Encounter with Tiber [v1.0]

by By Buzz Aldrin

  Whatever the reality, the Starbird, assisted off the pad by a Star-booster, made a perfectly uneventful journey to ISS, which was being used as a marshaling point because with its highly inclined orbit it was relatively easy to work into a polar approach to the Moon.

  The Pigeons for this mission were known universally as Pigeon Racks, because they flew lying on their sides, supported in a steel framework which was fitted with thrusters, with a Starbird drop tank filled with hydrogen in the same framework directly behind them. It made them ungainly looking, but it also gave them a major advantage for this mission: unmanned versions could be parked permanently on the Moon’s surface, and once their liquid hydrogen was drained off, they could easily be modified into surface habitats, living quarters for the moon. They were awkward and ungainly to watch in flight—like metal squids shooting backward through space—but they did the job.

  The transfer to the Pigeon Rack at ISS took only a few hours; a returning pilot from ISS would then take the Starbird back to base. Less than ten hours after the launch from Earth, the Tiber Two crew were given the go-ahead for translunar injection, and with a burst of fire from the main engine that squatted between the steel legs of the platform, sticking sideways from the HT, the Pigeon Rack was on its way to the Moon.

  It took about three days, just as it always did; as long as we were using chemical rockets, the efficient thing to do was a hard boost to get out of Earth orbit at a point where instead of falling on around the curve of the Earth, as it had been doing in LEO, the ship would instead be on a high trajectory, rising away from the Earth until, as it slowed from Earth’s pull behind it, it reached a point where it would fall toward the Moon and another deceleration thrust would slow it into orbit around the Moon. The time taken for those long falls would be three days in all, and until you had an engine that could boost you the whole way—a solar-electric or nuclear-electric rocket—the length of those falls would determine your schedule.

  There were occasional news reports featuring interviews with the crew of the Pigeon Rack, but not many, and they played only on the more obscure channels. There had been a great deal of excitement, of course, when the Tiber One had explored the South Pole Base, but now that everyone had seen all the pictures of dead Tiberians and of the still, silent equipment that had sat there for millennia, and then of the crew crawling all over the site looking for the Encyclopedia, the viewers, in their usual way, had decided that enough was enough. We could call them again when we brought back the Encyclopedia and held the parade.

  So I don’t know a great deal about how Dad spent those days; the official reports were kind of terse and dry, the news reports scanty, and nothing much got said in them. Peter said it was a fairly happy crew, “as much as could be expected given that our pilot, while a great person, was constantly being spied on by a fellow who never talked,” he added. “Chris and I had gotten to like Xiao Be a lot, you know, while we were in China— her approach to things worked so well with our own—but as soon as Jiang was around she’d clam up.”

  So I imagine that on the long trip out they mostly did what the mission plan called for them to do: conducted a few small-scale experiments that one agency or another had dreamed up, ran some drills, and practiced their maneuvers on simulators.

  Chris and Xiao Be would be on the Moon for some months. Peter and Jiang were to return on the next ship, but there was already another Chinese astronaut, suspiciously short on technical qualifications or duties, slated to arrive on that one. The other powers might fume, but it was the deal they had been able to get. As far as they could tell, the Chinese intention was only to maintain one political officer at all times on the Moon, keeping an eye on their nationals and making sure that their allies didn’t steal anything. If you looked at it that way, at least the percentage of deadheaders would go down over time.

  At last, after taking one setting-up orbit for position that incidentally let them sail over both poles of the Moon, Xiao Be fired the main engine and brought the Pigeon Rack slowly down to the landing site, in a broken crater two kilometers from Tiber Base. On the airless world, the descent was simply a fall until it was time to power up the engine, and then a slow, gentle ride down on the rocket until finally they hovered for a split instant on their exhaust before the metal feet settled onto the Moon, only about sixty meters from the scoured-bare spot where the first expedition had landed and departed.

  That triggered a real flurry of activity; as soon as they had landed, they suited up, drained the air from the Pigeon capsule into storage, opened the EVA hatch on its upper surface, and climbed out onto the steel skeleton that surrounded the ship, and from there down to the lunar surface.

  In one of his calls to me, Dad told me there was a funny sense of completion he got at that moment. The place where they had landed was invisible forever to the Earth, down in the crater, and thus they could not see Earth, either. For the first time, what he had dreamed of since he was a small boy had happened: his boots were planted on the soil of another world, and when he looked up he saw, not home, but only stars. He might have been anywhere in the universe at that moment, for every galaxy must be full of small, stony, airless worlds, and for some reason I never really understood, that was important to him.

  They found that the four other steel frameworks that dotted the small plain had landed as they were supposed to and contained the appropriate things in their cargo pods, which were simply Pigeons with the life-support systems pulled out to make more room for cargo. (Because they were never intended to fly back, these were “double Pigeon Racks”—two Pigeons with a DT tank between them graced each steel frame.) The slightly more distant fifth framework, which was the emergency return lander that had been brought there under robot control before anything else came, also checked out as it was supposed to, as the first expedition had confirmed. “Well,” Chris said, “we’ve still got two hours left on our EVA time, and we’ve accomplished everything we were supposed to do—confirming that it’s all here. Would anyone like to return to the Pigeon via Tiber Base?”

  Jiang spoke, which was so rare that everyone jumped a little when they heard his voice in their helmet radios. “We are not authorized for such an expedition.”

  “I can get us authorized in about ten, I think,” Chris pointed out. “It’ll get them a little news coverage which they haven’t had for a while, and it will give us the chance to do some exploring before we settle into routine.”

  “I would like to see Tiber Base myself,” Peter said, backing Chris.

  “You won’t get authorization if I protest, and I will,” Jiang said. “We are here to find the Encyclopedia, and then get off this godforsaken rock. If we are ahead of schedule at the moment, then we need to use that time to drain the HT on robot lander two and move the racks into it to create a habitat. It’s clearly stated in the manual of procedures and policies that time gained against the schedule should always be maintained and used to accelerate the working process—not for sight-seeing.”

  Chris shrugged—not that anyone could tell, he knew, in his pressure suit, but old habits are hard to break. He looked from one space traveler to another: Peter standing with his arms wrapped in front of himself, Xiao Be carefully neutral, and Jiang with arms slightly akimbo and feet wide and planted, as if daring Chris to defy him.

  The International Commission had ordered them to cooperate. NASA had ordered Chris not to let the Chinese run the show. And Chris had long ago decided that he didn’t like Jiang. So he said, very calmly, “Well, if we’ve invoked the rules and procedures, it would seem to me that the EVA mission is completed, and we need to radio home for further instructions. And I am required not to compromise your rest. The obvious thing to do is to return to the Pigeon, get a meal and a scrub, and radio Mission Control for further instructions.”

  “But—” Jiang’s protest died in his ears as Chris turned and headed back toward their lander. He didn’t listen for more, but kept moving in light, easy bounds, something like a kangaroo and
a bit like a squirrel. Around him the lunar surface was a dim gray, lit only by starlight and by reflected Earthshine and sunlight from the bright distant peaks. He knew without looking that Peter would be right behind him, but he was pleased to see Xiao Be come up on his right; Jiang would have no choice but to follow.

  The next work period was mostly spent outside. They opened the DT space and let the little puff of hydrogen vanish from it, leaving it clean and dry inside. Next they unloaded the pressurized rover, with its awkward-looking crane on the back end for construction work and various other jobs (most importantly, getting the Encyclopedia into a lander). It had to come out via the nose hatch in one of the cargo Pigeons, and that meant it came out in several large pieces which they then had to assemble, working with thick-gloved hands that, despite all their practice, fumbled the tools and often struggled to get things into their right places.

  With the crane they could start moving the racks—the internal structures—into the DT that was to become their permanent home at moonbase. As they shoved a load of material in through the side hatch that they had opened, Peter said to Chris, “You start to wonder if the whole universe is going to be covered with DTs. This one, four more on the other robot landers, one on ours, one at the International Space Station, your country is putting up another one next year in orbit, and then one at the L1 point, and . . . well, there will be a lot of them.”

  “Mobile homes of space,” Chris agreed. “It’s even about the same size as a single-wide mobile home with one extra room. Not elegant, but we can afford them—even if they do kind of make everywhere look alike after a while.”

  “Still,” Xiao Be pointed out, “this one will have a genuine bathroom. I don’t suppose you gentlemen will refuse to use that for aesthetic reasons?”

  As each rack was loaded in and bolted into place, the interior looked less and less like an old pressure tank and more and more like home. When they had gotten all the racks into place and all the materials that were to be unpacked inside, they finally replaced the three hatches with Plexiglas windows, attached the airlock, and filled it with air. It was at full pressure in ten minutes, and when it had held pressure for twenty, they gingerly removed their pressure suits and got to work on the job of unpacking. After five hours outside, the first thing they wanted to unpack was the food, and the second thing they wanted was to get the bathroom working. It was late in the shift when they had finally made sure that they would be able to stay in the newly-equipped habitat for the duration of their stay; only then, despite occasional grumbling from Jiang, did Peter get around to setting up the radio and trying to raise Mission Control.

  They came in loud and clear, almost at once. “Tiber Base, we have great news for you. One of our robot rovers has identified a site as the Encyclopedia landing site. And a camera on a polar orbiter satellite has confirmed it. We will be dispatching the Tiber Prize lander under robot control within a few days; as soon as it arrives, we’ll send you after the Encyclopedia.” Then the voice of Mission Control—an old friend who was temporarily out of the astronaut rotation due to minor surgery—added, “Hope you weren’t getting to like the Moon too much, Chris, because chances are you’ll be back here within two weeks.”

  Chris looked out one of the windows they had installed at the sharp, ragged edge of the crater illuminated by brilliant sunlight. Its lines uneroded by air or water, and able to stand at a steeper angle than you ever saw on Earth, lit in the harsh glare of the sun in perfect relief in that vacuum, the crater wall looked as if it had been made that morning, but it was billions of years old. Beyond it the stars shone with a light steadier than any ever seen on Earth. “To tell you the truth, I was kind of getting to like it up here,” Chris said. “Well, I hope it’s a nice day for a drive when the lander finally gets here.”

  * * * *

  8

  THE MAPS CAME THROUGH THE NEXT DAY, SCROLL1NG SLOWLY OUT OF THE small fax in the main lunar habitat. Chris and Xiao Be sat down to pore over it. “Well,” he said, “we certainly get to see Tiber Base—we’ll have to drive through there anyway. After that. . . well, I’m not sure I like doing this with just the radar and optical maps.”

  “I don’t either,” Xiao Be said. “But I don’t know how we can possibly get any more information than this.”

  “Here’s a helpful note,” Peter said, looking up from the computer screen. “They want you to drive slowly.”

  “How very helpful,” Chris muttered.

  Jiang glanced up and then looked down; whatever he was working on, on his terminal, he didn’t talk about it much.

  The lander would not arrive at the Encyclopedia site for almost a week, so they continued to develop the base, getting things unpacked in the habitat and the unmanned cargo landers, and setting up the permanent observation instruments. As the days crept by, the sun shone on different parts of the crater rim above them, working its way around the Moon’s 656-hour day. “And when it gets all the way around it will start over,” Chris pointed out. “You never think of the Moon as having a summer and winter, but it does, because its orbit is at an angle to the Earth’s orbit, and the Earth carries it around the sun; in six months you won’t see the sun on the crater wall at all, for many weeks.”

  Peter sighed. “I’m not sure how much people think of the Moon at all. And I suppose from a small-scale perspective they’re right; most of the time it’s just a pretty light in the sky. But I’m sort of glad that Tiber One didn’t find the Encyclopedia right away. If they had, I have a feeling they might have just canceled our mission entirely and left exploring Tiber Base for, oh, some other time. It seems to me that we haven’t changed much in the last fifty years or so; we’re still always looking for a reason to just give up.”

  Chris shrugged and passed his friend a sandwich; they were sitting at what they had nicknamed the “observation terrace,” the one tiny spot in the lunar habitat where there were two places to sit down, a surface to eat from, and a view out the window. “Oh, I’m sure nothing’s changed. And at the same time the world is full of people who would love to be where we are, but will never have the chance, not to mention people who still don’t believe you can land on a light in the sky anyway. Well, do you want to get an early start on our EV so we can catch it?”

  “As long as we’re here we might as well see the sights,” Peter agreed. “And besides, there’s a lot to get done before you and Xiao drive off with the crane and leave it out in the woods to find its own way back.”

  “It’s a big robot and it’s time it started looking out for itself,” Chris said. “Let’s suit up.”

  Twenty minutes later, outside, as they loaded a set of solar panels onto the back of the pressurized rover, Xiao Be’s voice broke in over their suit radios. “Just about time now,” she said.

  “Right,” Chris said. “Well, let’s get to where we can see.”

  The two of them bounded across the dusty plain to an open space they had chosen; Xiao Be bounced along from the other side. All of them looked like pale ghosts in the eternal dark of the crater, lighted only by the reflecting walls above. The dust flew out from their feet in straight lines, forming no roiling clouds, just glimmering once in the dim light, dispersing, and falling back to the surface where it had lain for billions of years.

  The three met together, almost at the center of the crater, where they would have the maximum view of the sky. “Jiang didn’t want to leave the habitat,” Xiao Be explained. “I think he has a long message from home, or maybe a report to file, or maybe he just wants some time to himself.” Neither Peter or Chris answered. They had both decided that they didn’t want to run the risk of anything they said to Xiao Be getting her into trouble, and it was obvious that nobody was supposed to notice that Jiang had very few duties and seemed to have been trained for very little. Long afterwards, Peter used to say that the one thing a secret policeman can’t stand is people acting like he isn’t secret.

  High above them, the Southern Cross shone brilliantly, amid a bla
ze of stars.

  “How many more stars are there?” Peter asked, as the three stood together and looked up. “Than we could see from Earth, I mean?”

  Chris chuckled. “Well, that would be a great question for an under-grad astronomy course. And I thought I was never going to teach another one. Part of it depends on what you mean by ‘from Earth,’ because on some very clear nights in some very high, dry places on the Earth you can see a lot more stars than you can in the swampier parts. But putting it roughly; well, since the brightest stars have a magnitude of one, and the next brightest of two, and so forth, and each represents a tenfold decrease in brightness . . . and since there are always more dim than bright stars and that’s roughly proportional. . . heck, I don’t know. But I’d figure we can see three more magnitudes, at least, even allowing for the visors on the suits, and if you figure there’s about ten times as many more stars per order of magnitude, that would come to something over a thousand times as many.”