Back to the Moon (2 page)

“I've got to see how big it is!” Schmitt said eagerly.

“I don't know, Jack,” Cernan said worriedly.

Schmitt didn't reply, bounded back to the Rover to the storage box, and got out a rake. “Gene, if there ever was something that looked like fumarole alteration, this is it!” he exclaimed. He trudged back to the splotch. “Orange soil is consistent with oxidized iron. This indicates volcanic activity, but everything else about Shorty points to an impact crater. We haven't solved a mystery at all. We've just created one! We've got to get some samples back.”

Cernan checked all his gauges and didn't like what he saw. He waited a minute, then another, while Schmitt filled some sample bags. He looked at his gauges again. If the Rover conked out, they were dead men. “Let's go, Jack,” he urged. “You got enough, right?”

“Still need a core sample.” Schmitt puffed and picked up the drive tube he had brought from the box.

Cernan watched Schmitt bobble the tube. He knew his partner was bone tired. Cernan was also feeling the fatigue of the long day. They had covered nearly two and a half miles of terrain, had made three stops, and gathered more than a hundred pounds of samples. Working on the moon in the pressurized suits wasn't easy. Cernan's hands ached and his forearms felt as if somebody had tightened steel bands around them. “I forgot the hammer,” he heard Schmitt say apologetically.

Cernan ignored another call from Houston. “I'll get the hammer, Jack,” he said. “Just stay where you are. Rest a little.” Cernan moon-hopped to the Rover and opened the box, revealing a jumble of tools all coated in sticky lunar dust. He was glad he wouldn't have to clean them. Everything in the toolbox was scheduled to be left behind on the moon. As he searched, Houston made another call, this one a command to get in the Rover NOW and head back to the lunar module named
Challenger,
their home on the moon and their ride up to Ron Evans waiting for them in the
Apollo
Command Module. Cernan, a Navy commander, had named the Lem after the old wooden sailing ship
Challenger
that had, in another age, explored uncharted seas for the purposes of science. Those old sailors had more time than he did. With both time and air running out, Cernan dug through the tools, still not finding the hammer. He grabbed the next best thing, a cylindrical canister capped on both ends. He had no idea what it was or why it was in the toolbox but he didn't care. He was going to give it a new purpose.

The soil was hard and Cernan had to use the canister to pound the drive tube with both hands. At two feet it refused to go any deeper. He gave it another tap, dropped the canister, and grabbed the sample tube with both hands and rocked it back and forth until it loosened enough to be pulled out. “Even the tube is orange!” Schmitt cried gleefully, reaching for it.

Cernan looked once more at the gauges on the front of his suit. All the needles were pointing south. “Come on!” he said, scuttling back to the Rover. He unlatched the sample box and stowed the precious orange-coated drive tube inside. If the Rover held together, if the oxygen gauges were correct, and if they didn't get lost on the way back, they could make it. There were a lot of
ifs
in that equation, too many for Cernan's comfort. His fingers mentally crossed, he cranked up the juice as Schmitt climbed into his seat. Plumes of lunar dust from the Rover wheels erupted behind them as the last two men on the moon made a desperate run against the clock.

Marshall Space Flight Center, Building 4200, Huntsville, Alabama

Dr. Wernher von Braun was called from a meeting of his designers who were working on the new engines for the proposed space shuttle. He listened carefully to the caller, and went back to his meeting, wrapping it up quickly. He left work early, the first time in decades, and drove his Mercedes up the mountain called Monte Sano, which overlooked Huntsville.

Von Braun, a handsome man with silver-gray hair and a bulldog chin that made him look perpetually optimistic and determined, was actually quite tired. For three decades he had fought bureaucrats, cajoled politicians, and courted the public in his quest to get humankind to the moon. Now, after he had done all that he said he would do, his beloved adopted country was abandoning the triumph of the lunar explorations after a final flight. He had told everyone—the NASA administrator, Senator Vanderheld, who chaired the Science and Space Committee, even the President of the United States—that it was madness to quit, although he had carefully couched his arguments in terms of scientific benefits and simple economics. To help his argument he'd even agreed to transfer to NASA headquarters in Washington, reluctantly leaving Huntsville for the chilly environs of the capital city. But all of his arguments had been turned away, especially after Vanderheld had issued his committee's recommendation to cancel
Apollo.
It was difficult, although von Braun had accepted the challenge, to debate with Vanderheld over the relative merits of spaceflight versus public housing, school lunches, veterans' benefits, and farm subsidies. How was it possible to say that
Apollo
was more important than any of those things? Senator Vanderheld, although polite, was sincerely troubled by von Braun's assertion that
Apollo
was like seed corn for the nation. From it, von Braun argued in his testimony before Vanderheld's committee, many things might be derived, great and noble things, wealth not yet understood, a new world of not only things but possibilities. Vanderheld had sadly refuted point by point everything the great rocket scientist had said. “The business of the federal government is to see to the needs of the people, Doctor,” the senator had politely lectured von Braun. “Tomorrow will take care of itself only if wise choices are made today.”

Von Braun's supervisors at NASA told him he should try to accept it. The director had even come up to him, put his arm over his shoulder, and said, “Be reasonable, Wernher. We've drunk the wine that has been given to us. And now the glass is empty.”

“But there is no reason to break the glass, is there?” von Braun had retorted. The director had shrugged, walked away, muttering. A NASA headquarters directive had ordered von Braun to shut down the
Saturn V
moon-rocket assembly line. Even the tooling that had built it was to be broken apart, sold as scrap.
Apollo
was over. Only the shuttle, now on the drawing boards, was left. By order of NASA headquarters the shuttle was to be designed so that it could only go into low earth orbit. It seemed almost deliberate that the moon had been put out of reach for a very long time.

Von Braun parked in front of a small brick cottage on a bluff that overlooked the city. Ursula Suttner answered the door. Von Braun kissed her cheek. “Are you well, Uschi?” he asked, holding her shoulders and searching her face. Ursula Suttner had come from Germany to marry her husband, Gerhard, von Braun's chief aerodynamic engineer. She was younger than the other wives, most of whom had been with their husbands through the war. Ursula brushed a wisp of blond hair away from her forehead. “I am quite well, Wernher,” she said with a smile. “Please,” she said, indicating the living room, “they are waiting for you.”

Shouts of greeting from the living room brought von Braun inside. There he found Katrina, the Suttners' ten-year-old daughter, lying on a rug watching the television coverage of the
Apollo 17
flight. As her father beamed proudly, and her mother watched adoringly from the living room door, Katrina got up and ran to von Braun, hugging him around the waist. “Have you heard, Katrina?” von Braun asked her gently. “It wasn't exactly what we plotted, I'm afraid.”

“Oh, Uncle, it's even better. I saw what happened. Do you think he will find it? Do you think so, really?”

Von Braun knelt in front of the little girl, gently touching her hair. Katrina Suttner was the kind of child who could light up a room with her bright, optimistic intelligence. Von Braun was certain she was destined for greatness. “Yes, little one. If he is the man you think he will be, I believe he will.” Then he let her lead him to a chair so together they could watch the end of the exploration of the moon.

The next day von Braun was on an airplane, flying back to Washington, while his rocket team gathered at the Suttner house to watch
Apollo 17
's final moments. The crew had made it back from Shorty Crater with their treasure of orange soil and geologists were licking their lips at the opportunity to see what they had actually found. There was a lick of flame at the base of the
Challenger
lunar module and then arcing debris flew away from it as it rose. The video camera attached to the Lunar Rover, abandoned by Cernan and Schmitt, tracked upward until the module and the men in it had disappeared into the black sky. Then it came slowly back to the abandoned lander and stared at the
Challenger
's truncated base.

Katrina looked around at the old Germans surrounding her. To her amazement many of them had tears streaming down their faces. “Do not be sad, Uncles,” she told them. “We will go back. I promise you we will.”

“If Katrina says it,” her father said, wiping away his own tears, “then it must be so.”

All the old men nodded solemnly.
Ja,
it must be so.

At the doorway Ursula Suttner put her hands to her face and turned away. A terrible premonition had reached her, come down as if from heaven, and turned her soul to ice.

30 YEARS LATER

DECIMATION

This I have known always: love is no more

Than the wide blossom which the wind assails,

Than the great tide that treads the shifting shore,

Strewing fresh wreckage gathered in the gales.

Pity me that the heart is slow to learn

What the swift mind beholds at every turn.

—Edna St. Vincent Millay
, ”Pity Me Not”

LAUNCH MINUS 5 MONTHS, 13 DAYS, 14 HOURS, AND COUNTING...

PROMETHEUS

MEC Clean Room, Hangar 1-D, Cedar Key, Florida

“NASA is and always has been a subversive organization. Anything else you hear is a public relations lie,” Jack Medaris said.

Dr. Isaac Perlman looked at the ceiling of the big hangar and wagged his head from side to side, an indication of his doubt at his companion's comment. “Subversive? Why, Jack, there's never been a more conservative bureaucracy on this planet. It takes polls to see what it should do next. It lets politicians decide technical matters. You forget I went there first for my moon dirt. NASA just laughed at me. That's why I hired you!”

Medaris and Perlman, dressed in clean-room regalia—white one-piece coveralls, puffy plastic hats, and latex gloves—were watching a dozen other similarly clothed men and women ministering to what looked to be a giant robot, two gangly arms akimbo, mounted on a go-cart. The doleful strains of Barber's
Adagio for Strings
accompanied the technicians as they moved slowly and reverently around the machine's oddly shaped pyramid of spheres, rods, and cables. Antennae protruded from each level of the machine. Its “arms” were actually two extendable and jointed booms. At the end of one of the booms was a digger, a rakelike device. The other arm had a grasping claw.

“I'll grant you NASA as a bureaucracy is timid,” Jack said. “But what I'm talking about is its charter. NASA is supposed to develop the means to allow American citizens to leave the planet.
Leave,
Doc! What could be more seditious than that? If NASA ever does what it's supposed to do, Americans are going to be flying all over the solar system. Where there's Americans, there's trouble. It's in our nature to cause trouble, challenge authority, kick up our heels, and be ornery. You think it's going to be any different in space? Just you wait. It'll be a sight to behold!”

Perlman kept shaking his head. “No, no, no, Jack.” He laughed. “Nothing of the kind will ever be done. You're talking about Americans the way they used to be. We're too fat and happy now. No American is going to get in a rocket ship and take off into the wild blue yonder. Why, they'd miss
Monday Night Football!”

Jack grinned. He enjoyed debating with Perlman. None of it was serious, just lighthearted philosophizing to offset the boredom of watching his engineers prepare for the final flight-readiness test of the robotic moon miner
—Prometheus,
as it was called. Jack owned the company that had built it, the Medaris Engineering Company, MEC for short. After the accident that had killed his wife, and the investigation that had resulted in his banishment from NASA, MEC had become the most important thing in Jack Medaris's life. An invention of his called the sling pump, used in almost every liquid rocket tankage system in the world, had made Jack wealthy and MEC a very prosperous company. His people were paid accordingly. WE HAPPY FEW, read a banner over the entrance to the clean room. It reflected the fierce camaraderie of the company and the loyalty of its people to its founder.

As the test neared its critical phase, Perlman became visibly nervous, not surprising since he had paid Jack and MEC over thirty-one million dollars to build
Prometheus.
“Is it looking good?” Perlman worried.

“Very good, Doc,” Jack said, concentrating on the sensor data scrolling down a computer screen.

“It's got to work,” Perlman breathed, his fingers covering his lips as if he was afraid to let his voice fall on the precious spacecraft.

“Everything is fine,” Jack said distractedly. And it was too. Jack and MEC's thirty engineers had spent a year carefully constructing
Prometheus,
borrowing liberally from the proven design of the old Soviet Union's
Lunakhod
series of moon-sample return spacecraft.

“I feel like WET's coming at me like an unstoppable locomotive,” Perlman remarked with a groan. Every so often, it seemed, Perlman had to voice a little misery.