Adrift on the Sea of Rains (Apollo Quartet)

by Sales, Ian

  Peterson is outside again. He stands with Elbow Crater at his back, Falcon Base to his left, and gazes north across Mare Imbrium. The land falls away from him in a gentle slope, flat but for the dimples of craters. Ahead, one such depression is too deep for its bottom to be visible. Four miles away, the far slope of another crater, littered with rocks, forms the face of a low, flat hillock. Beyond that, though it resembles a wind-smoothed dune of grey sand, Mount Hadley stretches more than fifteen thousand feet into the lunar sky. The sun is up high to his right, throwing sharp black shadows. Peterson’s world is grey, but he can see streaks of pale brown, and even white, in amongst the footprints, tyre-tracks and disturbed regolith. He feels calm, soothed by the insistent whirr of the fans in his PLSS, by the comforting rubber and sweat stink of his A7LB. Peterson has come to love this desolate lunarscape, a black and white rendering of the high desert, busy with razor-edge detail but lifeless.

  Once, Apollo 15’s Lunar Module sat alone on the plain, its silver face and golden skirt alien and bright; a strange visitor, bringing colour to this monochrome world. Though Peterson knows the LM’s descent stage is one of the many now scattered across Mare Imbrium, he is not sure which one it is. On past EVAs he has wandered among the spider-legged spacecraft, looking for a commemorative plaque. Progress has hidden Apollo 15’s LM, the achievement it represents, from casual view—the descent stages of the Augmented LMs are identical to it.

  Peterson’s radio squawks.

  Thirty seconds to evolution, says Scott.

  Peterson turns to his left so he is facing the Earth. The thought of a mission to that blasted world, a lunar mission in reverse, but with the same technical requirements, occurs to him. He imagines wandering the streets of New York in his spacesuit. Assuming, of course, those streets still exist—the city was likely a target. Or perhaps a visit to the fields of Omaha and Nebraska. Except they too probably did not survive—the Soviets would have targetted the Minuteman and Titan silos buried beneath their soil. The American countryside, he suspects, looks little different to Mare Imbrium. He could be standing there now, he thinks.

  But the sun here is too bright; the horizon is too close.

  Five seconds, says Scott.

  Peterson counts them down beneath his breath. He watches the earth… sees it shimmer and change…

  To blue.

  For one brief moment, he cannot speak. He opens his mouth but can think of nothing to say. He’d imagined he would never see a living Earth again; they had all thought so. Even Kendall. But the delicate planet above the lunar horizon is the blue marble he remembers.

  Phil, he says thickly, I think this is it.

  The earth shines, it shines. Blue, mottled with small patches of brown and marbled with white clouds.

  Someone lets out a whoop over the radio. Peterson winces at the volume. He opens his mouth to bark an order, but closes it without saying a word. There is cause for celebration, after all. He stares at the Earth, afraid it might return to lifeless black, that it is an illusion. He wills it to remain. A light-headedness comes over him.

  Another voice on the radio. It is a moment before Peterson identifies it as Bartlett.

  Got it, Bartlett crows. On the high gain. Some radio show, and it’s American, by God!

  Peterson can remain outside no longer. He turns his back on the Earth and, beneath its newly benevolent blue gaze, he jogs back to Falcon Base. He springs from foot to foot, leaping high in his urgency, dangerously near losing his balance with each balletic step. In the suiting up area, he unlocks and pulls off his polycarbonate helmet, and abruptly hears loud conversation in the command centre above. He struggles out of his A7LB alone, wondering at Scott’s absence, and leaves the spacesuit sprawled like a victim on the floor. At the foot of the ladder, he halts and looks up through the hatch. That noise, it seems so alien, a direct affront to the monasterial quiet which normally pervades Falcon Base.

  They are all in the command centre, pale wraithlike men, driven insipid by isolation, with haunted eyes and deep creases bracketting unaccustomed smiles. Peterson wades in among them, slapping backs and shaking hands, hard enough and tight enough to bruise flesh and grind bones.

  We’re going home, goddamn it! he tells them repeatedly.

  Kendall clambers up through the hatch and gazes in awe at the officers’ celebrations.

  Well? he demands. Well? What happened? Can someone tell me what happened?

  Curtis, who has put down his manuals, breaks the news. Kendall nods in acknowledgement, frowns darkly in thought, and then a slow smile evolves on his face.

  We’re saved, he says in wonder.

  It soon transpires that the men of Falcon Base can listen, but they cannot be heard. They try to contact someone using the S-band, but no one responds. They have no idea why—perhaps their equipment is faulty, although the self-tests say not. Perhaps the Earth no longer listens on those frequencies, perhaps the Earth has no dish directed at the Moon. It doesn’t matter. Now the men of Falcon Base have a home to return to. All it requires is for someone to go there and tell them about the castaways on the Sea of Rains.

  Do they even have a space programme? asks Kendall. We don’t know how far we’ve evolved from our Earth.

  So we show them how to do it, replies Alden with a grin; big Alden, always the most serious of them all. The corn-fed Mid-Westerner who says little, and then only after great deliberation. The dedicated engineer test pilot who is always worth listening to. The man Peterson is sure he has not heard say a word for nearly a year.

  Neubeck at the telescope lets out a whoop. They crowd round him like kids, demanding to know what he’s found.

  Cain’t be sure, he says with glee, but I reckon we got there a space station in orbit.

  Peterson pushes his way through the unruly astronauts. He tugs at Neubeck’s shoulder. Let me see, he orders. Is it Freedom?

  No, no. Too small. Neubeck glances down at Peterson’s expectant face and adds with a cheerful insolence, Sir. Too small, but it’s an orbital platform for sure.

  They can make out little detail. The space station is indeed smaller than Freedom, a collection of perhaps seven or eight modules, with only three or four pairs of solar cell wings. This Earth’s space programme, it seems, is less advanced than theirs.

  They gaze at each other in wonder. The same thought is written on their faces in the different languages of their features: it can be done. There’s an ALM with an ascent stage out there on the Sea of Rains, an ALM for the trip from the Moon to the Earth. The ALM can’t land, but there’s no need.

  Because there’s a space station in LEO.

  Imagine their faces, Peterson thinks, imagine the expressions on the faces of those guys in the space station when they hear a knock on the hatch and there’s some guy in a spacesuit outside. Imagine what they’ll say when they hear there’s a whole bunch more on the Moon.

  He looks across at Kendall and the resentment, the simmering anger, is gone. It’s clear space now, like that abrupt luminous moment he used to feel as his North American F-108D Rapier pierced the clouds and he found himself flying above a landscape of pillowy white. Sound has fallen away; vision, of preternaturally sharpness, is all. Then hearing would return: the muted roar of the YJ93 turbojets, the hiss of his headphones, the vibration of the airframe.

  Peterson is not ready to feel gratitude. Kendall and the Bell may have brought them all home, but Peterson will not thank the man yet. Later, perhaps. Once they stand on the soil of the good green Earth.

  Perhaps by then he will have come to terms with the debt he owes the scientist and his Nazi weird science.

  Higher, further, faster—Peterson’s career had taken him one step beyond the last with each move, which was neither an unusual nor an unexpected career-path for an officer of his calibre. After flying hypersonic reconnaissance missions thirty-five miles above the earth, close enough to space the sky about him was black and the only blue lay beneath his aircraft, as though he were skimming acros
s the surface of a vast curved lake—after flying so near to space he could almost touch it, the only step up was orbit, and USAF plainly thought he had the right stuff because they asked him to try out for their astronaut corps. They’d been launching Saturn IBs out of Slick Six at Vandenberg for over a decade, they even had their own line of Apollo spacecraft called Phoebus, though they would have preferred to throw spaceplanes into orbit. All that research at Edwards AFB they’d paid for, lifting bodies like the Martin Marrietta X-24 and Northrop M2-F3; and even the Boeing X-20 Dyna-Soar, though it never flew—so instead USAF happily bent the technology of North American and Grumman to its own uses, adding military hardware to Apollo capsules, turning ploughshares into swords. And now Peterson lay on his back, feet in the air, wedged between two other astronauts, an expanse of grey instrument panel before him, and waited for the gentle push in the back which would tell him the S-IB’s eight H1 rocket engines had ignited. He’d spent the last twelve months training for this mission and he knew more about this Apollo spacecraft than he had ever known about the aircraft he’d flown, the interceptors, the reconnaissance planes—he knew the placement and function of every switch, dial and readout. Yet if anything malfunctioned during the launch, he could do nothing, he was merely a passenger, and all his training had done was teach him facts and figures over which he had no control or influence. From somewhere far below him came a low rumble, as if a distant trapdoor to Hell had just opened, and he felt a slow pressure begin to build between his shoulder-blades. The capsule jerked from side to side, only fractions of a degree but noticeable, as those eight engines gimballed on their 1,600,000 lbs of combined thrust, and everything was vibrating, the readouts a blur, and he imagined the launch tower slowly sliding past as the S-IB rose on a tower of flame and thunder. One hundred and forty-six seconds later, Peterson was jerked forward against his straps, and then moments later kicked painfully back into his seat as the second stage ignited—but the ride now was smoother, although the roar transmitted the length of the S-IVB was louder. Ten minutes after they had launched, the J-2 engine cut off, and the silence felt to Peterson like a presentiment of catastrophe, a flame-out perhaps, and his hands itched for a stick to hold, for a means to control this errant craft. He’d brought hypersonic planes down to deadstick landings at Groom Lake after crossing the oceans at Mach 6, he’d hit the ground at two hundred knots in F-108D supersonic interceptors after Mach 3 dashes to the DEW Line, and he felt his present lack of control, his inability to pilot, keenly. Something rose past him, a washer, floating serenely across his vision, so he relaxed his arms and they lifted up of their own accord until his hands bobbed and swung before his face, and he felt a momentary fear as though he had lost control of his limbs and jerked his hands back down and balled them into fists. As he shifted in his seat, he realised he could no longer feel his rear pressing into the surface beneath it, and he began to relax, and revelled in this strange new freedom, his ties to the Earth so weak he could no longer feel them, and they no longer affected him, and it was enough to make him forget he was only a passenger on this trip. This was a taxi mission, the spacecraft would rendezvous with Space Station Freedom, and the three astronauts aboard would spend the next eight weeks in the station’s military module, although Peterson had spent so long in mock-ups and simulators and USAF’s own Weightless Environment Training Facility at Vandenberg he felt as though he had already completed his mission. This detailed and exhaustive training the astronaut corps practiced still took some getting used to, going through everything he would be doing in space again and again and again, until it was written into the fabric of his muscles, until every possible eventuality had been studied and plotted and planned and documented. It meant he felt like a puppet when it came to the actual doing of it, a weird sense of déjà vu accompanying every flick of a switch, every meter reading taken, every report made to Mission Control… And yet the mission itself was easy enough, just spy on the USSR and its forces in Iraq using Space Station Freedom’s powerful telescopes and cameras; it was only the location which dictated the depth of training, only the best of the best allowed in LEO, and even then they could not go without the most extensive preparation for all that they were the elite of elites. All that training, education and skills, applied only to a watching brief: though whatever they saw they could do nothing about as they had no weapons, no means of attack aboard the space station, and would be powerless bystanders should the Soviets finally bite the bullet and use those occasional border clashes with NATO troops on the border between Turkey and Iraq as provocation for war.

  They were trapped, but now there is an escape. All but Kendall gather in the wardroom to discuss their options, squeezing about a single table but, unlike at meal-times, confidently, keenly, meeting each other’s gazes. It occurs to Peterson that he has lived with these men for two years but he barely knows them. He sees seven men he knows chiefly by their reputations and the psychological profiles in their records. Their faces are as familiar to him as his own, but they might as well be the gold visors of spacesuit helmets for all their expressions tell him what each is thinking. Not once since they became isolated on the Moon have they worked together. He trained extensively with Curtis for the trip here, but once they had landed each had their separate duties… and since they lost the Earth, he has barely exchanged a dozen words with the man. And now… Now, the Curtis he knew is not the fevered-looking man on the other side of the table with arms folded across a stack of ring-binders.

  The Moon has changed them all; despair has made strangers of them.

  But now, with salvation a very real possibility, they are no longer uncomfortable in each other’s company. Hope has made amiable strangers of them.

  Hope: half a dozen modules in Low Earth Orbit. An elusive hope: they need to find a way to reach the space station. They have one ALM ascent stage left—and Peterson gives thanks it still remains, not launched out of desperation by one of them during the past two years.

  A thought occurs to him: how to get from lunar orbit to Earth?

  We need another engine for TEI, Peterson says.

  We can rip a DPS out of one of the descent stages, says Bartlett. They’re throttleable.

  What about fuel? demands Fulton. How you going to fuel the burn? You think maybe we can just brew up some Aerozine 50 out of Moon rocks?

  Both the Descent Propulsion System and Ascent Propulsion System are powered by Aerozine 50 and dinitrogen tetroxide. The latter they can perhaps manufacture through the catalytic oxidation of ammonia, but Aerozine 50 is beyond their capabilities. For it, they need sodium hypochlorite as well as ammonia. The third ingredient of Aerozine 50, unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine, requires a chemical plant.

  Bartlett gestures dismissively. All those descent stages on the mare, he says, each one has a minute, maybe half a minute, of Aerozine 50 left in the tanks.

  So where we put the DPS? asks Neubeck. There ain’t no room in the LM.

  There is a defeatist whine in the man’s voice, and it is a moment before Peterson calms himself enough to reply:

  We bolt it to the goddamn back, he snaps.

  Bartlett shakes his head. We’re going to have to put it on the top, he says, or we throw off the centre of gravity. We don’t need the drogue assembly in the docking tunnel, so we rip it out and we build us a frame to put in there for the DPS.

  Fulton is not convinced: You reckon we can get 20,000 lb fuel from all the descent stages?

  Why not, says Bartlett. Say you burn about ninety percent of that on the way down. That’s got to leave between 150 and 200 lb per LM.

  There’s gonna be some losses decanting it, Fulton replies.

  Peterson watches the two argue back and forth. The others are content to let them thrash it out. Fulton has always played the sceptic—but for that, he might have been commander of Falcon Base. Bartlett is a smart guy; perhaps, after Alden, the smartest guy on the Moon—

  It won’t work, says Alden in his slow, careful way.

&
nbsp; Bartlett turns on him. Sure it will work, he insists.

  Alden shakes his head. How much does the ascent stage weigh?

  10,024 lb, says Curtis from memory.