Asimov's SF, July 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  In Lithuanian.

  I took a stab at “naujo pirkejo registracija,” which surely was a link for new registrations, and my guess was a happy one. What came up was a series of boxes that looked just like any other website's new-registration form, except that the captions were incomprehensible. The first line asked for “prisjungimo vardas,” the second wanted my “slaptazodis,” and a third line requested my “pakartoti slaptazodis.” Feeling something like Champollion deciphering hieroglyphics, I concluded that I was being asked to pick a username, then a password, and to repeat my password. Yes! Onward now to my “vardas"—name?—and “pavarde"—address? Bluffing wildly, I filled out the whole registration form, clicked, and was overjoyed to find that I was now qualified to buy books from Lithuania. A few more desperate clicks in the dark and I was at a recognizable credit-card page, where it was not really hard to figure out where to enter my Visa number, etc.

  Reader, I bought the book. Two weeks later I had my very own copy of Robert Silverberg's Zmogus Labirinte. It is a joy to possess it. I find something wondrous in the sound of my own prose in Lithu-anian. Gregory Benford, if you are reading this, be advised that the same procedure will get you a copy of your novel Didzioji Dangaus Upi, which is advertised in the back of my book.

  My venture into darkest Lithuania was the most dangerous of my forays in quest of my foreign editions. For all I knew, I was buying not only my own book with that blind click but hundreds of others from the same publisher, though that was not what happened. By comparison, my purchases from France, Germany, and Spain were sheer simplicity. The Dutch ones were tricky but not beyond my abilities, though it took some patience, as I will eventually relate. In Israel and Bulgaria, where not only can't I speak the language, I can't even read it, I was spared the need for wrestling with mysterious alien websites, because kind English-speaking friends there bought the books for me. I've had the same sort of assistance in Hungary and the Czech Republic. And in Italy—ah, but there's no room here for the details of how I got my Italian books.

  I hope you find this as interesting as I do, because I'm going to continue it next issue.

  Copyright © 2009 Robert Silverberg

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Short Story: THE LAST APOSTLE by Michael Cassutt

  Just in time to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the first Moon landing, Michael Cassutt brings us a nostalgic look at the space program that could have been. The author's most recent projects include work on the upcoming Activision video game Singularity, and developing a novel/film project with David S. Goyer (co-screenwriter of Batman Begins). In the last few months, Michael has had two articles on the space program in Air & Space magazine, and a third is on the way. In his spare time, he teaches television writing and production at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts.

  Nothing is concealed that will not be revealed, nor secret that will not be known.—Matthew 10:26

  * * * *

  "Heart attack?"

  "No. Took a spill on his mountain bike. Hit a patch of sand barreling down some crappy road up near Flagstaff."

  Spell-check smoothed the errors of the e-mail exchange while failing to add texture or emotion. Nevertheless, Joe Liquori could not help smiling at the inescapable perfection of the news. Chuck Berens’ death had all the elements of his life: the outdoors, excess speed, and a total disregard for other people's rules and expectations.

  For God's sake, Chuck had been eighty-nine last April thirteenth. (The birth date was easy to remember; he and Joe shared it, three years apart.). Joe could not possibly have gotten his ancient ass onto a mountain bike, much less ridden it up, around or down some twisty road.

  "He was a good man,” he typed, as tears came to his eyes and his breathing quickened. Thank God this was text, not voice. These sudden, uncontrollable swells of emotion had afflicted Joe for forty years. But they still annoyed him.

  "It's okay, Dad.” Jason, his son, was fifty-nine, with children and grandchildren of his own: did he find himself growing more teary?

  "Is there going to be a service?” Not that there was any chance Joe would be able to attend.

  "Family says only a private memorial. Possibly going to want his ashes on the Moon.” Jason added an emoticon for irony.

  "So I'm the last one."

  "And the best.” Thank you for that, son. Joe logged off with a goodbye for now, then sat back.

  There had been twelve of them on the six lunar landing missions. Twelve who experienced the terrifying, exhilarating, barely controlled fall from sixty miles altitude to the gunpowder gray dust of the lunar surface. Twelve who opened a flimsy metal door to a harsh world of blinding sunlight. Twelve who had the explorer's privilege of uttering first words. Twelve who left footprints where no one had gone before.

  More accurately, twelve who, years later, would experience trouble with eyes, heart, hands, lungs, all traceable to time spent slogging across the lunar surface wearing a rigid metallic cloth balloon. Twelve who bathed in varying degrees of acclaim while suffering varying degrees of guilt over those who died along the way—and those who did the real work on the ground.

  Twelve Apostles, according to that stupid book.

  Joe knew them all, of course. There was the Aviator—the classic American kid from the heartland, standing outside a grass airfield watching planes take off ... the Preacher, the reformed drunkard and womanizer who found Jesus not on the Moon, not during the death march of booze and babes that followed, but years later after, a bumpy airplane ride as a passenger ... the Visionary, who used his lunar celebrity to give unjustified weight to everything from spoon-bending to geomancy...

  There was the Businessman, and his shadier, less successful twin, the Shark. The Mystic. The Doctor. The Politician. The Good Old Boy. The Lifer.

  Then, as always, there was the Alpha Male of Apollo—Chuck Behrens.

  Joseph Liquori, ninety-four, lunar module pilot for Apollo 506 and known, by the same scheme, as Omega—the Last Apostle—sipped his carefully rationed vodka and let himself weep, for a fallen comrade and an old friend, and for himself.

  * * * *

  An hour later, Joe decided to take a walk.

  This was not a casual decision. He had reached a stage in his life where exiting his living quarters required preparation. The facility he now called home provided him with a tiny bedroom and shared common area, roughly the same living space he had as a graduate student in Minneapolis’ Dinky Town in the 1950s. He could afford better—a palace in northern California, with vistas, gardens, rows of books, servants, and possibly a big-breasted “nurse."

  In fact, Joe had once possessed a mansion as well as several attractive, attentive nurses. But the nurses were gone, and the palace in Marin County had already been torn down, another lesson in the ephemeral nature of earthly existence. Or so the Preacher had informed Joe, the last time they shared a meal.

  In order to take a walk, Joe faced the usual agonizing hygienic and mechanical procedures typical of advanced age—the mechanisms to assure continence, the visual and aural aids, the medical monitoring hardware, all bringing to mind the phrase he had over-used since his arrival: “It's easier to walk on the Moon than it is to walk down my driveway."

  He was not required to get permission, but it was always smart to have help. Kari Schiff, the fresh-faced pixie from Kansas who called herself Joe's “co-pilot,” didn't think he should be going outside at all.

  Until he told her about the Alpha's death. “Then let me come with you,” she said.

  "I won't be going far.” It wasn't a big lie, by NASA astronaut standards.

  "You're sure?” Kari looked at her two colleagues, Jeffords and Bock. Bock had medical training, but he was also a passionate Libertarian. Any doubts about Joe's ability to take a walk in these circumstances were subordinate to his conviction that each man had the inalienable right to chose the time and place of his death.

  Not that a walk would necessarily be fatal
. “Okay,” Kari said, “let's put on your armor."

  The “armor” was an EVA suit, a rigid exo-skeleton that split in two at the waist, and in the best of circumstances could never be donned by a single person working alone. Especially not a man in his nineties, even if said senior was working in lunar gravity. Checking the life-support fittings and operation took more time.

  Finally Joe was buttoned up, much as he had been that day in April 1973, when he had emerged from the front hatch of the lunar module Pathfinder on the Apollo 506 mission.

  Five hours after receiving the instant message from his son about the Alpha's death, Joe Liquori emerged from the thirty-foot tall habitat (nicknamed the Comfort Inn) that he shared with three other astronauts at Aitken Base, on the far side of the Moon, to complete the last mission of Apollo.

  * * * *

  The Preacher died of age-related illnesses at a facility in Colorado Springs in 2011.

  * * * *

  The names had been bestowed on them by Maxine Felice, a famously confrontational Swiss journalist who tracked them relentlessly for a decade, ultimately publishing a controversial bestseller called The Apostles. (Chuck hated the title, as he made clear to Joe the next time they met. “Apostles? Remember what happened to those guys? Crucified upside down? Boiled in oil? No, thanks!")

  Felice had persisted: it was no coincidence, she said, that their number was twelve. “Our mission is slightly different,” the Aviator had said. “And so is the God we serve."

  The woman dismissed that. “What is Apollo if not a god?"

  Joe's agreement with Aitken Enterprises entitled him to a ninety-day stay with “possible” extensions. In truth, the company's laughable inability to maintain a regular launch schedule ensured at least one automatic “extension” to 180. And when an earlier Aitken Station crewmember required return to earth soonest, Joe offered to buy his seat; his hand-picked crew ops panel magically agreed; and Aitken's cash flow problems eased for a month.

  On the day the Alpha Apostle ran off that road in Arizona, Joe Liquori was in his 196th day at Aitken Base, where his time was largely spent blogging to the public—and telling sea stories. (The station trio especially loved the “true” story behind the Mystic's death.)

  Kari Schiff, the real space cadet of the three, even played the Maxine Felice game, asking Joe, “If you guys were the Apostles, what are we?"

  "'The three who can't find ice?'” Bock said, sneering. “Weren't they in the Letter to the Corinthians?” Jeffords howled with laughter as Kari punched him in the arm. It was true that the Aitken team had yet to find significant water ice, the primary goal of the whole enterprise. But they had found traces, and they continued to search, spending most of their time preparing for each EVA, then actually performing the ten-hour job in armor, then recovering. They were lucky to accomplish two cycles every eight days.

  In between, they managed the Virtual Moonwalks, driving mini-rovers across the surface to give paying customers back on Earth their own Aitken Experience. Now and then they made test runs of the processing gear from the Ops Shack, a second habitat connected to the Comfort Inn by an inflatable tunnel.

  Emerging from the habitat, Joe ran through the perfunctory communications checks, which ended with a question from Kari: “So, just in case anyone asks ... where are you headed?"

  "Where else?” he said. “Where Pathfinder landed."

  * * * *

  Robert Temple, the Lifer, died of a heart attack in Orlando, Florida, in 2008. He had stayed with NASA after Apollo and commanded three Shuttle missions.

  * * * *

  Joe had come back to the Moon in order to revisit a key moment in his own life that, based on other accounts, he either misremembered or missed altogether. He likened himself to a paratrooper from the 101st Airborne returning to Normandy fifty years after D-Day.

  It was possible, of course, that the discovery he and the Alpha made on their second EVA had distorted the experience for him.

  Whatever the reason, his only firm memories of those three days on the Moon were constant nervousness about the timeline, dull fear, total exhaustion. The fear started with the hiccup of the lunar module's descent engine during pitchover—so anomalous that it caused cool, calm Chuck Berens, the Alpha Apostle, to turn his head inside his fishbowl helmet, eyes wide with alarm, mouthing a simple, expressive, “Wow."

  But, in classic Alpha fashion, doing nothing. The engine resumed full thrust and the landing proceeded and, powered by adrenaline and relief, the two astronauts zoomed through their checklist to their first EVA. (Chuck's first words were, “Hey, Mom and Dad, look at me.” Then Joe's more mundane, “A lovely day for a walk.")

  Even though there were three relay satellites in orbit around the Moon the day Alpha and Omega landed, comm from the far side was still intermittent. Nevertheless, the first seven-hour jaunt went by the numbers. Flag erected. Rover deployed. Scientific instruments sited.

  After what turned out to be twenty hours of wakefulness and extreme stress, neither astronaut needed a sleeping pill to sack out in the cramped, uncomfortable Pathfinder.

  The next day—the public relations ceremonies and contingency sampling behind them—they were able to board the rover quickly and be on the road, just the way the Alpha loved to fire up a T-38 aircraft and bolt into the Texas sky. This was to be their long traverse, if circumstances and terrain permitted, reaching a straight-line distance from Pathfinder of six kilometers. ("Close enough so we can walk back if the rover conks on us.")

  The target location was known as Great Salt Lake, named by a geologist from Utah. GSL was a kidney-shaped mini-mare a kilometer wide and three high, marked by a rich variety of clustered craters and crevasses.

  By the three-hour point of the EVA, the astronauts were deploying instruments at the first of their two planned stops when they faced a forty-minute gap in the link to Houston. The Alpha said, “Hey, Joe, let's hike over there."

  There was a shadowed cleft in a rock face a dozen meters high, about fifty meters to the south. It appeared to be the mouth of a cave in the low hills inside GSL. Joe knew it, of course. His memory for the Aitken Basin Site was photographic. The passage was narrow, jagged, but did not lead to a cave, just an open area the geologists called the Atrium.

  Had the Alpha asked, “What do you think?” Joe would have said, Every minute of this EVA has been planned. This site is one the geologists have been aching to visit for a decade. And we're supposed to take a spelunkingdetour? But the question was never offered.

  The Alpha entered first, stopped (a bit of a trick, given his high center of gravity and forward momentum) and said, “See anything?"

  "What am I looking for?"

  "Color. Anything but black or gray."

  "What, some kind of oxidized soil? Shit.” Here Joe slipped and fell to his hands. Even with the suit and life-support pack, which together weighed more than he did, he was easily able to push himself back to standing without help.

  "This guy I know at JPL saw a flash of color in a single frame of film that he was processing.” Chuck stopped and turned left, then right, sweeping with his hand, each motion severely constrained by the suit. “Here."

  Joe blinked. Then raised his mylarized visor to give himself an unfiltered look. “You mean there."

  Joe wasn't sure what he'd seen—a flash of pink, just as likely the result of some fast-moving solar particle ripping through his optic nerve—but he felt compelled to check it out. Hell, this was the one un-programmed moment in all of the Apollo EVAs. Enjoy it!

  They hopped and shuffled toward the shadowed face of a boulder the size of a bus. “Maybe it's ice,” Chuck said.

  In the shadows, protected by a shelf of granite for God knew how many thousands, millions, possibly billions of years, was what looked to Joe to be a jumbled collection of pink pillars and related rubble—like the ruins of a Roman villa seen on a college trip to Herculaneum.

  The substance had flat surfaces ... not just crystalline facets, though
even in the first adrenalized flush of discovery he was ready to consider that it might be natural. But each time he blinked, breathed, and counted, the material looked ... artificial. Certainly it was like nothing they expected to find on the lunar surface. (Years later, seeing the destruction of the planet Krypton in the first Superman movie, Joe would literally stand up in the theater, thinking he was looking at the Aitken Coral.)

  The Alpha broke the silence. “How much longer to AOS?” Acquisition of signal, the return of contact with mission control.

  "Seven minutes."

  "Let's get a sample. And mum's the word."

  Joe wanted to scream in protest. Yes, they were already off the reservation as far as NASA knew. Why jeopardize the rest of their timeline by lobbing this particular grenade into the flight plan? When in doubt, do nothing. There would be time to look at this stuff when they returned to Pathfinder. Then, if it warranted, they could tell mission control—and return here on their third EVA.

  But this could be the discovery of the ages! Something that justified the entire Apollo program!

  Nevertheless, three years of training—twenty-five years of following orders—overcame all other impulses. Joe simply swallowed and reached for his tools.

  They quickly hammered off several faceted pieces and scooped up the rubble. “Interesting,” Joe said, knowing he might be overheard, “the hard stuff flakes like mica, but the rubble is like coral."

  "Houston, 506, comm check.” Chuck made the call in the clear, and also as a warning. Don't say anything. You work for me.

  The Businessman disappeared off the coast of Florida in 1999.

  All twelve Apostles met in the same room for the first time—post-Apollo—during interviews for the follow-up documentary to Felice's book. Nine years had smoothed out the old rivalries. They had dinner together, played golf in a trio of foursomes, stayed up late drinking and telling what the Alpha always called sea stories.

  Thanks to his newfound prominence as chairman of the board of X Systems, Joe noticed that the others—especially the Good Old Boy and the Shark, who in Houston never seemed to know Joe's name—actually gave him leave to speak.