The darkness came at her like a demon. Behind her only the tips of mountains were illuminated, the bases disappearing into shadow. The ground ahead of her was covered with pools of ink that she had to pick her way around. Her radio locator was turned on, but receiving only static. It could only pick up the locator beacon from the Moonshadow if she got in line of sight of the crash site. She must be nearly there, but none of the landscape looked even slightly familiar. Ahead was that the ridge she'd climbed to radio Earth? She couldn't tell. She climbed it, but didn't see the blue marble. The next one?
The darkness had spread up to her knees. She kept tripping over rocks invisible in the dark. Her footsteps struck sparks from the rocks, and behind her footprints glowed faintly. Triboluminescent glow, she thought nobody has ever seen that before. She couldn't die now, not so close. But the darkness wouldn't wait. All around her the darkness lay like an unsuspected ocean, rocks sticking up out of the tidepools into the dying sunlight. The undervoltage alarm began to warble as the rising tide of darkness reached her solar array. The crash site had to be around here somewhere, it had to. Maybe the locator beacon was broken? She climbed up a ridge and into the light, looking around desperately for clues. Shouldn't there have been a rescue mission by now?
Only the mountaintops were in the light. She aimed for the nearest and tallest mountain she could see and made her way across the darkness to it, stumbling and crawling in the ocean of ink, at last pulling herself into the light like a swimmer gasping for air. She huddled on her rocky island, desperate as the tide of darkness slowly rose about her. Where were they? Where were they?
Back on Earth, work on the rescue mission had moved at a frantic pace. Everything was checked and triple-checked in space, cutting corners was an invitation for sudden death, but still the rescue mission had been dogged by small problems and minor delays, delays that would have been routine for an ordinary mission, but loomed huge against the tight mission deadline.
The scheduling was almost impossibly tight—the mission had been set to launch in four months, not four weeks. Technicians scheduled for vacations volunteered to work overtime, while suppliers who normally took weeks to deliver parts delivered overnight. Final integration for the replacement for Moonshadow, originally to be called Explorer but now hastily re-christened Rescuer, was speeded up, and the transfer vehicle launched to the Space Station months ahead of the original schedule, less than two weeks after the Moonshadow crash. Two shuttle-loads of propellant swiftly followed, and the transfer vehicle was mated to its aeroshell and tested. While the rescue crew practiced possible scenarios on the simulator, the lander, with engines inspected and replaced, was hastily modified to accept a third person on ascent, tested, and then launched to rendezvous withRescuer. Four weeks after the crash the stack was fueled and ready, the crew briefed, and the trajectory calculated. The crew shuttle launched through heavy fog to join their Rescuer in orbit.
Thirty days after the unexpected signal from the moon had revealed a survivor of the Moonshadow expedition, Rescuer left orbit for the moon.
From the top of the mountain ridge west of the crash site, Commander Stanley passed his searchlight over the wreckage one more time and shook his head in awe. "An amazing job of piloting," he said. "Looks like she used the TEI motor for braking, and then set it down on the RCS verniers."
"Incredible," Tanya Nakora murmured. "Too bad it couldn't save her."
The record of Patricia Mulligan's travels was written in the soil around the wreck. After the rescue team had searched the wreckage, they found the single line of footsteps that led due west, crossed the ridge, and disappeared over the horizon. Stanley put down the binoculars. There was no sign of returning footprints. "Looks like she wanted to see the moon before her air ran out," he said. Inside his helmet he shook his head slowly. "Wonder how far she got?"
"Could she be alive somehow?" asked Nakora. "She was a pretty ingenious kid."
"Not ingenious enough to breathe vacuum. Don't fool yourself—this rescue mission was a political toy from the start. We never had a chance of finding anybody up here still alive."
"Still, we had to try, didn't we?"
Stanley shook his head and tapped his helmet. "Hold on a sec, my damn radio's acting up. I'm picking up some kind of feedback—almost sounds like a voice."
"I hear it too, Commander. But it doesn't make any sense."
The voice was faint in the radio. "Don't turn off the lights. Please, please, don't turn off your light. . . ."
Stanley turned to Nakora. "Do you . . . ?"
"I hear it, Commander . . . but I don't believe it."
Stanley picked up the searchlight and began sweeping the horizon. "Hello? Rescuer calling Astronaut Patricia Mulligan. Where the hell are you?"
The spacesuit had once been pristine white. It was now dirty grey with moondust, only the ragged and bent solar array on the back carefully polished free of debris. The figure in it was nearly as ragged.
After a meal and a wash, she was coherent and ready to explain.
"It was the mountaintop. I climbed the mountaintop to stay in the sunlight, and I just barely got high enough to hear your radios."
Nakora nodded. "That much we figured out. But the rest—the last month—you really walked all the way around the moon? Eleven thousand kilometers?"
Trish nodded. "It was all I could think of. I figured, about the distance from New York to LA and back—people have walked that and lived. It came to a walking speed of just under ten miles an hour. Farside was the hard part—turned out to be much rougher than nearside. But strange and weirdly beautiful, in places. You wouldn't believe the things I saw."
She shook her head, and laughed quietly. "I don't believe some of the things I saw. The immensity of it—we've barely scratched the surface. I'll be coming back, Commander. I promise you."
"I'm sure you will," said Commander Stanley. "I'm sure you will."
As the ship lifted off the moon, Trish looked out for a last view of the surface. For a moment she thought she saw a lonely figure standing on the surface, waving her goodbye. She didn't wave back.
She looked again, and there was nothing out there but magnificent desolation.
Shooting the Moon, by Geoffrey A. Landis
Yeah, kid, I've heard of you, or, anyway, I've heard of your organization. So you're going to do a moon-flight, are you. No, I'm not laughing at you—I believe that just maybe you can do it. The technology is there. It's been there for thirty years, we both know that.
How'd you hear about me, anyway?
Really? That old son of a bitch.
Okay. Maybe you can. It's not the technology that's going to trip you up, though. The technology is a piece of cake. I mean, it will be hard, it will be harder than anything you can think of, but it will be easy in one sense: with technology you know where you stand, you can figure out what's the best way to do things.
With people, it's not so simple, kid, take it from an old man: the hard part, the goddamn hard part, is the people.
You think you know it all, don't you? You think it's going to be easy. You don't know a goddamn thing.
I'll tell you a story. That's what you came here for, isn't it? To hear a story from the old man. You heard, somehow, about what we did, about what we tried—or maybe you heard some, and you guessed some. And you heard that we fucked up, and you want to know why. I can see that you really don't think anything I can say will apply to you. You think you're golden and you can't fail, and deep down you're sure that there's nothing that you can learn from screw-ups like us—no, you didn't say that, but I was young once, I know how you feel. We were young once, too, and we thought we knew what we were doing.
We did the calculations, yeah, the same ones you did.
This was back in the '70's. The Apollo program had come to a dead end, and we were a bunch of hot-shit aerospace engineers scraping out a living, but we had a dream. We were going to the moon. Not sending somebody, we were going to go ourselves. Forget th
e government projects; we were a little disillusioned with government—nothing against NASA, but we were the generation that saw Richard Nixon cancel the Apollo moonflights, and scrap three working Saturn rockets, and we didn't exactly trust big spaceflight projects. We were going to the moon, and we were going to get Hollywood to pay for it.
Yeah, sure you've heard this story before. It's true now, and it was true back then—there's enough money in the entertainment business to pay for a space program out of petty cash. To Americans, spaceflight is entertainment—science is just a sidelight, an excuse for the spectacle.
Okay. Shut up. Here's the story.
· · · · ·
Project Moon was going to be the greatest spectacle ever filmed, a spectacle to out-spectacle Star Wars; a real moon landing, filmed live on the moon.
It was Mr. Rich and the Gecko that thought of it, mostly. They dragged me into it, and we refined the ideas over more than a few beers at the Thirsty Ear. "I figure the Apollo spacecraft had a factor of two margin on the lunar surface," the Gecko said. "That's huge. We can cut corners, leave behind the redundancy, get rid of the margin—we can do it for a quarter of the launch mass."
There's an obscure law, you probably haven't heard of it, said that scrap government property can be claimed for cost by any company which has a legitimate business use for it. Far as I know, it's still on the books.
At the end of the Apollo program, NASA scrapped three complete Saturn rockets. You can see them, rusting away on display, one in Huntsville, one in Houston, one at the Cape. Lousy thing to do with a rocket, my opinion. We couldn't get them—the damn museums at the Space Centers refused to declare them excess. But we found out that the engines and avionics for Apollo 21—the long-lead-time parts, all the important stuff—had been manufactured before the mission was canned. They were still there, in perfect shape, stashed in climate-controlled warehouses in Alabama and California. We got dibs on them.
The Gecko was a tall gangly guy with an unpronounceable Polish name. You've never heard of him, but he was an orbital mechanics wizard, which was really something back in those days when a computer was a big hunk of temperamental iron that took up a whole air-conditioned room. I had never seen him wear anything other than a white button-down shirt, not even to the beach. Somebody called him the Gecko because he moved like one, stock still for minutes, and then suddenly—blur—he was somewhere else. The name stuck, even if the guy who tagged him couldn't hack it and left the program.
Mr. Rich, that's Ricardo Capolongo. He was short, dapper, and always wore a suit with a vest, even when vests were out of style. It was Mr. Rich tracked down the spare Apollo parts, and Gecko who said, with no trace of drunkenness in his voice, that if we could find backing, he could land us safely on the moon, no problem.
We'd all read Heinlein. "The Man Who Sold the Moon," great story. It was our inspiration. We could do it. There was money could be made in space, and the entertainment industry was the place to make it.
So we made a pact. We were solemnly sober about it. We pledged to the project everything we had: our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.
We bought tickets west, and hit the streets of Hollywood. I had our financial statements all worked out, knew how to talk knowledgeable about gross, net, up-front money, shooting ratio. We were ready to show how the venture could make money: just give us a billion dollars to put together a mission to the moon, I could guarantee a profit: if not on television and first-run film rights, then on the plastic models and Vue-Master and product endorsements. We had all our T's dotted and our I's crossed, and we started right at the top of the list.
We got laughed at. Kubrick we couldn't even talk to. Altman was too busy to talk, this week and for the rest of the next decade. We moved down the list. Once word started getting around Hollywood about the three nerds with their wacko pitch, we had problems even getting in the door. Roddenberry told us to shove off. We kept on pounding the pavement, moving down the list. Roger Corman loved it, couldn't get the money together. Then further down yet. Finally we scraped the bottom of the barrel, and when that didn't work, we went lower yet.
We ended up with Danton Swiggs.
No, I don't doubt that you never heard of him, although he produced two, maybe three hundred feature movies. He's known well enough in Hollywood, though. Let's just put it this way—Swiggs Productions never had to worry about the budget for wardrobe, since for the most part his actors didn't wear any.
To understand Swiggs, the king of sleaze, you gotta first understand Chicago. In the late '60s, it seems, there was this masseuse who massaged her clients in some places which Chicago's finest thought she shouldn't ought to be touching. The masseuse in question appealed, and Illinois Supreme Court had ruled that the question of which parts get massaged was a private matter between the masseuse and her client, and the police had nothing to say about it.
Swiggs had seen the business potential released by that decision. Within two months, he had opened up a series of massage parlors to employ busty women in skimpy clothes to rub their lonely male clients a little bit below the buckle, for a hundred bucks a pop. Heck, for all I know, some of 'em might have even known how to give a massage.
Danny Swiggs made a moderate fortune at the massage business, and got out of the business right before the bottom line went south from cut-rate competition. He moved into magazines, the type you don't see at family newsstands, and made money at that. From there he invested in Nevada brothels, and when he made a pile at that, he went on to movies. He already had the connections in the sleaze business. The laws about what you could show on screen were loosening up. Films like Last Tango In Paris were stretching the limits, making sex into art. Swiggs, he stretched the limits too, just in the other direction.
When we got to Swiggs, he'd made his bundle and was trying to go legit. He wore a magnificent wave of hair (none of it his own), a cream-colored polyester shirt open down to his navel to show off his thick gold chains, and lizard-skin platform shoes. Hanging from his gold chains was a crystal the size of a baseball. "Pure quartz," he explained to me proudly. "One hundred percent natural crystal"—expecting, no doubt, that I would be impressed. Guaranteed to balance his Chi, he said. Double his virility.
He had a girl on each arm. Not the type of woman I'd be interested in, even if I hadn't been married; the type that were designed with the word "ornament" in mind, the kind with too much mascara and clothes that were too few or too tight.
Swiggs Productions was going mainstream. He was looking for a project to establish him in Hollywood as a legitimate name, a by-god don't-call-me-I'll-call-you producer—in a town where producers were treated with about the same regard as lawyers or agents, only not quite so high class. But his first attempt at a legit film was a dog, twenty million spent in production and maybe twelve people actually paid money to see it.
That just whet his appetite. He had the cash, and he was looking to find the score.
The room was full of girls, girls just lounging around in mini-skirts and extremely tight sweaters. Even back then mini-skirts were years out of fashion, but he just liked the look. "Hey," he said, and winked. "You take a fancy to any of 'em, you give me the word."
Now, I know a lot of aerospace engineers, and all of them (back then) were men, and all of them were married. The astronauts get the publicity and the chicks; the engineers make the rockets work, and go home to their wives and children. "I'm married," I said. "Got two kids in high school."
He looked at me without any real comprehension. "Say, you think I can't be discreet?" He nudged me with an elbow. "No problemo, stud, it's under cover. Go ahead, your little muffy will hear nothing from me, word."
The Gecko would have walked out right then, but we couldn't. We just couldn't. We'd sunk every dollar we'd had or could borrow into Project Moon. Swiggs was the last human being left in Hollywood who would even let us in the door. We had absolutely no choices left.
"So tell me something I want to hear," sa
id Swiggs, leaning back in his leather chair behind a mahogany desk about the size of Idaho. "Give me the pitch that will make me come in my pants."
We held our noses and pitched the concept. Mr. Rich explained how we could scrounge old Apollo hardware. Gecko explained how we could land on the moon, really, no kidding, this is not a scam. I explained how during the Apollo program the sales of television commercials during the TV specials would have easily paid for the whole project.Project Moon could be the story of the century, the story of the underdogs, Horatio Alger times ten.
We ran out of words, and fell silent.
Swiggs had his eyes closed, his face all scrunched up. Suddenly he stood up and pointed a finger at me. "Baby!" he said. "Yes, fucking yes, and I mean, yes. I've got a hard-on, I'm coming in my pants, this is the E-ticket ride of the century. The Moon Mission. No, wait, more class—The Moon Odyssey. No, I got it, I got it: Adventure: Moon. I can see it. This is big, guys, I mean big."
Gecko looked at me, raised an eyebrow, ventured a tiny smile. I winked and gave him a covert thumbs up. At long last, could we finally have hooked a producer? Now if we could only reel him in.
"Just one thing," Swiggs said, and we wilted silently. He looked at me. "Convince me you can do it. I'm a simple kind of dude. That Apollo thingie cost 25 billion bucks. Explain to me in words I can understand just why you think you can do it cheaper."
I relaxed fractionally. This was a question we were ready for. "We're private," I said. "That means we're just plain more efficient than the government. We don't have to deal with politics, don't have to answer to Congress—when we need a decision, we make it. No committees, no reports, no justifications. When we need to buy something, we'll buy it—no government specifications, no fifty pounds of paperwork. We use off the shelf technology instead of custom made. Use electronics designed for televisions, at ten cents each, not aerospace parts at a thousand dollars a pop. And we know it can be done. Most of the technology is already developed, we can get it surplus."
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Page 223
