The banging on the other side of the door continued.
Standing on the other side of the door, Bill Stetson couldn’t tell if there was anyone alive or dead within the ship. The door was closed, and the ship was completely dark. He couldn’t get to the window to look in due to the fact that he was now a good fifteen feet off the ground, standing in what looked like the remains of a construction site after an earthquake, and if he were to try and reach the window, he would almost certainly fall to his death by being skewered on one of the many sharp edges of mangled metal that used to be the Harmony lunar lander.
He grasped the small aluminum rod that he’d picked up during his climb to the door and banged again.
Anthony Chow was sweating. It was a cold sweat, and it wasn’t caused by his work dismantling an experiment rack to be thrown overboard. Nor did the temperature within the Altair cause it. It was the cold sweat of fear.
Left alone in the lander for over an hour, Chow at first didn’t think much about anything other than getting the weight of the lander down to the point that would allow them to take on passengers. He’d already moved the easy stuff like the sleeping hammocks, the food rations that would have sustained the crew for an extended surface stay, and the containers that were to safely store the rocks and core samples they would have collected and returned to the Earth. There was still a lot to be done in order to get the lander off the Moon, even some modifications to the structure, but Chow couldn’t do those on his own. That would have to come later when Bill got the survivors back to the ship and they had a chance to assess and think on their situation a bit longer.
It wasn’t until he began to review the service manual for the experiment rack—so as to figure out how to disassemble it for throwing overboard instead of fixing—that he began to consider his situation. There was a little bit of tightness in his throat, and Tony could tell that he was starting to sweat.
What if Bill didn’t come back? What if his friend were to have an accident and never return? What if the engines don’t start on the lander, making the trip home impossible? He really didn’t want to die on the Moon.
Alone. Trapped. Facing death. No way out. It was his nightmare, and at that moment, Chow stopped working and stared out the window at the dimly lit lunar landscape. Fortunately for him, it was very dimly lit and he could only see the area immediately around the ship due to the lights. Being inside the lit ship, his eyes were dilated and couldn’t gather enough light to really see how vast the lunar wasteland around him truly was. Tony leaned forward and pulling himself closer to the window.
He was letting himself go unchecked in a downward spiral of despair and fear without having other tasks to keep his mind occupied. He was so absorbed in his fear, that he almost didn’t hear the voice on the ship’s radio. Slowly, his mental faculties overcame the fear, and he was able to focus. He did hear a voice. It was the voice of the Harmony’s captain.
The female voice was weak and barely audible as it came over one of the radio frequencies that the Altair was monitoring. “…hear me? Please respond if you can hear me!” The only reason Chow could hear her was because the Chinese engineers had told their NASA counterparts what channels the taikonauts would be using in their systems. This was the reason they’d heard them before while orbiting. After losing them following the first orbit, they had left the system on autosearch mode. The Altair’s radio was programmed to scan these frequencies and to stop on whichever one was active. This was the Chinese suit-to-suit communications channel.
Chow didn’t react quickly, but he did react. He slowly pulled himself together and moved toward the radio. At one point he even shook his head and took a couple of deep breaths.
“Get it together,” he told himself out loud.
“Please respond…”
“Captain Hui. This is Anthony Chow of the Mercy I. Can you hear me?”
“Yes, yes! I hear you! Thank God you can hear me. My suit is almost out of power. Are you the one banging on our door?”
“No, that would be Commander Stetson. I’m back in the lander getting the ship ready to carry you and your crew home.”
“Can you tell your commander that we hear him, but we cannot open the door. We have no power to run the depressurization system and evacuate the cabin. And with the cabin pressurized, there is no way to open the door for us to get out.”
“Uh, I think I understand. I’ll relay that to Bill. Hang on. His suit won’t work at this frequency, so I will have to be the middleman and relay information between the two of you.”
“Understood,” Hui answered. “Thank you.”
Chow was now sufficiently recovered from his lapse to relay the information to Stetson, whose reply was classic. “Damn!”
“Bill. You mentioned that there is a lot of debris. Can you use something to smash their window or to puncture the skin of the lander? If we can get the pressure down, then they can open the door.”
“Uh, let me look around,” Stetson replied. “There is no way I can even get close to the window. It is too dangerous. And I doubt that I can get sufficient force to puncture the skin of the lander. I’m fifteen feet in the air, bouncing around like a beachball in this pressurized suit, and I can barely keep myself from falling every time I bang on the door. There is no way I can get this can to open from out here. Wish I’d brought some tools with me. We didn’t plan this well.”
“Unfortunately, they are saying the same thing on the inside. They tried breaking the glass, but it didn’t work. That stuff is almost as strong as steel. They’re still looking around for something they might be able to use to puncture the skin from the inside.”
“Well, then I’ll just come back and get the power tools we brought with us. That’ll take some time.” Bill grunted.
“It’s worse, Bill,” Tony continued. “You may have time and power left, but they don’t. Captain Hui told me that they have less than an hour before their suits run out of power and they start to freeze. And at minus two hundred degrees, that’ll happen quickly.”
“That’s not enough time for me to get back to Altair, find the right tools, get back here, then figure out how to cut through the hull, and then get them safely back to Altair. Not enough time.”
“We have to do something, Bill.”
“I know, I know. Tony, do they have any ideas?”
“Not so far as I can tell. Sounds like they’ve tried everything and used up their last drops of extra power,” Tony explained.
“Come on, let’s think on this. You might toss it back to Houston and see if anybody there has any ideas.”
“Done. But they aren’t sure what to do without power, either. Or tools. Picking up some of the stuff around their crashed ship puts you at more risk than Houston wants.”
“I don’t disagree with them on that.” Then it hit him. “Power is the key! Tony, I’ve got an idea.”
“We need one.”
“Well, I’ve got one, and it’s because of something you said. You said I’ve got power and they don’t. But they do. If they have enough power to run heaters in their suits for another hour, then surely they have enough power to run a pump long enough to get the air out of the cabin. They can use the power from one of their suits to vent the air, and then they can open the door.”
“I’ll relay the message.”
Hui listened intently to Anthony Chow relay Stetson’s suggestion. Her excitement and optimism grew. She looked around the room at her crew and settled her gaze on the engineer—the political officer who, in her mind, was suddenly being more of a political officer than an engineer.
“Zhi, can it be done? she asked.
“Yes.” Without removing his gaze from the floor, he replied, “It can be done.”
“Will you help? We can’t do this without you. I don’t know the lander systems and where the control circuits are for the pump. I could look it up if the computer had power and I could pull up the manual. But then, if we had power for the computer, then we could open the
door. You’re the engineer. Do the job for which you were trained. Be an engineer.”
Zhi looked up from the floor and gazed directly into Hui’s eyes. Like two dogs trying to decide which was alpha, they stared at each other long and hard. Finally, Zhi averted his gaze.
“I’ll help. First I need to open this access panel.” Zhi pointed to Hui’s right at one of the instrumentation panels that ran along the wall of the lander. He rose from the floor, picked up a screwdriver from where he’d left it after a previous power-scavenging activity, and moved toward the panel.
“And one of you will have to give me access to the batteries in your backpack. There isn’t much time, and whichever battery I use will have even less power remaining—perhaps none.”
“I understand.” Hui didn’t hesitate. “You will, of course, use mine.”
“Of course.”
Hui at that moment realized what she was committing to. Without power, not only would the temperature in the suit start to drop, but also the air would stop circulating. Unlike deep-water suits, spacesuits didn’t just let compressed air from the tanks in the backpack diffuse into the suit. That would have been too wasteful and would severely limit how long astronauts could remain in them. Spacesuits had fans and carbon-dioxide scrubbers that required continuous airflow—and power. Without power, the air in her suit would slowly become poisoned by carbon monoxide, and she would suffocate. That is, if she didn’t freeze to death first.
“Dr. Xu, get Ming ready to travel. We will need to move quickly.”
Zhi was good. In less than ten minutes he had the access panel open, some insulation removed from the wires providing power to the pump that would vent the cabin’s air, and had found the connectors and wires he would need to send power from Captain Hui’s spacesuit battery to the pump.
“Captain Hui. Step over here and face away from me. I need to connect your batteries to the pump.”
“Understood.” She complied, and he continued his work.
“I’m first going to shut off the power to the rest of your suit. Once I’ve done that, I’ll connect the pump, and we’ll see if it works. Are you ready?”
“Yes.”
The next thing Hui heard was the sound of silence. She’d been hearing the spacesuit fans since sealing herself in as the Harmony’s cabin began to freeze, and she’d gotten quite used to their reassuring white noise. Now there was silence. The suit was well insulated, so she did not yet feel any colder. It was too soon for that.
Behind her was the rustling of the engineer as he scrambled to make the necessary connections. When he was on a technical task, it was easy to forget that he was also the ship’s political officer. All signs of his previous defeatist demeanor were now absent.
“Here goes,” the engineer said. The next thing they all heard was the whirring sound of the vent pump. As the air pressure began to drop, the crew could see some of the lighter objects in the cabin flutter in the ensuing wind. After just a few moments, the sound began to drop in frequency as the pump slowed and the air pressure dropped to the point that sounds would no longer propagate. The cabin pressure was now essentially the same as that of the lunar surface—zero.
Hui felt the engineer fiddling with something in her backpack. Then he tapped her on the shoulder and said something she could not hear.
“I can’t hear you! The air is gone, and we’ll have to use our suit radios.” She tried to turn on her radio, the one she’d used to speak with Tony Chow, and nothing happened. She was completely out of power. Her heart sank. Her life had only tens of minutes remaining unless she could either get more power or out of her spacesuit.
Hui moved quickly to the door and once again tried the emergency exit handle. This time it moved, and after just a few seconds the door was open. Standing on the other side was an American astronaut wearing a grin that only an American could possibly have conjured up under the circumstances.
He said something she could not hear. He then said it again, emphatically.
Not knowing the specifics, but understanding what he was probably saying, she turned and pointed toward Dr. Xu and the wounded pilot. She then made the universal hand motion indicating that they should leave first.
Not waiting for additional prompting, Stetson moved toward the doctor and the wounded pilot. He reached down and helped Dr. Xu lift Ming so that they could carry him out the door. With some effort, and guidance from Captain Hui, they were able to get him outside the cabin for the first time since they landed.
Captain Hui looked out and down at the remains of her beautiful lander and sighed. We will be back, she thought. But for now, we will get home! She shivered, and then she realized that her fingers and toes were starting to get cold.
She followed Stetson out and around the side of the lander and down what remained of the stairs to the lunar surface. This was the path she and Zhi had taken when they had built the makeshift furnace. This time it was much more difficult because Dr. Xu and the American astronaut were burdened by the limp mass of Ming Feng. Taking care to not drag Ming’s deadweight across anything sharp enough to puncture his suit, they finally reached the ground.
Hui’s feet were getting very, very cold, and she could no longer feel her fingers. Her head was also noticeably colder. She realized that her entire body was cooling rapidly, but the relatively poorly insulated extremities were the first things she noticed. In her mind, the pace was on one hand too slow—she would surely freeze to death or suffocate before getting to the American lander at this rate. On the other hand, if they were to rush and injure someone, then it could be a death sentence. She would have to be patient.
It was then that she noticed that Zhi was not with them. He was still in the lander. She ran up and tapped Dr. Xu on the shoulder to get his attention. He looked back at her as she pointed up to the lander’s now-open door and waved her arms. Xu looked back at her and grimaced. She could tell that he understood. There was nothing they could do. He could not go back because of his need to help carry Ming. If she went back, it would be a death sentence—she simply did not have time to spare.
“If he wishes to remain here and die, then that is his choice,” she said aloud to herself.
The group of four made their way around the boulders that separated them from the Altair and began their march across the lunar desert toward it.
In the distance sat the Altair, dimly illuminated from above by the reflected Earthlight and brightly lit from below by its own floodlights. To Hui, it was beautiful. It looked safe and warm. It was how they were going to get home. It was also intact. The four legs were upright, and there were no signs of any of the problems experienced by the Harmony.
Hui was now very cold. She was also getting light-headed. For a brief moment, she even forgot where she was. Hypoxia, she thought. Oxygen deprivation. But she was too relaxed to panic.
“Help!” she said aloud. “I’m starting to poison myself on my own carbon dioxide.”
No one could hear her.
Still, she trudged on toward the lander. Consciously putting one foot in front of the other, she kept up with the group. Left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot, right foot…” A nap about now would be nice. Darkness overcame her.
“Tony! We’ve got a problem. Captain Hui just collapsed. I’m about one hundred feet away, helping to carry one of their injured, and now we’ve got two down. I’m going back to see what happened,” Stetson said into his radio.
Stetson released his hold on the wounded pilot, forcing Dr. Xu to stop moving and simply hold him. Even on the Moon, carrying a limp deadweight like a person was almost impossible without help. This was especially true if the deadweight was encumbered with a two-hundred-pound spacesuit. Stetson cautiously quickly moved back toward the fallen Chinese captain, wondering what had happened.
He reached her and bent over to see if she was conscious. He then tried to figure out what might be the problem. Using his headlamp, he peered through her visor and saw that she was not conscious. She
looked very pale. It was then that he noticed the status lights on her suit—they were not powered on.
“Tony! I’m with Captain Hui, and her suit is completely out of power. I don’t know how long it’s been that way, but long enough for her to pass out from oxygen deprivation. She has to be getting pretty damn cold. I’ve got to get her into the ship now. Can you talk to the other Chinese on the radio?”
“I don’t know. She’s been the only one to answer up until now. I’ll try. Stand by.” The signal went blank as Tony switched channels back in the lander.
Stetson left the fallen Hui and went back over to Dr. Xu. He grasped the shoulder of the only other person standing on the lunar surface and began to motion toward his fallen comrade. Looking into Xu’s face, Stetson realized he was talking to someone—it had to be Tony. Xu said something and then nodded his head in understanding.
Stetson helped lower the pilot to the cold and gray lunar surface. As he did so, he realized that the fallen Chinese would likely lie there, losing heat through his suit into the cold lunar surface for at least the thirty minutes it would take to get Hui to the Altair and into the airlock. He’d hoped to cycle two at a time into the Altair, but clearly Hui would not live long enough to get both her and the other stricken Chinese through the airlock at the same time. This was getting complicated.
Stetson and Xu quickly bounded back to Captain Hui, using a combination run and skipping motion. Once there, they picked her up, one man under each of her arms, and began carrying her toward the Altair. They passed the other injured man on their way, causing Stetson to wonder if they would be able to get back to him before his suit went dead.
After what seemed like an eternity, they reached the Altair and the lift that would carry Stetson and Hui up twenty feet to the airlock.
“Tony, tell the other taikonaut that the lift will only carry two people at a time and that I need to get Hui up and into the airlock as soon as possible. He needs to wait here for me to come back so we can get his other colleague. Okay?”
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