Yefgenii is desperate for rest. His head aches with nausea, hunger and dehydration. His body aches from cold. His sunburn is bleeding and sore, he can feel the stinking dressing getting damper. He unfolds the mesh hammock and straps himself in. Darkness swallows Voskhodyeniye and, moments later, sleep its occupant.
HE SQUINTS IN THE SUNLIGHT. Ears of corn wave in the breeze. The crop is taller than him. He is running. A narrow path cuts through the cornfield, bordered by the tall stalks that catch on his elbows and spring back as he goes by. He is laughing. Though someone’s chasing him, he isn’t frightened, because she is laughing too. He feels her gentle hands hook him under the arms and swing him up into the air, so high he is whirling above the ears of corn. Together they are laughing and spinning. He gazes into her face but the sunlight bursts round the curls of her hair, burning out his vision of her. He squints into the glare, searching for her face, the woman laughing and swinging him, and he is laughing too, and so little, but he can’t see her because he is dazzled by the Sun.
Voskhodyeniye is blazing with light. He wakes, blinking at the glare bouncing off the metal plates of the BO. He unstraps himself and floats off the mesh hammock. The Ocean of Storms drifts below. He glimpses the triangle of craters, Marius, Reiner, and Kepler, and they appear different to him. He wonders if the orbit has slipped somehow. He glances at his chronometer. He’s slept for six hours, making three revs of the Moon since he last surveyed the landing site.
He feels sick and starved. Part of him craves a return to the hammock and straps, so he can huddle in his suit for days as if taking to his bed to break a fever.
The sextant is angled as it was for his previous determination of the orbit’s pericynthion. The distinguishing features of the landing site are passing below. He has time enough only for a single measurement, so he chooses the angular separation between Reiner and Kepler: this being the largest angle, it will provide the most accurate comparison. He looks back over his handwritten notes and sees his suspicion confirmed. The angular separation has increased. The orbit is decaying. Voskhodyeniye is losing altitude and at some point yet to be determined will plummet down to the surface of the Moon.
He’s failed to achieve the orbit demanded by the flight plan. The error is grievous. Most likely his navigation has been imprecise, and he’s misjudged the course corrections and the lunar orbit insertion burn. He rues his arrogance, for persisting with the original mission when the more achievable option was always to keep on the free-return trajectory to Earth.
Now he straps himself into the pilot’s seat. He intends to fire the Block D engine for an arbitrary period of ten seconds in order to accelerate into a less unstable orbit. That at least will buy sufficient time to plan and execute trans-Earth injection with requisite precision, trans-Earth injection being the burn that will hurl him home.
First he needs to swing the spacecraft round. The engine stands at the leading edge of the stack, in combination with the LK.
The thrusters fail. He is getting no power indications from any of the LOK’s systems. He checks the circuit breakers and fuel cells. The LOK is dead. Out of sheer desperation he attempts to fire the thrusters once more, but the propellant doesn’t ignite. The electronic connections between the LOK’s command power grid and the ship’s thrusters have drained.
Maybe from the LK he can still fire the Block D, but he must also turn the ship round, or else the sole effect of ignition will be to decelerate Voskhodyeniye and crash it into the Moon. He attempts to power up the LK from the LOK. He throws the switches to open the circuits to the LK but no power lights blink on. Both modules appear lifeless, but the LK may still be in its dormant state; its batteries may yet drive its guidance systems and spark its engines, and its engines are capable of powering the entire stack out of lunar orbit and onto the trajectory home.
His only hope lies with the lander.
The Sun sets. He must wait an hour in pitch blackness, with the orbit decaying by the minute. In darkness he feels his way to the storage locker below the environmental control system. His gloved hands pat the smooth dome of the bubble helmet and the bulky padding of the Krechet-94 Moonsuit. He strips off the Orlan and lets it drift away while he pulls on the Krechet. The freezing atmosphere of the cabin deadens his flesh. He slides into the suit and connects the panels. Any stretching of his frozen skin is excruciating. He fumbles the bubble helmet over his head and onto the metal collar, and locks it in place.
He floats in the darkness, sealed inside his suit, feeling warmth creep back into his body. Blood returns to the muscles and tendons. He twists and stretches, doing what little he can to loosen up. In his enclosed universe he breathes pure oxygen, but he smells his own dank odor, and the blood and goo of his sunburn.
Sunlight explodes across the horizon. The Far Side ignites into gray and brown speckles. The land rolls beneath the ship. For the first time the Sea of Moscow is lit, a dark eye in the upper left quadrant. He wants to take it as an omen. Moscow is watching him.
He dons his Moon helmet. He mounts his backpack and plugs in its cable and hoses, then attaches his tethering line. He belays the line onto a secure handhold and ties it off, leaving only a short loop.
Without power to depressurize the LOK, he must blow the hatch by hand. He turns the first safety lever, then the second. The metal creaks. He hears the locks clicking loose. He grips the handhold to the side of the hatch and releases the final lock. The cabin atmosphere blasts out into space in a single gale that boosts him up into the hatchway. The tether snaps tight but the belay holds firm. The line and his grip strain for a second, perhaps not even that long, and the wind drops. The air has gone. No force propels him outward. All is calm again.
His suit is swollen and rigid; he feels it raking against his sunburn, rupturing blisters that ooze sticky fluid, while outside the spacecraft the expelled air has sublimated in an instant and now a shower of glinting ice crystals shifts in a cloud toward the surface of the Moon.
Silence surrounds him. He sees that the surface has changed motion. It is not only sliding lengthways along the stack, but also rolling toward him. The Eastern Sea is the only feature he can recognize among the crammed overlapping rings of craters, but the Sea is rolling, it is advancing up over the equator toward the lunar north pole.
Then the land drops away from the spacecraft. Empty space begins to roll in, a black void of invisible stars. Venting the BO’s atmosphere has set Voskhodyeniye into a slow roll; no doubt it has slightly modified its orbit as well.
Yefgenii wiggles his backpack through the gap and squeezes out of the hatch into space. The tether trails behind. He maneuvers onto the handrail and now he is hanging over the northern hemisphere of the Near Side. The Sea of Cold turns under him. He is the first man to conduct an EVA in the realm of the Moon.
He reaches the boom but the motor has no power. He maneuvers by hand along the rails of the LOK fuselage toward the LK. His breath rushes. His heart drums. He must enter the LK before night falls, or else he’ll be stranded in darkness on the outside of the revolving stack.
Yefgenii has learned the most efficient method from his previous spacewalk, and secures a first position at the LK’s docking array, from which he then floats in parallel to the hull.
The LK hangs silent, cold and airless. Yefgenii secures himself on the handhold outside the hatch and begins to turn the sequence of latches to open the port. The inside of his suit is warmer than the chill air of the LOK, but his limbs remain cold, weak and stiff. No sound travels from the latches; outside the noisy living system of his suit stretches a silent endless vacuum.
When the final lock releases, the hatch remains motionless. He pulls to open it. The heavy door takes an effort to move; it retains all the mass it possessed on Earth. He swings the hatch outward and then attempts to struggle through the elliptical gap into the LK. The Kretchet Moonsuit is even bulkier than the Orlan. He twists onto his side to squeeze through the port. His backpack catches on the frame. Pain sears his s
unburn. He snakes and pulls. Suffering bolts through his lower back. For the first time in days of debilitating cold, he sweats.
Inside the LK, he rests. His boots still point out of the hatch. The Sea of Rain floats up into the framed segment of sky, then the Carpathians lift off the soles of his boots, then Copernicus. He is approaching the terminator.
Yefgenii pushes himself away from the hatch. His tether trails out into space, running back to the LOK, holding him back. He maneuvers to the control panel and activates the master switch. The LK draws power from its batteries. The cabin lights blink on. Gauge needles quiver, digital displays glow. He disconnects the tether, shuts the hatch and pressurizes the LK.
His suit softens and he removes his outer helmet, bubble helmet and space gloves. Taking a position at the pilot’s station, his priority is to arrest the rolling of the stack caused by blowing the LOK hatch. Flying Voskhodyeniye from the LK has never been simulated. The lander’s computer is coming online but it isn’t configured to the dynamics of the entire stack. He must work by trial and error.
Yefgenii fires the thrusters to oppose the roll. The roll slows but the stack yaws, swinging the LK — the bow of the stack — toward the Moon, and the stern — the LOK and power module — out into space. In the viewports of the lander the lunar surface sweeps into sight, and then the terminator, and then the spacecraft and the lone cosmonaut are in darkness, tumbling in roll and yaw, divergent on two axes, in a failing orbit less than 100 kilometres above the pitiless surface of the Moon.
FIVE DAYS since Mission Control lost contact with Voskhodyeniye, the widow will have accepted his death. She’ll be grieving. She’ll have sat the children in the living room of the apartment and said she has something very sad to tell them. She explains that their father has gone to a secret place and they will never see him again. The boy stares back at her with big blue eyes. “Where has he gone?”
“I don’t know,” she says.
“Is he dead?” asks the girl.
The widow nods. “Yes,” she says. “He is dead,” she says.
Already they are controlling their feelings. The boy is turning tough; he will become a man like his father who erects barriers to emotion. The girl is earnest; she will become more so, more austere. Yefgenii longs to burst into the apartment in their moment of grief and gather them all into his arms and give them the news that he’s alive and that he loves them and, in holding them and murmuring to them, reverse the emotional damage wrought by his obsessive pursuit of the perfect mission.
In the flight plan, he would make the landing and then return to orbit for rendezvous with the LOK. But he is losing his battle with the LK’s controls. He cannot correct Voskhodyeniye’s trajectory, so the LOK will not maintain orbit. It will crash down onto the surface of the Moon. It will not be here when the lander returns from the surface, and the lander itself cannot carry him home. It is too fragile to enter the atmosphere. The flight plan is no longer achievable. It has driven him through the past few days, the plan, always the plan. This thing has been the shape of his life, or his death, and even that has gone. Now it must either be the landing or the return home; it cannot be both.
Major Yefgenii Yeremin undocks the lander. He activates the controls of the Kontakt docking system to effect release of the LOK’s male probe from the LK’s female grid. He feels a bump as the probe rears away from the grid. Through the upper viewport he gazes at the LOK as it begins a slow drifting recession. The dark vessel turns as it falls behind. The two ships progress into night. Then the LOK — lifeless, powerless, lightless — vanishes.
Deploying its thrusters, he stabilizes the LK. The lander responds; it is nimble, flying under its own control at last, but in the same doomed orbit as the LOK. The computer fails to align the spatial navigation platform. He must assume the system has developed a fault, or has been faulty all along. He shuts it down and carries out a reboot. The computer fails to orient itself once again. He activates the Planeta landing radar. At present the craft’s altitude is too great for the system to acquire the surface. That will occur only toward the end of the descent.
The Sun rises. He catches a glint of metal far behind and far below. It’s the LOK, now sunk into an even more precarious orbit. The Sea of Moscow stares up at him. He is sailing over the Far Side in the most tiny and fragile craft imaginable. Its fuselage is paper thin. In all it weighs only 5 tonnes.
On impulse he claims an act for himself: he waggles the lander’s control sticks. The nimble craft rocks in pure Newtonian motion unmodified by lift or drag, proclaiming there’s a man flying this ship, a pilot at the pinnacle of his profession. Yefgenii smiles to himself and presses on.
Next comes the earthrise. He gazes at the blue and white disc gliding from behind the curve of the lunar horizon. No man has come so far away without returning. He crosses onto the Near Side, the Earth Side. The top of the lander points back, the base is leading. He ignites the LK’s Block D engine. The craft decelerates and begins the descent toward the surface. He pitches the craft more upright and now he’s falling feet first and face down with his back to the direction of the orbit. The lunar terrain scrolls upward through the lower viewport. Through the upper window the Sun plunges toward the edge of the Moon; the Earth glows in the fading light of lunar dusk. The celestial bodies are falling, he is falling.
Without the computer, he cannot judge his altitude. He must keep the radar active. The descent will be gradual over the course of a revolution; he doesn’t expect to receive an altitude signal till he’s closing in on the Ocean of Storms.
He endures the long lonely night, the cosmonaut in the tiny fragile craft. He stands perched in the straps and braces, a fist round each control stick, his gaze trained on the indifferent quadrangles of black space and black land framed by the upper and lower viewports. The roar of the engine reverberates through the LK’s narrow struts and thin metal sheets.
Gray bodies rupture the blackness framed by the lower viewport. They appear like whales rising from the ocean. At first he is uncertain if the forms lie outside the lander or represent reflections created within, and then the shapes gather detail, the clusters of craters, the lines of ridges. They are unrecognizable. The light is too weak and the lander’s position beyond determination.
He rolls the craft round and pitches it over so he’s plunging facedown and leaning forward into the realm ahead, where a brilliant bomb is detonating at the edge of the Moon. The craters and highlands begin appearing under him in relief in a narrow curving splinter of gray, and then they ripple and burn up in the expanding ball of sunlight, blasting through the tinted glass of the viewports. For a moment the terrible fire burns him up too; he disappears in the flood of rupturing light that blasts into the cabin, and then he is there again, haloed by the brilliance of his final dawn.
Yefgenii drops his gaze to the lower viewport. The collimating lens at its center blots out the scattering rays of sunlight. Looking down past his waist he scans the terrain behind, the craters, the overlapping overwritten rings that mottle the Far Side. The Sea of Moscow slides behind, the eye is averting.
As he crosses the Far Side, the Sun arcs through the sky in an accelerated celestial cycle. Lunar dawn becomes lunar morning in a matter of minutes. The Sun blasts the land in light, destroying the visual relief of rilles and depressions, of craters’ rims and their basins, until it has arced over the LK in lunar noon and crept behind. By the time he nears the landing site in the Ocean of Storms, the Sun will hang approximately 10 degrees above the western horizon, the optimum lighting conditions for judging an approach and landing.
Only minutes pass before he hears the first pings of the Planeta. The landing radar has acquired the surface. The digital readout blinks four dashes over and over again until the system’s computer interprets the returning signal. The numbers appear. The LK is operating at just over 3,000 metres above the surface, still skittering over the craters of the Far Side. He is far lower than expected, and it terrifies him. He has misjud
ged the final orbit, has fallen farther still in the lunar night, and now he faces the certainty that he will undershoot the landing site. In simulations he studied every crater and hummock on the approach to the planned touchdown, but here the surface panorama is beyond recognition. In the lower viewport the craters sweep beneath him, heaped one on top of another, gray and indistinct.
The Planeta rates his speed as over a 100 metres per second. He is too low and too fast. The Ocean of Storms remains on the other side of the world. The landing site lies thousands of kilometres ahead. The Far Side seems a far more desolate and forbidding place because of it.
For the first time he glimpses the LK’s shadow. Like some bizarre deformed insect, the angular black shape skitters across the rims and hollows of craters. He is down among the surface features that to this point have been remote and barely imagined. The hills undulate. The peaks and ridges are smooth, not jagged. Shadows gather in crater basins, like the openings of wells.
Next the roar of the engine cuts out. The Block D engine is spent. He jettisons the Block D and ignites the Block E. The LK flies onward, now only a couple of kilometres above the surface. Far ahead appears the foreshortened form of a broad lava plain. It can only be the Eastern Sea. It seems to reside at the very limit of his range, yet even this plain lies many kilometres short of the Near Side.
Out of the corner of his eye he glimpses something, another vehicle, and reacts with shock, then realizes it’s the Block D stage, a blackened husk, tumbling toward the surface. It is flying through the vacuum in a long arc and will take nearly a minute to crash.
Moment by moment the LK sheds speed and height. Yefgenii stands perched at the pilot’s control, fixed in a meshwork of straps and braces. He rolls to starboard, pointing toward the Eastern Sea, hoping to stretch the descent just far enough to reach its more hospitable terrain.
Ascent by Jed Mercurio Page 19