Island of Clouds: The Great 1972 Venus Flyby (Altered Space Book 3)

by Gerald Brennan

  The surface is beautiful, all reds and oranges and browns, finely detailed and wind-blown, and there are mountains and valleys and plains, and we can see the edges of the ice caps, top and bottom.

  In front of me and below the Red Planet, the wet workshop looms, the massive Saturn third stage, our home for the past several months. During launch there had been nothing in our living space but liquid hydrogen and the triangular metal grid of the floors. All our equipment, sleeping gear and provisions for the trip, was packed in the docking adapter area; we’d spent the first few days of the mission just setting everything up, taking it into the massive main area and assembling and unfolding it all in carefully choreographed sequence. There’s enough volume in the craft that we have something no one else has had in the history of space exploration: serious room for gymnastics, for aerial flips and twists and somersaults. They supplied us with a projector and several movies; in our off time, we rigged up a Beta cloth projection screen and brushed up on the classics, The Bridge on the River Kwai and Rear Window and Double Indemnity. We’ve been busy as well with telescope observations and planetary probes; we’ve already flown by Venus, and will do so again before the mission is over. But now it is January of 1978, and we are at Mars.

  “See any little green men?” Shepard’s voice is warm in the headset.

  “Even my eyesight’s not that good,” I reply. “It looks like a quite a place to explore, though.”

  “We’ll get there.”

  There’s a lot to be done: retrieval of equipment and film packages, photography, inspection of the thruster quads. But for a brief moment I relax and imagine people, our children or their children, exploring the new world below, driving through ravines and up massive mountains, gazing in wonder at the endless red desert.

  •••

  There’s one last thing to be done.

  We’ve left Shepard in the hallway by the bathroom; we can’t get him all the way back to the lower equipment bay, but we’ve realized that we can leave him in the tunnel, at least. So we ease his rigid body up there, taking extra care again with how we move him, both out of concern for the suit’s integrity, and respect for the man who is no more.

  Then: the tunnel cover hatch, valves open per normal procedure. He will be out of sight and at peace, at least.

  Neither of us needs to say anything more, not right now. There is an unspoken tired agreement that we’ve done everything that needs to be done for the day.

  We return to the sleeping chambers numb, shattered.

  I go back to reading, the history of Antarctic expeditions somehow now warm and comforting. Cherry-Garrard is describing the great luxurious sleep they enjoyed in the long polar nights. “Perhaps it is true of others as is certainly the case with me, that the more horrible the conditions in which we sleep, the more soothing and wonderful are the dreams which visit us,” he writes. And later: “And if the worst, or best, happens, and Death comes for you in the snow, he comes disguised as Sleep, and you greet him rather as a welcome friend than as a gruesome foe.” It occurs to me that we will have to move Shepard if something happens to one of us and we have to implement the plan we discussed, the last-ditch plan for the preservation of records and scientific knowledge.

  I realize I feel odd. I place the back of my hand to my forehead: it’s warm.

  •••

  Gus Grissom and I are descending towards the surface of the moon.

  It is February of 1969, and we are set to achieve Kennedy’s edict with months to spare, but we aren’t thinking of that; we aren’t thinking of anything but the present, the sharpness of reality, the intensity of the tasks at hand.

  We fly with windows rotated down at first, to measure the landmarks passing by the window and make sure we’re on track. Then we rotate upwards so the landing radar can get a lock, flying feet first and face-up like mixed-up superheroes. The trajectory is good but program alarms are flashing, yellow lights on the computer, and the radio chatter going back and forth, terse GOs after seconds of excruciating delay.

  And then pitchover, the spacecraft rotating so we could see the landing site at last. The computer is flying us towards a field of boulders.

  Gus takes over and starts aiming us further downrange, while I put my eyes back on the fuel gauges and the altimeter. I barely looked out at all. Watching the moon is Gus’s job, watching the gauges is mine. And I keep calling out the numbers, and soon Houston is barely responding; everyone is holding their breath except Gus.

  I risk a glance a few hundred feet up and see the shadow of the lunar module: our shadow on the moon.

  “Thirty seconds.” Charlie Duke calls out our fuel level. We have never been that low and landed in the sims.

  “Forty feet,” I call.

  “We’re picking up some dust,” Gus says, and I get goosebumps, because this is the first thing we’ve never said in the simulators. That is the first real thing.

  “Bingo,” Charlie calls, and this means we are about to go dry, we should abort.

  “Ten feet,” I call.

  “Engine stop,” Gus says, and we fall the last few feet and hit the moon hard.

  We hit hard, and everything in the lander rattles, and we bounce, an excruciatingly slow bounce, like a cartoon where physics don’t quite work right, and it feels like a couple seconds before we come down again, at an angle now, and I feel like we’re going to topple over.

  But then we tip back to something like vertical. Frantically we survey the gauges and everything is within reason, everything is OK, and there is no need for the post-touchdown abort. We are on the moon and it is real. My mother, the moon.

  I clap Gus’s shoulder and shake his hand. “Lord, what a ride,” I say, “Houston, Traquility Base. It was a rough touchdown, but the Eagle has landed,” and after the pause Charlie Duke says, “Eagle, Houston. I guess we can start breathing again,” and over the airwaves I can hear cheers from the control room, but it doesn’t matter, on our end it is back to procedures and checklists, making sure nothing is damaged, safing the spacecraft.

  I think: we hit so hard, surely we’ve sprung a leak. But the air pressure gauges are steady.

  Then Houston gives us a STAY. And here we are, on the moon and in no rush to leave, so at last we can take off our helmets and gloves and relax a little. Outside, it is remorselessly, relentlessly flat and empty, like a dirty gray beach that stretches out to the horizon. It looks warm and sunny and inviting, even though the sky of course is black.

  I take communion on the moon. Most people don’t know it, but I’m a church elder, and I’ve packed communion and a tiny chalice and a little vial of communion wine in my personal preference kit. I’ve cleared it with Deke beforehand, and per his suggestions, I keep my on-air comments general in nature, bland and inoffensive enough to provoke harmony, rather than lawsuits. When I pour the wine, it swirls around for a long time, slow and graceful in the low gravity. I read to myself, a quick Bible verse from a printed card: “I am the vine, and you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.” And in silence I eat the wafer and drink the wine.

  The tentative plan calls for a rest period, as if it were a relatively normal workday, as if you can just do all that work and land on the moon for the first time in human history and just go to sleep at the end of the day. Obviously that’s somewhat unrealistic.

  So we talk it over with Houston and decide to push ahead, to go outside on the moon.

  The checklists are long and elaborate, and it all takes longer than it did in training. But then it is done and we are suited and depressurizing. Peeling back the front hatch, almost, a rush of particles into the void.

  Gus goes first, of course, just like we’d practiced so many times, shimmying backwards on hands and knees through the open hatch, then climbing down into the history books. (He’s always been a man of few words; there was a famous incident where he was called on to make a speech at a factory, to the workers
making the Atlas rocket, and all he said was “Do good work.” And now it’s simply: “We made it.”) I stay behind for a few minutes to snap pictures and power down the lander and send the camera out on the clothesline-like conveyor.

  And at last here I am, crawling backwards myself. It is not difficult, but I have to concentrate. My heart is beating fast, not with fear but adrenaline, excitement and sharpness, that knowledge that nothing I have ever done is as momentous as this.

  Then: down the ladder. It is not flimsy, but it is sleek and slim, aluminum, perfectly designed and machined like everything else on the lander to have no more mass than necessary, slender and insignificant compared to the massiveness of what we’d done.

  Once I step off the lander and look around, it is apparent how much nothing there is. “Magnificent desolation,” I say. There’s something strangely compelling about so much emptiness.

  Around then I look around again and realize I can notice things a little better. When you look towards the sun there are deep shadows, lots of gray and black, and in the other direction it is all tan and washed out, like a beach. And yet it is truly alien, unlike anything I’ve seen, for obviously there is nothing that has been shaped by wind or water, no evidence of anything but cosmic bombardment. The surface of the moon is like an object lesson in probability: big craters fewer and farther between, and the distance between them directly proportionate to their size, and smaller and smaller ones in between, but all distributed unevenly, with random clusters here and there. And we can see larger features, like the boulders we’ve flown over, and with no atmosphere everything looks so incredibly close, all the way to the horizon, which we know is a mile or so out, but which still looks near enough to touch.

  But of course we have to go on about our tasks: moving the TV camera away from the lunar lander, collecting samples of soil and rock, planting the flag. We have practiced it all, but of course everything is slightly differently in reality. The cable for the camera is soon covered in moon dust, which makes it hard to see, and we nearly trip over it several times. The flag has a folding arm along the top so it won’t just droop lifelessly, but we can’t get it all fully extended. There is a seismometer and a laser reflector to deploy, and we have to keep everything level and not cover it with moon dust in the process of setting it up. And in general, there is too much to do to really figure out how we feel about being there.

  I am in the middle of this when Houston patches us through to the president.

  “Good evening, Buzz and Gus,” Johnson says, that Texas drawl still familiar after transmission across the void.

  “Good evening, sir,” Gus says.

  We wait for the normal transmission delay. Then: “For as long as man’s looked to the skies, he’s seen the moon. It’s the destination we’ve all longed for, more visible to us than any far-off mountain range or swath of jungle, and yet further from our grasp. It is my great pleasure to congratulate you two for making real what we’ve all dreamed about. And it is a tremendous honor to be your president while you planted the flag of our great nation upon this alien world.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Gus says.

  “Yes, thank you, Mr. President,” I echo.

  A delay. And at last: “For whatever divisions our nation and our planet have suffered these past years, we are united in our praise for your great triumph, our hope for your safe return, and our eagerness for greater journeys yet to come.”

  “It is our great pleasure to be here, Mr. President,” I say. “And we all know we wouldn’t be here without your leadership.”

  “Thank you,” President Johnson says. “I have a lot more questions for you! But I suppose they’ll have to wait until I see you on the Hornet.”

  “We look forward to it, Mr. President.”

  And with that, it’s back to work.

  Gus has a plaque to place on the lander. It says: “Here men from Earth first set foot on the moon. We come in peace for all mankind.” It was engraved with pictures of Earth and signatures: Gus, me, Mike, President Johnson.

  We don’t get all that far from the LM in those short few hours outside, probably only 100 or 150 feet. The point is just to be there, to prove it can be done. It’s an operational exercise; there are scientific goals, but by and large it is a test flight, to prove it can be done.

  And I’m fine with that. When at last it is time to head back inside, I do so without rancor or regret. It is clear that this is a strange and hostile place, not at all the type of environment where you can just kick back with a glass of whiskey. (Until we set up a base, and maybe some sort of dome, it will never be home, never anything but a place of spacesuits and tightly controlled environments and uneasy vigilance about checklists and procedures.) So I go up the ladder without hesitation. We haul two boxes of moon rocks up on the conveyor line, and then Gus comes up, and that is that.

  We have to do an initial repressurization so we can remove our outer helmets and backpacks and connect our hoses directly to the lander. Gone is the silence, the strange cocoon of sound surrounded by soundlessness; we can again hear the noise of the lander’s pumps fading in slowly with the air. But once those tasks are done, we have to depressurize again, to kick the backpacks out the front hatch and leave them on the moon so the lander’s ascent stage engine won’t have to haul them back into orbit. This is a key part of the plan to ensure a safe liftoff: relentlessly throwing away every bit of excess weight.

  Then we close all the valves again and start the second repressurization, the final one. As the air comes back I start to hear, again, sounds outside my helmet, the breathing of the machine, whirring of air through filters like a long exhalation, a sigh of relief.

  •••

  In the morning I’m in a fog.

  Joe looks tired and worried. I am worried for him. I am ashamed of my infirmity, and yet I don’t envy him the lonely months ahead if something happens to me.

  At the appointed hour, we repoint the spacecraft so the stuck antenna set is facing Earth. Houston sends us some flight information, then Joan comes on, calm and warm and reassuring, and then Shirley comes on to talk to Joe.

  I’m grateful, tremendously grateful, but exhausted as well.

  By the time that’s done, all I can think of is getting back to bed. Consciousness is difficult to bear, but there is a pleasant space on the edge of it: dreams and visions of the past, of alternate pasts, of impossible futures, forking and splitting, or just hazy and warm.

  •••

  We land hard on the moon.

  The spacecraft bounces hard and almost topples over, and there is a great rattle of equipment. We are in our goldfish bowl helmets, suited up and isolated from our spacecraft, which in turn is isolated from the lunar environment by its thin metal skin. Houston issues a STAY, but shortly afterwards I realize the noises outside are dimming, all the pumps and motors in the lunar lander, and sure enough, the pressure gauges are dropping, dropping, dropping. And the sounds of the machine fade away until there is nothing but my anxious breathing.

  We cannot isolate the source of the leak. We spend less than two hours on the surface of the moon, suited up and inside the spacecraft all the while. We take a few reluctant pictures, then lift off to catch the command module on the next orbit.

  •••

  I wake again and do not know if it is a new day.

  Joe is placing a pill in my mouth and imploring me to swallow.

  He has every reason to be alarmed by all of this, and yet I can see he’s most worried about me.

  “Don’t want to lose your last patient, huh?” A weak dark joke.

  He smiles thinly. “Sense of humor: not improved.”

  •••

  We’re flying above the surface of the moon, Ed White and I, and there are more and more program alarms, and initially they are telling us we’re a GO, but then the landing site is uneven, full of boulders and craters, and we are flying horizontally for what seems like forever, intermittently dipping down but still seeing
nothing, and I know the plot of our flight path is making it look like we’re cautiously taking short steps down a long flat staircase.

  And then at last Charlie Duke calls out “Bingo” and we are still 200 feet up, and his words are two seconds old and the engine is already starting to sputter.

  “Abort, abort, abort,” I call, and Ed hits the button with no perceptible hesitation, and all the pyrotechnic charges and guillotines fire in sequence to separate us from the now-useless descent stage, and the ascent engine lights and there we are, suddenly accelerating upward and away from the dead gray moon, that once-distant goal that we came so close to touching.

  Deke has promised that, if we can’t land safely, we should abort without hesitation, and we’ll be first in line for the next flight. But as we speed back towards the heavens, I can’t help wondering if Deke will be overruled.

  Everyone has that one thing that they do better than anyone they know, and for me, it’s rendezvous, the mathematical calculation of angles and speeds that will bring two orbiting spacecraft together. There’s a lot that’s counterintuitive about it; you have to fire your engines against your direction of travel and drop into a lower orbit if you want to catch someone that’s above and ahead of you, for instance. But I wrote my dissertation on it, and I worked hard during Gemini to help us perfect the techniques, and now I feel completely in my element. Dr. Rendezvous, they’ve been calling me behind my back, for it’s one of my favorite topics, one of the few things I feel comfortable talking about at cocktail parties. And now that’s what we’re back to, rehashing old things rather than experiencing new ones, and I’m in my element.

  It all goes well, far more smoothly than any simulator, every bit as stress-free as the descent had been stressful. The rendezvous radar works perfectly, and soon we’re in visual range of Columbia, gleaming bright and metallic above the dull moon. And after some quick photography and dispirited radio chatter, there is the last gentle movement of our two spacecraft together, and then the metallic rippling of the docking latches, the confident metallic sound of one thing going right, at least.