by Ray Hammond
‘You could save us all, Nick,’ she urged him again, squeezing his hand affectionately. ‘Once you land you could show them how to build a runway. We could all be safely back on Earth within a few months.’
As he started to weep again, silent tears rolling down his cheeks, Perdy bent forward and pulled his head against her shoulder.
Chapter Twenty-Five
For the return, Apollo Mission Control was established in the ERGIA Space Station’s main viewing gallery, just as for the outward leg of Negromonte’s journey nineteen months earlier. But this time no moonlighting American, Russian or Chinese space technicians had been available to shuttle up from Earth to control and oversee the command module’s re-entry and splashdown.
Because they had to retrain a whole new team of controllers to run a space mission using technology only their great-grandparents would have recognized – and because every single human trapped in space realized that there would be only one chance of a successful return to Earth – the new control team was, if anything, even more meticulous about its preparations than the original NASA engineers had been eighty-six years before.
The major problem was that, for his own re-enactment of the Apollo flight to the moon, Negromonte had not bothered to replace the original command-module motors. The complex four-part design of the Apollo spacecraft included a total of fifty separate engines. The main engine of the service module – the large rocket that had flown the spacecraft to the moon – had been replaced by a modern plasma unit ten times more powerful than the original. So too had the engines utilized for the lunar-descent stage.
But Negromonte and his team had seen no need to replace the small 100-pound thrusters needed to control the command module’s re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere. It had taken six months for the engineers at Luna City to cannibalize other craft in order to make new thrusters to replace the old, underpowered, dangerous compressed-gas units that had been in use a century before.
The new high-power plasma units allowed the craft a higher payload, and by replacing the old plumbing and life-support systems with modern micro units they also achieved significant extra storage space. This capacity would be used to carry down a cargo of hydrogen-fuel pellets for the engines of the Global Haven, an emergency supply of pharmaceuticals, a batch of livestock embryos prepared by the reproductive biologists in Luna City, and the uplink telemetry navigation systems required to allow shuttles and moon ferries to land safely back on the home planet. Thereafter, it had taken a further four months for the fully refurbished module to undergo thorough testing.
All this time, the astronauts pre-selected for this vital mission had been in rigorous training. Initially, Nicholas Negromonte had mutely and tearfully refused Perdy’s coaxing that he should pilot the command module back to Earth. But, a few days after she had first visited him, the patient had asked Dr Cohen if he could see Perdy again. She had returned to find him much more alert.
Negromonte asked to be updated about everything that had been happening and, after learning of the crucial role that ERGIA’s technology had played in rapidly cleansing the Earth’s atmosphere and ending the arctic winter – a process that would otherwise have taken thousands of years – he began to mutter about ‘doing his duty’.
Within two weeks his newly positive attitude had convinced his doctors that Negromonte was no longer a suicide risk. He subsequently spent six hours a day in the ERGIA company gym, getting his body back into shape whilst simultaneously tapping into the Luna City digital library to study every scrap of data in contemporaneous NASA reports about the Apollo missions’ re-entry and splashdown.
One significant drawback was the lack of an Apollo simulator on the moon. But Negromonte himself already had a feel for the craft’s handling, and he knew the responsiveness of its manual controls. At last, after four months of recovery and physical regeneration, he declared himself ready to pilot his spacecraft back to Earth.
Also selected for the critical mission were Michael Fairfax and Dr Emilia Knight. It was obvious from the outset that the lawyer had to be one of the crew. He had been the hulk people’s first champion and it now fell to him to negotiate with the people of the former hulk communities to facilitate a homecoming for the rest of those now trapped in space.
Emilia Knight was selected for her geological expertise. She would have to inspect all possible sites for the establishment of a runway, and she would also have to report back on seismic conditions as a whole.
It was clear to all that the reborn planet Earth was still highly unstable and, the geologists warned, would be likely to stay that way for centuries to come. But although considerable volcanic and earthquake activity was still occurring, this was no longer on a scale likely to cause atmospheric fog or to occlude the sun.
Emilia would therefore have to borrow a four-wheel-drive vehicle from the Global Haven’s well-stocked garage and set off to survey as much of the land mass as possible. Her mission was to find the safest and most stable sites on which the returnees could found a new community. But despite having these hugely responsible tasks ahead of her, some malicious members of the lunar community still grumbled that the real reason for her being selected was that she had become the lawyer’s girlfriend.
Their flight from deep Earth-orbit down to the surface would be rapid – less than three hours, thanks to the power of the modern engines – and the duties required of Michael and Emilia in piloting the craft were expected to be nil. But the mission planners insisted that both of them should learn every control and every life-support and safety feature of the module, just in case the pilot became incapacitated for some reason during the flight.
In between their long technical briefings and training sessions in a mock-up command module that the engineers had built, Michael and Emilia had to improve their fitness significantly. Sammy Giles was put in charge of their physical development and in addition to long hours in the gym they joined Nick Negromonte for repeated sessions in the swimming pool that was meant to simulate the hazards of splashdown. The low moon gravity made it impossible to simulate this properly, but the crew was put through repeated duckings and rehearsals for potential recovery problems.
After a total of eight months’ preparation, Mission Controller Bill Jackson finally declared the team ready.
*
‘In less than fifteen minutes, the Apollo command module will fire its small manoeuvring engines and blast out of deep-space orbit for its return to Earth,’ announced Magnus Blythe, staring directly into the camera lens.
When he had last made a broadcast at LunaSun’s official opening, the august commentator’s potential audience had been six billion people throughout the world. But this current transmission would reach only those on various space stations, on the moon, on Mars – and, of course, the hulk community below, where it would be piped to screens all over the Global Haven. And when Blythe had last faced the cameras, his wavy hair had been a glossy black. Now it was completely grey; Luna City had finally run out of hair dye.
The TV crew was positioned centrally in the observation gallery of the ERGIA space station in front of the tiered seating in which the mission controllers were making last-minute preparations. Also present were James Underwood and other members of the Apollo Planning Group, while on one side of the large room Perdy Curtis worked alongside Narinda Damle, mixing camera shots.
As she cut to an overhead camera mounted inside the Apollo command capsule, the three astronauts could be seen clearly: Negromonte in the pilot’s seat on the left, busily making his last-minute checks, Emilia Knight on the centre couch, and Michael Fairfax to starboard.
Perdy switched back to Magnus Blythe.
‘Over the last three months, our own pilots have been using long-distance telemetry to begin training members of the new Earth community to fly the recovery helicopter that will pluck Captain Nicholas Negromonte and his crew from the ocean. It is now hoped that they will be pulled from the module less than five minutes after splashdown.’
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‘Time to launch, thirty seconds,’ announced the Operations Director.
Blythe ceased his commentary as T-minus fifteen was reached. There was nothing more now that could be said, or done, that would serve to underline the importance of this mission.
‘Three, two, one – fire engines.’
Perdy cut to a long-range camera focused on the command module, where it floated in parallel orbit one kilometre away. Only a light-blue glow was visible from the upgraded starboard thrusters as the craft started to turn out of orbit to begin its approach to Earth.
‘On course zero six zero,’ reported Negromonte, his voice amplified by the Mission Control loudspeakers.
‘Copy that,’ said Capcom, a moon-ferry pilot who had been assigned the responsibility for in-flight communications with the three astronauts. ‘On course, zero six zero.’
Two hours and forty-one minutes later, the ninety-two-year-old refurbished Apollo module started to encounter the Earth’s upper atmosphere.
‘Six point two four re-entry angle,’ said Negromonte as he steadied the attitude yoke.
‘Copy that,’ said Capcom. ‘Six point two four re-entry angle.’
‘Re-entry interface acquired,’ reported Negromonte, locking on to his trajectory.
‘Copy that. Re-entry interface successfully acquired,’ echoed Capcom.
‘Descent rate, thirty-four thousand, eight hundred and two feet per second,’ read off the pilot-skipper. ‘Height, two thousand, six hundred and twenty nautical miles.’
The Apollo module hit the earth’s upper atmosphere precisely in the centre of a re-entry corridor only two and a half degrees wide. To miss would have meant either skipping off the surface of the atmosphere, like a stone cast onto the surface of a pond, and being lost in space for ever, or plunging in too deeply and burning up. Unlike the earlier Mercury and Gemini spacecraft that NASA had flown, the lunar return vehicle was designed for a faster, steeper and hotter descent through the atmosphere.
In a couch so closely sculpted to his body that it seemed to be hugging him, Michael Fairfax shut his eyes as the buffeting increased. It felt like their entire craft was being pounded by a piledriver.
To his left Emilia did the same, screwing her fists together so tightly that they hurt. She reached out a hand and grabbed Michael’s gloved fist.
In the left-hand couch, Nicholas Negromonte was reading off the G-force being applied to the old command module and its crew. Modern laser-borne communications no longer meant that radio contact was automatically lost during the re-entry phase, and he knew that Mission Control, the whole scattered space community and those waiting to recover them on the Earth’s surface would be listening in intently.
‘Six G. Eight G. Ten G.’
The buffeting had now reached its theoretical worst. All on board knew that twelve gravities was the maximum load that the module could withstand before disintegrating. Flames rushed past both port and starboard observation windows as the thick abalative heat-shield on the blunt end of the space pod burned away – precisely as intended.
But a century earlier, NASA scientists had over-engineered all aspects of the Apollo spacecraft, and the antique capsule completed re-entry before even half its heat-absorbing plastic and fibreglass heat-shield material had been incinerated.
The buffeting suddenly stopped and the roar disappeared. The module’s crew could see blue sky all around.
With a gigantic upward snap, the crew felt the Apollo’s three drogue parachutes deploy. They cheered, whooped and hollered as one.
Then Negromonte shook his head. ‘We’re off course,’ he yelled. ‘About eighty miles to the east.’
‘Jesus – we’re going to hit land,’ cried Michael. He knew that, theoretically, astronauts in a module hitting dry land instead of water were still supposed to survive. That was what the closely contoured and spring-supported couches were intended for. But at no point during the original Apollo programme had a descent onto land been tested with a live human crew.
‘To the east’ snapped Negromonte. ‘We’re coming down in the ocean.’
Back in Mission Control, jubilation suddenly gave way to consternation as their systems registered the craft’s drift off course.
‘Much higher winds in the stratosphere than we calculated,’ Recovery announced to the rest of the control team. ‘Sorry, guys.’
‘Copy that, Nick,’ said Capcom, in response to Negromonte’s report. ‘You are eighty-one miles south-east of the intended splashdown zone. We are informing the recovery team of your revised position.’
Although they knew that their rate of descent had now slowed to only twenty miles per hour, the Apollo module hit the water much harder than anything the practice sessions in the Luna City swimming pool had prepared them for.
Michael thought he lost consciousness for a few seconds. When he came to, he tried to lift his arm to wipe thick condensation off the triangular observation window above his head. His arm wouldn’t move! His weakened bones must have been fractured in the heavy splashdown.
Trying again, he managed to raise his hand a few inches. Then he realized that it wasn’t broken, it was the gravity – but a gravity that felt as if lead weights were wrapped around his arm. All three crew members had been warned that they would find Earth’s gravity almost unbearable at first, but Michael could not have imagined that it would feel quite like this. With a supreme effort he raised his arm once more, this time managing to get his glove against the surface of the window. As soon as he had cleared away the moisture, brilliant sunshine streamed into the module.
Suddenly, Michael became aware of a feeling of immense nausea as the sea threw the little craft around vigorously. Although none of the crew had been allowed to eat immediately prior to departure, all three had to force their leaden fingers to scrabble for vomit bags.
‘Dear God!’ exclaimed Negromonte, when he had finished retching. ‘I hope they get to us soon.’
In Mission Control, the Flight Surgeon shook his head in sympathy, his biomed read-outs providing clear signs of the crew’s physical distress.
‘How long till the chopper gets there?’ he asked the Flight Director.
‘Another forty minutes,’ said the FD. ‘Assuming they can locate them successfully.’
In Chanda Zia’s hulk community, many of the younger males, and some females, had been keen to learn to fly the helicopters carried aboard the Global Haven. When they were informed that pilots on board the ERGIA space station could instruct them from long distance, lessons had started at once.
Two of the mighty ship’s stock of twenty-seven helicopters had already been damaged during practice landings – the time delay of the signals coming from space was not compatible with precise flight control. And the young pilots’ bravado in arbitrarily disconnecting telemetric command in order to learn some procedures on their own also produced some problems. But this was a healthy sign, agreed their tutors on the space station: a certain degree of arrogance was natural to pilots.
Within weeks, four young men and one woman were showing sufficient progress at the flight controls to begin flying missions for the hulk community itself.
Much needed to be done. The former residents of Pacifica One were now building townships all along a 300-mile coastal strip of the new continent. One season’s crops had already been picked, and the rich, ash-fertilized soil had produced bumper harvests. Livestock was now reproducing and building work continued at a frantic pace. Helicopters proved the ideal means of rapid transport – especially to fetch emergency medical cases for treatment in the Global Haven’s operating theatres.
Fuel would become the main problem. Although the luxury vessel still retained large stocks of kerosene-based aviation fuel in its catamaran-hull tanks, nobody knew how long it might take to prospect for new oil – nor whether any oil was actually present in the newly formed land masses. After the initial training period, helicopter flights had been restricted to medical emergencies only.
; For all of these reasons, the Apollo mission controllers were anxious. It would be impossible to recover the command module itself – there were no heavy-lift choppers. Neither were there any frogmen or inflatable dinghies available. The plan was that when the Global Haven’s air-sea rescue helicopter and recovery team arrived the Apollo crew would clamber out of the module and into the sea. They would then be winched up into the helicopter one by one. Once the crew was safe, their vitally important cargo could be recovered from the spacecraft itself.
But twenty-eight minutes after it had splashed down all power failed in the command module. The crew members, rocking in their couches, heard a loud fizz and crackle just before the lights went out and the power drained out of all communications systems.
‘Water’s getting in,’ said Negromonte, flipping the emergency power switch up. Two bulkhead lights lit, but there was no sign of life in the radio communication system.
‘We won’t even know when the helicopter gets here,’ gasped Emilia, still anxiously clutching the sick bag to her chest.
‘I don’t think we can wait that long,’ said Negromonte. ‘We must get into the water now – this old craft could go down very quickly.’
In Mission Control there was a stunned silence as all communication and telemetry from the downed module was lost. The only voice to be heard was Capcom’s, repeating over and over: ‘Come in, Apollo. Apollo, come in.’
‘Looks like they’ve lost all power,’ suggested the Flight Director, with forced optimism. Nobody was going to be the first to suggest the module might have sunk before the helicopter could reach it.
Slightly less than 66,000 kilometres below Mission Control, Emilia Knight was the first crew member out of the escape hatch and into the water. She was still attached to the hull of the spacecraft by a quick-release line connected to her belt. As soon as the water touched her modern spacesuit, its inner buoyancy lining inflated.