Moon For Sale

by Jeff Pollard

  The flaw was the result of a basic engineering error. An engineer had created the EAGLE in a computer, using the exact location of the thruster nozzle exit as the point where the thrust exits. Then when calculating the direction of thrust when changing the angle of the nozzle, he had simply changed the angle of the exhaust, without changing the coordinate point of the nozzle exit. But when you turn the nozzle, the exhaust is no longer exiting at the same point.

  Because they stopped the burn, they lost vertical speed, thus they needed to regain some vertical speed, so they don't thrust directly at the horizon, but a few degrees above it. Kingsley does some quick mental math to try to figure out how long they need to thrust above the horizon in order to compensate for the loss of vertical speed caused by their aborted first burn. He checks his math on his wrist and then tells Lovell how much longer to keep this orientation before they need to lower the nose and burn completely horizontally.

  When they reach the end of the burn and need to lower the nose, Lovell presses the nozzle lever backward, pointing it forward of straight down. This moves the center of thrust behind the center of gravity, causing the nose to come down. Then he moves the lever back to 90 degrees. By making slight adjustments with the lever, he can maintain their attitude, at least in one axis.

  Soon they reach the time and K tells Lovell to shut it down.

  “So, we might now be in orbit,” K says tentatively. They are heading quickly toward the South Pole and the terminator, where light turns to dark. “There's Shackleton Crater,” K says. “That's where the lunar base is supposed to go. Malapert Mountain is a good spot for a solar array, the peak is always in sunlight.”

  “What's your oxygen at?” Lovell asks. “I'm at eighteen minutes.”

  “Me too,” K says. He's actually at sixteen. The two of them float silently above the lunar surface, covering nearly two kilometers of ground distance every second.

  “So you think we're in orbit?” Lovell asks.

  “I sure hope so,” K replies. “I think it's time to meditate and try to conserve oxygen.”

  “Does that work? Can you really use less?”

  “David Blaine told me it works,” K replies.

  “What's the first symptom that we'll get when we run out?” Lovell asks.

  “Euphoria,” K replies.

  They cross the terminator and the sun sets, casting them into darkness. The stars quickly appear, having been difficult to spot with such a bright Moon and Sun in their field of view. More stars than you will ever see from Earth. K turns off the back-light on his wrist-display. Lovell follows suit, removing the last traces of light. The Milky Way appears in all its glory.

  They fly on, waiting for a miraculous rescue or a slow fading death. They are in complete darkness, unable to even see their hands in front of their faces. In such darkness, their own bodies seem like nothing more than concepts. They look at the stars in silence, breathing shallow, in a trance-like meditative state. The depth of the star field seems to rush toward and away from them simultaneously, like the vertigo effect dolly-zoom that's been famously employed in many films, perhaps Jaws being the most prominent example. We tend to see the stars like they are on a dome, a physical plane made of points of light that spins around or planet, rather than the true three dimensional grand structure. But for a moment, the stars come alive.

  Kingsley finds himself forgetting, ever so briefly, that he may be about to die, just being happy in this moment, getting to experience this. It's a wonderful gift, even if his death is imminent, what better way to go?

  Those points of light in the Milky Way, seemingly unmoving, really are moving, and quite fast. Whipping around the galaxy every 200 hundred million years or so, orbiting on time-scales so large as to make their movement almost imperceptible on a biological scale.

  Kingsley Pretorius feels one with the universe. Not some alien, but a piece of the universe, the product of it, the result of fusion, gravity, a cauldron of organic molecules, evolution that culls the herd for the most advantageous changes to the molecular code, resulting in tool-using apes who looked up and figured out what those lights in the sky were, discovered the laws of motion, deduced the possibility of space travel, and put Kingsley on the far-side of the Moon, strapped to an ass-guided rocket-chair and looking out on the universe with a nearly complete understanding of what he is looking at and his place within it. It's a feeling K has felt before, but it usually requires a dose of DMT.

  K giggles with glee, smiling at the heavens, unable to contain his happiness. He knows that the DMT-like high is probably the result of this near-death-experience. He's had those before too. His experience of the grand spins around and zooms in on the brain, on the neuro-chemicals creating his feelings and influencing his consciousness. What a glorious world to live in, one where you can zoom out as far as light will travel and understand anything you see, meanwhile you can turn that zoom inward on the smallest of scales, on to the receptors in the brain and the lock-and-key like mechanisms that create near-death-experiences and understand that too. And you can experience the beauty of the very large and the very small simultaneously. What a world. What a moment in time. What a place to be. Euphoria is the only word to describe this feeling.

  Suddenly a spacecraft flies overhead, like the Star Destroyer at the beginning of Star Wars. It seems impossibly large, powerful. It says SpacEx down the side, and K reads it as it goes by. The craft is bullet shaped, a blunt cone at the top, tapering off to a cylinder. It has windows along the side, perhaps fifteen of them. This is no Griffin. This is a Mars Colonial Transporter.

  The MCT enters the Martian atmosphere nose first, heating up and creating a field of plasma. It flips around and activates its Raptor engines to slow it to a soft touchdown on red soil, right on target. Tycho Pretorius steps out of the MCT and hops out onto the Martian surface. Tycho hops along for several hundred meters, past some cargo Griffins, past a 3D-printed shelter, past a greenhouse and a Bigelow inflatable and a solar array. Beyond this ring of the settlement, Tycho comes to a gravestone:

  Here Lies Kingsley and Caroline Pretorius.

  “Kingsley. K. K, you there?”

  Kingsley wakes up, out of his space-suit, an oxygen mask on his face. Tim Bowe floats in front of him. K isn't sure if he can believe his eyes. Jim, Sergei, Dexter, everyone seems to be staring at him. Everyone but Caroline.

  “He's awake!” Bowe says. K, dizzy, light-headed, hears crying, sobbing, and looks around for the source, finally discovering that Caroline is floating up above him. Caroline is unable to contain her emotions. K looks around and finds his EVA suit floating in the corner. He reaches for the suit, for a pocket on the side of the left thigh. He extracts something and pushes his feet against the bulkhead, floating towards Caroline.

  He presents a golf-ball sized lump of plagioclase feldspar, a glassy rock twinged with a rainbow of colors. “It's a piece of the Selene rock,” K says. “Thought we could make some rings.”