Adrift on the Sea of Rains (Apollo Quartet)

by Sales, Ian

  Yet still he believes escape is possible.

  Peterson had only three weeks left of his tour when Kendall arrived at Falcon Base, although he’d known of the man’s arrival for several weeks in advance, and he’d repeatedly argued the Moon was not the place for a scientist, that if his experiments were so vital to national defence they needed to be somewhere secure, the Moon’s only defence being its remoteness. There was little stopping the Soviets launching one of their Proton boosters, sending a warhead all the way to Mare Imbrium and creating a new crater right where Falcon Base lay buried in the wall of Rima Hadley. After all, the situation was getting real bad down there, Peterson could see that even from his distant eyrie—no, nothing in orbit yet, no rain of ICBMs, horizon to horizon, rocketting East to West, immediately answered with a retaliatory launch, speeding West to East. No ten minute warning, no classrooms silent but for the whimpering of kids huddled beneath their school-desks, no slamming hatches echoing across yards as people waited for the end in inadequate fall-out shelters—it had not gone that far yet; but NORAD had been at Defcon 2 for the last five months, and there was fighting in Anatolia between Soviet forces and NATO-backed Kurdish rebels, and it was only a matter of time before the rest of NATO pitched in and the battle spread north along the Iron Curtain. Vandenberg claimed they’d spot any warhead launched on TLI, and they’d give Peterson plenty of warning, which didn’t answer what they’d do at Falcon Base after an alert—hide in the Apennine Mountains? in the depths of Archimedes Crater? learn to breathe vacuum and live off the regolith? There were a dozen men at the base but only a single ALM with an ascent stage—which could lift four into orbit and, now they were using the new Block IV 5-man command modules, they could get those four back to Earth in one spacecraft. But it didn’t take a rocket scientist to see the math didn’t add up. For all those hours Peterson had spent in classrooms at JSC and the Cape and Vandenberg, learning his way round the Apollo spacecraft and Falcon Base, he’d travelled to the Moon as much on faith as on Aerozine 50 and dinitrogen tetroxide, on an unshakeable conviction that if it all went SNAFU on the Moon, Vandenberg would do their damnedest to get every man home. Once he was on Luna, of course, he saw the error of his ways—if it broke on the Moon, you fixed it on the Moon, you couldn’t send it off to the repairman a quarter of a million miles away—if you didn’t fix it, you died. That wasn’t the case for the equipment they sent with Kendall for his experiments; if that broke there’d be a nasty bill for the Pentagon, but no one was going to find themselves sucking vacuum, which was a relief, except… The Bell was a Saturn V launch all its own, a LM Truck that could have, and should have, carried supplies—though they had close to two years’ worth on hand in Falcon Base. The one hundred kilowatt SP-100 nuclear reactor was good for twenty years, and they recycled their air and water so effectively both would last them years too; but food, that was the problem, if it could be called food, all freeze-dried or flash-frozen and about as appetising as a Pan-American economy class meal consumed somewhere over the Atlantic in a Boeing 2707 SST. As commander, Peterson felt it incumbent on him to be there to see Kendall land, so he was outside in his spacesuit, with lunar dust all over his boots and shins, as the ALM came hurtling over the horizon, the most ungainly flying craft he had ever seen and each time he saw it in flight the same thought struck him anew. As it approached, it pitched up and began to descend, throwing out a pancake cloud of grey dust, and it all happened in complete and utter silence, an absence of noise broken only by the steady hum of the fans and pumps of his PLSS, and not the rocket’s red roar his eyes told him he should be hearing. They got Kendall out of the ALM—he’d bought Alden and Neubeck with him, and he needed their help getting prepped for EVA and then moving about in the one-sixth gravity—and Peterson knew with the sort of sinking feeling brought on when reading orders written by some asshole with no situational awareness, he knew they’d skimped on Kendall’s training and the man was going to be a liability. Then the LM Truck flew over the horizon at two hundred feet, pitched over from twenty degrees to vertical, and began its computerised descent on its invisible flame, and, sitting on its cargo platform, was some bell-shaped thing that looked so unlike anything Peterson had ever seen before, he knew it had to be Kendall’s. When he later found out what the Bell was, he wondered just how bad it was on Earth, just how desperate was the Pentagon. This was ultra-deep black, not even the President’s advisors knew, but Vandenberg had to tell Peterson something, especially when he saw the small swastika and eagle embossed on the Bell, and Kendall later admitted the device was over forty years old and had been discovered in a Nazi underground facility in Silesia at the end of the Second World War. Kendall himself had been working on it for the last twenty years, mostly up at Montauk on Long Island, with the surviving members of the Project Rainbow team, who had apparently done weird shit with a destroyer in Philadelphia in 1943. It was Kendall’s contention the “torsion field generator” could only fulfil its potential in vacuum, so the Pentagon had moved his entire project, lock, stock and Bell, to the Moon, even though he’d never wanted to come in the first place. And Peterson gazed at this professor of exotic physics, a man who made Tesla look like a high school science teacher, and then looked out the window in the lab at the Bell sitting in its framework in the bottom of Rima Hadley, all a-glow violet, and he thought, he was here on the Moon and it had all turned into goddamned science fiction.

  Five more evolutions and the Earth still throws its unforgiving silver gaze down upon the Moon, as the Moon itself had once looked down upon the Earth. They’ve tried further back in time, as Kendall proposed, selecting decision nodes they remembered from the newspapers of their youth.

  To no avail.

  Peterson stalks the corridor which stretches the length of Falcon Base—as much as he can stalk in Velcro slippers and one-sixth gravity. Frustration sweeps through him, and he swings out an arm at the nearest locker, relishing the impact of his fist on the metal. In the gym, he pushes himself until his arms and legs burn, until even the weak lunar gravity seems to drag heavily on his aching muscles.

  Needing the wide-open monochrome vistas of the surface, he goes EVA. He walks along the edge of the Apennine Front—it’s more of a jog, bouncing from side to side, sliding one foot forward and then the other—and doesn’t stop until he is past the last of the tyre tracks made by Apollo 15’s LRV. Falcon Base, the garden of descent stages on the Sea of Rains, both are lost to view, hidden behind a soft feminine shoulder of the mountains. He is in a desert, leached of life and colour, and not even the star-speckled blackness above can offer anything but emptiness within and without.

  He turns back while he has enough air in the PLSS to return.

  Scott makes no comment, just vacuums the grey dust from the spacesuit in tight-lipped silence.

  On his next watch, Peterson sits at his desk and gazes at McKay at the radio. Neither has spoken. They came on duty, relieving Alden and Fulton, and silently took their places; and they have said nothing since. It occurs to Peterson that he is as isolated within Falcon Base as he is out on Mare Imbrium. But it is not the solitude of EVA which draws him, it is the sense of safety he feels when wrapped in his spacesuit’s nurturing cocoon. No matter which way he looks—to the west, across the Palus Putredinus; or north towards the LMs on the Sea of Rains—whichever direction, his view is framed by the LEVA of his helmet. He cannot fully engage with the lunar landscape because he is forever shielded from it. His fingers will never feel in situ the fine cordite dust of the regolith; his face will never experience the pure beat of the sun’s rays. Though he lives here, Peterson will never be of the Moon.

  His reverie is cut short by a rhythmic rip-rip-rip from the chamber below. Peterson has grown to hate that noise. It is as irritating as McKay endlessly clicking the end of his pen. But unlike McKay’s pen, he cannot demand it cease.

  Kendall’s head appears in the hatch from below. He halts once his shoulders are above floor-level, scowls at Peterson, and then pull
s the rest of his body into the command centre. He crosses to Peterson, walking like a man much stouter.

  I think I can do it, he says, still with that scowl on his face.

  Peterson remembers no promises from their last conversation. He recalls only bluster and excuses. When Kendall first arrived at Falcon Base, Peterson mistook his arrogance for assurance, but after two years of the man he knows now that the scientist operates the Bell as much on guesswork as he does using the scientific method.

  I can get us further, says Kendall, it’s going to take more watts so we’ll need to power down some of the base.

  It’s almost Pavlovian the way Peterson responds to Kendall: his beard, his air of petulant intellectualism, his unfitness for the space programme, his very presence here. Every time the man opens his mouth, Peterson finds himself fighting a rising tide of anger. It is happening now.

  Like what? demands Peterson. You think there’s systems here we don’t need and you can just switch off? The air you breathe, the water you drink, the food you eat, the light you see by, the heat that stops you freezing to death—we need power for all of it. If we power down the monitoring equipment, maybe turn off a few lights, we’re going to save maybe a handful of watts, but that thing of yours out in the rille drinks goddamned kilowatts.

  I need more power, Kendall insists mulishly.

  Then you magic up some goddamned power, Peterson replies, and you use that.

  Although his watch is not over, Peterson pushes past the scientist and crosses to the hatch in the command centre’s floor. He steps onto the first rung of the ladder, grabs the coaming, and swings himself down into the suiting up area below. As he walks along the corridor towards his room, the noise of his slippers rip-rip-rip-ripping from the carpet fuels his rage. He stops as vertigo swoops through him and sets the corridor rolling. Putting a hand to the wall, and reassured by the touch of plastic against his palm, he sucks in a deep breath. Air fills his lungs and his panic begins to ebb. He feels thick-headed, his anger gone as swiftly as it came—but what remains is smothered, wrapped about by a blanket. He reaches up and drags a hand back along the side of his head, and the pressure of his palm against his skull, the friction of the heel of his hand, brings him back into himself.

  After he has slowed his breathing, Peterson continues on his way to his bunk. Passing the wardroom, he hears an abrupt clatter. He stops. The next scheduled meal-time is not for hours. They all decided long before to eat their rations in front of each other. Mutual suspicion is their best defence against temptation.

  Peterson slides open the door and steps into the room.

  There are two tables in the wardroom—one to the left and one to the right. Each table sits three to a side on benches. Behind each table are store cupboards and a microwave. Sitting to Peterson’s left, his back to the door, is First Lieutenant Ed Neubeck, USAF. He is bent over a metal bowl, a spoon halfway to his mouth. His shoulders are hunched; he does not move.

  Peterson stares at the back of Neubeck’s head, at his unkempt hair. The rage returns. It is not Neubeck’s stealing of food that angers him, it is that the man has let himself go. He is unshaven, and his hair has grown to his collar and is unwashed and uncombed.

  The hand holding the spoon begins to shake.

  What the hell is this? demands Peterson.

  Neubeck puts down his spoon. It strikes his bowl with a brittle clang. He says nothing.

  Stepping further into the wardroom, Peterson puts a hand to Neubeck’s shoulder and hauls back. The man turns boneless beneath his grip, seems to both fold and straighten.

  If you steal food then you don’t get to goddamn eat at meal-times, Peterson says.

  His hand is still on Neubeck’s shoulder, and he pulls it away as if he has inadvertently grabbed something unclean or dead. He feels an urgent need to wipe his palm but resists.

  I was hungry, Neubeck mumbles.

  Until this moment, Neubeck has seemed to orbit Peterson’s world rather than dwell within it. Their paths cross only at meal-times—and even then, the nine of them might as well be in separate rooms. They do not talk to each other; they do not meet each other’s gaze. Outside the wardroom, they are on different watches—and they do not rotate because they are comfortable with their watch partners.

  This is the first time he has taken a good look at Neubeck in weeks. Perhaps longer. He remembers the resentment he’d harboured when Neubeck was first assigned to Falcon Base. The man is a gifted pilot but lacks discipline. It says so in his record. He should never have been invited to join the astronaut corps. He is lazy, he makes mistakes; and he relies on his aw-shucks country-boy charm to evade their consequences.

  I see you in here again for the next two days, says Peterson, and you get nothing for a week.

  Hey, I gotta eat, protests Neubeck. You cain’t give me no food for two whole days.

  Peterson feels himself enveloped, the enclosing air-bladder of an A7LB about him, his view constricted by helmet and LEVA. The whisper of fans fills his ears. He is here but in a world of his own. He cannot be touched and nothing can touch him. He reaches out and puts a hand to the back of Neubeck’s head. It is not his palm and fingers which touches the man’s greasy hair, but a glove’s. He forces Neubeck’s head forward and down with a sudden savage thrust. The man’s face hits the bowl before him. Neubeck yells, the bowl tips and in slow motion spills its contents to one side on the table-top.

  Neubeck swears and jerks back his head. He twists to look up at Peterson. His forehead is cut, a line of red across his brow, like a thief’s brand. Stew drips from the end of his nose, is painted across one cheek.

  Peterson steps back. His spacesuit will protect him—might as well hit a man in armour. Neubeck pulls himself up from the bench, but slows and comes to a halt.

  Peterson moves to one side. Neubeck swears once again, and then leaves the wardroom.

  In the now-empty room, the illusion Peterson is wearing a spacesuit abruptly vanishes. He wipes his hand against his leg, but the corruption smeared across his palm will need fiercer scrubbing. He wonders briefly what came over him, but it’s not something he wishes to think too hard about. He steps out into the corridor, slides the door to the wardroom shut, and continues on his way.

  Peterson arrives at his cabin. He lies down on his bunk and throws an arm across his eyes. Against the black of his closed eyelids, he sees the lunar horizon, an undulating line of ash-grey snow, and above it the insubordinate Earth.

  He was not so blasé he would fall asleep waiting for the launch, during the frequent delays, or even during the countdown itself, as some astronauts had done. Peterson still felt a keen anticipation, an eager expectancy of that inexorable push, of the rocket’s muted thunder, seeing the console before him vibrate until it blurred. It was a suspense tempered with apprehension, a foreknowledge of the slow build-up of Gs, the Earth’s reluctance to let him depart, pulling him back with such force his chair creaked and groaned beneath him as he suffered under his own increasing weight. And then that moment of vertigo, of abrupt revelatory lucidity, as the crushing acceleration suddenly ceased and he was thrown forward against his straps, only to snap back as if kicked in the chest, as the first stage dropped away and the S-II ignited. That one point in the trip to orbit, on every launch he had made, sparked the realisation he’d been sitting on 363 feet of explosive, equivalent to over half a kiloton of TNT, that he was being propelled into the air by nearly eight million pounds of thrust. Rocket travel was not safe—there had been remarkably few accidents, and there were countless back-up systems, but when something went wrong, it did so catastrophically. Now Peterson was in orbit and he no longer felt contact with the seat beneath him and his arms were floating above his seat’s arm-rests seemingly of their own accord. The CMP set about removing his spacesuit, and a pair of gloves and the polycarbonate bowl of an upturned helmet drifted past Peterson like one of those moments in a Tex Avery cartoon seconds before calamity strikes. On this taxi mission to the Moon, the
CMP captained the spacecraft, since Peterson and Curtis, the third astronaut, were only along for the ride; nor would they be returning, at least not for six months—newly-promoted Colonel Vance Peterson, USAF, had been given command of Falcon Base, the USA’s only settlement on the Moon, located near the landing site of Apollo 15, the fourth mission to land on the lunar surface back in July 1971. The Soviets had nothing like Falcon Base, were unlikely to ever put a man on the Moon, though he had heard they’d come close once—but their N-1 booster, which was nearly as big and powerful as a Saturn V, had been plagued with problems and never flew. Of course, they had other problems now, or rather they had changed priorities and perhaps looked to other solutions to the problem a Moon landing might well have solved; and this time the Soviets were determined to succeed, and their brinksmanship had already spilled over into bloodshed. They’d been sending supersonic bombers over the North Pole for decades—Peterson himself had intercepted a number of them—and reconnaissance aircraft over US fleets, and sneaking nuclear submarines into US and European waters, but in space they were falling behind fast and they knew it, their technology, their engineering, wasn’t up to the job. After finally subduing Iraq and now in control of its oilfields, much to the world’s embarrassment, the Russians had manufactured an excuse in West Germany, and moved across the border in force; and Peterson had heard about it and wished he was back in TAC so he could go head to head against Soviet fighter pilots and prove who had the right stuff and who would be falling to Earth in flames. But it was all over in a week, hundreds left dead, black smoke over Hannover and Magdeburg, the burnt-out wrecks of main battle tanks in fields that once held wheat but they’d never be beaten into ploughshares. They’d dared not call it a war, though the border was back where it had been before, only this time drawn with the blood of servicemen, this time a barricade “they shall not pass”, and Peterson looking down on it from high above, so high that nations and manifest destinies blurred into a palimpsest of geography and history. But that was then and this was now, so he turned away from the spacecraft’s window and looked down his floating length, knowing that after Trans Lunar Insertion he’d spend two days in this sealed chamber, hurtling at near 25,000 miles per hour towards the Moon. He’d be kept busy, as this spacecraft needed constant monitoring and adjustment, via twenty-six panels of switches, dials, meters and circuit breakers, a console thirteen feet wide and three feet high. Peterson was eager to learn the routine of living on the Moon, to discover the demands it made on a person, to expand his horizons and stretch his envelope. In truth, he knew there’d be little enough for him to command—a few dozen small scientific experiments already in situ, the monitoring of lunar orbit for Soviet spacecraft, and keeping watch on Earth through the main telescope for objects in LEO. Falcon Base was a working installation, but its strategic workload was light and its tactical workload non-existent. As he divested himself of his own spacesuit, and stored it in the area beneath the bank of seats, Peterson grinned at his fellow travellers to the Moon and thought, by God, it was good to be here right now.