by Neil Clarke
Too bad she hadn’t come awake into a better world. It was so damn unfair. That was the reward at the end of a nightmare, wasn’t it? You woke up to find everything was all right.
Instead, here was a long line of uniformed officers bearing birthday cakes to a fifty-kiloton atomic bomb.
Birkson had ordered the lights turned off in the Leystrasse. When his order had not been carried out, he broke out the lights with his putter. Soon, he had some of the officers helping him.
Now the beautiful Leystrasse, the pride of New Dresden, was a flickering tunnel through hell. The light of a thousand tiny birthday candles on five hundred cakes turned everything red-orange and made people into shadowed demons. Officers kept arriving with hastily wrapped presents, flowers, balloons. Hans, the little man who was now nothing but a brain and nerve network floating in a lead container; Hans, the cause of all this, the birthday boy himself, watched it all in unconcealed delight from his battery of roving television cameras. He sang loudly.
“I am a bomb! I am a bomb!” he yelled. He had never had so much fun.
Bach and Birkson retreated from the scene into the darkened recess of the Bagatelle Flower Shoppe. There, a stereo viewing tank had been set up.
The X-ray picture had been taken with a moving plate technique that allowed a computer to generate a three dimensional model. They leaned over the tank now and studied it. They had been joined by Sergeant McCoy, Bach’s resident bomb expert, and another man from the Lunar Radiation Laboratory.
“This is Hans,” said Birkson, moving a red dot in the tank by means of a dial on the side. It flicked over and around a vague gray shape that trailed dozens of wires. Bach wondered again at the pressures that would allow a man to like having his body stripped from him. There was nothing in that lead flask but the core of the man, the brain and central nervous system.
“Here’s the body of the bomb. The two subcritical masses. The H.E. charge, the timer, the arming barrier, which is now withdrawn. It’s an old design, ladies and gentlemen. Old, but reliable. As basic as the bow and arrow. It’s very much like the first one dropped on the Nippon Empire at Hiroshima.”
“You’re sure it’ll go off, then?” Bach put in.
“Sure as taxes. Hell, a kid could build one of these in the bathroom, given only the uranium and some shielding equipment. Now let me see.” He pored over the phantom in the tank, tracing out wiring paths with the experts. They debated possibilities, lines of attack, drawbacks. At last they seemed to reach a consensus.
“As I see it, we have only one option,” Birkson said. “We have to go for his volitional control over the bomb. I’m pretty sure we’ve isolated the main cable that goes from him to the detonator. Knock that out, and he can’t do a thing. We can pry that tin can open by conventional means and disarm that way. McCoy?”
“I agree,” said McCoy. “We’d have a full hour, and I’m sure we can get in there with no trouble. When they cyborged this one, they put all their cards on the human operator. They didn’t bother with entry blocks, since Hans could presumably blow it up before we could get close enough to do anything. With his control out, we only have to open it up with a torch and drop the damper into place.”
The LRL man nodded his agreement. “Though I’m not quite as convinced as Mr. Birkson that he’s got the right cable in mind for what he wants to do. If we had more time . . .”
“We’ve wasted enough time already,” Bach said, decisively. She had swung rapidly from near terror of Roger Birkson to total trust. It was her only defense. She knew she could do nothing at all about the bomb and had to trust someone.
“Then we go for it. Is your crew in place? Do they know what to do? And above all, are they good? Really good? There won’t be a second chance.”
“Yes, yes, and yes,” Bach said. “They’ll do it. We know how to cut rock on Luna.”
“Then give them the coordinates, and go.” Birkson seemed to relax a bit. Bach saw that he had been under some form of tension, even if it was only excitement at the challenge. He had just given his last order. It was no longer in his hands. His fatalistic gambler’s instinct came into play, and the restless, churning energy he had brought to the enterprise vanished. There was nothing to do about it but wait. Birkson was good at waiting. He had lived through twenty-one of these final countdowns.
He faced Bach and started to say something to her, then thought better of it. She saw doubt in his face for the first time, and it made her skin crawl. Damn it, she had thought he was sure.
“Chief,” he said, quietly, “I want to apologize for the way I treated you these last few hours. It’s not something I can control when I’m on the job. I . . .”
This time it was Bach’s turn to laugh, and the release of tension it brought with it was almost orgasmic. She felt like she hadn’t laughed for a million years.
“Forgive me,” she said. “I saw you were worried, and thought it was about the bomb. It was just such a relief.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said, dismissing it. “No point in worrying now. Either your people hit it or they don’t. We won’t know if they don’t. What I was saying, it just sort of comes over me. Honestly. I get horny, I get manic, I totally forget about other people except as objects to be manipulated. So I just wanted to say I like you. I’m glad you put up with me. And I won’t pester you anymore.”
She came over and put her hand on his shoulder.
“Can I call you Roger? Thanks. Listen, if this thing works, I’ll have dinner with you. I’ll give you the key to the city, a ticker-tape parade, and a huge bonus for a consultant fee . . . and my eternal friendship. We’ve been tense, okay? Let’s forget about these last few hours.”
“All right.” His smile was quite different this time.
Outside, it happened very quickly. The crew on the laser drill were positioned beneath the bomb, working from ranging reports and calculations to aim their brute at precisely the right spot.
The beam took less than a tenth of a second to eat through the layer of rock in the ceiling and emerge in the air above the Leystrasse. It ate through the metal sheath of the bomb’s underside, the critical wire, the other side of the bomb, and part of the ceiling like they weren’t even there. It had penetrated into the level above before it could be shut off.
There was a shower of sparks, a quick sliding sound, then a muffled thud. The whole structure of the bomb trembled, and smoke screeched from the two drilled holes in the top and bottom. Bach didn’t understand it but could see that she was alive and assumed it was over. She turned to Birkson, and the shock of seeing him nearly stopped her heart.
His face was a gray mask, drained of blood. His mouth hung open. He swayed and almost fell over. Bach caught him and eased him to the floor.
“Roger . . . what is it? Is it still . . . will it go off? Answer me, answer me.What should I do?”
He waved weakly, pawed at her hands. She realized he was trying to give her a reassuring pat. It was feeble indeed.
“No danger,” he wheezed, trying to get his breath back. “No danger. The wrong wire. We hit the wrong wire. Just luck is all, nothing but luck.”
She remembered. They had been trying to remove Hans’ control over the bomb. Was he still in control? Birkson answered before she could speak.
“He’s dead. That explosion. That was the detonator going off. He reacted just too late. We hit the disarming switch. The shield dropped into place so the masses couldn’t come together even if the bomb was set off. Which he did. He set it off. That sound, that mmmmmmwooooph!’ He was not with her. His eyes stared back into a time and place that held horror for him.
“I heard that sound—the detonator—once before, over the telephone. I was coaching this woman, no more than twenty-five, because I couldn’t get there in time. She had only three more minutes. I heard that sound, then nothing, nothing.”
She sat near him on the floor as her crew began to sort out the mess, haul the bomb away for disposal, laugh and joke in hysterical relief. A
t last Birkson regained control of himself. There was no trace of the bomb except a distant hollowness in his eyes.
“Come on,” he said, getting to his feet with a little help from her. “You’re going on twenty-four-hour leave. You’ve earned it. We’re going back to Burning Tree, and you’re going to watch me make a par five on the eighteenth. Then we’ve got a date for dinner. What place is nice?”
1976
Carter Scholz is the author of Palimpsests (with Glenn Harcourt), Kafka Americana (with Jonathan Lethem), Radiance, and The Amount to Carry. He has been nominated for the Nebula, Hugo, Campbell, and Sturgeon awards. He currently lives in northern California. “The Eve of the Last Apollo” was Carter’s first publication.
THE EVE OF THE LAST APOLLO
Carter Scholz
MILESTONES
Died. John Christie Andrews, 64, U.S. Air Force (Brig. Gen., ret.); of a heart attack;. Born July 17, 1935 in Abilene, Texas, Andrews was commander of the first manned spacecraft to land on the Moon. He is survived by a wife and son.
No. I don’t like that dream.
The dream-magazine faded and he was back in 1975, tentatively at least, until sleep plucked him again into a land beyond life where his existence could be reduced to those two magazine appearances: his achievement and his death.
The curtains ballooned inward on a light breeze. He caught at them, and saw the moon standing in the sky. It was gibbous, bloated past half but less than full. He hated it like that, the lopsidedness of it. Half or full or crescent he could stand some nights, but there was nothing tolerable in a gibbous moon. He could not pick out within five hundred miles the place on its surface where he had walked, just five years ago.
No cars passed on State Street. The moon might have been another street lamp. From his present vantage point in Teaneck, New Jersey, it seemed impossible that he had ever been there.
The Lunar Exposé. Time Magazine, August 2, 1987. The article explained that the moon landing had been a hoax, since the moon itself was a hoax. It explained how simple it had been for unknown forces to simulate the moon for unscrupulous purposes; a conspiracy of poets and scientists was intimated. Mass hypnosis was mentioned. In a sidebar was a capsule summary of his alleged mission with a drawing of the flight path, the complicated loops and curves that had taken them there and back, straight-line flight being impossible in space, with an inset map of the splashdown area. Suddenly he was in the capsule as it splashed, sank, and bobbed to the surface. He wanted to fling the hatch open and yell in triumph, be dazzled by the spray and brilliant blue Pacific sky, but of course he couldn’t do that, there was no telling what germs they had brought back, what germs had survived the billion-year killing lunar cold and void there was no telling, and the helicopters droned down and netted them and swung them to the carrier and into quarantine and for three weeks they saw people only through glass; that may have been the start of the isolation he felt now, just as his first time in space had been the start of the emptiness. When he had reached the Cape after all those weeks and miles and loops and backtracks, the trip was finally over, and he yielded to an impulse; he walked onto the launching pad and bent to put his hand on the scorched ground—but he had an attack of vertigo and a terrible intimation: the Earth itself had moved. If he went to the Cape exactly a year after the liftoff, the Earth would be in position again, the circle would be closed—but then there was the motion of the solar system through the galaxy to consider, and the sweep of the galaxy through the universe, and the universe’s own pulsations—and he saw there was no way for him ever to close the circle and return to the place he started from. Driving back to Teaneck with the road behind him spiraling off through space as the Earth moved and the Sun moved and the galaxy moved, he became ill with a complex vertigo and had to pull off the road. Only when it grew dark was he able to drive again, slowly.
The dream, the memory, dissolved.
By the time he woke next morning his wife had already left to spend the weekend at the commune upstate. He made breakfast for himself and his son and went outside in the Saturday morning heat to garden. He was almost forty.
He worked in an over-airconditioned building adjacent to the Teaneck Armory. On one wall of his office was a maroon and red square of geometrically patterned fabric framed like a painting. On another was an autographed photo of the President and another photo of himself on the moon; the landing module and his crewmate Jim Cooper were reflected in his face mask. Because it was a NASA publicity photo, his autograph was on it. He felt silly about that and had always meant to get a clean copy, but where he worked now there were no NASA photos.
After he had walked on the moon and declined promotion to an Air Force base in California, they seemed to have run out of things for him to do. He had a wood veneer desk that was generally clean and empty. On the floor was a cheap red carpet, the nap of which he was always carrying home on his shoes.
At first after the mission his time had been filled with interviews and tours and banquets and inconveniences, but with time his fame dwindled. At first he welcomed this escape from the public eye; then the emptiness began to weigh on him, like a column of air on his shoulders. The time he could now spend with his wife and son passed uneasily. He learned to play golf and tennis and spent more time at them than he enjoyed. He started a diary and grew depressed with the banality of his life.
So he took a few weeks off in the early summer of 1975 to sort the drifting fragments of his life: his wife’s departure, the imminent end of his fourth four-year term of service in the Air Force, the dead undying image of the moon that haunted his dreams, the book he had long planned to write, the mystery of his son, the possibility of a life ahead without a wife or son or career or public image, without every base he had come to rely on. He felt he had to consider what he was, and what he might become.
For a project he started a garden, even though it was the height of summer. He hauled sacks of soil amendments in the station wagon, rented a rototiller, chewed up part of the backyard, sweated through his t-shirt and shorts. Each day the heat seemed to come down on him sooner and harder. Each day he would hear Kevin go out, and then he would go back into the silent empty house to rest.
The lunar astronauts, the dozen or so people he had considered friends, drifted one by one away from the magnet of Houston, until the terrible clean emptiness of the city came to depress him terribly. Texas no longer felt like home.
In 1970, Harrison Baker, the command module pilot on Andrews’ mission, moved to New Jersey with his family to become a vice-president in a large oil company. The Andrews followed shortly. The prospect of friends nearby, and of New York, where he and Charlotte had once wanted to live, Kevin’s enthusiasm for leaving Texas, all these poor random factors pulled them to the sterile suburb of Teaneck as surely as destiny. As it turned out, they ended over forty miles from the Bakers, New York lost its appeal after six months, and Kevin talked of going back to Texas for college.
Baker had written a book on what it was like to orbit the moon while his fellow astronauts got all the glory. The book was called Group Effort. A bad book, Andrews thought. A humble book by a conceited man, written in fact by a hungry young journalist. Andrews had the impression, reading it, that Baker was somehow unconvinced of the Moon’s reality, since he himself had not walked there. Andrews disliked the book, or more precisely he disliked the feelings the book aroused in him: he felt he could have done it better if he had made the effort.
But adrift in this summer he nonetheless called Baker one day. He was alone in the house and desperate for company. He called him as if to summon a ghost of old confidence.
“Chris! How are you, you son of a bitch?” Baker’s voice was hard and distant on the wire. Andrews had quite forgotten that at NASA Chris had been his nickname. He had also forgotten Baker’s smiling combativeness, his way of wielding friendship like a challenge. Already he was regretting the call.
“Hello, Hank. How are you?”
“Great, just g
reat! Listen, I’ve been meaning to invite you and Sharl up for a weekend. It’s been too long.”
“Fine. Thanks, Hank. But actually Charlotte and I haven’t been getting on too well recently.”
“Oh? I’m sorry to hear it.”
“It’s just one of those things. We’re thinking of separating.”
“That’s a shame, Chris. That’s a damn shame. Francie and I always said what a good couple you were.”
“Well, I don’t know, I think it’s for the best. Hell, I didn’t call to cry on your shoulder, Hank. I had a question for you. I’ve been thinking of writing that book that Doubleday asked me to, you remember?”
“Sure. They’re still interested?”
“Well, I don’t know. I assumed they would be.”
“It’s been a few years, hasn’t it? You know, the royalties on my book aren’t what they could be. The hardcover’s out of print and the paperback sales are so slow they’re not going to reprint it. Which is a damn shame, I think. Not that I need the money. But the way I feel about it is, it’s a historical document and it ought to stay in print. But they say people aren’t interested in the moon anymore. People don’t care.”
“Well, sure, look at the whole NASA program.”
“Well, I’m a retired guy now. I don’t really follow the program.”
“This is the last one, Hank. This one coming up. After this, no more manned flights.”
There was silence. He remembered Baker’s habit of keeping him waiting on the line, when Baker was in the orbiter.
“Hank? I can’t help thinking we did it wrong.”
“Wrong? What do you mean?”
“Our landing. We planted the American flag, we left a plaque.”
“So? What should we have planted? Flowers?” Baker laughed, a short cold sound in the receiver.
“I don’t know. I thought the United Nations flag might have been a nice gesture.”
