Back to the Moon (44 page)

Penny trusted Virgil to sort everything out with Houston. She had other things to worry about. “What will be the command for me to pull the handle?” she asked Tate, referring to the loop of cable over her head that Virgil had attached through a port in the top of the dome (the port meant for a UHF antenna). The cable led to three cables attached where the landing spheres would have gone. By pulling the loop, Virgil's design would cause the pins to come out at the attachment points and the cables would be released.

“We'll say it three times,” Tate explained. “Release, release, release. Got it?”

“Got it,” Penny muttered, eyeing the loop. She could only hope the untested mechanism would work. If it didn't work, or worked poorly, Penny knew she could be flung into an unrecoverable orbit, or to the lunar surface miles away from the target. That worried but in no way deterred her. She had her expedition hat more firmly on than ever.

A half hour passed like an eye blink. “Thirty seconds, Penny,” Tate said.

“I'm here,” she replied, pushing her feet into her footloops as far as they would go. “Ready to rocket and roll!”

Tate came back. His voice was calm, assured. “After you're down, Penny, your suit comm won't be powerful enough by itself to talk to us or
Columbia.
You'll need line of sight with the antenna on board Jack's Elsie to get back in touch. So get out and get oriented as quickly as you can.”

“Roger, Sam. Understood.” Penny looked through one of the port windows, saw Virgil standing at the shuttle aft flight deck view ports. It was his job to control ATESS. She could hear the background chatter coming out of Huntsville to Virgil. The Italian science leader, Dr. Emilio Broglio, was enabled for voice air-to-ground communications. “We are with you, Mr. Judd,” Penny heard him announce as tether deployment began.

Penny couldn't feel it but saw
Columbia
move away through the ring of portholes in the Elsie-2. Her job at this point, besides pulling the release ring at the right time, was just to hang on.

THE DROP SCENARIO

Columbia

Virgil watched the tether smoothly unreel until Penny's dome disappeared into the texture of the moon. He was going by feel, watching the tether length on the ATESS screen, keeping an eye on the numbers from the satellite as it automatically used its cold gas thrusters to keep the line taut.

The ATESS tether was eighteen miles long.
Columbia
was in a nine-mile-high orbit, skimming along at nearly 3,700 miles per hour. Virgil was going to let the tether out eight and a half miles. Then, after
Columbia
slowed, and after a scan by Starbuck to determine the Elsie-2's position over the lunar surface, Virgil would let the tether out a bit more and Penny would pull the pin and drop away. The Elsie-2 would hit the lunar surface at under a hundred miles per hour, the Elsie-2's braced aluminum lattice absorbing the impact. It would be a rough landing, but survivable.

At least that was the scenario advanced by Houston.

The first trick, Virgil knew, was to slow
Columbia
's huge mass enough to allow a decent chance for the dome's survival but not so slow that
Columbia
herself would crash. Everything had to be balanced: the inertia lost by
Columbia
when the OMS put on her brakes; the dynamics of a nine-mile tether; and the boost in velocity the shuttle would need to get back up to orbital speed before it crashed. Tate had reported those calculations had taken the Cray in Houston more than several minutes to compute. It was going to be a near thing but it was, in NASA parlance,
doable.

Doable. Virgil shook his head. He guessed it was
doable
for pigs to sprout wings and fly around the barnyard too.
Probable,
that was the question....

SMC

Sam realized he was happy in his job for the first time in years. He had a free hand. The atmosphere in his Shuttle Mission Control reflected his electric mood, his controllers eagerly at their consoles. Huntsville had the show to control the tether, but Houston would control the orbital maneuvering system, the OMS,
Columbia
's internal rocket engines. Tate got on the line with Starbuck at Farside Control. The word there was go, all the way. Starbuck reported he had a good view of both the ATESS satellite on the end of the tether and the lunar terrain underneath. He had plugged into the signal from
Columbia
's Ku-band radar and between his own Farside data and
Columbia
's, he could calculate the fluctuating distances to within at least a hundred feet.

A cheer went up from Tate's Turds when a picture appeared on their monitors, courtesy of Farside. There'd been no time to write a good virtual image program but Starbuck was giving Houston a fair representation. On the screen was a circle (Penny's dome) attached to a vertical line (the tether). A horizontal line beneath the circle represented the moon's surface. As Sam watched, the vertical line grew longer, the circle moving closer to the horizontal line. The horizontal line rose and fell as the terrain
Columbia
was passing over varied. In the upper right corner a six-digit number representing the meters between the dome and the lunar surface changed every half second. Sam thought Starbuck's work was crude but effective, amazing really considering the short time he'd had to develop the code. The truth was, Sam didn't see how Houston would've had a ghost of a chance of rescuing Medaris without Starbuck. But there he was, a miracle. He said a silent prayer that the miracles would keep coming.

There were two numbers Starbuck was providing that Tate's controllers were looking for: fifty meters for the release altitude, and two hundred for the velocity in miles per hour.

“Sam, we're not going to make it,” the POD in Huntsville announced. “Dr. Broglio and Virgil are having trouble unreeling the tether. They've had to slow down the rate.”

Sam grimaced. This was going to mean another lunar go-around. He called Penny, explained it to her.

“Okay, Sam,” Penny replied. “I'll hang around.”

Sam grinned at her joke. She was hanging, all right, from the shuttle toward the moon, on about six miles of pencil-thin tether.

With the extra time required for another orbit Sam made a decision concerning the media. The networks and the cable news were screaming for access, so he opened up the internal NASA Select television system. People around the world began to camp out in front of their television sets just to watch the mission controllers in Houston and Huntsville at work. No live television was coming from the moon, but cartoonists and model makers hired by the networks were getting rich.

Elsie-2

Penny hung in her straps, teeth chattering. She was freezing. She had turned down the suit coolant system but it didn't help.

“How's it going, Penny?” Sam asked.

“I'm cold,” she admitted. “Anything from Jack?”

“Nothing,” he answered. “We've been trying to raise him but no joy. I think he must have turned us off. Would he do that?”

“Yes. He can get arbitrary.” Penny swore to herself.
Jack Medaris, I'd like to wring your neck!

MONTANA (4)

The Perlman Plant

Perlman looked at the surveillance monitor with satisfaction. The crater that had been blasted in an attempt to open up the sand tunnel entry had turned into a huge, muddy pond from the water he and Charlie had pumped up into the ground beneath it. The men in black fatigues stood around the crater, pondering it. One of them jumped back when the edge started to crumble beneath him, and Perlman laughed. “You son of a bitch!” he said. “Serves you right!”

Charlie padded in behind him. “Doc, they're up to something again. I heard drilling topside and looks like they punched through. Ain't a big hole—it'd take a year of drilling to make one big enough for a man—but looks like they're threading something through it. You better come see.”

Perlman swiveled around, grabbed his cane, and followed Charlie through the blast door, out into the concrete corridor. He looked nervously overhead. There was a lot of water sitting above them. Charlie saw his look. “Don't worry, Doc. This tunnel will hold the weight. It was built for compression in case of a direct atom bomb hit.”

“If you say so, Charlie,” Perlman muttered, hurrying as fast as his hip would allow.

They stopped at the end of the corridor, next to the elevator shaft. Charlie pointed to the floor in front of the door of the elevator. A spiral of steel lay there, apparently having fallen from a drilled hole far above. A scraping noise attracted Perlman's attention. He looked up at the elevator support structure and spotted a dangling wire, a black object attached to it, coming down at them. “I think we'd better get back to the plant, Charlie,” he said nervously.

Charlie was studying the object. “Too small to do much if it's an explosive, Doc. Ah, I can see it now. It's a speaker, I think.”

Perlman was glad Charlie had such good eyes because he still couldn't make out the object. A screech of feedback coming from it, however, convinced him Charlie was right. “Propaganda time, I think, Charlie. Warnings and threats.”

“Yes, sir.”

The speaker squawked, followed by a voice. “Dr. Perlman, the President of the United States orders you to vacate this site immediately. If you don't, we will have no recourse but to blast our way in. We cannot be responsible for your safety if that happens.”

Perlman frowned. It seemed to him they'd already tried to blast their way in, down through the sand chute. What other way was there? Through the blast doors? How big a detonation would that take from the outside? The blast doors were six feet thick, built of tempered steel and reinforced concrete. It would have to be a blast so huge, he thought, it would probably kill him and Charlie in the process, probably wreck the entire place, for that matter, all by itself.

Perlman shuddered.
They wouldn't do that, would they?

He stared upward, looking at the dangling speaker. It sat mute, as if awaiting an answer. There was probably a receiver/transmitter in it. “What do you think, Charlie?” he whispered.

“We done okay not talking to the bastards so far, Doc. Don't see no reason to start now.”

Perlman marveled at the machinist. He was starting to believe, even though he knew the best scientists in the entire world, that Charlie Bowman was the smartest man he'd ever met. A genius indeed!

THE LETTER

Taurus-Littrow

Jack was there. He'd gotten lost twice and nearly run into three deep craters, but he'd made it—Shorty Crater at last. To save Rover power he stopped at the crater's base and trudged up the slope. At the top he looked across the crater, estimating it to be a little over one hundred meters in diameter and perhaps fifty meters deep, a football stadium on the moon. Its walls were steep, much too vertical for someone in a spacesuit to climb out, so he kept his distance from the rim.

Apollo
boot-prints led around to the northwest and stopped at a work site. Jack spotted the telltale hole left from a drive tube and walked to it. There, about three feet away, lying serenely, was the canister tube he'd wondered about practically from the day he had met Kate. Jack slowly knelt and picked it up. His heart pounded in his ears, as if he had found and touched a holy relic. He ran his glove down its side, savoring the moment so long in coming. The canister had a cleverly engineered latch made for the heavy gloved hands of an astronaut. The initials “K.S.” were just below the latch—Katrina Suttner. He gently pushed the latch and it sprang open. He extracted what was inside—a sheet of notebook paper—and held it up to his helmet. There was her message, just as she had told him it would be, written in a girlish hand he still recognized as hers, sent to the moon by her adoring parents and uncles and the great Dr. Wernher von Braun himself. It was her message across space and time to him:

To my future husband—
My name is Katrina Suttner and I am ten years old.
But you know that. You know all the things I do not.
I wonder—
Will you find this and bring it back to me?
Or will our brave astronauts of the future return it?
Or will I be the one to carry home my message to you?
And I wonder—
Will you be handsome?
Will you be kind?
Will you be smart?
Will you always take care of me?
Will you always love me as I will love you, always and forever?

A tear found its way down his cheek. “Yes,” he whispered to her. “Yes.”

THE ELSIE-2 RELEASE

SMC

On the next flyby the word from Huntsville was go. The OMS boys also gave Sam the high sign. The OMS would be fired remotely from Houston, Virgil too engrossed in the ATESS to do it from
Columbia.
As planned, Starbuck would make the release call to Penny.

Sam stood. He simply could not stay seated. He hadn't felt such pride since
Apollo. No, damn it.
He felt more pride now. Those damn yuppies in the trenches were performing magnificently. No matter what happened, NASA was at least going out in grand style. Impulsively, he picked up the telephone and called his wife. When she answered, he said what he should have said long ago. “Geraldine, life hasn't been easy for you, I know. Me gone all the time over here, pulling these long missions, then all those hours of sims while you were at home with the kids. How have you ever put up with me? I can't figure it.”

Geraldine laughed. “Well, it's simple, Sam. Kinda goes like this. From the moment we met, I have always loved you.”

A crooked smile on his weathered face, Sam slowly hung up. His wife loved him. It shouldn't have been a revelation and it wasn't, not really. What it was was a goldurned
miracle
and so very nice to hear.

Low Lunar Orbit

Columbia
came batting over the rim, gravity flinging it down the front side of the moon along what the mission controllers were calling the Taurus-Littrow corridor. Penny's dome swung a thousand feet above the surface. As the highlands approached, the distance began to decrease, not because the tether was being let out but because the terrain was rising. If all went according to plan, a small circular lava bed named Mare Crisium would come into view just moments before the landing site. Past that was the big circular Mare Serenatis, the dry sea that contained the landing site of the
Challenger
Lem.