The Best of Bova: Volume 1

by Ben Bova

  “That’ll take four minutes,” Sam muttered, loud enough for us all to hear him. The eight of us were crammed into the command module, eight guys squeezed into a space built for three, at most. It was barely high enough to stand in, and the metal walls and ceiling always felt cold to the touch. Sam was pressed in with the guys behind me; I was practically touching noses with the skipper. The guys in back giggled at his wisecrack. The skipper scowled.

  “Goddammit, Gunn, can’t you behave seriously for even a minute? We’ve got a real problem here.”

  “Yessir,” Sam replied. If he hadn’t been squeezed in so tightly, I’m sure he would have saluted. “I’m merely attempting to keep morale high, sir.”

  The skipper made an unhappy snorting noise, and then told us that we would spend the rest of the shift checking out all the supplies that were left: not just our personal stuff, but the mission’s supplies of food, the nuclear reactor, the water recirculation system, equipment of all sorts, air tanks, the works.

  We knew it was busywork, but we had nothing else to do. So we wormed our way out of the command module and crawled through the tunnels toward the other modules that we had laid out and then covered with bulldozed soil. It was a neat little buried base we had set up, for later explorers to use. I got a sort of claustrophobic feeling, just then, that this buried base might turn into a mass grave for eight astronauts.

  I was dutifully heading back for barracks module A, where four of us had our bunks and personal gear, to check out my supplies as the skipper had ordered. Sam snaked up beside me. Those tunnels, back in those days, were prefabricated Earthside to be laid out once we got to the construction site. I think they were designed by midgets. You couldn’t stand up in them; they were too low. You had to really crawl along on hands and knees if you were my size. Sam was able to shuffle through them with bent knees, knuckle-walking like a miniature gorilla. He loved the tunnels.

  “Hey, wait up,” he hissed to me.

  I stopped.

  “Whattaya think will get us first, the air giving out or we starve to death?”

  He was grinning cheerfully. I said, “I think we’re going to poison our air with methane. We’ll fart ourselves to death in another couple of days.”

  Sam’s grin widened. “C’mon, I’m setting up a pool on the computer. I hadn’t thought of air pollution. You wanna make a bet on that?” He started to King-Kong down the shaft to the right, toward the computer and life-support module. If I had had the space, I would have shrugged. Anyway, I followed him there.

  Three of the other guys were in the computer module, huddled around the display screen like Boy Scouts around a campfire.

  “Why aren’t you checking out the base’s supplies, like the skipper said?” I asked them.

  “We are, Straight Arrow,” replied Mickey Lee, our refugee from Chinatown. He tapped the computer screen. “Why go sorting through all that junk when the computer has it already listed in alphabetical order for us?”

  That wasn’t what the skipper wanted, and we all knew it, but Mickey was right. Why bother with busywork? We wrote down lists that would keep the skipper happy. By hand. If we had let the computer print out the lists, Skip would have gotten wise to us right away.

  While we scribbled away, copying what was on the screen, we talked over our basic situation.

  “Why the hell can’t we use the nuke to recharge the fuel cells?” Julio Marx asked. He was our token Puerto Rican Jew, a tribute to the agency’s Equal Opportunity policy. Julio was also a crackerjack structural engineer who had saved my life the day I had started to unfasten my helmet in the barracks module just when one of those blessed prefab tunnels had cracked its airlock seal. But that’s another story.

  Sam gave Julio a sorrowful stare. “The two systems are incompatible, Jules.” Then, with a grin, Sam launched into the phoniest Latin accent you ever heard. “The nuclear theeng, man, it got too many volts for the fuel cells. Like, you plug the nukie to the fuel cells, man. you make a beeg boom and we all go to dat big San Juan in thee sky. You better steek to plucking chickens, man, an’ leave the electricity alone.”

  Julio, who towered a good inch and a half over Sam, grinned back at him and answered, “Okay, Shorty, I dig.”

  “Shorty! Shorty!” Sam’s face went all red. “All right, that’s it. The hell with the betting pool. I’m gonna let you guys all die of boredom. Serve you right.”

  We made a big fuss and soothed his feathers and cajoled him into setting up the pool. With a great show of hurt feelings and reluctant but utterly selfless nobility, Sam pushed Mickey Lee out of the chair in front of the computer terminal and began playing the keyboard like a virtuoso pianist. Within a few minutes the screen was displaying a list of possible ways for us to die, with Sam’s swiftly calculated odds next to each entry. At the touch of a button, the screen displayed a graph, showing how the odds for each mode of dying changed as time went on.

  Suffocation, for example, started off as less than a one percent possibility. But within a month the chances began to rise fairly steeply. “The air scrubbers need replacement filters,” Sam explained, “and we’ll be out of them inside of two more weeks.”

  “They’ll have us out of here in two weeks, for Christ’s sake,” Julio said.

  “Or drop fresh supplies for us,” said Ron Avery, the taciturn pilot whom we called Cowboy because of his lean, lanky build and his slow Western drawl.

  “Those are the odds,” Sam snapped. “The computer does not lie. Pick your poison and place your bets.”

  I put fifty bucks down on Air Contamination, not telling the other guys about my earlier conversation with Sam. Julio took Starvation. Mickey settled on Dehydration (Lack of Water), and Ron picked Murder—which made me shudder.

  “What about you, Sam?” I asked.

  “I’ll wait. Let the other guys have a chance,” he said.

  “You gonna let the skipper in on this’?” Julio asked. Sam shook his head. “If I tell him . . .”

  “I’ll tell him,” Ron volunteered, with a grim smile. “I’ll even let him have Murder, if he wants it. I can always switch to Suicide.”

  “Droll fellow,” said Sam.

  Well, you probably read about the mission in your history tapes. Houston was supporting three separate operations on the Moon at the same time, and they were stretched to the limit down there. Old Stone Face promised us a rescue flight in a week. But they had a problem with the booster when they tried to rush things on the pad too much, and the blessed launch had to be pushed back a week, and then another week. They sent an unmanned supply craft to us, but the descent stage got gummed up, so our fresh food, air filters, water supply and other stuff just orbited over us about fifty miles up.

  Sam calculated the odds of all these foul-ups and came to the conclusion that Houston was working overtime to kill us.

  “Must be some sort of an experiment,” he told me. “Maybe they need some martyrs to make people more aware of the space program.”

  We learned afterward that Houston was in deep trouble because of us. The White House was firing people left and right, Congressional committees were gearing up to investigate the fiasco, and the CIA was checking out somebody’s crackbrained idea that the Russians were behind all our troubles.

  Meanwhile, we were stranded on Mare Nubium with nothing much to do but let our beards grow and hope for sinus troubles that would cut off our ability to sense odors.

  Old Stone Face was magnificent, in his unflinching way. He was on the line to us every day, despite the fact that his superiors in Houston and Washington were either being fired directly by the President himself or roasted over the simmering coals of media criticism. There must have been a zillion reporters at Mission Control by the second week of our marooning; we could feel the hubbub and tension whenever we talked with Stony.

  “The countdown for your rescue flight is proceeding on an accelerated schedule,” he told us. It would never occur to him to say, “We’re hurrying as fast as we can.”


  “Liftoff is now scheduled for 0700 hours on the twenty-fifth.”

  None of us needed to look at a calendar to know that the twenty-fifth was seventeen days away. Sam’s betting pool was looking more serious every hour. Even the skipper had finally taken a plunge: Suffocation.

  If it weren’t for Sandi Hemmings we might have all gone crazy. She took over as capcom during the night shift, when most of the reporters and the agency brass were asleep. She gave us courage and the desire to pull through, partly just by smiling at us and looking female enough to make us want to survive, but mainly by giving us the straight info with no nonsense.

  “They’re in deep trouble over at Canaveral,” she would tell us. “They’ve had to go to triple shifts and call up boosters that they didn’t think they would need until next year. Some senator in Washington is yelling that we ought to ask the Russians or the Japanese to help out.”

  “As if either of them had upper stages that could make it to the Moon and back,” one of our guys muttered.

  “Well,” Sandi said, with her brightest smile, “you’ll all be heroes when you finally get back here. The girls will be standing in line to admire you.”

  “You won’t have to stand in line, Sandi,” Ron Avery answered, in a rare burst of words. “You’ll always be first with us.”

  The others crowded into the command module added their heartfelt agreement.

  Sandi laughed, undaunted by the prospect of the eight of us grabbing at her. “I hope you shave first,” she said.

  A night or two later she spent hours reading to us the suggestions made by the Houston medical team on how to stretch out our dwindling supplies of food, water and air. They boiled down to one basic rule: lie down and don’t exert yourselves. Great advice, especially when you’re beginning to really worry that you’re not going to make it through this mess. Just what we needed to do, lie back in our bunks and do nothing but think.

  I caught a gleam in Sam’s eye, though, as Sandi waded through the medics’ report. The skipper asked her to send the report through our computer printer. She did, and he spent the next day reading and digesting it. Sam spent that day—well, I couldn’t figure out where he’d gotten to. I just didn’t see him all day long, and Base Gamma really wasn’t big enough to hide in, even for somebody as small as Sam.

  After going through the medics’ recommendations, the skipper ordered us to take tranquilizers. We had a scanty supply of downers in the base pharmaceutical stores, and Skip divided them equally among us. At the rate of three a day, they would last four days, with four pills left over. About as useful as a cigarette lighter in hell, but the skipper played it by the book and ordered us to start gobbling tranquilizers.

  “They will ease our anxieties and help us to remain as quiet as possible while we wait for the rescue mission,” he told us.

  He didn’t bother to add that the rescue mission, according to Sandi’s unofficial word, was still twelve days off. We would be out of food in three more days, and the recycled water was starting to taste as if it hadn’t been recycled, if you know what I mean. The air was getting foul, too, but that was probably just our imaginations.

  Sam appeared blithely unconcerned, even happy. He whistled cheerfully as Skip rationed out the tranquilizers, then scuttled off down the tunnel that led toward our barracks module. By the time I got to my bunk, Sam was nowhere in sight. His whistling was gone. So was his pressure suit.

  He had gone out on the surface? For what? To increase his radiation dose? To get away from the rest of us? That was probably it. Underneath his wiseguy shell, Sam was probably as worried and tense as any of us, and he just didn’t want us to know it. He needed some solitude, and what better place to get it than the airless rocky expanse of Mare Nubium?

  That’s what I thought, so I didn’t go out after him.

  The same thing happened the next “morning” (by which I mean the time immediately after our sleep shift), and the next. The skipper would gather us together in the command module, we would each take our ceremonial tranquilizer pill and a sip of increasingly bad water, and then we would crawl back to our bunks and try to do nothing that would use up body energy or air. I found myself resenting it whenever I had to go to the toilet: I kept imagining my urine flowing straight into our water tank without reprocessing. I guess I was beginning to go crazy.

  But Sam was as happy as could be: chipper, joking. laughing it up. He would disappear each morning for several hours, and then show up again with a lopsided grin on his face, telling jokes and making us all feel a little better.

  Until Julio suddenly sat up in his bunk, the second or third morning after we had run out of tranquilizers, and shouted:

  “Booze!”

  Sam had been sitting on the edge of Julio’s bunk, telling an outrageous story of what he planned to do with Sandi once we got back to Houston.

  “Booze!” Julio repeated. “I smell booze! I’m cracking up. I’m losing my marbles.”

  For once in his life, Sam looked apologetic, almost ashamed.

  “No you’re not,” he said to Julio, in as quiet a voice as I’ve ever heard Sam speak. “I was going to tell you about it tomorrow—the stuff is almost ready for human consumption.”

  You never saw three grown men so suddenly attentive.

  With a self-deprecating little grin, Sam explained, “I’ve been tinkering with the propellants and other junk out in the return module. They’re not doing us any good, just sitting out there. So I made a small still. Seems to be working okay. I tasted a couple sips today. It’ll take the enamel off your teeth, but it’s not all that bad. By tomorrow—”

  He never got any further. We did a Keystone Kops routine, rushing for our space suits, jamming ourselves through the airlock and running out to the inert, idle, cussedly useless return module.

  Sam was not kidding us. He had jury-rigged an honest-to-backwoods still inside the return module, fueling it with propellants from the module’s tanks. The basic alcohol also came from the propellant, with water from the fuel cells, and a few other ingredients that Sam had scrounged from miscellaneous supplies.

  We lost no time pressurizing the module, lifting our helmet visors, and sampling his concoction. It was terrible. We loved it.

  By the time we had staggered back to our barracks module, laughing and belching, we had made up our minds to let the other three guys in barracks B share in Sam’s juice. But the skipper was a problem. Once he found out about it, he’d have Sam up on charges and drummed out of the agency, even before the rescue mission reached us. Old Stone Face would vote to leave Sam behind, I knew, if he found out about it.

  “Have no fear,” Sam told us, with a giggle. “I will, myself, reveal my activities to our skipper.”

  And before we could stop him, he had tottered off toward the command module, whistling in a horribly sour off-key way.

  An hour went by. Then two. We could hear Skip’s voice yelling from the command module, although we couldn’t make out the words. None of us had the guts to go down the tunnel and try to help Sam. After a while the tumult and the shouting died. Mickey Lee gave me a questioning glance. Silence; ominous silence.

  “You think Skip’s killed him?” he asked.

  “More likely,” said Julio, “that Sam’s talked the skipper to death.”

  Timidly, we slunk down the tunnel to the command module. The other three guys were there with Sam and the skipper; they were all quaffing Sam’s rocket juice and grinning at each other.

  We were shocked, but we joined right in. Six days later, when the guys from Base Alpha landed their return module crammed with food and fresh water for us, we invited them to join the party. A week after that, when the rescue mission from Canaveral finally showed up, we had been under the influence for so long that we told them to go away.

  I had never realized before then what a lawyer Sam was. He had convinced the skipper to read the medics’ report carefully, especially the part where they recommended using tranquilizers to ke
ep us calm and minimize our energy consumption. Sam had then gotten the skipper to punch up the medical definition of alcohol’s effects on the body, out of Houston’s medical files. Sure enough, if you squinted the right way, you could claim that alcohol was a sort of tranquilizer. That was enough justification for the skipper, and we just about pickled ourselves until we got rescued.

  The crystal statue glittered under the harsh rays of the unfiltered sun. The work leader, still sitting on the lip of the truck’s hatch, said, “It looks beautiful. You guys did a good job. Is the epoxy set?”

  “Needs another few minutes,” said the young man, tapping the toe of his boot against the base that they had poured on the lunar plain.

  “What happened when you got back to Houston?” the young woman asked. “Didn’t they get angry at you for being drunk?”

  “Sure,” said the leader. “But what could they do? Sam’s booze pulled us through, and we could show that we were merely following the recommendations of the medics. Old Stone Face hushed it all up and we became heroes, just like Sandi told us we would be—for about a week.”

  “And Sam?”

  “He left the astronaut corps for a while and started his own business. The rest you know about from the history books. Hero, showman, scoundrel, patriot, it’s all true. He was all those things.”

  “Did he and Sandi ever, uh . . . get together?” the young man asked.

  “She was too smart to let him corner her. She used one of the other guys to protect her; married him, finally. Cowboy, I think it was. They eloped and spent their honeymoon in orbit. Zero gee and all that. Sam pretended to be very upset about it, but by that time he was surrounded by women, all of them taller than he was.”

  The three of them walked slowly around the gleaming statue.

  “Look at the rainbows it makes where the sun hits it,” said the young woman. “It’s marvelous.”

  “But if he was so smart,” said the young man, “why’d he pick this spot ‘way out here for his grave? It’s miles from Selene City. You can’t even see the statue from the city.”