Donovan watched this performance, then nudged Zell. “You see this?” he said. “This is what we’re up against, here.”
“What are you talking about?”
“This rampant paranoia, fear, distrust, all of it,” Donovan answered. “This has gone beyond archeology. It’s teetering on something bigger than the search for alien life. People are searching for something more.”
“And that would be?” Zell asked, puffing away.
Donovan thought a moment. “Damned if I know.”
January 2
Johnson Space Center
Houston, Texas
8:31 a.m.
Established in 1961, the Johnson Space Center was originally named the Manned Spacecraft Center. Only after former president and Texas native Lyndon Baines Johnson passed away in 1973 did it get its new name. If the launch towers and fiery rockets of Florida’s Cape Canaveral represent the soul of NASA, then the JSC is most certainly its brain, and, some might argue, its heart. Every mission since Gemini IV has been handled from JSC’s Mission Control. There men were first guided down to the Sea of Tranquility in 1969. Later the tense days of Apollo 13 played out in 1970, and much later staff watched helplessly as Columbia fell from the sky in 2003.
On top of Mission Control, the JSC was also home to the astronaut corps and the principal training site for all space missions.
While the JSC’s primary focus was the stars, scores of scientists there also toiled daily to make life on Earth better. Everything from memory foam to scratchproof eyeglass lenses came from the JSC, using NASA technology developed for spaceflight. If travel to the stars represented the cutting edge of technological achievement, then the JSC was forever sharpening the blade.
After a much-needed day of rest and recovery, Donovan and Zell went back to work. They had been picked up at their hotel just after seven and briefed on the ride to the space center by one of the team members assigned to analyze the EM signal. After a cursory tour, they were ushered into a conference room, where John Dieckman was waiting for them.
“Dr. Zell, Dr. Donovan,” he said, extending his hand. “It’s a pleasure. I’ve read your dossiers, and I’m impressed.”
“Thank you, Mr. Dieckman,” Zell replied, grasping his hand firmly.
“Dr. Donovan,” Dieckman said, “it’s especially nice to meet you. I heard your father speak once. Here, actually. A lecture on geologic activity at Fra Mauro.”
“My father?” Donovan said. “You must have been what—five years old?”
“Six, actually,” Dieckman said. “I came here with my uncle. He was an engineer at Grumman and took me out here on a business trip.” Dieckman paused. “It was that trip, and your father’s speech, that first got me interested in working for NASA one day.”
Donovan nodded, smiling inwardly at this slight validation of his father’s work. “Thank you.”
“Yes, well, now here I am, and here you are, and we’ve got work to do.” Dieckman turned and reached into his briefcase, pulling out two large rocks. He placed them on a table with a thud. “Here are two rock samples from the Apollo 12 EVA in November 1969. It’s not much to go on, but right now it’s the only physical link we have to whatever’s going on up there. Can you tell me anything?”
Donovan picked up one of the rocks and turned it over in his hands. “Well, I’m not a geologist, Mr. Dieckman,” he said, “but the first thing that I notice is the abundance of refractory elements in the surface.”
“Refractory?” asked Dieckman.
“Resistant to heat or decomposition,” Donovan answered. “Could be something like titanium. What’s unusual is that, on Earth, heavier elements are pushed to the core of the rock, while lighter materials are drawn to the surface. Here we’ve got the reverse.”
“What do you think it means?” asked Dieckman.
“Again, I’m sure a geologist could tell you more, but it makes me think that these elements were somehow brought to the surface of the rock. How, well, I couldn’t even begin to guess. To do that would . . .”
Zell studied the rocks a moment, then took out his key chain, which had, among various other knickknacks, a small magnet dangling from it. He held the keys over the rocks. The movement was slight but unmistakably there. The keys were slowly drawn to the rock. He looked at Dieckman. “You know these rocks are magnetized.”
“That’s right.”
“But how? The Moon has no magnetic field.”
“Residual from the Earth’s magnetic field?” Donovan suggested.
“Impossible,” replied Zell. “The Roche limit prevents the Earth from getting too close to the Moon.”
“So your findings, gentlemen?” asked Dieckman.
“In my professional opinion,” said Donovan, “there’s definitely something weird up there.”
Dieckman smiled. “I’m glad we flew you all the way from Peru for that assessment.” He stood up. “Now, if you’ll follow me, we’ll get down to business.”
“Business?” asked Donovan.
“You think there’s something weird on the Moon?” said Dieckman. “Trust me, Dr. Donovan, you ain’t seen nothing yet.”
They left the conference room and made their way through the center’s corridors. As they walked, Dieckman began filling them in on some of the stranger goings-on on the Moon.
“In a way, this whole incident shouldn’t be entirely unexpected,” he said. “If you look back at the history of lunar exploration, there’s more that we don’t understand about our nearest neighbor.”
“Such as?” asked Zell.
“Well, for example, the upper eight miles of the Moon’s crust are shockingly radioactive. Thermal readings taken by the Apollo 15 astronauts near the Apennine Mountains were nearly off the chart. Some experts thought this meant the core was hot. We now know that’s not the case; it’s quite cold, in fact. So the question remains, where’s this radiation coming from?”
“And you think it might have something to do with our visitors?” asked Donovan.
“Your guess is as good as mine, Dr. Donovan, but it seems logical,” Dieckman answered. “Here’s one that’ll get you thinking. Unmanned probes we’ve sent in recent years have shown that much of the Moon’s surface is covered with a fine glaze, almost like glass.”
“Couldn’t that be caused by heat from meteor impacts?” asked Zell.
“Not to this extent, no,” Dieckman said. “There’s no doubt about it. Something, something big, scorched the Moon’s surface so intensely that it paved most of the target area over with glass. Ah, here we are, Mission Control.”
Located in building 30 of the Johnson Space Center, the Christopher C. Kraft Jr. Mission Control Center was the nerve center of NASA’s operations. The three-story facility was primarily made up of two wings, one for mission operations and the second for operations support. After a rocket cleared the tower at Cape Canaveral, control of the flight was kicked over to Mission Control, where it remained until touchdown. From there, flight controllers handled every element of the mission, no matter how trivial. On the building’s second floor, astronauts conducted simulated flights, running through every possible scenario to ensure that there would be no surprises in a mission. The second floor was also home to the Mission Operations Control Room, where every piece of information related to the flight, be it technical, operational, or even meteorological, was processed and displayed. Donovan and Zell were escorted to this room. Although neither of them had ever harbored more than average interest in space travel, they were awed by the sight. On the far walls of the room, a half dozen jumbo television screens provided an ongoing stream of data from the lunar orbiter Stellaluna while another set of screens seemed to be devoted to data coming from the ongoing mission at the International Space Station, where the current crew was also monitoring the situation on the Moon. On the ceiling, illuminated panels displayed the flags of various nations who had contributed to the ISS project. And all around them were workstations filled by technicians, physicists, and lunar experts, p
oring over lunar data and relaying their findings from department to department.
“Here’s where it all happens, gentlemen,” said Dieckman. “As you can see, we’re monitoring the data sent to us by Stellaluna, the probe currently in lunar orbit. It’s fragmentary, obviously. But it’s enough to give us a sense of what we’re dealing with. Plus, we’ve got every hi-tech satellite and earthbound telescope we could spare pointed in that direction.”
“So what data have you got for us?” asked Donovan.
“Take a look at this monitor here,” said Dieckman, leading them over to one of the massive LED screens. “Stellaluna detected massive concentrations of gravity, or mascons, located in and around the Ocean of Storms. These mascons were so great that, after rechecking Stellaluna’s orbit, we found that the probe dipped slightly and accelerated when passing overhead. So what could cause a gravitational field like that?”
“A large concentration of dense matter beneath the surface,” said Donovan, his eyes fixed on the screen.
“Right, and that’s not all.” Dieckman picked up a glass case from the desk and handed it to Donovan. Inside were small iron particles, almost like ball bearings.
“These particles, and others like them, were brought back from the Moon by the Apollo astronauts,” explained Dieckman. “Incredibly, after nearly half a century on Earth, they show no signs of oxidization.”
“Rustproof iron, eh?” said Zell. “Nothing of the kind exists in our world.”
“Not true,” said Donovan. “At the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque in New Delhi, there’s an iron pillar that hasn’t rusted in almost two thousand years.”
“That’s right!” said Zell, snapping his fingers in remembrance. “To this day scientists can’t identify the alloy.”
“Either way,” said Dieckman, “it’s clear we’re in uncharted waters.”
“I’ll say,” said Donovan. “So what’s the next step?”
“Well, we’re launching a satellite tomorrow, the SIR-K,” said Dieckman. “It’s an imaging system that sends out its own radar signal and then ‘listens’ to the echo.”
“Spaceborne imaging radar. Kind of like the Landsats you have in orbit that send digital data back to Earth,” said Zell.
Dieckman grinned. “I’ve got to say I’m impressed, Dr. Zell. Yes, it’s similar, only the Landsats use reflected sunlight to send an image. For more details, I should turn you over to the man behind the curtain, William Egan.”
A shaggy-haired man wearing faded jeans, flip-flops, and a Rush T-shirt stepped up and put out his hand. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-four years old.
“William Egan,” Zell said. “The same William Egan who codesigned the AEV 22 Space Telescope at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory?”
“The very same, my friend,” he said with a bit of a theatrical flourish.
“I remember reading about it in the Science Times,” Zell said. “I thought you were recruited out of MIT.”
“I was,” said Egan, pushing his glasses up his nose. “Halfway through my sophomore year.”
“Bill is one of the brightest minds we’ve got around here,” said Dieckman. “He’s also been helping design the ship that’s taking you and the rest of the crew to the Moon.”
“C’mon, let me show you how it works,” said Egan with all the excitement of a kid at Christmas. He sat at his terminal, which was decorated with triathlon medals and cluttered with printouts and books that included a dog-eared edition of the Dungeons and Dragons Fiend Folio.
“Okay,” he said, cracking his knuckles. “Basically, imaging radar is like a flash camera, right? A camera sends out a flash of light and records the light that’s reflected back through the camera lens. Got it? So, instead of a lens and film, radar uses an antenna and digital computer tapes to record its images. In a radar image, one can see only the light that was reflected back toward the radar antenna. So, what we did was send one of our little birdies up there, ran a few imaging cycles, and whap!” He struck a few keys like a concert pianist finishing a sonata. Instantly an eerie image of the lunar landscape popped up. At its center was a dark-blue mass.
“There she is,” said Egan. “Since the image is so dark, we can safely assume that it’s a flat surface. Buildings or any kind of topography will bounce the signal off each other, what’s called a ‘double bounce.’ They’ll always show up white.”
“She’s big,” Donovan said, letting out a whistle.
“And deep,” Egan said. “About a mile down.”
“So much for digging it up,” Zell said. “We’ll have to descend through the fissure itself, see what we can see from the inside.”
“Couldn’t dig it up anyway, even if we wanted,” Donovan said. “Much of the surface in that area is made up of titanium, zirconium, and beryllium. I remember reading one of my father’s old papers. He remarked that it was strange that these metals were there, as ordinarily they’d require extreme heat, somewhere around forty-five hundred degrees Fahrenheit, to fuse with rock.”
Zell stared at the image a moment, lost in thought. Then he clapped Donovan and Egan on the shoulders.
“How’s the coffee here, my boy?” he asked Egan.
“Detestable,” came the affable reply.
“Excellent! Put on a fresh pot. We’ve got work to do. If we’re going to uncover this Cracker Jack prize, we’ve got to know everything about where she is and, if possible, how in the hell she got there. Mr. Dieckman, I’ll need every bit of information you’ve got on the Ocean of Storms, including the mission logs and transcripts from the 1969 landing.”
“You got it, Dr. Zell,” Dieckman said, enthused that progress was being made.
With that, they turned to leave. As they were heading out the door, McKenna stormed in.
“Gentlemen, I’m glad I caught you,” he said. “I’ve got some disturbing news.”
He tossed a file on the desk, spilling out some satellite photos.
“Two days ago, the Chinese launched a rocket, headed for the Moon,” McKenna said. “We thought it was just another unmanned flyby. They had been sending them up even before the pulse occurred.”
McKenna sifted through the photos, finally producing one seemingly taken from the Moon’s dark side. “Skystalker satellites in geosynchronous orbit above the Moon picked this up last night.” He pointed at the picture. “That’s the Moon,” he said. “And that’s a manned command module.”
There was silence in the room as everyone took this in.
McKenna turned to Zell and Donovan. “You just joined the second space race, boys,” he said. “And the US is officially one lap behind.”
Chapter 5
January 11
Johnson Space Center
Houston, Texas
6:12 p.m.
In many ways it’s really not as bad as we figured. But in most of the ways that count it’s a helluva lot worse.
John Dieckman sat at his desk in Houston and popped another pill. His acid-reflux disorder had been acting up again despite the corrective surgery he had undergone ten years earlier. His doctor said it was psychosomatic, that there was no evidence that the disorder had reoccurred. No matter the assurances, most days he still felt like he was drinking battery acid.
The Chinese mission had returned to Earth successfully. The craft splashed down in the South China Sea off the coast of Hong Kong in a manner not too dissimilar from the old Apollo landings. The splashdown gave further confirmation to American intelligence that the Chinese were indeed mimicking the Apollo program down to the letter, since earlier manned Chinese missions were modeled on the old Soviet Soyuz, which had come down on land.
The Chinese crew was alive and well and had returned to Beijing armed with film taken over the Ocean of Storms, as well as areas of the dark side of the Moon. The photos, which the Chinese government immediately disseminated to all major media outlets, conclusively proved that there was no apparent alien ship parked on the surface of the Moon, nor was there an alien armada lurking on
the dark side, waiting to attack the Earth. This left most conspiracy theorists disappointed but alleviated the general panic in streets all over the world. The riots mostly subsided, people returned to their homes, and families went to cemeteries to bury those killed in the mass uprisings. The Chinese mission had done a service to humanity, much to the President’s dismay.
The President’s mood wasn’t helped much by the Chinese ambassador’s performance at the United Nations, where he displayed the photographs at a meeting of the General Assembly and touted the fact that the Chinese had undertaken this dangerous mission for the sake of “world peace” and to “add to the general and scientific knowledge of humanity.” When asked by reporters if the Chinese were next planning to land on the Ocean of Storms to seek out the source of the pulse, the ambassador merely smiled.
At the White House, the President made it clear that she would tolerate no delays in the planned American Moon mission.
“The Chinese are using this stunt to boost their standing in the eyes of the world,” the President declared. “We were this close to pushing through a NATO resolution condemning their threatening posture toward Taiwan. Now half the world, including the French, are suffering under the delusion that they’re the saviors of humanity and that their only interest in the Taiwanese is to give them all a great big ol’ hug. The bottom line is that if the Chinese get to the Ocean of Storms before we do, you can sure as hell bet that they won’t be planning to share their discoveries in the same generous manner they’ve been displaying these pictures. We need to get to the Moon. Now.”
Upon leaving the Oval Office, Deke felt as if he had just been scolded by a kindhearted but forceful principal who wanted him to make better grades in the future. But how? Deke couldn’t see any way they could possibly design, test, and build a new lunar program that would not only get them back to the Moon but also get them there before the Chinese. All of McKenna’s intel suggested that the Chinese had not yet built a viable lander, despite this successful circumnavigation of the Moon.
The plan was to have a manned flight in Earth orbit in two months’ time to test the prototype command and lunar modules. The next flight would then be a manned mission that tested both modules in lunar orbit. That would be in early April. Then they would try a full-up mission to the Moon, including a landing, in late June. Six months to land on the Moon when no one’s done it in over forty years. A rush job to end all rush jobs.
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