Back to the Moon

by Homer Hickam

  “Oh, God, Jack,” she said, despairingly.

  “Let me sleep, okay?”

  She relented. “Okay, Jack.”

  Jack found it difficult to sit in the EMU suit, so he simply sprawled on his back in the shadow of the boulder. He looked up at a black sky strewn with stars and planets. What a fantastic place for an observatory the moon would be! The Hubble Space Telescope whizzed around the earth at five miles a second trying to focus on constantly moving targets while being knocked around by its own solar panels swiveling desperately to aim at the sun. Why hadn’t NASA simply lofted a telescope to the moon? It was almost as if the agency had been afraid to go back to the site of its greatest triumph.

  Jack wiped NASA politics from his mind, tried to get comfortable. He was so tired, he thought he would drop off immediately, but instead his mind kept turning. The suit’s aluminum neckring hurt, and anyway, he had always disliked the moments just before sleep. It seemed a form of giving up and he hated to give up on anything. For some reason he thought of the Sinai Desert, where once he and Kate had dived the crystal waters and rainbow reefs of the Red Sea, and explored the dry wadis and mountains of the surrounding desert. Now that he thought about it, those old brown hills and dry creek beds had looked a hell of a lot like the moon.

  Go to sleep, Jack! he ordered himself.

  His mind puttered on, then finally gave in to his fatigue. He had a final, fleeting thought: Don’t call me. Old not-quite-dead Jack will call you.

  MET 9 DAYS AND COUNTING . . .

  HIGH EAGLE’S DECISION (3)

  Taurus-Littrow

  Jack lay on the moon and overhead there was nothing but stars....

  Kate was with him on a night dive, their two flashlights cutting the darkness, sweeping across the great reefs that lined the deep chasm of the Red Sea between the Sinai and Saudi Arabia. Creatures wandered in and out of the lights—great, sleek sharks, pulsating sea hares and nudibranchs, schools of darting squids, brooding lionfish. Phosphorescent fishes near the surface flitted about like underwater fireflies. Jack ascended with her. When they broke the surface, Kate’s delighted laughter made him laugh too. “I love you, Jack,” she called. “Thank you for bringing me here.”

  Her voice receded. Jack couldn’t find her. “Kate!” Panicked, he turned in the water. “Kate!” He plunged underneath the surface, saw her far, far below. He kicked harder, heading down into the endless blue. He had to catch her, had to or she would die....

  Jack jerked awake. No fish swarmed over his head, only millions of stars, so many it was as if a dam filled with glitter had collapsed and flooded over the black sky. Stiff and sore, he groaned as he rolled over on his side. He reached back to rub his neck. When his gloved hand struck the back of his helmet, he remembered where he was and that this was the day he was going to die.

  He rocked his head back and forth, scrunching up his shoulders, trying to work some blood back into his neck and upper body. Then he looked at his watch. “Dammit!” He had wasted four hours on sleep, hours that were counting down to zero for him forever. He struggled upright, moving his arms and legs, trying to work out the kinks. He gave Houston a call, just to let them know he was awake.

  “Jack, good morning!” Molly Peterson, an astronaut, identified herself. In the background Jack heard the sounds of excitement in the Mission Control. “Great news! We’ve made progress on your rescue!”

  Peterson’s chipper tone reinforced Jack’s dark mood. “I don’t need rescue, I need coffee,” he growled. He hoped there was some in the food pack he’d stowed on the Rover. He crunched out of the shadow of the boulder and pulled down his helmet sunshade. He looked out across a bouldered plain. If there had been a moon crow flying in a line from where he stood, the fictitious bird would have taken a straight shot across that plain for a distance of about four kilometers. In the interest of time that was the way to go, but it would mean crossing new ground. He eyed a possible path.

  Peterson was doing her best to ladle good cheer. “Do you want to hear our plan, Jack?”

  “No.”

  “Okay,” she chirped, “we’ll get back to you.”

  “How’s Columbia ?” Jack asked irritably, but trying not to growl.

  “Super!”

  He’d always hated trite astronaut chitchat. “Listen, Houston. Concentrate on Columbia. Get ’em home!”

  “We copy!” Peterson practically bubbled.

  Jack grumbled and clumped to the Rover, changed his air pack and scrubber, drank water when, despite a desperate search, he failed to find any coffee in his pack, took a satisfying leak, and jumped on board his trusty steed. The sleep had been too long by half but it had at least left him refreshed. He scrutinized his maps, made his decision on the route, and headed south by southwest.

  Columbia

  “Sam, that’s the way it’s going to be!” Penny stated flatly.

  “Penny, I can’t let you do it,” Sam declared just as flatly. “I’m giving you a direct order. Elsie-2 will go down unmanned.”

  Penny was at the airlock hatch, already in her coolant underwear and cloth communications helmet. “In case you haven’t noticed, Sam,” she said, “we aren’t exactly very good at following orders up here. Now, listen to me. Jack’s getting low on air and there’s no guarantee he’ll be able to reach the supplies in the Elsie-2. Someone might be needed to carry them to him. I also know how everything is supposed to go together. I have to go down.”

  Penny was angry and determined. She was going after her man and nobody, not Virgil or Tate or every fudpucker engineer in NASA, was going to stop her. They either needed to help or get out of her way. She climbed inside the airlock, started getting into her suit. Since there was only one MEC-designed coverlet for the EMU suit, and Jack was wearing it, Virgil had fashioned something made out of a parachute shroud to protect her suit joints from dust. He’d used duct tape to wrap the pieces around the suit and the result looked as homemade as it was. “I must look like the first hobo in space,” Penny complained.

  “You look fine,” Virgil said encouragingly, watching her through the airlock porthole.

  “Penny, don’t do this,” she heard Tate in her earpiece. “An unmanned Elsie-2 will give Jack a chance and you’ll still be safe. That’s the way he’d want it.”

  “I’m going,” Penny snapped. “Just get that through your head. Drop out if you can’t take it.”

  There was a moment of silence. “Nobody down here is going to drop out,” Tate said.

  “Fine,” Penny said sharply.

  “Give ’em hell, Penny,” Virgil said, grinning at her through the porthole. He’d done his share of arguing with Penny about her decision, too, but had ultimately seen the wisdom of it. He’d then argued that he should be the one to go but Penny wasn’t having any of it. It was her idea and she was going to do it.

  Penny finished her prebreathe, depressurized the airlock, and crawled through the hatch. Columbia was turned tail-forward to her orbital flight vector, her cargo bay turned down toward the moon. The RMS arm was stowed and everything else battened down except the tether apparatus and the Elsie-2. The spare moon lander was attached to the ATESS tether spool by a cable made out of the EVA guide wire that ran along Columbia ’s starboard sill. The Italian builders of the ATESS in the Huntsville POCC had done their calculations and determined that the tether could take the load.

  Penny worked her way up the ATESS boom and into the Elsie-2. Being a spare, the sphere had none of the controls in the Elsie Jack had flown down. Virgil had done the best he could to prepare it for its mission, stowing inside everything that Houston had ordered including the cabling and connections he had worked on for hours, mostly cobbled together from middeck experiments. It had all been packed away along with additional oxygen tanks taken from Columbia ’s own air-system spares. The airlock primary oxygen system valve had been disconnected and attached to one of the tanks to allow replenishment of Penny’s backpack supply. All of the equipment was secured tightly wit
h heavy straps already inside the dome. It had been a quick engineering job, but a thorough one.

  Virgil had also strung a web of straps for Penny. She zipped up the airlock tunnel and pressurized the dome. The internal pressure gauge indicated no leaks. She clipped herself into the straps and stabilized her feet into the footloops. “Ready,” she said.

  Tate came back on-line. His voice was resigned but deliberate. “Penny, we’re about thirty minutes away from release. We’re going through both the ATESS and the OMS prefiring checklist now.”

  “Roger,” Penny replied stolidly.

  Houston had determined that the shuttle’s standard OMS rocket engines would be used for the maneuver, the Big Dog engine in her tail held in reserve. Mission Control knew all there was to know about the OMS propulsion system but Big Dog was not trusted. Virgil had told Penny that he thought this was a mistake, that a “Not Invented Here” syndrome was affecting the NASA troops because they didn’t know anything about the Big Dog. A message on the SAREX told them that the MEC people had fed their calculations to Columbia, were standing by with Big Dog just in case the OMS crapped out. Sally Littleton also said their eighteen-wheeler was headed for Huntsville, flank speed. MEC Control had been offered a back room in the POCC.

  Penny trusted Virgil to sort everything out with Houston. She had other things to worry about. “What will be the command for me to pull the handle?” she asked Tate, referring to the loop of cable over her head that Virgil had attached through a port in the top of the dome (the port meant for a UHF antenna). The cable led to three cables attached where the landing spheres would have gone. By pulling the loop, Virgil’s design would cause the pins to come out at the attachment points and the cables would be released.

  “We’ll say it three times,” Tate explained. “Release, release, release. Got it?”

  “Got it,” Penny muttered, eyeing the loop. She could only hope the untested mechanism would work. If it didn’t work, or worked poorly, Penny knew she could be flung into an unrecoverable orbit, or to the lunar surface miles away from the target. That worried but in no way deterred her. She had her expedition hat more firmly on than ever.

  A half hour passed like an eye blink. “Thirty seconds, Penny,” Tate said.

  “I’m here,” she replied, pushing her feet into her footloops as far as they would go. “Ready to rocket and roll!”

  Tate came back. His voice was calm, assured. “After you’re down, Penny, your suit comm won’t be powerful enough by itself to talk to us or Columbia. You’ll need line of sight with the antenna on board Jack’s Elsie to get back in touch. So get out and get oriented as quickly as you can.”

  “Roger, Sam. Understood.” Penny looked through one of the port windows, saw Virgil standing at the shuttle aft flight deck view ports. It was his job to control ATESS. She could hear the background chatter coming out of Huntsville to Virgil. The Italian science leader, Dr. Emilio Broglio, was enabled for voice air-to-ground communications. “We are with you, Mr. Judd,” Penny heard him announce as tether deployment began.

  Penny couldn’t feel it but saw Columbia move away through the ring of portholes in the Elsie-2. Her job at this point, besides pulling the release ring at the right time, was just to hang on.

  THE DROP SCENARIO

  Columbia

  Virgil watched the tether smoothly unreel until Penny’s dome disappeared into the texture of the moon. He was going by feel, watching the tether length on the ATESS screen, keeping an eye on the numbers from the satellite as it automatically used its cold gas thrusters to keep the line taut.

  The ATESS tether was eighteen miles long. Columbia was in a nine-mile-high orbit, skimming along at nearly 3,700 miles per hour. Virgil was going to let the tether out eight and a half miles. Then, after Columbia slowed, and after a scan by Starbuck to determine the Elsie-2’s position over the lunar surface, Virgil would let the tether out a bit more and Penny would pull the pin and drop away. The Elsie-2 would hit the lunar surface at under a hundred miles per hour, the Elsie-2’s braced aluminum lattice absorbing the impact. It would be a rough landing, but survivable.

  At least that was the scenario advanced by Houston.

  The first trick, Virgil knew, was to slow Columbia ’s huge mass enough to allow a decent chance for the dome’s survival but not so slow that Columbia herself would crash. Everything had to be balanced: the inertia lost by Columbia when the OMS put on her brakes; the dynamics of a nine-mile tether; and the boost in velocity the shuttle would need to get back up to orbital speed before it crashed. Tate had reported those calculations had taken the Cray in Houston more than several minutes to compute. It was going to be a near thing but it was, in NASA parlance, doable.

  Doable. Virgil shook his head. He guessed it was doable for pigs to sprout wings and fly around the barnyard too. Probable, that was the question....

  SMC

  Sam realized he was happy in his job for the first time in years. He had a free hand. The atmosphere in his Shuttle Mission Control reflected his electric mood, his controllers eagerly at their consoles. Huntsville had the show to control the tether, but Houston would control the orbital maneuvering system, the OMS, Columbia ’s internal rocket engines. Tate got on the line with Starbuck at Farside Control. The word there was go, all the way. Starbuck reported he had a good view of both the ATESS satellite on the end of the tether and the lunar terrain underneath. He had plugged into the signal from Columbia ’s Ku-band radar and between his own Farside data and Columbia ’s, he could calculate the fluctuating distances to within at least a hundred feet.

  A cheer went up from Tate’s Turds when a picture appeared on their monitors, courtesy of Farside. There’d been no time to write a good virtual image program but Starbuck was giving Houston a fair representation. On the screen was a circle (Penny’s dome) attached to a vertical line (the tether). A horizontal line beneath the circle represented the moon’s surface. As Sam watched, the vertical line grew longer, the circle moving closer to the horizontal line. The horizontal line rose and fell as the terrain Columbia was passing over varied. In the upper right corner a six-digit number representing the meters between the dome and the lunar surface changed every half second. Sam thought Starbuck’s work was crude but effective, amazing really considering the short time he’d had to develop the code. The truth was, Sam didn’t see how Houston would’ve had a ghost of a chance of rescuing Medaris without Starbuck. But there he was, a miracle. He said a silent prayer that the miracles would keep coming.

  There were two numbers Starbuck was providing that Tate’s controllers were looking for: fifty meters for the release altitude, and two hundred for the velocity in miles per hour.

  “Sam, we’re not going to make it,” the POD in Huntsville announced. “Dr. Broglio and Virgil are having trouble unreeling the tether. They’ve had to slow down the rate.”

  Sam grimaced. This was going to mean another lunar go-around. He called Penny, explained it to her.

  “Okay, Sam,” Penny replied. “I’ll hang around.”

  Sam grinned at her joke. She was hanging, all right, from the shuttle toward the moon, on about six miles of pencil-thin tether.

  With the extra time required for another orbit Sam made a decision concerning the media. The networks and the cable news were screaming for access, so he opened up the internal NASA Select television system. People around the world began to camp out in front of their television sets just to watch the mission controllers in Houston and Huntsville at work. No live television was coming from the moon, but cartoonists and model makers hired by the networks were getting rich.

  Elsie-2

  Penny hung in her straps, teeth chattering. She was freezing. She had turned down the suit coolant system but it didn’t help.

  “How’s it going, Penny?” Sam asked.

  “I’m cold,” she admitted. “Anything from Jack?”

  “Nothing,” he answered. “We’ve been trying to raise him but no joy. I think he must have turned us off.
Would he do that?”

  “Yes. He can get arbitrary.” Penny swore to herself. Jack Medaris, I’d like to wring your neck!

  MONTANA (4)

  The Perlman Plant

  Perlman looked at the surveillance monitor with satisfaction. The crater that had been blasted in an attempt to open up the sand tunnel entry had turned into a huge, muddy pond from the water he and Charlie had pumped up into the ground beneath it. The men in black fatigues stood around the crater, pondering it. One of them jumped back when the edge started to crumble beneath him, and Perlman laughed. “You son of a bitch!” he said. “Serves you right!”

  Charlie padded in behind him. “Doc, they’re up to something again. I heard drilling topside and looks like they punched through. Ain’t a big hole—it’d take a year of drilling to make one big enough for a man—but looks like they’re threading something through it. You better come see.”

  Perlman swiveled around, grabbed his cane, and followed Charlie through the blast door, out into the concrete corridor. He looked nervously overhead. There was a lot of water sitting above them. Charlie saw his look. “Don’t worry, Doc. This tunnel will hold the weight. It was built for compression in case of a direct atom bomb hit.”

  “If you say so, Charlie,” Perlman muttered, hurrying as fast as his hip would allow.

  They stopped at the end of the corridor, next to the elevator shaft. Charlie pointed to the floor in front of the door of the elevator. A spiral of steel lay there, apparently having fallen from a drilled hole far above. A scraping noise attracted Perlman’s attention. He looked up at the elevator support structure and spotted a dangling wire, a black object attached to it, coming down at them. “I think we’d better get back to the plant, Charlie,” he said nervously.

  Charlie was studying the object. “Too small to do much if it’s an explosive, Doc. Ah, I can see it now. It’s a speaker, I think.”

  Perlman was glad Charlie had such good eyes because he still couldn’t make out the object. A screech of feedback coming from it, however, convinced him Charlie was right. “Propaganda time, I think, Charlie. Warnings and threats.”