Moon Dreams

by M.A. Harris

To the Moon

  The sun blasted in through the front window of Paul’s little chalet, illuminating the small table that occupied the tiny dining alcove. The classic southwest decoration and coloration, with a strong undertone of sage, was both fitting - and a mockery of the beauty outside. Sitting here he could look out across what seemed like an infinity of almost empty desert with a blue sky that suddenly seemed very close.

  Breakfast was fruit and yogurt with toast, supplied by the Hollow’s support staff, much like the long stay hotels he had used in the past. It was a comfortable but lonely and impersonal life, in most ways he was happy enough living this way…most of the time. He had come back here last night and realized that he had no one to celebrate with. On top of the greatest day in his life he had gone to bed in one of the deepest depressions of his life. He had fallen into a restless sleep and woken before the sun was above the horizon to go out and run and work out in the little exercise room in the hostel. Feeling a lot better now, he had beaten the depression back into its hole and life was returning to an even keel.

  Today was going to be a busy day, the first components of the MoonDream were going to start moving into position in the assembly shed and they were going to start refining the lift schedule for the Moon Base. The materials that were early on the lift schedule were being moved into the shed by the Alexis’ hanger. He had noted that some material was being stored under tarps now; it was no longer worth while building new sheds. In a few weeks at most a lot of it would be on the moon, in less than six months most of the material stockpiled in the hollow would be on the moon along with the better part of a hundred people - at least that was the plan.

  It was amazing what they were planning, what they were doing. In some views it was insane, they were taking risks that few modern people took any longer, but it felt incredibly good. Certainly there was a chance for disaster, for death, even horrible death, but mankind was really on the road to the stars at long last. Somehow it almost felt like they were the first molecules out of a relief valve, hurled out by the pent up pressure behind them.

  Everything just seemed right, seemed to be pushing them to go fast. The Paaly Stacks of course - but also the spacesuits, the life support systems, the power conversion and computer infrastructure. As much as anything the technology just seemed ready, right; lying there for them to pick up and go. Maybe this was how it had been at other turning points in human history, back to the Stone Age, points in time when technology, society and concepts all suddenly melded to create a great leap into an unknown future.

  Paul found himself standing with his heart beating fast, “I’ve got to remember that thought for the speech tonight,” he whispered with a crooked smile at his own emotional roller coaster.

  -o-

  The stars gleamed as Paul did a last quick check of the Alexis Aurora, wondering again what the name signified to Aristide.

  Raoul was doing his hardware checks so Paul climbed up the short ladder into the shell and onto the cargo deck. He noted that Patsy was already on her way up the ladder. Paul took a quick turn around the deck to check the few mission critical items that resided down on this level then followed the copilot up to the cabin. Patsy was still on the catwalk around the cabins as he let himself in through the main airlock.

  A few more checks and Paul was in the vessel commander’s position running through the checklist. After checking with Raoul he started the APU diesels and started the Stack warm up. Just as a check he cross-connected one of the Stacks to the battery pack, since the Stacks were almost cold tonight it was going to be an hour before they had full power. Time passed amazingly fast, the tone indicating the first four Stacks were generating power caught him by surprise. He flicked the power to the next group of Stacks, and started recharging the batteries. The only external connection they had now was the refrigerant line keeping the ice tanks chilled.

  The refrigerant line was the last one to be disconnected. As the last set of Stacks began to develop thrust Paul used a camera mounted on a nearby pole to watch the ground crew disconnect the big line and pull it back out of the port in the shell. The little hatch was closed and Paul saw the last light on the ‘board’ turn from amber to green.

  “You’re clear for flight Alexis.” There was a great deal of tension in Cliff’s voice. There was no turning back from this point on, or so it felt. And for all his dedication to the company, the cause and his religion, Cliff had to know that they were preparing to break quite a few laws, not the least of which were the ‘UN Space Laws’ that were supposed to control access to space and how it was used. Those laws didn’t make a great deal of sense, but they had the power of international treaty.

  “See you when we get back Cliff.” They would have no communication from lift out to touch down. The little laser line of sight communication link they were using right now was far too weak and was too touchy for long-range communications between the ship and the ground and any other communications system could too easily give the ship away. There were plans for a Moon base to Earth communication network in the works but it was going to be a couple of months. Until then communication was almost back to pre-radio days, they had a ham radio setup that could be used in extremis, but that would probably trigger events none of them really cared to think about.

  Paul checked with his flight crew, Patsy was watching the navigation system and flight control systems. Raoul was watching life support, power and propulsion, Paul said softly, “Crew, are we are go for liftout?”

  “Go” Patsy’s voice was strangled.

  “Go Commander.” Raoul sounded very comfortable, though he had to be as excited as Paul.

  Paul rolled the thrust level up manually and locked it. Patsy read out the lift again, “Thirty tons, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, we have lift off,”

  Raoul spoke softly, “Gear up and doors closed, integrity is one hundred percent.”

  The Alexis was far from an aerodynamic shape and at fifty miles an hour Paul rolled the thrust back to maintain a constant upward velocity. The world fell away around them in an eerily prosaic way. At a thousand feet the ship rocked as they passed through a thermal layer. The lights of Primus Junction pulled in and faded slowly.

  As they climbed, the atmosphere thinned and cooled, allowing Paul to increase their velocity. A hundred miles an hour, two hundred, three hundred, they were far above the majority of the atmosphere and arcing eastward to keep in the earth’s shadow. Finally the acceleration was a steady one and a half gravities and they were building up velocity as well as altitude.

  “Looks good from my position, any warning signs?” Paul asked, they had intersected the pre plotted line and he was simply monitoring the flight path now. He was cross checking the three navigation systems. They were still using GPS as well as the triple redundant inertial platform and the star tracker that had a tiny port in the stealth shell forward in the hull.

  “One hundred percent Commander, nothing but green lights on my board.” Patsy said quietly.

  “I have an amber on the ice baths Commander; we’re running a little hotter than expected so they’re melting faster than planned. It’s far from being a problem; we’ll be in stable orbit long before they max out. Nothing else.” Raoul sounded relaxed.

  Paul had noted the power anomaly, he’d kept their velocity lower for longer than originally planned, mainly because the dynamic loads on the hull had been deflecting the shell more than he liked. It was no major problem; he’d have to talk to Cliff about some stiffening, particularly in the other two ships.

  The four huge displays in the front of the bridge, showing the view outside, were somehow no replacement for a window. But it was still spectacular to look down and across the world, they passed over Atlanta, a glowing jewel set in a cobweb of light. Then they were passing over the east coast and it was a clear night, the seaboard from north to south glowed with light, a network of sparks interrupted by small areas of dark and
knots of fire.

  “Anything on the threat receivers, Patsy?” Paul asked quietly.

  Patsy had one of her displays setup to monitor the big and expensive set of test and analysis equipment in a shock-mounted rack that they had built to act like a military electronic intelligence and warfare suite. The equipment could sniff the airwaves from the ultra violet of some lasers all the way to the ultra low frequency over the horizon radars. It was, in fact, at the extreme edges of the spectrum that they knew the Alexis was most vulnerable to detection.

  Patsy tapped the screen and her input system a few times, “Nothing obvious Commander, there are a couple of powerful radars lit off up the coast; I think they must be warships on some kind of exercise. The over the horizon radars in Maine and Florida are both up and they might be detecting us but there’s no way to tell.”

  The Alexis slid over the Atlantic and two hours after takeoff they were in a stable orbit. The Stacks stopped producing thrust and suddenly Paul understood the term ‘free fall’ intimately. He had to control his stomach as it tried to revolt.

  Patsy’s “Whoooeee!” helped, the laughter took his mind off his stomach.

  Raoul laughed as well, “I think that this may be a little too much of a thrill ride even for me Commander. I guess I’m glad we won’t be doing this for very long.”

  Paul chuckled but he was running through the checklist. A few lights were glowing amber, “I don’t think the diesel tanks were baffled very well Raoul, you see the indicators.”

  “Yeah, the feed tanks are pressurized and the scavenger pumps can pull it in so we’d be OK, I think.”

  They went down a list of indicators as the Alexis rose above the darkened world below. Most of the Stacks were still on and generating power at a very low level. Two had been shut down. The tanks of water ice below were almost all liquid now.

  Paul checked the world outside, and the map display, they were high over the southern hemisphere, away from prying eyes. “Deploy the thermal wings, Raoul.”

  “Aye Commander, deploying the thermal wings.” The faint Latino accent put an odd inflection on this.

  Paul flipped one of the two Stacks from shutdown to startup and watched it out of the corner of his eye as Raoul deployed the thermal wings. Four large panels of the stealth shell over the cabin and engineering module pulled in and motored down tracks mounted to the stiffening frame. Two long telescoping masts then motored out from their housing above the engineering module. As they deployed they dragged radiator elements out of two twenty foot high storage cabinets mounted to the side of the main structural ring.

  About halfway out, Raoul stopped the deployment and motored it backward for a few seconds. The panels calmly began to fold away again. No one loved the system, the Alexis’ original design had included fixed thermal wings, they would have been much more reliable but again they had been forced to compromise, giving up some safety and a lot of cost to get stealth.

  “Looks good Raoul, motor them all the way out, and let’s get the cooling system switched over.”

  “Yes Commander.”

  The temporarily shut down Stack was back on line and stable. “Patsy, give us a line for that ten thousand mile orbit if you please.”

  Patsy nodded, “Here you go Commander.” She’d had several options pre-planned and it only took a few seconds to get the course and thrust curve updated and fed into the navigation computer. Paul could pilot by hand but it made little sense, the computer had to tell him where to go anyway so why not let it do the whole job. Paul and Patsy would just monitor to make sure the system was operating normally.

  As the Stacks came up to power and started producing thrust, Raoul flipped a few switches and the coolant began flowing through the big radiator wings, not the ice baths, which by this time were warm water. Now part of the thermal load on the radiators was the refrigeration plant that would refreeze the ice baths over the next eighteen hours.

  Paul sat back and watched the outside universe, while monitoring the Alexis; it was strange how mind numbingly exciting this was, while being oddly boring. Again he realized that it simply felt right, they had the tools and they were making use of them for what the human race did best, explore, adapt and expand.

  Thirty some minutes later the Alexis was in free fall again, the Stacks again generating minimum power. Paul restarted the Stack that had been cooling now for almost fifty minutes and flipped five to the power down. The three of them worked at their tasks, checking the ship’s various systems in free fall for almost two hours. Paul gradually turned off more and more of the Stacks as he became confident that the system was not affected by free fall. He’d leave two Stacks on, generating power, but the others weren’t needed right now.

  “Uh, Commander I got personal business in the back,” Patsy said with a grin as she unsnapped her harness. She already had the slightly bloated look you saw in people in free fall but she looked happy enough. Paul waved her on. She floated up and out of her seat and started making her way carefully towards the back. She seemed OK, Paul checked Raoul, the young Mexican seemed comfortable enough, and his hand met Patsy’s almost surreptitiously as the young copilot passed. Paul shook his head, wondering when the two would find some time together in the rest area in the back of the crew cabin.

  The universe glimmered through the screens, the moon glowed in one screen and the Earth far below in another. The sun burnt fiercely in velvet blackness, but if you covered it you could see what seemed like a million other suns as well.

  Paul glanced back at his engineer, “What would you think about a quick look outside Raoul?”

  Raoul laughed, “I think it would be a great thing. How would you like to do it?”

  Paul grinned nastily at Patsy who had poked her head back into the bridge, she’d obviously heard the exchange, “I think the copilot needs a little command time, how about you and I Raoul and then if the young one wants a turn you and Patsy can take a turn looking at the stars for a few minutes. We have an hour or so left before we head for the Luna orbit, so we have the time.”

  Patsy was wide eyed and eager, Paul waved her over, “Get belted in and settled and let’s get started. Unless you still have things to do Raoul?”

  “No sir, green down to the line and the oranges below the critical systems line are all pretty much expected in free fall. Couldn’t design some of the systems to operate well in free fall.” Patsy was quickly getting her ‘space legs’ because she was quick and graceful in getting back into her seat. Paul felt very clumsy getting out of his.

  -o-

  The helmet got in the way a little but the feeling as he hung onto the railing and looked out over the edge into infinity was unspeakable. Time was meaningless as he and Raoul floated just outside the airlock, carefully tethered to a cleat inside. There was no point in going further than the line would reach. Raoul had already made his way over to the radiator wings and checked them out.

  Earth hung below them and the moon above, the sun was ‘behind’ the cabin which made this area very cold but a bit safer. The Ultra Spandex single suit and the outer shell were providing plenty of protection right now. The life support backpack was supplying clean air with no odor that Paul could detect. From past experience he knew the system was pretty good; he’d worn it for almost ten hours one day, getting acclimatized.

  After a long quiet time Paul drew a deep breath and turned to Raoul who seemed almost startled at his motion, “Let’s give Patsy a turn ehe?”

  “Yes sir, Commander. Paul this is...this is incredible - wondrous - I feel like the hand of God is nearby when I look out across the universe like this.”

  “That’s what a lot of astronauts have said over the years Raoul, and who am I to deny it? I feel it myself.” The airlock worked as advertised and twenty minutes later Paul watched the airlock readouts cycle as the young couple went outside. Twenty minutes later they came back in.

  Time stretched as Paul ran throug
h the checklist and ran various tests. There were an almost infinite number of things one could check if you wanted. Paul checked the time, he grinned wickedly to himself, an hour really ought to have been enough time for the two young hot bloods. He heard movement in the cabin behind and a couple of telltales said the bathroom was being used again.

  Patsy and Raoul slipped into the bridge, studiously ignoring Paul and trying to act as if they had been gone only a few minutes, not the better part of two hours. Paul made no comment at all, which seemed to embarrass the young couple, providing Paul a great deal of internal amusement.

  He had already begun bringing the Stacks back up and they were all responding nominally. In five minutes the Alexis was under power and curving up and away from the Earth.

  -o-

  “Wow, I hate to say it but Déjà vu all over again!” Whispered Patsy as the Alexis swept low over the moon. The tapestry of grays, browns, creams and whites rolled below them like the movies and real life footage all of them had seen growing up.

  The Alexis was in orbit around the moon but they were practicing a maneuver that had never been practical for any other spacecraft. They were in a powered orbit, the Alexis was ‘head down’ over the moon, her Stacks putting out almost a quarter of a G, holding her much closer to the surface than natural dynamics would have allowed.

  Under power the whole way the Alexis had made orbit in less than four hours and this was their second orbit. Back at home it was still the middle of the day; Paul realized that all of their planning had been tinged with experience of the past, with the concept that the Moon was a faraway place and space vast; with the Stacks that was no longer really true.

  “What would you two think about a Luna landing at the base site?” Paul asked quietly.

  The gurgling noise he got from Patsy was very endearing if a little enigmatic, Raoul laughed, “Why not, we have the time and the power.” Patsy was nodding fierce agreement, even though she seemed unable to say much.

  “Then let’s plot the line Patsy, Raoul put out the landing jacks and check the camera pack.” Paul settled down into his seat. They were over the nearside of the moon right now, the Earth a distant icon of home.

  They killed forward velocity as they swept over to the farside and actually power-dived downwards for a minute or so before flipping over for the final approach. The surface grew huge around them but in an odd way it seemed unchanging, a fractal surface of craters upon craters. As they got closer the small features simply grew and then sprouted craters and textures of their own. The lips of the massive and broken crater Aristide Industries had chosen to cup the first permanent Luna settlement rose around them, stark and gray brown.

  “Grounding strap is showing current flow Commander,” the laser altimeters were showing almost seven hundred feet, the long grounding strap hanging down was almost five hundred feet long. The Alexis had been its own little world at its own electrical potential for almost fifteen hours now and had built up a massive charge that the strap was designed to deal with.

  The camera mounted on landing jack one showed an immense flash of light, Raoul yelped, “Damn.” Paul’s teeth clenched and Patsy jerked, but there was no other obvious effect. A check showed that there had been a momentary blip on the power bus but that was all. Raoul whistled, “Fuse links one through five went to hell Commander, but we’re clean and clear now.”

  “Guess we need to carry a spare for that if we intend to make more than two landings on the same trip,” mused Paul, tapping that note into his log as the Alexis floated down. The thump of landing was almost anti-climactic.

  The ground under them was slightly tilted but the laser altimeters had brought them to a perfect four point landing. Thrust fell away and there was a little shifting, but it was only detectable through the ships incredibly sensitive motion sensors, Paul could feel nothing, he snapped eighteen of the Stacks to shutdown.

  The three of them sat there staring out across the moon through the big view plates. Paul panned the camera and then flicked to the next one. The ground was rolling and covered with boulders, very similar to views they had seen from the Apollo program. Paul looked at the other three, “How about a turn around the catwalk again? I don’t think we should go down to the surface but I don’t see a reason not to take a constitutional?”

  Ten minutes later the three of them stood at the railing, looking out. To the east the ground rose in a smooth curve to the top lip of the crater. If they walked to the top of that lip they would have been able to see the Earth. Since the Moon was in tidal lock with the Earth this crater bottom would never see the big blue marble.

  Nearby to the west were a series of small craters and a ripple in the ground. The craters and the ripple were going to be part of Luna Haven. The big sections of concrete, metal and plastic canal pipe that would make up the base would be buried here. The great excavating machines should be able to scrape out trenches that the pipes would be laid in and then buried under tens of feet of gravel and dust, regolith in moon speak.

  The Alexis was sitting on a relatively open stretch of ground that Paul had selected as they came down. Raoul was scanning the surroundings, “Paul this looked like the flattest and most open piece of ground around, I’d have thought they’d want an area with fewer boulders and flatter ground?”

  Paul shrugged, “Not likely to find a lot better Raoul, this is good enough, we can drop equipment here and they can clean it out, and we can start the staging yard over there to the north around those big boulders, plenty of space between ‘em. That small crater off to the northwest may make a good place to bury the ‘construction shacks’ the construction crews will be using for a month or so until the first ‘arm’ of the village is sealed and livable.”

  Patsy chimed in, “We took all the Luna Surveyor information we could get our hands on, this place is almost ideal, in the long run after things have settled down the city’ll probably grow up the side of the crater and a lot of places can have views over the horizon at the Earth. In the meantime this is pretty well protected and the ground’s good for building, stable but pulverized into a deep gravel bed that we can dig into pretty easily.”

  After they went back inside they had a meal and they took turns napping for an hour or so. In another few hours they would be on their way home. Paul lay on his back on the couch, oddly uncomfortable in the light gravity, and stared up at the ceiling, finding it hard to believe that he was on the moon, but a quick toss of any object into the air was enough to show where they were.

  -o-

  The Alexis dropped smoothly through the night air a few miles to the south and east of Primus Junction, Utah. The night was dark and the air cool as the GPS guided the Moonship to a position directly over the landing pad as she dropped down at fifty miles an hour.

  Paul watched the lights of home rising up to greet them with a profound feeling of unreality. Only six hours before they had been on the surface of the moon and now they were almost back after the most remarkable thirty-two hours in his life, possibly in the history of mankind.

  Weight increased as the final braking came up, there was a faint thump and they were down. Paul flipped nineteen Stacks to shutdown, leaving one for internal power. They were all silent as they went through the shutdown procedures.

  “Alexis, this is the command center, how did it go?” Cliff’s voice was nervous.

  “Command center this is Richards, Cliff get the first load in the queue ready. We’re done with the flight testing for now.”

  “What? What was that Paul?” Cliff sounded choked, he’d been upset enough at Paul’s short circuiting the first week of flight tests to begin with.

  “We touched down at the Luna Haven site Cliff, got some panoramic shots the Luna graphic people can use to start planning, but we have a good spot for the spaceport and the staging field near the site for the village itself. I don’t see any point in hanging around. The ship operated perfectly, straight down
the line.”

  “What Paul? Damnit Paul!” It was the first time Paul had ever heard Cliff curse, “You can’t keep short-circuiting the testing like this, you’ll get yourself and your crew killed.” A long second while he drew in a breath and tried to calm down, “let’s talk about this during the debrief Paul.”

  “Roger that Cliff.” Paul grinned over at Patsy and Raoul who both knew that Paul had really already won. Cliff’s own hard work in making the Alexis all but perfect was working against him.