Space

by James A. Michener

  “Lots of regions on the Sun more active than that,” one old-timer said.

  “Granted,” the manager said, “but is there any evidence of significant change?”

  “None,” Cottage said. “If you’ll compare photographs of fifteen days ago, you’ll see it’s less active now.”

  “Thank God. Anything could have happened on that other side.”

  The astronauts went to bed on the night of 22 April with such a wealth of information that only young men in the finest physical condition could have hoped to keep it in order and available. Claggett, for whom this would be his fourth trip, told the NASA people who dined with them, “In raw data to be handled, if Gemini was indexed at 1.0, my Apollo flight was 2.3, but this one, to the other side of the Moon, it’s got to be 3.3. This is really complex.”

  They were wakened for breakfast at 0400, and Deke Slayton with five other NASA officials was surprised when Claggett lifted his glass of orange juice and toasted: “To William Shakespeare, whose birthday we celebrate with a mighty bang.” Slayton helped them dress and accompanied them to Complex 39, where a score of searchlights played on the waiting rocket and nearly a million spectators gathered in the pre-dawn to watch the last flight of this majestic prototype as it headed for regions doubly mysterious.

  Despite NASA’s unhappiness with the inaccurate description Expedition to the Dark Side of the Moon, this had become the popular designation, and more than three thousand newsmen and women waited in and around the grandstand erected on the far side of protective lagoons, five miles distant. Automatic cameras, emplaced in bunkers around the Complex, would ensure excellent shots of the historic moment.

  By elevator the astronauts rode 340 feet in the air, walked across a bridge to the White Room, and with hardly a pause, proceeded directly to the capsule. Without ceremony, Claggett eased himself into the left-hand seat, and while he adjusted his bulky suit Dr. Linley awaited his [614] turn, assuring Deke Slayton, who had picked him for this flight, that he would surely bring back rock samples which would answer some of the questions about the Moon’s structure and perhaps its origin. Then he slipped into the right-hand seat, after which Pope eased himself into the one in the middle.

  When the men were finally in place, strapped flat on their backs to the seats specially molded to their forms, the critical moment of the countdown arrived. In a bunker below, Dieter Kolff looked stolidly ahead, assuring himself that his final Saturn would soar as planned. At 00:00:00 he saw a blinding flash of fire and felt the ground tremble, as 28,000 gallons of water per second gushed forth to quench the flames, and another 17,000 gallons protected the skin of the machine. From this deluge the rocket began to rise.

  Inside the capsule the three astronauts barely felt the lift-off, and Linley, who had not flown before, said, “Instruments say we’re off,” and Pope, busy with check sheets, tapped the geologist on the arm and nodded.

  At this moment, when it was assured that Apollo 18 would be successfully airborne, control passed from Cape Canaveral, whose engineers had done their job, to Houston, where Mission Control had hundreds of experts prepared to feed information and instructions into the system:

  HOUSTON: All systems go.

  APOLLO: We’re getting ready for jettison.

  In less than three minutes the huge Stage I had discharged its obligation, lifting the entire burden of 6,300,000 pounds eight miles straight up, and now it was useless; indeed, it was worse than useless, for it constituted dead weight and had to be discarded before Stage II could be fired. So Claggett watched as automatic switches-he had more than six hundred above and about him-blew Stage I away, allowing it to fall harmlessly into the Atlantic some miles offshore. With satisfaction, Pope noted that all events so far had adhered to his schedule.

  Since Apollo 18 developed no pogo, these first moments of flight were extremely gentle, no more than a G and a half developing, but when Claggett ignited the five powerful engines of Stage II, the rocket seemed to leap upward from an altitude of a mere eight miles to a majestic 112 and to a velocity of more than 15,000 miles an hour. The flight was on its way.

  [615] Now Houston began to feed in data, all suggestions being delivered by a team of three CapComs, and it had been agreed that Hickory Lee and Ed Cater would conduct most of the communication. Lee was speaking:

  HOUSTON: Okay, Apollo 18. You must be doing everything right.

  APOLLO: We were happy to avoid pogo.

  HOUSTON: Sometimes our engineers develop real smarts.

  APOLLO: Pope speaking. This craft is sure roomier than Gemini. I can hardly wait for the signal to run about.

  HOUSTON: You stay put, Bunny Rabbit.

  Now Claggett jettisoned Stage II with its five massive engines and Apollo was powered by only the single strong engine in Stage III, the one that would be burned once to insert the vehicle into orbit around the Earth and once more to thrust Apollo into its course to the Moon, after which it, too, would be discarded. But of course the system as a whole would still have the smaller engines in the modules, and after Stage III was jettisoned, about three hours into the flight, these smaller rockets would control until the landing capsule returned to Earth.

  At the 84-minute mark a conversation of immense importance began:

  HOUSTON: All systems say go.

  APOLLO: We read the same.

  HOUSTON: We’re ready to make the big decision.

  APOLLO: No opposition here.

  HOUSTON: It’s go for the Moon.

  APOLLO: We read 17,432 speed at an altitude of 119.6 miles.

  HOUSTON: Roger. Fire at 01:26:28. And you’ll be on your proper trajectory.

  With everything set for a long, leisurely drift to the Moon, the men turned to an exercise that was fundamental to the flight but which might have terrified one not accustomed to space. The components of the vast machine had been packaged in a way that would provide the best aerodynamic surface for climbing through the dense atmosphere, and this required that they be packaged in what one might call an upside-down position; Claggett called it ass-backwards. But now, since frictional drag in space was negligible, one shape was as good as another for drifting [616] through the reaches, and it was advisable for the astronauts to take their monstrous machine apart-massive pieces drifting independently at nearly 18,000 mph-and reassemble them properly, at which time the cumbersome unnecessary portions would be jettisoned and allowed to fall back and burn up in the atmosphere.

  “Wish me luck,” Claggett said as he began this preposterous maneuver, and when the parts had been separated and the command and service modules, as a single unit, had been turned completely around, he edged them gently against the lunar module and docked them. Then with great skill he pulled his entire package away from the useless Stage III and watched as it started its swift descent to destruction. The astronauts were alone in the small vehicles that would deposit them on the Moon.

  But there was one further obligation. As the tricky maneuver ended, Claggett and Pope did something that no former astronauts had ever done: with the most careful timing they fired the explosive bolts, knocking open the hatch cover and allowing the three spring-loaded communication satellites to eject from the Apollo. Utilizing the same forward thrust that their mother ship had, they would in due course reach a position near the Moon, but much too high and too speedy to attain orbit. At that time Claggett would send a radio signal which would activate a small retrorocket in each satellite, causing it to drop dutifully into its assigned position around the Moon. There it would serve as the vital connection with Earth when the astronauts were working on the other side.

  “Now we can go to sleep,” Claggett said, for it would be a slow, methodical, totally supervised trip that Apollo 18 would engage in for the next sixty hours. Claggett would play country music on his tape machine, Pope the symphonies of Beethoven when it came his turn. Dr. Linley monitored communications with Houston and took note of the NCAA basketball scores as CapCom Cater read them off. On the second night, to c
oincide with prime-time television in the States, Dr. Linley activated Altair’s television camera and relayed to Earth a fifty-minute program depicting life aboard the spacecraft. Claggett told some rather dreadful Texas jokes, mainly about his uncles, but the highlight was an exposition by Pope of the consequences of weightlessness. He showed how a spill of water [617] formed a globule, how one than would sleep with his head in one position, his companion upside down relatively, and the special problems of eating and drinking in space. To delight the children he added, “Going to the bathroom isn’t simple, either.” He used the word urine and showed how it was expelled from the capsule, and then he asked Linley to carry his camera behind his, Pope’s, head, so that the children could see the absolute welter of switches the astronauts had to memorize. He stressed the device which had come late in the space program, a kind of metal bar behind which each switch hid, protected against accidental activation. With a grand sweep he brushed his left arm across one bank of switches and showed how such a careless gesture would leave the switches undisturbed.

  He then took the camera and asked Linley to explain the heart of the system, the computers which stored the data necessary for such a flight, and as the scientist detailed the amazing amount of information the computer held, Pope said, “In a few minutes Colonel Claggett is going to fire an engine for eleven seconds, no more, no less. How does he know when and how long to fire? The computer tells him, and after he fires it, we’ll be on dead target to the Moon.”

  Claggett felt the program was getting somewhat professorial, which was bound to be the case when Pope was in charge, so he took a bite of cracker, producing large crumbs, which hung in the capsule. “Catch the crumbs,” he yelled at the other two. “That’s how we do our housework up here. Catch the crumbs, you limeys. I’m Captain Bligh.” And he held the camera while Pope and Linley tried to capture the errant bits.

  On the next day things sobered considerably, for the men of Altair were about to attempt something never tried before, a walk on the other side, and as the Moon loomed ahead, enormous in their small windows, they could identify areas where the earlier Apollos had landed, and they felt momentary remorse that they were not headed for any of the sites they had memorized as beginning astronauts. But when they swung around the edge of the Moon and saw for the first time the strange and marvelous mountains awaiting them, they gasped with delight.

  Flight plan called for them to make many orbits of the Moon before actually descending, and in this waiting [618] period they talked with Hickory Lee in Houston:

  APOLLO: Things couldn’t look smoother.

  HOUSTON: Who wrote Claggett’s lines for the television show?

  APOLLO: Joe Miller, two hundred years ago.

  HOUSTON: The show was an enormous success. Editors liked Pope’s explanation of weightlessness.

  APOLLO (Claggett speaking): So did we. I never understood it before.

  HOUSTON: Could you see any debris from previous landings?

  APOLLO: None. And we really searched.

  HOUSTON: That’s hard to believe. When you drop to lower orbit, of course ...

  APOLLO: Our landing spot is in darkness now, but what we can see of the lighted area looks reassuring. Totally different from the Earth side. Many, many more craters.

  HOUSTON: We want you to make four sunlight passes.

  APOLLO: You can be sure we want to.

  HOUSTON: Any glitches?

  APOLLO: None whatever. Fingers crossed, but this has been a perfect mission so far.

  There was a glitch. Sam Cottage, monitoring the Sun on the morning after lift-off, saw with interest that Region 419 had maintained its horseshoe configuration, with signs indicating that a sunspot big enough to see with the naked eye might be developing, but there was no indication that a solar proton event might erupt. His summary that day informed the world and NASA scientists:

  Region 419 produced several subflares. New spots are appearing in white light. Region exhibiting mixed polarities. Geomagnetic field likely to remain unsettled. Region likely to produce moderate flares.

  But on the next day, as the astronauts were preparing their approach to the Moon, Region 419 subsided dramatically, so that the summary contained nothing to alert the NASA scientists that anything of importance might be impending.

  However, Cottage could not sleep, and during the hours when Claggett and Linley were preparing their descent [619] to the Moon, he was alone in his workroom, reviewing all the data regarding Cycle 20 and the behavior of Region 419, and the more mathematics he applied to what was before him, the more apparent it became that if his theories were correct, Region 419 must soon erupt as a major flare.

  He had nothing to work on except his correlations, but in the morning he carried them to the manager and said, “Here I am again. Statistically, everything would balance out if 419 did go bang.”

  “We’re not gypsies telling fortunes.”

  “All right, disregard my figures. What do you think?”

  “It’s a troublesome region, but dammit, we don’t have enough here to warrant an alert.”

  And again none was issued.

  On 26 April, as the two astronauts were making their final decisions regarding a descent to the Moon, Sam Cottage did not leave his watching post for lunch, because a routine event was occurring on the Sun which, although it involved no specific danger, did produce a period of maximum risk to the two men who would be walking on the Moon. Region 419 was moving from the eastern half of the Sun’s visible surface to the western, and this made it triply threatening. First, because of solar rotation the paths followed by energetic atomic particles thrown out by the Sun are curved, so that those originating on the western half are more directly channeled toward the Earth and Moon. Even a truly massive flare on the eastern half would do little damage, for its ejecta would curve outward and away from Earth, to be lost in space. Second, the travel time for deadly particles originating on the western half is much shorter than those coming from the eastern, so that the likelihood of their overtaking the astronauts before they could seek shelter was much greater. Third, solar-flare particles reaching Earth or Moon from the western side are just more energetic than those from the east.

  The most threatening single position for a flare is twenty to forty-five degrees west of the Sun’s central meridian, and that was the ominous area into which Region 419 now entered.

  When Sam missed his lunch, his girl friend appeared with a sandwich and watched the Sun with him. “I was [620] jittery yesterday,” he said. “Took all my data to the boss and showed him nothing. He told me we weren’t gypsy fortunetellers, and he was right. Look. It’s a calm Sun. Region 419 is transiting from east to west in an orderly fashion. This time we’re going to escape, but I’m still convinced that before Cycle 20 ends, there has to be a bangeroo.”

  “Lucky for the guys up there it skips us this time,” she said.

  “Why, are they on the Moon?”

  “Not yet. But I heard the broadcast from Houston and they’re on their way down.” She hesitated. Seeing that he was bleary-eyed and nervous, she said, “Why don’t you take a walk with me over to the library? You could use a break.”

  “I want to see this thing vanish off the western limb.”

  “How many hours?,

  “Six more days.” Then he broke into a laugh and surrendered. “All right, off we go, but only for an hour.”

  At about the time that Sam Cottage was going to the library with his girl, Claggett and Linley were slipping through the chute that carried them into the landing module, and after they had satisfied themselves that everything was in readiness, they signaled Pope that he could cast them loose, but he was so busy verifying the check lists that governed his solitary command of the capsule, that he asked for more time: “I’ve got three more pages. I want this place to be locked up when you pull away.”

  “We want it, too,” Claggett said over the intercom. “Something to come home to.”

  At the conclusion of
his meticulous checking Pope cried, “Randy, it’s everything go. Contact Houston.”

  So the word was given; the computers aloft and their mates in Houston concurred, and the Luna broke away to start its descent to what Tucker Thompson had told his readers was “the dark and dangerous chasm in which unknown forces threaten the life of any trespasser.” Dr. Mott, reading the report in Folks, growled, “The basic forces are identical with those which govern Brooklyn. Only the landscape is different.”

  It certainly was. As the Sun began to illuminate regions farther and farther into the hemisphere, Claggett and [621] Linley could see a Moon very different from the Earth side they had once studied so assiduously. Here there were no vast seas, no multitude of smooth-centered craters, no rilles leading out in tantalizing patterns. This was a brutish Moon composed of great mountain ranges, valleys perilously deep. The Earth side had been known for twenty thousand years and mapped for three hundred. Grammar-school children could make themselves familiar with their side, but only scientists studying the Russian and American photographs could say that they knew much about Luna’s chosen landing spot.

  With unmatched skill, Claggett brought the lander right down the middle of the corridor-enough Sun to throw shadows that identified every hillock-and as the long delicate probes which dangled from the bottom of the landing pads reached down to touch the Moon and alert the astronauts to turn off their power, lest they fly too hard onto the rocky soil, the final conversation with Houston took place:

  LUNA: Everything as ordered. God, this is different.

  HOUSTON: We read perfection. Soon now.

  LUNA: No signals from the probes. Could they be malfunctioning?

  HOUSTON: You’re still well above the probe level. All’s well.

  LUNA (Claggett speaking): Too busy to talk now. Drifting to left. Too much.

  LUNA (Linley speaking): No strain. Straighten up, dead ahead I see it.