Back to the Moon-ARC

by Travis S. Taylor; Les Johnson

  “Holy cow!” Chow exclaimed. “Look at the dirt we’re kicking up. I don’t see Harmony.” The engines were now kicking up an ever-increasing amount of dust as the ship drew nearer and nearer to the surface. Some of the debris was undoubtedly being blown far enough to impact the walls of the Harmony only three hundred meters away.

  With a thump, the Altair reached the surface and the engines shut off. The lights illuminated the area around the lander, and, over the next couple of minutes, most of the airborne dust and debris kicked up during descent settled to the surface. The Altair was on the Moon, and neither Chow nor Stetson said a word for at least thirty seconds.

  “We’re here.” Chow exhaled and relaxed just a little.

  “Right. Touchdown,” Stetson replied. “We don’t have much time. Let’s go through checkout, and I’ll get ready to get out of here and over to the Harmony—if we’re in the right place. I never did see the ship as we were coming in.”

  “Houston, this is Mercy I. We’re on the Moon.” Stetson knew that history was being made, and he was being very careful in his choice of words. “We don’t yet see Harmony, but I am preparing an EVA to find them.”

  “Mercy I, this is mission control. Good luck. You’ve got some very happy people back home who want to see you and your passengers get back home safe and sound.”

  “Roger that.” Stetson reached forward and turned off the microphone. “Now that the perfunctory remarks are concluded, let’s run through the checklist and make sure we don’t screw anything up that will keep us from going home. See if you can contact Harmony on the radio again.”

  Chow adjusted some settings on the ship’s transmitter and spoke into it. “This is Mercy I. Captain Hui, are you there? Can you hear me? Please respond.”

  The speaker remained silent. Chow repeated the message while gazing out the window at the lunar landscape. After another thirty seconds, he repeated it again.

  “Bill, if they’re still with us, then they’re not able to respond for some reason. Their batteries and fuel cells must be totally out of power.”

  “I was afraid of that. According to what we saw when we flew over, we should be only about a thousand feet from them. Their ship should be just over there. Right?” Stetson said while pointing out the window toward an outcropping of rocks about one hundred and fifty feet away. “I guess I’ll just have to go out there and find them.”

  For the next thirty minutes, Chow helped Bill Stetson check out his spacesuit. As during Apollo, spacesuits were custom designed to fit each astronaut. Each connection had to be secure and airtight; there was no room for error in the unforgiving lunar environment.

  “Okay. I think I’m ready to go.” Bill tapped a gloved hand against his sun shield, pushing it up and locking it out of the way. He certainly wouldn’t be needing it. “Any issues with the airlock?” Unlike the Orion, from which the in-flight EVA had to commence, the living space in the Altair lander did not have to vent to vacuum for each EVA. Instead, the lander was equipped with an airlock.

  “It’s clear. Nothing but green lights on the panel.”

  With that, Stetson finished making the last suit connection and walked over to the airlock’s inner door. It was barely large enough for him to enter fully encumbered, but he managed. Once inside, he closed the inner door and began preparations for opening the outer door—into the vacuum of space that was the Moon’s natural environment.

  “Alright,” Stetson said as the door opened. “Tony, I’m on my way. While I’m gone, go ahead and start piling up the stuff we’re throwing overboard. Just don’t put any in the airlock yet. We may need to get our guests into the lander quickly, and I don’t want any crap in the way. After we cycle them in, we can off-load. We’ll assess their conditions, and then we’ll do the mods to the skin of the ship.”

  “Sure thing. Good luck.”

  “Thanks.”

  With that, Stetson stepped out of the airlock. He had been totally ready for the outer door to open, but when it had, he reacted with a startle reflex. He carefully walked over to the door and peered out. But stepping out, on the other hand, was a whole different thing. As eager as was to step on the Moon, he felt a sense of hesitation, like looking down at a swimming pool below from the high dive and swallowing the butterflies in order to just dive in.

  “Damn. What were those stupid-ass engineers at NASA thinking when they put the crew compartment on top of this monster?” Stetson said, forgetting that the live microphone was recording his words for posterity.

  He was reminded by the voice of mission control. “Bill, is there a problem?”

  Realizing what he’d just said into an open microphone, including the “damn” part, he replied, “No, there’s no problem. Sorry about the chatter. I’m just looking out the door and down at the ground—the view surprised me is all.”

  But that was not what Bill Stetson was thinking. He was standing on the exit platform in front of the airlock and looking twenty feet straight down to the ground. I told those jackasses that putting the crew compartment on top was a stupid idea, and they wouldn’t listen. Falling twenty feet to the ground on Earth could kill you instantly. Falling twenty feet to the ground on the Moon in one-sixth of Earth’s gravity would break bones, and, since you’re three days from a hospital, it could still kill you. Dead would be dead. Stupid jackasses.

  Stetson moved across the platform to the elevator that would take him down to the surface. To call it an elevator was actually an undeserved flattery. It was more of a moving cage that would take astronauts from the crew compartment to the ground and back again. Though there was a ladder, the lander designers had realized the risks of a clumsy astronaut wearing a spacesuit attempting to use one on the Moon.

  Stetson entered the elevator, closed the gate, and pushed the down button. With a clank, the elevator began to move slowly downward. After a painfully slow few minutes, which to Stetson seemed like an hour, he reached the surface.

  A few minutes later, Bill Stetson became the first American to walk on the Moon since Gene Cernan. He tried not to think about the external cameras on the Altair recording his every move. He didn’t make any pithy comments for posterity, nor did he think he needed to say anything. He was focused on his rescue mission.

  He headed toward the boulders and, hopefully, the crew of the Harmony.

  The boulders were farther away than they appeared. Without the usual reference points of houses, trees, or even clouds, it was very difficult to determine how far away an object on the Moon really was. The fact that it was nighttime further complicated gauging the distance.

  Now acutely aware that he was potentially speaking to about six billion people listening back on Earth, he said, “It’s not as dark as I thought it would be. The sun is not visible, and the Earth is only about one-tenth visible on the horizon here at the limb. But the reflected light from the Earth is more than enough for me to see. It’s sort of like taking a midnight walk under a full Moon. It’s tranquil. It’s serene. It…it’s beautiful.”

  Stetson had been walking for ten minutes, and he couldn’t discern that he was any closer to the boulders than when he first left the Altair. He trudged on, alternating skipping and walking, depending upon how the mood struck him. Skipping along wearing a two-hundred-pound backpack was relatively easy on the Moon, where it weighed only thirty-three pounds. He managed to cover more ground that way to boot.

  Approximately thirty minutes after leaving the lander, Stetson reached the outcropping of rocks on its left side. Now walking much more slowly due to the increased number of loose rocks near the base of the outcropping, Stetson moved around the boulders. As he made his way around, he saw the Harmony.

  Clearly a copy of the Altair design, the lander was also, clearly, severely damaged. Instead of sitting proudly on the lunar surface as was the Altair, this lander looked like a silver wounded animal trying to get back on its feet while dragging a broken leg behind it. The front leg of the Harmony was crumpled; the remaining three leg
s were bent at impossible angles. What was once a hopeful symbol of China’s emergence as a world power was instead a mangled mess on the lunar plain. Stetson was humbled, momentarily imagining that it was he and his crew similarly trapped so far from home.

  “Tony, I see the lander. It is totally dark, and there is no external sign of life. I’m going forward. They’re bound to be in the crew compartment. Camera working okay?”

  Stetson tapped his helmet near where the camera was installed. The camera was broadcasting and recording everything he saw.

  “Camera working fine. What a mess. Be careful.” Chow kept his reply brief.

  Stetson began walking toward the lander, and, as he got closer, he could see where the Chinese had run a hose from the ascent engine’s propellant tanks to what appeared to be a small rocket test stand, complete with an improvised rocket engine, pointing straight toward the lower left wall of the crew compartment. The connections to the fuel tanks were crude and, from all appearances, leaky. Whoever had made the connection had found a way to puncture the tanks and insert what looked like aluminum air hoses into the openings. The hoses looked to be in pretty good shape as they snaked across the ground and connected to the bent metal of the improvised “engine.” He couldn’t tell from what the engine was made, but since it was so obviously charred, it couldn’t have been aluminum. Aluminum would have melted during the resulting combustion.

  The scorched sides of the compartment’s outer wall were clearly visible just in front of the improvised engine’s exhaust nozzle. Stetson immediately realized what they had done.

  “Brilliant,” he said. “Tony, do you see this?”

  “Bill, I see something, but I can’t tell what it is.”

  “It’s a Bunsen burner. They built themselves a furnace to keep warm. A furnace! If their ship is like ours, and it clearly is, then they may not have had power, but they sure had fuel. The fuel they would have used to get back into space. Do you get it?”

  “Um, no. I don’t.”

  “Doctors,” Bill muttered under his breath.

  Not wasting any time, Stetson explained as he continued to navigate around the crashed lander, trying to find a way to get inside. “Like us, they used hypergolic fuel in their ascent stage because it has to be simple. Cryogenic fuel has to be kept cold, and it still boils off. They kept their system simple, and, from the looks of it, they used the same thing we do—N2O4. Mix it with hydrazine and, poof, it lights. Simple. Only instead of using the fuel to get off the Moon, they kludged it to make a Bunsen burner to keep warm. The flame was aimed at one wall of the crew compartment, and I bet I’ll find them all huddled around that one wall. The flame is out now. And I can’t tell from looking at it for how long. If it had been us, the flame might have burned right through the thin skin of the lander.”

  Stetson trudged forward and used his suit’s built-in lamps to see the boot prints in the lunar dust leading around the lander to just the other side of the crumpled landing leg. Whoever made the burner had walked this way.

  “Aha,” Stetson blurted out without thinking first. “I see MacGyver’s boot prints leading back toward the crew cabin. And that’s where I’m going now. I want to meet this guy.”

  Carefully avoiding the many shards of broken metal sticking out from the damaged legs, Stetson made slow but steady progress toward the door of the cabin. Moving to his left to avoid a rather large piece of metal, Stetson momentarily lost his balance. Had he been on Earth in his ungainly suit he would have surely fallen. As it was, he merely tipped to the side and then eased himself back into an upright posture. As he did so, he bumped into a strut that was, fortunately, not sharp.

  “Careful, Bill,” Chow spoke. “Those metal shards you are walking through look sharp enough to cut your suit. Is there another path?”

  “Maybe, but there’s no time. I’m being careful. I have no intention of venting to vacuum when I’m this close.” Stetson’s reply sounded confident, but his mental comment was not. Please, God, don’t let me trip and cut my leg off.…

  Inside the Harmony, as the crew huddled together looking at their suits’ power indicators drop mercilessly toward the red, they felt the thump of Stetson’s benign contact with the frame of the lander. It wasn’t much, but in a place where no wind has ever blown, it was the first movement other than their own since the crash. The large outcropping of boulders had effectively shielded them from the dust and debris kicked up by the Altair as it landed, and, since there was no atmosphere to carry sound, the noise of a rocket engine descending to the surface only a few hundred feet away was absent.

  “Did you feel that?” asked Dr. Xu. His voice was muffled due to the fact that their visors were closed to retain heat within the suits and their suit radios were off to conserve power.

  “Yes. Yes, I did. The lander is either settling or the Americans are here,” replied Hui Tian, her voice also muffled, as she rose and moved toward the door. The crew compartment was crowded and now very cold. Though her suit temperature was at the bare minimum required to keep her alive and not hypothermic, she was no longer aware of how cold she felt. Instead, she was focused on finding out what had bumped the lander and at containing her excitement at the thought that help had arrived.

  She neared the cabin window and peered outside into the near-darkness. At first she couldn’t see anything, and then she saw motion—and an American astronaut carefully climbing over the remains of the lander legs toward the cabin door. She turned quickly to face her crewmates.

  “They are here! The Americans are here!”

  She moved to the cabin door and abruptly stopped. She stood motionless, staring at the metal door that separated her crew from the American astronaut.

  “There’s no power. We cannot open the door without power.”

  “Ha.” Engineer Zhi grunted. “Of course we can. Just use the manual override. We trained for that a million times. Are you not thinking clearly?”

  “Who is not thinking clearly?” Hui responded. “Zhi, did being in your spacesuit for so long make you forget that the cabin is pressurized? We’ve got close to one atmosphere of air in here pushing on the door. And there is no pressure on the other side. When we EVA, we have to vent the cabin first, and that requires power. The door opens inward. Without venting the air, the pressure is enough to keep the door from opening even if I use the manual override.” Unlike the American lander, the Chinese did not have an airlock. When they exited for a surface EVA, the entire lander, like the Orion, vented to vacuum. The Chinese designers had not foreseen the need to design the door to open to vacuum when the cabin was still fully pressurized.

  “Of course,” Zhi chortled. “So, our American saviors arrive, and we cannot even go out and meet them with dignity.” He lowered his head and appeared to stare at the floor in front of him.

  “Let’s get this door open.” Dr. Xu gently moved the injured pilot to a resting position leaning against an instrument rack and rose to join his commander at the cabin door. “I am certain we can find a way.”

  Hui removed the latch from the door handle and grasped it in her right glove. Xu moved close to her, grabbed the handle next to where she had placed her hands, and began to pull.

  Nothing happened. The door remained stuck.

  “It is basic physics,” Zhi said. “Atmospheric pressure is a little more than fourteen pounds per square inch. The door is about two thousand square inches. That means the total force pushing on the door is about thirty thousand pounds. Do you think the two of you can move thirty thousand pounds all by yourselves?”

  Hui and Dr. Xu responded by trying again to move the door. Again, nothing happened.

  “Enough.” Hui and Dr. Xu turned to face Zhi. Clearly frustrated, Hui spoke, “Zhi, do you have any ideas? What can we do to open the door?”

  “Hmm.” Zhi looked up at his commander. His response bordered on insubordination. “Captain Hui, if I knew, I am not sure I would tell you. Who will recall what we did to get home when it will be the triu
mphant American heroes who get the credit? It is better to die than to let them have the glory that should have been ours.”

  “I do not understand you, Zhi. You are the one who figured out how to keep the ship warm using the rocket fuel. You are the one who kept the fuel cells working far longer than they should have. You are the one who will get much of the credit for keeping this crew alive long enough for the Americans to give us a ride home. You are a hero of China! Do you not see that? Are you giving up? Why? You’ve done so much already!”

  “Because it was pointless. It would have been better if we had died in the crash. This was supposed to be our day. China’s day.” He averted his gaze from Hui back to the cabin floor and said nothing more.

  It was at that moment that they heard a banging sound come from the other side of the door. It sounded like whoever was on the other side had picked up a piece of metal and was using it to signal them.

  Dr. Xu responded by banging his glove on the door.

  “Without air, he won’t hear that.” Hui was frustrated with their predicament as well. She wanted to go home. “But he might feel it.”

  “Or he might not,” Zhi added.

  “We’ve got to let him know we are here and what our problem is. I’ll turn on my radio.” She raised her hand and turned on the power to the transmitter within her spacesuit.

  “Hello? Can you hear me? This is Captain Hui of the Harmony. Can you hear me? Please respond if you can hear me!”

  The banging on the other side of the door continued.

  Standing on the other side of the door, Bill Stetson couldn’t tell if there was anyone alive or dead within the ship. The door was closed, and the ship was completely dark. He couldn’t get to the window to look in due to the fact that he was now a good fifteen feet off the ground, standing in what looked like the remains of a construction site after an earthquake, and if he were to try and reach the window, he would almost certainly fall to his death by being skewered on one of the many sharp edges of mangled metal that used to be the Harmony lunar lander.