Transformers Dark of the Moon

by Peter David

  vi

  On May 25, 1961, before a special joint session of Congress, President John F. Kennedy gave what he considered to be the single most important speech of his presidency, if not his life. Only a handful of people truly understood the subtext of what he was discussing, and they were sworn to secrecy under threat of treason.

  One of them was Aaron Brooks. He sat with his arm draped around Carla Spencer, who nestled against him on the couch, listening attentively.

  “First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space, and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish. We propose to accelerate the development of the appropriate lunar spacecraft. We propose to develop alternate liquid and solid fuel boosters, much larger than any now being developed, until certain which is superior. We propose additional funds for other engine development and for unmanned explorations—explorations which are particularly important for one purpose which this nation will never overlook: the survival of the man who first makes this daring flight. But in a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the moon—if we make this judgment affirmatively, it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there.”

  Neither of them dared say aloud what was going through their minds, because they had had hammered into them, by no less than Director Webb himself, the necessity of keeping silent about the impetus for what they were hearing. Let the rest of the world believe that this was in response to the Russians. But Brooks and his people, they knew better.

  Still, the matter could be addressed without actually being addressed.

  “Do you think they’ll go for it?” she asked.

  “I certainly hope so,” Brooks said. “Because I’m telling you right now: I don’t think we can afford not to.”

  HOUSTON, TEXAS—

  JULY 20, 1969

  i

  “I’m at the foot of the ladder. The LM footpads are only depressed in the surface about one or two inches, although the surface appears to be very, very fine grained, as you get close to it. It’s almost like a powder. The ground mass is very fine.”

  The voice of Neil Armstrong paused. In Mission Control in Houston—in a large room filled with technicians, engineers, and the best and brightest the aerospace industry had to offer—everyone was quiet, tense, and focused on the job at hand. They were all too aware of the weight of history pressing down upon them. No one wanted to be the one who, lapsing in his duties, was responsible for anything going wrong in the mission designated Apollo 11.

  “I’m going to step off the LM now.”

  Another pause, one that the fanciful would have said stretched from the very first moment humanity’s most distant ancestors stared up in wonder at the pale globe in the sky through to all the descendants to come who would look back upon this moment as one of the seminal achievements of the race.

  A framed picture of John F. Kennedy, hanging on the wall, looked on in silence.

  Thirty-five seconds ticked past. It was the longest thirty-five seconds anyone in the room could possibly have imagined.

  And then Neil Armstrong’s voice came through, announcing that he had set foot upon the moon, and the place went berserk.

  It was thoroughly unprofessional, but it was a brief indulgence that Bruce McCandless could understand. He did not, however, join in the burst of excitement and the cheers that were going on around him. In his position of being in charge of Capsule Communications—otherwise known as CAPCOM—he couldn’t afford to allow his focus to waver for so much as a second. His was the voice of Mission Control, and he had to stay on top of every single word Armstrong was saying.

  Someone was tapping him on the shoulder. McCandless glanced to his left and saw a PR flack from NASA consulting a sheaf of papers. He looked confused. “Did Armstrong just say, ‘One small step for man’ or ‘One small step for a man’?”

  “ ‘For man.’ Why?”

  “He was supposed to say ‘a man.’ ” The flack double-checked the papers. “That’s the line that was vetted.”

  “What difference does it make?” McCandless was getting impatient.

  “It makes a huge difference grammatically. Talking about an individual man makes sense, but just saying ‘man’ as in the whole of humanity makes the line self-contradicting.”

  McCandless was incredulous. “Oh, for God’s sake. We just put an astronaut on the moon. You seriously think years from now anyone’s going to care about whether or not he said a participle?”

  “It’s an article, actually. And reporters are already asking. Could you tell Armstrong to say it again, correctly?”

  “Get away from me,” said McCandless, because Armstrong’s voice was coming through again.

  “Yes, the surface is fine and powdery. I can kick it up loosely with my toe. It does adhere in fine layers, like powdered charcoal, to the sole and sides of my boots. I only go in a small fraction of an inch, maybe an eighth of an inch, but I can see the footprints of my boots and the treads in the fine, sandy particles.”

  McCandless nodded and said, “Neil, this is Houston; we’re copying.” He noticed that the flack was now standing between reporters from Reuters and The New York Times. Everyone looked confused. The flack was saying something about static obscuring the word “a.” McCandless rolled his eyes. Some people had no sense of priorities.

  He waited for Armstrong to reply, to keep him and, by extension, everyone in Mission Control apprised. But instead of the mission commander’s voice coming back to him, he began to hear increasing amounts of static. “Neil, we’re getting signal interference. Do you copy? Come in.”

  Nothing. The static only grew louder and more annoying.

  McCandless kept his voice level, but there was quiet intensity in it as he called out, “What the hell just happened?”

  Everyone was hearing—or not hearing—the same thing McCandless was. One of the technicians called out, “Seems to be a transmitter malfunction.”

  “Well, get it back up. Get our men back in contact!”

  ii

  Need to know.

  That had been the golden rule of the operation ever since JFK had first said the words in the Oval Office.

  Among everyone in the building that housed Mission Control at that moment, only three men needed to know what was about to happen on the moon.

  None of them was actually in Mission Control.

  Instead, while the technicians endeavored to fix the problem that had just dropped upon them from nowhere and McCandless tried to keep his concern bottled up as he waited for the techies to get matters sorted out, three men were huddled in an antechamber that almost no one in the building even realized existed.

  All three men were wearing black suits, crisp white shirts, and black ties. Their appearance had been carefully conceived to leave no lasting impression on anyone who might see them.

  They were all named Johnson.

  None of them was related.

  “Eagle,” said Johnson into a small but powerful microphone, “you are dark on the rock. Mission is a go. You have twenty-one minutes.”

  Standing next to Johnson, Johnson clicked a stopwatch on Johnson’s mark. The twenty-one minutes began running.

  THE MOON—

  JULY 20, 1969

  i

  “Twenty-one minutes, copy that,” said Neil Armstrong. He glanced toward Aldrin, who nodded by tilting his entire upper torso.

  They started moving as quickly as they could.

  All the practice that they had done in swimming pools, trying to simulate what it would be like to move in a low-gravity environment, had been fine as far as it had gone. But the preparation could only take them so far, and now, faced with the reality of the moon, Armstrong realized that there was going to be a learning curve in being able to bound
across a gray, powdery surface with a fraction of the earth’s gravity.

  As they moved as quickly as they could across the Sea of Tranquility, heading toward the short ridge they needed to scale, Armstrong could only imagine what CAPCOM was going through. McCandless must have been out of his mind with concern. He felt bad about it, and the week before liftoff, there had come a moment where he was almost tempted to tell McCandless not to be concerned if there was an extended absence of communication shortly after touchdown. But McCandless was simply too smart a guy. He would have asked what Armstrong meant by that, and one question would have led to another, none of which Armstrong would have been in a position to answer. So he kept it all to himself even though the prospect he was facing seemed almost too gargantuan for any human being to conceive, much less keep secret.

  Although Armstrong was the first one on the surface of the moon, it was Aldrin who made it first to the top of the lunar ridge. The height would provide them with enough elevation that they would be able to see down into the section of the moon’s far side that was their true destination.

  Armstrong heard Aldrin gasp upon seeing something and, with a final vault, landed on the top of the ridge next to him. He did not make a sound in the same way Aldrin had, but he fully understood why Buzz had reacted that way.

  Until that moment, Armstrong had not quite been able to shake the notion that maybe, just maybe, this entire side mission was some manner of twisted joke, coming down from a secret branch of the government whose only job was to mess with the heads of United States citizens. It would certainly have explained a lot about why the country was the way it was. But all remaining doubts went right out of Neil’s head as he beheld—spread out below them, half-buried in the lunar soil, just beyond the edge of available sunlight—what could only be the ruins of a vast spacecraft. The ship had clearly been blown apart on impact, creating gaping holes in the outer hull.

  Armstrong finally managed to say, “Where do you think it came from?”

  “I have no idea,” said Aldrin.

  “Let’s go,” Armstrong said. “We don’t have time to waste.”

  “Roger that,” Aldrin said ruefully.

  Armstrong and Aldrin made their way down the ridge as quickly as they could. There was no easy path, and in short order they were climbing over the wreckage as they moved toward the holes that would provide their means of access.

  Armstrong had to think that if they had a signal, the medical boys would be going out of their minds trying to figure out why his vitals had probably just gone through the roof. This was almost too much for one human mind to embrace. Not only the first man on the moon but the first to make definitive physical contact with something that was extraterrestrial?

  He stepped through one of the holes, being extremely careful to make sure there were no jagged edges that could tear his suit. That would be the last thing he needed. Aldrin came in right behind him, holding a light to illuminate the eerie interior of the vessel. “Houston,” said Armstrong, “we are inside the ship. Extensive damage. Hull’s been breached. Appears to be empty—”

  That was when the ground literally went out from under him.

  The floor of the ship gave way beneath his feet. It caught him completely by surprise, for everything had seemed solid until that point. Bits of lunar dust and debris were falling through, and then so was Neil Armstrong.

  It was the low gravity that saved him—the low gravity and the quick thinking of Buzz Aldrin, who was standing just beyond the crumble zone. He grabbed Neil by the arm and pulled him clear before he could disappear into the gaping hole.

  The lunar debris continued to fall past as Armstrong found his footing. Aldrin had the presence of mind, even as he helped stabilize Armstrong, to shine his light down into the depths of the hole.

  “Thanks, buddy,” Armstrong said.

  Aldrin didn’t hear him. “What the hell?” he breathed.

  Armstrong looked down to see what the light was playing against.

  Even though it was exactly what they were looking for, he still couldn’t quite believe it.

  It was a mouth. A gigantic mouth that appeared to be in the face of a huge mechanical creature. A robot, perhaps, or …

  … something more?

  It took Armstrong a few precious seconds to find his voice, and then he finally managed to say, “Houston … we’ve found extraterrestrials. No signs of movement or life.”

  “Jesus,” came the stunned reaction from Earth, and there was some hastened muttering briefly audible. For some reason, Armstrong found that comforting. The black-clad special ops men had been living with this knowledge for far longer than Armstrong and Aldrin, who were relatively recent additions to the need-to-know roster. If even the go-to guys for the hush-hush stuff could reflect astonishment in their voices, that made Armstrong feel better about his amazement. Then they continued, “We copy,” which was somewhat unnecessary since the startled exclamation of the Savior’s name pretty much confirmed that they’d heard him. “You’ve got seven minutes. Take photos and samples and get ’em home safe.”

  Seven minutes? The statement ripped through Armstrong’s mind. He checked his mission readout and realized that the information was correct; time had slipped away from him in the face of what they were experiencing, and now they were hemorrhaging time.

  They did as they were bidden, grabbing as much evidence of what they were witnessing as they could. It required two minutes of what they had remaining to them, and then they headed for the hole through which they had entered. Another precious minute gone then as they emerged from the ship and moved as fast as they could toward the ridge.

  And then Armstrong saw it on the distant horizon line: the first glimmerings of the sun’s rays.

  Sunrise was coming. Sunrise on the far side of the moon, bringing with it sunlight that would not be filtered by atmosphere.

  There might not be a problem. After all, Tranquility was in direct sunlight. But there was no certainty that the daylight temperature on the far side might not be hotter than expected. It was possible that despite the insulation, Armstrong and Aldrin could literally broil inside their suits. They might well be safe if they remained in the alien ship, but then they could be trapped there far beyond the limits of their oxygen supply. To play it safe, they had to get going immediately.

  They moved as quickly as they could.

  As if they were beings from myth wearing legendary seven-league boots, the two astronauts bounded across the surface of the moon. They were going far faster than they had when they’d initially hit the lunar landscape, yet because of the oncoming sunlight and the possible threat it was carrying with it, they felt as if they were moving even slower. Up the lunar ridge they sprinted—or as close to sprinting as they could considering they were moving like tortoises—and now they were feeling the glare of the oncoming sunlight on their faceplates. Armstrong’s heart was pounding against his chest, his breath ragged in his lungs, and in his imagination he thought he could actually hear the sun roaring toward them like an express train.

  They hit the top of the ridge, and suddenly the ground started to crumble under Aldrin’s feet. He tumbled backward, and Armstrong grabbed at him.

  He just missed.

  Buzz Aldrin fell backward into the direct sunlight bathing the far side of the moon.

  “Buzz!” Armstrong shouted.

  He lay there for a moment and then slowly got to his feet. “No problem,” he said. “Temperature’s a little hotter, but nothing unbearable.”

  Armstrong sighed in relief.

  “Should we go back?” Aldrin suggested.

  “No. We don’t know the long-term effects of the far side, and there’s only so long we should keep CAPCOM hanging.”

  “Eagle, do you read?” came the concerned voice of Johnson. “It’s been—”

  “I know what it’s been, Houston,” Armstrong said wearily. “We’re clear. Repeat, we’re clear. Although the flight surgeon’s probably going out of h
is mind; our bio-med readings must be—”

  “They’re all reading normal, Eagle,” Johnson assured him. “We’ve taken care of that.”

  Armstrong didn’t quite know how they would have gone about feeding false data to the med heads in Mission Control and decided he was fine with that. He already knew more than he wanted to.

  And as he and Aldrin got to their feet, Armstrong said with wonderment, “We’re not alone, after all, are we?”

  Buzz said, “No, sir. We are not alone.”

  ii

  Aldrin had never heard anyone sound quite as relieved in his life as when CAPCOM reestablished contact. McCandless was a good guy, one of the best, and Aldrin hated what the man must have been put through during that interminable blackout. At least the astrounauts knew what was going on; McCandless had been in the dark. He deserved better than to be going out of his mind with worry.

  Couldn’t be helped, though.

  Everything else about the mission had been utterly routine. That was what happened when the best minds in aerospace put their heads together and mapped things out. It was amazing how quickly one’s world could shift. One day walking upon the moon is the stuff of science fiction, and the next day the entire world knew it was science fact.

  But there was other previously believed fiction that had to remain in the realm of speculation, at least for now.

  As the lunar capsule hurtled toward the earth, planning its angle for reentry with perfect precision, Aldrin realized that he was devoting only a portion of his attention to his assigned tasks. It wasn’t happening in such a way as to endanger their safe return, but every so often his thoughts kept drifting back to what he had experienced on the moon’s far side. He thought about that vessel with the pitted hull and that gigantic machine buried deep within. The machine with a face … presuming it was a machine at all. But if not … then what? A once-living creature that looked like a machine? Was that even possible?