Moonfall

by Jack McDevitt

  “Name it.”

  “I want to go outside.”

  Sam Anderson lost most of his color and began to shake his head vigorously no. Charlie put on a bemused expression for the senior agent.

  “On the surface?” asked Evelyn.

  “Of course. On the surface.”

  She hesitated. “You have any experience with p-suits?”

  Sam looked as if he were going to explode.

  “Your people can show me,” said Charlie.

  “Mr. Vice President, we don’t allow anyone to go out who isn’t thoroughly familiar with the equipment.”

  “How long does it take to become thoroughly familiar?”

  “Usually a few days. We do some training and administer a written test and a practical. And a physical.”

  Charlie sighed. “I’m not going to be here that long.”

  Evelyn smiled sympathetically. “What do you think they’d do to me if I lost a vice president?”

  “Give you a medal.”

  She dazzled him with a brilliant smile. “I don’t think so.”

  An aide had been trying to get her attention. She turned away momentarily, signed a clipboard, and then looked back at him. Her expression had grown very serious. “It is a risk,” she said, “that I’d prefer not to take. May I ask why you wish to go out?”

  Because it’s something I’ve always wanted to do and this might be my only chance. “I might not get back here again,” he said.

  She looked at him for a long moment. “When do you want to do this foolish thing?”

  Charlie felt like a boy confronting a disapproving teacher. How hard could it be to learn how to walk around in a pressure suit? “At your leisure,” he said.

  She sighed. “Understand, I do not think this is a good idea.” She glanced at Sam, establishing her witness for the future inquest. “However,” she added, “if I were you, I would also wish to go outside.” She took his hand, and the grip was curiously electric. “We can do it now, if you like.”

  Yes, Charlie decided, he would like very much. He called Rick and directed him to cancel his morning’s schedule. Rick was, of course, appalled.

  Sam wasn’t happy either. “I’m sorry, sir. I just can’t allow it. It violates procedure.”

  “Relax, Sam,” said Charlie. “I’ll be fine.”

  Moonbase was an underground facility. The surface was nine floors up from the Director’s Dining Room. Evelyn, Charlie, Sam, and Isabel took the elevator, which climbed the outside of the headquarters building, providing a panoramic view of Main Plaza. From this perspective, Moonbase resembled nothing so much as a vast park.

  At the top level they passed along a winding corridor whose walls were decorated with a series of prints depicting Moonbase at various stages of construction. They stopped before a heavy metal door marked CAUTION—AUTHORIZED PERSONNNEL ONLY. An intercom was mounted on the wall. Evelyn keyed it, said her name, and the door opened.

  They entered a long room filled with benches, equipment bins, cabinets, and racks. Pressure suits in various bright colors hung from overhead bars. A technician rose from a desk and stood by.

  “We have several ground-level exits,” Evelyn explained. “We’re quite busy outside. Moonbase is still under construction, as you know. The crews are in and out all the time. And researchers. And our maintenance people. And occasional tourists.” Here she brightened and pursed her lips.

  The technician provided them with two p-suits. One was gold and the other, vermillion. Evelyn accepted the gold suit and removed her shoes. “You get the loud one,” she smiled.

  “Wait a minute,” Charlie said. “I didn’t intend for you to have to go out.”

  “Nobody goes out alone. We don’t allow it.”

  It made sense. “Okay. But why not send someone else? I don’t want to take up your time.”

  “It’s my pleasure,” she said.

  “I’ll need a suit, too,” said Sam, looking resentful.

  “Why?” said Charlie. “Who’s out there to take a shot at me?”

  “Sir, I don’t see that it matters. It’s dangerous and I wish you wouldn’t do this.”

  “It’s settled.”

  “I have to go along. It’s in the regs.”

  “How familiar are you with the equipment?”

  “Not much.”

  “Which means, in an emergency, how much good would you be?”

  The muscles in Sam’s jaws were rippling. “Not much.”

  “You might even become the emergency. Sit tight. Evelyn’ll take care of me and we’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  Evelyn gave him a quick course on procedure, which consisted mostly in not jiggling the suit’s controls unnecessarily once they’d been set. She showed him how to modulate the air pressure, how to control the temperature, and how to use the radio. “Keep in mind the gravity differential,” she said. “That’s the real danger. There are lots of fissures, craters, cracks, you name it, for you to fall into. Keep your eyes open. The suit is tough, but it’s still possible to punch a hole in it. Red light means you’ve got a problem and you should come back immediately. If you see a red light, they’ll see it at the same time back here and they’ll tell you to return. Anything like that happens, no argument, okay?”

  Charlie was no dummy. “How often do you get red lights?”

  She shrugged. “They’re not unheard of.”

  They put on his helmet and air hissed into the suit. Evelyn did a radio check. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Good.” She was pulling on her own helmet. “You’ll enjoy it, Mr. Vice President.”

  The technician led them into an adjoining room where an airlock stood open, waiting to receive them. Charlie followed Evelyn inside and the technician closed the door. Colored lights flashed. “You’ll feel a tingle as the air pressure changes,” Evelyn said.

  He couldn’t see her face anymore behind the smoked Plexiglas. “How many times have you been outside?” he asked.

  She laughed. “Once or twice.”

  Charlie assumed she was tweaking him, but a long silence followed. “You’re kidding,” he said.

  “Yeah. I’ve been out a few times. Not as often as I’d like.”

  A green lamp came on and the exit door irised open. Charlie looked out at the lunar surface, a broken plain, etched in silver light. The sky was black, but filled with rivers of stars.

  She waited, letting him go first.

  “It’s magnificent,” he said. He stepped through the hatch. Out onto the regolith. The illumination, most of it anyway, was coming from Earth, which hung blue and white and very big almost directly overhead.

  “It’s about forty times brighter than a full Moon,” said Evelyn.

  The horizon looked close. Had there been natives on Luna, they would have known without any question they lived on a globe.

  There were no words. He’d seen the hologees many times, but they were nothing like this.

  Evelyn led him out to a rectangular area that had been cordoned off. It was about one hundred by fifty feet. A walkway had been built across it, a few inches above the surface. Here and there he saw footprints, each marked with a small post and a yellow tag. She showed him the names on the tags. They were all familiar, all well known: Sheila Davidson, who had commanded the first return mission to the Moon; Angela Mikel, the first woman to give birth on Luna; Ed Harper, who’d overseen most of the construction efforts. Evelyn pointed to an unbroken piece of ground. “I’d like you to step down onto the regolith,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “You belong here.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “If you win in the fall, people will look at your prints centuries from now and remember the first president to walk on the Moon.”

  “If I lose?”

  She smiled. “We’ll take down the rope and run a roller over it.”

  He looked again at Earth, blue and warm and inviting in the black sky. “I can understa
nd,” he said, “why people come out here and get religion.” And then with a rush of caution: “Can they hear me back inside?”

  “Every word, sir,” said the technician’s voice.

  “It’s okay,” said Evelyn. “Nobody’ll quote you.”

  “Good.” As Rick would have reminded him once again, it wouldn’t be the first time a spontaneous remark had sunk a candidacy. George Romney had faded after commenting on his return from Southeast Asia that he’d been brainwashed; Teddy Roosevelt had ruled himself out of a second term without stopping to think; and Mary Emerson was on the verge of becoming the first woman president when she told a reporter there were a lot of deadbeats on Medicaid.

  He stepped down onto the marked ground, trying to leave clear prints. It was gratifying to imagine people standing on this spot ages from now, pointing out to one another that Charlie Haskell had walked here. First president of the Space Age. It had a nice ring to it.

  It occurred to him that Evelyn was probably wondering whether his moonwalk was a political stunt. Something that would appear later in a campaign biography. But there was nothing he could do about that. And Charlie wondered, not for the first time, whether his political career was worth all the hassle. He enjoyed the cut and thrust of politics, he loved winning, and he enjoyed being in a position to make things happen. But there was a price to be paid. He would never again be able to go out to a restaurant or run over to Wal-Mart without attracting a crowd.

  A fan in the back of his helmet changed pitch, adjusting to temperature or humidity.

  His one major political drawback was that he was a bachelor. The party believed the voters would not be comfortable without a first lady. That notion did not show up in surveys, but it was the common wisdom in a society that had become increasingly concerned about personal morals while only one marriage in six now stayed the course.

  The ground was gray and crumbly. The guidebooks maintained the Moon hadn’t changed much in three billion years or so. There was no volcanism on Luna, no climate, no wind to move things around. It was a world where nothing ever happened except occasionally it got plunked by a falling rock.

  He climbed back up on the walkway and looked around at the flat plain. “I thought Moonbase was inside a crater,” he said.

  Evelyn was behind him, allowing him an unbroken view. “It is. But the crater’s big, and the Moon’s small. Alphonsus is a hundred seventeen kilometers across. We’re in the center of the crater, and its walls are all below the horizon. But they’re there. If you like, we can take a ride over.”

  “Yes,” said Charlie. He studied her for a long moment, wishing he could see her face. “You’d like to do that, wouldn’t you?”

  She chuckled. “I think you caught me,” she said. “But yes. With the vice president’s permission, we can turn this into a jaunt.”

  “By all means,” said Charlie. He looked at the horizon. “I wonder if we can see the comet from here.”

  Evelyn was silent, and the voice of the technician came over the radio. “No, sir, it’s not visible from Moonbase.”

  “Pity,” he said.

  2.

  Beaver Meadow Observatory. 9:30 A.M.

  Wesley Feinberg canceled his flight home and stayed on at Beaver Meadow. Hoxon gave him an office and a computer and he got on the circuit with Kitt Peak and NASA and Zelenchukskaya and twenty other institutions. The astronomical community, of course, was fully aroused and scrambling to pin the comet down. Could it be identified with anything in the record? How big was it? Where was it going?

  The quick way to get a handle on the object was to track down where it had been, say, in January or February. Then it would become possible to work out a trajectory. It should have been visible in the early part of the year. So it was just a matter of conducting a thorough search.

  But as yet there was insufficient data to make even an intelligent guess where it might have appeared in the winter heavens. Feinberg worked methodically, bringing up sections of sky and comparing them against the database, hoping to find an object that did not belong. The images were produced by ACCDs, Advanced Charge-Coupled Devices, mounted on major telescopes around the world and in orbit. The pictures were far sharper than the photos with which he’d worked when he’d begun his career near the end of the last century.

  He knew that an army of professionals and talented amateurs were doing the same thing, but he wasn’t interested in waiting for someone else’s results. Although he’d have denied it, he was a competitor and wanted very much to get there first. He was, after all, less likely to be led astray by every point of light that didn’t fit the catalog. But after working through the night, he had nothing. That was understandable. What he did not understand was that no one else had anything either.

  Feinberg had stayed with it until almost six A.M., when he began to doze at the keyboard. Finally he’d given up and commandeered a couch in a utility room, where he slept until noon. By then several sites had reported positives. But after a glance Feinberg dismissed their “finds” as the carcasses of junked earth satellites, two known asteroids, and in one case, a nebula.

  By late afternoon there was still nothing.

  Curious. “It’s very hard to understand,” he told Hoxon, who had done some nominal searching on his own.

  The director agreed. He was a garrulous, beak-nosed man who spent most of his time organizing public tours and who seemed to have remarkably little interest in real astronomy. He persisted in carrying on pointless conversations with people around him who were trying to work.

  Feinberg extended his search, on the theory that the comet might be moving substantially faster or slower than the forty kilometers per second that was more or less the ballpark velocity. He worked through the late afternoon, sorting images while the mystery grew.

  At six P.M. a postdoc at Cerro La Silla in Chile asked for help. She sent pictures that seemed to indicate she’d found a second comet. The pictures revealed an object on the far side of the Sun, out near Jupiter’s orbit. The images had been run on successive nights, March 25 and 26. But the same area in another set of images taken six days earlier showed nothing. Nor did the object appear in a third series beginning March 30. The object had apparently been in the sky for ten nights at most and then vanished. Where had it gone? The postdoc was asking if anyone else had pictures of the area during the subject period.

  Now, that was odd. They had two elusive comets.

  Hoxon appeared and suggested Feinberg join him for dinner. “My treat,” he said.

  Astronomers do not, as a rule, command large paychecks. Consequently, Feinberg wasn’t surprised when Hoxon took him to the local Shoney’s. They talked about the Chilean business. In fact, Feinberg knew he was babbling about it. But Hoxon’s only significant response was to observe that it was only a postdoc after all, and who knew what she really saw.

  We’ve got the pictures, nit. But Feinberg let it go.

  ACCDs functioned by counting photons and converting the results to optical images. Feinberg began thinking about photon counts and fingerprints somewhere between the meat loaf and the ice cream sundae he decided he deserved. Two objects, one near Jupiter, one near the Sun. Both hard to track.

  He did a quick calculation to check the idea that had been unconsciously forming, and smiled at the result. He’d been scribbling on a napkin, and when Hoxon asked him what it was about, he shrugged. “Nothing,” he said, dismissing his result.

  His host did not think it was a good idea to go back to work, announced that he was going home, and suggested that Feinberg also quit for the night. Feinberg wondered what would have happened to the spirit of scientific inquiry if everyone had possessed the director’s driving curiosity. “No,” he said, “I have one or two things to finish up.”

  Unfortunately, what Feinberg wanted to finish up couldn’t be handled directly from his keyboard. He made two phone calls. The first was to the Skyport Orbital Laboratory, which had used its Venusian probe to make the images of Tomiko
’s Comet; and the other was to Cerro La Silla. In both cases he asked for the photon count that had produced the comet images. Both sites said they would get back to him.

  Cerro La Silla returned his call within the hour. He recorded the result and waited eagerly for the response from the Orbital Lab. It was a procedure that could take time, especially if they were busy, as he suspected they were. At midnight he was still sitting by his phone.

  He didn’t recall dozing off, but he remembered coming out of a deep sleep, seeing gray light coming through a window, uncertain at first where he was. The telephone was ringing.

  Windy Cross at Skyport apologized for the delay, but gave him the data. “If you don’t mind, Professor,” asked Windy, “what use is it?”

  Feinberg remembered the count from the Jupiter comet. It was almost identical. Not definitive, but damned near. They were possibly the same object. “I’ll get back to you, Windy,” he said. “When I’m sure.”

  He stared at the numbers, puzzling over the problem. The Cerro La Silla sighting was way the hell out of range. Comets had an upper speed limit of about fifty kps. If this was the same object, it would have to be moving at eight or nine times that velocity. Four hundred—plus kilometers per second!

  That meant it did not, could not, belong to the solar system.

  There was no question that vast numbers of comets drifted through the interstellar void, unattached to any sun. The latest estimates Feinberg had seen placed the number of unattached comets in the neighborhood of the solar system and out to, say, the half-dozen or so nearest stars, somewhere in the range of a trillion. He did not personally subscribe to that view. It was true that comets were periodically ejected from the solar system by the Sun, and sometimes even by Jupiter. He could not see that the process happened sufficiently often to support the more wild-eyed theorists. But who really knew?

  In any case, this appeared to be a true interstellar. If both sightings were the same object, it had to be.

  No interstellar comet had ever been recorded. If he was right, Wesley Feinberg was going to take his place with Shapley, Herschel, Eddington, and Galileo.