“But then,” Dyer said, “Hoover’s Human Protection League people looked at the transient lunar phenomena at Aristarchus, and joined the dots with the Verne incursion at Florida, and we decided we needed to get people up there quickly. Armed with a few weapons.”
“And luckily,” Muldoon said dryly, “America had a plan.”
The engineers from Bell Aerosystems who dreamed it up, as an emergency Moon-race measure in 1962, had called it the “One-Way Space Man.” The astronauts called it “Project Poor Slob.”
Muldoon ticked off the stages. “You send up a Surveyor lander probe. Use it as a radar beacon to attract the landing of shelters—‘chuckwagons,’ we called them—on uncrewed boosters. Finally you send up an astronaut . . .”
A poor slob who rode a Mercury capsule on top of a Saturn booster, all the way to the Moon.
Dyer eyed me. “You may be reminded of the recent space movie Countdown. Or the book it was based on. More hiding in the open.”
“In the event, we sent up two guys. Two Mercury shots.”
“What about the radiation? The solar flares?”
Muldoon shrugged. “We hardened the Mercury capsule. Heaped-up lunar dust keeps the crew protected on the surface. More robust than Apollo, actually. It just couldn’t bring you home again. The chuckwagons had to be docked together, covered with lunar soil, then a silo dug out for the nuclear missiles . . .”
“Not ICBMs,” Dyer said. “Lunar gravity is gentle, remember. Small rockets would suffice to deliver a lethal payload anywhere on the lunar surface.”
“Of course the nukes could have been turned on the Soviets, if they ever got there,” Muldoon added. “As opposed to the eldritch threat. That was the deal that got the USAF to cooperate.”
“I’ve been in space. I can’t believe two guys could do all that work.”
“They had—help,” Muldoon said. “Need to know, Jones.”
“And then what? They just wait? For months, years?”
“They do their duty,” Muldoon said sternly. Then he hesitated. “Inconveniently, the lunar base itself is situated in Aristarchus.”
I gaped. “At ground zero?”
Dyer shrugged. “J. Edgar Hoover had to—negotiate—with the air force. Who could not be told the whole truth, of course. It was the best we could do.”
“And if the missiles are launched—”
“There’s a time delay of an hour,” Muldoon said. “That’s enough time to get to safety. You can run a few miles in an hour. Even on the Moon. There’s even a secondary shelter out there.”
I just stared. “Terrific. And, anyhow, it’s all gone belly up. Right?”
Muldoon sighed. “Three problems. One: The guys stopped talking to us. Well, we betrayed them. They were supposed to be picked up by Apollo after a couple of years. But we never built Apollo. Two: We think one of them died, which is bad because it takes two personnel to launch the missiles. Hamilton, we think. Various fragments of evidence, including the lack of any medical telemetry. But Spender, if he survived, wasn’t talking to us. And, three: Now we can’t talk to them at all.”
“Because of Yog-Sothoth,” said Dyer. “We think.”
“Another eldritch,” I guessed. “You think.”
“You already know about him,” Dyer said sadly. “Everybody does. At midday GMT on January 1, 1964, every telephone in the world began to ring. Remember that?”
“That was Yog-Sothoth?”
Dyer sighed. “Offspring of Azathoth, possibly. And a crucial bridge between the other realms and ours. ‘Yog-Sothoth is the key to the gate, whereby the spheres meet . . .’ According to Armitage’s translation of the Necronomicon. Well.
“But we know this one likes patterns. It’s long been known he can be attracted by the right incantation, for example—as Armitage demonstrated during the 1928 ‘Dunwich Horror’ episode. And Yog can inhabit, it seems, the networks of the modern human world. He’s thought to have infested the London Underground, last year. And in 1964—”
“The telephone network.”
Dyer said, “Arthur C. Clarke covered up that one for us.”
They speculated a little more about this. About how the Human Protection League had been pushing for the development of electronic comms networks as a way of enabling human interaction that circumvented Cthulhu’s growing telepathic powers. And how the bad guys, such as the Olde Fellowes or The Esoteric Order of Dagon, may also have been covertly supporting such developments for the precise opposite reason—to let in the likes of this Yog-Sothoth.
“It is an appalling thought,” Dyer said, “that the eldritch threat may be evolving, seeking vulnerabilities of our modern world undreamed of in Lovecraft’s time. Maybe a key organization like NASA, itself a network, could somehow be—possessed.”
“Anyhow, we think Yog-Sothoth managed to get into what we were beginning to call the Deep Space Network,” Muldoon continued. “Turning it against us. So we had to shut it down.”
“So how do you talk to your astronauts at all?”
“We risk simple point-to-point radio messages. Otherwise, we’ve set up a visual coding system. Speech converted to light pulses, with sodium flares. But it does make communication with a rebellious astronaut a little tricky.”
“So what is it you want me to do?”
“Recover the situation. See who is alive. Check out the nuke silo. If necessary, if we send up the confirming order, hit Aristarchus before the solar eclipse in September reaches its height.”
I thought it over. “And if I fail?”
“Then we’ll send up another poor slob. And another, until we get it done.”
Which told me all I needed to know about my mode of transport to the Moon.
“I never trained on Mercury, Joe.”
Muldoon shrugged. “We still have the simulators in Hangar S. It’s simpler than Gemini. And anyhow it’s spam in a can—we could fly you automated all the way to the Moon. Even if you didn’t have help.”
“Help? Need to know?”
“We promise we’ll bring you back,” said William Dyer.
“Some day,” added Joe Muldoon.
Well, I accepted the mission, Jocelyn. I think you would have. We all have our duty.
But I caught Joe wistfully looking at the desolate Moon base on the screen. He had got no closer to the Moon than being a backup for a nonexistent Apollo mission. I had the feeling, Jocelyn, that he envied this poor slob.
III
I was to be launched from the Cape on September 7, 1969, with a landing on a nearly new Moon on the 10th. A day before what Dyer anticipated being the day of the crisis—solar eclipse day, September 11. They thought that the closer to the crisis I landed, the less time I’d have to get killed before dealing with it. Also, unless I secured life-support from the poor slob base, I wouldn’t last more than twenty-four hours anyhow.
I slogged through a couple of months of training.
NASA had indeed kept their old Mercury simulator. It stank of the Mercury 7 heroes, of aftershave, hangover fumes, and crotch. But I ignored it all, and got on with the training.
Muldoon hadn’t lied when he said Mercury was simple, mostly, compared to flying Gemini. I remembered the first two flights were by chimps, called Ham and Enos, who had nothing but puzzle-buttons to press—and that was a memory that would come back to haunt me.
I rehearsed the most-sweaty-palm moment of the whole mission, the landing on the Moon, over and over. The automatics ought to bring me down. If not, I’d have to do it myself.
Anyhow, my launch day rolled around, as it always does.
It is a Sunday in September, clear and bright.
I ride the gantry elevator, climbing past the flank of the booster. The Saturn I is a hundred and fifty feet tall, the biggest beast I ever rode. As I rise up, I can see for miles. The coast of Merritt Island is marshy, the water shining in the morning sun that hangs low over the ocean. From here I can’t see any of the poisoned vegetation.
It tak
es me some effort, with the aid of a pad rat, to get inside the capsule. Mercury is small, small, a cone a little more than six feet tall, six feet wide. It is, after all, a spacecraft designed to fit on top of primitive early-1960s ICBMs; it is a hollowed-out nuclear shell into which they stuff an astronaut. Once you are in, you can barely move.
Meanwhile, the booster stack creaks and sways below me, as its mass of liquid fuel is loaded. It is a relief when the countdown winds to its finish.
At first there is a shudder, a rumble far below. I start my mission clock, like setting an oven timer. The Saturn’s first stage burns with a million and a half pounds of thrust, but so great is the mass that there is barely a sense of acceleration at first. Still, the press on my chest builds up. The capsule shakes like we’ve hit a bumpy road as we smash through the sound barrier.
The big first stage booster shuts down after only a couple of minutes. The thrust of the second stage is harder, and I lie back and endure it. Eight minutes. Bang. I’m pressed back, even harder, by the rattly, ragged burn of the third stage.
After which, I have been hurled direct onto my trajectory to the Moon.
I look out of the Mercury’s small window. The Earth is a pool of light behind me. And I see the spent S-V upper stage tumbling away like a spent July 4 skyrocket.
Joe Muldoon is my Capcom, at Houston. “You are through the gate, Melody 7.” The first time my call sign has been used.
Through the gate.
The gate to what?
That was Sunday.
Monday, Tuesday, I cruised to the Moon.
Look, I could barely move. I spent a lot of my waking time exercising, as much as I could, the muscle groups in turn: my neck, deltoids, biceps, abdomen, thighs, calves. I’d done three-day stretches in the simulator. This wasn’t so bad. At least I was going somewhere.
But I had too much time to think. Jocelyn, I kept remembering John Glenn’s first orbital flight. The whole world was watching on TV. Flying in secret, I felt remarkably alone.
Of course I wasn’t, as I was soon to find out.
By Wednesday, the Moon, nearly new, was a pit of darkness in the sky ahead of my little ship.
And we came to my last abort window.
Either I fired my first stage landing rocket—it was a Polaris booster, a cut-down missile—a brief burn to start my descent to the Moon, or I didn’t. And if I didn’t fire my Polaris rocket, I would just swing around the Moon and fall back to Earth.
We went through the checklist briskly. I had a go to fire the Polaris. I pushed the button.
Polaris fired.
So I had sailed through another gate. And I was committed to the Moon.
Now, an anticlimax. There was a blank in my checklist. I knew that a parcel of Earth re-entry gear—the Mercury’s heat shield and flotation bags and life raft and so forth, stuff that was never going to be used now—was going to be dumped, to save weight. I had never inquired how that was to be achieved—I assumed some automatic system.
At first, what followed was only faintly alarming. There were thumps and bangs and rattles around this big garbage can in which I rode. Out through my window I saw chunks of gear spinning away in the raw sunlight.
It was when I clearly heard an angry hoot—“Hoo!”—transmitted through the hull that I started to grow curious.
“Houston, Melody 7. I heard that, Joe.”
A long time-delayed sigh. “Melody 7, Houston. I guess we hoped you guys would get acquainted on the lunar surface. George, you’d better show your face.”
And, through my window, he did.
An ape’s face, through layers of glass. I recoiled, shocked.
A gloved finger pressed a pad on its chest where letters lit up, like a computer display.
HELLO BOSS.
GEORGE. ME.
HAM AND ENOS NOT ONLY MERCURY SPACE CHIMPS.
And he pressed his faceplate to the window, and again I could hear that muffled laugh. “Hoo!”
Turned out he had flown with me all the way up from the Cape, inside the cowling that had sheltered my landing rockets. Suited up all the way. But what a suit.
George was indeed a chimp. And he was a smart chimp. Nobody had actually known how smart chimps were until NASA had had a few taken from their mothers in Africa, and shipped them to an air force base in New Mexico, and trained them to fly in space. Trained—they used a technique called “operant conditioning,” where you get punished for getting stuff wrong, mostly by electric shocks to the soles of your feet.
Smart, yes. Smart enough, some of them, to use sign language, even touch-key systems, with a few brain-jolting electrical enhancements. Smart enough to remember what had been done to them, and to take revenge on their handlers, if they got the chance. But too smart not to be useful.
Simps.
After Ham and Enos, highly trained but unmodified chimps who rode Mercury capsules in a blaze of publicity, the program at Holloman AFB went dark.
“Hence, the super-chimps,” Joe Muldoon admitted to me over the radio.
A super-chimp in a super-suit. George wore a kind of glassy spacesuit, a collection of tubes of a thermoplastic acrylic resin encasing his torso, head, and limbs. Inside with him I could see electronics, wires, motors, and bulbs, all lit up. He wore extraordinary boots, clearly meant to allow his feet to grip—they were more like flexible glassy gloves—but they were lined with metal insoles, panels that I guessed were there to deliver those electric shocks.
And in there too were packets of green stuff—blue-green algae. Together, I learned, chimp and algae made up a closed life-support system, the algae cracking carbon dioxide from George’s breath back to oxygen. It was super-efficient, but would only last a few days before replenishment. Or the simp was disposed of, whichever suited the mission plan.
“Let me guess,” I said. “Now I know how Lunarville 1 got built.”
“And a lot of other stuff, yes. Of course, the whole thing was deflected from public attention with fiction, as usual. Planet of the Apes. The man-apes in 2001 . . .”
I looked into George’s wary eyes. “Can you hear me, George?”
A thumbs-up.
“What do you remember?”
A rattle of keys. AFRICA. HOME. MOTHER. CAGE. BOAT. PAIN. FEET. BURN. HAM. ENOS.
Then he screeched, laughed, and rolled out of sight.
After all that, the landing itself felt like an anticlimax.
Lunarville 1 was a hundred miles or so inside the western walls of Aristarchus Crater. I just needed to lock onto the Surveyor radar beacon, around which the base had been assembled in the first place.
I acquired the beacon two thousand feet up.
You have to imagine my Mercury capsule upright now, with me inside lying on my back, sitting on a frame like a four-legged dining table, which in turn sat on the cylindrical fuselage of the Polaris. My big Polaris engine was firing again, and the lander shuddered this way and that as the thrusters gimbaled. I was riding a missile, I thought, flying down on its tail of flame, to the dusty ground.
Seven hundred feet up. The horizon flattened out toward dusty gray mountains. This was the night side of the Moon, but I could see a surprising amount thanks to the Earthlight, forty times as bright as a full Moon. And, lying on my back, I had a periscope so I could see the landing site. Nests of craters like bullet-holes. Cylindrical habitats buried in the dirt like worm casts. And I saw a matrix of shining, sparking lights. That was the sodium-flare communicator array through which I am speaking to you now, Jocelyn.
And on the close horizon—something elusive. Almost like mist. An odd color, an elusive shade.
I knew immediately that the HPL was right about this place, about the infestation of Aristarchus. And I was coming down right in the middle of it.
I looked away. Concentrated on the landing, which I had yet to survive.
Two hundred and fifty feet. We were kicking up dust already. Two hundred. The Polaris coughed, shuddered, and fell away. Now a much smaller
engine was guiding us into the Moon’s forgiving gravity for our final landing. I had my hand on a joystick, ready to take over manual control if all else failed.
I had no idea where George was. Clinging to the frame, probably.
At twenty feet, a dangling probe found the ground, and a contact light shone. The engine cut, and we fell and landed with the softest of jolts.
It was just past midnight, Thursday, September 11. Eclipse day.
There was a clatter from the hull exterior. Still lying on my back, I glanced out of my window to see George—a chimpanzee knuckle-walking across the surface of the Moon.
I got to work.
IV
I closed up my suit, popped my hatch, and struggled for a while, until George came over to help me out of the capsule. Help—that’s a word that doesn’t really cut it. Look, chimps are strong and limber, but they ain’t gentle. George just got an arm under my shoulders and hauled me out onto the dirt.
When I got to my feet, I took my first step in that low gravity, and I fell over. I got up, took another step, and sailed up from the ground, wriggling. And so forth.
George hooted laughter.
Then he pointed, and tapped his chest unit. BASE.
“Agreed. We have to get to the base.” Lunarville 1, which was maybe two hundred yards from where we had set down.
I glanced up at the full Earth. I couldn’t yet see the Moon’s shadow touching that glowing dish of light, but the eclipse would start soon. Also, I needed life-support from the base supplies. One way or another we didn’t have a lot of time.
We set off, me stumble-hopping, the simp loping easily.
Moon dust is rock flour, ground by impacts. It took a boot-print well. And, as there is no weather on the Moon, boot-prints and vehicle tracks last a long time. I could see how the base had been built. We crossed a lot of sled-marks, cut into the dirt. The trails led back to a bunch of fallen rockets, which littered the surface in a rough, wide circle around the base. I knew they were cargo pallets, fired up here over five long years. The contents had been industriously dragged into the center—probably mostly by simps, I thought. I couldn’t tell which tracks were fresh, and which were five years old.
The Lovecraft Squad: Dreaming Page 20