by Jeff Pollard
But these creatures aren't so eternal. And when one dies, the other no longer wants the twin rings. Now the rings take on a new meaning and soon find themselves inside a spacecraft, riding a rocket, sharing another experience with the creature that found them. Having finally fallen out of interplanetary purgatory and accreted into the sixth largest concrescence in the system, these twin orbits of nickel, a ghostly signature of the iron-60 created in a supernova that seeded our stellar nursery with the elements that would go on to make complex life possible, now find themselves moved by intelligent life forms off and away from the sixth largest body and instead deposited in the soft loose soil of the fourteenth largest body.
As the rings settle into the coarse grains, other creatures stand over the rings and shed tears, thinking of the creature that discovered the twin rings.
These are some of things that hydrogen atoms do when given gravity and billions of years.
Kingsley drops to his knees on the lunar surface, at the north rim of Tycho Crater. He's transported through space and time to the moment when he felt the lifeblood escape from Travis Clayton. Kingsley is reminded that nothing is ever permanent. Our lives end, sometimes abruptly and without warning. Even these rings, this monument, will not be here forever. The Moon itself is living on borrowed time, waiting until the Sun rips it apart, the result of another one of those nuclear fires desperately switching to a different fuel. Kingsley thinks about what might happen then. Perhaps the rings will survive the breakup of the Moon and the dying of the Sun. Perhaps they'll float in interstellar space, still intact, still as rings. But they almost certainly won't stay together. They'll float apart, separated, never to meet again. Eventually they'll probably be melted down and even the individual molecules will be dispersed. If you think the universe is a harsh environment for delicate humans, consider that it isn't even a hospitable place for chunks of nickel.
In this moment, watching Kingsley cry, Caroline suddenly realizes that she's an eight kilometer drive away from a spacecraft that has to work and take her back into orbit, rendezvous and dock with another spacecraft, and that spacecraft has to work, and then maybe she can get back to Earth. That's a long daisy-chain of failure points between safety and her and the lifeforms she carries with her.
Now that her visit to the Moon is nearly over, the time to head back to the lander almost here, she starts to regret the predicament her past self has put her present self into.
Kingsley struggles to get to his feet and finally hops into the air.
“Alright, we've got work to do,” K says, still facing away from his comrades, not wanting them to see the tears he can't wipe away.
“I wonder if anyone will ever find these rings and wonder how they were made,” Tim Bowe says quietly.
“They'll just assume they're man-made,” K says. “Or they'll make a History Channel show about how Egyptians had a jewelry making colony on the Moon and the pyramids were their communication device to talk to the Moongyptians.”
This is the fourth and final day on the surface, and this is the fourth and final EVA. They mount up on the Wally rover and this time Jim Lovell is given the controls. They need to collect the core samples from the drill before heading east to explore along the outside of the crater rim.
“Wait, what's that?” Caroline asks, stopping to look at a rock sticking out of the crater rim. Lovell and Bowe are a few hundred meters to the North, exploring separately. “Check this out,” Caroline says as she bends over at the waist to get a better look. Kingsley comes up behind her grabbing her hips and humping her. “Very funny.”
“I was thinking we could cut our EVA a little short, get back before Jim and Tim and then we can initiate operation MoonSpank.”
“You're just always thinking about sex,” Caroline says.
“We can be the first people to bang on the Moon, and the first to bang in three different gravity fields. Once we add Mars we'll be able to write the interplanetary Kama Sutra. It'll be our real legacy.”
“No but seriously, check this out,” Caroline replies. K joins her, dropping to his knees to examine this flat rock sticking out of the soil almost vertically.
“I can see some twinning in there,” K says.
“You talking about the rock or still thinking about me?” Caroline asks.
“It works both ways,” K replies.
“So what is it?” Caroline asks.
“Plagioclase feldspar, and also some glass, maybe maskelynite. This could be a piece of the original lunar crust that was here and then heavily shocked by the Tycho impact.”
“It must be important then I take it.”
“This is what we came for,” K replies. “This harsh angle kept it from accumulating lunar soil, so it's been exposed and therefore we can get a great age approximation by measuring its cosmic ray exposure. If that number comes back at about the age of Tycho Crater, we'll know when it was deposited like this.”
“Check out the layers you can see on this,” Caroline says.
“This is a hell of a rock.”
“And I discovered it. Looks like I'm not just some bimbo duchess huh?”
“Well lets pick it up, then go directly back to the lander so we can celebrate by making a lunar sex tape.” Caroline simply ignores Kingsley and grabs one side of the rock and pulls. It doesn't budge.
“Give me a hand will ya.” They both bend at the knees, get a good hold, pull up on the huge rock and absolutely nothing happens.
“Tim-Jim, this is your King speaking, would you guys get the rover and come meet us.” While they wait for Tim and Jim and the rover, Kingsley and Caroline brush away soil from the base of the rock and try to see just how large the chunk is. They quickly discover that they can't find the end of it. It seems to stick several meters into the ground.
“We're gonna have to break it off,” K says. They all have rock hammers with them to break off samples. But this task looks more like chopping down a tree made of stone. K sizes up the rock for a good spot to begin chopping.
“Do we have a weight limit?” Caroline asks.
“Yeah, we can't take on more than 500 kilograms of samples.”
“And how much do we already have?”
“Probably 300 at least.”
“So how much of this thing can we take?” Caroline asks. K puts his hand on the rock, drawing an imaginary line.
“You think from there up is less than 200 kilos?” Caroline asks skeptically.
“Definitely.”
“Do I get to name it? I mean, that's why you explore things right, you get the god-like power of naming stuff.”
“It's also why you write Harry Potter novels,” K replies.
“I want to call it Selene,” Caroline says.
“Let's see what they think about our find first,” K says. Tim and Jim arrive on Wally and stop thirty meters away since the terrain is pretty rough.
Jim is immediately excited by the find and the four of them get to work hacking away at the rock like a team of lunar-lumberjacks. They fell the stone and hop out of the way as it falls to the ground.
“How much do you think it weighs?” K asks Tim. Bowe gets down and lifts the rock up.
“Oh I'd say it's a good eighty pounds.”
“That's all?” Caroline asks.
“It feels like eighty pounds,” Tim says.
“So a mass of 220 kilograms,” K says.
“Too big?” Caroline asks. K takes the rock from Tim.
“I'd say more like 30 kilos,” K says.
“So a mass of 180 kilos,” Caroline replies. “So the science nerd thinks it's fine and the pilot thinks it's too heavy.”
“That's about right,” Tim says.
“Let me give it a try,” Jim Lovell says. K hands over the rock. “We actually did some of this in astronaut training in the sixties. They didn't really know what astronauts would need to do, so they just made us do all kinds of crazy stuff and figured if we could hand
le crazy things we'd be fine.”
“They had you guess the weights of things?” Tim asks.
“By the end of it they were making us hold our breath in a pitch-black tank of water for four minutes with our hands tied,” Jim responds. “Okay, I'm gonna say this is 73.3 pounds.”
“Point-three?” Tim asks incredulously. “You can say that precisely?”
“What's that in MoonKilos?” Jim asks. K does the math in his head and then looks at Jim suspiciously. “What?”
“It comes out to 199.9,” K says.
“So it's under the weight limit,” Jim says cheerfully.
“Yeah, or you worked backwards from the weight limit and made your guess the exact number of pounds to get it under the limit, then made up a story about being a human scale.”
“Well the only way to know is to bring it home and weigh it on Earth,” Jim says. Tim and K lift up the Selene rock and carefully find a place on the Wally rover to store it.
“Pegasus, Hawthorne,” Sylvia calls from her station as CAPCOM.
“Pegasus,” Bowe replies as they insert the rock between the two back seats.
“You guys might want to take a gander to the south, the Luna 100 lander is about to take-off and NASA wants Wally's cameras to document it. Liftoff is in fifteen minutes.”
“Roger that,” Tim replies. With the rock loaded up, the four of them climb aboard Wally and Tim carefully drives the rover back up to the edge of the crater rim, avoiding rocky outcroppings along the way. He gets Wally up to safety and turns the rover around, facing south into Tycho Crater, with the central peak before them.
“Hawthorne, what's the ETA?” Tim asks.
“73 seconds,” Sylvia replies. They dismount from the rover and stand on the rim of the crater. The liftoff of the ULA Luna 100 missions is another reminder that their own mission is nearly over.
“We're gonna need to head back as soon as this is over,” Tim says. “Take it in guys, it's almost over.”
“This has been the fastest four days of my life,” Caroline says.
“Next thing you know we're gonna be sipping crappy champagne at a fundraiser while Richard Branson talks our ears off about how he beat us to the Moon,” K says. “That's the rest of our lives, fundraisers, people asking us what the Moon's like, so take it in.”
“That's better than being constantly asked about not walking on the Moon,” Jim adds.
The Boeing Lunar Lander Armstrong blasts off silently in the distance. It will go straight up before pitching over, heading south and away from them on its way to orbit.
The Armstrong rides an invisible flame, coming level with the horizon for the Pegasus 3 crew.
“That doesn't look right,” Tim says. The Armstrong seems to be slowing down during its ascent, as if Tycho Crater has the Armstrong in its gravitational tractor beam and is unwilling to let it go. The Armstrong seems to hover over the middle of Tycho Crater. Then it begins to fall back down.
“Oh god,” Caroline says, trying to put her hands to her mouth except there's a helmet in the way.
The Armstrong's main engine has failed. Dexter Houston tries to get the engine restarted and/or figure out the nature of the problem while simultaneously trying to slow the Armstrong's descent as it has several kilometers of altitude between it and an impact with the crater floor. The RCS jets fire continuously as Dexter uses the maneuvering thrusters to slow the Armstrong's fall. It's a losing battle as the thrusters don't have enough force to counter the weight of the ship, but they can at least prevent the ship from free-falling at top speed.
The Pegasus 3 crew watches as the Armstrong loses its fight with gravity and crashes in Tycho Crater some 45 kilometers away. The gold and silver dot is clearly damaged, bits of debris fly away from the impact. They can't perceive the extent of the damage from this distance, but they all already know instinctively that the Armstrong will not be able to take back off again.
What they can't know is whether the whole Luna 100 crew is already dead or merely waiting to die.
Chapter 33
The failure of the Armstrong is well documented. Despite occurring hundreds of thousands of miles from Earth, it's witnessed live by millions. Wally provides a stereoscopic, albeit far away, view of the crash. The Armstrong itself has a multitude of cameras, both inside and outside, that were broadcasting during the launch. Of course, all the Armstrong's cameras are lost when the Boeing Lunar Lander crashes. The horror that strikes the crew between engine failure and the moment of impact is well documented by cameras on the inside of the cabin. But at impact all signals except those coming from the SpacEx crew more than forty kilometers away are lost.
The entire world is left to wonder if they've just witnessed the next Challenger or the next Apollo 13. There is no immediate way of knowing if any of the crew of Luna 100 have survived the impact.
All eyes and speculation turn to the SpacEx crew as saviors.
“It's not that simple,” K says.
“Why can't we fly over into the crater, land next to them, see if there are any survivors, pull them out, then fly back to orbit?” Caroline asks. “Why can't we do that?”
“Fuel,” Tim says coldly. The SpacEx crew has already returned to Pegasus lander and re-entered the cabin, returning as quickly as they could to conserve suit oxygen and try to come up with a plan before their dwindling resources run out. They were scheduled to leave in just a few hours.
“It can't be that much fuel,” Caroline insists.
“Off the top of my head, we've got 2.5 kilometers per second of delta-v to get back to orbit, a maneuver that requires 2.2 kilometers per second,” K says. “We've got 300 meters per second of margin. Taking off, going 50 kilometers horizontally, then landing again is probably 400 meters per second of delta-v at the very very least. Even if we could do it within the margin, if we pick up four survivors, we're taking on maybe 300 kilos and that will eat into our delta-v we need to get to orbit.”
“It might be possible,” Tim says, “if we get rid of all the unnecessary weight we can. Ditch all our surface samples, throw out our EVA suits, get rid of any food we have on board, I'm talking everything that's not absolutely critical. Then maybe, maybe, we can get there and take on four people and get back to orbit.”
“I don't think so,” K says.
“It's worth trying,” Caroline insists.
“We don't even know if anyone's alive down there,” K replies. “You want to get there, realize they're dead, then try to get back to orbit and find out we don't have the fuel and we end up crashing on the far side of the Moon? This isn't some vague situation like risking your life to run into a burning building to save lives. This is a very well defined situation, and I'm not making any decision based on emotion. Before we try anything, we're gonna crunch the numbers, and that will tell us what to do.”
“For what it's worth, I don't care if we know, you don't leave anyone behind,” Tim Bowe says. He doesn't need to remind anyone that he was a decorated helicopter pilot that put himself into peril to save others on numerous occasions.
“Hawthorne, Pegasus, do we have any progress on figuring out if there are survivors?” K asks.
“Negative so far,” Sylvia replies from Mission Control. “They're trying everything, but no radio contact so far.”
“Do we know the impact speed?” K asks.
“Hold on, I think we have that,” Sylvia replies.
“Trying to figure out if they're already dead so we don't have to try?” Caroline asks.
“Wait a minute,” Jim Lovell speaks up. “We have telescopes. We can go look for ourselves.”
Kingsley and Caroline exit the Pegasus and walk to the pair of telescopes K and Tim placed on the first day. They remove one, unfastening it from the lunar surface, packing up the solar power supply and then loading it up on Wally. The two of them ride in silence to the south, toward the crater rim. K drives Wally as fast as he can, conserving suit oxygen.
&n
bsp; “K we've got that number for you,” Josh Yerino, CAPCOM, says on the radio.
“What was it?” K asks.
“Thirty-six meters per second.”
“Copy,” K says.
“How bad is that?” Caroline asks.
“That's about 80 miles per hour,” K says. If they landed square on the landing legs, the legs should cushion the impact somewhat, but even with some protection it'd still be like hitting a brick wall at maybe 60 miles per hour. The ship is certainly destroyed. It's doubtful that all four of them could have survived. And if they did, cabin pressure was lost, thus they're all on just their pressure suits. And an impact like that...hard to say if any of their suits are still intact. They may have survived the impact but asphyxiated soon after.”
“The last thing they would have experienced would have been the strong smell of burnt gunpowder,” Caroline says sadly.
They reach the crater rim and quickly work to setup the telescope. They can't physically look through the scope, it has no eyepiece, so they plant it and then immediately head back to their lander. They listen on the drive back as Tim and Jim control the telescope and zoom in on the crash site.
“What do you guys got?” K asks.
“Hold on, we're still getting it in focus,” Jim replies.
“I wish we could just drive down there and get them,” Caroline says.
“Too far, too steep. We can't drive fifty kilometers there and fifty kilometers back in time before we'd run out of oxygen.”
“I know, I just wish we could at least go see,” Caroline replies.
