Asimov's SF, July 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  And so, with the Alpha's encouragement, the last night in that hotel room in Glendale, California, Joe shared the secret of the Aitken Coral.

  "You bastards!” the Politician said, only half kidding. “You realize how hard it is to sell the manned space program these days? You could have saved me a lot of work!"

  The Mystic was already chiming in, “You've got to get this out! My God, it would create a whole new paradigm!"

  At this, the Shark and the Businessman both guffawed. Joe couldn't tell which was the more contemptuous. What the hell was a “paradigm"?

  Before a vote-to-release by acclamation could be entered, the Preacher preached caution. “How do you know it's real?"

  The Aviator chimed in, too. “Have you had it tested?"

  The Visionary wanted to know where it was stashed. The Lifer, as usual, sat back in silence. There were other opinions—the Good Old Boy seemed to be on both sides of the matter.

  A show of hands left it 5-5.

  Joe turned to the Alpha, who said, “Guys, thank you. As Jeb Pruett used to say, whenever we bitched out our assignments, we'll ‘take that under advisement.’ We told you because we want your opinions. But the decision is ours. Joe?"

  Joe was indecently pleased. For the first time in their working relationship, Chuck Behrens had offered him a voice in a decision! “I say, sit on it for a while yet. Do some definitive tests. If it's really real, a few years’ delay won't matter. If it's not what we think, we'll save ourselves a world of shit."

  The Alpha concurred. The vote of the Apostles was 7-5 against.

  There never was another gathering of the twelve Apostles as a group. Somehow the Alpha always managed to cancel. And then death began to reduce their numbers.

  * * * *

  Herman Polski—the Politician—died much too young, felled by a heart attack in Texas three years later.

  * * * *

  Even at Aitken Base, Joe would still hear the question, “How did you find out you were going to the Moon?” They didn't realize it was a three-step answer. Number one, “The day I got the phone call from NASA telling me I'd been selected as an astronaut, and to get my ass to Houston by January fifteenth."

  Step two took place six years later. It was ten minutes before a Monday morning pilots’ meeting, two days after the Aviator and the Preacher splashed down from the first lunar landing on 501.

  Chuck Behrens motioned Joe into his office. “Jeb's going to announce me as backup commander for the third landing."

  "Congratulations.” Joe could not help thinking that every time another astronaut succeeded, he died a little.

  "Wanna go with me?"

  "As lunar module pilot?"

  "What else?"

  "Okay."

  Chuck raised an eyebrow. “You're a low-key son of a bitch, Joe. When I got my Gemini assignment I could have reached orbit without the rocket."

  "I've been waiting six years. My feeling is, ‘about fucking time.’”

  Step three was the least surprising. Joe and Chuck had spent a year backing up the Shark and the Mystic. Joe and Chuck were watching their splashdown (a bit tricky, since one of three parachutes collapsed) in mission control when Jeb Pruett turned to them and said, “You've got 506."

  That was when Joe could have reached orbit—or the Moon itself—without a rocket.

  But the key decision had been made earlier, when the Alpha invited him onto his crew. “One thing before we lock this in, old buddy. From this day on, you take orders from me."

  "Why wouldn't I take your orders?"

  Chuck laughed so hard his face flushed. “Joe, Joe, Joe ... the whole reason you're the right-fielder in this team is that you are too goddamn independent! And everybody knows it. Not insubordinate. You just obviously know more than the rest of us, and make sure whoever you're working for gets the message, too.

  "I can't have that. I will acknowledge right here and now that, based on I.Q. and all that good stuff, you should be my commander. Hell, you know more about the lunar module than anyone, including me. You've got a sci-fi kind of mind, which doesn't hurt, either. But from this point on, what I need from you is the certainty of blind obedience. If I tell you we're going direct from AUTO, you do it. If I tell you to strip down and take a shit on the White House lawn, you do it. If I'm wrong, and it is likely I will be wrong in some matters, it's my problem.

  "And if I get us killed, then either I wasn't the right guy to be commander, or the universe was against us. Either way, I want my last thought to be the knowledge that it was my doing.

  "I need you to be a tool. And never give me the idea you're thinking ahead of me, that you're dying to give me a brilliant out-of-your-ass suggestion."

  It took Joe Liquori all of two seconds to make up his mind, to change his whole personality and his destiny. “Okay."

  * * * *

  Jesse King, the Shark, commander of the troubled 503 mission where the lunar module ascent stage shut down early, forcing the command module to swoop down for an emergency rescue, died of lung cancer in 1990. “Good career move,” the Alpha said, perhaps unkindly. The Shark's financial career had caught up with him. Had he lived, he would have been prosecuted for fraud.

  * * * *

  In theory, the choice of landing site for the sixth mission had been made years back. From the relatively benign Sea of Tranquility and Ocean of Storms to more challenging highlands, like Fra Mauro and Hadley, the sites had been clicked off by the first missions. It looked as though Chuck and Joe were headed for Cayley Plains, until a program planning meeting attended by the center director, the program manager from HQ, science chief, twenty head sheds and horse-holders.

  And, uninvited, Chuck and Joe. They had been up in T-38s that morning, and Chuck had insisted they stay in their sweaty flight suits. And arrive ten minutes late.

  Dr. Rowe, the center director, noted their presence. “You guys take a wrong turn on the way to the simulator?"

  "Depends on what we hear here,” Chuck said, grabbing a pair of seats as close to the front as he could.

  Rowe, whose fatherly demeanor hid a precise engineering mind, glanced at General Shields, the nothing-like-fatherly Apollo program manager. Who simply said, “Let's have it, Chuck."

  Smiling, Chuck walked toward the map of the Moon and tapped his finger on Tranquility, Storms, Fra Mauro. “We've been here, here, and here. A year from now, we'll have been here, too."

  Then he removed the map from its easel and turned it over. There was nothing on the back. “That's funny, I'd always been taught that even though we couldn't see it, the Moon really had a Far Side.” Joe, the sci-fi reader, had told Chuck about an Asimov story that claimed precisely that.

  The meeting room was silent, except for the thump of General Shields’ pencil. “Your point, Colonel?"

  "By the time Apollo is done, we'll have spent twenty billion dollars and visited a fraction of half a world. The front half. The easy half. Is that what the president said? ‘We do these things because they are easy'?"

  The room erupted with protests, some emotional, some technical—"How do we relay comm from the back side?"—and even answers to the objections—"The Air Force has a bunch of small comsats sitting on the shelf in LA. We could put them in the service module on the next three landing missions—"

  Chuck knew he'd over-reached, but that was his style: ask for the Moon and take what you can get.

  Nothing changed—that day.

  Seven weeks later, NASA announced that the sixth and last lunar landing would attempt to reach Aitken Basin on the far side.

  * * * *

  Len Caskey, the flight surgeon turned test pilot, always known as The Doctor, died in 2007, six years after a debilitating stroke.

  * * * *

  It was only in the sleepless second night that they found the privacy to speak about their discovery. “Funny, isn't it?” Chuck said. “Three human beings within a quarter of a million miles—one of them in another spacecraft—and we're worried abo
ut being overheard."

  "Yeah. Funny."

  Chuck tapped his bare foot on the sample case. “What do you think it is?"

  "Pink coral."

  "Even something as basic as coral would be significant, wouldn't it? It's not, though. Not with those edges. Somebody made that."

  "Maybe it was somebody,” Joe said. “Maybe that was the body of a crystal alien."

  "You and that sci-fi mind of yours.” Chuck had closed his eyes. “All I know is, word gets out about this, lots of people are going to be pissing their pants."

  Joe didn't bother to tell Chuck that on seeing the Aitken Coral he had, indeed, filled his diaper.

  The third EVA was as routine as moon walks ever went. A few hours later, buttoned up in Pathfinder, they fired the ascent stage to begin the journey home.

  Once they'd docked to Conestoga and moved their samples and gear aboard, Joe swam into the LM for a last look before jettison.

  The entire weight of the mission, the secret, the training, his whole life landed on him. He started weeping.

  "Joe, you all right down there?” Don Berringer, their command module pilot, had seen him through the tunnel ... fetal, floating, shuddering with sobs.

  "Shut up, Don.” Chuck had seen it, too ... and gently pushed the hatch closed.

  Five minutes later Joe had calmed himself. He completed the close-out checklist, stashed the fecal waste bags Berringer had accumulated during his three days of orbital privacy, allowed himself one last look out Pathfinder's triangular window at the desperately desolate moonscape sliding past.

  Chuck floated into the module, closing the hatch behind him. “Ready to rock and roll?"

  "Yeah.” He noted a sample bag in Chuck's hand. “What's that?"

  "What do you think?"

  "What's it doing here?"

  "I've half a mind to leave it. Send it around the Sun for the next ten thousand years.” When separated from Conestoga, Pathfinder would be launched into a heliocentric orbit.

  Joe was still in absolute-obedience mode. “Copy that."

  Chuck laughed again. “I can't. But I don't want to broadcast the news, either. Not yet. Like they taught us in all those sims, when in doubt, do nothing. And let me tell you, my friend, I'm in serious doubt about what to do."

  "Then you better move it to the PPK.” PPKs were the astronauts’ personal preference kits, bags of family memorabilia, postal covers, and commemorative coins.

  Chuck winked and made a clicking sound, a sign of the highest approval.

  That was the extent of the discussion.

  * * * *

  The Good Old Boy, Floyd Brashear, died of prostate cancer in 2019.

  * * * *

  The PPKs turned out to be a bit of a problem. The post-flight check out included a weigh-in, which showed what NASA would call a “significant discrepancy,” which Chuck managed to alleviate by convincing those doing the weighing that he had stuck his EVA gloves in there. “Rather than throw them overboard, you follow?"

  Then he had turned around and thrown a regular fit in Jeb's office. Somehow, Chuck and Joe managed to walk out of the center with both PPKs—unopened.

  There was one question in the debrief. The Utah geologist edged up to the most recent moonwalkers at the coffee break to say, “Ah, say, did you guys ever get a look inside those hills in GSL?"

  "God, Nick, I'm so sorry. During that first dead zone we got within maybe ten feet of the son of a bitch. We were looking through the opening, weren't we, Joe?"

  "Right through it, Chuck."

  "Right at the mouth. But the soil looked a little loose and the walls a little tight and jagged, if you catch my drift.” And here Chuck lowered his voice and leaned in to the geologist. “I was afraid of falling on my dang face and, you know, ripping my suit. I didn't want to screw up like that with fifty million people watching."

  No ground-based science nerd was going to second-guess an astronaut in a situation like that—at least, not openly.

  And that had been the end of the inquiries.

  But not the end of the discussion.

  Five years later, when Joe made his first trip back to Houston as a civilian, to take his annual physical, he heard at the clinic that Chuck had come through earlier in the day. Naturally Chuck would be in Houston around the same time ... the target date for physicals was that shared birthday. Strangely, Chuck had left a message for him: meet me at ops at 0800 tomorrow.

  Ops was Ellington Air Force base five miles up the road, where NASA kept its fleet of aircraft. Somehow Chuck had convinced them to give him a T-38 for a hop ... with Joe.

  It was only when they were in the air, bouncing their way through the clouds of an approaching Gulf storm, that Chuck broke his usual radio silence: “Five hundred million years old."

  "What?"

  "That pink coral we found at Aitken? The mysterious object we found on the Moon and kept secret all these years? It's five hundred million years old."

  "That's really not old by lunar standards. Last I heard that thing was four billion years old. Or five."

  "Joe, that coral is from Earth."

  Through God knows how many contacts and cut-outs, Chuck had arranged for samples to be tested at three different facilities. Age, composition, carbon dating, all tests had the same result: it was just like material found on Earth's sea floor five hundred million years in the past.

  The knowledge changed nothing—Alpha and Omega kept their silence—but it did inform later discussions between the Apostles in various ways. Over the next thirty years, on his own and in conversation with like-minded souls such as the Visionary and, somewhat to Joe's surprise, the Shark and the Aviator, Joe developed a conceptual model of the entities who had left the pink coral at Aitken Basin.

  They were amphibious at least, possibly even aquatic.

  Earth in five hundred million BC—aside from being a blue-white sphere (as seen from the Moon)—would have been unrecognizable: the continents were still smushed together in some version of Gondwanaland. What would later be the Antarctic was ice-free—possibly even the home of the Beings.

  (Although a civilization robust enough to launch at least one flight to the Moon would logically require more than a single landmass. “Why?” the Shark said. “What is the basis for that conclusion?")

  The Visionary was more troubled by the lack of evidence of past civilizations. Here the Aviator showed an unexpected grasp of archaeology and geology. “How much of the land we see and excavate was above water that long ago?” Before the Visionary could suggest a ballpark figure, the Aviator had one: “Under 5 percent, maybe as little as 2 ... maybe zero.

  "And even if you had 5 percent of the Coral People's land still dry, suppose it was in the Andes? Or the middle of the Takla Makan?"

  "Or in Albania,” the Shark said, to general laughter.

  "One of the reasons we find any evidence of past civilization is that we're digging where we know they lived. Besides, these civilizations only existed during the past ten thousand years.

  "We seem to find dinosaurs,” the Visionary said, stubborn as always. (And, Joe remembered, from a Fundamentalist family.)

  "By accident,” Joe said. “And keep in mind ... the oldest dinosaur—Cambrian Era—is only half as far back as these Beings lived."

  "At a minimum,” the Shark added.

  "But we do find fossils from that era, long before the dinosaurs. And they're all small. Shouldn't we find, hell, I don't know ... pottery? A fork? The equivalent of an oil rig or even a temple?"

  "I did a rough calculation on this,” Joe said. “You know how Heinlein said, ‘The surface of the Moon has an area equal to the continent of Africa. Our missions have explored a neighborhood in Cape Town'?

  "If you just assume that the surface area of our Coral People civilization was the continent of Antarctica, which is surely too small, we have turned soil in less area than Vostok, Byrd, and the other half dozen South Pole stations cover: about a hundred square miles."


  "Ultimately, though, it's a matter of belief. Based on admittedly skimpy—"

  "—One sample? Yeah, that's taking the word skimpy and giving it a good squeeze—"

  "—evidence, we believe the Moon was visited by terrestrials at least half a billion years before you two."

  "Or the rest of us.” Shark always liked to remind people that Apollo was a program, not a single event like Lindbergh's flight.

  "I'm completely comfortable with that statement,” the Visionary said. “Which makes it the discovery of the Epoch! Like Noah's Ark or a piece of the True Cross! Why not make it public?"

  "Because Chuck and I are still concerned about what it would do to the program.” Here Joe extended his hand to the Shark. “Shuttle's flying, space station program is in the works, lunar exploration's on the drawing boards.

  "Right now things are fine! It's like being on flight status when you go to see the doctor—the only thing you can do is make it worse."

  Mention of flight surgeons, especially in the absence of the Doctor, won the day.

  Joe almost believed it.

  * * * *

  The Aviator died of a brain tumor in Seattle, 1994.

  * * * *

  In April 1998, Joe arrived in Houston for another physical, checking into the Kings Inn right outside the Johnson Space Center gate. He found a blinking light on his room phone with a message from Chuck—good old Alpha—inviting Omega aka Joe to his house that evening.

  In all their time together, Joe had never been in the Alpha's house. It wasn't an issue: Joe felt the two had seen enough of each other to last two lifetimes.

  The Alpha and his third wife, Laurie, had a three-bedroom condo on an inlet of the misnamed Clear Lake ("neither clear nor a lake") in a gated community developed by the Shark himself.

  In spite of his blue suit, flyboy background, the Alpha had taken up sailing, buying a forty-foot sloop which he named 506. After a suitable number of drinks, a round of sea stories, they headed out.

  The first thing to become clear was that for a natural aviator and astronaut—literally a sailor of the stars—the Alpha was a total landlubber. Joe, of course, was no better, preferring water in swimming pools or ice chests. His sole advantage was that he didn't pretend to be a sailor.