The Tranquillity Alternative (24 page)

Fuck it. Glancing through the canopy windows, he could see stars beginning to appear around him as the Sun set behind Earth. It was always a pretty sight, one of the few things that still made it worthwhile to be an astronaut. The mission was going well enough for him to sneak a peek.

Carefully keeping one hand steady on the yoke, McGraw loosened his shoulder straps so he could turn slightly to his left and look out the portside windows. Earth was a vast, dark shape behind him, its curve described by a thin blue-yellow line of light. A smile reappeared on his face as he savored the view. Damn, it sure was pretty. He should remember to bring a camera out here sometime, snap a few pictures for the grandkids back home. Maybe they would …

All at once, something caught his eye: a tiny spot of light within the darkness, like a fireball lancing across Earth’s atmosphere.

“Whoa!” he yelled. “You see that?”

For a moment, he thought it was a large meteorite entering the atmosphere. He had seen that a few times over the years: pieces of a passing Apollo asteroid, meeting its final fate as it disintegrated within the upper reaches of the stratosphere. Yet this miniature comet didn’t quickly burst and fade from view. And it was going in the wrong direction, heading out instead of in …

See what?
Billy asked.

Of course, he couldn’t see anything. Sealed inside the bottlesuit, Billy couldn’t see jackshit until he had disengaged from the belly of the retriever ship.

As abruptly as it appeared, the fireball vanished. Poppa watched as it disappeared among the stars. In another moment, it was indistinguishable from any one of dozens of satellites in low orbit.

“Uh … naw, never mind.” McGraw turned back around, blinking rapidly as he put his eyes back on the radar display. The first brace of tanks was coming up fast; he couldn’t afford to screw around with UFO sightings right now. “Thought I saw something, that’s all.”

What did you see?

“Forget it,” McGraw replied. “Just get ready for the drop.”

Damned if it didn’t look like an orbital rocket being launched from somewhere on Earth. Yet, when he glanced at the Zulu-time chronometer and did a little mental figuring, the likely point of origin didn’t make much sense. Given the time of day, the rocket must have been launched from somewhere in Southeast Asia. With the exception of Japan’s launch sites at Kagoshima and Tanegashima Island, there weren’t any there, and the Japanese weren’t scheduled for any night launches the last time he had checked.

His right hand drifted uncertainly toward the communications panel; then he stopped himself. He could see the departure tanks through his front window now, and
Fido’s Pride
was going a bit too fast for an effective capture rendezvous. McGraw hastily throttled back to zero and fired the ship’s forward RCR’s; the harness dug into his chest and shoulders as the mutt put on the brakes.

Poppa, what the hell
…
!

“Sorry about that, kid.” McGraw returned his concentration to the tricky maneuver he had almost botched. “Just seeing things.”

And so it was. He was just seeing things.

Main-engine cutoff and separation of the departure tanks had gone as well as could be expected, and although they were to perform four course-correction burns within the next sixteen hours, the first one wasn’t scheduled for another hour and a half, when they reached the second checkpoint at 21,750 nautical miles.

Nonetheless, the launch had not gone flawlessly. When Lewitt deployed the high-gain telemetry dish and the mercury-solar boiler, he reported that the long-range radar seemed to be on the fritz. Gene unstrapped and floated over to Jay’s station, where he confirmed that the LR radar display was showing nothing but snow. Most likely, something outside the ship had come loose during launch. However, since the close-range radar was still operational, it wasn’t an immediate source of concern; while the short-range system was vital for landing, the LRR was a secondary array which didn’t need immediate attention, since it was mainly used for rendezvousing with the hangar during the return flight.

“Keep on it,” he said to Jay. “If we don’t get it ironed out before we get to the Moon, we’ll fix it there.”

Jay nodded. “Got it. Going below?”

“Yeah. Time to check on the tourists.” Parnell pushed off from the bulkhead. “You’ve got the wheel. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

He left the command deck and floated headfirst down the gangway shaft to C-deck. As he expected, most of the passengers were clinging to rungs near the portholes, watching as Earth receded behind them. Thankfully, no one had gotten spacesick; by now, even Bromleigh and Dooley had become accustomed to surges and sudden drops of g-force, and Bromleigh was aiming his Sony out one of the portholes to snag a few shots of Earth.

As he watched Dooley and Rhodes jostling for room at a porthole, like a couple of kids fighting for the best seat on a carnival ride, Parnell wondered why no one had ever taken space tourism seriously. Probably because first the Space Force, then NASA, had jealously fought off bids by various entrepreneurs to develop low-orbit spacecraft for civilians. So far, the only untrained individuals who had ever been in space were a select handful of politicians, journalists, and celebrities. Sure, NASA had let John Denver sing a couple of songs aboard the Wheel, and George Lucas had been allowed to shoot a zero-g fight scene in the hub for
Revenge of the Jedi
. But wouldn’t it have been better publicity if the agency had traded one famous pop singer or film director for a couple of suburban housewives, who could have then gone home to tell their friends that spending tax money on space travel was worthwhile after all?

One more lost opportunity …

He had intended to brew some coffee in the galley, only to be surprised that Markus Talsbach had already found the microgravity coffee maker. “We have studied your equipment completely,” Talsbach said, giving Gene a smug smile as he slipped a catheter around a squeeze bulb and handed it to him. “It is a good design … but it needs a little improvement, yes?”

“Yes, it … yeah, maybe so.” Gene loosened the catheter, took a sip through the straw, and almost gagged. Talsbach had made coffee strong enough to raise the dead. “Thanks, but take it easy on the bags next time. We’ve got to make the supply last.”

Talsbach grinned at him, then pulled himself up the gangway ladder to B-deck, where Aachener was inspecting the ship’s mainframes. Gene considered following them, if only to explain the equipment, but realized that the Germans had probably studied that part of the moonship, too. In fact, their simulators probably contained computers which were more state-of-the-art than
Conestoga
’s.

He turned around to find James Leamore strapped into a seat on the other side of the mess table. The Englishman had already figured out how to cradle his squeeze bulb within one of the table’s magnetic coasters. He had also discovered the gripsole sneakers in the locker beneath his couch and was now putting them on his feet.

“A nice launch, Commander,” he said as he carefully adjusted the shoes for his size. “We hardly felt a thing down here.”

“Thanks, Mr. Leamore …”

“James, please. Or you can call me Pat. Most of my friends do.” Leamore laced up his left sneaker, unstrapped his seat belt, and carefully stood up, testing the cling offered by the frayed carpet. “Well … works rather nicely, doesn’t it?”

“It should. We’ve had a little practice at this sort of thing.” Gene nodded to his own feet, which were not shod in gripsoles. “Personally, I get along without them. Just one less thing I have to worry about.”

“I imagine so.” Leamore took a few tentative baby-steps around the floor. “We’re still trying to decide whether to equip our ships with these things. Seems as if it’s a matter of six of one and half a dozen of the other …”

“Something like that, yeah.” Gene shrugged. “You get the illusion of gravity, but for that you give up some mobility, too.” He took a seat on the far side of the table but didn’t strap himself down. Instead, he crossed his legs so that his left knee pinned his right leg between the bottom of the table and the floor, anchoring him in place. “Practice is all it takes.”

“Hmm. Yes.” Leamore slowly walked back to his chair and sat down; he didn’t try to imitate Parnell’s crossed-leg trick. “Of course, our ships won’t be … well, quite as spacious, if you know what I mean.”

Gene knew what he meant. Koening Selenen’s Monhunde moonships would not only make orbital hangars unnecessary, but also reduce the size of the vessels themselves. The Monhunde was to be a two-stage vehicle, the first stage of which was a retrievable liquid-fuel booster that would be jettisoned once the vehicle reached low orbit. The second stage would utilize an advanced nuclear engine capable of sending men and cargo straight to the Moon; this engine would then be refueled on the Moon, using reactive volatiles refined from the lunar regolith. Before the first Monhunde was launched, an unmanned, teleoperated fuel-manufacturing plant would be sent to Tranquillity Base, where it would begin stocking up on fuel not only for the return flight but for subsequent missions.

In other words, Koenig Selenen intended to make Tranquillity Base self-sufficient by forcing it to live off the land instead of shipping from Earth everything needed for survival. If it worked—and there was no reason to believe that it wouldn’t—the cost of space exploration would be greatly reduced, and large-scale space colonization would become a real possibility. Indeed, Koenig Selenen was already discussing plans to use nuclear indigenous-fuel spacecraft to send a return mission to Mars, the asteroid belt, and even the outer planets of the solar system.

The sad irony of the NIF engine was that it had first been proposed in the mid-eighties by a team of researchers from the Martin Marietta Corporation. Unfortunately, NASA’s entrenched bureaucracy had not paid much attention to the idea; it was also opposed by the antispace movement, whose knees jerked at the mere mention of the word “nuclear.” Suffocated by redundant impact studies and railed at by technophobic newspaper columnists, the NIF engine died in the United States. The project’s key scientists quit Martin Marietta, left the U.S., and moved to Germany, where they were quickly hired by Koenig Selenen GmbH.

Even more ironic was the fact that once NIF moonships entered service, one of their main jobs would be hauling high-level nuclear waste to the Moon, where it would be stored inside the empty Minuteman II silos. This would please environmentalists concerned about the disposal of nuclear waste on Earth … but who had opposed a solution to the same problem because it involved using space technology. Of course, Koenig Selenen GmbH would profit handsomely from this enterprise as well.

Now, as he sat across the galley table from Parnell, James Leamore had the twinkle in his eyes of a patient tortoise who has outraced a complacent, slumbering hare.

“I’m sure you’ll manage somehow,” Gene said. He uncrossed his legs, swiveled the chair around, and pushed off from the table, taking his coffee with him. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to return upstairs.”

On his way up the ladder, Gene paused on B-deck. The two German astronaut-trainees were bent over the plotting table, their feet restrained by floor stirrups as they closely studied the highlighted map of the lunar farside. He was about to join them, when he noticed Cris Ryer on the far side of the deck.

She had lowered one of the cots from the bulkhead and was sitting on it as she changed into gripshoes from her duffel bag. She looked up warily as Gene pulled himself along the ceiling rail until he grabbed a support stanchion.

“If I had known you were coming below,” he said, “I would have offered to buy you coffee.”

“That’s all right, Commander,” she replied. “I just needed to change shoes. I’ll get some coffee myself before I go back up.”

“You sure? I could run down and grab another bulb.”

Ryer shook her head; the sudden motion caused her short blond hair to drift across her face. “No, sir, that’s fine. I can manage by myself.”

Her eyes darted to the open privacy curtain, as if she were wishing she’d thought to draw it around her bunk. She was clearly uncomfortable in his presence, and Parnell suddenly felt a twinge of guilt. After all, he had been prodding her in a sore spot ever since they left the Cape; they didn’t have to be friends, but neither her job nor his would be made any easier if they couldn’t tolerate each other for a few days.

“Look, Cris …” he began, then glanced over his shoulder to see if either Aachener or Talsbach were paying attention. They were engrossed in the map, murmuring to each other in German. He lowered his voice. “Look, let’s just drop it, okay?”

“Drop what, Commander?”

“Drop the hostility, that’s what I mean.” He took a deep breath. “I know you’re upset about … y’know, what’s happening with you and the agency. Believe me, I understand …”

“Oh. You understand.” Ryer angrily shoved the discarded boots into her duffel bag, then raised her left foot and thrust it into a gripsole sneaker. “So how’s the wife, Commander? How’s the kids?”

“I don’t see what my family’s got to do with …”

“No? Of course you don’t.” Her eyes were cold when she glanced at him. “I hear your son’s got a dope problem and you’ve spent a lot of time trying to keep him out of jail. That right? Funny how nobody questions your patriotism or calls you a security risk.”

Parnell felt his face grow warm. “That’s not the same thing, Captain …”

“It isn’t?” Ryer impatiently swept the hair out of her face. She laced up the sneaker and reached for its mate. “It’s your private business, something that stays at home. Right? Well, what I do stays at home, too. In fact, it had for almost ten years, until someone saw me kiss my wife in a bar. Then I became a security risk …”

“Cris …”

“Yeah, okay … you’re right. Maybe we should just drop it.” She nodded toward a nearby bunk while she laced the other sneaker. “The TV queen is supposed to sleep over there. You think she’ll mind? I mean, she’s really not my type, but you never know about us queers …”

“Cut it out!” he snapped.