Voyage n-1

by Stephen Baxter

  “Three minutes,” Stone said. “Altitude forty-three miles, downrange seventy miles.”

  “Coming up on staging,” Gershon said. “Stand by for the train wreck.”

  Right on schedule the first-stage engines shut down.

  The acceleration vanished.

  It was as if they were sitting in a catapult. She was thrown forward, toward the instrument panel, and slammed up against her restraints. The canvas straps hauled her back into her seat, and then she was shoved forward again.

  The first-stage engines had compressed the whole stack like an accordion; when the engines cut, the accordion just stretched out and rebounded. It was incredibly violent.

  Just like a train wreck, in fact. Another thing they didn’t tell me about in the sims.

  She heard the clatter of explosive bolts, blowing away the dying MS-IC. And there were more bangs, thumps in her back transmitted through her couch: small ullage rockets, firing to settle the liquid oxygen and hydrogen in the huge second-stage tanks.

  Vibration returned as the second-stage engines ignited, and she was shoved back into her seat.

  There was a loud bang over her head, startling her, as if someone was hammering on the skin of the Command Module. Flame and smoke flared beyond her window.

  “Tower,” Stone reported.

  “Roger, tower.”

  The emergency escape rocket had blown itself away, taking the conical cap over the Command Module with it. Daylight, startlingly brilliant, streamed into the cabin, lapping over their orange pressure suits, dimming the instruments.

  York peered out of her window. There was a darkening blue sky above, a vivid bright segment of clouds and wrinkled ocean below.

  Stone said drily, “Ah, Houston, we advise the visual is go today.”

  There was a lot of debris coming past York’s exposed window, from the jettisoned escape tower and the MS-IC. It looked like confetti, floating away from the vehicle, turning and sparkling in the sun.

  Young said: “Press for engine cutoff.”

  “Rog,” Stone said. “Press to ECO.”

  Whatever else happened, Ares was to continue on, up to cutoff of the MS-II’s main engines. On to orbit.

  “Ares, you are go at five plus thirty, with ECO at eight plus thirty-four.”

  Ares had reached Mach 15, at an altitude of eighty miles. And still the engines burned; still they climbed upward. Earth’s gravity well was deep.

  “Eight minutes. Ares, Houston, you are go at eight.”

  “Looking good,” Stone said.

  The residual engine noise and vibration died, suddenly. The recoil was powerful. York was thrown forward again, and bounced back in her canvas restraints.

  “ECO!” Stone called.

  Engine cutoff; the MS-II stage was spent.

  …And this time, the weight didn’t come back. It was like taking a fast car over a bump in the road, and never coming back down again.

  “Standing by for MS-II sep.”

  There was another muffled bang, a soft jolt.

  John Young said, “Roger, we confirm the sep, Ares.”

  “Uh, we are one zero one point four by one zero three point six.”

  “Roger, we copy, one zero one point four by one zero three point six…”

  The parameters of an almost perfect circular orbit about the Earth, a hundred miles high.

  Phil Stone’s voice was as level as Young’s. Just another day at the office. But the stack he commanded was moving at five miles per second.

  York gazed out of the window, at the glistening curvature of Earth, the crumpled skin of ocean, the clouds layered on like whipped cream.

  I’m in orbit. My God. She felt a huge relief that she was still alive, that she had survived that immense expenditure of energy.

  Above her head, the little cosmonaut was floating, his chain slack and coiling up.

  Sunday, July 20, 1969

  TRANQUILLITY BASE

  Joe Muldoon peered through the Lunar Module’s triangular window. Muldoon was fascinated by the play of light and color on the lunar surface. If he looked straight ahead, to the west, away from the rising sun, the flat landscape reflected back the light in a shimmering golden brown sheen. But to either side there was a softer tan. And if he leaned forward to look off to the side, away from the line of the sun, the surface looked a dull ash gray, as if he was looking through a polarizing filter.

  Even the light here wasn’t Earthlike.

  Outside, Armstrong was moving about with what looked like ease, bouncing across the beachlike lunar surface like a balloon. His white suit gleamed in the sunlight, the brightest object on the surface of the Moon, but his lower legs and light blue overshoes were already stained dark gray by dust.

  Muldoon couldn’t see Armstrong’s face, behind his reflective golden sun visor.

  He checked the time. It was fourteen minutes after the commander’s egress.

  “Neil, are you ready for me to come out?”

  Armstrong called back. “Yes. Just stand by a second. First let me move the LEC over the edge for you.”

  Armstrong floated about the LM, pushing aside the LEC, the crude rope-and-pulley lunar equipment conveyor which Muldoon had been using to pass equipment down to his commander on the surface.

  Muldoon turned around in the evacuated cabin and got to his knees. He crawled backwards, out through the LM’s small hatch, and over the porch, the platform which bridged to the egress ladder fixed to the LM’s front leg. The pressurized suit seemed to resist every movement, as if he were enclosed in a form-fitting balloon; he even had trouble closing his gloved fingers around the porch’s handles.

  Armstrong guided him out. “Okay, you saw what difficulties I was having. I’ll try to watch your PLSS from underneath here. Your PLSS looks like it’s clearing okay. The shoes are about to come over the sill… Okay, now drop your PLSS down. There you go, you’re clear and spidery, you’re good. About an inch of clearance on top of your PLSS.”

  When he got to the ladder’s top rung, Muldoon took hold of the handrails and pulled himself upright. He could see the small TV camera, which Armstrong had deployed to film his own egress, sitting on its stowage tray hinged out from the LM. The camera watched him silently. He said, “Now I want to back up and partially close the hatch. Making sure I haven’t left the key in the ignition, and the handbrake is on…”

  “A particularly good thought.”

  “We’d walk far to find a rental car around here.”

  He was ten feet or so above the lunar surface, with the gaunt planes of the LM’s ascent stage before him, the spiderlike descent stage below. “Okay, I’m on the top step, and I can look down over the pads. It’s a simple matter to hop down from one step to the next.”

  “Yeah,” Armstrong said. “I found it to be very comfortable, and walking is also very comfortable. Joe, you’ve got three more rungs and then a long one.”

  “I’m going to leave one foot up there and move both hands down to the fourth rung up…”

  It was routine, like a sim in the Peter Pan rig back at MSC. He didn’t find it hard to report his progress down the ladder to Houston.

  But once he was standing on Eagle’s footpad, he found words fleeing from him. Morning on the Moon:

  Holding on to the ladder, Muldoon turned slowly. His suit was a warm, comforting bubble around him; he heard the hum of pumps and fans in the PLSS — his backpack, the Portable Life Support System — and he felt the soft breeze of oxygen across his face.

  The LM was standing on a broad, level plain. There were craters everywhere, ranging from several yards to a thumbnail width, the low sunlight deepening their shadows. There were even tiny micrometeorite craters, zap pits, punched in the sides of the rocks littering the surface.

  There were rocks and boulders scattered about, and ridges that might have been twenty feet high — but it was hard to judge distance because there were no plants, no buildings, no people to give him any sense of scale: it was more barren
than the high desert of the Mojave, with not even the haze of an atmosphere, so that rocks at the horizon were just as sharp as those near his feet.

  Muldoon was overwhelmed. The sims — even his previous spaceflight in Earth orbit on Gemini — hadn’t prepared him for the strangeness of this place, the jewel-like clarity about the airless view, with its sharp contrast between the darkness of the sky and the lunar plain beneath, jumbled with rocks and craters.

  Holding the ladder with both hands, Muldoon swung his feet off the pad and onto the Moon.

  It was like walking on snow.

  There was a firm footing beneath a soft, resilient layer a few inches thick. Every time he took a step a little spray of dust particles sailed off along perfect parabolae, like tiny golf balls. He understood how this had implications for the geology: no atmospheric winnowing on the Moon, no gravitational sorting.

  In some of the smaller zap craters he saw small, shining fragments, with a metallic sheen. Like bits of mercury on a bench. And here and there he saw transparent crystals lying on the surface, like fragments of glass. He wished he had a sample collector. He would have to remember to come back for these glass beads, during the documented sampling later.

  His footprints were miraculously sharp, as if he’d placed his ridged overshoes in fine, damp sand. He took a photograph of one particularly well-defined print; it would persist there for millions of years, he realized, like the fossilized footprint of a dinosaur, to be eroded away only by the slow rain of micrometeorites, that echo of the titanic bombardments of the deep past.

  Muldoon’s job was to check his balance and stability. He did turns and leaps like a dancer. The pull of this little world was so gentle that he couldn’t tell when he stood upright, and the inertia of the PLSS at his back was a disconcerting drag at his changes of motion.

  “…Very powdery surface,” he reported back to Houston. “My boot tends to slide over it easily… You have to be careful about where your center of mass is. It takes two or three paces to bring you to a smooth stop. And to change direction you have to step out to the side and cut back a little bit. Like a football player. Moving your arms around doesn’t lift your feet off the surface. We’re not quite that light-footed…”

  There was a pressure in his kidneys. He stood still and let go, into the urine collection condom; it was like wetting his pants. Well, Neil might have been the first man to walk on the Moon. But I’m the first to take a leak here.

  He looked up. A star was climbing out of the eastern sky, unblinking, hauling its way toward the zenith, directly over his head. It was Apollo, waiting in orbit to take him home.

  Armstrong peeled away silver plastic and read out the inscription on the plaque on the LM’s front leg. “First, there’s the two hemispheres of the Earth. Underneath it says, ‘Here Man from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.’ It has the crew members’ signatures and the signature of the President of the United States.”

  They unfurled the Stars and Stripes. The flag had been stiffened with wire so it would fly there, without any wind.

  The two of them tried to plant the pole in the dust. But as hard as they pushed, the flagpole would only go six or eight inches into the ground, and Muldoon worried that the flag would fall over in front of the huge TV audience.

  At last they got the pole steady and backed away.

  Muldoon set off on some more locomotion experiments.

  He tried a slow-motion jog. His steps took him so high that time seemed to slow during each step. On Earth he would descend sixteen feet in the first second of a fall; on the Moon, he would fall only two. So he was suspended in each mid-stride, waiting to come down.

  He started to evolve a better way of moving. He bent, and rocked from side to side as he ran. It was more of a lope than a run: push with one foot, shift your weight, land on the other.

  He was breathing hard; he heard the hiss of water through the suit’s cooling system, the pipes that curled around his limbs and chest.

  He felt buoyant, young. A line from an old novel floated into his mind: We are out of Mother Earth’s leading-strings now…

  The capcom’s voice startled him.

  “Tranquillity Base, this is Houston. Could we get both of you on the camera for a minute, please?”

  Muldoon stumbled to a halt.

  Armstrong had been erecting a panel of aluminum foil that he unrolled from a tube; the experiment was designed to trap particles emanating from the sun. “Say again, Houston.”

  “Rog. We’d like to get both of you in the field of view of the camera for a minute. Neil and Joe, the President of the United States is in his office now and would like to say a few words to you.”

  The President? Goddamn it, I bet Neil knew about this.

  He heard Armstrong say formally: “That would be an honor.”

  “Go ahead, Mr. President. This is Houston. Over.”

  Muldoon floated over to Armstrong and faced the TV camera.

  Hello, Neil and Joe. I’m talking to you by telephone from the Oval Office at the White House. And this certainly has to be the most historic phone call ever made. I just can’t tell you how proud we all are of what you have achieved. For every American, this has to be the proudest moment of our lives, and for all people all over the world, I am sure they, too, join with Americans in recognizing what a feat this is. Because of what you have done, the heavens have become part of man’s world…

  What Muldoon mostly felt as Nixon rambled on, in his oddly unstructured way, was impatience. He and Armstrong had little enough time there as it was — no more than two and a half hours for their single moonwalk — and every second had been choreographed, in the endless sims back in Houston, and detailed in the little spiral-bound checklists fixed to their cuffs. Nixon’s speech hadn’t been rehearsed in the simulations, though, and Muldoon felt a mounting anxiety as he thought ahead over the tasks they still had to complete. They would have to skip something. He could see them returning to Earth with fewer samples than had been anticipated, and maybe they would have to skip documenting them, and just grab what they could… The scientists wouldn’t be pleased.

  He would like to have gotten a sample of one of those glittering fragments in the crater bottoms, or one of the crystals. There just wouldn’t be time.

  Muldoon didn’t really care about the science, if truth be told. But he felt a gnawing anxiety about completing the checklist. Getting through your checklist was the way to get on another flight.

  With these thoughts, some of the lightness he’d enjoyed earlier began to dissipate.

  …For one priceless moment, in the whole history of man, all the people on this Earth are one. One in their pride in what you have done, and one in our prayers that you will return safely to Earth.

  Armstrong responded: “Thank you, sir. It’s a great honor and privilege for us to be here, representing not only the United States but men of peace of all nations — and with interest and curiosity, and men with a vision for the future.”

  And thank you very much. Now I want to pass you on briefly to a special guest I have here with me in the Oval Office today.

  Muldoon thought, A guest? My God. Has he any idea of how much this call is costing?

  And then familiar tones — that oddly clipped Bostonian accent — sounded in his headset, and Muldoon felt a response rising within him, a thrill deep and atavistic.

  Hello, gentlemen. How are you today? I won’t take up your precious time on the Moon. I just want to quote to you what I said to Congress, on May 25, 1961 — just eight short years ago…

  ’Now is the time to take longer strides — time for a great new American enterprise — time for this nation to take on a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on Earth.

  ’I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth. No single
space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish…’

  My God, Muldoon thought. Nixon hates Kennedy; everyone knows that. Muldoon wondered what calculations — PR, political, even geopolitical — lay behind Nixon letting old JFK back into the limelight, today of all days.

  It was hard to concentrate on Kennedy’s words.

  Fifty feet from him the LM looked like a gaunt spider, twenty feet tall, resting there in the glaring sunlight. The Eagle was complex and delicate, a filmy construct of gold leaf and aluminum, the symmetry of the ascent stage spoiled by the bulbous fuel tank to the right. The craft bristled with antennae, docking targets, and reaction control thruster assemblies. He saw how dust had splashed up over the skirt of the descent stage’s engine, and the gold leaf which coated it. In the sunlight the LM looked fragile. And so it was, he knew, just a taut bubble of aluminum, shaved to the minimum weight by Grumman engineers. But here, on this small, static, delicate world, the LM didn’t seem at all out of place.

  I want to tell you now how nervous I was that day, gentlemen. I wasn’t sure if I was right to ask that august body for such huge sums of money, indeed for a transformation of our national economy. But now that goal is accomplished, thanks to the courage of you, Neil and Joe, and so many of your colleagues, and the dedication of many skilled people all across our great country, in NASA and its contractor allies…

  Muldoon glanced uneasily at the mute TV camera on its tripod. He said “the goal is accomplished.” He knew that on a hot July evening in Houston it was around ten-forty. He wondered how many moonwalk parties would already be breaking up.

  Maybe it really was just about footprints and flags after all.

  But, back in Clear Lake, Jill would still be watching — wouldn’t she?

  …Apollo has energized the American spirit, after a difficult decade at home and abroad. Now that we have reached the Moon, I believe we must not let our collective will dissipate. I believe we must look farther. Here, at this moment of Apollo’s triumph, I would like to set my country a new challenge: to go farther and farther than most of us have dreamed — to continue the building of our great ships, and to fly them onward to Mars.