Asimov's SF, Sep 2005

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Flat lava plains, jagged mountains, untouched by wind and weather? What a laugh. We'd known enough to predict the dusty hills and low, rolling slopes of the Moon, even if we couldn't see them in telescopes. There's not much force to the solar wind, but it'd been blowing down on the mountains of the Moon for four billion years.

  I snapped the big, boxy color TV camera to the top of the tripod's altazimuth mount, while Meat held it steady, trying to get it aimed back toward Moonbase, toward the edge of the wreckage field beyond, where we expected Oryol 1 to set down.

  "Hold up the color card. Let's see if we can get the damn thing focused."

  He rummaged in the small toolbin, found the card, and stepped back, holding it at arm's length, while I pushed up my sunvisor and leaned in to put the clear glass of my bubble against the rubber viewfinder mount. “Heh. No perspective. Looks like you're standing on the edge of an abyss."

  "You find an abyss here, lemme know."

  Yeah. Real tired of this place. “Okay.” When he was out of the way, I twisted the lens, watching the scene magnify. About a klick beyond the last old lander stage, not far from where the R-1 crashed, they'd laid out shiny scrap metal for a target, X marks the spot. I stood up.

  Meat, standing with his back toward the crater, looking up toward the crest of the rim, a few hundred meters west, rising maybe fifty meters above us, said, “By this time next week, I'll be out here with that damn Russian kid."

  "Musa Borodin."

  "Moosa! What a name! Doesn't even sound Russian."

  "You like Georgii Volynovskii better?"

  "That the pilot?"

  "Yeah. A two-star general."

  "Christ.” He turned and looked at me, pushed his own sunvisor up, so we could see each other. “I won't say I've enjoyed being stuck up here all this time, but I always liked working with you, Wild Bill. We made a good team."

  I nodded. Nothing to say. And you'll be up here for at least another year, before your rotation turn comes, won't you Meat?

  He smiled, maybe reading my thoughts. “Hell, Billy-boy, think of me when you give the wifey what for, huh?"

  Just chit-chat. Ain't no secrets up here. When we were in college, Meade Patterson hadn't been known for his sensitivity, and he hadn't done much growing up since. So I smirked like you'd expect, and said, “Hell, Meat. It's been so long I probably don't remember how."

  "Maybe it's like riding a bicycle?"

  I started to say after nine years in one-sixth gee, I probably couldn't ride a bicycle either, but my eyes started to crinkle up hard. Jesus, if I start to cry in a space helmet, I won't be able to clear my vision and run the camera when the time comes. Shook my head and focused on swallowing everything.

  Meat's voice softened. “Hey..."

  I said, “Given when that little bastard of hers was born, she must've been in bed with that God-damned construction worker, and pregnant, less than three months after we came up here."

  Meat said, “Easy, Bill. I'm sorry if I..."

  I tried smiling. “You know, Meat, I was pretty busy the last couple of years before we left. I wouldn't be surprised if..."

  He said, “Well, yeah. But at least you had a wife. You've got those three kids to go back to. You can think about grandkids for when you get old. Me, all I ever had was sluts in barrooms, and that's all I've got to go back to. And in case you forgot, I'm forty-six years old, too."

  The two of us just staring at each other. “Jesus."

  "Yeah."

  I said, “Maybe you should reconsider applying for a berth on Starover?"

  That got a grimace. “Not me. If I'd known I was going to be up here on the Moon for ten years with no pussy, I wouldn't've come.” He stared at me. “And I can see you would, no matter what."

  I nodded.

  He said, “Barroom sluts may not be much, but I miss the hell out of them. What've I got left, fifteen, twenty years before I'm an old man? I'm going to go home and fuck women until they won't have me anymore, then I'll goddam pay for it ‘til I can't get it up no more."

  I laughed. “Then what?"

  "Then I'll sit around and remember all the pussy I had ‘til they shovel dirt in my face."

  "Hell, Meat, the Starover missions are only going to be a few months long!"

  "Yeah? Well, this one was only supposed to be two years. I was supposed to be home by ‘68.” Another long look. “You think they might let you go to Mars with your kid, don't you, you silly bastard?"

  I looked away, back toward Riccioli and the Moonbase mess, like some kid's toys in a dirty sandbox. Almost time. “It's a long shot."

  "You think about what it'd be like to see your kid die on Mars right in front of you?"

  "I thought about what it'd be like to sit home and drink beer and watch him die on TV.” That shut us both up. I switched over to the base's general frequency, and said, “Base? Traverse 2271. We're all set."

  Jilson the Signal Corps officer's voice crackled in my headphones, “Roger, Traverse. Switch to 778. We've set up a patch to the Soviets’ ground-to-orbit. You'll be able to hear the Oryol/Almaz traffic."

  "Can they hear us?"

  Jilson laughed. “No. It ain't magic, Dunbar. It's wires on my console."

  "Ho-ho. Plagioclase in your sock come Christmas, bucko!"

  "Not from you, my boy."

  No, not from me. I told Meat, then turned my comm dial to the new frequency. “Hear anything?"

  "Nope."

  "Maybe they're not really up there."

  "Maybe we're not really on the Moon."

  Jilson said, “There's some guy down in New York getting a lot of TV time, claiming there's no Moonbase, and no forty Americans stuck on the Moon. Claims we faked it, to fake out the Russians."

  Meat said, “Damn right! This is fucking Nevada! Hey, you guys wanna go over to Reno tonight after work? I hear there's this place called the Mustang Ranch..."

  Jilson said, “Open circuit, Meat. They're going to put everything on national TV, starting about two minutes before touchdown."

  "Er. Sorry."

  I got behind the camera, putting myself in position, elevating it slightly, so the viewfinder showed black sky and a scrap of horizon, looking almost white by contrast, though moonsoil is very nearly black. “What a waste of color."

  "I heard the Russian exhaust is a kind of orange-violet."

  "Hydrazine.” I was outside when R-1 crashed. It was pretty while it lasted, a hemisphere of transparent bluish fire that expanded and dissipated in an eyeblink.

  Jilson said, “Azimuth one degree. Thirty seconds. They'll go high gate less than fifteen seconds after they come over the horizon, so be ready."

  "Roger that.” I lowered the camera to take in more horizon, hoping I was aimed for the right spot, over the far crater wall, well south of my own position. “Keep an eye peeled, Meat. If you see a dot of light, sing out."

  "Right."

  There.

  "Bill!"

  "I see ‘em.” Just a white fleck, kind of wavering, rising over the horizon. Not really rising. Coming toward us in a flat trajectory across the landscape. And, in the earphones, someone said, “Da, khorosho. Kuda mne itti napravo ili palevo?"

  Not a word. I'd taken Latin in high school and German in college, of course. Practically nobody was taking Russian in the forties. But the voice sounded as if it were, I dunno. Puzzled?

  Meat said, “That's strange..."

  Another voice said, “Idite pryamo.” Sounding a little nervous maybe.

  The first voice said, “Shto?"

  The second voice, suddenly louder, sharper, words coming very fast: “Vtaroi povorot naprava!"

  Meat said, “Jesus! Uh..."

  The image in the viewfinder was more than just a wavering splotch of fire now. Four spidery legs sticking out of pastel flame, two of them pointing up at the sky. I muttered, “More'n fifteen seconds, I think..."

  The first voice, almost panicky, said, “Ya zabludilsya..."

  I had to t
ip the camera back sharply to keep them from going out of the top of the picture. Suddenly realized I could see the body of the lander beyond the flame, two bulgy, baggy greenish spheres stacked one on top of the other. I pulled my face out of the viewfinder and looked. “Holy shit!"

  Jilson said, “You're losing them, Bill."

  I went back to the viewfinder, as the same panicky voice said, “Eta ochen stranno ... Ya ... ya ... Idite vperyot! Pzhalst..."

  I realized the camera was at its backstop, pointing as close to straight up as it could get.

  Meat said, “Jesus, guys! Punch out!"

  When I let go of the camera, it started tipping over, and I let it fall, turning, looking ... “My God!” Oryol was sailing right overhead, maybe two hundred meters away, looking big as an airliner. The fire ... suddenly it guttered, throwing off little streamers of orange and pink, then went out, and smaller sparks twinkled here and there.

  RCS jets. The ship started tipping forward, trying to come upright. Getting in position to abort, get the hell out of here.

  One of the Russian voices shouted, “Bozhe...!” Then, very much quieter, “Gde mne slezt? Pozhaluista otkroite okno—"

  There was a flare of sparks as Oryol hit the crest of the rimwall, then nothing. Darkness. And, of course, silence.

  From over by the mooncar, Meat, looking at our instrument package, said, “Interesting. Two big seismic events, and three smaller ones. No aftershocks.” He looked over at me. “You know, he made a joke, right there at the end."

  I shook my head, looking up at the rimwall. You could barely see the little scuff where they hit, and I wondered just how many little bitty pieces of my ride home we'd be finding on the slope beyond.

  * * * *

  I stood the camera tripod back up, started pulling plugs, unclipping fittings, putting stuff away. Nothing. Nothing. Now somebody's buried on the Moon. Funny how, despite everything, nobody'd ever died outside the Earth's atmosphere before. Oh, sure, Komarov died when Voskhod 6 crashed in ‘67, almost two years to the day after the Apollo 1 crew burned on the pad, but what killed him was running into Kazakhstan at four hundred miles an hour.

  I remembered the Russians had been having a bad time, during the year after Sergei Korolyov died on the operating table, while Mishin and Glushko struggled to take control, fighting each other, every step of the way. First the Voskhod 4/5 rendezvous and docking mission failed so badly, then the Komarov crash. For a while, it looked like they were done, and we were all startled when Almaz 1 rode Chelomei's UR500 to low Earth orbit toward the end of 1968. Space station, we said. Until they put one around the Moon, three years later.

  Jilson's voice crackled in my headset, “Guys? The Almaz pilot says he's still getting telemetry from Oryol.” Somewhere in the black sky overhead, Valeri Bykovskii would be flying by himself, looking at his consoles, and realizing he'd be going home alone.

  Meat said, “Voice?"

  "No. Just engineering data."

  I said, “Didn't you guys look at the Pravda diagram they faxed up last week? Voice and biomed go through the ascent stage high-gain. Everything else is through omnidirectional stub and whip antennas.” I turned and looked up at the ridge crest. Though they were fresh, and wouldn't change for geologic ages, I still had a hard time spotting the little scars where they'd clipped the ground.

  Jilson said, “Pilot says it's baseline ascent guidance data. He says they apparently had a staging event after they bounced off the mountaintop ... uh, no way to tell if it was triggered by the impact or by their on-board computer. Says they'd initiated the abort guidance system command sequence, but..."

  Meat said, “Boy, I wouldn't want to fly with a Russian computer."

  "I wouldn't want to fly with one of ours, these days.” The Gemini Rs were using a modified Apollo diskey computer, early sixties technology at its best, but a couple of months ago, Billy'd held up his new Rockwell calculator, sung me the “big green numbers” song and told me how much it cost. I'd told him to get me one as a coming-home present.

  Looking down at the charge gauge on the mooncar console, I said, “We've got just about enough juice to make the top of the ridge and still get back to base. You guys listening?"

  Meat got in the passenger side and started clipping his D-rings. “Let's go."

  Jilson said, “Right. Stay line of sight, Bill."

  From the top of the rimwall ridge, you could see Oryol on the slope beyond, in the beginnings of the Hevelius Formation, a jumble of Mare Orientale ejecta, all cracks and crags, that was one of the main reasons Moonbase was sited at Riccioli. Somebody'd thought they'd spotted outgassing here back in the fifties, and imagined there might be a volcano somewhere. Of course, that was back when people were still arguing about the origins of Arizona's Coon Mountain. They call it Meteor Crater now, and there aren't any volcanoes on the Moon.

  Meat said, “Eight, maybe ten clicks? Good thing they're out of the rimwall shadows. We'd never spot ‘em otherwise."

  Jilson said, “What d'you see? You're still on open mike, guys."

  "Right.” So try not to say fuck too much. Some congressdork might not like it. I said, “The ascent stage looks intact in binoculars. Lying on its side, of course. No sign of the descent stage."

  Meat pointed off to one side, and said, “I'd say that bright scar over there might be it."

  "There's some debris scattered around. Too small to identify, kind of in an arc between the ascent stage and the explosion scar, if that's what it is."

  Meat said, “You see those ripples up slope of the mess? Looks like they rolled for a while."

  I panned around, looking at little sparks and twinkles of torn metal. “I see the high gain antenna. Maybe five hundred meters from the intact crew cabin."

  Jilson, voice sharp: “Intact?"

  "Well. Not broken into pieces.” I put the binoculars back on the thing and tried focusing carefully. “Too damn many scratches on these lenses. These are the ones I brought up in ‘65.” I turned my aim carefully, getting Oryol into the clearest patch of glass. “The green thermal blanket is torn, but I can make out the hull underneath. Not well enough to see if it's cracked."

  Meat said, “These Russian pressure vessels are a lot tougher than ours. They use a full one-atmosphere environment."

  "So if they get a puncture, there's all that much more force exerted on a potential tear?"

  "Well."

  I walked back to the mooncar and looked at the gauge again. “We got enough juice to drive down there and maybe get three-quarters of the way back up the rimwall."

  There was a long silence, then Jilson said, “Guys? We've had President McGovern on the horn. He says it's your call."

  Meat said, “That figures."

  I got back into my seat, and said, “Meat?"

  "Yep."

  "Okay. Jilson, you guys have two charged-up mooncars down there. Bring ‘em on up to the ridge line. Just sing out when you're line of sight."

  Long silence, then he said, “Roger that."

  Meat said, “Time we went, Wild Bill?"

  I said, “If you're going to call me that, you have to be Andy Devine, and your line is, ‘Hey, Wild Bill, wait for me!’”

  Jilson laughed nervously in our earphones.

  * * * *

  It was a relatively easy drive down, there are few slopes greater than fifteen or twenty degrees anywhere on the Moon, and we managed to get within a kilometer or so of the wreck of Oryol before we had to stop, parking at the edge of one of those few.

  Standing at the precipice, looking down into the dark, Meat said, “We were right on top of it before it looked like anything but a shadow. Good thing we were going slow."

  Good thing. You could see that little story playing out, like the famous scene from that James Dean movie, and me with no comb to hold in my teeth as we fell.

  It'd been a little dicey driving in the deep shade, and I'm always afraid machinery will seize up in the cold. We have to spend two weeks out of every
month holed up in the birmed shelters as it is, and usually wait until the sun's been up for a dozen hours or so before we try to start anything that might break. Give the graphite lubricant time to thaw out.

  The mess below us, kind of a big crack, with a jumble of huge rocks beyond, was one of the “vents” that made the astronomers think there might be a volcano here, just a big pile of rubble, kilometers deep, tossed from the Orientale impact, eons ago. No more than a void in the regolith, that's all. Oh, maybe they didn't imagine that “outgassing.” Maybe there's old cometary ice under the ejecta blanket. Maybe it gets crushed and heated by moonquakes from time to time. But there'd been decent-sized moonquakes while I was here to watch, and I'd never seen a damned thing.

  Meat was pointing off to our right, northward along the ledge, toward a big area of bright rock, where the topsoil seemed to be gone. “Maybe they clipped the edge and bounced over?"

  Just beyond it, the crevice narrowed, turned to a crack and disappeared under dark gray dirt. I said, “We'll need the Hasselblad, I guess, all the lanyards and wire rope..."

  He pushed up his sunvisor, looking at me. “You really think we can make it across that?” A gesture, at the jumbled boulder field between us and the crash site.

  I wanted to shrug inside the suit, shook my head instead. “One of us, at least."

  "Nice try.” He walked back to the mooncar and started pulling lines and cable out of the bin, and said, “Let's clip together with the twelve-footer."

  "Right. I'll take the camera."

  We started walking, staying far enough apart to keep the lanyard from dragging on the ground, stopping every now and again so I could shoot a picture. Sixty frames on this roll. I need to keep count.

  After we cleared the end of the crevice and started down toward the broken rocks, Meat said, “I sure as hell am glad we're not in those old Gemini suits."

  "Yeah. Gotta give those Apollo guys credit, at least they watched us on TV and figured out they'd be falling down a lot."

  On foot and unplugged from the extended-EVA subsystem of the mooncar, the Apollo suit portable life support system can manage about seven hours on its own. It took us three hours to walk the last kilometer to Oryol, climbing over the scree below the so-called vent.