by Ian Sales
Contents
Title
Adrift on the Sea of Rains
Appendices
ADRIFT ON THE SEA OF RAINS
(APOLLO QUARTET 1)
Ian Sales
Whippleshield Books
www.whippleshieldbooks.com
© 2012 Ian Sales
All rights reserved.
Published by Whippleshield Books
ISBN 978-0-9571883-1-0 (limited)
ISBN 978-0-9571883-0-3 (paper)
ISBN 978-0-9571883-2-7 (ebook)
Edited by Jim Steel
Cover by Ian Sales
Adrift on the Sea of Rains
Some days, when it feels like the end of the world yet again, Colonel Vance Peterson, USAF, goes out onto the surface and gazes up at what they have lost.
In the grey gunpowder dust, he stands in the pose so familiar from televised missions. He leans forward to counterbalance the weight of the PLSS on his back; the A7LB’s inflated bladder pushes his arms out from his sides. And he stares up at that grey-white marble fixed mockingly above the horizon. He listens to the whirr of the pumps, his own breath an amniotic sussurus within the confines of his helmet. The noises reassure him—sound itself he finds comforting in this magnificent desolation.
If he turns about—blurring bootprints which might otherwise last for millennia—he sees the blanket-like folds of mountains, grey upon grey, and a plain of the same lack of colour, all painted with scalpel-edged shadows. Over there, to his right, the scattered descent stages of LM Trucks and Augmented LMs fill the mare; and one, just one, still with its ascent stage. Another, he knows, is nearly twenty years old, a piece of abandoned history; but he does not know which one.
A click from his radio reminds Peterson where he is. The voice of Major Philip Scott, USMC, his XO, follows:
We’re about ready to make another evolution.
Peterson glances at the Omega strapped about his spacesuited forearm and sees that he’s been out for half an hour. The PLSS is good for a seven-hour EVA. He says, I’ll watch it from out here.
Hope died months before. This is not a landscape in which hope can grow; these monochrome plains and mountains can sustain nothing, real or abstract. The Bell, Kendall’s torsion field generator, offers some prospect of salvation, but every evolution so far has left them in the same situation.
Another click precedes Scott’s dry, plodding voice: Thirty seconds.
This is the third evolution Peterson has witnessed from outside the base. It is safe enough. An area more than a mile in diameter is affected. He should see it—
There. Yes.
A ripple runs through the heavens. Above the lunar horizon, the Earth wavers and blurs… and then returns. But its skies still roil, sere and blasted. It is not the blue marble Peterson needs to see and, feeling lifeless inside, he tells Scott, Another dead one.
His thoughts are as grey and barren as the regolith on which he stands, so he shuffles about and begins to bounce back to sanctuary. Using his ankles, as the thickly-insulating spacesuit has very little range of movement at the knees, he propels himself forward in a low arc. Each time he lands, dust billows about him and then falls with eerie suddenness.
Peterson approaches the waist-high pole which marks the bulldozed ramp leading down into Rima Hadley and Falcon Base’s airlock. He stops hopping and adopts a slow-motion rocking shuffle, a safer gait for the approach to the hatch. He’s had plenty of time to learn how to get about in one-sixth gravity. Peterson should have rotated back to Earth after six months; he’s been here two years. Three of the base’s staff rotated themselves out after they learned they were alone: one overdose of sleeping pills, and two EVAs without spacesuits. Peterson despises them for their cowardice; he despises himself for believing salvation might be possible.
They are dead, all nine of them, unless the Bell finds them a home. Peterson knows it, he has learned to live with it, but he still finds it difficult to accept. It is a concept that is beyond his intellect to handle; it is not aerodynamics or orbital mechanics, subjects he finally mastered after weeks sitting on his ass in a classroom.
Peterson has removed his gloves, and just unlocked and pulled off his helmet, when the airlock’s inner hatch swings open. Scott steps carefully over the coaming, sneezes and puts the back of one hand up to his nose. Scott is sensitive to lunar dust.
The major follows Peterson through into the suiting up area, and then helps him out of his spacesuit, just as he assisted him into it earlier. He unscrews the hoses, lifts off the PLSS after Peterson unlatches the straps holding it to his back, and then unzips the A7LB’s pressure garment from the left hip around the back and up to the right shoulder. He asks, No luck then?
Looked the same as the others, Peterson replies sourly.
Scott shakes his head sadly. He has more bad news: Fulton’s not picked up any radio traffic on the S-band, he says.
Peterson contorts himself out of the spacesuit’s torso, and then worms out of its legs. Scott, a hand across his nose and mouth, sets about removing the lunar dust from the A7LB’s knees, shins and boots with a handheld vacuum cleaner.
What does Kendall say? Peterson asks. He strips off his LCG and pulls on a constant wear garment.
Scott turns from hanging up the spacesuit. The evolutions we’ve made are based on recent decision nodes, he says. Kendall claims we need to move further, ones with nodes years back in the past.
Peterson grunts. This is not unexpected. He asks, How far back?
The major shrugs and says, Twenty years maybe.
Not too far, goddamn it, or we could be even worse off.
They leave the airlock and enter the base. These close confines are all the home Peterson has known for the past twenty-four months, are all he can expect to know for the short period remaining of his life. Grey lockers on every wall, a carpetted floor to which his Velcro slippers stick and rip free with every step. After six years, everything in the base is as dilapidated, as battered, as Peterson feels. Pulled threads undulate like tiny kelp from the carpet; bright glints, falsely promising newness, shine from lockers’ worn edges and corners; the smell of burnt electronics, the cordite reek of regolith, the animal odours of men living in close proximity—all colour the air. After the rubber and sweat stink of the spacesuit, Peterson’s nose rebels at the palimpsest of aromas inside Falcon Base—but it will soon tire, and he’ll no longer register the smell, much as Peterson tires of life in these cramped cylinders part-buried beneath the lunar surface in the upper wall of Rima Hadley.
Kendall’s laboratory is at one end of the base, past the wardroom, gym and one of the habitation cylinders. Peterson grew up on B-movies and has spent years in the company of rocket scientists. He knows what a lab is supposed to look like, and Kendall’s resembles nothing of the sort. It is a room like every other room in Falcon Base, walled with grey lockers, and containing collapsible furniture made of drab aluminium tubing and plastic the colour of fresh-mown grass, a colour that mocks them now they have lost the Earth. A pair of consoles occupy one side of the lab, each dominated by the cyclopean gaze of a circular monitor screen ringed with switches and indicator lights.
The Bell—Kendall never calls it that, only the “torsion field generator”—is not in the lab. It is outside, sitting in the bottom of the rille and visible through a small window between the two consoles. Kendall did not invent the Bell; it is a Nazi Wunderwaffe. It glows an alien violet colour when activated.
Kendall, compact and saturnine, with a neat van dyke and a black gaze, and not the lunatic suggested by his field of study, scowls as Peterson enters the lab. He says, I’m scaling it back. I can’t af
ford to burn out more components.
Peterson is outraged, and shows it: Goddamn it, I’m not spending what little time we have left playing safe. I want to get somewhere before the supplies run out.
Kendall draws himself up. He has made no secret of his opinion of Peterson. He never wanted to be sent to the Moon to conduct his experiments. He’d be dead if he’d stayed on Earth, but he has never acknowledged as much. If, he says, my calculations are correct—
You’ve been saying that for over a year, snaps Peterson, and we’re still stuck here.
Awkward in the lunar gravity and moving like a man underwater, Kendall rip-walks across to a locker. He opens it, fetches out a plastic crate, turns about and holds the crate at an angle to show its contents: milspec integrated circuits. The code printed on their backs means nothing to Peterson.
When these have gone, Kendall says, I’ll have to engineer something to take their place. I don’t even know if I can do that. I can promise it’ll take me weeks, months maybe, to come up with something.
The man, Peterson thinks, and not for the first time, should have a German accent, a thick German accent. Not that grating Midwestern drawl. It makes it hard to take him seriously—as if the goddamn Nazi Bell were not already difficult to take seriously. Peterson is a USAF astronaut, he knows aircraft and spacecraft and their attendant sciences. All the rest is mumbo jumbo.
Kendall returns the crate to the locker and continues: Let me try a couple of evolutions with the power dialled down. Let’s see if I can recalibrate the torsion field generator to get maximum evolution distance without blowing components.
We’ve got four months, Peterson wants to say, we’ve got supplies for four more months; and then we’re dead. There’s no one to come for us, and nowhere for us to go.
Unless the Bell finds us a home.
Colonel Vance Peterson did not see the end of the world, although he was on duty in the command centre, sitting at his desk and listening to Lieutenant Robert McKay, USN, read out his latest report to Vandenberg—and even then he heard little of what the man said. He had put his hands behind his head and stretched his back, thinking: another three weeks and he’d be rotated back home, where he’d once again see blue skies, the good green earth, his blonde wife and tow-headed son. He was looking forward to it, that was no surprise—it had been exciting at first, living here on the Moon, but the novelty had soon worn off, although he still found EVA fascinating, being out there on the surface, such a visceral confirmation of his presence here on Luna. There were, of course, plenty of clues within the base itself: the sense of lightness, as if his body felt a continual need to escape and return to Earth, the rip-rip rip-rip of the Velcro slippers as he walked, the confinement within these eight cylinders, the ever-present knowledge that outside existed an environment which would kill him in a heartbeat… He imagined life aboard a nuclear submarine on patrol might be the same, although he suspected sailors received better food, and certainly their days were better-filled with tasks to perform. Much of the life here at Falcon Base was make-work, as there was only so much they could do to maintain the systems of the base, or safeguard Kendall’s incomprehensible experiments with the Bell, or keep a weather eye on Earth as the USA and USSR manoeuvred for war. From here, they could only imagine Soviet bombers testing US defences, NATO on full alert as Warsaw Pact forces lined up behind the Iron Curtain from East Germany to Syria, or diplomats leaving tables in disgust as talks failed again and again. From here, they could see only what appeared in orbit: no ICBMs yet, but plenty of recon satellites and the occasional Soyuz or TKS spacecraft flying a tad too close to Space Station Freedom. They were not scientists at Falcon Base, which might at least have given them more of a purpose, a mandate to explore this small world they had colonised, to discover its makings, its origin and its uses. Instead, their eyes were focused on the Earth—and it seemed a natural consequence of living on this airless “sea”, where nature had not intended life to live, for thoughts to dwell on worries and daydreams of their home world. This in turn led to a blankness in the gazes of the men in Falcon Base, not a thousand-yard stare but a variation on “lonely sky”, that strange overpowering sense of solitude which overcame fighter pilots, in which they no longer felt bound to, or by, the Earth, but briefly believed themselves to be creatures of the heavens, beyond the fears and vicissitudes of a terrestrial existence. Here on Luna, the astronauts were of Earth no longer, albeit temporarily, but they had concerns, both immediate and a quarter of a million miles distant—the systems of the base, the Moon’s inimical environment, the situation back home, the brink of war, the war, the war, the war… Which McKay demonstrated at that precise moment, as he clicked through channels on the radio and said insistently, Repeat, Vandenberg, repeat, over. Peterson sat up straight, all thoughts of his impending return forgotten, and asked what was happening. McKay spun round from his station and said, They just went dead on me, I’m not picking anything up on VHF or S-band—there was this long burst of static and then nothing on any of the frequencies. Peterson did not understand; he considered the probability of a catastrophic equipment failure, but every system had triply-redundant back-ups and the likelihood they had all failed was… astronomical. It occurred to him the fault might lie at Earth’s end, some malfunction in the Deep Space Network, but that too had back-up upon back-up and separate facilities in different countries. Such failure was not an option. Keep trying, Peterson told McKay, and then he called Scott on the intercom and told him he needed a hand prepping for EVA—he was going outside, although there was no good reason to do so.
Peterson sits at his desk in the command centre, mapping the boundaries of his cabin fever. Soon he will have to go EVA again, but for now his awareness still resides within the curved bulkheads of the base’s cylinders. It is the lightheadedness brought on by the one-sixth gravity, it makes him feel as though his mind occupies a space bigger than that of his skull, as though it fills the room, the cylinder, Falcon Base, Rima Hadley, cislunar space…
He puts his hands on the desk-top, splay-fingered, and gazes down at them. The last five evolutions have taken them to dead Earths, and salvation remains elusive, as precarious as their existence. Now that he has the Bell recalibrated, the more kilowatts Kendall pumps into it, the further each evolution takes them. But push too far and he’ll burn out more than those integrated circuits. The main power bus, perhaps. The SP-100 nuclear reactor, maybe. And without that they’re finished. The fuel cells might last a week, eight days, but once they’re drained…
A scrape of sound across the command centre catches his attention. McKay at the radio shack has just moved a clipboard. As Peterson watches, McKay picks up a pen and scribbles something on the page attached to the clipboard. He is not following orders—Peterson ceased giving them: he abdicated his authority over nine months before, no longer seeing a reason for it. They are all highly-trained officers—USAF, USMC and USN; pilots and aviators—and they know what needs to be done. They follow their daily routine, the unwritten orders of the day, because it fills their waking hours, because it provides some small sense of purpose, some small reason to go on living. It makes bearable the desolate landscape around and about Falcon Base, the tubular prison of the base itself. Without routine, they would have no reason to monitor and maintain the systems which keep them alive.
That note McKay has just scrawled is the result of the hourly scan of the S-band. It reads, Nothing to report. As it has done since they witnessed the death of the Earth.
Ripping noises rise lightly through the hatch to the floor below. Moments later, Scott’s head appears and he climbs up into the command centre. He is followed by Captain Gordon Curtis, USMC, who has a ring-binder tucked under one arm. They are to spell Peterson and McKay, to take the watch for another four fruitless hours. McKay leaves without a backward glance, and Curtis settles before the radio and begins scanning frequencies.
Peterson rises from his desk and gestures for Scott to take his seat.
There is a protocol to these handovers, but they can only say, Nothing to report, so many times, in so many different ways. Scott silently takes Peterson’s chair, and it’s as though what little personality the XO possesses drains from him. As Peterson watches, the man turns into an automaton, and sits there blank and unblinking.
Peterson leaves him to it. They all have their own ways of dealing with the situation. Deep inside each of them, hope has been eroded away to a tiny nub, as useless as an appendix. Peterson loses himself in the lunar landscape. McKay locks himself in his room and listens to mournful country music, as if their misery renders his own smaller and more manageable. Scott has put away his personality, consigned it to some corner of his mind where it cannot be battered and bruised by their slow descent into despair. Curtis reads, working his way obsessively through every manual and technical document in the base. Kendall has his torsion field generator, the Bell, whose arcane workings he claims to understand more with each passing week.
The others—Alden and Fulton, Bartlett and Neubeck—each have their own methods to counter the madness. For now, those four are hidden away somewhere—perhaps in their own rooms, in the gym, the workshop. Peterson doesn’t know and he doesn’t want to know. He considers visiting Kendall in his lab, but he doesn’t like the man and the feeling is mutual. He makes his way down the corridor to his own room, feeling like he’s walking on tiptoe though the soles of his feet adhere strangely to the carpet.
He reaches his room, slides open the flimsy door, stretches out on his bunk, and thinks black thoughts. Every now and again, his breath seems to catch in his throat, as if expecting vacuum. These brief panic attacks have become increasingly common, are now waking him several times each night. Only in his spacesuit, wrapped in its protective embrace and soothed by the whirr of its pumps and fans, does he feel peace. The polycarbonate helmet, with its LEVA, is his window on the world, and gives him distance from the lifeless landscape. He needs to be able to divorce himself from his surroundings, to put up barriers—physical and emotional and mental—between himself and the world. Without that, he thinks he might die. He refuses to invest too much emotion in the Bell. For months now, it’s taken them to one dead Earth after another.