In three days the ground would be 250,000 miles away. I stared ahead at the open capsule hatch, squeezed the bridge rail harder with shaking hands, and shuffled toward the capsule.
The Apollo capsule itself had just been built so it smelled like a new car inside. But it looked as old-fashioned as a laptop computer. I lay there flat on my back while technicians snapped fishbowl helmets over our heads, Howard on my right and Metzger on my left.
A tech patted my head, shot me a thumbs-up, then ducked back outside and sealed the hatch. Gray sky shone through the little capsule window. I scrunched my shoulders, hands at my sides, and tried to remember all the things I’d been taught over the last twenty-four hours, mostly what not to touch. The trip to the moon would last three days, but they had crammed me with three months’ training since yesterday. I had been nervous about learning my flight duties until they explained that I had none.
My trainer assured me, “The first American astronaut was just a monkey. He did fine.” Then my trainer eye-balled the Infantry tab on my file. “A really dumb monkey.”
My trainer taught me that the monkey wore a little space vest and diapers. My trainer never taught me how to pee in space.
Metzger’s voice and the ground controller’s rang inside my helmet. We had more room in the capsule than the old pioneers had because the old-fashioned instruments that had filled much of the capsule had been replaced by a wireless ‘puter Metzger held. It was not much bigger than a Playstation Model-40.
I sat atop history’s biggest conventional bomb. This spaceship was strictly forties, according to the briefings I’d sat through yesterday. But its ancestors had a few problems. Out of less than twenty Apollos, one incinerated its crew on the ground and another blew apart on its way to the moon and limped home. The space-shuttle airframes that had been revived to make Interceptors like Metzger flew exploded one trip every fifty. No wonder we started years ago to send robots to space instead of people.
My heart rattled like a stick dragged along a picket fence.
Metzger glanced over and raised his white-gloved thumb at me.
Pumps rumbled hundreds of feet below me and jostled my couch.
In my helmet, somebody said, “Ignition!”
Chapter Seventeen
I figured it would be loud. And I expected the G-forces, like a piano on my chest. But the vibration nearly had me screaming in my helmet. I’d read that these tubs shook like crazy.
I gripped the seat so hard I was afraid my fingers would puncture my pressure suit. I tried to relax my hands but couldn’t. I saw blue sky, really dark blue, for the first time in months. Then the palsied view ahead was blackness and stars.
When the engines cut off, the silence was as deafening as the roller coaster had been.
Metzger was saying something about attitude and roll, then he looked over and winked behind his visor. The view changed as he rolled the ship onto its back. It didn’t feel like that, of course. There’s no up or down you can feel. I just mean we were upside down, relative to Earth. Once he rolled us, Earth was over my head, not at my feet.
The planet a hundred miles below filled the little windshield. Or whatever you called the front window up here where there was no wind.
Until that moment all the pictures from space I had ever seen were the burnished, blue planet with the wispy white cloud streaks.
The dirty gray ball we’ve gotten used to since the Projectiles and their dust made me cry.
I tried to wipe my nose and bumped my hand against my helmet faceplate while Metzger and Ground Control rattled back and forth. He didn’t sound excited, exactly. Just a notch higher voice pitch, like he always sounded before an exam.
He held a Voiceboard in a gloved hand and studied its readouts, then let go of it. It hung there, weightless just like the holos show it.
“Metzger, can I undo my helmet?”
“No.”
“Just to wipe my nose—”
“This thing’s brand-new. If it develops even a pinhole leak, we could be dead.”
We were drifting a quarter million miles through vacuum. I’d seen all those holos where the guy in the space suit has a bad heater and he freezes solid. Or his head explodes when his suit rips. Or he just floats off into space sobbing into his radio. I always thought that last would be the worst. I licked my lip and tried to forget the snot.
There was no sound except the three of us breathing into our helmet mikes.
The Apollo looked like a big rifle cartridge. The three of us sat in the cone-shaped capsule that formed the “bullet” on Apollo’s front. The cylindrical “cartridge” behind us stored the spider-legged Lunar Excursion Module. It was the part of Apollo that would drop to the lunar surface, slowed by retro-rockets, then land on its unfolded legs. Later the LEM would rocket us back to dock with the “bullet” capsule orbiting the moon. Then we would crawl back into the bullet and ride it back to Earth.
Over the next day, Metzger and Canaveral decided the capsule wasn’t going to spring a leak, so we got to take off our helmets and pressure suits. Metzger jettisoned the skin that encircled the LEM, then detached the “bullet” capsule we were riding in and reversed it so it traveled fat end forward. That let him dock the hatch on the capsule’s pointy end with the LEM’s hatch.
Once we popped the two hatches, we created a narrow tunnel between the two vessels. After hours shoehorned in the Apollo capsule, the extra space felt like we had finished off our attached garage.
Moving around in zero gravity is like swimming, except that every movement’s consequences are exaggerated. I got the hang fast, but Howard bounced around the Apollo like a golf ball hit in a shower stall.
Metzger and I finally strapped him back into his seat, and he explained our gear to me, panting. He held up a plasteel box the size of a kitten. “Mass spectrometer. Touch the probe to any part of the Projectile hull, and we’ll read chemical composition in a nanosecond.”
The next item I knew. “Palm holocam.”
He nodded. As we ticked off each item it went in a rucksack that soon bulged like Santa’s bag before his first stop.
I pointed at it. “Who carries that?”
“On the moon it weighs one-sixth what it does on Earth.”
“Meaning I carry that?”
He nodded. “And this.” He drew a pistol from floating wrappings, an old, nine-millimeter Browning automatic. He held it between fingers like it was rotten fruit. “I hate these things.”
I could tell the weapon was clear because the slide was back, and the magazine floated next to it.
He held up a plasti of ammunition. “The shells are loaded with less powder to reduce recoil in lunar gravity. Guns work fine in vacuum. Their combustion oxygen is stored in the powder grains—”
“Howard, why do I need a gun? It’s just a broken machine.”
He shrugged. “Precaution.”
“There’s something alive in that thing?”
He shrugged again. “Who knows? Be better if there is.”
“Better for who?”
He just shrugged.
Howard and Metzger kept busy in the LEM. Metzger checked the LEM’s systems, Howard the sensors and recorders he would use to examine the alien wreck.
My job was to check the low-tech part of the lunar-excursion equipment Howard wasn’t checking. I had a day to do it, and I thought while I worked.
We were actually going to walk on the moon in white, extravehicular-activity suits with gold visors, just like the old pioneers. The suit sleeves still had fifty-star American flag patches.
Until I unpacked the EVA suits I didn’t know how “just like.” While the suits had been updated, they had ac-tually been built and used for training decades ago, during the Apollo program.
This mission was so tacked-together that our EVA suits hadn’t even been laundered or checked since last century. Those old pioneers had trained hard enough to sweat plenty. I unzipped the first suit and ammonia reek slapped my nose like a gym lo
cker of old jocks opened after seventy years. I breathed through my mouth to filter the stink as I worked.
I dug in a cargo net behind the suit that had been altered to fit me and found a fat-barreled signal-flare pistol and a yellowed pamphlet, copyright 1972, titled Surviving in the Pacific.
The capsules used to parachute into the ocean. I made a mental note to remind Howard and Metzger that they had forgotten to brief me whatsoever on return-flight procedure and tucked the leftovers into my suit’s thigh pocket.
I also found a packet of orange powder called Tang. I dissolved a little in a water squirt bottle and tasted it. Tang is to orange juice as MREs are to food.
It brought home to me how hardy the old-time space pioneers must have been. They crossed space in this tiny coffin, like a rice grain tossed on the Pacific, living on acidic swill. Many died. Not from the Tang. It wasn’t that bad.
But they didn’t even have ‘puters. They did math with wooden rulers.
The history chips say they came in peace for all mankind.
If that had been true, they wouldn’t have quit coming. Those old sleeve flag patches weren’t United Nations, and they sure weren’t Russian. The Cold War drove mankind to the moon. When America won that war, we stopped coming.
Since the first Neanderthal figured out he could poke his rival better with a stick than a finger, quantum technology leaps have been war-driven. From the chariots and long bows of antiquity to jets and nuclear fission last century to coagulant bandages and Brain-Link Robotics in this century, the sad truth is that war is to human innovation as manure is to marigolds.
Peace lets us meander. So, seventy years of peaceful meander after man landed on the moon we were making the crossing in this same primitive pud.
By day three, the moon’s white glow filled the viewport.
Metzger pointed at a gleaming flat to our lower right. “Mare Fecunditatis. The Sea of Fertility. It’s just a couple hundred miles from the dark side.”
“Why did it crash there?”
“Wouldn’t we like to know?” said Metzger. “That’s one question we want answered. No Projectile’s so much as sputtered on the way in before.”
I turned to Howard. He was unwrapping nicotine gum. This might be a tobacco-days spacecraft, but this flight was all nonsmoking.
“Howard, what’s the terrain like?” This question made me proud. A good Infantryman always knows METT— mission, enemy, terrain, and time.
“Flat. A lava flow covered in dust of unknowable thickness. We guess a few inches thick from the skid mark the Projectile cut on impact. It crash-landed oblique. That’s why it’s still in one piece.” Howard angled one palm above the other.
I’d already asked about the presumably nonexistent enemy, and I knew the mission was to poke our collective nose into this wreck. But I hadn’t asked about time. “How long do we have down there?” I didn’t know the answer, but I knew blasting off from the moon to rendezvous with the capsule was a critical, sophisticated game, even with forties ‘puters.
Howard shifted his gaze to Metzger.
Metzger shrugged. “Long enough.”
They knew more than they were telling me. I looked from one to the other. Metzger looked away.
Before I could get pissy with them over the secrecy, it was time to struggle into our extravehicular-activity suits while Metzger inserted Apollo into lunar orbit.
My EVA suit still reeked of ammonia inside. You’d think if they send you to save the world, they wouldn’t make you wear somebody’s stinking pajamas.
Metzger’s voice crackled inside my new helmet as he closed the hatch between us three, stuffed in the LEM, and the now-uninhabited Apollo. “Disengaging LEM.”
A faint thump disconnected us from our way home. Tang ate at my stomach lining.
The descent to the moon was slow. Since we had now strapped bouncing Howard to the LEM wall, I got to stand at the window and watch the Sea of Fertility rush up to greet us.
Flat as the sea looked from space, it spread cobble-strewn and undulating. We closed in, and I realized the cobbles were as big as Dumpsters. The last fifty feet our engine kicked up dust, so I saw nothing. Obviously, Metzger couldn’t, either. If we roosted on a boulder, the LEM could topple, tear out its insides, or just break something vital to us getting home. I clutched a stanchion and gritted my teeth.
Thump.
Just like that, we were down. Metzger made it seem cake.
Metzger ran system checks while Howard and I waited in a two-man line. Metzger had to operate the ship, and Howard was never the first to do anything physical. So I would be the first human to touch the moon since the days when major-league baseball used wooden bats.
As I waited I thought of something. “Metzger? How do we pee?”
“Use the little condom thingy in the leg. You hooked it up, didn’t you?”
Air bled from the lock.
“What thingy?”
“Sorry. Should’ve told you. Just hold it.”
He opened the hatch.
Before me another world, as dead and white as bones, stretched to a black horizon. I turned around, felt for the descent ladder’s first rung, then stepped into airless nothing cold enough to freeze helium.
I hopped off the bottom rang into the Sea of Fertility’s dust, then focused my vision on the object a half mile away.
Peeing my pants was the least of my worries.
Chapter Eighteen
Howard lowered my gear rucksack on a synlon rope. I shuffled aside, tripped on a rock, and nearly fell.
I yelped. Falling would kill me if a rock punctured my suit. My coordination sucked after three weightless days, and, even with suit and gear, I only weighed forty pounds.
Howard’s knees wobbled as he backed down the ladder, and I steadied him as he planted his feet in moondust.
“My God. Missus Hibble’s geek is an astronaut.”
So was Missus Wander’s.
I spent ten seconds in mental back-patting while I looked up at the LEM, jumbled boxes papered in gold foil. My escape from the moon depended on discarded Christmas wrap on legs.
I pointed past the LEM’s spider leg. Howard’s mirrored helmet faceplate turned where I pointed.
A hundred yards from us ran the brink of a shallow canyon as wide as a shopping mall. Its edge was strewn with jagged boulders like plowed-up refrigerators. The canyon ended a half mile away. At least, that’s what the distance looked like to me. The moon’s smaller than Earth. The horizon’s closer. They briefed me that the curvature distorts perception. Whatever the distance, my heart pounded.
At the canyon’s end the Projectile rose. We couldn’t know how much of it had burrowed beneath the surface. What we saw was a blue-black dome bigger than a football stadium. Spiral whorls creased its surface like a metallic snail shell.
Howard examined it through binoculars fitted with a rubber hood that fit against his faceplate. “It skidded in here at ten thousand miles an hour, but it seems intact. I was counting on a hull rupture to get you in.”
“In? Inside?” I pointed at the Projectile.
He lifted the rucksack and strapped it to my back.
Metzger’s voice came from aboard the LEM. “Take care, Jason.”
Howard and I skirted the canyon the Projectile plowed when it skidded in. There was no telling how unstable the disturbed lunar surface could be.
My brief Earthside lessons in moon shuffling at one-sixth my weight clicked in after a hundred fumbling yards. Still, sweat soaked my long Johns in minutes.
Howard clumped and bounded, his hoarse panting roaring in my earpiece. “Flex your knees before you land, Howard. Like jumping rope.”
“I never jumped rope. Worst mistake of my life.”
I looked at the sky. Earth hung before me, blue streaked with gray soot clouds and a quarter million miles away. Was this the worst mistake of my life?
Waiting for Howard took forever. We wound around bus-size boulders just as craggy and uneroded in thr
ee billion airless, waterless years as the ones the Projectile had gouged from the substrate days ago. Howard kept stopping and thrusting his faceplate against boulders, muttering about vesicles and rhyolite. On one such detour, he stepped on a smooth spot that turned out to be a dust-filled pothole and sank to his chest. After I hoisted him out, I leashed him to me with synlon cord around our waists so he had to follow my footsteps.
Finally, we stopped and looked up at the derelict fifty yards in front of us. The exposed part of the Projectile rising above us could have been a domed stadium, skinned iridescent blue-black. That it had moved seemed incredible, but spiral scratches scored its flanks. It had been rotating like a passed football when it hit, scraped but barely torn by a ten-thousand-mile-per-hour crash. I whistled.
Howard breathed. “Holy Moly.”
As soon as we got off this rock I was giving Howard expletive lessons.
Something keened in my ears, a repeating whine, high-pitched, then low.
“Howard, I hear sound. But there’s no air to carry the waves.”
He stomped the ground. “The sound’s conducted through rock. The Projectile’s making noise.”
“It was supposed to be dead.”
He turned me, pulled the palm holo from the rucksack on my back, and held it against his suit. “Now we’re recording the sound.”
He dug the spectrometer out of the rucksack and clam-bered over gouged-up rubble toward the Projectile. He tugged me at the end of the cord that connected us like he was a poodle chasing a squirrel.
Pressing the spectrometer’s probe against the Projectile hull, he hummed along with the rhythmic, conducted sound, “Wah-aah, wah-aah.”
While he worked, I looked up. Forty feet above us, just a fraction of the thing’s height, I saw a circular, silver opening.
“Howard!” I pointed. “A maneuvering nozzle! Just like we found in Pittsburgh!”
He stopped humming and backed away from the hull. Standing beside me, he pointed, too. “Better. Look closer.”
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