Come In, Collins

by Bill Patterson

  ***

  “T minus ten minutes,” said Peter Brinker. “All stations, report readiness to launch.” He didn't mean at the same time, of course. Just like launch operations for the past century, there was a specific order in which the subgroups on the effort reported.

  “Range is go.” This meant there was nobody within the safety limits of Sandy, or anywhere along her expected trajectory.

  McCrary listened with half an ear. The team was broken into a series of subsections: Range, Tracking, Radar, Electronics, Payload, and Vehicle. The number was reduced from the more familiar ones in the UN Space Operations launch facilities. There, there were a lot more required departments, including securing the launch area from curious and stupid onlookers. Here, of course, everyone was smart enough to stay away from Sandy.

  “Payload is go.” The bomb appeared ready to go.

  “Vehicle is go.” The remains of Sandy were ready for their final mission.

  “Commander.” McCrary came out of his fugue and looked at Peter at the LOC console.

  “Commander is go. Launch Sandy,” McCrary said.

  “Launch commit is go. We will come out of the pre-planned seven-minute hold within the next thirty-seven seconds. From seven minutes down to T minus fifteen seconds, controllers will call an abort with 'abort-abort-abort'. In the case of an abort, all controllers will safe their stations and recycle to the T minus seven-minute position. From T minus fifteen seconds, controllers will not abort, and the final commit unlock will be governed by the Launch Director.” Peter continued with the launch briefing, and McCrary fought to remain in the here-and-now, instead of thinking about all of his previous launch experiences, both from behind a console as well as within the vehicle.

  ***

  Sandy had to be the most ungainly vehicle ever launched. The lower stage was mostly unchanged from its previous service as an orbital transfer vehicle. From the final engine bulkhead forward, though, the vehicle was completely different. The entire crew, payload, and pilot cabins were torched away. The amputations were not gentle, and marks of the arc torches were easily visible—scorched paint, ragged edges, and runnels of melted aluminum dribbled down the sides of the formerly beautiful spacecraft.

  Atop the engine bulkhead was a solid aluminum/magnesium plate three meters thick and arching upward, forming a parabolic dish. Four solid columns rose through the dish, continuing ten meters in the sky. Atop the columns was another sheet of aluminum, eight meters on a side, half a meter thick, and roughly polished to a bright finish.

  Within the columns was a single solid pillar, and atop the pillar at the approximate focus of the parabolic dish and beneath the top plate, was a roughed-in box about three meters square. Within that box was the nuclear bomb.

  “The concept is simple,” McCrary had explained to Commander Lee. “When the nuke goes off, the shock wave will reflect off of the parabolic dish for a fraction of a second before the dish is vaporized. But that reflected shock wave will reverse and go in the direction of the target. Above the bomb is a large sheet of aluminum, placed in the correct location for maximum effectiveness. In space, the only effect that can be transmitted from the bomb to the impactor is the large flash of energy, which unfortunately is not enough. The blast won't do much either, since the only parts that will make up the hydrodynamic shock wave are the parts of the bomb, vaporized. Even Sandy won't help, since it will be accelerated away from the impactor as it gets vaporized.

  “So, the overhead sheet is there to form a plasma?” asked Lee.

  “Correct, sir. It forms a dense plasma, the shock wave reflected from the parabolic dish drives the plasma into the impactor, and the whole mess shoves the impactor to a higher orbit.”

  “Any idea of yield?” asked Lee.

  “Well, you're not going to believe this,” said McCrary. “Vito thinks he can get a half megaton out of it.”

  “That's incredible!” said Lee.

  “Calm down, sir!” said McCrary. “We're perfectly safe here. There are hills between us and the detonation point. We'll have to deploy cameras to witness anything.”

  “No, I understood that the first time, McCrary. I was just amazed at the yield. I was expecting a twenty-kiloton, not five hundred.”

  “So was I. Mr. VonShaick was most insistent that the higher yield was not only possible, but probable.”

  “Amazing,” Lee said quietly.

  “Better get some rest, sir. I'll make sure you don't miss the big show.”

  ***

  Billy was thinking about EN-27. How close to the name of an isotope that was. Eternium 27. Might as well be. He idly flipped the infrared filter over the spotter scope to look around the lunar disk for hot spots. Impacts always left hot spots. The lasers were firing, and their waste heat was too small to show up on the spotter scope, although a small blob indicated the heat cast off of Mighty Thor.

  Billy sat back from the monitor. Thor. Nuclear power. Naw—there's no way to do anything but get power from a thorium reactor. Hmmm.

  He called up an online encyclopedia, searched for thorium power cycle. Uh-huh, protactium, right, U-232, proliferation resistance. Wait.

  Instead of a neutron reflector, if a reactor is surrounded by a blanket of thorium-232, and the protactium is removed before it is transmuted to uranium-232, then the proliferation resistance of that isotope is likewise removed, leaving protactium-233 which will decay in about a month to fissile uranium-233.

  He sent an email to Doctor Circe and Director Fenester. “Peculiarities in the path of EN-27. Require your input.

  ***

  “This better be good, Billy,” said Jama. “I left a donor party to get here.”

  “Doctor Circe will be here in ten minutes,” said Billy. “I am sorry to ruin your evening, but I think there's a good chance you'd rather be here when I tell you what's up.”

  “This EN-27. It's just a rock circling the Moon, right?”

  “Yes, ma'am. It's about two hundred meters long, and it's going to impact the Moon in three to four months’ time, about five kilometers from the Collins.”

  “What?” she shouted. “Why didn't you tell me about this earlier?”

  “What could we do?” asked Billy. “We're trapped at the wrong end of a shooting gallery. OK, say we're going to send them a big tug to pull the rock out of the way.”

  Jama snorted.

  “Or a bomb, something, anything. No matter what we send, it will be full of holes and mostly worthless by the time it gets there. We can't do a thing but watch.”

  “So, for this you drag me out of a function?”

  “No, ma'am, but I'd really rather wait for the Doctor to get here first.”

  “I'm here,” said Doctor Circe, emerging from the light-lock into the darkened dome. “Sorry, I was jogging.”

  “In the dark?” asked Jama. “Isn't that dangerous?”

  “Not really,” said the older man. “Besides, I'd really rather not have a 'fat old man in speedo' video going viral. So, what's the hoo-rah, boy?”

  Billy laid out, briefly, how he got to the point where he had to alert them.

  “Frankly, I think they're going to do something about EN-27, and I think I know what it is.”

  Jama and the Doctor looked at him. He looked back, expectantly.

  “No, boy, I'm not going to guess, tell us, dammit!” said the old man. Jama nodded her agreement.

  “They're going to fly a bomb to the rock and blast it to a higher orbit.”

  ***

  “Coming up on T minus one minute,” said Peter. Around him, other LOC personnel had their heads riveted at screens full of data. “Vehicle, set ground support computer to 'launch'.”

  “Computer set to 'launch',” replied a voice.

  “O2 tanks are at full pressure, H2 tanks pressurizing.” The flow of orders was quiet, precise. Unless one looked closely, it was difficult to tell that this was a unique launch. The nervousness appeared in the twitching of fingers, or the way a pen would be spun
around the fingers of one hand, quite unconsciously.

  “Forty-five seconds.” McCrary held his breath. It was always in these last few seconds that an abort was most feared.

  “Thirty. Vehicle is now on internal power, ground support computer has control of all events leading to the launch.” Peter reached over to the top center of his console, flipped aside the plastic cover on a yellow and red striped button, and laid his thumb on it.

  “Ten, nine, eight,” he intoned, in a ritual that was over one hundred years old.

  “Come on, baby,” whispered Commander Lee, from his bunk in Sick Bay.

  “Seven, six,” Peter continued.

  “Come on, come on,” murmured Irma Huertas, from her bunk in the crew dorm. A couple of her bunkmates looked at her strangely.

  “Five, four, three,” Peter pressed the button down, committing the vehicle to launch.

  “Main engine start, and liftoff!” cried Peter. He let go of the button and scanned his board rapidly. Behind him, his fallback controller, on hand only if Peter should suffer some kind of physical problem, took over the description of the flight for the benefit of the Collins workforce.

  “The vehicle has completed the pitch and roll maneuver, aligning it to the correct orientation for its destination over the perilune point. We are currently T minus two minutes before the next passage of the impactor. Radar has picked up the impactor within five meters of its expected position.

  “Mission time T plus one minute. Vehicle is accelerating smoothly, with minimal wobble from its top-heavy load. There is, of course, no air resistance here on the Moon. T plus two minutes. Performance nominal. Impactor overflight in twelve seconds. Seven. Impactor in sight. Overflight at seventy-three point four kilometers. Radar data is being automatically fed into the course computers and uplinked to Sandy. New trajectory and detonation point have been calculated and sent to Sandy.”

  “Detonation point has been changed by less than five meters. Sandy is executing routine 12E, decreasing thrust. This is to be expected, as we don't want Sandy to be above the impactor at detonation! Inertial navigation shows Sandy will be five hundred meters below impactor's flight path when impactor is acquired by on-board ranging.

  “T plus three minutes. Performance nominal. Detonation coming up at T plus five minutes, forty point three seconds, mark.

  “T plus four minutes, Detonation in D minus one hundred seconds. Bomb fusing is activated. McCrary has one deadman switch in his hand, Controller Brinker the other. We are go for detonation in sixty seconds.

  “Detonation in D minus thirty seconds. Vehicle performance nominal. Tank pressurization good. Velocity downrange is three hundred meters per second, altitude forty kilometers, closing to fifty. Twenty seconds. Deadman switches depressed and held high. All indicators green.”

  “Helium 3 filling the weapons box now. This will initiate a low-grade fusion reaction during detonation. Five seconds. Four. Three. Two. One. Deton…” The voice of the backup controller fuzzed out throughout the Collins.

  McCrary blinked his eyes to rid them of the sudden blinding lights from outside the Operations windows. He looked out cautiously. A vast purple rippling was making its way overhead. “What the devil?”

  In Sick Bay, Weng Ho Lee chuckled. “Somehow, the concept of 'the Moon is in a vacuum' never gets reexamined.”

  Vito looked up from his post in Operations. “My console's dead. I think it went off just fine.”

  On the repeater screens, the remote cameras from near the original perilune location seemed to have recovered from the huge radiation overload to their optics. The color circuits were recovering, but for the moment, the black-and-white image showed a vast shape, glowing vigorously in the visible spectrum. At least one camera was instrumented and calibrated at McCrary's insistence.

  “Radar?” called McCrary.

  “Too much interference,” called the operator.

  “Come on! We only have three minutes before it moves out of line-of-sight.”

  “Can't change the laws of nature, chief,” said the operator cheerfully. “But I will let you know when we get an image.”

  “Optical?” McCrary asked. Peter Brinker had worked with McCrary long enough to know that his Chief was not mad at him, he was fully immersed in The Problem, and was trying to get information, even if it wasn't the politest way of doing so.

  “We have an image and some crude orbital elements,” said the person in charge of the telescopic cameras. “Good thing it didn't break up,” she said. “Then it would have been a skeet shoot.”

  “Good. What about the orbit? Did we change it?”

  “Optical verifies that the impactor was enveloped by the center-of-mass of the exploding bomb. Movement has occurred, but we don't have good enough data to give you a curve.”

  “Damn,” said McCrary. “I don't know whether to cheer or scramble around, buttoning up the joint.”

  ***

  “What?” shouted Jama. “With what?”

  Billy laid out his guesswork. “They'll have to do something to shove the rock into a higher orbit now, before it hits. I think they are going to nuke it, using U-233 from the Mighty Thor. I'm just not sure how they are going to get the bomb up to the rock.”

  Then he put the current image from Cyclops on the monitor.

  “Holy Jesus!” Doctor Circe shouted. “Look at the infrared! That's got to be a launch plume!”

  “Shut the dome!” shouted Jama. Billy was already halfway to the control, pounding the big red button with his fist. The dome's rotation motors spun up agonizingly slow, but the huge mass of steel began pivoting around, closing the opening through which the scope was exposed to the sky.

  “Sun shade! Get the sunshade in place!” shouted Doctor Circe. He was already shutting the aperture on the spotter scope.

  A sudden rattle of keys caused them to look over at Jama. “Telling everyone to close their domes, too.”

  A half-meter slit wasn’t much on a dome that was fifteen meters across. But it was enough to temporarily blind the three occupants of the Spartanburg Observatory when the Moon was suddenly washed out in a brilliant glare.

  ***

  The controllers were working against one of the frustrating things about nuclear weapons. Unless one is equipped with radiation-resistant sensors, the effects of a nuclear explosion disable all other kinds of detectors. Radar was full of fuzz, optics overloaded from the sudden flash of detonation, and other means of detection wouldn’t work at all.

  McCrary could ill afford to wait. However, a quirk in the rock's orbit meant that they would get to glimpse the impactor for a short period of time, around apolune, to see how much the orbit changed. That was nine days away, though, as the big chunk of rock was rotating over the horizon and away from limited observation point.

  “Can you give me a best guess, Radar, before we lose it?”

  “Not yet, sir. I cannot cleanly image the impactor in all of the overlapping bands of noise.”

  “Fine,” he said grumpily. He looked out the window again. “Why is there this haze?”

  The controllers were well trained. Nobody came to join him at the window, except for Vito VonShaick.

  “Looks like a coronal discharge,” he said quietly. “I am betting that all of our communication gear is down.”

  “We know. But what caused it?” McCrary hated being without answers, and this was definitely beyond his ken.

  Vito rubbed his chin. “I wonder,” he began, before subsiding. He continued to stare at the strange glow.

  “Wonder what?” asked McCrary after a lapse of several minutes. “What has you so concerned?”

  “Well, remember how we were surprised by the beams of light from our lasers? Someone, I don't know who, took a spectrum of the light, and compared it to some Lunar samples. Turns out that we have a tenuous atmosphere, one made out of the dust that we kick up here. The crazy thing is, when you detonate a nuke above an atmosphere of dust, you'll get the same kind of weird effects that
they had during open air testing back on Earth.

  “The dust gets ionized. Some of the gas shakes off some adsorbed atoms that had plated themselves over the particle. The result of all this is an atmosphere at a rather low pressure.”

  “A neon light,” breathed McCrary.

  “Not just that. The material of the dust itself fluoresces as well. So, you have two different sources of light. I would say that it is pretty persuasive evidence that the bomb worked.”

  “Oh, we know the bomb worked, Mr. VonShaick. The real question is, did it move the impactor enough? Or is it still going to crash into the Moon?”

  “It will still crash into the Moon. And relatively soon, too.”

  “Wait, what?” asked McCrary. “Why did we go through all of this, then?”

  Vito shook out of his reverie. “Oh, by relatively, I am talking perhaps a hundred years. Not tomorrow. And probably not in the next three months, either. It's just that when you have such a tightly bound orbiting object like the Moon around the Earth, things like our little impactor get their orbital energy bled away and drill into whatever they are orbiting fairly quickly, in the larger scope of things.”

  McCrary glared at Vito. “Stop scaring me like that. Now, get out of here.” Vito turned to go, but McCrary put out his hand. “Wait a minute, please. Let me ask you, how much thorium do you have stockpiled for Mighty Thor?”

  “What do you need it for?” he asked. “Because if I tell you I have x amount of thorium, it might not be in a form that you can use. What do you have in mind?”

  “You know how we boosted the danger away from us with a nuke? Maybe something like that would allow us to get home sometime.”

  Vito's eyes lit up. “Orion!” McCrary made shushing motions.

  “For heaven's sake, man, keep your voice down! It's only a concept right now. I don't want the natives to get restless. I'm only thinking about it, and my palms are sweating. Just let me know how many pony nukes you can make in a reasonable time. No blockbusters, just a couple of kilotons is all we need, but we'll need a couple of hundred, I think.”