,” Perlman breathed, his fingers covering his lips as if he was afraid to let his voice fall on the precious spacecraft.
“Everything is fine,” Jack said distractedly. And it was too. Jack and MEC’s thirty engineers had spent a year carefully constructing Prometheus, borrowing liberally from the proven design of the old Soviet Union’s Lunakhod series of moon-sample return spacecraft.
“I feel like WET’s coming at me like an unstoppable locomotive,” Perlman remarked with a groan. Every so often, it seemed, Perlman had to voice a little misery.
Jack ignored the comment. He didn’t want to get off into a discussion of WET. The acronym stood for the World Energy Treaty, a United Nations agreement that had been drafted after the breeder reactor disaster in Sorkiyov, Russia. Hundreds of Russians had died, thousands more were going to get cancer, livestock devastated by the score, trees, grass, everything contaminated and dying. An antinuclear frenzy had swept the planet. WET banned all “power plants utilizing fissile and radioactive materials.” The treaty had been ratified by every country in the world except France and the United States. President Edwards had signed WET but the Senate, as yet, hadn’t approved it.
Jack had known Perlman for five years. The physicist had just turned up on Cedar Key one day, introduced himself in Jack’s office, and tried to start an argument. “Do you know what the most important product of our civilization is?” he had demanded.
“No, Dr. Perlman,” Jack had replied, amused, “what is the most important product?”
Perlman had raised his finger, his habit when he pontificated. “It’s not cars, not television sets, not even computers. It’s energy! Without energy Western civilization would not exist. A good portion of the earth—the so-called Third World—struggles in misery and degradation. Those poor people think what they need is money, or a different political or economic system, to rise up out of their poverty, but what they really need is energy!”
To Perlman’s disappointment Jack had not seen fit to argue. “Okay, Doc. Energy. What does that have to do with me?”
Perlman had looked out Jack’s office window, to the ocean tide that lapped the nearby shore. “Mr. Medaris, did you know that in a gallon of seawater there is the equivalent energy content of three hundred gallons of gasoline? That’s because ordinary water contains deuterium—heavy hydrogen. If deuterium is fused with an isotope known as helium-3, the result is nearly limitless energy. Did you know that?”
Jack remembered Perlman spreading his hands in that effusive way he would come to know so well. “I have come up with a way to use inertial confinement of a quantity of deuterium and helium-3, subject it to the heat and pressure of a rather large laser beam, and release all that energy. Fusion, Jack. Energy from fusion is within my grasp.”
Energy from fusion: the commercial application of the same physics as the sun and the hydrogen bomb. It had been the dream of scientists, engineers, and researchers for six decades. The little man had leaned forward. “But I need help, Jack. You are my only hope!”
Sally Littleton caught Jack’s eye, releasing him from his reflections. Her eyebrows were raised. She was ready to complete the final test. Jack nodded and his lead Prometheus engineer began to call out the next steps.
“If it fails...” Perlman worried.
“It’s not going to fail.”
“There’s so little time.”
“There’s plenty of time. Everything I read says the Senate won’t pass WET until July. That’s six months away. When we finish tonight, we’ll disassemble Prometheus, ship him off to Shiharakota. The Indians have already mounted our dog engine to their Shiva launcher. Once this payload is stacked, we launch. We’ll have your dirt back to you in three weeks.”
“It isn’t dirt,” Perlman grunted, ever sensitive. He could call it that but he didn’t like anybody else doing it.
Jack nodded. “Fire beads, then.”
“And it’s not quite true that I will have it three weeks after launch.” Perlman clucked. “It’ll still be on a ship.”
Jack had explained it to the physicist a half-dozen times. “We could speed things up if we had the freighter dock in Hawaii, lease a jet there. Probably save you a week.”
“I’ll ask my benefactors,” Perlman said doubtfully.
Jack shrugged. It was ever thus, even with a group of heavy-hitting investors like the January Group. Jack assumed at least one of the members of the organization was a bean counter, worrying about spending thousands when they’d already spent millions—hundreds of millions, in fact—to build Perlman’s pilot fusion plant in Montana. “Penny wise and pound foolish, eh, Doc?” Jack gently gibed.
“The men and women of the January Group are cautious with their money in their own audacious way,” Perlman answered stiffly. “Thank the good Lord for them or I’d not be as far as I am. You wouldn’t either.”
“Do you even know who they are, Isaac? I know you work through their attorney.”
“I do not,” he said primly. “It is none of my business. But I’ve been told they are the movers and shakers in this country.”
Jack looked Perlman over. “You haven’t told them about me, have you?”
“You asked me not to.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
Perlman changed the subject, not fooling Jack for a moment. “I still can’t believe WET will make fusion energy a crime. It will all be done in the name of the children, of course—what reckless activity in the last decade hasn’t? And what is the world going to do for energy? Keep burning fossil fuel! Oil and coal, Jack! Can you imagine the pollution? The degradation to the environment? My technology is clean, cheap, and limitless!”
Sally gave Jack a thumbs-up on the sensor readings, and also a pert smile. She was a handsome woman, that Sally. Perlman was still rattling on, extolling the advantages of his technology. “Doc, everybody’s going to see that,” Jack interrupted. “We’ve still
got time. You’ll get your dirt—fire beads—in a month or so and you’ll be able to fire up your plant, show it to the media, demonstrate how safe it is too. After that I guarantee you they’ll make an exception in WET for fusion.”
Perlman shook his head. “I don’t want that damned treaty modified. I want it killed. If we approve it, we might as well pack it in. In fifty years, maybe less, this tired old polluted planet is going to go dark.”
“We’re doing the best we can, Doc.”
Perlman was into it. He stabbed his index finger at the roof. “I don’t care about fission energy, Jack. They can shut down every nuclear reactor in the world and I wouldn’t give a flying fig. But fusion is not fission.”
Jack took a deep breath. “You told them about me, didn’t you?”
Perlman slowly lowered his hand. “I had to. The January Group wasn’t going to give me seventy million dollars to hire someone they didn’t know.”
Jack looked at Perlman. “What did they say? I’m sure they dug up everything they could find on me.”
“Nothing.” When he saw Jack’s doubtful expression, he added: “I swear, Jack. They cut the check within two weeks after I told them your plan.”
Sally had rolled a computer up to Prometheus, plugged it into an interface panel. A graphic display, a thick red horizontal line on a blue background, formed on the monitor. “Ascent stage sim, plus ten,” she announced, keying in the parameters of the final stage of the mission.
“Reentry activation, nominal readout,” Virgil Judd said, watching the numbers come up on the computer. Judd had been a Cape Ape, laid off by the decimation of the workforce there over the last two years. He was a big, gentle man with a lovely wife and a very sick daughter suffering from the advanced stages of cystic fibrosis. Jack had done everything he could to help Virgil, including arranging for tests at the Mayo Clinic. We happy few.
