Starfire & Snowball

by Alastair Mayer

  “Any signs of activity or possible hazard?”

  “None we could detect. No electromagnetic or gravitic emissions beyond normal background, except for the radiation sources earlier noted, and they are low level”

  “Very well. Where is the octagon platform that is near a three-legged structure?”

  Cartographer brought up a hologram of the moon, made a gesture which caused a number of points on the surface to light in a variety of colors, and pointed to a close pair of lights near the equator, some distance south of a pronounced crater with bright rays. “Here, Leader.”

  “Ah, nearly at the closest point to the planet. Excellent. We’ll land there and deploy survey teams to the other sites. I also want a preliminary survey of the planet. Have a science team take the longboat to do an orbital survey.”

  “Yes sir. Will they land?”

  “Depending on what the survey shows, yes. But no landings without further discussion, and they must stay alert for any signs of activity, organic or robotic.”

  * * *

  November 19, 1969—Apollo 12 Lunar Module Intrepid, descending toward the lunar surface.

  Pete Conrad focused on flying the LM, they were now just four hundred feet above the surface. He’d taken manual control at seven hundred and quickly killed most of their descent speed. He wanted to get close to Surveyor Crater and look around some before kicking up dust. He thought his ground track was a bit too far south. “I’ve got to get over to the right.”

  At his side, Alan Bean watched the instruments. “You’re at 330 feet, coming down at four feet per second.”

  “Yeah.” He adjusted the controls. This wasn’t quite like flying a helicopter; the lower gravity meant the engine didn’t use much thrust to balance their weight, which meant he had to tilt the spacecraft a lot more to get the same effective sideways or back-and-forth thrust from it.

  “You’ve got eleven percent fuel. Loads of gas, 300 feet, coming down at five.”

  “Check.”

  Bean glanced away from the instruments, looking out the window. “Oh! Look at that crater; right where it’s supposed to be! Hey, you’re beautiful.”

  Conrad spared a glance in that direction. That bright object near the rim of the crater, was that Surveyor? But he was still too far north and east.

  Bean checked the instruments again. “Ten percent fuel. 257 feet, coming down at five; 240 coming down at five.” The LM tilted again as Conrad adjusted course. “Hey, you’re really maneuvering around.”

  “Yeah.” He killed the rate of descent some, keeping the craft pitched over to reduce their horizontal speed, he didn’t want to overshoot the landing area. There was a spot, between Surveyor Crater and Head Crater. He needed to angle over to it.

  “Come on down, Pete.”

  “Okay.”

  “Ten percent fuel. 200 feet; coming down at three. You need to come on down.” Bean sounded a little nervous, like a passenger trying to press an imaginary brake pedal in a car.

  “Okay.” Conrad straightened the LM, descending again toward the spot he’d picked out. To the left he could now clearly make out Surveyor III sitting on the gentle slope of the crater where it had landed two-and-a-half years earlier. He focused on the landing; they were getting close.

  Bean was intent on the instruments. “190 feet. Come on down. 180 feet; nine percent fuel. You’re looking good. Going to get some dust before long.” In fact Conrad could already see some. “130 feet; 124 feet, Pete. 120 feet, coming down at six. You got nine percent,” the number flipped over, “eight percent. You’re looking okay. ninety-six feet, coming down at six feet per second. Slow down the descent rate!”

  Conrad goosed the control, the exhaust kicked up more surface dust.

  “Eighty feet. Eighty feet, coming down at four. You’re looking good. Seventy feet; looking real good. Sixty-three feet. sixty feet, coming down at three.”

  The dust grew thicker outside Conrad’s window. The films of Neil’s landing, Apollo 11, hadn’t shown it this bad.

  “Fifty feet, coming down; watch for the dust.” Bean focused on the displays, not the view out the window. He hadn’t seen the dust yet.

  “Yeah.” Conrad’s answer had a wry note.

  “Forty-six feet.”

  A voice from Ground Control came over the radio. “Low level.” That was a fuel warning. Both astronauts glanced at the annunciator panel, the “DES QTY”, descent quantity, lamp was lit. Less than two minutes of fuel left.

  “Okay.” Bean started a countdown clock. At twenty seconds of fuel left, they’d have to make the decision to either land or abort, jettisoning the descent stage and rocketing back to orbit. He looked back at the display. “Forty-two feet, coming down at two. Forty, coming down at two. Looking good; watch the dust.”

  Out the window, Conrad could no longer see the horizon nor indeed much of the ground, so much dust sprayed out from under the LM. He looked over at the “eight-ball”, leveling the spacecraft. But now he couldn’t tell if he was drifting sideways or backwards—if he landed with too much horizontal speed, the landing gear could buckle. Even if the LM didn’t crash, a bad angle would make it impossible to launch back to orbit. He looked out the window again, managing to see some rocks through the dust that let him judge his speed. He looked back at the eight-ball again to level the ship.

  “Thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty feet. Coming down at two, Pete; you got plenty of gas, plenty of gas, babe. Hang in there.”

  The voice from Houston came again. “Thirty seconds remaining.”

  “Eighteen feet, coming down at two. He’s got it made! Come on in there.”

  From the side and rear landing legs thin metal probes projected down a few feet below the pads. They touched the surface, buckled. On the LM’s instrument panel, a blue, circular light lit up.

  Bean saw it immediately. “Contact Light!”

  Conrad cut the descent engine, and the Intrepid dropped the last few feet to the surface.

  * * *

  LifeSeeker, near Surveyor Crater

  The LifeSeeker was the third spacecraft to land at that spot in the Ocean of Storms. The octagonal platform stood stark near the edge of a gently sloping crater, on whose slope a smaller spacecraft sat on three splayed legs. The LifeSeeker survey crew kept a respectful distance, not wishing to disturb the footprints that encircled the octagon and led to the tripod and beyond. A technician suited up and took a gravsled over the site, pausing to take detailed images and scans of the platform, the scattered equipment, and what seemed to be scientific instrument packages, cabled together and in turn connected to a dish antenna pointed up at the planet overhead. The radiation they’d detected came from one of the packages in the instrument cluster, a vertical cylinder with a fins radiating from it. A power source.

  “Retrieve the power unit, perhaps we can determine the age from the isotopes,” the captain directed. The instruments were long dead, it wouldn’t matter.

  Other survey teams spread out over the moon in their scoutboats. They found similar instrument packages and dish antennae at five of the sites, a sixth had a simpler experiment suite. Near three of the former they found wheeled vehicles with footprints leading to and from, and wheel tracks leading away in several directions. They followed the tracks and found areas where footprints reappeared, where the surface had been disturbed.

  “They must have used the vehicles to cover more distance, then stopped to make detailed studies. Exploring or prospecting.” one of the Scouts reported back.

  At two other places on the moon they found another kind of wheeled vehicle, apparently entirely robotic, and traced the tracks of each back to landing vehicles.

  In many places they found debris, scraps of metal and plastic film and fiber and circuits, smashed and scattered when the original craft had hit the surface at orbital speed or better. They sampled them for later analysis.

  * * *

  LifeSeeker’s Longboat, near the planet

  The scout team in the Life
Seeker’s longboat orbited an almost featureless world. In their careful approach to the planet they’d noted several artificial satellites, some in an equatorial orbit nearly synchronous with the planet’s rotation, others in lower, highly inclined orbits. Nobody would deploy so many and such varied satellites around the snowball below them. But they detected no other signs of intelligent life; the satellites’ power and maneuvering systems were long dead; the planet’s surface almost covered in glaciers. Near the equator there were stretches of open water, and elsewhere in the ice large cracks had repeatedly formed and refrozen. Perhaps an ocean beneath.

  “How could intelligent life develop on such a frozen world?” Pilot said.

  “Maybe it froze later,” Planetologist replied. “This planet is near the outer edge of its sun’s habitable zone, near freezing on average. If the sun’s output dropped slightly, or the concentration of greenhouse gases fell off too much, or heavy clouds or dust high in the atmosphere blocked the sunlight, that might tilt the balance.”

  Climatologist picked up the explanation. “Once the ice covered enough of the planet, the albedo would be so high, it would reflect so much sunlight back into space as to cause a runaway feedback cycle and the planet would freeze over. It happened on our homeworld, a billion years ago.”

  “How did it ever thaw out?”

  “Our sun warmed as it aged, volcanic activity increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from, microorganisms on the surface of the ice reduced its reflectivity.”

  “Could that happen here?”

  “Possibly. It depends what caused it, what the long term activity of this sun is like, how much tectonic activity there is. Let’s ask for permission to land and see what we can determine from ice cores and penetrating radar.”

  * * *

  LifeSeeker, near Surveyor Crater

  “Physics team, do you have an analysis of the radioactive fuel yet?”

  “Partially, Leader. It is primarily uranium-234 oxide, with a significant fraction of plutonium-238 and a scattering of other isotopes, probably decay products. But of more significance is the plutonium. The 238 isotope has a relatively short half-life, about ninety-five years—eighty-eight revolutions of this planet around its sun—and it emits helium nuclei.”

  “So a useful isotope for a crude power source, then.”

  “Yes, the generator assembly contained thermocouples, for turning the heat of decay into electricity. There were similar designs on the probe we found outside this system. But there’s something else. The half-life, and the fact that we detected so much plutonium with the uranium, means that this couldn’t be very old, no more than a few millenia, possibly less. I’ll have a more definite number when we’ve finished the quantitative analysis.”

  Leader’s brow crest bristled in mild surprise. Such a short time? “Get me the number, it might help us figure out what happened.”

  * * *

  LifeSeeker’s longboat, orbiting the planet

  The planetary survey team had part of the answer. The first hints had come from a close examination of some of the orbiting satellites.

  “This is odd—look at the density of microcraters on the surface of this one,” Planetologist said.

  “It’s probably been up here a long time,” Pilot said.

  “No, it doesn’t correlate with the cosmic ray exposure. It’s almost like it ran into a cloud of something.”

  “That could happen, debris from another satellite perhaps, exploded or hit by a meteoroid.”

  “I’m going to do a trace element analysis on this surface, see if I can determine what hit it, or what it hit.”

  * * *

  “It didn’t hit satellite debris” Planetologist announced definitively.

  “What’s your data?” asked Climatologist.

  “I’m finding traces of silicates, carbonates, and even chlorides, not what you’d expect from another satellite.”

  “Salt?”

  “Yes, and the silicates and carbonates could be from sea bottom mud. I think a large impactor, an asteroid or comet, must have hit this planet’s ocean. The blast would have kicked up the sea floor, the salt would be left when the water boiled away.”

  “And this satellite flew through the cloud?” asked Pilot.

  “I don’t have a better explanation.”

  Pilot just wiggled his brow crest, a shrug.

  “I’d like to see what we find with our core sampling and deep radar,” said Climatologist.

  “The density of this planet is high enough that the oceans can’t be very deep, just a skin on the surface. Even a modest asteroid or small comet could hit bottom.”

  * * *

  LifeSeeker, near Surveyor Crater

  The octagonal platforms and the surrounding areas proved the most interesting. All had numerous and overlapping impressions in the dust, oval with several ridges through them. At each octagon, near the base of the ladder-like leg, they found curious, stiff fabric bags, L-shaped, with a hard surface along the bottom of each. The shape and ridges of this surface matched the impressions in the dust.

  “If these were monuments, I’d say these bags or baskets were some kind of offering,” said the Studier of Ancient Peoples. ”The numerical significance is interesting.”

  “How?” asked the Engineer, who had been examining one of the instruments they’d recovered.

  “The platforms have eight sides. We found four of these objects at each site, and two of the large rectangular boxes. Two, four, eight. See the progression?”

  Another put forth: ”And the wheeled vehicles: four wheels, two fabric platforms.”

  Engineer’s brow crest flattened. ”Most of our wheeled vehicles have four wheels, it’s a convenient number by the laws of physics, not numerology. And many have two seats, for a driver and observer or navigator.”

  “And the octagons?”

  “Again, a convenient shape. Four legs for a landing craft makes sense, better load distribution than three, lighter than five. At this level of technology”—chemical propulsion!—“weight would be critical.”

  “Ah, and the four baskets?”

  “Not baskets, bags. Footbags—they left footprints!”

  “But why leave the footbags?”

  “I can think of two good reasons,” said Engineer. “They are incredibly dusty, they wouldn’t want to bring that inside their ascent vehicle.” Analysis of the blasted upper surfaces of the octagons had made it apparent that an upper component had rocketed itself away, presumably returning the visitors home. “And again, the weight. The large box structures, and other debris we found scattered around the base, all probably excess weight jettisoned before launch.”

  “What do you suppose they looked like?”

  “No way of knowing for sure. Probably bipedal, if those were footbags, two explorers per lander, given two seats in the vehicle.”

  “The footprints look consistent with two legs, and there are no tail drag prints,” said Studier of Ancient Peoples.

  “I don’t think those vehicle seats would work with tails.”

  “They could have had tail stubs, or thin tails they kept down a suit leg.”

  “And we have no idea how many upper limbs they had, or heads, or what sensory organ clusters.”

  “We may eventually determine some of that by analyzing their tools. They’d be designed to be easy to use by beings with a given configuration of manipulatory appendages and sense organs. We can run computer models.”

  * * *

  August 2, 1971, the Apollo 15 landing site near Hadley Rille

  Jim Irwin and Dave Scott were near the end of their third and last excursion on the Moon’s surface in nearly as many days. The official timeline had them transferring their samples to the Lunar Module, and parking the rover a short distance away and aligning the antenna. Their personal, unofficial timeline had one more task.

  Scott was behind the rover, out of site of the TV camera, when he heard Joe Allen, the CapCom, back on Earth. />
  “Jim, how are you doing?”

  “Oh, fine, Joe,” Irwin answered. “Transferred a few bags up to the porch.”

  “Sounds good.” Allen’s reply came back.

  Dave opened a bag and carefully removed a small plaque and a polished metal figurine. The crew had planned this in advance, a memorial to astronauts and cosmonauts who had died in the furtherance of space exploration.

  Irwin’s voice came over the radio again. “We have about three more bags to transfer up.”

  Allen’s response came a few seconds later. “Super.” There was a long pause. “And, Dave, you might want to check TV Remote.”

  He was busy setting up the memorial. “Okay, Joe. Just a sec.” Bending down against the pressure of his suit, he placed the plaque standing up on edge, pushed down into the soil a bit to hold it. Then he laid the figurine—a stylized astronaut—face down on the lunar dust in front of the plaque. He looked at the names on the list, he’d known many of them. Authorized or not, this was right. Some of these guys never got to go.

  Scott rose, the suit’s pressure almost pushing him up. He started to ready the Hasselblad camera to photograph the memorial.

  Allen’s voice came again over his headset. “Dave, give me a call on your present activity.”

  “Oh, just cleaning up the back of the Rover, here, a little, Joe.” Scott answered. He quickly took a couple of pictures.

  “Oh, okay.” A pause. If that had sounded as weak to Allen as it had to Scott, he didn’t mention it. “And, Dave, we do not have our TV yet. You might want to check TV Remote.”

  “Okay, Joe.”

  * * *

  LifeSeeker, near Surveyor Crater

  “Just a moment,” Studier of Ancient Peoples said, entering some commands to bring up an image on the display over the table. “Look at this, we found it near site five. It doesn’t seem to be a tool.”