Lunar Descent

by Allen Steele

  “Altitude twelve thousand feet, range one hundred miles,” he said as he carefully guided the moonship down. “Radar on and locked into the landing grid.”

  “We copy, Descartes Traffic, thank you,” Alli said to the voice in her ear. “Traffic has us in their pattern and reports we’re looking fine.” She reached up and simultaneously clipped down a row of four toggles. They felt a slight tremor run through the moonship; she watched her status screen, then double-checked it against the lights above the toggles, which turned green. “Landing gear deployed and in position.”

  “Altitude one thousand five hundred feet, range twelve miles and closing,” Ray said.

  Lester could see the station better now: low, square and rectangular mooncrete buildings clustered together under bulldozed soil, interconnected by subterranean tunnels and above-ground crosswalks. The high MainOps tower and the aluminum-gray domes of the factory complex, gleaming in the midday sunlight, were almost all that could be seen of the base above the radiation-shielding regolith-pack. In mid-distance from the short horizon, he could make out tiny dozers and regolith combines slowly roaming the strip-mined plains to the north and northwest. Furthermost away, beyond the heavily tracked and trailed land, the long rails of the mass-driver stretched westward across twenty miles of high lunar plateau, crossing under the shadow of Stone Mountain.

  Gazing down at the complex, he could only admire the work that had gone into the expansion of the base. A lot of moondogs had busted their asses getting the new base built. In 2016, when he had last been here, Descartes Station had been little more than a double row of prefab modules, nine in all. The mass-driver had yet to be built; a couple of tall refinery stacks and three dozers and a few rovers were all that had been available for the mining operations. Skycorp and NASA had persuaded the public into thinking Descartes was a mining town back then, even though the place was less developed than a mid-twentieth-century Antarctic base.

  Lester shook his head in admiration; he had seen the pictures and layouts of the new base, but it had taken until this moment for him to believe it. They had done a lot with the place in the last eight years. Now Descartes Station was, in all truth, a company town.

  The song on the radio ended, replaced by a guttural, fast-talking voice: One could imagine a Southern yahoo behind the microphone, babbling away as he fondled a pint of Wild Turkey between his legs, deliriously imagining himself to be the reincarnation of Wolfman Jack as his voice howled Top-40 shuck and jive across the pitted wastes. Ow! Yeah! Baby baby baby! The father of rock ’n’ roller, Mister Chuck Berry, courtesy of El-Dee-Ess-Em, home of the moonrocks …!

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Lester muttered.

  Now the moonship was directly above Descartes Station; the pilots were working together in concert, calling out angles of descent, nursing the engine thrust, letting the Collins gradually descend to the landing pad below. They felt the gentle tug of lunar gravity as the lander slowly descended on its engine-thrust.

  Moondog McCloud’s voice dropped to a conspiratorial growl. That one was going out by request from some of the boys, to the—a solemn, reverential tone of voice now—honored and most worthy passenger of the LTV arriving at Pad One even as I speak.…

  “I think they know you’re coming,” Alli murmured, grinning as she watched her dashboard. “Two-fifty and down, push it a little left by ten, down two bills …”

  “I’m flattered,” Lester said, grinning from ear to ear. He was indeed; maybe this wasn’t going to be so tough after …

  The DJ’s voice again rose to a hysterical scream. Yowsuh, our new GM! The boss! The chief! The Ayatollah of the Moonah! The big BM the GM! Let’s have a big LDSM welcome for Mister Lester Riddell!

  Then—at the moment the landing gear touched down on the scarred mooncrete landing pad, bringing a proud and embarrassed Lester Riddell back to the Moon—there came over the radio the sound of a loud, wet, and enthusiastically rude Bronx cheer.…

  Alli James reached over to the com panel and snapped off the cabin feed. “Now wasn’t that interesting?” she said drily.

  Tina McGraw, finally raising her eyes from the floor, glanced at Riddell. So did the pilot and co-pilot, looking over the back of their seats at him. There was a long, frozen moment of silence in the moonship’s flight deck.

  “That wasn’t very funny,” McGraw said.

  Lester just stared ahead at the windows.

  Alli broke the pall by unclipping her checklist from beneath the dashboard. “Engine arm off. Controls auto. Gear sensors nominal change, gyro stable.” She paused to flip toggles, then added with terse formality, “Welcome back, Mr. Riddell.”

  Lester’s eyes came back into focus as he turned away from the window. There was no way he was going to take this kind of abuse. Your first command decision, pal …

  “Patch me into MainOps,” he said. Alli nodded and tapped a key on the communication panel; Lester touched the lobe of his headset. “Descartes Control, this is Lester Riddell, the new general manager. I want a meeting of all station personnel in the mess deck at thirteen hundred sharp. That’s everyone, no excuses accepted. Call in all shifts. Absentees will be docked for one day’s pay.”

  He switched off before he could get a reply; he didn’t care to hear it. He released the headset and watched Ray and Alli go through the post-touchdown checklist. I’ll show you who’s the Ayatollah of the Moonah, he thought. I’ll show you who’s in charge of the promised land.

  Yes, But Does She Know Anything About Igneous Formations? (Pressclips.2)

  (Excerpt from “Susan Peterson—The Playboy Interview”; Playboy, March, 2022:

  The question that millions of men around the world have about you is …

  I’ve heard it already. Why have I quit modeling to go to the Moon? (sighs) I thought I answered that a long time ago.

  One more time, please …

  If it’ll help cut down on all those fan letters asking me to pose in a teeny-weeny little thong again, sure. (laughs) For starters, the Moon in general, and lunar geology in particular, was my first interest in life, not being a super-model. When I was a little girl I decided that, one way or another, I was going there. But I grew up in the poor-black area of Kansas City, and my folks didn’t have enough money to send me through college … Dad was a city sanitation worker, which is not a high-paying profession. This meant that even after I managed to earn a high-school scholarship to go to college at Washington University in St. Louis, I didn’t have any money to keep myself in school. My grant paid for the tuition and that was it. I still had to eat, and once I moved out of the dorm, pay rent for an apartment.

  So you decided to go into modeling.

  Well, I didn’t really decide for myself. I mean, I never considered myself to be any sort of raving beauty. I was never a cheerleader or a prom queen in high school. But one of my roommates encouraged me to apply for work at a local modeling agency where she was part-timing herself. I was reluctant about the whole thing, but when she pointed out that they would be essentially paying me good money just to stand in front of a camera (shrugs) … well, it was either that or wait tables, so I went to the agency and, much to my surprise, they hired me. And it sort of went from there. I worked in St. Louis for about a year, posing for local department stores ads, before I was discovered by a talent scout for the Ford Agency in New York.

  You make it sound as if it was accidental.

  It was accidental! Honestly, I never once considered myself to be a professional model, not even after I went to work for the Ford Agency. To me, it was moonlighting to earn money to get myself through school. It was just a job that paid better than most others. When you consider that lunar geology is Ph.D-track academic work—because you really can’t find meaningful employment in this particular field without having earned a doctorate—I needed to keep employed almost constantly, especially after the scholarship ran out before I even received my B.S. And if that meant posing in fishnet bikinis for ten thousand dollars
an hour, well …

  Grin and bare it?

  Why not? It paid my way all through postgraduate school.

  So you didn’t consider it glamorous work?

  Are you kidding? Look … in the middle of a major research project or the writing of my thesis, I would have to drop everything and catch a plane to, say, Hawaii for a Sports Illustrated photo shoot. This is in January, so the Pacific Ocean at Maui is frigid at that time of year—it only looks warm in the photos—but they’ve got me peeled down to the buff, wearing this little spandex thing which leaves me next to stark naked, standing up to my waist in forty-six-degree surf. You ever wonder how swimsuit models make their nipples stick out? It’s because they’re so goddamn cold, that’s why!

  You’re talking about when you were on the cover of the ’18 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.…

  Yeah, right. That sexy smile was because my teeth were chattering. Modeling is a twelve-hour-day job … and don’t believe for a second it’s not a job, because for each picture that actually gets printed, there’s a few hundred exposures that end up on the darkroom floor. Half of them are in contortionist positions that only double-jointed persons should try, and the other half are in poses which would have made Masters and Johnson blush. By the end of the day, you’re sore all over … and the next morning, you start it all over again. No, it’s not glamorous. It’s bloody hard work.

  You once complained, in an interview published in Ms., that modeling was demeaning side-work for a scientist.

  Yes, it is. I still stand by that statement. Look, I didn’t ask to be African-Asian, beautiful, and stacked. Nature gave me this body, and I was able to utilize those looks as a way out of a bad financial predicament. In that sense, working as a Ford model was a blessing from heaven. But I didn’t like what I was doing because of the major drawback.

  Which was?

  The eternal stereotype of beautiful women is that if they’re good-looking, they must be stupid, too. (winces) Maybe it’s because most guys are nervous about great-looking women who have brains. I mean, it was difficult as hell to have any meaningful relationship with men outside my lab at Washington U., because even though I could have had any man I wanted, most of them thought I had to be some bimbo … and that’s just not my style, because I’m not going to play down my intelligence just for some guy’s attention. So I’d go out on a date with somebody … I was getting fixed up with blind dates for a while … he’d ask me what I did besides modeling, and I’d start talking about how I was currently studying the volcanic origin of basalts from lunar maria, and these shutters would click down over their eyes. “Oh, God, she’s smarter than I am … I can’t handle this.” End of relationship. Call me a cab. (laughs) And you can’t go out on dates with your colleagues because you have to work with them in the lab. Job-fostered romances are nothing but poison. So, yeah, it was hard to be a researcher and a model at the same time. Practically impossible, in the long run, because your colleagues resent you for being famous, and your public doesn’t want you to be intelligent.

  Is this the answer to the question of why you quit modeling?

  Took me a while to formulate the answer, didn’t it? (laughs) Yeah, it is, but only a little bit. As it turned out, my contract with the Ford Agency happened to come up for renewal at the same time that I was finishing up my doctoral work at the university. The Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston wanted me aboard as an associate, and Skycorp was offering me a contract to do basic research at Descartes Station, so … (shrugs) There wasn’t really much of a choice, as I saw it.

  Was the salary that they offered you comparable to your modeling fee?

  Oh, nowhere even close! But it wasn’t a question of salary. As I said before, lunar geology had been my calling in life. Why should I give up a chance to live and work on the Moon … my lifetime dream … just for a few more years of having the bottom of a swimsuit run up my ass? Besides, by that time I was twenty-nine years old. In the high-profile modeling world, that meant I was almost over the hill. I don’t think there really was that much of a choice.

  You were engaged for a short time to tennis champion Bill Cooper. That broke off as soon as you announced your intention to quit modeling. Did he want you to continue being a model?

  I … (sighs) Hey, that’s a personal matter between Billy and me. I don’t want to comment on it here.

  It’s been said that he wanted you to stay in modeling, and that he broke it off when you opted for a full-time career as a research scientist.

  No comment. It’s nobody’s business but our own. The breakup was peaceful, that’s all anyone needs to know. Next question.

  A lot of people believe that you were crazy for opting out of modeling when you were at the top of your profession.

  My profession is science. Modeling was how I paid the bills. I was more than happy to get out of it when I could.

  Your nickname in the modeling field was “Butch”…

  Still is. That’s what everyone calls me. Butch Peterson.

  How did you get the name?

  Because I was hard to work with. Maybe it’s my mean streak. Maybe they meant “bitch” and somebody just misspelled it. Who cares? I like the name. Describes my character accurately. I’m a tough cookie.

  Tough enough for the Moon?

  Well, Skycorp’s sending me up there in about five weeks, on a joint-operating agreement with the Lunar and Planetary Institute, just as soon as I complete my training at the Cape. Three years with the Descartes Station science team. We’ll get to find out, won’t we? (laughs) Hey, and if it doesn’t pan out, I can always pose for a centerfold in Playboy, right?

  5. The Usual Gang of Idiots

  “You know, of course, that he’s going to want to change everything,” said Mighty Joe Young.

  He was watching from the traffic control cupola on top of the LTV maintenance center. Out on Pad One, under the glare of the ring of landing beacons, ground vehicles moved in on the Michael Collins as hardsuited pad rats dragged fuel lines and power cables across the reinforced mooncrete apron toward the LTV. Mighty Joe dispassionately watched the scene through the triple-thick windows. “This guy’s going to be nothing but trouble,” he added sourly.

  Casey Engel, the pad operations manager, didn’t look up from his console. “Give him a chance, willya?” he answered softly as he watched a bank of TV and computer monitors. “He’s company, but I heard he’s been here before. He might be a blessing in disguise, for all we know.”

  “I doubt it.” Mighty Joe shook his shaggy head. Joe Young resembled the cinematic ape after whom he was nicknamed: six-foot-six, 275 pounds of hard muscle covered by hairy, sunburned skin, heavily bearded and long-haired except for the beginnings of a bald spot on the crown of his head, which he kept covered with a baseball cap from a Florida alligator farm called Gatorama (“the only place in the world with more lizards than Skycorp,” he was fond of telling people). Most of the time Mighty Joe was grinning, as if all the universe were a great cosmic gag and he was the only one who knew the punch line. Now he was glowering through the windows at the moonship.

  “Bullshit,” he groused. “Fucking company’s up to something. First we get a work slowdown, then we get fifty new guys sent here in the last few weeks, and now this guy shows up.” He thrust a hairy finger at the spacecraft. “I’m telling you, pal of mine, there’s a shitstorm coming. I can smell it and I can feel it.”

  “Umm.” Casey was barely paying attention to the tug pilot. Cupping his right hand over his ear, he listened to the voices in his headset. “Yeah, we verify that, Ray,” he said. “Engines are safed and we’ve got you on external power. You’re go to pop the hatch any time you’re ready.” He glanced over his shoulder at Mighty Joe. “Sorry, Joe. You were saying …?”

  “Nyahh … forget it.” Mighty Joe looked away from the Collins toward the other side of the landing field, where his own ship was poised on Pad Two. A couple of other pad rats were working on the tug, their arms thrust deep wit
hin service hatches leading into the guts of the big, ugly spacecraft, prepping the ship for its next flight in a few hours. He smiled as he gazed upon the tug, once known as the Harrison Schmitt until he had rechristened it. Slightly smaller then the LTV on Pad One, but with larger DPS engines and trusslike strongbacks running along its lower fuselage, it resembled an albino toad which had just crawled out of a sandbox. Gray lunar dust was caked on its sides; its wide flight-deck windows and mid-deck airlock hatch gawked at him like an amphibian face. There were too many moonships named after old, dead astronauts already, and the tug was the only thing on the Moon bigger and uglier than himself. Its registered name had been insolently crossed out with two red swaths of paint, and its unofficial name had been crudely painted below: Beautiful Dreamer. No one got the inside joke behind the new name, which suited Mighty Joe Young just fine. Let the uncultured peasants lose sleep over it.

  “Listen, the Dreamer’s still having trouble with Main Bus A,” he said as he watched the pad rats crawling around the tug. “Probably a short in one of the conduits or something, maybe down in the mid-deck I think. The last flight up we had to keep switching over to the backup cells. I put in my report. Has anyone gotten around to fixing it yet?”

  Casey sighed. “I dunno …”

  Mighty Joe stared at the back of Engel’s head. “You don’t know? Hell, Casey, I gotta fly that thing with a faulty electrical system! Why don’t you know?”

  Casey nodded toward the tug. “See that kid on the left? That’s one of the new guys Skycorp sent us this month. I brought it to his attention and he told me he’d look at it once he read the section in the service manuals.”