He planned to be the first to greet Commanders Borman, Lovell, and Anders on the last part of their journey home.
* * * *
Susan gave them five minutes’ warning before she opened the cargo bay entrance. Richard and his team of scientists put on their bubble helmets, turned on the oxygen in their suits, and started the small heaters to keep their own bodies warm.
If he hadn't done this before, he would have protested the use of the heaters. He was hot enough at the moment; nervousness had made him sweat again. But he knew once inside the bay, he had only a few hours before the deep cold would permeate his space suit. He wanted as much time with the capsule as he could get.
He helped Heidi strap on her helmet, then checked Patricia's. He gave the other three scientists a cursory glance, but they seemed more competent with the equipment than the archeologists, which made sense. Archeologists usually didn't have to wear space suits to look at remains. They simply dug into the ground.
Here, they'd be opening a cold ship, preserving the scene, and beginning an intellectual voyage of discovery, one that could, hopefully, retrace everything that Apollo 8 had seen.
He could hear the rasp of his own breathing, and that reminded him to turn on the audio chips outside the helmet. The audio chips were an addition for this mission. Most of the time, astronauts didn't need the external sound sensors.
But he'd had them added to all of the helmets. Even though the team would use their internal communications equipment to keep track of each other, he figured they all wanted to hear this process as well as see it.
He wanted as many of his senses engaged as possible.
Once everyone was suited up, and Susan gave the all clear, he opened the single door leading into the back of the cargo bay.
The bay looked different, smaller, with the capsule inside. It was also darker since the capsule blocked much of the light from the center of the room. The two astronauts stood near the side of the capsule. They weren't going to be active in this part of the mission, but he knew they wanted to be here, to see everything.
He handed one of them a video camera. Even though there were cameras inside the bay, and at least two of the scientists were filming the entry, Richard figured he couldn't have enough film of this historic moment.
He straightened his shoulders and smiled at the team, even though they couldn't see his face. “Let's go,” he said.
It was, all in all, a belated command. The archeologists were already filming, taking samples from the exterior, finding ways to preserve as much of the stuff surrounding the ship as possible.
As excited as he was, Richard knew this was important, just as he knew that proceeding methodically was important.
He had little to do in this early stage, so he walked around the capsule slowly, taking it in.
The dent in the cone was uneven, almost as if something larger had hit it with a glancing blow. The area around the dent was worn, and the metal looked fragile. If he had to guess—and that was all he could do at this point—he would have thought that the damage there was quite old.
What he had originally thought were streaks were tiny holes all along one side. The holes were very close together, almost as if the capsule had been pelted with gravel. Only Richard knew that gravel would have done much more damage; more likely, it had gone through some sort of rock belt as fine as sand.
His stomach lurched—excitement now, not nervousness. The capsule had quite a story to tell. All these little details, the burn marks near the engine, the long score against the metal on one side as if someone had run a car key against it, the little holes and dents and divots, were records of everything that happened to this capsule.
In some of those dents and digs might be dust from civilizations long gone. Evidence of life from some other planet, or a bit of ore that no one had believed existed this far out. There might be as yet undiscovered chemicals, minerals, biological matter, things that boggled the human imagination.
They could all be on this capsule, smaller than anything he could see through the reflective plastic of his helmet, more important than anything he could imagine.
Finally, he rounded the capsule and stopped by the small hatch. He and his team on Earth had discussed the hatch several times. They had studied the specs from the various capsules and had even visited the two that were in museums.
Since the fire on Apollo 1 that killed three astronauts, the capsule hatch opened outward. But it was designed so that in space it was sealed shut.
Richard and his team knew that they'd have to cut the hatch open, and they needed to do so in a way that would cause the least amount of damage. But, they agreed, he would try to open it by hand first.
The scientists had photographed and then cleared an area around the hatch. Richard's stomach lurched again—he was so glad he hadn't eaten anything—and he tried not to look at the light from one of the cameras that someone was pointing at his face. He knew they could only see him in profile, and even then they couldn't get a clear reading through the plastic in his helmet.
No one would know how close to tears he was.
He had waited a lifetime for this.
He wished the internal mikes were off. He wanted to whisper, “Welcome home, gentlemen,” but he was afraid that not only would his team hear him, but so would everyone who watched on Earth.
Instead, he gripped the handle, and yanked.
To his surprise, the hatch moved. Just a little, but it moved all the same.
Some dust and particles fell off the capsule's frame.
He caught himself before he cursed.
He looked at the others and thought he saw surprise through their helmets. They pushed closer to him. The light from the camera was on his superfine white glove.
He braced his other hand on the capsule's side and then pulled again.
The whole capsule shook, but the hatch moved enough that he could see its outline on the frame.
"My heavens,” one of the women said. “We aren't going to have to cut it."
Her voice held a mixture of shock, awe, and relief, precisely the same emotions that Richard was feeling.
He pulled with all his strength.
This time, the hatch fell open, banging against the capsule with a loud clang. Richard stumbled backward, freeing his hand at the last minute, narrowly avoiding being part of that bang of metal against metal.
He hoped he hadn't destroyed anything near the hatch.
The interior was shrouded in darkness.
The team, bless them, didn't move forward, but instead waited for him to get his feet beneath him. He stood upright, still feeling slightly off balance from loosening the hatch, and then headed for the capsule.
He had to remind himself to breathe.
He might find anything in there, from skeletons (depending on how long the environmental systems survived) to carcasses exploded in their environmental suits to body parts strewn throughout the interior because the capsule had somehow gone through explosive decompression.
He had ordered that no one film the interior until he gave the signal. He now hoped that the astronaut he'd given the camera to remembered that instruction.
Richard took a small flashlight one of the archeologists handed to him, then leaned through the hatch.
The interior was dark and, for a moment, his breath stopped in his throat. He couldn't see the astronauts. He braced himself, figuring he'd find parts of them all over the equipment and the metal interior.
He tried to keep his breathing regular, so that anyone listening wouldn't think something was wrong. He shined the light, saw frost on the panel displays, wondered how it got there, then remembered there had to be a lot of biological material in here, and that material had had some time—he wasn't sure how much—to grow.
He hoped some of what he was looking at wasn't the astronauts themselves.
Then he shone the light past the couches to the so-called computer display to the flight equipment. He saw bags against
the side, the pee-tube curled up against one side, and a crumpled food container near one of the storage units.
He stared at all that for a moment, knowing something was wrong, feeling that something was wrong. His subconscious saw it, but his conscious brain hadn't caught up.
He shone the light one more time, registering how small the space was; he wondered how grown men could have survived in this small environment for even a few days, let alone the rest of their lives.
Something had been braced under one of the couches, wrapped in some kind of metallic heat blanket.
Something had been placed there.
Then his consciousness caught up. He saw no evidence of explosive decompression. He saw no evidence of any kind of traumatic sudden end to Apollo 8's mission.
But he saw no evidence of a slow death either, aside from the food container and whatever it was stored under that couch. His hands were shaking, making the light shake.
He examined the interior one last time.
Nothing.
No men, no space suits, no evidence—except those bags and that food wrapper—that anyone had ever been inside this capsule.
"What do you see?” Susan asked from her vantage in the cockpit. The scientists, apparently, could wait him out, but the pilot couldn't.
"Nothing,” he blurted.
"Nothing?” she asked. “What do you mean ‘nothing'?"
"I mean,” he said, “they're gone."
* * * *
The theories came in from all over. The scientific illiterates, the ones he called Flat Earthers, were convinced that friendly aliens had arrived and taken the crew somewhere special. Borman, Lovell, and Anders were now enjoying a new life on some unnamed planet or back on Earth in secret (and unknown) identities at Area 51. Or, Susan had stated sarcastically, they were in that zoo in the Twilight Zone.
Others believed that Richard was too hasty—that they had died in the capsule and he just hadn't seen it. Some wag suggested (and it got credence on the 24-hour news channels for a while) that the astronauts had moved to another dimension, just like in some Star Trek episode.
In fact, much of the chatter that filtered to the Carpathia focused on old science fiction scripts, either from shows like the Outer Limits or Time Tunnel or Land of the Giants. Apparently some of the most renowned scientists of the day were spouting off on the cable channels, and so were some of the better known science-fiction writers.
Richard ignored the chatter. Susan followed it as if it could give her the truth of her experience in space by filtering it through the talking heads on Earth.
The scientists spent days checking the interior for evidence of explosive decompression and found none of it. They did find the mission's carefully protected garbage, which included the feces that they hadn't discarded into space—clean to the last ("from that,” Patricia said, “we can determine how long they lived.")
The scientists found evidence of vomit ("Someone had gotten space sick,” Heidi said. “Probably Anders,” Richard said. “It was his first experience with zero g.").
But they didn't find much else; certainly not brain matter or blood or bits of bone.
They also didn't find evidence of alien arrival—"If it came,” someone said, “it came in a form we don't recognize as living matter."
What they did find, carefully wrapped in a blanket and as much heat shielding material as possible, was the Hasselblad camera the astronauts had taken with them, plus rolls and rolls of film.
Richard would have the film carefully developed and preserved if possible, but he knew, even without the scientists saying much of anything, that the chances of photographs surviving intact for so very long in the radiation and the extreme conditions were next to none.
The astronauts themselves had probably known that and had done what they could to protect it. Along with it were some letters to the families written on the few sheets of fireproof paper the astronauts had brought along. The flight plan was also wrapped with the camera, and on the back of that paper was careful handwriting.
Richard recognized the quote. It was from Genesis:
In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth; and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.
And God saw the light, that it was good.
And God divided the light from the darkness.
And God called the light Day and the darkness He called Night.
And the evening and the morning were the first day...
It went on, quoting the entire passage. Whoever had copied it had done so in a clean hand. Although, looking at it, Richard wasn't sure it was copied. He wondered if someone had written it from memory.
He stared at it a lot as the scientists worked, his gaze always falling on the last few lines:
...And God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering together of the waters called the Seas.
And God saw that it was good.
And then a hasty scrawl:
God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth.
* * * *
Richard was the one who finally told the scientists what happened. He figured it out using four pieces of evidence: the scrawls on the back of the flight plan—"A goodbye note,” he said—the missing space suits, the missing bodies, and the unlatched hatch.
He gathered the entire team into the cargo bay and stood as close to the capsule as he could get. By now, days later, the temperature had returned to normal. The capsule had been scraped and examined and reviewed; most everything that had to be stored had been.
The crew still wore breathing masks—they had to, in case something in the particles caused allergic reactions or other kinds of reactions (and, the scientists insisted) to keep the particulate matter on a flat surface, so that it could be removed.
Richard held the flight plan, wrapped as it was in protective plastic, and stared at it before he even spoke to the team. When he did, he explained his thinking.
"They wrapped up everything they considered important."
Or maybe, he thought to himself, the last person alive had done that. Probably Borman as captain of the mission; old nautical traditions died hard. Richard had seen Borman's handwriting and had a hunch it had been Borman who had written the passage from Genesis on the back of the flight plan.
"Then,” Richard continued, “they put on their space suits, unlatched the hatch, and evacked."
"What?” Heidi said. They weren't being filmed now. The live feed to Earth had ended days ago. “Why would anyone do that?"
Richard glanced at the capsule. “They knew they were going to die."
"You think it was a blaze of glory?” Susan said.
He shook his head. “I don't think they were being dramatic. They were astronauts, for heavens’ sake. They had a choice between dying in a tin can and dying in the freedom of the great unknown."
"They climbed out and pushed off into space?” Patricia asked. “Is that sane?"
"Does it matter?” Richard asked. “They had only two choices of how to die. They took the one they considered to be the best."
"But that took out all possibility of a rescue,” one of the younger scientists said.
Everyone looked at him as if he were crazy.
"They knew they couldn't be rescued,” Richard said. “Not with 1968 technology."
He thought of all the movies made in the 1970s, movies about astronauts being rescued from the Moon, astronauts being rescued from deep space, astronauts being rescued from orbit. The entire country—the entire world—had been haunted by their loss, never realizing that the men had taken the choice away from the rescuers’ and their imaginations long ago.
"So they drifted into nothingness,” Heidi said.
Susan smiled at her. “It's not nothing,” she said quietly. “It's the greatest adventure of all."
* * * *
<
br /> Great adventure or not, Richard now knew that the Carpathia's mission was over. One of the archeologists asked him if the ship would go after the bodies, and he had stared at her, trying to remember her specialty was ancient societies, not modern ones.
"Finding the capsule was a miracle,” he said. “All three of them will be in different orbits, if they still exist. Finding a body in the vastness of space is like finding a needle in a haystack."
Maybe a needle in a galaxy's worth of haystacks.
Still, his own answer echoed in his head. And while his scientists grew excited about new discoveries made every day on the Carpathia, bits and pieces of the Apollo 8 puzzle, he had already gone beyond that.
He needed to figure out how to find three needles.
How did a man search a galaxy's worth of haystacks?
And more to the point, how did he succeed?
* * * *
Part Two: 2018
"We have something,” the researcher said.
Richard pulled up a chair, letting the movement hide his irritation. Of course they had something. If they hadn't had something, he wouldn't have flown halfway across the continent to get here.
But he didn't say anything. The researchers in this wing of the Asteroid Collision Project knew that Richard wasn't really looking for asteroids on a collision path with Earth. He was looking for three bodies, jettisoned into space beyond the Moon sometime between December 27 and December 31, 1968.
This wing of the project—the secret wing—had its own equipment. The rumor in the ACP was that this wing, called ACP-Special (ACP-S), had military and spy satellite connections. The regular ACP employees figured that the ACP-S were searching for bombs or weapons or materiel that other countries had launched into space.
ACP did have a military arm; it needed one, in case one of the asteroids on a collision course with Earth was large enough to threaten human life or was small but on a trajectory that might harm the transports to the Moon Base.
It had been a long time since he had been in this room. He hadn't been to the ACP since it had been built nine years before. This room, and the equipment inside, had layers of security protocols just to reach the interior.
Asimov's SF, February 2007 Page 16
