by Homer Hickam
He brought HOE up on the virtual panel. It was ahead of the BEM, and much lower. It was tracking something. It wasn’t the shuttle.
“Dammit,” Starbuck swore. “They’re going after the lander!”
“Give me a position!” BEM Lead called.
“No,” Starbuck said. “HOE has a built-in signal generator. Feed in that frequency to the BEM as priority tracking and let it go. It’s all we can do. Things are happening too fast for us now.”
BEM Leader signaled the BEM its new instructions.
letmego letmego letmego letmego letmego letmego letmego letmego letmego letmego letmego letmego
“You got it, Lover!’ BEM Lead cried, sending the release command.
The Elsie
Jack wiggled the hand controller. He had come in a bit too far north and needed manual control to find the landing site. Elsie stopped and hovered, waiting for his command. Jack pushed the stick forward. Little Dog swiveled on its gimbals and the Elsie moved laterally across the North Massif. The large crater named Shakespeare scrolled past and then a flat plain, covered with craters. The photographs Jack had studied of the landing site had shown only a few craters of only medium size but he saw hundreds, and it was difficult to judge how big they were. He checked the Little Dog. There was plenty of propellant left.
A large crater passed below with a smaller one bisecting it. He knew it because he had named it himself during his study of the Apollo 17 photographs. “I’ve got Onizuka,” he announced, the first words he had spoken since he started his descent. Ellison Onizuka had been one of Jack’s friends at NASA. El had died aboard Challenger.
The reply from Virgil was filled with crackles and pops. Columbia was about to go over the lunar horizon. “We copy, Jack.”
Jack switched back to automatic pilot to allow the Elsie to stabilize herself while he made a quick survey. He was in the triangle of Camelot, Steno, and Sherlock craters. A little nudge north and he should be at Shorty. He used the hand controller to pitch the Elsie down so he could look things over. The site below was as smooth as a baby’s butt. He took a deep breath and gave the Elsie the go-ahead to land. He felt like cheering.
Space
BEM XJ-251, released from Farside Control, made a quick scan and picked up HOE’s scent, then cut in its thrusters, dropping low and accelerating. It came out of the shadow of the moon in a rage.
The HOE, also on automatic, took no note of the BEM. It worked to get an exact fix on the lander. At a distance of five kilometers its nose cone blew off and a fifteen-foot web of metal strips spun up to buzz-saw velocity.
XJ-251 sensed that its propellant would be depleted in twelve seconds. It accounted for the lunar gravity, its own acceleration, and the velocity of its target, predicting a new intersection. It screamed ahead. With one second of propellant remaining it cut itself off to ensure a smooth transition to unpowered flight. Silently, the BEM coasted, its silvery eyes staring seriously ahead.
HOE closed in on Elsie, aiming for the center of its radar return, but jumping to its heat sensors every nanosecond in case the radar failed. When it was still one hundred meters away from the lander, the BEM struck it. HOE, made of composite material, broke up on impact. Pieces of it and the BEM flew in an embrace, crashing into the lunar surface.
The HOE web, broken loose from the main body, kept spinning chaotically, answering only the call of the tumbling gyroscope that it had become. Along the way it caught the base of the Elsie. It did not puncture the spheres—they were too tough for that. It tore two of them away from the collar, knocking Elsie awry, sending her wandering.
The Elsie
Jack felt a thump, checked the laptop, but no caution and warning messages were showing. He pushed his feet into the footloops and clutched the hand tethers. Little Dog kept firing but Elsie seemed to be drifting. The guidance package seemed confused. Little Dog’s gimbals shuddered as if trying to throw off its worry and then Jack saw the light that indicated the contact sensor rod had struck the regolith. Little Dog shut down and Elsie fell to the moon.
He felt more than heard the crash. There was the grinding of metal on metal of the contact, and then the Elsie took a sickening lurch. Jack, his feet ripped from the footloops, fell, his hands losing their grip.
A dust cloud rose up around the Elsie as she hit and then, very slowly, fell back, a gray rain around the ruined lander.
Mankind had returned to the moon.
Farside Control
Starbuck, shaken to his core, looked at the blank panels and his equally empty console screen. “I only hope to Christ we were in time.”
The phone was ringing. It was the leader of the HOE team. “Sorry, Starbuck,” she said.
There was no use getting angry. They were all outlaw hackers here. “What did you see before the BEM got you?”
“Looked to be some kind of landing craft.”
Starbuck swallowed. “Did you hit it?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t think so, not directly anyway. There was a lot of shrapnel near it, I would imagine.”
Starbuck asked the question but he knew the answer. “Why did you do it?”
“Puckett promised us a million dollars if we tried.”
“Did you get the money?”
“Already cashed.”
Starbuck hung up. BEM Lead was standing, stretching. With a sigh Starbuck ordered the Farside computer to shut itself down. Star Wars, Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative dream, after one hundred billion dollars, had fought its first, last, and only real battle.
HOE Facility, San Jose
Puckett stared at the screen. “You did it,” he exulted.
“We did it, all right. The question is why did we do it?”
Puckett grinned triumphantly. “You got well paid. What the hell do you care?”
HOE Lead stood up, rolled up her sleeves. “I want you to leave, Mr. Puckett.”
Puckett shrugged. “Sure.” He started toward the door, then turned. His .38 Police Special was more pistol than he needed to do the job but it was all he’d brought. Four well-placed shots to their big heads before the damned nerds could even move was all it took. He inspected each of the bodies with a professional interest, giving himself the benefit of the doubt considering that they’d all been moving targets. He was satisfied, acceptable wounds within a small circle of where he’d been aiming. It looked, though, as if he was pulling slightly to the right when he pulled the trigger. He made a mental note of it, to correct it on the practice range. Then he saw his shoe was in a spreading pool of blood from the HOE lead’s head and stepped back daintily. He wiped his shoe on the carpet, went out the door, whistling. Mission accomplished.
FRAU MAURO
Though earth and moon were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And thou wert left alone,
Every existence would exist in thee.
There is not room for Death,
Nor atom that his might could render void:
Thou—Thou art Being and Breath,
And what Thou art may never be destroyed.
—Emily Bront é, ”Last Lines”
ON THE MOON
Columbia
Virgil had heard Starbuck’s explanations and apology, passed it all along to Penny. She sat in the pilot’s seat, her face a mask of loss and pain. Virgil knew Jack better than she did. He hadn’t lost hope, not by a long shot. Jack was one tough country boy. If anybody could survive even this catastrophe, it would be him. “Talk to Jack, Penny,” Virgil urged. “Maybe he can hear but can’t answer. Maybe he needs to hear a friendly voice. Talk to him!”
Penny made no reply, just kept staring at the implacable moon. It had been an hour since they had last heard from Jack, just before his landing attempt. Virgil watched earth, shrunk to the size of a blue-and-white marble, slowly rise over the edge of the moon as Columbia came around the far side. When Taurus-Littrow came into view, he climbed into the commander’s seat, used the binoculars Jac
k had left there, to study the terrain, looking for evidence of a crash landing. He could see nothing but craters and rilles and mountains, the silent, everlasting, harsh moon hanging suspended in vast and hostile space.
Penny suddenly moved, fitted her headset on, squinted at Virgil. She’d come out of her shock. “What do you want me to say?” she demanded.
Virgil gave her a big grin. “Attagirl. Just anything. Let him know you’re here.”
She took a deep breath, keyed the transmitter. “Jack, this is Penny. Dammit, Jack. Answer!”
There was no answer, just a faint whisper of static. Virgil kept looking through the binoculars and Penny kept calling. When Virgil next looked at her, he saw zero g tears flying from Penny’s eyes like pearls from a broken necklace.
Taurus-Littrow
On his back, looking up at the bent lattice still supporting the fabric of the Elsie, Jack moved his arms and legs and flexed his fingers. No bones seemed to be broken and his backpack was delivering air. At least that. He started to speculate on what had happened, then dismissed it. He needed to get out first. He turned over, easy in the light gravity of the moon, and crawled to the hatch. If he was going to die, he wanted it to be outside, not in the crushed egg the Elsie had become.
We choose to go to the moon and the other things, President Kennedy had said, not because they are easy but because they are hard.
Jack unzipped the hatch and poked his helmet through the opening. The ground below was a gray, puttylike dust. He grasped the edge of the entrance, turned around, and dropped feetfirst. He landed off-balance and fell hard on his back. “You were right, JFK.” He sighed. “This ain’t easy.”
He turned over and climbed to his feet, then crunched over the regolith to look at the Elsie’s base, to see if he could figure out what had happened to cause his crash. There was, inexplicably, only one landing sphere attached to the landing craft, abraded material the only thing left of the attachment points of the other two. Little Dog was a ruin.
Jack checked his suit. Pressure and power were normal and the communications mode selector switch was on, although he heard nothing in his earpiece. He clumped around and looked at the UHF antenna and saw the reason. It was torn from the strap that held it, dangling down the side of the smashed dome. He’d have to reaim it to communicate with Columbia.
Jack found it easy to move on the moon, even in the EMU suit, which was not designed for lunar EVA. MEC had designed a coverall to keep moondust out of the EMU joints, and added booties with soles made from old tire treads for traction. More KISS, and it worked perfectly.
Jack turned around, trying to get a fix on his location, spotted the cliffs of the North Massif, the South Massif, and the smaller Family Mountain. They looked like huge sand dunes that a giant had sprinkled with boulders. As he turned, he saw a flash of color out of the corner of his eye. He trotted in its direction, raised the sunshield visor on his helmet, tried to get a fix on whatever it was.
Then he saw it, and gasped with recognition.
The crash had almost dumped him on top of the Apollo 17 landing site.
The old Apollo 17 Lem, named Challenger, sat on a rolling plain, looking like a spraddled four-legged milk stool. The top part of it was gone, used by Schmitt and Cernan to fly up to the Apollo capsule. Jack looked closer and saw the Lunar Rover parked nearby. It had been the Rover’s golden parabolic antenna that had attracted his attention, catching the sun in a spray of rainbow light.
Jack’s joy at seeing the Apollo 17 landing site was tempered by the realization that he was miles away from Shorty Crater. He checked his oxygen pack again and considered his overall air situation. His mind jumped ahead, to imagine how it would be when it inevitably ran out. When the last of the oxygen seeped out of the cylinder on his back, he would only have what was left in his helmet to breathe. Carbon dioxide would quickly build up until Jack would begin a reflexive gasping. Then a pounding headache would follow, one that would feel as if a spike were being driven into his forehead. It would probably drive him to his knees, where he would begin to strangle and choke, his lungs burning as if corrosive acid had been poured into them. He would pant, froth pouring from his mouth, his eyes rolling back into their sockets. He would begin to hallucinate. It would not be an easy death.
Jack contemplated puncturing his suit when the time came. That wouldn’t be easy, the material tough and multilayered, but he could do it, perhaps with the screwdriver in the toolbox aboard the Elsie. He would die quickly but it wouldn’t be painless. He remembered his brief exposure to the vacuum when Penny’s suit had failed. To open his suit on the moon would make his skin feel as if it were being torn in strips from his body. Massive embolisms would course through his blood, lodging painfully in his heart, his lungs, his brain stem. He remembered reading of rescuers finding trapped cave divers who had spit out their regulators while there was still air in their tanks, breathed in the water, drowned rather than face their last gasp of air. Others had breathed their tanks down to nothing, never giving up hope. Jack had always admired the latter. They had not given up, lived until the last possible moment. That’s what Jack decided to do, to face the agony of suffocation squarely. Only one other decision remained: whether to strike out for Shorty, probably die on the way in total isolation; or poke around the old site, gasp his final breath among the oddly familiar relics of the last Apollo mission.
He lowered his sun visor and trundled ahead, stopped briefly at the Rover. The unimpeded sun had faded and cracked the nylon seat covers but otherwise it looked as if the Apollo astronauts had just parked it and might be back at any moment. Dust from their boots still lay like beach sand on the floorboard. Had the evolution of spaceflight gone as many in the nation had hoped, this would have been hallowed ground, a place for visitors to see and contemplate. Instead, Jack decided it would be where he was going to die, a lone American, starved for air, wearing tire-tread boots. The irony did not escape him, though he had little time to waste on its contemplation.
Jack took long strides toward the Challenger. He had already perfected the gait required to move in a two-hundred-pound suit that now weighed just thirty-four pounds in the reduced lunar gravity. Although he could move along at a quick pace, he had to gauge his center of gravity and plan several steps ahead. There was really nothing to it and he would’ve been having fun except it was difficult to forget that he was on an oxygen countdown that was going to leave him dead. He bounded over a thin red wire running along the ground from one of the Apollo experiments, the surface electronic properties (SEP) dipole antenna, then began a stutter of small steps to stop in front of the lander. The plaque on the landing leg—Here man completed his first exploration of the moon, December 1972 A.D.— and the ladder identified it as the front of the spacecraft. Just before entering the Lem, Eugene Cernan had made a little speech that Jack had memorized:
This is our commemoration that will be here until someone like us, until some of you who are out there, who are the promise of the future, come back to read it again and to further the exploration and the meaning of Apollo.
“Gene, somehow I don’t think I’m what you had in mind,” Jack muttered. He loped around the lander until he came upon a pile of discards—cameras, unused sample tubes, sundry wires and cables. Numerous boot prints were tramped into the dust all around the Lem, but farther out there were distinct paths to the Apollo Lunar surface experiment package (ALSEP), an experiment that measured the violence of moonquakes, and the LACE experiment that studied the tenuous moon atmosphere. Jack went all the way around the Lem, completing his exploration, then checked his oxygen again. He estimated he had a little over three hours left before he would need to recharge his backpack. He trudged to the front of the Lem, looked at the Rover, then walked over to it.
The Rover’s power switch was still turned on, left that way by Cernan and Schmitt to provide power to the television camera and communications package. All the gauges were pegged at zero, the batteries long dead. Jack sat down in th
e starboard seat and took hold of the hand controller, toggling the switch. Nothing happened, the Rover as dead as he was about to be. He got out, looked back toward the Elsie’s dome protruding above a low dune. An idea was forming. He saw no way to save himself but there might be a way to get to Shorty Crater before he died. Kate. He could die with her.
Columbia
Virgil watched Penny, still desperately trying to raise Jack. Columbia was coming around the far rim of the moon and lifting above the bright gray surface. “Jack, this is Penny,” she called. “Answer me, Jack!”
There was no reply. Virgil heard the SAREX tone and went down to retrieve the message. He read the report, replied, and came back up. “MEC reports Houston is still trying to contact us,” he told her. “I’m thinking maybe we should respond. What could it hurt? Presuming they’re friendly, they might be able to help us make contact with Jack.”
Penny nodded agreement. “Can you configure the comm channel?”
“Yeah. No sweat.” Virgil settled into the pilot’s seat and brought the shuttle computers back on-line. When he enabled the comm page, he immediately heard a droning voice come through the speakers. “Columbia, this is Houston. We want to help you. Please answer us. Columbia, this is Houston—”
“We got you, Houston!” Virgil exclaimed. “Go ahead!”
A reedy Texas drawl filled his ears. “Columbia, this is Sam Tate. How do you read?”
“Loud and clear, Mr. Tate! How me?”
“Call me Sam. Yes, we hear you loud and clear. Can we be of any assistance?”
“You’re damn right you can!” Virgil yelled back.
“We’re ready to copy, Columbia. Who am I talking to?”
“This is Virgil Judd. Call my family. They’re at the Mayo Clinic. Tell them I’m okay. Find out how they are. Got that?”
“Consider it done, Mr. Judd.”
