Emerging from the habitat, Joe ran through the perfunctory communications checks, which ended with a question from Kari: “So, just in case anyone asks…where are you headed?”
“Where else?” he said. “Where Pathfinder landed.”
Robert Temple, the Lifer, died of a heart attack in Orlando, Florida, in 2008. He had stayed with NASA after Apollo and commanded three Shuttle missions.
Joe had come back to the Moon in order to revisit a key moment in his own life that, based on other accounts, he either misremembered or missed altogether. He likened himself to a paratrooper from the 101st Airborne returning to Normandy fifty years after D-Day.
It was possible, of course, that the discovery he and the Alpha made on their second EVA had distorted the experience for him.
What ever the reason, his only firm memories of those three days on the Moon were constant nervousness about the timeline, dull fear, total exhaustion. The fear started with the hiccup of the lunar module’s descent engine during pitchover—so anomalous that it caused cool, calm Chuck Behrens, the Alpha Apostle, to turn his head inside his fish-bowl helmet, eyes wide with alarm, mouthing a simple, expressive, “Wow.”
But, in classic Alpha fashion, doing nothing. The engine resumed full thrust and the landing proceeded and, powered by adrenaline and relief, the two astronauts zoomed through their checklist to their first EVA. (Chuck’s first words were, “Hey, Mom and Dad, look at me.” Then Joe’s more mundane, “A lovely day for a walk.”)
Even though there were three relay satellites in orbit around the Moon the day Alpha and Omega landed, comm from the far side was still intermittent. Nevertheless, the first seven-hour jaunt went by the numbers. Flag erected. Rover deployed. Scientific instruments sited.
After what turned out to be twenty hours of wakefulness and extreme stress, neither astronaut needed a sleeping pill to sack out in the cramped, uncomfortable Pathfinder.
The next day—the public relations ceremonies and contingency sampling behind them—they were able to board the rover quickly and be on the road, just the way the Alpha loved to fire up a T-38 aircraft and bolt into the Texas sky. This was to be their long traverse, if circumstances and terrain permitted, reaching a straight-line distance from Pathfinder of six kilometers. (“Close enough so we can walk back if the rover conks on us.”)
The target location was known as Great Salt Lake, named by a geologist from Utah. GSL was a kidney-shaped mini-mare a kilometer wide and three high, marked by a rich variety of clustered craters and crevasses.
By the three-hour point of the EVA, the astronauts were deploying instruments at the first of their two planned stops when they faced a forty-minute gap in the link to Houston. The Alpha said, “Hey, Joe, let’s hike over there.”
There was a shadowed cleft in a rock face a dozen meters high, about fifty meters to the south. It appeared to be the mouth of a cave in the low hills inside GSL. Joe knew it, of course. His memory for the Aitken Basin Site was photographic. The passage was narrow, jagged, but did not lead to a cave, just an open area the geologists called the Atrium.
Had the Alpha asked, “What do you think?” Joe would have said, Every minute of this EVA has been planned. This site is one the geologists have been aching to visit for a decade. And we’re supposed to take a spelunking detour? But the question was never offered.
The Alpha entered first, stopped (a bit of a trick, given his high center of gravity and forward momentum) and said, “See anything?”
“What am I looking for?”
“Color. Anything but black or gray.”
“What, some kind of oxidized soil? Shit.” Here Joe slipped and fell to his hands. Even with the suit and life-support pack, which together weighed more than he did, he was easily able to push himself back to standing without help.
“This guy I know at JPL saw a flash of color in a single frame of film that he was processing.” Chuck stopped and turned left, then right, sweeping with his hand, each motion severely constrained by the suit. “Here.”
Joe blinked. Then raised his mylarized visor to give himself an unfiltered look. “You mean there.”
Joe wasn’t sure what he’d seen—a flash of pink, just as likely the result of some fast-moving solar particle ripping through his optic nerve—but he felt compelled to check it out. Hell, this was the one un-programmed moment in all of the Apollo EVAs. Enjoy it!
They hopped and shuffled toward the shadowed face of a boulder the size of a bus. “Maybe it’s ice,” Chuck said.
In the shadows, protected by a shelf of granite for God knew how many thousands, millions, possibly billions of years, was what looked to Joe to be a jumbled collection of pink pillars and related rubble—like the ruins of a Roman villa seen on a college trip to Herculaneum.
The substance had flat surfaces…not just crystalline facets, though even in the first adrenalized flush of discovery he was ready to consider that it might be natural. But each time he blinked, breathed, and counted, the material looked…artificial. Certainly it was like nothing they expected to find on the lunar surface. (Years later, seeing the destruction of the planet Krypton in the first Superman movie, Joe would literally stand up in the theater, thinking he was looking at the Aitken Coral.)
The Alpha broke the silence. “How much longer to AOS?” Acquisition of signal, the return of contact with mission control.
“Seven minutes.”
“Let’s get a sample. And mum’s the word.”
Joe wanted to scream in protest. Yes, they were already off the reservation as far as NASA knew. Why jeopardize the rest of their timeline by lobbing this particular grenade into the flight plan? When in doubt, do nothing. There would be time to look at this stuff when they returned to Pathfinder. Then, if it warranted, they could tell mission control—and return here on their third EVA.
But this could be the discovery of the ages! Something that justified the entire Apollo program!
Nevertheless, three years of training—twenty-five years of following orders—overcame all other impulses. Joe simply swallowed and reached for his tools.
They quickly hammered off several faceted pieces and scooped up the rubble. “Interesting,” Joe said, knowing he might be overheard, “the hard stuff flakes like mica, but the rubble is like coral.”
“Houston, 506, comm check.” Chuck made the call in the clear, and also as a warning. Don’t say anything. You work for me.
The Businessman disappeared off the coast of Florida in 1999.
All twelve Apostles met in the same room for the first time—post-Apollo—during interviews for the follow-up documentary to Felice’s book. Nine years had smoothed out the old rivalries. They had dinner together, played golf in a trio of foursomes, stayed up late drinking and telling what the Alpha always called sea stories.
Thanks to his newfound prominence as chairman of the board of X Systems, Joe noticed that the others—especially the Good Old Boy and the Shark, who in Houston never seemed to know Joe’s name—actually gave him leave to speak.
And so, with the Alpha’s encouragement, the last night in that hotel room in Glendale, California, Joe shared the secret of the Aitken Coral.
“You bastards!” the Politician said, only half kidding. “You realize how hard it is to sell the manned space program these days? You could have saved me a lot of work!”
The Mystic was already chiming in, “You’ve got to get this out! My God, it would create a whole new paradigm!”
At this, the Shark and the Businessman both guffawed. Joe couldn’t tell which was the more contemptuous. What the hell was a “paradigm”?
Before a vote-to-release by acclamation could be entered, the Preacher preached caution. “How do you know it’s real?”
The Aviator chimed in, too. “Have you had it tested?”
The Visionary wanted to know where it was stashed. The Lifer, as usual, sat back in silence. There were other opinions—the Good Old Boy seemed to be on both sides of the matter.
A
show of hands left it 5-5.
Joe turned to the Alpha, who said, “Guys, thank you. As Jeb Pruett used to say, whenever we bitched out our assignments, we’ll ‘take that under advisement.’ We told you because we want your opinions. But the decision is ours. Joe?”
Joe was indecently pleased. For the first time in their working relationship, Chuck Behrens had offered him a voice in a decision! “I say, sit on it for a while yet. Do some definitive tests. If it’s really real, a few years’ delay won’t matter. If it’s not what we think, we’ll save ourselves a world of shit.”
The Alpha concurred. The vote of the Apostles was 7-5 against.
There never was another gathering of the twelve Apostles as a group. Somehow the Alpha always managed to cancel. And then death began to reduce their numbers.
Herman Polski—the Politician—died much too young, felled by a heart attack in Texas three years later.
Even at Aitken Base, Joe would still hear the question, “How did you find out you were going to the Moon?” They didn’t realize it was a three-step answer. Number one, “The day I got the phone call from NASA telling me I’d been selected as an astronaut, and to get my ass to Houston by January fifteenth.”
Step two took place six years later. It was ten minutes before a Monday morning pilots’ meeting, two days after the Aviator and the Preacher splashed down from the first lunar landing on 501.
Chuck Behrens motioned Joe into his office. “Jeb’s going to announce me as backup commander for the third landing.”
“Congratulations.” Joe could not help thinking that every time another astronaut succeeded, he died a little.
“Wanna go with me?”
“As lunar module pi lot?”
“What else?”
“Okay.”
Chuck raised an eyebrow. “You’re a low-key son of a bitch, Joe. When I got my Gemini assignment I could have reached orbit without the rocket.”
“I’ve been waiting six years. My feeling is, ‘about fucking time.’”
Step three was the least surprising. Joe and Chuck had spent a year backing up the Shark and the Mystic. Joe and Chuck were watching their splashdown (a bit tricky, since one of three parachutes collapsed) in mission control when Jeb Pruett turned to them and said, “You’ve got 506.”
That was when Joe could have reached orbit—or the Moon itself—without a rocket.
But the key decision had been made earlier, when the Alpha invited him onto his crew. “One thing before we lock this in, old buddy. From this day on, you take orders from me.”
“Why wouldn’t I take your orders?”
Chuck laughed so hard his face flushed. “Joe, Joe, Joe…the whole reason you’re the right-fielder in this team is that you are too goddamn independent! And everybody knows it. Not insubordinate. You just obviously know more than the rest of us, and make sure whoever you’re working for gets the message, too.
“I can’t have that. I will acknowledge right here and now that, based on I.Q. and all that good stuff, you should be my commander. Hell, you know more about the lunar module than anyone, including me. You’ve got a sci-fi kind of mind, which doesn’t hurt, either. But from this point on, what I need from you is the certainty of blind obedience. If I tell you we’re going direct from AUTO, you do it. If I tell you to strip down and take a shit on the White House lawn, you do it. If I’m wrong, and it is likely I will be wrong in some matters, it’s my problem.
“And if I get us killed, then either I wasn’t the right guy to be commander, or the universe was against us. Either way, I want my last thought to be the knowledge that it was my doing.
“I need you to be a tool. And never give me the idea you’re thinking ahead of me, that you’re dying to give me a brilliant out-of-your-ass suggestion.”
It took Joe Liquori all of two seconds to make up his mind, to change his whole personality and his destiny. “Okay.”
Jesse King, the Shark, commander of the troubled 503 mission where the lunar module ascent stage shut down early, forcing the command module to swoop down for an emergency rescue, died of lung cancer in 1990. “Good career move,” the Alpha said, perhaps unkindly. The Shark’s financial career had caught up with him. Had he lived, he would have been prosecuted for fraud.
In theory, the choice of landing site for the sixth mission had been made years back. From the relatively benign Sea of Tranquility and Ocean of Storms to more challenging highlands, like Fra Mauro and Hadley, the sites had been clicked off by the first missions. It looked as though Chuck and Joe were headed for Cayley Plains, until a program planning meeting attended by the center director, the program manager from HQ, science chief, twenty head sheds and horse-holders.
And, uninvited, Chuck and Joe. They had been up in T-38s that morning, and Chuck had insisted they stay in their sweaty flight suits. And arrive ten minutes late.
Dr. Rowe, the center director, noted their presence. “You guys take a wrong turn on the way to the simulator?”
“Depends on what we hear here,” Chuck said, grabbing a pair of seats as close to the front as he could.
Rowe, whose fatherly demeanor hid a precise engineering mind, glanced at General Shields, the nothing-like-fatherly Apollo program manager. Who simply said, “Let’s have it, Chuck.”
Smiling, Chuck walked toward the map of the Moon and tapped his finger on Tranquility, Storms, Fra Mauro. “We’ve been here, here, and here. A year from now, we’ll have been here, too.”
Then he removed the map from its easel and turned it over. There was nothing on the back. “That’s funny, I’d always been taught that even though we couldn’t see it, the Moon really had a Far Side.” Joe, the sci-fi reader, had told Chuck about an Asimov story that claimed precisely that.
The meeting room was silent, except for the thump of General Shields’ pencil. “Your point, Colonel?”
“By the time Apollo is done, we’ll have spent twenty billion dollars and visited a fraction of half a world. The front half. The easy half. Is that what the president said? ‘We do these things because they are easy’?”
The room erupted with protests, some emotional, some technical—“How do we relay comm from the back side?”—and even answers to the objections—“The Air Force has a bunch of small comsats sitting on the shelf in LA. We could put them in the service module on the next three landing missions—”
Chuck knew he’d over-reached, but that was his style: ask for the Moon and take what you can get.
Nothing changed—that day.
Seven weeks later, NASA announced that the sixth and last lunar landing would attempt to reach Aitken Basin on the far side.
Len Caskey, the flight surgeon turned test pilot, always known as The Doctor, died in 2007, six years after a debilitating stroke.
It was only in the sleepless second night that they found the privacy to speak about their discovery. “Funny, isn’t it?” Chuck said. “Three human beings within a quarter of a million miles—one of them in another spacecraft—and we’re worried about being overheard.”
“Yeah. Funny.”
Chuck tapped his bare foot on the sample case. “What do you think it is?”
“Pink coral.”
“Even something as basic as coral would be significant, wouldn’t it? It’s not, though. Not with those edges. Somebody made that.”
“Maybe it was somebody,” Joe said. “Maybe that was the body of a crystal alien.”
“You and that sci-fi mind of yours.” Chuck had closed his eyes. “All I know is, word gets out about this, lots of people are going to be pissing their pants.”
Joe didn’t bother to tell Chuck that on seeing the Aitken Coral he had, indeed, filled his diaper.
The third EVA was as routine as moon walks ever went. A few hours later, buttoned up in Pathfinder, they fired the ascent stage to begin the journey home.
Once they’d docked to Conestoga and moved their samples and gear aboard, Joe swam into the LM for a last look before jettison.
The entire weight of the mission, the secret, the training, his whole life landed on him. He started weeping.
“Joe, you all right down there?” Don Berringer, their command module pilot, had seen him through the tunnel…fetal, floating, shuddering with sobs.
“Shut up, Don.” Chuck had seen it, too…and gently pushed the hatch closed.
Five minutes later Joe had calmed himself. He completed the close-out checklist, stashed the fecal waste bags Berringer had accumulated during his three days of orbital privacy, allowed himself one last look out Pathfinder’s triangular window at the desperately desolate moonscape sliding past.
Chuck floated into the module, closing the hatch behind him. “Ready to rock and roll?”
“Yeah.” He noted a sample bag in Chuck’s hand. “What’s that?”
“What do you think?”
“What’s it doing here?”
“I’ve half a mind to leave it. Send it around the Sun for the next ten thousand years.” When separated from Conestoga, Pathfinder would be launched into a heliocentric orbit.
Joe was still in the absolute-obedience mode. “Copy that.”
Chuck laughed again. “I can’t. But I don’t want to broadcast the news, either. Not yet. Like they taught us in all those sims, when in doubt, do nothing. And let me tell you, my friend, I’m in serious doubt about what to do.”
“Then you better move it to the PPK.” PPKs were the astronauts’ personal preference kits, bags of family memorabilia, postal covers, and commemorative coins.
Chuck winked and made a clicking sound, a sign of the highest approval.
That was the extent of the discussion.
The Good Old Boy, Floyd Brashear, died of prostate cancer in 2019.
The PPKs turned out to be a bit of a problem. The post-flight check out included a weigh-in, which showed what NASA would call a “significant discrepancy,” which Chuck managed to alleviate by convincing those doing the weighing that he had stuck his EVA gloves in there. “Rather than throw them overboard, you follow?”
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