by Neil Clarke
“Break, break,” Capcom interrupted. “Lunar Ops reports the LM is out of range by about ten kilometers!”
Mr. Smith was right?
“Guidance, Flight, we’ve uncovered the problem. The LM software uses nautical miles and the corrections we made assumed statute miles. We’re off by a factor of 1.15.”
Ms. Pressa rose from her seat and paced back and forth. Not out of the woods, indeed!
“Guidance, get me the right numbers for Mr. Smith to fly to. Capcom, inform Ms. Phillips we’ll be doing another maneuver.”
Precious time ticked by while the LM rapidly approached the point of no return. The trajectory map refreshed with a new image showing the LM arcing up but not quite reaching the intersect point with the cargo ship. Unless it changed course fast, the historians were doomed. If I hadn’t cut off Mr. Smith’s comments earlier, would they have discovered the problem sooner? Was this all my fault? Maybe I didn’t have the right stuff to be a pilot after all.
Lunar Ops reported that she had moved the cargo ship to a slighter lower orbit that would help close the gap. But it also increased her speed. That seemed counterproductive to me until I saw on the plot that the intersection point was farther around the Moon than predicted earlier. Orbital mechanics was confusing!
Finally Guidance reported they had the commands ready. The flight director said to execute them. If anything went wrong, we would know in a few minutes. If so, we might need Mr. Smith to fly to the numbers manually.
Ms. Pressa approached and held up her phone. I heard the shutter sound of a camera snapping a photo.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Mr. Smith shouted. Ms. Pressa looked puzzled. “Just taking your picture, Grandpa,” she explained.
Uh-oh. He didn’t like to be called that!
“Grandpa! You didn’t think I was too old at the bar the other night!” He squinted at her badge. “P . . . R . . . E . . . S . . . S . . . You’re a reporter! Get out!” He pushed her back with the heel of his big left hand. Her phone clattered across the floor, and she fell back into a chair.
The security guard from the door seemed to appear out of thin air, “Director, are you okay?” he asked, lifting her to her feet.
Director? Of what?
“I’m okay, Harry,” Ms. Pressa insisted, smoothing her suit jacket. “There’s just been a misunderstanding.” Dr. Winkler handed her phone to Harry. “Escort me to the door, please.”
“Whatever you say, ma’am,” the big guy replied, glaring at Mr. Smith.
“Paparazzi,” Mr. Smith cursed.
Dr. Winkler poured Mr. Smith a glass of water from a pitcher on a nearby table. He handed it to him and assured him that everything was under control. I’d never seen the doctor so rattled. Having a patient almost flatten his great-granddaughter was rather upsetting!
The doctor met my eyes and then darted his glance to and from the water glass. I understood that he had added something to the water. Then he said, “Sir, I suggest that you rest your feet while we wait for communications to come back.”
“Are they in blackout?” Mr. Smith asked.
“Yes,” I agreed, holding the plugs to his headset and the speaker out of view. All of Mission Control had heard his outburst at Ms. Pressa. I hoped they didn’t realize that she really was his great-granddaughter. Even though Pressa was probably her married name, some enterprising person could use it to figure out Mr. Smith’s identity.
Mr. Smith gulped the water like he was taking a shot of scotch. He settled onto the stool, glancing down at his feet. “Man, I hate these stiff military shoes. When I retire, I’m only going to wear slippers!”
“Your mother won’t like that,” I quipped.
He smiled. “No, she won’t!” he agreed. “And that’s another reason I’m going to wear slippers!” He laughed.
I was dying to know what was going on with Ms. Phillips. The trajectory display on the TV was blinking. In all the commotion, the maneuver had come and gone. He couldn’t do any harm now.
“We’re getting the signal back,” I said, and plugged Mr. Smith and the speaker back in. Guidance reported that he was waiting for Lunar Ops to confirm target acquisition.
Mr. Smith surprised me when he calmly said, “Ms. Phillips, quit worrying about the trajectory for a minute. Look out the window. You owe it to yourself.”
I wasn’t sure if Mission Control had let this message through until Ms. Phillips said, “Seeing the Earth above the desolate Moon reminds me of just how precious life is. I’ll never forget this moment.”
“Me either,” Mr. Smith said.
“Me either,” I whispered.
Lunar Ops reported target acquired! I sagged onto my stool, suddenly realizing how tired I was. Some fancy remote flying on the part of Lunar Ops completed the rendezvous. The cargo ship scooped the LM into its wide bay, and cheers erupted in Mission Control. I gave Mr. Smith a high five, and Dr. Winkler patted him firmly on the back. “Where are the cigars?” Mr. Smith asked.
“Sorry, but this is a no-smoking area,” Dr. Winkler said.
“Oh,” Mr. Smith said, obviously disappointed.
A text appeared on my laptop. “Good call on the nautical miles—you saved two lives. Sorry about the photo. Forgot blackmail incident still upsets him. I’ll be in touch. Thanks again.” She signed it, “R. E. Pressa, Director of Knowledge Capture, Department of Homeland Security.” Knowledge Capture?
After the cargo hold was pressurized, Ms. Phillips was able to take off her spacesuit and help Dr. Canterbury out of his. The flight surgeon did a remote exam. Turned out that Dr. Canterbury didn’t have a concussion. His suit had been damaged and he was suffering from carbon-dioxide poisoning. If they hadn’t done the direct ascent, he would have died. Ms. Phillips hooked him up to oxygen and settled in to wait for the Russian rescue ship to rendezvous with them. Mr. Smith’s advice no longer needed, Mission Control cut our connection. We were now in listen-only mode.
Dr. Winkler escorted a sleepy Mr. Smith to the men’s room while I moved the chairs back to their proper places in the lounge.
Just before I unplugged the speaker box, I heard Ms. Phillips thank the team in Houston for sending the cargo ship and especially for recruiting Mr. Smith to help her. “I have dedicated my life to preserving the history of space,” she said. “Yet today when I was faced with having to recreate that history, I realized just how little I actually know. I now have a new level of understanding and respect for the courage and skill of the Apollo astronauts. I hope that I’ll have the opportunity to thank Mr. Smith in person when I get back.”
I knew that wasn’t going to happen. By the time she got back, he’d already have forgotten all about this day.
But I wouldn’t. I would remember for him. And tomorrow, I’d check out every e-book and disk I could find at the library and read all about the Apolloprogram and the amazing men who first walked on the Moon. We’d watch that Apollo movie with Tom Hanks, and fly simulations together. Though Mr. Smith might soon forget even his real name, and wouldn’t remember Ms. Phillips next week, my memories of this time with him would be as long lasting as his footprints on the Moon.
Dedicated to the victims of Alzheimer’s and their caregivers, with special remembrance of the first director of Johnson Space Center, Dr. Robert Gilruth, my fatherin-law, Ralph Dyson, and my grandfather, George Canterbury.
2012
Hannu Rajaniemi is an author, mathematical physicist, and a science innovator from Finland. He has a Ph.D. in string theory. For more than a decade, he lived in Edinburgh, and currently resides in California. He holds several advanced degrees in mathematics and physics. Multilingual from an early age, he writes his science fiction in English. His latest novel is Summerland.
TYCHE AND THE ANTS
Hannu Rajaniemi
The ants arrived on the Moon on the same day Tyche went through the Secret Door to give a ruby to the Magician.
She was glad to be out of the Base. The Brain had given her a Treatment ea
rlier that morning, and that always left her tingly and nervous, with pentup energy that could only be expended by running down the gray rolling slope down the side of Malapert Mountain, jumping and hooting.
“Come on, keep up!” she shouted at the grag that the Brain had inevitably sent to keep an eye on her. The white-skinned machine followed her on its two thick treads, cylindrical arms swaying for balance as it rumbled laboriously downhill, following the little craters of Tyche’s footprints.
Exasperated, she crossed her arms and paused to wait. She looked up. The mouth of the Base was hidden from view, as it should be, to keep them safe from space sharks. The jagged edge of the mountain hid the Great Wrong Place from sight, except for a single wink of blue malice, just above the gleaming white of the upper slopes, a stark contrast against the velvet black of the sky. The white was not snow—that was a Wrong Place thing—but tiny beads of glass made by ancient meteor impacts. That’s what the Brain said, anyway. According to Chang’e the Moon Girl, it was all the jewels she had lost over the centuries she had lived here.
Tyche preferred Chang’e’s version. That made her think of the ruby, and she touched her belt pouch to make sure it was still there.
“Outings are subject to being escorted at all times,” said the sonorous voice of the Brain in her helmet. “There is no reason to be impatient.”
Most of the grags were autonomous: the Brain could only control a few of them at a time. But of course it would keep an eye on her, so soon after the Treatment.
“Yes, there is, slowpoke,” Tyche muttered, stretching her arms and jumping up and down in frustration.
Her suit flexed and flowed around her with the movement. She had grown it herself as well, the third one so far, although it had taken much longer than the ruby. Its many layers were alive, it felt light, and best of all, it had a powerskin, a slick porous tissue made from cells with mechanosensitive ion channels that translated her movements into power for the suit. It was so much better than the white clumsy fabric ones the Chinese had left behind; the grags had cut and sewn a baby-sized version out of those for her that kind of worked, but was impossibly stuffy and stiff.
It was only the second time she had tested the new suit, and she was proud of it: it was practically a wearable ecosystem, and she was pretty sure that with its photosynthesis layer, it would keep her alive for months, if she only had enough sunlight and carried enough of the horrible compressed Chinese nutrients.
She frowned. Her legs were suddenly gray, mottled with browns. She brushed them with her hand, and her fingers—slick silvery hue of the powerskin—came away the same color. It seemed the regolith dust clung to the suit. Annoying. She absently noted to do something about it for the next iteration when she fed the suit back into the Base’s big biofabber.
Now the grag was stuck on the lip of a shallow crater, grinding treads sending up silent parabolas oflittle rocks and dust. Tyche had had enough of waiting.
“I’ll be back for dinner,” she told the Brain.
Without waiting for the Base mind’s response, she switched off the radio, turned around, and started running.
Tyche settled into the easy stride the Jade Rabbit had shown her: gliding just above the surface, using well-timed toe-pushes to cross craters and small rocks that littered the uneven regolith.
She took the long way around, avoiding her old tracks that ran down much of the slope, just to confuse the poor grag more. She skirted around the edge of one of the pitch-black cold fingers—deeper craters that never got sunlight—that were everywhere on this side of the mountain. It would have been a shortcut, but it was too cold for her suit. Besides, the ink-men lived in the deep potholes, in the Other Moon beyond the Door.
Halfway around, the ground suddenly shook. Tyche slid uncontrollably, almost going over the edge before she managed to stop by turning around mid-leap and jamming her toes into the chilly hard regolith when she landed. Her heart pounded. Had the ink-men brought something up from the deep dark, something big? Or had she just been almost hit by a meteorite? That had happened a couple of times, a sudden crater blooming soundlessly into being, right next to her.
Then she saw beams of light in the blackness and realized that it was only the Base’s sandworm, a giant articulated machine with a maw full of toothy wheels that ground Helium-3 and other volatiles from the deep shadowy deposits.
Tyche breathed a sigh of relief and continued on her way. Many of the grag bodies were ugly, but she liked the sandworm. She had helped to program it: constantly toiling, it went into such deep places that the Brain could not control it remotely.
The Secret Door was in a shallow crater, maybe a hundred meters in diameter. She went down its slope with little choppy leaps and stopped her momentum with a deft pirouette and toe-brake, right in front of the Door.
It was made of two large pyramid-shaped rocks, leaning against each other at a funny angle, with a small triangular gap between them: the Big Old One, and the Troll. The Old One had two eyes made from shadows, and when Tyche squinted from the right angle, a rough outcrop and a groove in the base became a nose and a mouth. The Troll looked grumpy, half-squashed against the bigger rock’s bulk.
As she watched, the face of the Old One became alive and gave her a quizzical look. Tyche gave it a stiff bow—out of habit, even though she could have curtsied in her new suit.
How have you been, Tyche? the rock asked, in its silent voice.
“I had a Treatment today,” she said dourly.
The rock could not nod, so it raised its eyebrows.
Ah. Always Treatments. Let me tell you, in my day, vacuum was the only treatment we had, and the sun, and a little meteorite every now and then to keep clean. Stick to that and you’ll live to be as old as I am.
And as fat, grumbled the Troll. Believe me, once you carry him for a few million years, you start to feel it. What are you doing here, anyway?
Tyche grinned. “I made a ruby for the Magician.” She took it out and held it up proudly. She squeezed it a bit, careful not to damage her suit’s gloves against the rough edges, and held it in the Old One’s jet-black shadow, knocking it against the rock’s surface. It sparkled with tiny embers, just like it was supposed to. She had made it herself, using Verneuil flame fusion, and spiced it with a piezoelectric material so that it would convert motion to light.
It’s very beautiful, Tyche, the Old One said. I’m sure he will love it.
Oh? said the troll. Well, maybe the old fool will finally stop looking for the Queen Ruby, then, and settle down with poor Chang’e. In with you, now. You’re encouraging this sentimental piece of rubble here. He might start crying. Besides, everybody is waiting.
Tyche closed her eyes, counted to ten, and crawled through the opening between the rocks, through the Secret Door to her Other Moon.
The moment Tyche opened her eyes she saw that something was wrong. The house of the Jade Rabbit was broken. The boulders she had carefully balanced on top of each other lay scattered on the ground, and the lines she had drawn to make the rooms and the furniture were smudged. (Since it never rained, the house had not needed a roof.)
There was a silent sob. Chang’e the Moon Girl sat next to the Rabbit’s house, crying. Her flowing silk robes of purple, yellow, and red were a mess on the ground like broken wings, and her makeup had been running down her pale, powdered face.
“Oh, Tyche!” she cried. “It is terrible, terrible!” She wiped a crystal tear from her eye. It evaporated in the vacuum before it could fall on the dust. Chang’e was a drama queen, and pretty, and knew it, too. Once, she had an affair with the Woodcutter just because she was bored, and bore him children, but they were already grown up and had moved to the Dark Side.
Tyche put her hands on her hips, suddenly angry. “Who did this?” she asked. “Was it the Cheese Goat?”
Tearful, Chang’e shook her head.
“General Nutsy Nutsy? Or Mr. Cute?” The Moon People had many enemies, and there had been times when Tyche had led
them in great battles, cutting her way through armies of stone with an aluminum rod the Magician had enchanted into a terrible bright blade. But none of them had ever been so mean as to smash the houses.
“Who was it, then?”
Chang’e hid her face behind one flowing silken sleeve and pointed. And that’s when Tyche saw the first ant, moving in the ruins of the Jade Rabbit’s house.
It was not like a grag or an otho, and certainly not a Moon Person. It was a jumbled metal frame, all angles and shiny rods, like a vector calculation come to life, too straight and rigid against the rough surfaces of the rocks to be real. It was like two tetrahedrons inside each other, with a bulbous sphere at each vertex, each glittering like the eye of the Great Wrong Place.
It was not big, perhaps reaching up to Tyche’s knees. One of the telescoping metal struts had white letters on it. ANT-A3972, they said, even though the thing did not look like the ants Tyche had seen in videos.
It stretched and moved like the geometrical figures Tyche manipulated with a gesture during the Brain’s math lessons. Suddenly, it flipped over the Rabbit’s broken wall, making Tyche gasp. Then it shifted into a strange, slug-like motion over the regolith, first stretching, then contracting. It made Tyche’s skin crawl. As she watched, the ant thing fell into a crevice between two boulders—but dexterously pulled itself up, supported itself on a couple of vertices, and somersaulted over the obstacle like an acrobat.
Tyche stared at it. Anger started to build up in her chest. In the Base, she obeyed the Brain and the othos and the grags because she had Promised. But the Other Moon was her place: it belonged to her and the Moon People, and no one else.
“Everybody else is hiding,” whispered Chang’e. “You have to do something, Tyche. Chase it away.”
“Where is the Magician?” Tyche asked. He would know what to do. She did not like the way the ant thing moved.
As she hesitated, the creature swung around and, with a series of twitches, pulled itself up into a pyramid, as if watching her. It’s not so nasty-looking,Tyche thought. Maybe I could bring it back to the Base, introduce it to Hugbear.It would be a complex operation: she would have to assure the bear that she would always love it no matter what, and then carefully introduce the newcomer to it—