The Tranquillity Alternative

by Allen Steele

  “Yes, it … yeah, maybe so.” Gene loosened the catheter, took a sip through the straw, and almost gagged. Talsbach had made coffee strong enough to raise the dead. “Thanks, but take it easy on the bags next time. We’ve got to make the supply last.”

  Talsbach grinned at him, then pulled himself up the gangway ladder to B-deck, where Aachener was inspecting the ship’s mainframes. Gene considered following them, if only to explain the equipment, but realized that the Germans had probably studied that part of the moonship, too. In fact, their simulators probably contained computers which were more state-of-the-art than Conestoga’s.

  He turned around to find James Leamore strapped into a seat on the other side of the mess table. The Englishman had already figured out how to cradle his squeeze bulb within one of the table’s magnetic coasters. He had also discovered the gripsole sneakers in the locker beneath his couch and was now putting them on his feet.

  “A nice launch, Commander,” he said as he carefully adjusted the shoes for his size. “We hardly felt a thing down here.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Leamore …”

  “James, please. Or you can call me Pat. Most of my friends do.” Leamore laced up his left sneaker, unstrapped his seat belt, and carefully stood up, testing the cling offered by the frayed carpet. “Well … works rather nicely, doesn’t it?”

  “It should. We’ve had a little practice at this sort of thing.” Gene nodded to his own feet, which were not shod in gripsoles. “Personally, I get along without them. Just one less thing I have to worry about.”

  “I imagine so.” Leamore took a few tentative baby-steps around the floor. “We’re still trying to decide whether to equip our ships with these things. Seems as if it’s a matter of six of one and half a dozen of the other …”

  “Something like that, yeah.” Gene shrugged. “You get the illusion of gravity, but for that you give up some mobility, too.” He took a seat on the far side of the table but didn’t strap himself down. Instead, he crossed his legs so that his left knee pinned his right leg between the bottom of the table and the floor, anchoring him in place. “Practice is all it takes.”

  “Hmm. Yes.” Leamore slowly walked back to his chair and sat down; he didn’t try to imitate Parnell’s crossed-leg trick. “Of course, our ships won’t be … well, quite as spacious, if you know what I mean.”

  Gene knew what he meant. Koening Selenen’s Monhunde moonships would not only make orbital hangars unnecessary, but also reduce the size of the vessels themselves. The Monhunde was to be a two-stage vehicle, the first stage of which was a retrievable liquid-fuel booster that would be jettisoned once the vehicle reached low orbit. The second stage would utilize an advanced nuclear engine capable of sending men and cargo straight to the Moon; this engine would then be refueled on the Moon, using reactive volatiles refined from the lunar regolith. Before the first Monhunde was launched, an unmanned, teleoperated fuel-manufacturing plant would be sent to Tranquillity Base, where it would begin stocking up on fuel not only for the return flight but for subsequent missions.

  In other words, Koenig Selenen intended to make Tranquillity Base self-sufficient by forcing it to live off the land instead of shipping from Earth everything needed for survival. If it worked—and there was no reason to believe that it wouldn’t—the cost of space exploration would be greatly reduced, and large-scale space colonization would become a real possibility. Indeed, Koenig Selenen was already discussing plans to use nuclear indigenous-fuel spacecraft to send a return mission to Mars, the asteroid belt, and even the outer planets of the solar system.

  The sad irony of the NIF engine was that it had first been proposed in the mid-eighties by a team of researchers from the Martin Marietta Corporation. Unfortunately, NASA’s entrenched bureaucracy had not paid much attention to the idea; it was also opposed by the antispace movement, whose knees jerked at the mere mention of the word “nuclear.” Suffocated by redundant impact studies and railed at by technophobic newspaper columnists, the NIF engine died in the United States. The project’s key scientists quit Martin Marietta, left the U.S., and moved to Germany, where they were quickly hired by Koenig Selenen GmbH.

  Even more ironic was the fact that once NIF moonships entered service, one of their main jobs would be hauling high-level nuclear waste to the Moon, where it would be stored inside the empty Minuteman II silos. This would please environmentalists concerned about the disposal of nuclear waste on Earth … but who had opposed a solution to the same problem because it involved using space technology. Of course, Koenig Selenen GmbH would profit handsomely from this enterprise as well.

  Now, as he sat across the galley table from Parnell, James Leamore had the twinkle in his eyes of a patient tortoise who has outraced a complacent, slumbering hare.

  “I’m sure you’ll manage somehow,” Gene said. He uncrossed his legs, swiveled the chair around, and pushed off from the table, taking his coffee with him. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to return upstairs.”

  On his way up the ladder, Gene paused on B-deck. The two German astronaut-trainees were bent over the plotting table, their feet restrained by floor stirrups as they closely studied the highlighted map of the lunar farside. He was about to join them, when he noticed Cris Ryer on the far side of the deck.

  She had lowered one of the cots from the bulkhead and was sitting on it as she changed into gripshoes from her duffel bag. She looked up warily as Gene pulled himself along the ceiling rail until he grabbed a support stanchion.

  “If I had known you were coming below,” he said, “I would have offered to buy you coffee.”

  “That’s all right, Commander,” she replied. “I just needed to change shoes. I’ll get some coffee myself before I go back up.”

  “You sure? I could run down and grab another bulb.”

  Ryer shook her head; the sudden motion caused her short blond hair to drift across her face. “No, sir, that’s fine. I can manage by myself.”

  Her eyes darted to the open privacy curtain, as if she were wishing she’d thought to draw it around her bunk. She was clearly uncomfortable in his presence, and Parnell suddenly felt a twinge of guilt. After all, he had been prodding her in a sore spot ever since they left the Cape; they didn’t have to be friends, but neither her job nor his would be made any easier if they couldn’t tolerate each other for a few days.

  “Look, Cris …” he began, then glanced over his shoulder to see if either Aachener or Talsbach were paying attention. They were engrossed in the map, murmuring to each other in German. He lowered his voice. “Look, let’s just drop it, okay?”

  “Drop what, Commander?”

  “Drop the hostility, that’s what I mean.” He took a deep breath. “I know you’re upset about … y’know, what’s happening with you and the agency. Believe me, I understand …”

  “Oh. You understand.” Ryer angrily shoved the discarded boots into her duffel bag, then raised her left foot and thrust it into a gripsole sneaker. “So how’s the wife, Commander? How’s the kids?”

  “I don’t see what my family’s got to do with …”

  “No? Of course you don’t.” Her eyes were cold when she glanced at him. “I hear your son’s got a dope problem and you’ve spent a lot of time trying to keep him out of jail. That right? Funny how nobody questions your patriotism or calls you a security risk.”

  Parnell felt his face grow warm. “That’s not the same thing, Captain …”

  “It isn’t?” Ryer impatiently swept the hair out of her face. She laced up the sneaker and reached for its mate. “It’s your private business, something that stays at home. Right? Well, what I do stays at home, too. In fact, it had for almost ten years, until someone saw me kiss my wife in a bar. Then I became a security risk …”

  “Cris …”

  “Yeah, okay … you’re right. Maybe we should just drop it.” She nodded toward a nearby bunk while she laced the other sneaker. “The TV queen is supposed to sleep over there. You think she’ll mind? I mean, she’s
really not my type, but you never know about us queers …”

  “Cut it out!” he snapped.

  He heard Aachener and Talsbach abruptly go silent. He didn’t have to look behind him to know that they were staring in his direction. Parnell forced himself to calm down; it wouldn’t do any good for him to blow up at Ryer now.

  “Look,” he said, “let’s go back to square one. We’ve got our jobs to do. Regardless of everything else, that’s the first priority. We can’t go to the Moon and back snarling at each other … we’re the guys in charge here. Got it?”

  Ryer was about to retort, then apparently reconsidered. She sighed, nervously flicking her hair away again; she didn’t look his way. “Yeah. Okay. Got it.”

  “Good. So let’s make a deal. You do your job, and I’ll stay off your case.”

  “Yeah, okay, Commander.” She pulled the duffel bag closer and began to dig into it. “Whatever you say … Christ, where’s that cap?”

  Parnell felt his temper rising once more. She was avoiding him again, and the silly-ass game was beginning to piss him off. He reached forward to grab the duffel bag, intending to yank it aside so that she couldn’t use it to escape the conversation.

  “And another thing,” he said as his fist grasped the bag’s nylon cord. “Cut the ‘Commander’ crap. My name’s …”

  What happened next was the sort of accident that can only occur in free-fall. He didn’t intend to spill the duffel’s contents, but she wasn’t holding it firmly enough; in the next instant, boots, rolled socks, a sweatshirt, underwear, a spare jumpsuit, a toilet kit, a computer diskette … all practically exploded in midair, pulled outward by the force of his tug.

  “Goddammit!” she yelled, but she was redfaced and laughing in spite of her anger as her personal belongings were made public. “Oh, shit, Parnell! Look what you’ve done!”

  “Jeez … Cris, I’m sorry!” He heard the Germans laughing as he let go of his squeeze bulb and began grabbing for anything within reach.

  He managed to snag one of the boots, a pair of white silk undies—he tried not to look at them too hard—and a sweatshirt before he spotted the computer diskette tumbling past his shoulder. He snatched it up and, out of curiosity, glanced at the handwritten label.

  “Tetris?” he said. “Hey, I love this. My daughter got me into it …”

  “Gimme that!”

  Before he could react, Ryer dropped the clothes she’d retrieved, flung herself across the six feet of space separating them, and grabbed the diskette out of his hand. “That’s not for you!”

  For an instant, he saw terror in her eyes. “Hey, whoa,” he said, surprised by her expression. “Easy does it. I’m just surprised you brought a game with you, that’s all.” He cocked his head toward the nearby computers. “If you’ve got a minute, let’s load it up and …”

  “No,” Ryer said. “Let’s not.”

  She unzipped a hip pocket of her jumpsuit, shoved the diskette inside, and zipped the pocket closed again before she forced a smile on her face. “C’mon, Gene,” she said. “Help me get all this stuff. We’ve got the second-post burn to do in a few minutes.”

  “Uh … yeah. Sure.” Parnell handed her the armful of clothing he had already collected, then went to retrieve the toilet kit which was spiraling end-over-end toward the other side of the deck. No problem with him getting a good, close look at her panties, but let him touch a knock-off copy of an arcade game …

  Damn, but she was a strange woman.

  From The Associated Press (national wire); January 25, 1985

  WASHINGTON—President Ronald Reagan today ordered that the remaining NASA space shuttle, Discovery, be temporarily grounded, following last Tuesday’s explosion of the shuttle Challenger.

  The order was made public by White House spokesman Larry Speaks, in a brief statement issued to the press. “Until we know exactly what destroyed Challenger, we cannot allow Discovery to remain in service,” Speaks said.

  The Executive Order follows preliminary reports by NASA accident investigators which indicate that Challenger was destroyed by a malfunctioning solid-rocket booster. Although Navy divers are still probing the wreckage of the shuttle off the Florida coast, analysis of film footage of its launch shows that flames erupted from part of the right SRB seconds before the explosion occurred.

  The investigators theorize that the fire from the SRB might have burned through the shuttle’s external fuel tank, thereby igniting its volatile hydrogen-oxygen fuel.

  Seven astronauts were killed in the disaster, which occurred during Challenger’s third test-flight. Challenger was the first vehicle in NASA’s new shuttle fleet. They were intended to eventually replace the Atlas-C space ferries, which have been in continuous use since 1965.

  NASA spokesman Hugh MacDonald said that the Atlas ferries will continue to be launched from Cape Canaveral. “It’s an older class of vessel, but it has a superb safety record,” MacDonald said. “For the time being, we will be using the Atlases as the main workhorse for manned orbital operations, until Discovery is judged to be completely reliable.”

  However, Speaks left little room for Discovery to be returned to service any time soon. “Until key safety issues are resolved, the President believes that we must act prudently to prevent a recurrence of this tragedy,” he said.

  FOURTEEN

  2/17/95 • 1407 GMT

  THERE WERE A FLEETING few seconds after he pushed open the outer airlock hatch and before he attached the tether of his suit’s lifeline to the catwalk railing, when Parnell felt an old, atavistic fear.

  Oh my God, I’m falling …

  And indeed, so he was. But so was Conestoga itself, and even if by some strange accident he was cast away from the moonship, he would fall with the vessel. If such a thing were to occur, it would be embarrassing, because someone might have to suit up and come outside to haul him back in, but hardly fatal … so long as the lifeline held.

  Yet, in those few seconds, common sense and experience did little to ease his nerves. Even though it had been half a lifetime since he’d taken his first spacewalk, and only a few hours since he made the short jaunt between Harpers Ferry and the moonship, this was different, because back there he was still in Earth orbit, while here …

  Blackness. Utter starless void. A pit as deep as the universe itself, vast as all eternity.

  And he still hadn’t attached the tether …

  Parnell remembered when he had taken Gene Jr. on a camping trip to Canyonlands National Park, one of the last times he and the boy had been close enough to share a holiday. For three days they hiked through the Utah desert, sleeping in canyons and atop mesas, following trail markers and his map until they reached their destination, the confluence of the Colorado and Green Rivers. For three days they walked, sang Boy Scout campfire songs and Creedence Clearwater Revival hits, took snapshots of the Needles and Druid Arch, complained about boot blisters, sipped canteen water and dined on trail mix, and walked some more until, almost unexpectedly, they reached a place where the ground fell away and they found themselves staring into a primitive canyon with rock walls like the prows of enormous petrified battleships and the Y-shaped confluence so far below, it seemed as if they were in an airplane.

  They had stood there, the toes of their hiking boots at the verge of the drop-off, soaking in the scenery, listening to the wind as it whispered through the enormous gorge … and then Gene Jr. did something only a goddamn fifteen-year-old would think of.

  He grabbed his father’s shoulders and shouted, “Hey, don’t jump!”

  In that instant, Gene’s knees had turned to butter, his arms flailed helplessly at the dry air, and a soundless scream threatened to emerge from his parched throat, because he imagined his feet losing contact with the dry crumbling soil, falling forward, plummeting thousands of feet down, down, down into the gaping abyss below.

  It was one of the scariest moments of his life.

  It had also been the first, last, and only time he had eve
r struck one of his kids. He lost his temper and gave the boy a slap. A glancing swat off the top of the head, not a solid punch to be sure … but Gene Jr. had never forgotten it, nor completely forgiven him. The following day they trudged out of the desert without saying much to each other, and it was only a few months later when Judith found a couple of joints hidden underneath a Captain America comic book in the boy’s bedside table drawer.

  Hey, Gene? You copy? Lewitt’s voice was crisp and clear within his helmet.

  Hell with it. “I’m here. Just taking in the view.” Parnell reached forward, clamped the tether to the railing and gave the line a swift, hard tug to make sure it was secure. “Okay, I’m on the catwalk,” he added.

  We gotcha. Lewitt chuckled. Don’t fall off now.

  Coincidence. Jay was only joking. Gene had never told anyone, not even Judith, about the incident in Canyonlands.

  He swallowed, gave the line another perfunctory tug, then pushed himself off the catwalk. “I won’t,” he murmured. “Going out to check the antenna now.”

  He had originally intended to let the failure of the long-range radar system go unattended until they reached the Moon. It was nonessential equipment, after all, at least as far as their mission was concerned; it was there mainly to track other vessels in cislunar space. Conestoga could easily make touchdown at Tranquillity Base without it, using the short-range dish alone for the approach and final descent. Yet his conscience had continued to bother him until, sometime during lunch, he announced his intent to go EVA and fix the damn thing once and for all.

  Both Jay and Cris had argued with him, each maintaining that a spacewalk wasn’t necessary and that they could handle the landing maneuvers without the LRR. Perhaps they could, but the fact of the matter was that Gene wanted a reason to leave the vessel for a few minutes. The tortured syntax of the Germans, Leamore’s remarks about obsolete American space technology, Dooley’s inability to eat without throwing food all over the place, Rhodes and Bromleigh wanting to videotape everything short of his visit to the head … altogether, his passengers made him need to escape the ship for a few minutes. Get a breath of fresh air, as it were, although he reckoned that if someone had so much as farted, he would have taken it as a good excuse to check the oxygen tanks.