Year’s Best SF 15 (41 page)

“Seven minutes.”

“Let's get a sample. And mum's the word.”

Joe wanted to scream in protest. Yes, they were already off the reservation as far as NASA knew. Why jeopardize the rest of their timeline by lobbing this particular grenade into the flight plan?
When in doubt, do nothing
. There would be time to look at this stuff when they returned to Pathfinder. Then, if it warranted, they could tell mission control—and return here on their third EVA.

But this could be the discovery of the ages! Something that justified the entire Apollo program!

Nevertheless, three years of training—twenty-five years of following orders—overcame all other impulses. Joe simply swallowed and reached for his tools.

They quickly hammered off several faceted pieces and scooped up the rubble. “Interesting,” Joe said, knowing he might be overheard, “the hard stuff flakes like mica, but the rubble is like coral.”

“Houston, 506, comm check.” Chuck made the call in the clear, and also as a warning.
Don't say anything. You work for me.

All twelve Apostles met in the same room for the first time—post-Apollo—during interviews for the follow-up documentary to Felice's book. Nine years had smoothed out the old rivalries. They had dinner together, played golf in a trio of foursomes, stayed up late drinking and telling what the Alpha always called sea stories.

Thanks to his newfound prominence as chairman of the board of X Systems, Joe noticed that the others—especially the Good Old Boy and the Shark, who in Houston never seemed to know Joe's name—actually gave him leave to speak.

And so, with the Alpha's encouragement, the last night in that hotel room in Glendale, California, Joe shared the secret of the Aitken Coral.

“You bastards!” the Politician said, only half kidding. “You realize how hard it is to sell the manned space program these days? You could have saved me a lot of work!”

The Mystic was already chiming in, “You've got to get this out! My God, it would create a whole new paradigm!”

At this, the Shark and the Businessman both guffawed. Joe couldn't tell which was the more contemptuous.
What the hell was a “paradigm”
?

Before a vote-to-release by acclamation could be entered, the Preacher preached caution. “How do you know it's real?”

The Aviator chimed in, too. “Have you had it tested?”

The Visionary wanted to know where it was stashed. The Lifer, as usual, sat back in silence. There were other opinions—the Good Old Boy seemed to be on both sides of the matter.

A show of hands left it 5-5.

Joe turned to the Alpha, who said, “Guys, thank you. As Jeb Pruett used to say, whenever we bitched out our assignments, we'll ‘take that under advisement.' We told you because we want your opinions. But the decision is ours. Joe?”

Joe was indecently pleased. For the first time in their working relationship, Chuck Behrens had offered him a voice in a decision! “I say, sit on it for a while yet. Do some definitive tests. If it's really real, a few years' delay won't matter. If it's not what we think, we'll save ourselves a world of shit.”

The Alpha concurred. The vote of the Apostles was 7-5 against.

There never was another gathering of the twelve Apostles as a group. Somehow the Alpha always managed to cancel. And then death began to reduce their numbers.

 

Herman Polski—the Politician—died much too young, felled by a heart attack in Texas three years later.

 

Even at Aitken Base, Joe would still hear the question, “How did you find out you were going to the Moon?” They didn't realize it was a three-step answer. Number one, “The day I got the phone call from NASA telling me I'd been selected as an astronaut, and to get my ass to Houston by January fifteenth.”

Step two took place six years later. It was ten minutes before a Monday morning pilots' meeting, two days after the Aviator and the Preacher splashed down from the first lunar landing on 501.

Chuck Behrens motioned Joe into his office. “Jeb's going to announce me as backup commander for the third landing.”

“Congratulations.” Joe could not help thinking that every time another astronaut succeeded, he died a little.

“Wanna go with me?”

“As lunar module pi lot?”

“What else?”

“Okay.”

Chuck raised an eyebrow. “You're a low-key son of a bitch, Joe. When I got my Gemini assignment I could have reached orbit without the rocket.”

“I've been waiting six years. My feeling is, ‘about fucking time.'”

Step three was the least surprising. Joe and Chuck had spent a year backing up the Shark and the Mystic. Joe and Chuck were watching their splashdown (a bit tricky, since one of three parachutes collapsed) in mission control when Jeb Pruett turned to them and said, “You've got 506.”

That
was when Joe could have reached orbit—or the Moon itself—without a rocket.

But the key decision had been made earlier, when the Alpha invited him onto his crew. “One thing before we
lock this in, old buddy. From this day on, you take orders from me.”

“Why wouldn't I take your orders?”

Chuck laughed so hard his face flushed. “Joe, Joe, Joe…the whole reason you're the right-fielder in this team is that you are too goddamn independent! And everybody knows it. Not insubordinate. You just obviously know more than the rest of us, and make sure whoever you're working for gets the message, too.

“I can't have that. I will acknowledge right here and now that, based on I.Q. and all that good stuff, you should be
my
commander. Hell, you know more about the lunar module than anyone, including me. You've got a sci-fi kind of mind, which doesn't hurt, either. But from this point on, what I need from you is the certainty of blind obedience. If I tell you we're going direct from AUTO, you do it. If I tell you to strip down and take a shit on the White House lawn, you do it. If I'm wrong, and it is likely I will be wrong in some matters, it's my problem.

“And if I get us killed, then either I wasn't the right guy to be commander, or the universe was against us. Either way, I want my last thought to be the knowledge that it was my doing.

“I need you to be a tool. And never give me the idea you're thinking ahead of me, that you're dying to give me a brilliant out-of-your-ass suggestion.”

It took Joe Liquori all of two seconds to make up his mind, to change his whole personality and his destiny. “Okay.”

In theory, the choice of landing site for the sixth mission had been made years back. From the relatively benign Sea
of Tranquility and Ocean of Storms to more challenging highlands, like Fra Mauro and Hadley, the sites had been clicked off by the first missions. It looked as though Chuck and Joe were headed for Cayley Plains, until a program planning meeting attended by the center director, the program manager from HQ, science chief, twenty head sheds and horse-holders.

And, uninvited, Chuck and Joe. They had been up in T-38s that morning, and Chuck had insisted they stay in their sweaty flight suits. And arrive ten minutes late.

Dr. Rowe, the center director, noted their presence. “You guys take a wrong turn on the way to the simulator?”

“Depends on what we hear here,” Chuck said, grabbing a pair of seats as close to the front as he could.

Rowe, whose fatherly demeanor hid a precise engineering mind, glanced at General Shields, the nothing-like-fatherly Apollo program manager. Who simply said, “Let's have it, Chuck.”

Smiling, Chuck walked toward the map of the Moon and tapped his finger on Tranquility, Storms, Fra Mauro. “We've been
here, here,
and
here
. A year from now, we'll have been here, too.”

Then he removed the map from its easel and turned it over. There was nothing on the back. “That's funny, I'd always been taught that even though we couldn't see it, the Moon really had a Far Side.” Joe, the sci-fi reader, had told Chuck about an Asimov story that claimed precisely that.

The meeting room was silent, except for the thump of General Shields' pencil. “Your point, Colonel?”

“By the time Apollo is done, we'll have spent twenty billion dollars and visited a fraction of half a world. The front half. The easy half. Is that what the president said? ‘We do these things because they are easy'?”

The room erupted with protests, some emotional, some technical—“How do we relay comm from the back side?”—and even answers to the objections—“The Air Force has a bunch of small comsats sitting on the shelf in LA. We could put them in the service module on the next three landing missions—”

Chuck knew he'd over-reached, but that was his style: ask for the Moon and take what you can get.

Nothing changed—that day.

Seven weeks later, NASA announced that the sixth and last lunar landing would attempt to reach Aitken Basin on the far side.

It was only in the sleepless second night that they found the privacy to speak about their discovery. “Funny, isn't it?” Chuck said. “Three human beings within a quarter of a million miles—one of them in another spacecraft—and we're worried about being overheard.”

“Yeah. Funny.”

Chuck tapped his bare foot on the sample case. “What do you think it is?”

“Pink coral.”

“Even something as basic as coral would be significant, wouldn't it? It's not, though. Not with those edges. Somebody
made
that.”

“Maybe it
was
somebody,” Joe said. “Maybe that was the body of a crystal alien.”

“You and that sci-fi mind of yours.” Chuck had closed his eyes. “All I know is, word gets out about this, lots of people are going to be pissing their pants.”

Joe didn't bother to tell Chuck that on seeing the Aitken Coral he had, indeed, filled his diaper.

The third EVA was as routine as moon walks ever went. A few hours later, buttoned up in Pathfinder, they fired the ascent stage to begin the journey home.

Once they'd docked to Conestoga and moved their samples and gear aboard, Joe swam into the LM for a last look before jettison.

The entire weight of the mission, the secret, the training, his whole life landed on him. He started weeping.

“Joe, you all right down there?” Don Berringer, their
command module pilot, had seen him through the tunnel…fetal, floating, shuddering with sobs.

“Shut up, Don.” Chuck had seen it, too…and gently pushed the hatch closed.

Five minutes later Joe had calmed himself. He completed the close-out checklist, stashed the fecal waste bags Berringer had accumulated during his three days of orbital privacy, allowed himself one last look out Pathfinder's triangular window at the desperately desolate moonscape sliding past.

Chuck floated into the module, closing the hatch behind him. “Ready to rock and roll?”

“Yeah.” He noted a sample bag in Chuck's hand. “What's that?”

“What do you think?”

“What's it doing here?”

“I've half a mind to leave it. Send it around the Sun for the next ten thousand years.” When separated from Conestoga, Pathfinder would be launched into a heliocentric orbit.

Joe was still in the absolute-obedience mode. “Copy that.”

Chuck laughed again. “I can't. But I don't want to broadcast the news, either. Not yet. Like they taught us in all those sims, when in doubt, do nothing. And let me tell you, my friend, I'm in serious doubt about what to do.”

“Then you better move it to the PPK.” PPKs were the astronauts' personal preference kits, bags of family memorabilia, postal covers, and commemorative coins.

Chuck winked and made a clicking sound, a sign of the highest approval.

That was the extent of the discussion.

The PPKs turned out to be a bit of a problem. The post-flight check out included a weigh-in, which showed what NASA would call a “significant discrepancy,” which Chuck managed to alleviate by convincing those doing the weighing
that he had stuck his EVA gloves in there. “Rather than throw them overboard, you follow?”

Then he had turned around and thrown a regular fit in Jeb's office. Somehow, Chuck and Joe managed to walk out of the center with both PPKs—unopened.

There was one question in the debrief. The Utah geologist edged up to the most recent moonwalkers at the coffee break to say, “Ah, say, did you guys ever get a look inside those hills in GSL?”

“God, Nick, I'm so sorry. During that first dead zone we got within maybe ten feet of the son of a bitch. We were looking through the opening, weren't we, Joe?”

“Right through it, Chuck.”

“Right at the mouth. But the soil looked a little loose and the walls a little tight and jagged, if you catch my drift.” And here Chuck lowered his voice and leaned in to the geologist. “I was afraid of falling on my dang face and, you know, ripping my suit. I didn't want to screw up like that with fifty million people watching.”

No ground-based science nerd was going to second-guess an astronaut in a situation like that—at least, not openly.