Lunar Descent

by Allen Steele

  Nonetheless, it took fifteen minutes of sweating, tugging, and heaving to extract himself from the hardsuit. It was rather like trying to squirm out of a full-body cast; by the time he was done, Lester had pulled a muscle in the back of his neck and had banged the top of his skull on a bulkhead. Finally, though, he was standing in his nylon long johns in the antechamber, freezing his ass off in the unanticipated cold while he disconnected his coolant and urine-collection tubes.

  Byrd Station’s habitat modules were unoccupied most of the time; although the control and lab modules remained pressurized for the benefit of supply crews from Descartes, the thermostat was kept at 45°F. to keep the instruments inside from freezing. And there wasn’t even any clothing in the anteroom for visitors to slip on over their hardsuit undergarments. Rubbing his arms and blowing little puffs of steam, Lester made a mental note to have the next resupply team bring a couple of pullovers up here; the joint was cold as hell, and neither he nor Butch was wearing enough clothing.

  He walked into the next room, and suddenly he didn’t mind that little annoyance anymore. Butch Peterson was seated cross-legged in a chair in front of the main computer station, intently studying the flatscreen through her glasses. She, too, was wearing only her long johns, but on her they fitted like a second skin. Her long black hair, braided into beaded corn rows, fell exotically around her slender shoulders. For the past few weeks, Riddell had tried to distance himself from Peterson’s good looks; this time, though, she unconsciously exuded the sensuality of a nubile teenager in a string bikini.

  “Have a little trouble there?” she asked, not looking away from the screen but faintly smiling just the same.

  “Umm?” he said, trying to unstick his tongue from the roof of his mouth. “Oh, that! No, no, no. None at all. No problem.”

  Butch glanced around at him, giving him a look of don’t-kid-me amusement. “Well, maybe a little,” he admitted. “How did you manage to …?”

  “Get out of my suit? Try working as a fashion model for ten years. You learn to do stuff with your body that makes limbo-dancing look easy.” Then, as if the long johns weren’t enough, she swiveled around in her chair and, with the exhausted sigh of someone who had been staring at a screen for a couple of hours, stood up, reached back with her arms, and stretched until it looked as if her lithe body were about to rip through the seams of the undergarment.

  Lester wondered if he was going to start drooling. Cut that out, he reprimanded himself. He swallowed and quickly looked away, focusing on the lab bench behind the computer station. A rack of test tubes held thawed specimens from the deep-core samples she had taken shortly after they had arrived at Byrd Station. While he and Mighty Joe had made themselves busy outside, pumping ice water from Byrd Station’s holding tanks into the LRLT’s cargo module, Butch had been in here, checking the satellite data she had collected at Descartes Station against the raw data Byrd Station’s computers had automatically collated and her own core samples from the underground permaice deposits. He gently picked up one of the tubes at random and peered at it; the water in the tube was cloudy, with fine sediment floating in the water and more lying on the bottom. “Did you get this before it went through the filtration system?” he asked.

  Peterson glanced at the tube in his hand. “No,” she said quietly. “That’s what came through the filters.” She paused, then added unnecessarily, “It’s what we’re taking back to Descartes with us.”

  At once, all the horny thoughts fled from Riddell’s mind. The well at the Byrd Station Permaice Extraction Facility worked on a fairly simple set of mechanics. The permaice which the artesian-style well penetrated was melted in situ, a little at a time to prevent vacuum boil-off and evaporation, and pumped into a heated holding tank, drawing it through a series of porous filters which sifted out the contaminants. Of course, the filters couldn’t separate all the dirt; microscopic particles were expected to seep through, and they were later distilled from the water back at Descartes Station. But this water looked as if it had come out of a roadside ditch, not from the filtered water normally brought home by the long-range crop dusters.

  “Before you ask,” Peterson said, “I checked the filters and the pumps. The pumps are up to par. The filters are ready to be changed again, sure, but they shouldn’t be, because according to the logbook they were replaced by the last supply crew which came up here.”

  Riddell shot her a disbelieving look. “They were changed last month?” The filters had a combined efficiency of at least four months. “But this stuff …”

  “That’s the stuff which came through the filtration system,” Butch insisted, pointing at the tube. “And this …” She picked up another test tube from the rack and held it before his face. “This is the stuff that comes straight from the permaice pack itself.”

  The liquid in the second tube looked as if it had come from a sewer; matte-black, almost brackish with heavy particulate, it resembled swamp water from the Okefenokee. Lester took the second tube, uncorked the stopper and passed it under his nose; a pungent odor like discharged gunpowder made his nostril hairs want to curl-up and die. He made a face and held the tube away. “Uh-oh,” he said softly.

  “Uh-oh is right.” Peterson took the tubes from his hands and placed them back in the rack. “If it makes you feel any better, I took a second batch from the secondary ice pack. The particle concentration and turbulence came out close to normal standard. But that second pack, as you know, has nowhere the volume of the primary pack. It’s been treated only as a reserve supply. Are you catching my drift so far?”

  “I’m afraid I am.” Riddell turned and looked at the bar-graphs displayed on the computer screen. “What do the monitors have to say?”

  Butch leaned against the back of the chair, looking down at the floor as she absently reached under her braids and kneaded her neck with her hands. Again, it was an undeliberately sexy pose on her part, but right now Lester was hardly in the mood. “I could go into gross detail,” she continued, “but I’ll cut right to the chase and spare you the geophysical gobbledy-gook. The computer confirms everything that’s in those tubes. The permaice is drying up, Les. In fact, we’re close to rock bottom.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Tell me about it.” She sighed, shook out her hair, and looked straight at him. “The primary well … my best guess is that we’ll be able to come up here one more time for some of this dishwater. Maybe two trips if we stretch our consumption. If we open the second well and start using the reserves, we’ve got somewhere between eight and twelve months’ supply. Fourteen or fifteen months max if we tightly ration it. Then we’re bone dry. Kaput.”

  Riddell took a deep breath and let it out. He looked down and found himself gazing at her breasts, which seemed to surge against the tight fabric of her undergarment; he could see the coffee-colored areolae of her nipples through the cloth, and he felt his face growing warm. Hell of a time to be noticing that. He glanced away from her again. “Are you sure?” he asked, then quickly shook his head. “No, no … if you say you’re certain …”

  “I’m going to dump all the files onto a disk and take them back to Descartes for analysis,” Butch said. “Maybe I’ll come up with something different, but I wouldn’t bet on if I were you.” She hesitated. “To give you a straight answer, though … yeah, I’m pretty certain. And I might even be sugar-coating my last guesstimate. Counting the reserves, I’d realistically give it eight or nine months, tops.”

  “Terrific.” Lester watched as she sat down in the chair again and began to save the files on a CD-ROM diskette. This was a potential disaster; he should be more upset than he already was. Besides that, he had more things to do outside before they left Byrd Station.

  Yet, in spite of all that, he found that the thing he wanted to do most of all was to linger in the control module with Butch Peterson. Great. Makes a lot of sense. Here’s a man crawling out of the Gobi desert on his hands and knees, deliriously gasping through his parched throat, “Sex … se
x … sex.…”

  “When you go out there,” she continued, not looking away from her work, “you better tell Joe to top off the water tanks in the cargo module. We’re going to need every drop we can get. Once the well starts going empty, there’s going to be some boil-off, so we might as well grab it while we can.”

  “Okay. Sure.” Lester hesitantly laid his hands on the back of her chair, looking over her shoulder at the screen and fighting the urge to take one of her soft braids and gently unravel it between his fingers. “Uh … you need any help in here?”

  She shook her head. “No, that’s okay. I’m just going to do this and download the current data from Hawking, then …” She stopped, and then half-looked over her shoulder at him. “What’s the matter, Lester? Never seen a woman in her BVD’s before?”

  Lester felt all the blood in his face rush down to his feet. He coughed uncomfortably. “Sorry,” he murmured. “Guess it was kinda obvious, wasn’t it?”

  Butch favored him with a sultry half-smile. “Doesn’t matter to me. Not as long as you don’t get any funny ideas.”

  Lester laughed … then, impulsively, he extended his forefinger and stroked the back of her neck. Peterson moved her neck out of the way, the smile disappearing from her face. “Like that one,” she said. “If there was a cold shower available, I’d suggest that you go take one.”

  Riddell hurriedly removed his hand. What the hell’s gotten into you, pal? he admonished himself. The lady doesn’t want or need this. “I’ll … um, go help Mighty Joe with the rest of the, um …”

  “I’ll be out in a few minutes.” Her tone suggested that she had already forgiven and forgotten—at least for the time being. Lester turned and headed for the anteroom. Damn, he thought. And I would have loved to see how she gets back into her suit.…

  “Okay, boys and girls, strap yourselves in and we’ll be getting out of here.” Still wearing his hardsuit, although he had removed the helmet and gloves, Mighty Joe Young gave his seat harness a final cinch, then reached out to the dashboard to power up the LRLT. Next to him in the co-pilot’s chair, Lester automatically picked up the clipboard and pushed back a couple of pages on the checklist. “Don’t need to worry about that,” Joe said. “We’ve only been here a couple of hours, so everything’s still configured for flight.”

  Lester raised an eyebrow as he replaced the clipboard in its slot. “Not exactly regulation, is it?”

  Joe shrugged as he ran through the prelaunch routine of pressurizing the fuel tanks and arming the engines. “Maybe not, but it gets the job done just the same.” He scratched at his beard and grinned at the general manager. “Don’t fret. When you fly with me, you’re flying with the best. But if you want to be helpful, you can double-check the cargo module to make sure she’s clamped on nice and tight.”

  “Oh, Lester always wants to helpful,” Butch Peterson said from the passenger seat behind Joe. “Isn’t that right, Les?”

  Lester shot a wary glance at her, which made Peterson giggle; Mighty Joe looked first at Riddell, then glanced at Peterson’s reflection in the Plexiglas canopy in front of him. The scientist was hiding a wicked smile behind her hand, and the GM was pretending to study a status board on the right side of his seat. The flight compartment of the LRLT was about the size of a two-door economy car; very little of what went on inside could be kept a secret. Joe was about to make a comment, but decided to let it pass. Something had happened between the two of them while he had been loading the rest of the water into the LRLT’s tanks … but whatever might or might not have occurred, it was none of his business.

  “The module’s secure,” Lester said, ignoring Butch’s jab. “Pressure nominal. No leakage.”

  “Okay then.” Mighty Joe switched the electrical system from BATT. to MAIN, reset the guidance computer to MAN., toggled on the auto-sequence launch program and watched as idiot lights on the fuel tanks flashed from red to green. A low hum swept through the tiny cabin, signaling that the fuel tanks were pressurized; the VTOL thrusters and main engines were armed and ready. Through the windows, he could see the lights of the station reflecting off the modules and the tall, cylindrical tower of the well pump; around them rose the steep, dark walls of Byrd Crater. Joe couldn’t wait to get out of there; despite the lights and the man-made artifacts, this had to be one of the most depressing places on the Moon.

  He studied the flatscreen between him and Lester, then put his left hand on the attitude-control yoke and his right hand on the parallel throttles. “We’re going for a ten-second countdown on my mark. Y’all set? Okay. Mark … ten … nine … eight …”

  The Grumman LRLT-105 was a hybrid vehicle, a mutant among spacecraft. Too unstreamlined for effective use on Earth or Mars, not powerful enough for translunar orbital operations yet too powerful for short-range missions, it was principally designed for long-range operations which would take its four-person crew from one side of the Moon to the other. Long, slender and flat, the LRLT had a pressurized crew compartment in the front-including an aft-deck compartment containing four bunks and a miniature lab for extended missions—a double-truss strongback in the center which contained the separable, multifunction cargo module, and an oversized engine compartment in the stern, all of which was perched on four extendable landing legs. In short, it was a lunar version of the standard space shuttle design; although fuel-hungry, it was capable of transporting people and equipment on extended sorties into the hinterlands.

  Normally, the LRLT flew above the lunar surface, skimming the tops of craters and mountains alike; hence its nickname “crop-duster.” For supply missions between Descartes Station and Byrd Station, though, the standard flight profile was more exotic. The LRLT rose into vertical ascent, using the VTOL launch thrusters on the underside of its hull; when the craft had climbed to proper altitude, the pilot would tilt the nose slightly upwards, then simultaneously disengage the VTOL’s and kick in the main engines. It was a difficult maneuver, but it would boost the LRLT into a suborbital arc which would take it thirty miles above the lunar surface and sling it around the limb of the Moon, matching gravitational pull against engine-thrust to send the crop-duster toward its targeted destination. It wasn’t the smoothest of rides, either—those who experienced an LRLT slingshot often compared it to a ride on an amusement park tilt-a-whirl—but it effectively reduced the flight time for translunar missions from several days to a handful of hours. So a return trip from Byrd Crater to the Descartes plateau was a relatively quick journey, if all went well.

  From the instant that the red warning lights flashed across the engine status board, less than a minute after the VTOL thrusters were cut and the big Pratt & Whitney main engines were engaged, Mighty Joe knew that everything wasn’t going to go well.

  “Heads up,” Young said as the spacecraft lurched and the lights went from green to red. “We’ve got a problem.”

  “Hmm?” Riddell had been looking out the window during the takeoff and ascent, admiring the crescent Earth rising above the curving horizon. As an annunciator sharply buzzed, his eyes darted to the co-pilot’s station. “What’s going on?”

  “We’re losing velocity,” Joe snapped, “Damn if I know why, but we are.” He hurriedly slapped off the alarm, disengaged the autopilot, and grabbed the yoke. He glanced at the digital altimeter and felt his heart freeze. The LRLT’s ascent had stopped at 27.4 nautical miles; as he watched, the numbers suddenly switched to 27.3, then 27.2, then 27.1.

  “Losing altitude, too,” he said, more calmly than he himself could believe. His eyes swept across the gauges, searching for the problem. “What the hell is …?”

  “We’re falling?” From the back seat, Butch Peterson’s voice rose on a high-pitched note of panic. Looking past their shoulders, she could see the horizon slowly climbing into view again. “You mean we’re going down?”

  “No shit, lady. I gotta be jinxed or something, I dunno.” Mighty Joe’s gaze landed on the flatscreen above the engine throttles, where a red warning bar was stro
bing above a line of cryptic numbers. “Aw, damn,” he hissed as he checked the readout. “I was afraid of that. Loss of IPS ratio from the mains. We’re overloaded in the cargo module.”

  “What does that mean?” Peterson demanded.

  “Means we shouldn’t have topped off the water tanks,” Lester said. “Too much mass aboard for us to reach escape velocity. The mains can’t handle the extra load.” He immediately reached for his panel and flipped back the candy-striped cover above the emergency cargo-module jettison. “Okay, let’s fire the pyros and …”

  “Cut it out!” Mighty Joe’s right hand slapped Lester’s hand away from the switch. “This is my ship and nobody touches a thing without my say-so!”

  “But if we ditch the load …”

  Mighty Joe shot an angry look at Riddell. “The water’s too valuable for us to dump,” he snapped. “You said that yourself. And we’re not out of options yet.” He snapped a set of toggles on the engine board. “Brace yourselves,” he commanded, grabbing a smaller pair of throttles below the main engine sticks. “I’m cutting in the auxiliary thrusters. Three … two … one …”

  Lester and Butch barely had time to grab the armrests of their seats before Mighty Joe yanked down on the auxiliary thruster bar. The spacecraft shuddered like a drenched dog shaking off water. The altimeter stopped at 25.2 and the horizon steadied in the windows … then, slowly, the LRLT began to ascend again. “Okay, there we go,” Joe whispered. “Climb, baby, climb. Climb—!”

  There was a loud bang! and a violent impact which felt as if they were in a car that had been rear-ended by a Mack truck; several alarms went off at once as the LRLT suddenly careened sideways. “Sweet fucking Jesus!” Joe shouted. “Not again!”