Back to the Moon

by Homer Hickam

  A big cylinder on one side of the room necked down to a cone in its center and then expanded back to a larger cylinder that curved down into a square hole in the concrete floor. Farther on there was a huge turbine that spun an electric generator. A hundred feet above, a vent, hidden behind a small hillock, released the only residue of the reaction, pure water in the form of steam. There was no residual radioactivity. The only things produced were energy and water. It was the perfect power plant, the solution to cheap, safe energy.

  For years Perlman had tried to gain financial support for his radical idea to make fusion work. Finally, miraculously, he’d received support from an organization called the January Group. He’d brought twenty unemployed fusion scientists out of Russia and the United States and France and Italy to the desolate Montana prairie and, within three years, was prepared for a full-scale test. Perlman’s approach required a powerful laser and a particular fuel, an isotope known as helium-3. But with helium-3 there was bad news and good news. The bad news was that the isotope was rare, at least on earth. The good news was that it was abundant almost everywhere else in the solar system. In fact, Perlman had used the small amount of helium-3 that he’d gathered from Apollo moon rocks to test the concept. In the lab, at least, it had worked.

  Encouraged, the January Group gave him more money. Perlman built a full-scale fusion plant, used the isotope left from Apollo to test it. The plant worked—perfectly. To go into production all Perlman needed was more helium-3. The best place to get it was where he’d gotten his sample: the moon. But when he’d asked NASA for help, the space agency had, in effect, laughed at him. The Washington space weenie who’d answered his letters had said, in effect, that NASA was no longer in the business of going to the moon. “For we are but of yesterday, and know nothing, because our days upon earth are a shadow,” Perlman muttered, quoting Job, his favorite biblical prophet.

  He’d heard about Jack Medaris through a friend in the aerospace industry. Medaris was a man who loved a challenge, could be audacious. Now, it had come to all this. WET was going to be approved in a few days. After that, Perlman would have to scrap his plant. The only hope was Medaris and Perlman had no idea what was happening. There had been almost a complete press blackout on the events in space.

  Charlie Bowman, a mechanic, was the only other worker with Perlman at the site. He’d volunteered to keep Perlman company and pull maintenance on the plant. “Dr. Perlman,” Bowman greeted him warmly. “I replaced the thermocouples on the heat exchangers this morning on boiler number two. Probably didn’t need it but I didn’t trust them after they got so hot during the test. Just routine. Everything else is up to snuff.”

  “Thank you, Charlie. You all right?”

  Bowman, a big, friendly man with close-set eyes perched above a bulbous nose, put his thumbs under the straps of his big overalls and pulled on them. He grinned. “You know me, Doc. As long as I’ve got some machinery to tinker with, I’m happy as a bug in a rug.”

  “How happy would that be?” Perlman asked, amused.

  Charlie scratched his head, taking Perlman’s question seriously. “Well, I reckon a bug’d be warm inside a carpet, get plenty to eat, have things to do. Just like me. Not much left to want out of life.”

  Perlman smiled and nodded, pleased that he’d picked Charlie to stay with him. All the others, the physicists, chemists, machinists, and engineers, had long since gone home, disappointed, convinced that their work was not going to ever be properly appreciated. “I’m glad you’re with me, Charlie.”

  Charlie shrugged and went off, pulling a rag out of his hip pocket and disappearing into a maze of steam pipes. Perlman chuckled and then crossed the floor to a curtained cubicle. Inside, on a table, was a glass tube of what appeared to be an orange powder. He held it up to the light, admiring the translucent, glowing material within. It looked magical and it was. The powder—actually microscopic-sized glass spheres—had been brought back by the Apollo 17 crew, inside it was a host of volatiles, including a pure elixir of helium-3.

  The huge picture of the moon on the wall of Perlman’s office reminded him of when he’d shown Jack Medaris where the Apollo 17 crew had found the powder. Perlman had been surprised at Medaris’s reaction. The engineer, until then unsure about taking on Perlman’s quest, had suddenly gone pale. “Do you believe in fate, Dr. Perlman?” he asked. “Do you believe we all have a destiny? Until this moment I doubted mine.”

  In all the time he’d known him, Perlman had not asked Medaris what he’d meant by that. He wished now that he had.

  A telephone buzzed in the clean room but Perlman let it ring. The recorder would pick it up, pass the message along that the silo was locked up tight. As far as the outside world was concerned, nobody was home. Then the phone stopped abruptly in midring. Perlman picked up the phone. There was no dial tone. A movement on a television monitor beside the table startled Perlman. It was connected to a camera topside, beside the main entrance. Perlman saw two men dressed in what appeared to be black fatigues. They were investigating the entranceway at the primary elevator. They walked, out of sight of the camera, and then returned to the door. Perlman used the monitor’s joystick to direct the camera to zoom in on a shoulder patch on one of the men. It said PUCKETT SECURITY SERVICES. He remembered Jack’s warning the day before the launch, to look out for men wearing this patch. The camera continued to track them as they trudged off across the parking lot. They had come in a big jeeplike vehicle, a Humvee, Perlman thought it was called. The men drove the Humvee down the road, through the open gate of the silo perimeter fence.

  Perlman’s breath caught in his throat. He hadn’t counted on this. Perlman heard metal on metal somewhere deep in the maze of steam pipes. “Charlie?” he called. “Would you mind coming here? I think we may have a situation.”

  Houston, You Are the Problem

  Bonner couldn’t go home. The media had staked out his house. He couldn’t even go to the Rawhide, try to numb with Jack D his disappointment in Endeavour ’s failure. He was camping out in his office with firm orders to Public Affairs to say nothing, zero, nada. He had to think about what to do next. It was no mystery to him what had happened. Jack Medaris was heading for the moon. He didn’t have to wait for the tranjectory analysis to be done. “Medaris, you bastard,” Bonner seethed. There had to be a way to stop him.

  The phone rang. Bonner had expected a call from the vice president but was surprised that it was from Bernie Sykes. “Hold, please,” the White House operator said, “for your call from Baghdad.”

  Sykes came on-line. He was obviously agitated. “What a damn screwup, Frank! The president of Iraq tried to be nice about it but I could tell he was amused. “Perhaps my scientists can be of service?’ he asked the President. Can you imagine how that made us feel? I told the President I had the greatest confidence in you and now he’s getting laughed at by Third World dictators!”

  Bonner was out of his chair, pacing. “Bernie, Grant did her best.” He stopped. “I gave her the gas canister that came from the contractor you recommended. The word I got was that it exploded.”

  “Had to be a defect, Frank,” Sykes replied, softening his tone a bit. “You think I would want some kind of bloody disaster up there? Look, you got anything else up your sleeve?”

  Bonner hated to confess the truth. “Columbia went for escape velocity, Frank. They’re out of my reach until they come back.”

  “Escape. . . what do you mean?”

  “I mean they’re on their way to the moon.”

  The line was silent for a moment. “Listen, Frank, you need help. I’m going to get you some. I’m going to send you a consultant. A man who is used to playing big games in the shadows, if you know what I mean.”

  Bonner frowned, started his pacing again. “Are you talking about some kind of secret agent, Bernie? I don’t think I need that. I’m going to call a meeting, talk to my managers. We can still handle this. Wherever Columbia ’s going, the one certain thing is she’s going to com
e back. We just have to figure out where and grab her as she flies in.”

  “No. This has gotten too big now,” Sykes said grimly. “Cooperate with my consultant, okay? His name’s Puckett, Carl Puckett. One hell of a guy and knows a lot of things you don’t. Got it?”

  Bonner got it, all right. There’d been no more mention of the NASA administrator’s job, nothing but implicit criticism. Now he was going to get help from some kind of outside contractor! This is all Medaris’s fault. Every bit of it! The bastard always seemed to beat him.

  The phone rang again. When he answered, a gruff voice responded. “I’m Carl Puckett, Dr. Bonner. I’ll be at your office in an hour. You get me on the center?”

  Bonner thought about keeping the man off-site. He could do it, at least for a while. Then, suddenly, he felt completely drained, defeated. It was all over, he realized that now. His career was gone, NASA was in the toilet permanently. “Stop at the gate, get a pass, Mr. Puckett. Your name will be on the approved list.”

  “Thanks,” the man said, and hung up without another word.

  Bonner shook his head and then went to his wall of awards and trophies. There was a small framed photograph, almost lost among them: Kate and Bonner together. She was looking at him, smiling. He was grinning, on top of the world. He suddenly felt ashamed. He had lost Kate’s love and, over the years, he had lost or forgotten her dreams as well. He took the photograph off the wall and placed it facedown on his desk. Displaying it now seemed a betrayal of all that was, or could have been.

  THE HORSE THAT CAN’T BE RODE

  SMC

  Sam was at his console at the SMC. Lakey and the astronauts had left and Bonner hadn’t sent anybody to chase him out, so he decided to stay where he was. All was quiet, his controllers sitting in an exhausted trance in front of their consoles. Four hours into his twelve-hour shift he sat half-dozing in his chair, until the EECOM roused him from his stupor. “Sam, they’re doing something. Just got a spike here.”

  Sam blinked awake. “What’s happening?” He yawned.

  “I’m not certain. It was just a spike. All the systems numbers came up. I think it was Columbia. ”

  “I can confirm that, EECOM,” a voice in their headsets intoned. It was one of the faceless technicians in the back room who kept watch on shuttle subsystems around the clock. “It wasn’t Endeavour. She’s in LOS. Had to be Columbia.”

  The EECOM shrugged. “Just a blip, I guess.”

  “Naw, that ain’t it,” the voice said, revealing all of its Texas flatland twang. “I think they came up just long enough to plug in a GSC.”

  Sam rubbed his face. “A what?”

  “A general support computer. Probably a laptop. They plugged in their own little operating system is my guess. Took us plumb off-line, probably for good. Us ol’ boys might as well lock up and go home after Endeavour gets in. Columbia’s software looks to me like it’s bulletproof.”

  Sam understood. Medaris had cut Columbia off from any possible interference from Houston by putting a monitoring computer in place with all the bells and whistles of an internal Mission Control. Houston was no longer in Columbia ’s loop, could neither monitor her systems nor control them in any way. Guess I don’t blame him, Sam thought. All of a sudden retirement had never looked so good. There was a spacecraft on the way to the moon and its crew so distrusted Houston, it had deliberately cut them off. Sam shook his head. His controllers were all looking at him. They knew the score. He reluctantly keyed his transmitter. “When Endeavour lands,” he announced, “we’ll go to a skeleton staff here. I’ll be distributing a list of who stays and who goes. Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve performed magnificently, but sometimes you get on a horse that can’t be rode. Looks like we’ve found ours.”

  CECIL REMEMBERS

  The Marymount Hotel, Washington, D.C.

  Cecil sprawled on the bed passing the time studying federal statutes and thinking about the strange circumstances that had brought him to this moment. He also thought about the man who had orchestrated it. On a clear evening with stars and planets abundant in the sky, Cecil had walked with Jack along the beach at Cedar Key. Cecil remembered Jack pointing at the brightest sparkler and saying, “The whole solar system’s been a disappointment, Cecil. It started with that one, Venus.”

  “That’s like saying the ocean is a disappointment, Jack,” Cecil replied. “It is what it is, nothing more, and nothing less either.”

  Jack kept studying the sky as if he expected to see some kind of sign, something that would change what he believed. “Maybe we should have never looked it over,” he said quietly. “In a way it destroyed our dreams. When I was a boy all the books I read said that Venus might have rain forests and seas underneath all those clouds. I could imagine dinosaurs down there and fish-men and fish-women. What did it turn out to be, this sister of earth? We sent probes to Venus and found a planet with a surface hot enough to melt lead and sulfuric acid for rain. That acid ate up the dreams of a generation of kids, Cecil.”

  “There’s Mars, Jack. We’ll go there someday.”

  Jack stopped, pointed at a dim pink star. “There it is. Pretty, huh? But Mars is even worse. I remember being excited because the astronomers said that Mars had shadows that changed with the seasons. That just had to mean there was vegetation. And then there were the canals that the astronomers said they could see too. That meant maybe a great civilization. Then the space program showed us what was actually there. The vegetation proved to be dust storms, the canals just our imagination. Microbial life? Maybe, but otherwise not so much as a Mars mouse. You want to go out farther? Jupiter, Saturn—pretty but just big gas balls.”

  “Didn’t I hear that there might be life on Europa or Titan?” Cecil asked of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

  That night Jack would not be denied his skepticism. “Doubtful. No wonder we stopped trying to go out, just stuck ourselves into low earth orbit.”

  “You skipped the moon, Jack.” Cecil had laughed, trying to cajole the man into some good humor. “Want to say something nasty about the moon while you’re at it?”

  He wouldn’t be baited. “The moon,” he said, “is different. It’s more than what anybody thought it was. According to the Apollo astronauts, Cecil, it’s a beautiful place. Stark, perhaps, but a beauty much like the high deserts here on earth. And it’s covered with a magic dust.”

  It was the first time Jack had explained to Cecil about helium-3, the isotope that could burn in fusion reactors to keep earth humming for centuries. It might be useful for rocket engines, too, he’d said. But then Jack had said something else, something Cecil often thought about. “The moon has something of mine, Cecil, something I need.”

  “What, Jack?”

  Jack hadn’t replied, just kept looking up.

  Cecil rose from the bed and swept the curtain back from the window. Clouds covered the night sky. “I hope the moon doesn’t disappoint you, Jack,” he whispered, looking up into the darkness.

  There was a pounding on his door. Cecil answered and saw two dark suits from the FBI. “The AG wants to see you,” they growled, nearly in unison.

  Fifteen minutes later Cecil sat sweating in the AG’s office while she frowned at him from her desk. She had several sheets of paper and an envelope in front of her. She slid it across the desk. “Read it and weep, counselor.”

  Cecil read. It was a letter to the AG from the ex-wife of Colonel Craig “Hopalong” Cassidy. She had enclosed a letter from Cassidy to his son. In it he had written that he was going back into space and that “many people will think I’m wrong for doing it.” It also included much expression of Cassidy’s love and devotion for his son and his country. The envelope was marked To be opened only in case of my death. Cecil tried to keep a neutral look as he read but his mind was racing ahead. After he finished, he sat back. “Colonel Cassidy is clearly a great patriot.”

  The AG narrowed her eyes. “Maybe so, Cecil, but he’s also just jerked the rug out from under your clients.”


  Cecil cocked his head. “I beg your pardon?”

  “This letter clearly shows that Cassidy had the intent to commit a crime. He also mentions that others are in it with him. That would be your clients. Isn’t it obvious?”

  “No, ma’am. They are simply fulfilling the terms of their contract with DOT. As for this letter, Captain Cassidy just says that some people might think he’s wrong. It doesn’t say he plans on committing a crime.”

  The AG rubbed her face, tugged at her chin. “Cecil, maybe you’re right, maybe you’re wrong, and maybe it doesn’t matter.” She drew back Cassidy’s letter, looked at it, tapped it with her finger, clasped her hands together, leaned forward. “But I can tell you this. No way is President Edwards going to allow this to continue. For one thing, all those talking heads on TV have got the American people stirred up. They want blood and they want the President to get it for them. Your clients are dead meat if they don’t turn around and soon. If you have any way of communicating with them, let me strongly recommend you do so.”

  Cecil thought about continuing his argument but caught the determination in the AG’s eye. This was not the time for a debate. “Yes, ma’am,” he said although he knew there was nothing he could do, that Jack Medaris would never stop until he found whatever it was he was really looking for on the good, golden moon.

  OUTBOUND

  Up goes my boat among the stars

  Through many a breathless field of light,

  Through many a long blue field of ether,

  Leaving ten thousand stars beneath her;

  Up goes my little boat so bright!

  —William Wordsworth, ”Among the Stars”

  MET 4 DAYS AND COUNTING . . .

  VICTORY ROLL

  Columbia

  Jack had set Columbia free. He used a short puff of RCS to put her into a slow roll. He had studied the Apollo missions, knew the mission controllers called the maneuver the “barbecue mode,” because it was used to even out the heat of the sun. Jack preferred to think of it as a victory roll for Columbia all the way to the moon. He went to the aft flight deck to watch earth recede. Only a few hours out, the full disk of humanity’s planet had already shrunk to the size of one view port. His crewmates joined him.