Back to the Moon

by Homer Hickam

  Although Suttner was willing to discuss the space program all day, he would say no more about Medaris and his possible motives. Frustrated, Shirley thanked him and gave up. She slowly drove toward the crest of the mountain. Before she reached it, a blue sport utility vehicle pulled out in front of her from a side road. It flashed its lights. Shirley stopped. The driver of the SUV was Elsa Suttner.

  Later, as she drove down the mountain, Shirley, who was proud of her toughness, found to her surprise that she was crying. She pulled over at a scenic observation point to look out over the beautiful valley. There was another rumble, another rocket engine being tested, and she thought of what Elsa Suttner had told her about her niece and how Jack Medaris had staggered into the hot belching exhaust of a rocket engine out of control, screaming not from the physical pain of the burning of his flesh but from the anguish of losing his very reason for living. Elsa had told her more, speculation really, on why she thought Medaris had taken an enormous gamble, just to reach back, to be with Kate again in the only way he could. “I love thee with the breath, smiles, tears, of all my life,” Shirley quoted softly to herself as the plumes of smoke drifted from the engine into the sky. “And, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.”

  She used a tissue to dab her tears away, and hurried down the mountain. She was on her way to Houston, where Elsa said there were more answers.

  IGNITION OF THE BIG DOG

  Columbia

  Jack watched Penny, made certain she was properly strapped into the pilot’s seat. She gave him a smile, then a thumbs-up. “I’m okay,” she said. “Let’s do your tests and end this. And, Jack?”

  Jack looked over his shoulder, raised his eyebrows. “Um?”

  “I’m going to testify for you down there. I’m going to do everything I can to keep you and Virgil out of prison.”

  “Thanks, High Eagle. Nice of you. Virgil, did you check her straps?”

  Virgil was strapped in a resurrected mission specialist seat. Paco had been put back in his padded locker. “She’s good to go, boss,” Virgil said.

  Columbia rode high and alone. Jack had her in a plus-Z attitude, her orange tank and black bottom facing earth, her nose in line with the direction of her orbit. The great mass of her main engines had drifted far behind, beginning their slow spiral into the gravity well. Endeavour had also drifted off. Jack could see her below, orbital mechanics dictating that because she was lower and going at the same velocity, she was gradually speeding ahead.

  Jack had plotted the course and keyed it into the laptop that controlled the Big Dog engine as well as the shuttle computers, which had been cautiously brought up. He had deactivated the Ku-band antenna, cutting off the possibility of ground interference. A series of numbers marched toward zero on the laptop. Jack watched them and then reached down between the seats and pulled a handle. Columbia shuddered as if in regret as the ET separated. “So long, old horse,” he said. “And thanks for the supplies.”

  Penny watched, transfixed, as the tank drifted away. “How long will it stay in orbit?” she wondered.

  “We’re in a high-energy situation,” Jack said. “I’d say it’s good for a year without a reboost. Maybe somebody will be smart enough to make use of it. Pretty cheap base for a space station. All that’s required is the will to get up here, clean it out, and use it.”

  The numbers ticked on. Jack watched the edge of the earth. The sun was just starting to peek around it. The mantle of air surrounding the planet looked as thin as an onion’s skin. “I wonder if you can see a green flash from up here,” he said as much to himself as anyone.

  “What’s a green flash?” Penny asked.

  “Sometimes,” he said, “especially on tropical islands, when the sun goes down into the sea, just as it sinks out of sight, its rays penetrate the clear water. If you’re lucky, you’ll see it—a green flash. One of the most beautiful things there is to see on the good earth. Of course, they say you have to be in love to see it.”

  Penny pushed against her straps for a better view, then sat back. “I didn’t see a flash,” she said, sounding disappointed.

  Jack shrugged. He hadn’t either. He’d seen it only once, with Kate on a scuba trip to Guanaja, in the Republic of Honduras. He never expected to see it again. He kept his eyes on the numbers flashing on the monitor screen. Columbia was turning slowly. The earth slid away and Jack peered into vast darkness. Astronauts had often spoken of the sense they had of the fragility of the earth. Now he sensed the same thing. So little earth and air, so much. . . nothing.

  Jack pulled his pocket calculator from a tab on the console. He made some inputs, looked back at the screen, and then smiled when his numbers matched. Columbia was nearly ready. For the first time in decades a manned spacecraft was about to go somewhere, not just count laps in the sky. He briefly considered telling Penny where they were heading then decided against it. She’d know soon enough.

  Endeavour

  Brown slid back into her seat after checking Grant again. Her commander had sullenly gone to her sleeping bag, a night mask strapped over her eyes. Brown ordered Barnes to watch over Grant, hoping the sleeping pill she’d taken had started to work. Then she called Newell to come up and man the second seat in Endeavour ’s cockpit. Per their last order from Houston they were supposed to keep an eye on Columbia. Dropping off the Space Station node was out of the question. Too much RCS propellant had been used to sneak up on Columbia and their orbit was deteriorating too rapidly. The node would drop into the atmosphere before another shuttle could come up and get it. The decision had been made to bring the node back.

  Endeavour ’s rescue mission had cost about a half-billion dollars and nothing good was going to come out of it. Some careers were going to suffer and Brown suspected hers was going to be included in the body count. As she watched, and worried about what awaited her on earth, the external tank dropped slowly away from Columbia. Then the country’s oldest shuttle began to assume an odd nose-up attitude. Brown pushed against her seat straps, trying to see better. She fired up air-to-ground. “ET sep!” she announced.

  “Say again?” CAPCOM queried.

  “Columbia ’s external tank has separated,” Brown reiterated. “And she’s in a roll maneuver. She’s in a plus-X, omicron 180 attitude.”

  “Understand, bay back, nose up,” Kelly Niven, the CAPCOM, replied, putting the pilot’s words in English.

  “Roger that.”

  Newell was using the binoculars. “The bay doors are closing. They must be getting ready for reentry.”

  “In that attitude?” Brown questioned. “I don’t think so.”

  “What’s going on, guys?” CAPCOM asked.

  Brown stared at Columbia. It was a good question but she couldn’t think of a single answer.

  Columbia

  Penny searched the darkness. Her eyes were beginning to adjust. There wasn’t just emptiness facing Columbia ’s nose. There were millions of white and pink and yellow and blue sparkles of light strewn across the sky like diamonds on black velvet. Stars, a horde of them. Columbia kept turning. It was as if she was looking for a special star. “Why are we pointed in that direction?” Penny asked.

  Neither Jack or Virgil said anything, just sat there staring into the vast reaches of outer space. Penny felt a chill that started at her neck and went all the way down her spine. “Medaris, damn you!”

  SMC

  Ordered out of the SMC, Sam had sneaked into an auxiliary control room to listen and watch the proceedings on a closed-circuit monitor. “What are you doing, Jack?” he muttered.

  “Keep us apprised,” he heard Niven, the CAPCOM, beg Endeavour.

  Brown came up after a momentary hiss of dead air. “Nothing new,” she said. “Columbia ’s still here with her bay doors closed. The ET has dropped down, gone ahead of us.”

  Sam kept trying to make sense of it all. Medaris had torn the shuttle apart, ripped out the mains and put in their place another engine. Why would he do that? “W
ait a minute,” Sam said aloud to the room, empty except for a commtech who was eating his lunch. “They’ve lowered their mass by six tons.” He swore and got on the phone. He needed to talk to the Air Force. When he got them, he said, “Eglin, what can you see?”

  The Air Force liaison officer on the other end fortunately recognized him. “Keyhole’s still got it, sir. We see the same thing as Endeavour reported. We’re about to go over the horizon in a few minutes. We’ll lose Keyhole then so if anything’s gonna happen, hope it happens soon.”

  Sam sat down. Jack had lowered the mass of Columbia, shoved a big rocket engine up her tail, and then aimed her toward space. “Shit!” He went to the flight director push. John Lakey answered. “John, Columbia ’s going for escape velocity!”

  Lakey’s reply reflected his confusion. “What did you say, Sam? Who’s escaping? Where are you?”

  “You idiot!” Sam raged. “They’re leaving earth orbit! They’re headed out—” Sam stopped, stabbed off the push. But where are they going? he said to himself. Hell, where else? Sam sat back in his chair, rocking it spasmodically as he tried to make himself believe it. Then he stopped and allowed a huge grin to slide across his face. He had never thought he’d be alive to see it happen again. “Jack Medaris, you crafty son of a bitch!”

  Columbia

  Columbia had her star and reported it. Jack stabilized the ship with three quick RCS burns. “Nominal, nominal,” he whispered. The numbers on the monitor had stopped except for a sequence in the upper right-hand corner. A countdown clock.

  SMC

  Sam came back inside Shuttle Mission Control. Lakey watched him in confused silence and then stood aside without resistance as Sam took back his position at the flight director’s console. He called for a video patch from Eglin so he could see the shuttle through the Keyhole. “Who’s on the other end, Eglin?” Sam demanded.

  “This is Captain Terry Callisto, sir.”

  “Keep feeding us, Callisto.”

  “Yes, sir. As you can see, she’s still just sitting there.”

  Sam heard noise in the background and then a man shouting, “It’s blown up, sir!”

  Callisto called, “Houston, I’m getting a report that Columbia ’s blown up!”

  Columbia

  The violence of the engine shocked Penny. From below and behind came a sound like nothing she had ever heard, a deep rumbling howl like a crazed dog from hell. She was slammed back into her seat, the g-force a steady, heavy hand on her chest. “Medaris?” she called, close to panic. “Jack? Dear God! What’s happening?”

  “Let’s go!” whooped Virgil.

  The engine drove on. Then as abruptly as it had started, it stopped. Penny was slung against her belts. Then, as zero g crept over her again, she craned her neck to look up through the ceiling view ports. White swirls of giant cloud patterns over a blue sparkling ocean slid rapidly by and then the edge of the earth, and then nothing. She heard Jack type rapidly into the keyboard of his laptop. She looked to see. Numbers sped across his monitor. “Dammit!” he snapped. “Engine shutdown six point two seconds premature.”

  SMC

  Sam rubbed his face, stared at the huge monitor on the wall, puzzling over the bright spot where Columbia had been just moments before. Then he understood. “She didn’t blow up, Captain. Columbia has fired her engine.”

  “Houston!” Callisto was yelling, “She’s. . . God, she’s...”

  “Like a bat out of hell!” Sam heard Brown yell down from Endeavour. “She was here and then she was—poof!—gone like a bat out of hell!”

  Columbia

  Jack didn’t want to answer Penny’s questions, not yet, not until he figured out what had gone wrong. His fingers flew across the keyboard. Everything had seemed so right. What the hell had happened? A 6.2-second premature shutdown would put them into a trajectory like an artillery shell, have them coming back into the atmosphere at God knew what angle. By the time Columbia got ten miles inside the air envelope, every living thing inside her would be nothing but a blackened cinder.

  The laptop kept going through its reporting mode and then cycled into trajectory analyses, the numbers coming up based on a postulated delta V. Jack stared at it, pushed the return button, and more numbers began to march. He scratched his head and got out his calculator. He punched in the numbers.

  “Medaris, tell me what’s happened!” Penny demanded again.

  Jack shook his head. “Virgil, we were way off on our calculations about ol’ Big Dog.” He turned, reached across the back of his chair to shake Virgil’s giant, callused hand. “The dog’s one hell of a lot more powerful than we thought. That’s why it shut down early.”

  Virgil laughed, unstrapped himself, and leaned over to clap Jack and Penny on their shoulders. It jarred Jack even in zero g. “It means we’re on our way, don’t it, boss?”

  “Look out, moon!” Jack said, grinning at Penny. Then he lost his grin. “Sorry, High Eagle,” he said, trying to appear sheepish.

  Penny unstrapped herself, and went for Jack’s throat. He dodged her, and Virgil held her back. She swung futilely until she’d worn herself out. Her arms drooped. “Let me go, Virgil,” she said tiredly. She hung from a handrail after he’d released her. “Medaris, do you think you could answer one question without lying?”

  Jack nodded.

  “Why”—she licked her lips, tried to hold her anger in check—”Why are we going to the moon?”

  “Because there’s something there that. . . I need.”

  Penny shook her head, pushed away, and disappeared into the middeck. Jack felt the urge to go after her, to explain everything, but he couldn’t. She was not part of the equation, never had been. This was something he had to do; he had always known it would come to this. He turned back to the cockpit windows, looked out. Columbia ’s nose lay precisely on her star. And the world receded behind.

  MONTANA (1)

  The Perlman Plant Site, Missile Complex 22 (deactivated), United States Air Force 305th Strategic Wing (decommissioned), Montana

  Deep below the Montana central prairie Perlman wandered the silent halls and laboratories of his magnificent accomplishment. His walking was hindered by his need for a cane, the result of an artificial hip implanted two years before when he had fallen from a scaffold working on the project. Perlman had a tiny efficiency built for himself just off from his lab so he didn’t have to travel far. After his morning coffee and a light breakfast of a toasted bagel, he left it to see his plant once more, to remind himself that it still existed, that it might yet come alive.

  Missile Complex 22 had been the old official designation of the installation: a Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile site that had once held three nuclear-tipped rockets capable of reaching out to a range of 6,000 miles. With the stand-down after the end of the Cold War, this site and the others of the ICBM Wing that controlled it had been emptied of its missiles, the holes left in the ground offered up as surplus. The Montana state government had purchased this one and Perlman had leased it for his effort.

  Perlman used a key card to enter a blast door. Stepping through, he entered a short tunnel, low enough that he had to lean against his cane, one step at a time, careful not to bump his head. On the other side a steel gangplank led to an oval-shaped cavern that had once housed the Minuteman III launch control center. The Egg, as its crew had called it, had been empty for over a decade. Another key card was required for the next blast door and he used it, the massive structure swinging easily on its well-oiled hinges to reveal a huge room. In it was Perlman’s baby, the world’s first working fusion reactor, capable alone of providing all the power needed by Montana, Idaho, and Utah. But there was an If. A big If. If it had the fuel it needed.

  Most Americans had never heard of fusion energy. But it was, Perlman believed, actually their only hope for the future. Hydrocarbon fuel was going to be exhausted within a few decades. Geothermal, solar, and wind energy would never be able to take up the slack. Nuclear energy wa
s too difficult to keep safe. Chernoble, Three Mile Island, and Sorkiyov had proved that. The world, in fact, was heading toward slow-motion disaster. Perlman believed that the governments of the world, especially the United States government, had known about the impending crisis for some decades but had suppressed it politically for short-term political gain. Why distress the people when everything seemed to be going so well? Why not let the next administration worry about it? And then the next?

  The World Energy Treaty had been the answer everyone around the world seemed to grab as the solution. The treaty couldn’t put a drop of oil back in the ground, nor provide a kilowatt of energy, yet it was supposed to solve the world’s energy problems. All it was going to do was set up a bureaucracy that would ration energy as it started to become more scarce. WET was a coming disaster.

  Perlman shook his shaggy head in exasperation as he limped down the hall. Here was the solution. Physics and chemistry, that’s all it was. Quite simple, really. Fusion was the energy released when hydrogen atoms—or some isotope of this simplest of all elements—combined to form helium. More energy is required to hold two hydrogen atoms together than one helium atom. Push the two hydrogen atoms together, create helium, and energy is released. Simple. But sometimes, simplicity was difficult to create.

  For decades scientists the world over had tried to make fusion work. It was the heavier isotopes of hydrogen that had shown the most promise for controlled fusion reactions. All that was required was to heat them up to approximately three times the temperature of the core of the sun—about a hundred million degrees—contain them in a plasma state, and extract all the resulting energy. But a workable plant always seemed another decade away. It was as if all of the scientists in the fusion community were like Prometheus trying and failing to steal fire from the gods. Perlman looked around his creation with much satisfaction. Here, they had done it, he and his scientists and engineers had stolen the fire.