He regarded her knowingly. “You’re going to do this in your head.”
She nodded.
“I’ll shut up when you tell me why,” he said, bending and twisting his body, angling himself toward the panel and grunting with the effort.
“When I started out, all things being equal, the best jobs were still going to men, especially in Malaysia, India, everywhere I looked,” Saranya said. “So I made sure that things were not equal, that my calculations were faster and I could function in places where the IC wasn’t yet hooked to the AllPower.”
“Smart,” Lord said.
She smiled. “No, smart would have been investing in AP.”
Lord chuckled as he continued to close in on the panel. At least the tight confines of the cockpit, the snug seat, and stiff suit helped him stay in any position he placed himself.
To his right, Saranya was aiming the purely mechanical rangefinder out of the window, estimating their descent speed, refining her guess about the volume of helium in the cryomagnet, the force of its explosive expansion from liquid to gas, the geometry of the vent. The numbers didn’t have to be exact, only close enough to let them belly-flop on the moon. It would never be a pretty landing; even if everything went as planned, there were still innumerable variables—had a significant fraction of the ship’s mass been knocked away, for example, in the blast? Her only hope was that impact on the lunar surface wouldn’t be disastrous.
Finally, Saranya looked down, the glow of the helmet moving with her, changing the shadows in the cockpit. It suddenly looked darker, mirroring her expression. She began to write. Lord glanced over.
“Isn’t it funny how we take for granted that things will work?” she said.
Lord studied the panel then plucked a screwdriver from the air. “Not at all,” he said. “In fact, they usually do, when you consider how many moving parts even a human body has, how many things can go wrong.”
“You’re quite an optimist,” she said.
“Incurable,” he admitted. “And I’ve got to tell you, as emergencies go, this one’s a day at the beach.”
“You’re just saying that,” Saranya insisted.
“No, it’s true. It’s happening in slow-motion. I’m used to disasters hitting me around Mach 5, usually with a contrail and headed in my direction.”
She smiled lightly. “That’s a little reassuring,” she admitted. “Though very soon the moon will be headed at you at Mach 5 if we don’t pull this off.”
“I wonder if they’ll call the impact zone Lord’s Crater,” he quipped.
Lord looked into the opening below the panel, which was about three feet square. He saw the main electronics bay that connected the flight deck avionics with the various systems of the ship. Lord disconnected the sick battery, opened up the connector, then freed and spread out the wires inside.
“Would you pop my suit battery?” Lord asked.
Saranya turned to him with alarm. “Are you—”
“I’m sure,” Lord said. “We need it. I’ll be fine.”
“You’ve considered, of course, that the flight crew won’t be able to repressurize the cabin and that when they open the cockpit door—”
“I’ll breathe cockpit air for now and open the valve on the tank when they return,” Lord said. “It won’t circulate without the battery, but it will keep the suit full and the air breathable for ten minutes. Trust me, I’ve done it at high alt.”
“You’ll lose your comm unit,” she said, pointing to her own ears. “Hand signals may not be enough for this—”
“Crack your faceplate a little and turn up the volume,” he said. “I’ll eavesdrop.”
Saranya’s expression became resigned. “What do I do?”
He shifted so his back was toward her. “The red squares on the sides? Press simultaneously and hand me the pack.”
When she did so, the electromagnet that held it in place died. So did Lord’s helmet light. So did his tanks. He could always bleed them manually if he had to.
Lord pressed the sides of his helmet and raised the visor. As he did, a warm, stale wash of air poured in. It was humid and unscrubbed but it was breathable. To save breath, he motioned for Saranya to angle her helmet light toward the open panel. Then he studied the back of the battery pack, squinting at the small writing, broke into the casing, and started to improvise a connector to match that of the shuttle.
“You copy in there?”
It was Kodera. Saranya punched the men back in. Lord listened hard.
“Yes, Captain,” Saranya said.
“Doctor, it’s truly weird out here,” he said. “More still, more silent, much darker than I’ve ever experienced. It’s like someone threw a blanket on space.”
“I can’t even begin to speculate on that kind of emptiness,” Saranya said.
“Well, for you space isn’t empty, is it? You’re not seeing it with just your eyes.”
She didn’t answer. Lord made a circling motion with his hand, urging her to continue, to keep him connected to people, to the familiar.
“Maybe if I get these quench numbers crunched ahead of time, I can head out there with you guys and collect some data before we land,” she said.
“If we manage to get these engines back, sure—happy to oblige,” Kodera told her. “First Officer Landry’s looking at the ion thrusters. I’m nearly at the main engine— Oh-ho! There you are, big boy!”
“Say again?” Saranya said, but then she realized what Kodera was referring to. Through the small cockpit side window she could see stars begin to appear—and the looming crescent edge of the moon. It was close—just a few minutes away in free fall.
“Someone turned the cosmic lights back on,” Kodera said with relief. “Maybe we’ll have the same luck.”
“Different situation entirely,” Saranya said. “The stars weren’t shut down, the photons were just pushed aside.”
“I know that, Doctor,” Kodera said with an embarrassed chuckle. “I was just wishing on a star.”
Lord made a face and motioned for her to dial back the reality check. She twisted her mouth but nodded. She was scared too, and science was her way to deal with it, but Lord understood pilots. There was romance in their souls, and hope. From the very first barnstormers, they were always looking for castles in the air.
“Not much left of the engine, I’m afraid,” they heard Kodera announce. “Looks like we’ll have to ride home on Dr. May’s cryostat rocket.”
“Ion thrusters seem intact,” Landry added. “They’re just not working with the reactor out.”
Saranya settled down. Hearing that she would have the tools they required, she exhaled. Lord had situated himself back in the seat to conserve energy. Throughout this present trial he admired her sudden shift from the wistful, frightened woman to cold-eyed scientist. Now that she had jumped into it, nothing else existed.
Lord let her be. With nothing else to do but stay calm and savor every moment of life, he looked around. It was the first chance he’d had to study the cockpit and there was something comfortable about it. It wasn’t just the snugness, or what he had always called the Iron Womb—the comfortable proliferation of metals and alloys, of controls that gave a man like him life. No, there was something else . . . .
“Okay, then,” Saranya said. “Better get that burn started. On to the cryostat.”
“Heading there now,” Kodera replied. “How are you doing in there?”
Lord glanced at the battery pack, and at a standby voltage indicator on the flight deck panel. The instrument glowed only feebly; a trickle was coming from the battery. He gave her a thumbs-up, privately hoping that all their efforts weren’t wasted.
“We’re all set,” she assured the flight crew.
After several agonizing minutes, the captain reported that he was at the cryostat with Landry. Saranya finally looked up from the QRH, w
here Lord saw that she’d scrawled unnervingly few formulae. He hoped it was because she had the rest of the hard data in her head.
“All right,” she said conclusively. “While you’re getting the flow routed: what’s your estimate of the thrust vector we’ll have?”
“Near as I can tell, the vent’s pointed straight down at the surface of the moon,” the captain replied as Landry drilled out a panel to access the cryostat plumbing. They didn’t hear it outside, of course, but the vibration made a humming sound in the wall of the spacecraft.
“I’m guessing we have about thirty seconds of this,” Landry said.
“That will give you roughly two minutes to get back in your seats,” she said.
“Doable,” Kodera told her.
Saranya was looking out the window at the rising lunar horizon when a bolt of alarm shot through her belly, sharp and discomforting. It caused her to jump. Lord noticed.
“What is it?” he asked.
She shook her head angrily, as if she were in denial.
“Dr. May?”
She waved him off. “Captain, when you’re done, get back in as quickly as possible.”
“Problem?” Kodera asked.
She scratched out several figures. “I forgot the damn cargo pallet, Captain. Stupid! Stupid!”
“What does that mean?” Kodera asked.
“It means we must execute our burn in”—she looked at the quaintly ticking watch—“forty-one seconds. Either we’re flying by then, Captain, or we crash.”
“Can’t do it,” Kodera said, a hint of anxiety finally showing in his voice. “It’ll take nearly that long to finish here and shut the door!”
“Why don’t we just cut it loose?” Landry asked.
“I have to calculate the kickback, the opposite reaction. . . .” Her voice trailed off.
Lord had been listening to the exchange. His eyes wandered out the window, picked out the only artificial light source on the moon. He had spotted it earlier, recognized the landscape around it, knew it was Armstrong—humankind’s first permanent foothold on alien soil. It sent a thrill down his back to actually lay eyes on it, not just for the achievement: it had the strange quality of a homecoming, the same he used to feel when he flew northward from the Atlantic and saw the first familiar contours of Manhattan Island. Lord had never been to the moon, of course, but his imagination had always been rooted in the sky, in pushing the envelope, in a manifest destiny for humankind. Despite the politics, the bureaucrats, the distractions, there was no bolder statement of that than Armstrong.
Lord was surprised to find other glints here and there, which he realized were exposed silicon from local mining expeditions.
He flipped his attention back to the cockpit. That too seemed comfortable. What was it that struck him?
“I’ll be damned,” he said suddenly.
“Sir?” Kodera asked hopefully.
Lord breathed carefully as he answered; now he really had to stay awake and alert. He leaned nearer to Saranya’s comm.
“Got some beautiful antiques up here,” he said.
“I’m sorry, sir—?”
“The backup sidestick—it’s an old RHC: twist to yaw, with a trim-rate switch; Captain, I can fly this!”
“Sir—”
“No time, very little air,” he said. He motioned for Saranya to turn on his tanks, looked at her ticking clock. “Just do what Dr. May said: finish with the cryostat and get yourselves inside. In forty-something seconds. Tell me how to light this bird up and I’ll take her in!”
“Is the battery secure?” Kodera asked.
“Yes,” he answered, though it was still barely producing a current, damn its alkaline soul.
“Then controls will return automatically,” Kodera said.
“I’m done!” Landry announced.
“We’re coming back!” Kodera said.
Saranya found the purge button on the tanks and pushed them on. Lord closed his visor manually. His very limited reserves of air were ticking down.
The pilots clawed their way toward the main hatch as Lord got his bearings.
Saranya said, “Quench in fourteen, thirteen, twelve— ”
“World of time,” Lord assured her as he looked at the equipment. “I’ve even got time to get a feel for the stick.”
“What you have is eleven seconds . . .” Saranya said.
“And is that not time, Dr. May?”
“Ten . . .” she said. “Director Lord, were you angling for this all along?”
“I was not,” he said truthfully. “But here it is.”
Lord fell silent as Saranya resumed the countdown.
“. . . nine, eight . . .”
They listened to the flight crew in their helmet. The men were nearly at the hatch.
“. . . seven, six . . .”
Lord was confident but not cocky. What’s that line in Melville? he wondered. Something about Moby-Dick being a monstrous big whale but, still, ultimately, just a whale? The Grissom was an unfamiliar craft, but he’d spent many years of his aerial career in flight test, in craft that were familiar to no one the first time he took them up. And he survived them all. Except that it doesn’t require an atmosphere or wings and was essentially, critically nonfunctional, Lord thought. Except for that . . . .
“. . . five, four . . .”
“Give me your hand, Captain! I’ll pull you in.”
That was Landry. Kodera must have motioned for him to enter first.
“. . . three, two . . .”
There were grunts in the ears and then the hull shook. That was the hatch door closing.
And then the helium exploded into vapor and the shuttle seemed to halt in the black sky. The deceleration was accompanied by two dull whams from somewhere in the cabin.
Saranya looked at Lord with alarm.
“The flight crew hitting something,” he said. He didn’t bother looking at the battery. Either he had control or they would hit the moon much, much sooner than anticipated.
Since the dawn of human flight, aviators have said that flying is easy; it’s the takeoff and landing that are difficult. That has never been truer than now, Lord thought. His hands were on the rotational and translational controllers. Inputs here spun or slid the ship—or at least that’s what they should have done: Lord tried to align the nose of the ship with rabbit lights that appeared to recede into the Armstrong landing field, a round pockmark in the lunar surface. The nose failed to budge, drifted a little farther off-true.
Lord pulled off his gloves, connected with the machine as if he’d known it all his life, tried to make the adjustments by tensing and relaxing the muscles in his fingers. He felt warm inside as he thought of the saddle back on Earth, crossed the centuries, imagined Isaiah Lord doing the same with whatever trusted steed had been beneath him. But the shuttle, here and now, still stubbornly drifted.
The future is that way, he thought, quoting a favorite line from Isaiah’s journals.
Lord did not take his eyes from the beacon at Armstrong Base, which was growing noticeably in size and brightness. But from the corner of his eyes he saw Saranya actually smiling, eying that light with hope and relief—
Suddenly, the entire ship lit up as if the neutrino attack had never happened. The oxygen hummed on, the panels lit up, the controls suddenly manifested a comforting, let-me-help-you quality, and someone in the cabin shouted the Houston Pincers volleyball cheer, “Payo!”
Lord felt cautious relief . . . until he saw that Saranya was now frowning.
“Doctor?” Lord asked.
“I don’t understand that,” she said. “Systems don’t recover from that kind of burn. What happened?”
Lord was about to remind her of the mouths of gift horses when, just as suddenly, everything went off again. Including the few limited controls h
e was working. Almost at once, the moon lost its happy stability outside the window and began to spin. Or, rather, they began to spin. Lord glanced at his feet. There were stars, gallons of them, piled one atop the other, but the beacon was nowhere in sight.
“Oh, screw you with a boring cylinder,” Lord told the shuttle.
“What?” Saranya asked.
“We need your comm. We need a better solution. I may need the crew.”
Lord’s gloves sailed around the cabin as the Grissom pinwheeled slowly, now in the sun, now in the dark, stark shadows playing madly around the interior.
The air was becoming very thin very fast: Saranya was breathing it too. Lord reached over and slid her visor shut.
Lord looked around the cockpit during the bright flashes of sunlight. His eyes settled on a tiny drawer, like an old DVD tray, labeled IC Power. That would be dead, of course, but he wondered if there were a solar storage battery attached to it—and if so, how could he patch that in so close to impact. He eyed the watch covetously. Did it have a battery? He could accept perishing in a crash, the idea had never been far from his mind. But to die without even a spark of fight—that was never going to happen.
“Sam!”
Lord’s eyes snapped from the clipboard to Saranya. She flipped up her visor.
“The captain,” she said, narrating as she listened to the incoming message. “He’s—the air scrubbers aboard this shuttle, they’re basically fuel cells that run in reverse. Put power and CO2 in; get oxygen out. But now he’s working on putting oxygen in to get you power. Says he thinks he’s got it this time. Get ready!”
Breathing heavily, Lord turned his eyes to the moon and held the controllers tightly. The Grissom was pointing nose-down, toward the crater that held the Armstrong Base. Lord flashed to images he once saw from the old pre-Apollo Ranger program, reconnaissance robots that took photos of potential landing sites as they plunged headlong into the lunar surface.
Not the heritage you want, he told himself.
An instant later the cockpit lit up like Times Square at night. Lord’s mind jumped ahead to Neil Armstrong during the Apollo 11 landing and the infamous Dead Man’s Curve: ten feet from the surface, fuel running out, no clear landing site in view, Armstrong set the lander down by gut, by feel. The ion thrusters fired again.
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