Lunar Descent

by Allen Steele

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “Okay, listen. There should be some sample-collection bags stowed back there. I know it’s messy, but you’ll have to use them. Tell Joe to turn his head and …”

  Right, she said tersely. I guess. Over and out.

  He heard a soft click as the comlink was shut off. The old Butch Peterson was back among them. Lester chuckled despite himself; he could just imagine the exchange between Butch and Mighty Joe which was going on right now in the crew cabin. For the moment, it was better to be out here.

  In more ways than one, Lester was glad he was out of the crew cabin. It had been many years since he had been out on the surface of the Moon by himself. Here was darkness, peaceful and everlasting, and now that Butch was attempting to pee in a plastic bag there was only silence, unbroken except for the thin hiss of his air regulator.

  Hell of a time to be enjoying himself. Yet, despite the criticality of their situation, he found within himself a certain elation. I haven’t felt this way in twenty years, he thought …

  Cut it out, he reprimanded himself. Time to look over the ship. Not that there was much left of the LRLT to be examined. The hull had remained intact, but on the whole, the spacecraft was totalled. They had come down in a shallow dive which had dug a furrow a quarter-mile long across the mare, leaving behind bits and pieces of the landing gear in a deep trench. Joe had accomplished a nose-up belly landing which would have done a carrier pilot proud; the destruction of the landing gear had helped to brake the LRLT and save the fuselage from the worst damage. Still and all, it didn’t take an expert to see that the spacecraft would never move from this spot again. The trusses which comprised the midsection strongback above the cargo module were bent in the center; his helmet lamps shined across the buckled framework as he walked closer for another look. Out here in the boonies, there was no way this craft could be salvaged.

  Lester bounced away from the lights, hop-skipping around the rock-battered cones of the main engines toward the starboard side. He rounded the aft end of the craft, and as he did, his helmet lamps captured a lone figure in a spacesuit, standing just outside the cone of light cast by the lamps.…

  “Whaaa …?” Lester yelped in mid-leap. His knees turned to jelly; his jump took him a few more feet; then he sprawled on his butt on the hard, stony ground, legs outstretched and arms cast back to catch his fall. Dirt kicked up around him, falling back around his feet and legs like soft gray rain.

  He felt the impact even through the rigid carapace of the hardsuit, but it hardly mattered. Lester stared straight ahead, his helmet lamps again finding the spacesuited figure. The suit design was obsolete; Skycorp had stopped using that type at least five years ago. The overgarment was caked and soiled with dirt, as if the wearer had crossed—impossibly—hundreds of miles of lunar terrain; dust clung to every crease and fold as if it had been stamped in. The helmet’s faceplate was scoured; Lester could see eyes, a nose, and a mouth, but nothing that suggested a personality, except …

  His heart thumped loudly in his ears. His breath came as a harsh rasp. There was a warm jet of fluid in his crotch; he was pissing in his urine-cup, but it barely registered on him, for at that moment his helmet lamps captured, for the briefest of instants, the faded black-nylon name patch sewn on the suit’s overgarment.…

  Sloane, S.K.

  “Sam,” he whispered.

  Very slowly, the figure’s right arm rose, forefinger thrust out as if in accusation, pointing at Riddell.… Then, after hovering for a moment, it rose to point again, beyond Riddell, toward the wrecked spacecraft behind him.

  Then, before Lester could force another word through his parched throat, the specter stepped backward. One step, two steps, three …

  As, at that very moment, the sun rose above the far eastern horizon, casting a bright silvery haze above the terrain, extending long shadows from the rock and boulders of the mare and the wall of the giant crater in the distance. The first rays touched the figure …

  And it faded, dissipating like smoke in a place where there had never been air. Gone, forever gone.

  Heart still pounding in his ears, Lester sat up on the ground and slowly turned around to look in the direction the specter had pointed, at the LRLT. At the top of the forward fuselage where, for the first time since he had gone EVA, Lester noticed the bent-over mast of the high-gain radio antenna. The antenna had been broken by the crash. All he had to do was climb up there and fix the thing with duct tape, and they had telemetry again. The Moon Moths would find them once radio contact was established.

  Lester looked around again. Nothing. Not so much as a footprint.

  “Sam …” he breathed.

  Mighty Joe’s snores rumbled from the aft cabin, a counter-point to the electronic crackle of the radio in the flight compartment: hronnk!… hrronnnnk!… hrronnnnnnk! Butch had gone back twice already, once to prod him and tell him to shut up, the second time to attempt to roll him over on his stomach. The first time, Joe had muttered something obscene and had quit snoring for all of two minutes; the second attempt had been futile, since he was too big and the fold-down bunk was too small. Finally she had given up and resigned herself to enduring the nasal foghorn.

  “What do you want me to say?” Butch asked quietly as she finished typing the last instructions into the computer keyboard in front of the co-pilot’s seat and tapped the ENTER button. The LCD readout flashed as the data she had collected at Byrd Crater were transmitted via satellite comlink with Descartes Station. As soon as Lester had repaired the high-gain antenna on top of the spacecraft, she had insisted on relaying the all-important data back to the base for safekeeping. “You saw a ghost? Okay. You saw a ghost.”

  “I don’t know,” Lester said. “Maybe I just want you to say that you believe me.”

  “Oh, I believe you, all right.” Butch sat back on the couch and propped her sneakered feet up on the dashboard. The cabin was dark except for a few instrument lights and the half-light of the rising run, filtering through the polarized canopy windows. “I mean, I don’t think you’re making this up,” she added as she sipped from the straw in the water bottle in her lap, “but I don’t believe in ghosts, either.”

  Lester was looking out the window. “Neither do I,” he admitted. “At least I didn’t until …” He stopped and shrugged. “I saw what I saw, Susie.”

  “Susie.” Butch grinned. “Nobody’s called me that since I was a little girl. Thanks.” The smile left her face. “Did you check your suit’s air feed? Maybe the mixture was a little …”

  “I already covered that,” Lester replied. “No, the oxygen-nitrogen ratio was copacetic. Right by the manual. Of course, I had been working out there, and then was jumping around a bit, and maybe I hyperventilated, so it’s feasible that I could have …”

  He paused, then shook his head. “No. It’s conceivable, but I know what I saw. That was no hallucination. That was Sam Sloane out there.”

  They were both silent for a minute. Once the antenna had been fixed, they had been able to reestablish contact with Descartes Station, which in turn passed the information to the Moon Moths. The search-and-rescue team had the crash-site pinpointed now; it was just a matter of waiting until they arrived. With Mighty Joe doped-up and asleep in the back, they had plenty of time to kill. Time for a few ghost stories, Lester reflected. All we’re missing now is a campfire and some marsh-mallows.…

  “You knew Sam personally, didn’t you?” Peterson asked, interrupting his train of thought. Lester nodded his head. “Were you here when he …?”

  She didn’t finish the question. “Uh-huh,” Lester said. He propped a foot up on the instrument panel and clasped his hands around his raised knee. He hesitated, then added, “You could even say that I was responsible for his death.”

  “Umm.” Butch put down the water bottle and laid her head back against the headrest of the upholstered couch. “I heard part of the story. He got stranded in a crevasse and a rescue party didn’t go out for him until it was too late.
That was when you were in charge of the first base, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah. In a nutshell, that’s what happened.” Lester cleared his throat. “There were twenty-five of us back then. It was a much smaller base and the workload wasn’t that heavy, so we had a lot of time on our hands. We had a good pipeline for getting dope shipped up to us from the Cape, so we had all the drugs we wanted. Uppers, downers, Ecstasy, crank, coke … we were always ripped to the tits on something or another.”

  “Sounds like fun,” Peterson said drily.

  Lester shook his head. “Naw. Not really. I’ve listened to a lot of so-called drug experts in my life, heard them yap on about how people get into dope because of … y’know, social pressures or media influences or all those theories about an innate human need to expand their consciousness. But they’re full of shit, when it comes right down to it. Any doper can tell you that. You get into the stuff because you’re bored with life.” He waved a hand at the bleak landscape beyond the windows. “I mean, look at this place. How boring can you get? A quarter of a million miles to the nearest decent cheeseburger.”

  Butch cracked up. “Never heard it put that way before. Two hundred and forty thousand miles to the nearest dill pickle.” She shook her head and rubbed her eyes, still giggling, then regained her composure and looked back at him again. “So you were high all the time,” she asked in a more somber tone.

  He blew out his breath. “High. Wasted. Fucking cross-eyed. Spent hours lying on my back in my office with a pair of headphones on my head, listening to old punk-rock tapes. Everyone else was in the same condition.”

  Lester stopped, remembering eight years gone by. “Except Sam,” he added. “He didn’t want any part of that shit, so he went out exploring by himself.” He sighed. “Must have been fun. More entertaining than frying your brain. But we thought he was a dink. I mean, I didn’t care what he did. Not as long as I had enough pills and coke to get me through another day …”

  He reached over and picked up Butch’s water bottle. “Then one day he didn’t come back on time.” He took a sip from the bottle and went on. “We had just gotten another load of dope from our ever-friendly source at the Cape, so we didn’t notice. I didn’t notice … until someone bothered to check the EVA logbook and noticed that Sam had left the base twenty hours earlier.”

  Remembering, Lester put down the water bottle; he bent forward, closed his eyes and placed his forehead in his hands. “Twenty … goddamn … hours,” he said slowly. “Christ, he was down in that crevasse long enough to dictate his memoirs. And he knew we weren’t coming to rescue him. He knew the general manager was a junkie who couldn’t see straight. And you know all that he said on that tape that he dictated? ‘You sons of bitches, I’m going to get you for this.’ That was the worst thing he said about us.”

  Lester lifted his head again. He steepled his fingers together and peered over them at the rising sun. “I could have saved him, Butch,” he said almost inaudibly. “I could have gotten to him before his air ran out, but I was too late.”

  He smiled with grim humor. “And then his ghost comes back to save my ass. Talk about your classic fucking irony.”

  There was another long silence between them. Mighty Joe snorted and grunted in his sleep, the radio made a constant static noise, the cabin air regulator made a soft hiss. “So,” Peterson said at last. “That’s why you’ve been riding everyone so hard at the base. Why you’ve tried to straighten up the base.” Lester looked sideways at her and nodded. She sighed and looked down at her hands. “And I thought you were just a regular company asshole.”

  Lester smiled and shrugged. “Maybe I am just a regular company asshole. But I’ve been the opposite, and believe me when I tell you that it sucks.” He looked out the window again. “So let me ask you a question.”

  Butch hesitated. “Do I think you saw a ghost? The answer is, maybe you did … although perhaps not quite the way you think.” She stopped, then added, “And I don’t think you were directly responsible for Sam’s death either. You didn’t get him into that crevasse. He did that himself. But it’s still something you and your conscience are going to have to settle between yourselves. I can’t help you with that.”

  “Uh-huh.” He tapped his fingers nervously on the seat’s armrests. “I appreciate that … but that wasn’t the question I was going to ask.”

  He didn’t say anything. After a moment she looked back at him. Neither of them spoke; they didn’t have to, because the question didn’t need to be spoken aloud. The long seconds stretched on endlessly. After a while, Butch sighed and looked away from him. “That’s certainly a change of subject,” she said. “Should have known what was on your mind, the way you were checking me out in the lab.”

  Lester winced. “Changing the subject seemed like a good idea.” He glanced over his shoulder to make sure Mighty Joe was still asleep. “Sex and death seem to go together, for some reason. I dunno.”

  “Maybe so.” She sighed and dropped her legs from the dashboard, primly folding her hands in her lap. “I’m going to have to think about it, Les. But whatever I decide, it’s not here, and not now.”

  “Why not?” he murmured smoothly. “The kid’s asleep, the cat’s been put out for the night.…” She chuckled and shook her head. “And hey, at least it’s something you can put in your memoirs. I mean, everyone’s done it in the back seat of a car, but how many folks can say they’ve done it on the floor of a crashed spaceship?”

  She blushed and fought to stifle a grin. “Not so fast. You’re rushing me.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t know I …”

  “Look,” she said, cocking her head toward the window.

  At that moment a small set of bright lights rose above the southern horizon. As the searchlights of the Moon Moths’ LRLT stroked across Aristotle Crater, beelining their way toward the crash site, a voice came over the radio. LRLT One-Three-Zero, this is LSR Flight Alpha-Zero-One. We’ve got your lights, do you copy? Over.

  “Damn. Just when it was getting interesting.” Lester pulled the headset up from his neck and placed the bone-phone against his jaw. “We copy, Alpha-Zero-One. Riddell here. How’ya doing, Quack? Over.”

  We’re tired and we wanna go home, Quack Lippincott replied. How are y’all doing? That’s the important question.

  “Joe’s got a couple of cracked ribs, but I think we’ll be able to put him in a suit for the walk over. Have you got a stretcher in there for him?”

  That’s affirmative. Monk’s here with us, so he can tend to those dinged ribs. Hell of a place for you to park that vehicle of yours, boss. What do you think this is, a goddamn airport?

  Lester chuckled. It was the typical refried bullshit from Descartes’ resident Texan good ol’ boy. “I’ll let you take it up with Mighty Joe, once he wakes up from his snooze. You’ve got good landing clearance on either side of us. We’ll suit up and be ready for you by the time you touch down.”

  Good ’nuff, Quack replied. We’ll keep the engines warm. Make sure you leave nothing behind you might want, ya hear?

  The Moon Moths’ chief meant any small equipment that needed to be salvaged from the wrecked LRLT. Lester glanced over at Butch, who was monitoring the conversation, and grinned at her. “We copy that, Quack. I’ve got everything I want right here.”

  Butch Peterson closed her eyes and looked away. But she was smiling. That was the important thing.

  PART FOUR

  The Great Space Swindle

  Black Friday (Video.3)

  From “The CBS Evening News With Michelle Woodward”; Friday, August 16, 2024.

  (THEME UP and FADE. Michelle Woodward is seated at studio desk.)

  WOODWARD: Good evening, I’m Michelle Woodward, sitting in for Don Houston, who is on vacation this week. There was trouble in space today, as three astronauts were rescued from a remote region of the Moon after their spacecraft crash-landed following engine failure. Yet even more disturbing than that news was the revelation that lunar operations may be
endangered by an impending shortage of a scarce, valuable resource—water. Garrett Logan reports from Huntsville, Alabama.…

  (FILE FOOTAGE of an LRLT lifting off from a landing pad at Descartes Station. This is replaced by COMPUTER ANIMATION of the same vehicle plummeting to the lunar surface and making a crash landing, followed by a MAP of the polar region with the crash site highlighted.)

  LOGAN (V.O.): A Skycorp long-range lunar transport, on its way back to Descartes Station following a routine supply and inspection mission to the company’s Byrd Crater Permaice Extraction Facility at the Moon’s north pole, went down soon after takeoff from the automated base. The accident occurred shortly after midnight on Earth, Eastern Standard Time. Although the craft was totaled, none of the three crewmembers aboard was seriously injured. The LRLT crashed in the Sea of Cold, about two hundred miles south of Byrd Crater.…

  (FILE FOOTAGE of Skycorp’s giant A-frame headquarters building in Huntsville, the installation at Byrd Crater, and Descartes Station. This is replaced by COMPUTER ANIMATED diagram of the permaice wells at Byrd Crater.)

  LOGAN (V.O.): Yet even as Skycorp spokespersons confirmed that the LRLT’s crew had been found and safely rescued by a team from Descartes Station, they announced more bad news. Before leaving Byrd Crater, the same team had discovered that the ancient deposits of permaice—a valuable water resource which lies beneath the bottom of Byrd Crater and is mined for rocket propellant and drinking water for the one hundred and ten-person crew of the industrial moonbase—is rapidly drying up.…

  (FILM CLIP of a Skycorp spokesperson, identified as Holly D’Amato, at a news conference in Huntsville.)

  D’AMATO: We have received news from the base that the … uh, limited natural ice resource at the lunar north pole is in danger of being exhausted within a matter of … ah, some months.

  LOGAN (V.O.): And that has some people worried.…

  (FILM CLIP with space industry market analyst, identified as Clifford Brandenstein).