Ascent by Jed Mercurio

by Ascent (com v4. 0)

  All of a sudden, a drastic change occurs in the world around him. One of the ambient sounds to which he’s become accustomed has altered. At first Yefgenii cannot identify the change, then realization comes to him: the fan of the environmental control system has stopped. He floats to it with mounting panic. He holds himself to the metal grill. He feels no flow of oxygen. Frost clings to the grill’s tiny bars. He removes his gloves and scratches off some of it with his fingers. He cups the frost in his palm, and when it melts he licks up the precious moisture. He cleans the frost from the duct and then he resets the circuit, but the system doesn’t come back to life; it’s dead now, as dead as the radio and all the other systems that blinked out one by one, starved of electricity.

  He carries out a rapid calculation. Under the tiny probe of his penlight, his pencil scratches out symbols on the pad. He knows the dimensions of the BO and the SA. He knows that at rest a man of his size consumes about 15 litres of oxygen every hour. As he works through the calculation and adds in his estimates of the oxygen reserves contained in his two space-suit backpacks and in the LK tanks, he realizes that sufficient oxygen remains to support a slingshot round the Moon and the return journey to Earth, provided of course that conditions don’t alter, with, for example, a fire or a breach of the spacecraft hull.

  The flight rules in this instance aren’t flexible. As soon as the ship experienced a widespread electrical failure, an attempt at a lunar landing became reckless. Now that oxygen is limited, he must expedite a return to Earth. But Voskhodyeniye is already accelerating toward the Moon. The gravity of Earth has lost its influence and now the lesser body is reeling in the tiny metal boat. The great gray sphere looms through every porthole. The Moon has entered its last quarter. The western hemisphere beams back sunlight. At this distance the brilliance is dazzling.

  Mission Control’s order would be to pitch the spacecraft 180 degrees over on its longitudinal axis in order to swing the LK-Block D assembly aft, then to fire the Block D engine and speed Voskhodyeniye along the free-return trajectory, so as to slingshot round the Moon and hurl the spacecraft onto a reciprocal course for Earth.

  He shivers. He is drifting in the middle of the BO. His breath forms tiny spherical clouds. Time passes. The Moon grows closer. He is plunging toward the eastern limb, and into lunar shadow. Any further failure of the ship’s systems could leave him stranded in the realm of the Moon. Voskhodyeniye would orbit till he suffocated and eventually the orbit would decay until the spacecraft crashed somewhere on the airless waterless desolate surface.

  Whatever outcome awaits him, Yefgenii must still apply himself to the necessary calculations, to be prepared to burn the engine at a specified time for a specified duration. He works through the numbers, either to accelerate the free-return trajectory or alternatively to decelerate the spacecraft so that it’ll be captured by the Moon’s gravitation and reeled into orbit.

  By the time he completes the calculations, a coat of frost has spread over the coldest surfaces of the capsule, forming from the diminishing quantities of water vapor that he is generating from sweat and respiration. Once again he consults the reference figures in the flight plan. After four days in space, concentration is difficult. He checks and rechecks his working. On a number of occasions he’s some way through a calculation, then becomes disoriented and has to start again.

  While he floats, while he ponders, the fourth day comes to an end. Decision time arrives, though he can even choose to do nothing and the ship will still travel the free-return trajectory back to Earth.

  Ninety-eight hours into the mission, he slows the thermal control roll. He feels sick in the pit of his stomach from motion and hunger. His eyes are tired, and gritty from the dry air. His head aches.

  Firing the thrusters causes the ship to stop, but then to begin rolling in the opposite direction. He must apply counterthrust to arrest the motion. He overcompensates and the ship wobbles back. He fires again and steadies her again. He knows he’s wasting fuel. Without the onboard computer to carry out maneuvers like this one, his flying is imprecise, it’s wasteful; it depletes the spacecraft’s fuel but also it depletes him.

  The maneuvering is complete. Only six men before him have come this far, the crews of Apollo 8 and Apollo 10. A chance still exists for him to return to Earth, to see home again, to see the cheering crowds in Red Square, but this was not the objective of his ascent. He has not risen so far to emulate the achievements of other men, to choose a glory amortized by repetition; his destiny must be the perfect mission, the unique mission, that which no other man can do, which no other man would do.

  Home hangs in a porthole. He raises his hand and just a thumbnail is enough to cover Earth. This far out, a man is bigger than countries: Yefgenii Yeremin is the size of the planets themselves.

  He fires the Block D engine for three minutes and fifty-four seconds, decelerating the spacecraft. The ship no longer possesses the velocity to slingshot round the Moon and be flung home. He has surrendered to gravity and it captures him, like Icarus.

  DARKNESS SURROUNDS THE FRAGILE METAL CRAFT. Voskhodyeniye is passing through the shadow of the Moon. Frost speckles the instruments and bulkheads of the cabin. Yefgenii wears his space gloves and communications helmet for warmth, stripping to the lining gloves only for delicate tasks. He huddles a metre above the floor. It doesn’t matter which part of the cabin he occupies, there’s no sunlight, no source of warmth. He blinks ever slower, falling asleep. Out of the porthole he glimpses a vast black hole in the stars. This is the surface of the Moon, drifting below. He sails across the unlit portion of the Near Side into the unlit portion of the Far Side. Only blackness spans the below.

  He wonders if he is dreaming, if he’s at sail in a ship of the imagination, on a blank ocean, an ocean of souls. He dreams of Kiriya, and Skomorokhov, and little Gnido, of Bondarenko, Komarov and Gagarin, and of the Americans too, the nameless pilots in Korea whose aircraft shattered and burned before their parachutes could bloom; he dreams of them all, too many and too long ago to picture, and of Grissom, White and Chaffee, burning like Bondarenko burned, in a capsule too rich in oxygen, conquerors of the air being conquered by it.

  Then the universe explodes. One star flares, a point of light expanding into a gigantic inferno that spreads across creation in a vast rippling disc of fire that consumes the stars and planets.

  He wakes to gaze upon the secret face of the Moon. The Sun has risen across the lunar horizon, and now light is blazing across the craters of the Far Side. Millions of years of meteorite impacts have pitted the surface into a featureless scarred ruin, without mountains, without rilles, without the striking basalt plains of the misnomeric lunar seas. The Moon has passed its last quarter, but this is as viewed from Earth; the Sun lights the Far Side into a waxing gibbous Moon that arches into shadow behind him and curves toward the Near Side ahead.

  He drifts toward the Sun, like an etiolated plant struggling toward the light, and bumps against the porthole. The dazzling light scorches through into the cabin. He huddles in it, craving warmth, but frost streaks the panels and gauges and pipework, and even coats his space suit, so that as he moves it crinkles and floats off into the air, where it drifts as glistening confetti.

  Perhaps he’s still dreaming. His ship of the imagination appears to be travelling backward in time. The lunar shadow recedes from Voskhodyeniye. The ship is sinking toward the Sun, then toward the Earth, then he will return to cislunar space, wherein the Moon presents him with yesterday’s waning gibbous face hours before last quarter, and he is back in the time of making calculations and planning whether to pitch the spacecraft round and fire the Block D to hurry himself home, or to insert Voskhodyeniye into lunar orbit.

  Now he remembers. He made the insertion burn. The spacecraft is swinging behind the Moon and heading back toward Earth, not to return but to establish lunar orbit. He’s not dreaming. He’s here. This is what he’s done, and he asks himself if he was right, or if this isn’t the supreme folly o
f a life which, if surveyed backward in the dreamy voyage of his ship of the imagination, falls from the Korean sky glinting with metal and fire where Ivan the Terrible was born, into the soot and ruins of Stalingrad. Babak, that was his name, the boy who raped him: from that nadir Babak is the one who ascends to the flight school at Chkalov, and another VVS ace, Pepelyaev, is the one who wins more jet kills than any pilot in history, and Armstrong and Aldrin will be the first visitors to the surface of the Moon. It may as well be, because Ivan the Terrible never existed, because Earth has assumed him lost and turns with aloof serenity, turns in the sky as if by turning from west to east, from night into day, she is turning her beautiful watery blue back to him.

  Yet in gazing down at the secret face below, he feels fulfilled in choosing the Moon over the Earth. For eons the Far Side has been invisible to man, yet it has always been here, and, like his own voyage that is unknown and invisible to those on Earth, it is no less beautiful or dramatic because of it.

  So he is here. The one illuminated feature he recognizes drifts below, a plain circular patch of ancient lava, like an ectopic gray eye on a pitted brown face: the Eastern Sea. The curve of the lunar limb bulges ahead. He is sailing from the Far Side onto the Near Side, the Earth Side, and then he glimpses her, rising, the only coloured thing in the universe, the brilliant blue-and-white disc of home. She is floating on a black sea, a part submerged buoy that appears to pull against an invisible anchor, straining out of the blackness to mark the solitary known point of water and life.

  He weeps. He thinks perhaps it is from tiredness, from the tyrannies of thirst, hunger and cold, but he is a man watching the earthrise, and he is weeping.

  His gloved fingers paw his cheeks. He captures the tears on his fingertips and licks the moisture before it freezes. His mouth is dry. His cheeks and lips are numb and cracked. He purges the dying fuel cells. Only one remains working. He gleans its meager production of water, and drinks. He scrapes frost off the cabin’s frozen surfaces and cups it in his hand, where it melts, and then he drinks that too.

  The Ocean of Storms slides below. The spacecraft has curved round the edge of the visible land and now is traversing the Near Side, which has diminished to a little less than half-lit. The face is a waning crescent, but broad, bulging, and stretching just about as far as the westernmost escarpment of the lunar Appenines.

  He identifies the landing site at once, bounded by a triangle of distinctive craters, Kepler, Marius, and Reiner. Voskhodyeniye is sailing on, over the Ocean of Storms, over the Bay of Dew and the Bay of Rainbows, over the Sea of Rains and the Sea of Moisture. Now the ancient nomenclature acquires a bitter irony.

  Not only is Voskhodyeniye crossing the surface, but she should also be rising away from it. The decelerating burn was designed to place the spacecraft in an elliptical orbit spanning 280 kilometres by 100. The closest approach, the pericynthion, should lie over the landing site.

  By eye he finds it impossible to judge altitude. The gray-brown beach rolls under the ship, but he has no experience of this perspective, and no instruments to guide him. No precise method of measuring the orbit can operate without the computer and out of contact with Mission Control.

  Yefgenii decides he must acquire an approximation of the spacecraft’s altitude and velocity. The landing site has been mapped by unmanned probes. The dimensions of its most distinctive features are entered in the flight plan, and they’ve been used as part of his training, in the hope that he might acquire a sense of visual perspective on the descent to the landing site. Using the sextant he attempts to measure the angles between the craters Kepler and Marius. He works as fast as he can, but the craters speed by before he can take the measurement.

  Instead he decides to time an orbit over the crater Copernicus, but he knows he won’t be timing a true rev, as the Moon will also rotate on its own axis. He must factor this in for accuracy.

  Two hours later he is back over the landing site, and this time set up with the sextant, so that he manages to measure the angle of separation between Kepler and Marius while the spacecraft is directly overhead, and then he watches Copernicus roll under, and marks the time on his chronometer. He also starts the chronometer’s second stopwatch.

  Without delay he embarks on his calculation. The apparent angular separation of Kepler and Marius will permit him to calculate his altitude above the landing site as the height of an isosceles triangle above the base given by the known distance between the two craters. The duration of one rev will reveal his orbital velocity.

  When Voskhodyeniye first enters the lunar shadow, the only light in the BO originates from Earth. The clouds and oceans reflect the Sun’s light with four times the radiance of the Moon. He braces at a porthole and contorts to bring his notepad into the earthlight. Soon the spacecraft’s orbit carries it over the Far Side, and the Earth sets behind the Moon.

  Yefgenii slides the penlight out of a pocket of his space suit and continues. After ten minutes, the light flickers and dies. The battery has given out. The mission carried the light for emergency use only, and the engineers deemed a spare battery a luxury, given the flight’s strict payload limits. Every item aboard has been weighed and its value calculated. The calculations have been balanced down to whether the mission is better served by an extra roll of film for the camera or by an additional bullet for the crew revolver in the event of a wilderness touchdown and the need to repel wild animals.

  His universe is one of cold and almost total darkness. The faint glimmers of stars speckle the black sky, but the light is negligible. The interior of the cabin, even his own body, is invisible to him. The cold oppresses him. He feels it push into his throat and down into his lungs, turning his blood lukewarm. It is chilling his bones.

  It seems an age but is in truth only a matter of minutes before the Sun rises over the Far Side. He presses against the porthole to claim every drop of golden syrupy light. The battered surface drifts below. Craters overlap craters, new on top of old. The back of the Moon bears the scars of the outer face of the Earth-Moon system, the shield of an eon’s meteorite strikes.

  When the second stopwatch indicates he’s halfway round this revolution, he identifies the crater Tsiolkovsky directly below, and with the sextant measures its apparent diameter. This measurement he hopes will determine the high point of Voskhodyeniye’s orbit, the apocynthion.

  An hour of sunlight illuminates Yefgenii’s toil, and then lunar night once again engulfs the spacecraft. He must stop, and cannot help contemplating his situation. If his orbital velocity is too slow, Voskhodyeniye will soon crash to the surface.

  When day breaks again, he continues through his calculations: Voskhodyeniye is travelling an acceptable orbit, moving at close to the predicted velocity. His present situation appears stable. He must stop work. He must rest and take sustenance.

  He consumes his food allowance. The surviving fuel cell has produced a pittance of water. Little frost is forming on the interior of the cabin now. What water vapor remains in the cabin atmosphere comes from his own breath. He removes his gloves and squeezes out of the spacesuit. The cold stings his flesh. He hurries, he shivers. He seals off and disconnects the filling pipe of his waste collection bag and removes the bag from his suit. A globule of straw-coloured fluid floats off the tip of the bag’s hose. He puts the hose of the waste collection bag in his mouth and opens the seal. He sucks out the liquid that’s a mixture of his urine and sweat. It amounts to only a couple of hundred millilitres. He chases the globule that escaped from the tube. It wobbles and shimmers. Spectra flash off streaks of grease. The surface is already frosting. He closes his mouth over the globule, taking it in one gulp.

  After reinstating the waste collection bag, he struggles back into the suit. The material stretches but his muscles and tendons don’t. He contorts into it. The sunburn on his flank tears. He screams, tears come to his eyes, and he finds a way to drink those too.

  By now the spacecraft is travelling through darkness again. When it emerge
s, he huddles in the sunlight. The Far Side rolls below. The Moon is small and the ship is close. He gains a sense of speed in contrast to the stately promenade of Earth orbit.

  The Eastern Sea slides under the lunar equator. Earth rises again. He sets himself at the porthole with the telescope trained down on the surface. By eye he tracks the appearance of the highlands of the Ocean of Storms’ western coastline dominated by the crater Hevelius, 100 kilometres across. Without an atmosphere to burn them up, meteorites have struck the surface intact and gouged out great lumps of rock and dust.

  He sees the land flatten. Through the eyepiece of the telescope he surveys the landing site. The lava bed ripples between Reiner and Marius to the northeast. No large craters or cliffs ruin the picture. Eastward streaks of ejecta begin to appear, diverging from their point of origin, Kepler. This closer survey supports the objective of setting down somewhere in a zone measuring about 200 kilometres by 300. No observable feature suggests the landing site is unsuitable.

  Voskhodyeniye leaves the Sun behind, and the dazzling yellow disc begins to slide behind the lunar horizon. The shadow is visible ahead, crossing the Sea of Islands east of the crater Copernicus. The illuminated portion of the Near Side is continuing to dwindle. The Ocean of Storms will remain sunlit for a further three days; in six days there’ll be a new Moon, when the satellite swings between the Earth and the Sun and the entire Near Side falls into darkness. At present, the Sun angle is optimal for the landing, being oblique to the Ocean of Storms so that craters and hills are thrown into relief, rather than being blasted into a flat panorama that gives an observer no sense of perspective.