Wilson knew he didn’t have concerns about the crew. Everyone was at the top of their respective fields. Even the archeologists had come through their training with flying colors. And the Chinese—he had never seen such intelligent and disciplined people. Despite himself, he particularly admired Yuen. Seeing him in training, Wilson wasn’t the least surprised that the Chinese had asked him to be the commander of the Tai-Ping.
So why the hell are my palms sweating? It’s the weight; it has to be the weight. This whole mission’s a rush job to end all rush jobs. We designed the lander to carry four people to the surface, not five. All the engineers say it’ll hold five plus a couple hundred pounds of materials we take back from the object.
Wilson squinted through the capsule’s window into the morning sky. Yesterday’s Moon was just fading away. It was almost a target in the corner of his window. All he had to do was aim and shoot.
I’ll get the Copernicus down. I’ll set her down right between the remains of Surveyor III and Apollo 12.
Do your job, Wilson. Think about the mission. Everything’s nominal. Everything’s on the line.
Benny groaned into his mike. “Lieutenant Colonel, are they gonna fix their little problem or what?”
“Frank,” the capcom said, trying to stifle a laugh, “tell Benny if he keeps that up, we’re going to have him wait for the next bus.”
“Hear that, Benevisto?” Wilson said with a smile. “They’re going to pull your hall pass.”
“Let ’em try it, Colonel,” Benny said, smirking as he did. “Let ’em try.”
Christ Almighty, am I sick of this waiting, Benny thought. Let’s go, let’s go, Mission Control. Go on, say it, Benevisto. You’re scared. You’d crap your pants right now if it wouldn’t set off fifteen alarms at the surgeon’s console. Thank God they’re not taking you down to the Moon.
God. He shook his head inside his pressurized helmet. If you hadn’t gone into that church, you wouldn’t have gotten your head so screwed up with this God business.
Still, there was something about that church. Nothing about it reminded Benny of the Catholic churches back in Brooklyn, full of imposing statues and bloody crucifixes and marble and stained glass. It was just a simple white clapboard church on a little hill on the outskirts of Houston. Trimmed bright-green front lawn. Quiet. So simple he had never imagined it to be a Catholic church. When he saw that it was, he felt compelled to go in and light a candle in front of a statue of Saint Jude the way his grandmother had always done whenever she thought she needed the intervention of the patron saint of hopeless cases. Then that priest came by and smiled at him and went into the confessional. And Benny followed him in.
What had that priest told him in there?
God gives us all divine gifts and abilities, and we must be humble before them. Your gifts have brought you to a unique moment, and your abilities will guide you through it. The only question is whether or not you are willing to be humble enough to better understand the path upon which God has set you.
“Phoenix, looks like we’ve nailed down that little snag in the cabin-pressure reading. We’re reading nominal pressure as well now. Please reconfirm your cabin pressure. Over.”
“Roger that, Houston,” Yeoh replied.
Here Bruce Yeoh was a crew member of the most important spaceflight in history, thanks to, of all people, Bruce Lee. Growing up in Shanghai, Yeoh and his brother, Xi, would always watch classic movies on Saturday mornings at the little theater near their home, where their uncle was the projectionist. He would never forget first seeing Bruce Lee’s Fist of Fury. The moment Lee leapt into the air, shattering a sign that read “No Dogs and Chinese Allowed” with one swift kick, twelve-year-old Yeoh Kong-sang’s life was changed forever. He immersed himself wholly in the study of the martial arts. His friends kidded him, called him “Bruce.” The name stuck. As he tried to master Lee’s ideas of moving like water, he saw how matter and energy were interconnected, one feeding off the other. Before too long, Yeoh’s fixation on martial arts was second only to his fascination with physics. A door had been unlocked in his mind.
Yeoh sighed, remembering those fond times with his brother, Xi. As he flipped a few switches, his mind drifted back to a summer evening long ago.
We had taken Grandfather’s boat out on Hangzhou Bay. Before we knew it, we rowed past the breakers and out into the East China Sea. I was so scared, but Xi had stayed calm, pointing back at the shore.
“See the lights?” he had said. “That’s Shanghai. That’s home. Row toward the lights, and we’ll get home.”
Over and over I said those words in my head. And when my arms gave out, Xi took my place at the oars and began rowing. “Just look at the lights, little brother. Look at the lights and think of home.”
Yeoh peered out the small window at the top of the capsule, seeing a sliver of the Moon peeking out from the brilliant blue of the morning sky. So very far away from where he was now.
Look at the lights and think of home.
“Roger, Phoenix. All systems read nominal. We are restarting the countdown.”
“About time.” Benny looked through the edge of his visor at Moose. “Nice to know they’re keeping their promises.”
“Never doubted they would, buddy.”
Benny shook his head. “Still waiting for the day something messes with your midwestern Zen, Moose.”
Moose chuckled. Man, Benny will flip when he finds out. He’ll think I’m off my nut, especially after getting bumped from the landing.
Makes sense, though. Ma had never wanted me to be a pilot. Too dangerous. Told her there was more of a chance of getting killed in a car than up in the air. Dad understands. But Ma’s fears run deeper. She’s afraid the family’s going its separate ways after she’s tried for so long to keep us together. You grow up and move away; you want to see the world. That’s life.
Things had been difficult for his mother in running the farm since his father’s stroke. Money, always tight, was especially so now that she had to pay for all that extra hired help. The strain on her face was clear when she came to visit Moose just before the crew had gone into isolation. She looked tired, old. Taking care of both the farm and his father—
She never asked me to come home. She just did that thing with her shoulders that she had always done whenever she felt funny about saying something, like she was bracing against the cold.
Mother and son tried to distract themselves from the mission by talking about the farm as they walked around the Cape. After a while, almost without meaning to, Moose told her he was thinking about coming home to take care of the farm after the mission.
I thought she was going to jump out of her skin, she was so happy. She didn’t look so tired or old after that, just took my arm as I showed her around.
Before she left Moose to isolation, she took out a little plastic bag of soil from the farm—a piece of home to keep with him. Moose patted the spot where the soil sat in his pocket under his pressurized suit.
Promises to keep.
“T-minus sixty—”
“Dr. Donovan?”
“Yes, Dr. Soong?”
“Remember that Mission Control is not the only one who has promises to keep.”
I honestly cannot believe that the Americans could find no better archeologist to join this mission than Alan Donovan. He is too unpredictable. In every single excavation scenario we have run, he has tried to find some way to bend the rules, if not break them outright.
Soong took a deep breath and tried to ready herself for liftoff. To block Alan Donovan from her mind. To be calm in knowing that all of the prelaunch procedures had gone according to plan.
Procedure matters. One follows rules, connects dots, delivers results. Yes, there is some room for improvisation. For original and creative thinking. But not for the brash, flagrant disrespect for rules that Donovan and his keeper, Elias Zell, employ. Still . . . they had produced results. If only they could stay in line long enough to uncover whatever t
ruths are buried there . . .
Is anyone else’s heart hammering as mine is? But I am not just uneasy. It is something else: yes, an overwhelming sense of elation. Years spent in the pursuit of justice by surrounding myself with death. Any victory—always wrought from human tragedy and suffering. Now the quest is not justice but truth. And such a wonderful feeling in seeking the truth. To be a part of this great journey . . .
Whatever we find there, it is impossible to believe that it will not be a joyous affirmation of life.
“Thirty-five, thirty-four, thirty-three, thirty-two—”
“Promise, Dr. Soong?” Donovan laughed. “I never promised you anything. I only said I’d make an effort.”
Donovan flexed his fingers, trying to relieve his tension. She wanted me to promise not to try anything outside of Mission Control’s orders if the object proved irretrievable. Is she kidding? I’m not leaving the Moon until we find out what that goddamn thing is.
Donovan hadn’t gotten much sleep in the last week. Night after night he found himself lying awake in bed, trying to imagine the object in his mind. Trying to visualize it and know its purpose. Trying not to think of Syd or his father or of anything else that could keep him from completing his mission.
We have to show the world that this first contact is just a part of humanity’s future, nothing else. As we go out into space, we’ll probably meet dozens of civilizations. We can’t be cowed by our own fears and taboos and just hide in our little corner of the galaxy because we’re afraid. We need to make contact. We can’t fear the future.
“Twenty-five, twenty-four, twenty-three, twenty-two—”
“Elias.”
“Yes, Alan.”
“What if it turns out to be an old Soviet probe? Some experimental thing that we never knew about?”
“Soviet probe, my ass,” Zell grumbled.
Zell thought of his father. Oh if only old Thackeray could see him now! He wondered for a second if his father would feel the same humbling terror he felt at this moment, strapped into one of the most powerful rockets ever made by man, or if he would be elated by the grand adventure in it. He smiled to himself, knowing the answer.
Be brave, my lad, he would always say. There’s no fear in the unknown, only in the lack of trying to make it known.
His father had always said that the more people learn as a race, the less they seem to have understood. Thackeray Zell knew that statement not only applied to his generation but to all generations of humanity going back to antiquity, when the Greeks believed Apollo pulled the sun across the sky each day with his chariot. Yet a new piece of information had always come along to prove so many of the previous generations’ theories wrong. Newton. Galileo. Einstein. Any of those precious few who leapt beyond conventional thinking and saw the universe with new eyes.
And what have we learned from the experience? Not to stand in awe of the remarkable fabric of the universe, but to pat ourselves on the back after each of our discoveries. If we were really intelligent, we’d accept the fact that we hardly know anything at all. Perhaps then we could make the really great leaps in scientific understanding, leap beyond the limits of our own life spans and experience.
In order to be truly wise, we have to learn how to question things above ourselves, above time.
“Five, four, three, two, one—we have liftoff! Liftoff of Phoenix 6, through whose fires humanity’s exploration of the Moon is reborn—”
As the rocket broke free of its moorings and thrust itself toward the stars, Zell thought of her name: Phoenix. Though pressed back into his couch by the excessive g-forces, Zell forced himself to look through the viewport as the blue of the firmament slowly evaporated into the darkness of space.
In your fires, he thought, we are reborn.
Chapter 10
June 26
7:17 p.m., Houston Time
3 days, 13 hours, 2 minutes, Mission Elapsed Time
The Tai-Ping glided through the vacuum of space with eerie silence. In the days since the crew had left Earth’s gravity, the trip had been remarkably free of incident. Benny and Moose had docked with the Copernicus with no trouble and had fired the rocket’s third stage to enter the lunar corridor, which would carry them the rest of the way to the Moon. From this point forward they were on a free-return trajectory, which would slingshot them around the Moon and back to Earth.
Aboard the ship, things had been less than cheerful. Donovan, though physically unaffected by the weightlessness, found his mind wandering along with his eyes to the tiny window, watching the Earth recede. Zell, on the other hand, spent much of his time wondering if a good cigar would cure his incessant nausea. His condition had made him ornery, leading him to perpetually lock horns with Donovan and Soong over how best to investigate the object. To make matters worse, none of them could agree on anything, switching sides so often in an argument that it became difficult to determine how they even got started. There had also been some tension between Yuen and Wilson, each one jockeying for the role of commander, but for the most part the two kept things civil, silently working their way through the day’s tasks. Yeoh remained similarly reticent, although not so much out of disdain as out of pure disinterest in the day-to-day machinations of the mission. He spent most of his time poring over data and telemetry scans, forever looking for clues to the puzzle that awaited them. That left Benny and Moose, who at times felt like audience members to the world’s most expensive soap opera. Luckily, there were enough tasks to keep them occupied, and Benny tried to face the situation with his usual good humor.
Whap!
“Son of a bitch!”
“Louder, Benny,” said Moose, not looking up from the lunar chart he was studying. “They didn’t hear you on Pluto.”
Benny floated down from where he had been trying to sleep, still rubbing his head where he had struck it on a bulkhead. “How the hell’d you ever learn to sleep in zero-g?”
“You find a way,” Moose offered. “Last time I was on the space station, one of the guys used to sleep with the EVA suits. He found that he could snuggle up against the arms and they’d just hug him tight. Me, I used to just free-float. You get used to it.”
“When?”
Moose looked at his friend with a half smile. “About a week after getting back home.”
“Tai-Ping, this is Houston, over.”
At the sound of John Dieckman’s voice, the astronauts on board sprang to attention.
“Houston, Tai-Ping. Go ahead,” answered Wilson.
“First off, I want to welcome you to the Moon. You’re officially in the influence.”
This marked a significant moment for the crew. They had officially crossed the boundary where the Moon and the Earth’s gravity balanced. From this point forward, the Moon was exerting the greater pull on their ship. Deke’s announcement was met with applause from the crew.
“Copy that, Houston,” said Wilson. “We’re happy to be here.”
“Okay, we’ve got you coming in at about four thousand feet per second, just shy of thirty thousand nautical miles from the Moon’s surface. We want you to start making your preparations for a slight midcourse correction. That’ll put you right on track.”
“Roger that, Houston,” said Moose.
“After that, we’ll let you coast for about fourteen hours or so before we light the service propulsion system for lunar orbit insertion.”
“Sounds good,” Wilson said, checking over some data. “With reference to the midcourse, we’re reading pitch and yaw at eight degrees and three hundred twenty-three degrees, respectively. Do you concur?”
“Roger that,” said Deke. “Since you’re using the reaction control system thrusters and not the SPS, your pitch and yaw factors shouldn’t change much.”
“Hey, Deke,” said Benny. “What’s the news like at home?”
Deke’s radioed sigh told them all they needed to know.
June 27
Camp David, Maryland
7:30 a.m.
The President of the United States stood outside Aspen Lodge, the presidential cabin at Camp David in the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland, enjoying the morning sun. She knew it would likely be the most peaceful moment she would have all day. During her time in office, she had come to love the presidential retreat—its security and isolation, its natural beauty, its cool mountain breezes. First used by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1942 as a way to escape the stifling summer heat in Washington, DC, the retreat was initially called Shangri-La after the mountain kingdom in James Hilton’s book Lost Horizon. Here, Roosevelt hosted British prime minister Winston Churchill in 1943 as the two men planned the Allied invasion of Europe during the Second World War. In 1953 President Dwight D. Eisenhower renamed the retreat Camp David for his grandson.
Ostensibly, presidents have come to Camp David for generations to relax. Since that first visit by Winston Churchill, however, it has also served as a place where many historic events have occurred, most notably the peace agreement between Israel and Egypt brokered by President Jimmy Carter.
The current occupant of the Oval Office hadn’t used the presidential retreat nearly as much as some of her predecessors. She much preferred the comforts of her own farm in North Carolina, but seeing as Camp David was about a half-hour helicopter ride from DC, it made sense to take her vacation here. By taking a respite now, she wanted to give the impression to her fellow Americans that the current crisis off the coast of Taiwan was of little concern. Little did they realize she had gotten only a few scant hours of sleep each night since the crisis began.
The sun lighted the peaks of the mountains in the east as she began hiking a trail with Aaron Stein. Hiking some feet behind them and several feet before them was the usual detail of Secret Service agents.
Stein hated Camp David. He hated the bugs and especially hated what the mountains did to his allergies. But when he received the latest intel from China, he gathered his medications and handkerchiefs and top-secret briefings and headed out into the morning gloom, where the President stood whacking the tall grass absentmindedly with a stick.
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