“Then there are practical considerations. Fuel loads are critical. At every point, you need to reduce mass to maximize the fuel available to the mission. Then there are the subtleties—the things we learned through tragedy.”
“Like what?” Victory asks.
“Are you going to use pure oxygen within the capsule?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, you want to avoid that until you’re well into orbit and can run at low cabin pressure. While you’re on the pad, you need to keep nitrogen in the mix to reduce the risk of fire from sparks and short circuits. Trust me on this—you will have sparks and short circuits. You do not want a fire in the cabin. Your astronauts need to breathe pure O2 in their suits, but the capsule itself has to gradually shift to that as the rocket ascends.”
Victory takes notes, writing vigorously on a clipboard.
“You see that?” I say, pointing at the mock-up A-frame chair by the door. “You’ve used natural fibers like cotton. We used synthetics that were coated in a fire-retardant. You got to develop materials that cannot burn. Fires need heat, oxygen, and fuel. You’ve got to make sure there’s little to no fuel inside that capsule because, once your crew launches, that tiny tin can is all they’ve got.”
Victory nods. “This is good. What else?”
I laugh. “If I had to distill space flight down to four key principles, they would be—test, test, test, and then test some more. Any time you make a change, you need to test everything again. Up there, you have zero margin for error. Simple, easy-to-fix mistakes down here will cost lives up there.”
Even Adrian’s making notes.
“How many test flights have you conducted?” I ask.
Victory looks nervous. She says, “Four.”
“Of this stack?” I ask, pointing vaguely at where the rocket is, imagining it beyond the far wall of the conference room. “Of this current configuration?”
“No.”
“But using this design, right? These engines. These fuel tanks.”
Victory nods.
I ask, “And they were successful? They reached orbit?”
“Sub-orbital.”
“So just the first stage?”
“Yes.”
I sigh, shaking my head. “You realize you’re launching a rocket on top of a rocket that just happens to be perched on top of yet another rocket, right? You’ve got to do all-up testing of the whole damn thing. You can’t put anyone on that beast until you know your staging sequence is going to work.”
Victory hangs her head.
Adrian points at me, addressing her as he says, “This is what we need. Some balance.”
Victory nods, saying, “Will you help us?”
I pause for a moment before saying, “Well, it’s either that or milk cows, right?”
She grins as I laugh.
After dinner, Adrian takes me to the women’s quarters. He introduces me to the engineers and scientists there. Unlike the farmers, several of them have a good grasp of English. They had to be fluent to be able to decipher instruction manuals from before my time. Those that don’t understand Old Tongue are polite. They’re all curious, though. They’re all fascinated by the living, breathing dinosaur in front of them.
We sit on our bunks as the evening wears on. A few people sit on the floor, slumped against the metal frames, listening to the conversation. I quiz them about things like Maxwell’s equations. The replies are a little muddied, but that could be a reflection of my own partial recollection of electromagnetism. Math never was my strong suit. For me, biology was a nice way of sidestepping physics. If anything, it’s surprising how much I can recall.
They tell me someone called DeMuir figured out Kepler’s laws of planetary motion from scratch about seventy years ago. Damn, that’s impressive. Enough knowledge survived for DeMuir to start with the heliocentric theory. Then it was a case of accurate measurements and reverse engineering. He figured out the mathematical relationship between the motion, position, and orbital speeds of the planets.
They haven’t heard of Einstein. Now there’s a name I never thought would fade. To be fair, we only needed Newtonian physics to get to the Moon, but it’s a harsh reminder about how their understanding is disjointed. They’ve mastered the basics of electrical power and alternating current, but there are gaping holes in their knowledge. We can sit and chat beside a dim lightbulb and enjoy running hot water, but there’s no special or general relativity. No quantum mechanics. I describe the photoelectric effect as best I can to one of the younger women, an electrical engineer that seems particularly bright. I tell her how solar panels can be used to generate electricity from sunlight. I could have been describing magic. She believes me when I say it’s possible, but it seems like alchemy to her.
How do I describe the computers of my day to these guys? From what I saw in the boardroom, all their calculations are performed freehand. Originally, a computer was a career position, like an accountant. It described someone who had the acumen to calculate ballistic tables. By my day, computers were electronic and capable of so much more than calculations. They were virtual assistants. They’d amplify, clarify, and enhance the decision-making process. Often, they’d expose broader points that we’d fail to consider. It’s a long way from an abacus to artificial intelligence, but the basic principles are the same—extend human logic. One of the older women is excited. She describes how they’re etching circuits on silicon wafers. I’m tempted to tell her about our quantum computers, but even I don’t understand how those damn things work. At best, I can point her in the right direction. I can’t explain it, though. I decide to keep that distraction for another day. It’s good to hear they’ve developed basic computing. I’m guessing their computers are the size of a bus.
Lights-out occurs around midnight. A few of the women slip away quietly to the men’s quarters. Nothing has changed in that regard, which is good to see. We are human, after all. I don’t think there’s any strict edict on gender segregation. From what I can tell, it’s simply practical as it allows the project to house more people in one spot.
Lying on a bottom bunk, staring out a warped glass window, tens of thousands of stars dot the sky. I’m in awe of where I am. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, I looked up at those same stars as a child. Little did I know they’d lead me to this moment in time through a torturous route spanning two different star systems. I feel as though I’ve cheated. I guess I have cheated death, but it wasn’t cheating as such. I never wanted to be cryogenically frozen or even revived. Somewhere up there, an alien race has inhabited our moon. I hope it’s not the creatures of Procyon Alpha. They had no interest in technology, but I can’t shake the feeling they could have evolved to embrace human technology. Damn, I hope I’m wrong.
Somehow someone came across my tiny brain fragment, and hey, presto, here I am. Again. I wonder about my cellular remnants. How did they survive the vast expanse of time? How the hell were those necrotic cells still viable? Still able to house memories and my suspended conscious awareness?
What happened after the battle on Erebus?
Someone must have preserved my shattered remains. I bet it was Gal. He would have been protective. Pretty Boy would have done all he could to revive me, but I was beyond even his science-magic. Somehow, they ensured my remains were treated with dignity. I was handled with the care of a historical artifact, something akin to the mummified remains of an ancient pharaoh. But how did this particular message in a bottle, floating adrift across a sea of stars, ever find its way back home? All I can think is that someone cared about my remains, and that warms my heart.
I’m improbable. In an infinite universe, the impossible shouldn’t surprise me, but it does. I guess it’s that all this happened to me, personally, that’s shocking. Out of the hundred billion people that have been born and died on this tiny planet, here am I.
I snuggle on the mattress, pulling the sheet up over my shoulder. For the first time in eons, I’m safe. The muscles in my neck relax. My head sinks into
the pillow. My eyelids grow heavy. I don’t want to go to sleep. Not just yet. It’s funny, but the last time I lost consciousness, a quarter of a million years passed in the blink of an eye. I guess I can be forgiven for being a little hesitant. Relax, Jess. Tomorrow’s a new day.
The stars blur, fading into the darkness.
Simulator
I wake to the surreal sound of over a hundred women quietly getting ready for the day. Dozens of conversations are held in a whisper. Shift workers turn on their bunks, wanting to drift back to sleep. Beds are made. Towels are hung over the rungs of ladders welded onto the various bunkbeds. Toothbrushes, hairbrushes, and other personal effects are stowed in boxes that roll beneath the beds. Someone has placed a basket on the stool beside my bunk. A pretty pink bow has been wrapped over the top. Inside, there’s a change of underwear, toiletries, and a washcloth, along with a couple of granola bars and an apple.
I look around the dorm. In the daylight, it’s plain to see I’ve been given one of the prime spots by the window. The room is divided into rows, with most of the bunks either lined up against a wall or forming the central row. Who did I bump to get pole position? Pecking orders are unavoidable and never healthy.
My eyes dart around, peering through the gaps as people move around. I’m looking for anyone that might be watching me. There! Middle aisle. Ten bunks back. Near the bathroom. She smiles. I wave Hello, and mouth the words, Thank you.
After getting dressed and preparing for the day, I join the others as we walk to the dining hall. I don’t want special attention and am happy to stand in line, but Adrian sees me and brings me over to the head table. Victory is there, but she’s busy reviewing the schedule for the day. She waves and returns to an intense discussion with the aide standing beside the table.
A carafe of coffee is passed around—coffee made from beans that have been roasted and freshly ground. This isn’t instant coffee. It’s real goddamn coffee. I can smell it! I pour a cup and raise it to my lips, breathing deeply before sipping at the bitter drink. The others look at me like I’m mad, but I’ve been light-years from the nearest coffee plant. To them, this is the regular cup of morning Joe, but to me, it’s divine.
“Good, huh?” Adrian says.
“Perfect.”
Breakfast is a kind of slop that seems to be somewhere on the spectrum between porridge and gravy. At a guess, it’s a Leftover Special as it’s been blended into a thick sludge, but I don’t care. I’m hungry.
“Did you fly an Apollo?” Victory asks. I love the way she thinks of Apollo as a class of vessel rather than the name of a program that ran for over a decade.
“No. But I mucked around in the simulator.”
That gets a knowing glance between Victory and Adrian, but neither says anything. Victory shuffles through a bunch of papers and pulls out a schematic diagram, placing it in front of me.
“Do you recognize this?”
“Oh, yeah,” I say, looking at the box-shaped Lunar Module Simulator. “Last time I was in one of these, I was doing shots.”
Victory is horrified. “You shot people?”
I laugh, shaking my head.
“No,” I say. “It’s a colloquialism. We would train hard all week, putting in ten to twelve hours a day. On Saturday evenings, we’d shoot pool and have shots of alcohol to relax.
“They had this old warehouse at the back of the Johnson Space Flight Center. It had been converted into a clubhouse, somewhere for the trainees to relax. And someone thought it would be fun to store the old Lunar Mission Simulator in there. So we’d take turns in the box, doing shots and making craters on the Moon.”
“But you landed on the Moon, right?” Adrian says. “In real life.”
“I was stationed at Tranquility Base. By my day, it was a case of push a button in orbit and the craft landed itself. I played around in the old Apollo simulator and made it down a few times, but it was a novelty. We never had to do anything like that for real. For us, it was a bit of fun.”
Victory shakes her head in admiration. Even though my experience was in a fully-automated Hermes-class lunar shuttle, I feel as though I should say something more.
“It’s not like flying a plane up there. There aren’t any crosswinds. No turbulence. If you’re coming down over a Mare, you don’t have to worry about going long and missing the runway. You can drift downrange. There’s no smooth glide path or runway centerline to follow.”
“How did you do it?” Adrian asks. I’m tempted to say, I didn’t. It really was as simple as pressing a button in orbit. In his mind, I’m an Apollo astronaut—only I’m not. I’m an interstellar biologist. I was born over a hundred years after the last Apollo mission. I’m not that close to the program at all.
His eyes plead for more detail. Why does he have to have puppy dog eyes?
I say, “You’ve got to understand the numbers coming at you as you work with your velocity and altitude.”
Adrian says, “Oh, the simulator’s got images of the Moon on a conveyor belt, just visible out the window. It makes you feel like you’re right there.”
“You’ve got to ignore the view,” I say, hoping I’m not offending him. “Look out at what you’re doing and you’ll crash, even in a simulator. The problem is there’s no sense of depth on the Moon. All the craters look the same. They all look so damn close.”
“So you flew on instruments?” Victory asks.
“Most Apollo missions did until about a hundred meters,” I say. “Craters are deceiving. They look the same regardless of altitude. Look at them too soon and you’ll freak out, thinking you’re too low. Burn through your fuel too quickly and you’ll go splat.”
“What was your approach?” Victory asks. “Could you do it again?”
“We’re talking about an Apollo simulator, right?” I say, “Maybe. I guess.”
I want to make sure we’re clear about our conversation. Hitting a button in orbit to activate an autopilot routine on a 22nd-century spacecraft is very different from Apollo. Hell, all of their spacecraft were prototypes. No two were the same. My training catered for emergency landing procedures, but if anything had gone wrong, I would have hit the abort button. A computer would have guided me back to the orbital station. Better to live and fly another day than become a smudge on the lunar surface, but that’s not what they’re talking about. They’re dealing with clunky, old Apollo hardware.
“Come,” she says, getting up from the table. Adrian and I follow, much to the surprise of everyone else. Several of them look at each other, wondering what they should do next.
Victory is excited. She leads me between buildings and into a warehouse. There it is at the back—a lunar simulator looking every bit as chunky and ancient as ever. Steel stairs lead up to a square room elevated above the ground, being mounted on pylons. The door is open. The inside looks all too familiar. Toggle switches line the walls. The gunmetal grey equipment panels are broken by the occasional orange rail or handhold. Warning labels are plastered over critical flight controls. Apollo’s computers were so antiquated they could only handle one flight mode at a time.
“We keep getting errors.”
“Twelve-oh-twos?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says, surprised that nugget has stuck in my head over all these years.
“Yeah, the computers in these things are quite limited. If you have too many subsystems running, you’ll get overflow errors. Shut down things you don’t need, like the docking radar, and you’ll find it’s all just peachy.”
Adrian slaps Victory’s arm. “See?”
I laugh. For them, this is some obscure insight. For me, it’s a piece of history. When Neil and Buzz were training, any time they got an alarm, they hit the abort button. They never hesitated. When it came to the actual landing, though, with alarms ringing in their ears every few seconds, Mission Control insisted they were good to go. At the time, no one knew why alarms kept being triggered. All they knew was they weren’t critical. The flight controllers had ice in
their veins. Neil and Buzz trusted their instincts. If it had been me in that lander, I would have had my finger hovering over that goddamn abort button the whole way down. Those two? They had nerves made from titanium.
The windows in the LEM are as ugly as I remember. Rivets surround the triangular aluminum frame. The shades have been rolled back. Outside, someone powers up the simulator. Lights flicker on. I familiarize myself with the controls. I’m used to a digital display that adjusts to whichever mission mode is being undertaken. It’s a novelty to see an actual gyroscope. It’s a black ball set inside a glass case, showing rates of yaw, pitch, and roll.
“Ah, we normally had someone start the descent program,” I say. “There’s a checklist to ensure everything’s in the right position.”
Adrian gestures to the joystick, saying, “Okay. It’s set at 10,000 feet and ready for landing, captain.”
Very funny.
“All right. Pitch is eighty degrees. Velocity is 130 feet per second. Let’s have some fun.”
I watch my fuel and velocity, talking to Adrian and Victory as the simulation progresses.
“You’ve got to trust the program. Let the computer do the hard work. The key to this is recognizing it’s a powered descent into a gravity well. We’ve got to hold our nerve and think in terms of bands of altitude. We need to bleed off our sideways velocity rather than burning too much fuel too soon.
“This isn’t like an airplane. We never glide. We are always correcting for something. The challenge is not to over-correct. Mistakes cost fuel. Use too much fuel too soon and you won’t make it.”
Being back in a Lunar Simulator is a touch of déjà vu. It brings back memories of wild parties with the crew of the Intrepid. I’m not going to tell these guys this, but we’d fly blindfolded with some drunk tech reading the metrics aloud. Now that was crazy, but simulators are a tease—they’re as close to reality as possible, and yet they’re nothing like reality at all. It’s the lack of stakes. Crash here and it’s a bit of a laugh. Come down hard out there and you’re sucking vacuum.
Déjà Vu (First Contact) Page 21
