Déjà Vu (First Contact)

by Peter Cawdron

  I continue talking through the approach as the simulation unfolds.

  “Rather than flying in straight toward an airport like you would on Earth, our trajectory is an arc. Okay, pitching the module to forty-five degrees.”

  “By 2,000 feet, we want our rate of descent to be under fifty feet per second and pitching at thirty degrees. The program should take care of that. All we need to do is make sure we’re hitting that milestone.

  “By 1,000 feet, we want to be under thirty degrees and pitching at ten. It’s about now we’re looking for a landing spot and thinking about taking manual control.”

  I’m glad they didn’t find the blueprints for the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle, aka the flying bedstead. The damn thing nearly killed Armstrong. It was a high-powered jet engine mounted vertically inside a lightweight, thin metal frame. No wings. The engineers were trying to simulate a lunar landing in Earth’s gravity well. It was unstable as hell—a goddamn flying coffin. It could accelerate at 2Gs up to 6,000 feet, which was a death sentence to anyone foolish enough to try. Most astronauts took the bedstead gingerly up to fifty feet, set it down and sulked away, praying they were never asked to fly it again. The bedstead had some serious pucker-factor. Risking life and limb on Earth made the prospect of a lunar landing all the more real. The consensus was a helicopter was just as realistic on approach, even if the controls were vastly different. At the very least, it was safer.

  “By five hundred we should be level and down to ten… By two hundred we’re down to five feet per second and five degrees…. Looking for somewhere to land… and twenty feet at two feet per second… Contact Light! And we’re down. Engine stop. Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

  I check my instruments and, “Hey, we’re on the ground, and we’ve still got 15% in the tank!”

  Victory claps from behind me.

  “She did it the first time,” Adrian says, clapping.

  “Ah,” I say. “This is very different from an actual landing. There are a million steps that have to work flawlessly before you get to this point.”

  “And she did it on instruments,” Victory says, ignoring my comment.

  Being congratulated for trusting the descent program seems strange. I tweaked a few things on the way down, but I didn’t actually fly the thing until it was almost down anyway. Hell, the program is designed to land itself.

  I’ve got to say something about flying on instruments.

  “You can’t trust your inner ear when you’re going from a weightless environment into a gravity well. You’re lying on your back for most of the descent so you have to trust your instruments. It’s too easy to be fooled about your orientation. The controls, though, never lie—or so we tell the pilots.”

  She nods, grinning.

  I add, “Oh, and don’t forget. You’ve got to land early in the Lunar morning.”

  That gets her attention.

  “Why?”

  “Because of the shadows,” I say. “As you get lower, you can see the shadows cast by boulders and crater walls, and even your own craft in the final fifty yards. It helps you feel your way down those last few feet. You do not want to land around noon, or it really will be instruments only.”

  Victory adds another note to her clipboard.

  “Could you do it, though?” Adrian asks, and I get the feeling Victory has put him up to this. It’s far easier for him to suggest this as a hypothetical question. Anything coming from her would be seen as a formal request with a hard yes or no—and a no from me would be difficult to negotiate. This is a soft request.

  Victory wants someone experienced up there—and not just in regards to spaceflight. She hasn’t said as much, but if the aliens on the Moon are advanced forms of the creatures from Procyon Alpha, she knows I’ll recognize them. Where someone else might hesitate, I’ll be decisive. She wants a canary in this goddamn coal mine.

  I’m torn. The prospect of flying into space one more time is alluring. I’d prefer a Tsiolkovsky-class LEO shuttle like the one I took to reach the Intrepid, but spaceflight is one helluva drug. Oh, to drift in weightlessness again.

  I wonder about the operational state of their rocket. Spacecraft are complex. Bugs are inevitable. Even when it came to an interstellar craft like the Intrepid, there were so many commissioning issues it drove us crazy. I can imagine working on Apollo was like walking through a minefield.

  What’s the worst that could happen to me? I could die. Again. For the third time. Would that be the last time? Or am I a cat, destined for another six lives? Will each reincarnation be exponentially further forward in time?

  I’m not flight certified on Apollo hardware. I’ve only played around in a simulator, but I have been in orbit plenty of times. The problem is, no one that’s been revived in this era has ever been into space. Given the project is months to years away from launching, I’ll have plenty of time to learn about the craft. I’m no pilot, though. I’m an astrobiologist. The thought of meeting an advanced intelligent extraterrestrial species is appealing. I only hope Victory is right and these aliens don’t have a sea of eyes surrounded by tentacles. It would be nice to avoid being dissected.

  I nod. “It’ll take a lot of work, but count me in.”

  Adrian claps his hands together. “Yes!”

  Victory smiles.

  “When?” I ask, feeling like I may have jumped with too little information.

  “Within a year,” Victory replies.

  “Who else is on the crew?” I ask.

  “On this first flight? Just you and Adrian.”

  Launch

  The next six months are a blur of testing and training.

  Finally, the launch countdown is underway. The Command Module is cramped but not claustrophobic. After a week stuck inside this tin can, my opinion might change, but for now, it’s comfortable.

  Lying here on my back, looking out at the clear blue sky, I reflect on everything that brought me to this point. Time has flown by on New Earth, as it’s known. Technically, it’s the same planet I left, but there was a hard-stop somewhere around 12,000 AD.

  Victory and her team have undertaken extensive archeological digs. They’ve sailed to Europe and sent expeditions to the Middle East. Not only have they recovered fragments from past civilizations, they’ve gained insights into what happened over the past quarter of a million years.

  I thought the destruction of the Constellation was bad, but it was just the start of humanity’s problems. The AI war raged for thousands of years across several star systems. Earth was left in ruins. Our luck finally ran out. Homo sapiens were driven to extinction. Details are sketchy because no one survived.

  For over two hundred thousand years, the planet was hominid-free. Cities crumbled as nature surged. Continental plates collided, changing the landscape of Asia and the Pacific. The climate shifted, rebounding from anthropomorphic global warming. Several ice ages rolled by unnoticed by our long-dead civilization. North America was crushed as far south as Missouri. Ice sheets towered a mile high above New York.

  Cyclones raged along the equator, forming persistent storms akin to those on the gas giants. Europe was erased by a seemingly perpetual cycle of advancing and retreating glaciers. A reduced Gulf Stream swirled within the Atlantic, keeping Maryland and Virginia from being buried under the ice. That particular weather pattern protected the East Coast from the ravages of extremes between the equator and the poles. Somehow, it preserved the last vestiges of human existence in North America.

  Once the climate stabilized, a hot-humid period prevailed for tens of thousands of years. The ice sheets retreated. Flora and fauna flourished.

  At some point, less than two hundred years ago, humans appeared on the scene again. They were seeded by some advanced alien species curious about a once-mighty civilization. Somehow, I got caught up in that extraterrestrial zoological drag-net.

  “Ten minutes and counting,” comes over the radio.

  “Getting a little déjà vu?” Ad
rian asks, looking across at me from behind the visor on his helmet.

  “Kinda,” I reply. I get what he’s doing. He’s nervous. For him, this is all new. He’s looking for a little reassurance from an old hand. He wants someone to tell him everything’s going to be okay, so I say, “Launches are fun. You’re in for a good ride.”

  “I hope so,” he replies. That neither of us speak for the next few minutes puts lie to my claim.

  The padding within my Snoopy cap is itchy. I rock, trying to scratch behind my ear. I don’t want to remove my gloves and reach in behind the speaker in the cap. Like a cat getting cuddly, I lean against the edge of the headrest and rub my head against the lining within the helmet. Ah, that’s better.

  My motion shakes the dual seat frame as it’s mounted on rubber padding to help absorb any shaking during the launch. Adrian looks at me as though I’m mad. I don’t offer anything beyond a polite smile by way of explanation.

  Victory speaks from within the control room.

  “We’ve got a thunderstorm to the south. At this point, we’re confident we’ll have you underway before it gets close.”

  One thing I learned early on in the astronaut corps was to rest whenever possible. Launches are risky. Even when everything’s going smoothly, it can feel like the rocket is about to be torn apart. To be fair, we’re riding a prolonged, controlled explosion into space so it’s a reasonable concern. Once we’re up there, everything’s going to unfold quickly. We have two orbits before our trans-lunar injection burn. Only then can we relax. We’ll have a couple of days twiddling our thumbs as we drift across the void toward the Moon.

  Victory has adopted a duplicate procedure profile.

  Between the thirty-two checklists and manuals on board, there are over three hundred and fifty pages going to the moon in a variety of binders. Most of it has been typed up, but there are handwritten notes in the margins and lots of extra sketches to work from. It’s not so much a case of flying as following written instructions. We’ll walk through each scenario on paper before taking any action. Together, we’ll talk through computer program settings, switch positions and timings to avoid errors creeping in. This also gives Mission Control the chance to suggest changes. Even something as simple as opening the hatch will take upwards of half an hour. The hope is, being methodical will avoid mistakes. Given our novice status with spaceflight, it might just save our lives.

  Shortly after I arrived, I mentioned to Victory that the Mercury 7 were ambassadors for the space program. They visited the women sewing their spacesuits together, along with those working on the capsule. The idea was to make the build personal. Cutting corners weighs on your conscience if you know that lovely, nice person you met last week is going to fry to a crisp because of a missed stitch. Victory loved the concept. For her, it was one of those gems that gets overlooked in manuals and procedures. After that, she had me tour the various build facilities along the coast. I rode across what I eventually realized was the Carolinas, visiting the makeshift factories supporting our moon shot.

  A patchy young horse called Strapper was my equivalent of the personalized jet aircraft used by Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo astronauts. It’s strange how this age has skipped flight entirely, going straight for rockets. In the same manner, they settled on coal-fired trains and jumped combustion engines. Rockets have been their priority for over a generation. Everything about this society is geared toward getting to the Moon. Their only interest in fossil fuels is in support of rocketry.

  I got to visit the steelworks on the edge of a vast quarry and saw how they used x-rays to check for impurities. They machine rocket fuel tanks alongside water towers for farms.

  A nearby chemical lab boasted it could produce liquid oxygen by cooling and filtering the atmosphere. I have no idea what the ratio was in my day, but they’re compressing air at a rate of nine hundred to one. I regret not taking up the option of touring these facilities back then. Seeing frozen liquid oxygen being produced by a society that has only just mastered the plow is pretty damn impressive.

  Much to my horror, our spacesuits were put together by the delicate fingers of children. Schools, as I knew them, don’t exist. If your father is a machine shop worker, you spend half of the day in a village classroom and the other half helping your dad work on a lathe. The kids I saw sew the seams in our gloves were far more conscientious than I ever was at the age of eight. For them, meeting me was like getting to hang out with Batgirl or something. It seems celebrities transcend time.

  Electronics are a labor of love. The team developing the integrated circuits in our flight computer built a few simple video games as prototypes. Their version of a computer monitor is the size of a piano, but only has a resolution of a couple of hundred pixels. Computer programs are woven like a garment, with strands of wire weaving in and out of tiny magnetic rings. Passing the wire through a ring equates to the binary value of one, while bypassing it is a zero. Rather than having bugs in their code, they have dropped stitches. As clumsy and cumbersome as it seems, it works.

  At my insistence, a large vacuum chamber was built to test the capsule and lander. A radiant heater approximated the sun. Liquid oxygen cooled the far side of the chamber to replicate the heat differences in orbit. In practice, the team never reached the extremes found in space, but it ensured core components like hatch seals could be properly tested. Adrian and I even suited up and walked around inside, but not until a test dummy had survived in our suits. I took a feather and hammer into the chamber to demonstrate Galileo’s falling bodies experiment. I dropped them and they both hit the ground at the same time. No one knew who Galileo was, but they thought that was cool.

  “Coming up on one minute.”

  Our version of the Command Module looks more like a testbed than flight hardware. Rather than being an exact copy of Apollo, we’re in a hybrid. The control panel in front of us has a bunch of rotary dials and toggle switches mounted on a thin piece of sheet metal. The edges have been filed to remove any burrs that could catch on our suits.

  Only one percent of the vehicle sitting here will end up orbiting the Moon. Most of our moon shot is comprised of fuel and expendable rocket stages. As for the lander, well, that’s less than one percent. It’s ridiculous to think of how utterly impossible it is to reach the Moon, and yet we’re doing it. Damn.

  “You see that?” Adrian asks, pointing at one of the gyroscopes. As we’re seated on the launchpad, the axis should be zeroed. The horizon indicator is on an angle of about ten degrees. Adrian taps the glass and it corrects itself.

  Sarcasm drips from my words. “Well, that’s reassuring.”

  We’re launching with a full-stack, but the plan is to treat each phase as an all-up shakeout test. If we pass our initial tests in a low Earth orbit, we’ll proceed to the Moon. If everything’s going fine in lunar orbit, we’ll proceed with a low-altitude test in the Lunar Excursion Module. If that passes muster, we are Go for landing just like Neil and Buzz in Apollo 11. If at any point, the wheels come off the wagon, we call it Apollo 8, 9 or 10 and return to fly another day.

  I make a note on a clipboard, keeping track of each issue.

  “Ten seconds.”

  Where’s the countdown? How can you have a launch without a countdown? Mentally, I’m counting down toward zero, but the radio is silent. There’s no comment on ignition. Nothing. These guys have a lot to learn about launch protocols.

  Birds fly past the window, oblivious to the violence that’s about to be unleashed.

  The nose cone on the Launch Escape System partially covers the windows on the Command Module. The LES is a miniature rocket strapped on top of the CM. It’s something I hope we never actually need. If it fires, the exhaust will spread out, being funneled over the Command Module. The idea of being accelerated at thirty gees in less than a second doesn’t exactly thrill me. If there’s no warning, then depending on where my arms happen to be, I could break a few bones. That rate of acceleration unfolding in a hundredth of a second wil
l be like having a couple of tons of sand crash down on us. It’s survivable. Just.

  From hundreds of feet below us, there’s a deep rumble. The capsule shakes. I’m used to being thrown back into my chair during a thundering launch, but this is a slow, steady surge of raw power. I feel as though I’m sitting on top of a flame thrower rather than a rocket. The roar of the engines reaches my ears.

  The launch tower passes beside our capsule. Massive white clouds billow around our rocket. We crawl off the pad, accelerating at what feels like barely a gee. The shaking, though, is disconcerting. It feels as though the rocket is going to come apart. A panel rattles loose beside me, shaking madly as we rise into the air. Screws fall, bouncing around on the floor of the capsule. I’m not sure whether they were already lying around, carelessly wedged in some gap, or if they’ve been knocked loose by the shaking.

  I reach out, pushing against the side panel with my glove. I’m trying to silence the rattling as between that and the roar of the engines, I can’t think. I need to hear what’s happening. Sound is a way of probing machinery. My ears are accustomed to the thunder of the rocket engines firing hundreds of feet below me. I listen for any irregularities, catching even the slightest variation. This might be a bone shaking ride, but it’s consistent in how it threatens to shatter my fragile bones. When it comes to rockets, consistency is king. Just get me into orbit, goddamn it!

  My sight blurs. The vibration coming through the headrest is shaking my helmet. I tense my stomach muscles, lifting my shoulders and helmet away from the seat to steady my vision.

  “This is,” Adrian calls out, stuttering with, “n—n—normal, right?”

  “Yes.”

  I’m lying. Adrian’s hand is a little too close to the translation control that’ll fire the Launch Escape System. I don’t want to spook him. Yes is a better answer than no.

  I understand his concern, but I don’t want him tugging on that handle. I’ve never flown on anything this old. I’m pretty sure rockets aren’t supposed to fall apart within the atmosphere.