by Marty Steere
To his surprise, Gale extended the gun toward him. “Sorry, Commander.” And then Cartwright’s world went black.
#
Spots swam before him, blinking randomly in a vivid multi-colored pastiche. Lights on a Christmas tree, he realized. On the floor, the boys were gleefully tearing into brightly colored wrapping paper, their voices a cacophony of shrieks and exclamations. A warm glow spread through him. He smiled, opening his mouth to speak. But instead of sound came pain. A sharp, intense pain radiating out from his forehead. He felt himself falling backward. The lights were no longer twinkling, but throbbing. And with each throb, came an ache, mild at first, but, with every new pulse, stronger. Soon, the pain was unbearable. Must open your eyes, he heard himself say. Who was he talking to? Himself. And he suddenly knew with an overwhelming certainty that he had to open his eyes.
Cartwright’s eyes flew open.
A few inches in front of him he saw metal, a washed out gray cloaked in semi-darkness. He blinked twice before it occurred to him that what he was looking at was the upper bulkhead of the lunar module. He was lying on his back, suspended in his hammock. The vessel was strangely silent, and it took him a moment to realize that he did not hear the normal whirring sounds of the Environmental Control System. He had the sudden thought that he needed to get into his suit, followed immediately by the comprehension that he was already in his suit. But he was not wearing his helmet, nor was he connected to the personal life support system contained in his backpack.
Instinctively, he called out, “ECS failure,” and he started to reach up for a handhold to pull himself out of the hammock. His arms would not move.
“Take it easy,” he heard another voice say. It sounded strange, almost as if he were hearing it underwater. Gale. And his memory of the events in the Soviet space station came back in a rush.
“Relax,” Gale said. “All systems are nominal.” His face appeared as he rose to stand next to the hammock. “You’re not hearing the usual sounds because our ears have been impaired by the discharge of a weapon in an enclosed space. Hopefully, it’s just temporary.”
Cartwright took quick stock of his situation. His arms were pinned to his side, a rope or some other restraint having been tied around both him and the hammock at his waist. His legs were similarly immobilized. He felt a hot flush.
“Cut me out of here,” he said through clenched teeth. “Now.”
Gale raised a hand in a placating gesture. “I will. I just didn’t want you to hurt yourself when you came to.”
Gale, however, made no effort to undo the bindings. Instead, with his other hand, he held up Cartwright’s Snoopy cap. “Before I do, there’s someone you need to talk to.” He reached forward and slid the cap onto Cartwright’s head. Cartwright had to force himself to bite back the expletive that came to mind.
“Houston,” Gale said, speaking into the stalk on his own cap, “do you copy?”
Through the earpiece, Cartwright could hear Gale’s voice more distinctly. Then the fact that Gale had hailed Houston hit him. The communications problem, he told himself, must have been corrected. At least he had that.
“Roger,” came the reply. It sounded like the man who’d been speaking to him from Alamogordo. So he’d had time to get to Houston. Cartwright wondered just how long he’d been out. “Stand by for Deputy Administrator Huffman.”
“Hello, Bob,” came another voice after a short delay. “This is Adam Huffman. We met in Stu Overholdt’s office back in April.”
Cartwright recognized the man’s voice. He paused before responding. The fact that he was speaking to the second-in-command at NASA while tied into his hammock was disorienting. “Yes, sir. I remember.”
“Bob, you’ve been doing a hell of a job. That landing was particularly impressive.”
“Well, thank you, sir, but…”
Huffman had not waited for a reply. “Now I know you have some questions, but I’m not at liberty to discuss them with you over an open channel. Dr. Gale will fill you in to the extent appropriate. Just understand that you have NASA’s full support and gratitude. Hell, what am I saying. You have the country’s support and gratitude. Listen to what Dr. Gale has to say. And we’ll look forward to seeing you back here in a few days.”
When he felt confident the man had finished, Cartwright asked, “Sir, am I still in command here?”
There was an odd moment of silence before the deputy administrator replied. “Yes, Bob. Of course.”
“Good,” Cartwright said, looking directly at Gale. “Now cut me out of this goddamned hammock.”
#
They sat awkwardly side by side on the ascent engine cover, each considering the other. After Gale had untied the elastic tethers holding him in place, Cartwright had slung himself off the hammock, unhooked the forward end and angrily threw the thing toward the back of the module. His head throbbing, he’d then retrieved a container of juice from one of the food storage compartments to slake the wicked thirst that had overtaken him.
“Look,” Gale now said, evenly. “I didn’t want any of that to happen back there. But I didn’t have a choice. You saw the weapon in Petrov’s hand. If I don’t shoot first, he shoots. Probably at you.”
“That still doesn’t explain why you shot me.”
Gale pursed his lips. Finally, he said, “I didn’t exactly shoot you. I disabled you. I had to. You were making an already dangerous situation worse.” He took a breath. “We incorporated the tranquilizer option in the weapon for a number of contingencies. One of them was the possibility that you might get in the way. I had express authority to use it on you if that happened. Again, it wasn’t what I wanted to do.”
The suggestion that he was somehow interfering, albeit with something he didn’t yet understand, was troubling to Cartwright, and it gave him pause, helping to reign in some of the anger. “All right,” Cartwright said after a moment, “let’s take it from the beginning. Who the hell are you?”
“I’m Mason Gale. That’s my real name.”
“Are you a lunar geologist?”
“No.”
“Who do you work for?”
“Same as you. The government.” Then he added, “Different agency.”
Cartwright snorted. “What agency?”
Gale shook his head. “That I can’t tell you. But it doesn’t matter. You’ve never heard of it. Let’s just say it’s one of the intelligence services, and leave it at that. In the scheme of things, it’s not important.”
Cartwright decided that was probably right and elected not to pursue it. “Why were you sent here?”
“My mission,” Gale said, “was to assess the situation, respond to threats, and, if necessary, neutralize them.” He put a hand up, apparently recognizing that Cartwright was about to ask what the hell that meant. “For the last several years, we’ve been closely monitoring the progress of the Soviet space program. Some of it is legitimate. Exploration. Not all of it, though. Publicly, the Soviet Union has committed - same as us - to neutrality in space. Both of our countries have signed a treaty to that effect. But the Soviets have been working hard to do exactly the opposite, under a project code-named Almaz. Salyut 3 was their first success. It was supposed to be for scientific research, but it was really a military space station, armed with a 23 millimeter rapid fire cannon. Salyut 5, which was launched three months ago, is also an Almaz station.”
“And the base here is part of that program?” Cartwright asked.
Gale nodded. “Yes, as it turns out. Though we weren’t sure. Several months ago, we learned that the Soviets were planning to finally put men on the moon. They’d kept this one really quiet. That, of course, sent up even more warning signals than most of the stuff they do. And,” he added with a slight shrug, “we’d had some intelligence setbacks over the past couple of years. Lost some good people, so we were behind the curve. We weren’t really sure what they were up to.”
“So,” Cartwright said, “Apollo 18 was revived. To give us a chance to
go take a look.”
“Exactly.”
“But why not let me in on it? Don’t tell me your people thought I’d go blab it to the Russians.”
“No, nothing like that. At least I don’t think,” Gale added, without a hint of sarcasm. Cartwright was once again reminded how humorless Gale could be. “As I said before, it wasn’t my call. I can only tell you what I was told. We weren’t sure what was going on up here, and we had to play it close to the vest. Simple fact is, you’re not a professional operative.”
“You mean I’m not a professional liar,” Cartwright said dryly.
“That too.”
“So now what?” Cartwright asked. “We go public?”
Gale didn’t respond right away. There was something ominous about the silence. Finally, Gale said, “We let the higher-ups deal with it. Our job is to sit tight, wait for the launch window, and return to the command capsule. Then we go home. By the time we get there, it’ll all be sorted out.”
“That’s it?”
Gale nodded. “Those are our orders.”
It didn’t add up, but Cartwright was having trouble putting his finger on the reason. Perhaps, he thought, he was suffering lingering effects from whatever drugs were in the tranquilizer. He closed his eyes and tried to focus. After a moment, he asked, “So what exactly happened back there after you knocked me out?”
Again, Gale hesitated. “Nothing. I got us both suited up, dragged you to the rover, and drove us back here.”
That also didn’t compute. Concentrate Bob, he told himself. Then something occurred to him. “How was I interfering?”
“You’d put yourself between me and the other Russian,” Gale said immediately. “You were giving him an opening. I had to take away his advantage.”
Cartwright thought about that. As Gale had noted, Cartwright was not a, what had he called it? A professional operative. Even so, that seemed a bit of a stretch. “Having me unconscious wasn’t a distraction?”
“No.”
“And nothing else happened?”
“Correct.”
The process of getting into their gear was not easy. Putting on the bulky backpack could be done by an astronaut on his own, but it took a long time. For Gale to have accomplished it while ostensibly keeping an eye on someone intent on doing him harm would have been almost impossible. Cartwright looked hard at Gale.
“You’re telling me Kruchinkin just stood there watching while you suited us both up?”
“Yes.”
Gale didn’t blink. He didn’t look away. But, then again, Cartwright thought, as between the two of them, Gale was the professional operative. And Cartwright’s own words came back to him. Professional liar.
“I don’t believe you.”
Gale didn’t exactly smile, but the corners of his mouth did turn up slightly. It was actually more menacing than his usual dispassionate look.
“I don’t care,” Gale said.
In the unnatural silence, Cartwright considered the man. Gale almost appeared to be enjoying himself, which was remarkably disconcerting. And then the thing that had been bothering Cartwright, that had been tickling at the edges of his sentience for the past several minutes, frustratingly just out of reach, finally took root. He started to speak, stopped, then, the residual anger taking over, he decided, what the hell.
“Back at the space station,” Cartwright began, slowly, “you said the pulse generator was loaded onto a Soyuz a week ago. That was before we even launched.” Gale’s expression did not change. “We didn’t need to come here to determine what the Soviets were up to, did we? We already knew.”
He was familiar enough with Gale to know the man wouldn’t respond to that, and, sure enough, he didn’t. Instead, he continued to regard Cartwright with that ambiguous look.
The seconds stretched into an uncomfortably long period. Gale seemed perfectly at ease in the silence. Cartwright’s mind was working overtime, making up for its previous lethargy. Gale, he knew now without a doubt, was a very dangerous man. The two of them were in a confined space. The lyrics of a popular song came to mind. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
Finally, Cartwright asked, “Do you have anything more to say?”
Gale shook his head slowly. If anything, his grim smile deepened. The man, Cartwright realized, really was enjoying himself. He was in his element. Sadly, Cartwright was not.
Or was he?
Cartwright kept his own face as neutral as possible, but the gears were turning. “All right,” he said after a long moment. “I don’t know what’s going on, but I can follow orders.” He placed his two gloved hands on the engine cover and pushed himself up. As he came to a standing position, one knee buckled slightly, and he fell against the bulkhead to their right. Because of the fractional gravity, the fall was in a slow motion, and he had plenty of time to put out his right hand to break it. As he leaned against the side wall, he held his left hand up to his forehead. Even through his glove he could tell there was a knot in the middle, the result, he guessed, of being shot with the tranquilizer. He shook his head side to side and straightened.
“Wow,” he said in a slightly surprised, but groggy voice. “That wasn’t a very a smooth move.”
Blinking his eyes, he looked back at Gale, still seated on the engine cover. The man stared back, but said nothing.
Reaching for the unattached end of his hammock, Cartwright said, “I’m going to lay down for a little bit, until the dizziness passes.” He raised a gloved finger in Gale’s direction. “No more tethers.”
Gale shook his head slightly, then raised a hand as if giving an oath.
Cartwright hooked the end of the hammock into the eyelet near the front of the module and reached above his head for a grip on the overhead hatch handle to pull himself up into his bunk. Instead of grabbing the main handle, however, his hand closed around the smaller lever for the dump valve on the opposite edge of the hatch, the one that was used to depressurize the cabin when the astronauts were prepared to make an EVA. As he swung himself up into the hammock, Cartwright twisted his wrist, shifting the lever from its standard Auto position to the Open position, allowing air from the cabin to vent out into space.
Normally, the hiss of escaping air would have been detected by both astronauts, but, as Cartwright had suspected, the damage they’d suffered to their eardrums rendered the sound almost inaudible. Cartwright, who was aware the valve had been opened and whose head was now inches away, could barely hear it. If Gale’s audio faculties were as impaired as his, the man would not hear it at all.
Of course, the module was fitted with an alarm that would normally have sounded when the valve was opened, and that sound would have been quite loud and readily heard by both astronauts. But, as Cartwright had fallen against the bulkhead, he’d come in contact with the Environmental Control System mounted aft of the lunar module pilot’s station. With his right hand concealed from Gale’s view by his body, he’d hit the override switch on the alarm and had shifted the cabin repressurization valve from Auto to Closed. He’d hoped Gale, who, despite the man’s intense introduction to the workings of the module over the past several months, was still not nearly as familiar with it as Cartwright, would not notice either of the changed settings. To Cartwright’s relief, the man apparently had not.
Timing was going to be critical. What Cartwright intended to do was extraordinarily dangerous, and there was a very good chance he would end up killing the both of them. In his current state of mind, it was a risk he was willing to take.
He knew that, as the air bled from the dump valve, it would take approximately three minutes for the cabin pressure to drop from its normal 5.0 to a mere 0.08 pounds per square inch. When it got near the latter point, Cartwright, assuming he was still conscious, would be able to pull the hatch open against the remaining pressure. Then, all of whatever oxygen was still in the module would rush out through the opening into the vacuum that surrounded them. From that moment, Cartwright would have, at best, maybe ten s
econds to do what he needed to do.
Heart beating fast, he counted. Twenty-one Mississippi, twenty-two Mississippi. He was banking on the notion that, as oxygen was sucked out of the module, it would vacate the areas farthest from the source of the leak first. Somewhat counter intuitively, therefore, he hoped the best place to be was where he was now, close up against the spot from which the air was escaping. It was a theory he’d never tested. Or ever imagined he would need to test.
As he passed through a hundred Mississippi, Cartwright felt himself growing faint, the light in the cabin dimming and his field of vision narrowing. He heard, or thought he heard, a grunt from Gale. Then a movement below his feet told him the man had realized there was a problem. Gale had risen and now lurched toward the ECS panel.
To reverse what was happening, Gale would need to diagnose the problem and hit several switches in the right sequence, all while in an already oxygen-deprived state. Cartwright didn’t think it was possible. Still, Gale reached for the panel, gloved fingers fumbling for the controls. As he slapped at the panel, he must have toggled the override switch because the alarm suddenly sounded, filling the cabin with an intense noise. A part of Cartwright’s mind not only registered the man’s actions, but marveled at his strength.
Cartwright knew he couldn’t wait any longer. Fighting against the oncoming blackness, his vision and focus entirely on the hatch above him, he planted his feet against the upper bulkhead, gripped the main handle on the hatch with two hands and twisted it. Then he pulled down with all his remaining strength. As he felt the silicone compound seal separate, he expelled what little air remained in his lungs, clamped his lips shut and allowed his legs to drop to the engine cover below him against the sudden rush of the remaining air escaping through the open hatch. The alarm stopped abruptly, and the module was plunged into absolute silence as it was exposed to the vacuum of space.
A common misperception, one promulgated over the years by bad science fiction, was that a human body when subjected to a vacuum, would either explode or instantly freeze. Neither was true. In reality, the body could continue to function in a vacuum for several minutes, skin holding in all the organs, heart still pumping blood to the extremities. The immediate problem for someone cast into the void was lack of oxygen. And it would do no good to hold one’s breath. In fact, due to the inevitability of gas expanding in a vacuum, that would be the worst thing one could do, as it would likely lead to a rupture of the lungs.