Shanghaied to the Moon

by Michael J. Daley

  Just one dead end and he’s giving up? There are a dozen options we haven’t explored yet. Is he really just going to sit there and let us miss the Moon?

  “Val Thorsten never gives up!”

  “You’re a witness to history, kid. It’s over.”

  Men and women fought for the privilege of shipping out with Val Thorsten. But that’s not who I shipped out with. He hasn’t got the guts anymore.

  “Call for help.”

  “Huh?”

  “Use the radio! Call the Moon. Call Earth! Anybody!”

  “You don’t understand.” He takes a deep breath and presses his head hard into the cushions. His breath wheezes slowly out. “Nobody can reach us in time.”

  “Of course they can!” Just because he’s Val Thorsten doesn’t mean he isn’t crazy. “We’re just going to miss the Moon, not drop off the edge of the universe. Even if we drifted for a week—”

  “Don’t have a week. Twenty hours, max, we’ll be out of air.”

  “What?!”

  “There’s nothing wrong with the fuel cells, kid. That was just a story to keep you from panicking. It’s the oxygen. Most of it vented when we overheated leaving orbit. Discovered it when I had to switch tanks too early.”

  “You made me exercise!” I can’t breathe normally suddenly, even though there’s still plenty of air. The fear of running out is like the heavy pressure of liftoff, keeping my lungs from expanding.

  “You know what space travel is, kid? It’s like trying to skim a stone across a pond. Takes a good ship, a lot of skill, and luck to make it. We just ran out of all three.”

  “Stop talking like that!” My body says “breathe,” but my mind says “hold each breath tight.” My chest burns. “You should’ve turned back!”

  “Been an all-or-nothing mission from the first, kid. A final voyage to restore my good name. Not a bad way to go.”

  “I can’t die out here! I need those AstroNav lessons. I need answers.”

  “I’m sorry, kid. I meant to do you a favor … but losing your mother should’ve taught you. When you reach for the stars, you sometimes get burned.”

  “No. It taught me to be like you. You always pull it out.”

  He closes his eyes. He’s calm. He looks like a person in church, praying. He hasn’t given up, he’s choosing this end.

  “Maybe they’ll make a 3-Vid. Val Thorsten’s Final Voyage. Leave out the stink. Put us in one of those spiffy Comet Catchers. We’ll live, of course.”

  “We’ll live now!” I attack the controls like a fool, throwing switches, setting knobs, punching in parameters, hoping to make him so nervous he’ll help.

  His eyes stay closed. I’ll have to pull this out myself.

  More calmly, I really try to set a course for this tub. Bad as I am at AstroNav, I can still tell that it doesn’t look good.

  I notice a bank of knobs off to my left. The name-plate reads: MANEUVERING THRUSTER ALIGNMENT—MANUAL CONTROL SYSTEM.

  Manual. For people. It’s what the broken black box did automatically.

  “Hey! Hey!” I reach around the dangling NavComp and shake him hard. It takes forever for his eyes to open and focus on me. “We don’t need that stupid black box!”

  “Huh?”

  “We need a pilot! Look!” I point at the matching manual thruster controls on his side. His gaze kind of drifts that way, but he stays slouched in the seat. “Don’t you understand? The NavComp is giving good data! You can read the code and fire the thrusters manually.”

  He twists away so I’m looking at his back. He doesn’t want to hear my idea. He doesn’t want to get out of this.

  “You can fly this tub, can’t you?”

  “Stupid kid,” he mutters to the window. I strain to hear. “There are thirty thrusters on this thing. Damn PLV only had five. Barely handled that.”

  “I don’t care! You’re Val Thorsten. You’ve got to try!” Rage fuels my arm muscle. I punch him, the force lost in the heavy jacket. Quick as ever, he catches my wrist. Holds it in iron. My eyes tear, blurring his old face. “Please … be Val Thorsten. We need him.”

  I smear the tears away in time to see him glance at the manual controls. His gaze jumps away. Can’t blame him. The thruster controls cover a couple of feet of panel; thirty boxes with dials, knobs, and switches. No one could handle so many. Not alone.

  “What if I read the code and set the thrusters? You fire them and the main engines. Won’t that work?”

  “Look, kid. Look!” He pushes his other hand into the tangle of wires. The fingers tremble like an insect struggling in a spider’s web.

  “So what? You docked us and kept us from blowing up!”

  He makes a fist. His jaw muscles tighten.

  “You know why you’ve always been my hero?”

  His eyes narrow.

  “Because I’ve known … ever since the crash … deep in my heart, I just know if you’d been the pilot of that shuttle, Mom would be alive today. Val Thorsten always brings home the crew.”

  “Damn …” His eyes squeeze shut, hard, for so long that I worry I’ve lost him again. Then he shakes his head like he’s waking from a bad dream. “Can you really rig it like you said, dual control?”

  “You bet!”

  “Okay. Do it.” He releases my arm.

  I give it a victory pump. “Yeah!”

  “One thing, kid.”

  “What?”

  “It was only the ship.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Val Thorsten always brought home the ship.”

  16

  MISSION TIME

  T plus 20:28:16

  BY the time I’m done making the adjustments, there are only twenty minutes left until the mid-course burn.

  He locks in the coordinates. “All set?”

  I can only nod. My eyes are locked on the thirty small thruster control boxes that are my responsibility. For each manuever, I have to pick the right box and set its controls faster than I’ve ever done anything before.

  “Watch that screen.” He activates the NavComp, which begins the complex calculations.

  I force my eyes away from the boxes to focus on #2 monitor. It’s blank. Any moment, the first thruster code could come up. But the seconds drag. The screen stays blank. It’s weird, a computer taking so long, but I had to slow it down to human speed. We’d never be able to keep pace with it otherwise.

  I steal a glance at him. He’s hunched forward. Sweat beads along the sides of his neck. His knuckles are white from gripping the joystick. His other fingers tap anxiously near the fire control button.

  His job is to fire the thruster for the correct burn duration, then work the compensators to prevent any overcorrection of our course. And then there’s the midcourse burn using the main engines. That he has to do alone.

  Unless he falls apart …

  He catches my anxious look.

  “The screen.” He points. I snap my head back. Still blank. “We take it one step at a time, kid. Forget the last move, don’t think about the next one. Become those thruster controls.”

  The code flashes—AV-7 Yaw 78 Pitch 03 Roll 00—frighteningly white and huge on the black screen. I find thruster AV-7, twist the knob, punch the buttons, flip the switches. Tell him, “Set!”

  The shuttle shudders once, then three more times as he works the compensators to settle us on the new trajectory.

  Another code. Locate. Twist, punch, flip. “Set!”

  He does his part: two blasts this time, then five with the compensator.

  Code.

  It goes on and on with barely time for a breath between maneuvers. I glance at #1 monitor. A white line marks the course we need to be on. A red line shows our error. The gap is beginning to close between them. Unfortunately, the nearer we get to a perfect match, the harder it is to bring the two lines together, and the faster the codes come, almost faster than I can set switches.

  We start zigzagging across the white line.

  A warnin
g sounds.

  MIDCOURSE BURN T MINUS FIVE MINUTES.

  My eyes blur. I miss a code. Then I set the wrong thruster. I try to correct my mistake, but he’s already fired the thruster. It nudges us the wrong way, further off course.

  Code comes up to correct my first mistake, then another one before I can even set the switches.

  “Don’t fire! I missed one!” Another. And now I’m three behind. We’ll never make it. I’m blowing it. “I can’t do it!”

  “Not your fault,” he says and shuts down the NavComp. Less than four minutes. We’re doomed …

  “The roll,” he says. “Mistake.” A series of rapid thruster shots follow his words.

  The barbecue roll! The spin on the ship is making the maneuvers too complex. The NavComp can easily handle that kind of complexity because of how fast a computer works. But we both forgot the spin would make our job a thousand times harder at a human pace. It’s not easy to think of every detail in a crisis, but a mistake this bad will be hard to recover from. Can he pull us out?

  Strain shows in every line of his body as he struggles to stop the spin. His hands are like separate creatures, graceful and sure as they work the joystick. It’s beautiful.

  “Start again.” He turns on the NavComp.

  Code. Locate twist punch flip. “Set!”

  Two minutes.

  Code.

  Code.

  Code.

  The white line flashes red. “On course!”

  MIDCOURSE BURNT MINUS ONE MINUTE.

  He flips the shuttle to point the engines at the Moon so the thrust will slow our fall into its gravity well. The midcourse burn is all up to him. He scrambles to set switches, running on instinct. There’s no time to follow elaborate checklists. “Listen, kid. This’ll be a twenty-second burn. Gonna be rough. I can’t do it and the thrusters, too. So if a code comes up, you have to make the maneuver. Fail and we’re dead.”

  He reaches over and activates the joystick control on the arm of my seat. I stare at the stick as the meaning of his words sinks in. The moment has come. I get to fly this thing, too!

  The turbo pumps growl up to speed. A terrible rattle vibrates through the shuttle. Ignition. Deceleration hits, slamming me into the seat. My arms drop into my lap. As the engines belch to full throttle, blackness sneaks in at the edges of my sight.

  A squiggly? A memory? I don’t want either one right now!

  The engines hiccup, bucking the shuttle violently. A movement catches my eye. His free hand rakes over the controls in a desperate attempt to damp out the rough running. The building acceleration threatens to pull me into unconsciouness. I fight it. Gotta stay focused …

  “Code!” His urgent voice is a light in the darkness. “Kid, we’re drifting!”

  Can’t drift. We’ll miss the Moon. I reach for the thruster control boxes. I’m in a swift stream, fighting a strong current. Time’s running out … I throw my body forward, grab the edge of the console, and get my fingers on the buttons: twist punch flip to lock in the maneuver.

  The code starts flashing. It’s the warning sign that I have only a few seconds to make the maneuver or we’ll be off course when he makes the burn—disaster!

  I fall back. My hand finds the joystick and my thumb squeezes down on the “fire” button at the same instant. I can’t feel the punch of the thruster, but the monitor says it fired.

  “Compensate, NOW!” A voice that hundreds obeyed. A man they wanted to obey.

  This is the hard part. The NavComp is operating so slowly now it won’t be able to tell me how to stabilize the shuttle until it’s too late. It’s up to me to make the right maneuver. The first time I’ve touched the controls of this tub. The first and—if I screw up—final test of my skill.

  The stuttering roar, the vibration, Val’s desperate struggle with the engines—all those worries fade into the only important details I need to know to keep this thing on course: pitch, roll, yaw.

  My fingers tighten on the joystick. I make my maneuver.

  The main engines go silent … end of burn.

  Pressure ceases. I come out of my intense focus on my flight panel and see him staring at #1 monitor. I stare, too. It’s a perfect white on red match. We’re headed to the Moon again.

  “We did it,” he whispers. His voice grows stronger, louder. “We did it!”

  He whoops and shakes my shoulder. He’s grinning like crazy. I wonder how his dry old skin can stretch so much without cracking.

  “Damn good piloting, kid! Damn good!”

  A huge grin pushes at my own ears. I really flew this thing! I kept us on course. I made his struggle with the engines worth it.

  My fingers curl lightly around the joystick. A stillness spreads through me. It’s really possible now. Stewart Hale … graduating Space Academy … first assignment, navigator on the never before attempted—

  The clunky old control panels of Old Glory blur around me. For a second, I believe it’s the force of my own imagination making that happen, but then the air folds, shimmers, and I realize it’s a squiggly. The squiggly drops me in front of the sleek, gleaming flight controls of an ultramodern shuttle …

  I’m in the pilot’s seat. A little kid. The foot pedals are far from my dangling feet. I admire my silvery gripper booties. Kick them in joy.

  “I’m flying to Mars!”

  A big, hairy hand closes over mine, gently tries to tug it off the joystick. I look up at Commander Derrick, who’s smiling down at me.

  “Got to have my seat back now, son.”

  “No! Let me!”

  A gust of laughter from behind the high back of the pilot’s seat. Many voices mingle. One special voice …

  “Mommy?”

  I turn to look …

  … and find myself back on Old Glory on my knees, turned backward, clinging to the high back of the copilot’s seat like a bit of wreckage at sea. Nothing behind us but gutted controls. Dimness. Stink and cold. The beautiful ship is gone.

  “What’s the matter?” Val twists around to look behind us, too.

  “I … I thought … I heard … Mom’s voice.”

  Val mutters, “Ghosts.”

  I turn my head and meet his narrowed, nervous eyes. He licks his lips. “Get in the squid. We’ll train.”

  17

  MISSION TIME

  T plus 26:25:17

  OKAY, that’s enough.” The small speaker in the squid makes Val’s voice sound tinny and distant. He’s coaching me from flight deck so he can make course corrections whenever codes come up.

  The simulator screen flickers, goes black. Images of the lunar landscape return every time I blink my eyes. I’ve been crammed in the squid since we got back on course—hours ago. Every part of my body is numb. I can barely move my left hand anymore. After the first few successful landings, he made me put on the space suit gloves. Every move is like squeezing a rubber ball. It’s a real good thing we switched the joystick to my left hand. My right would never have been able to take the strain.

  I made a dozen perfect landings in twenty tries. Val said I beat the odds a few times by getting out of some of the wild glitches he threw at me. I’m too exhausted to feel excited anymore. I never want to see Moon craters again!

  Well, just once more. Real ones.

  There’s been no time to think or sort things out, just like in Jupiter Turnabout. Val bullied the crew with regulations, drills, cleanup, and maintenance. Everything by the book and to the letter. They never had a minute to worry about what would happen if the boomerang maneuver failed.

  There’s this super funny scene where Val badgers Tony to black his boots, again, and Tony says, “Okay, if make-work is what you want, I’ll help.” He pulls off his boots and socks and puts the polish on his feet. Then he goes dancing all over the ship.

  Only, that can’t have happened …

  Keep busy!

  I twist out of the squid. It’s dark in the canister—more power conservation. Goose bumps pop up as the cold air sucks away
my body heat. Usually the problem is keeping a spaceship from getting too hot inside. But with so many systems shut down, there’s too little waste heat being generated to keep the temperature anywhere near comfortable. We’re running with just one fuel cell to save as much oxygen for breathing as possible.

  Following the dim glow from a guide strip, I slip feetfirst into the narrow tunnel, hook a foothold, then haul the canister hatch shut. In the air lock, I strip off the gloves and clip them on the suit. I shake out the numbness, then close the tunnel hatch to the canister before pushing off into the blackness of middeck. It’s cold, refrigerator cold. I pause to close the last hatch. The cold and the clang of the hatch make me think of old submarine movies, of sinking to the bottom of the sea.

  Busy doesn’t always work!

  It’s warmer on flight deck, but even here all the lights are off except for two shining on the controls. Val’s snug in his jacket. He’s squeezing green Gunk—spacer survival rations, officially—into his mouth. My nose wrinkles at the chalky smell of the Gunk as I settle into my seat. Close up, I notice he’s shaved.

  “Want some?” The words bubble through the paste.

  I shake my head. “Makes me gag.”

  “Drink this anyway. It’s loaded with electrolytes and minerals.” He hands me some Squirt, then taps his clipboard. “A little surprise—don’t look like that, it’s a good one for once. I finished analyzing that burn. We shaved nearly six hours off our ETA.”

  No wonder he was pushing me so hard in the squid. We had planned on one more training session. Twelve out of twenty doesn’t seem so good anymore.

  I finish sucking down the Squirt. Tastes straight from a chemistry lab. I buckle up. The shifting colors on the instrument panel blur. I force my eyes open. Try to stifle a yawn.

  “Go ahead, sleep. I’ll take the first watch.”

  “Don’t want to.”

  “Been there, kid.” He washes a mouthful of Gunk down, makes a face at the Squirt. “Too bad you dumped all the booze.”

  “That wouldn’t do me any good!”

  “Then you’ll have to play solitaire.” He reaches over and taps a button on my keypad. The game flashes onto #3 monitor on my flight panel. Above the slots for aces is a number: 871,023.