Back to the Moon (39 page)

Jack had no choice but to leave Penny to turn off the alarm and the fuel cell. He did it and then considered the situation. If fuel cell number two couldn't be restarted,
Columbia
would have only one fuel cell left. And if that one failed, they were all dead. Reluctantly, he pulled out the troubleshooting checklist, to search for a fix if there was one.

Then Paco came out, meowing like he was hungry. Penny went to check on his food delivery system. She gave Jack a sad smile and a pat on his shoulder as she passed. Their moment was over nearly as soon as it began.

CLEAR LAKE

Clear Lake, a suburb of Houston, Texas

It was one of those Houston days the natives called “close,” moisture clinging to the skin and the sun beating down so hard, it actually seemed to have weight. Geraldine Tate led Shirley Grafton into the backyard where Clear Lake lapped against the shore. Sweat streamed down Shirley's face. She was hot, but she was also nervous. She was taking a lot on herself, even with the vice president's approval. She considered turning around and running for home.

Tate eyed Shirley with amusement. “Honey, you look like you could use something cool. I got some lemonade in the fridge.”

“No, thanks. Got to get moving.” She wiped her forehead with a tissue. Soaked, it fell apart. Shirley stared at it. “I don't think there'd be any Houston if air-conditioning hadn't been invented,” she marveled.

“Aw, we'd manage, one way or the other. Texans don't give up easy.” She pointed to a distant dot on the lake. “That's Sam. If you want him, you'll have to go out and get him.”

Shirley shaded her eyes with her hand. She could barely see the bobbing boat. “How do I do that?”

Tate pointed to a boat tied off on the neighboring dock. “Take that one. The Comptons are out of town. We're watching it for them. They won't mind. Here, take my gardening hat. Keep the sun out of your eyes.”

Shirley, not much of a sailor, edged cautiously out onto the lake and then set off for the distant speck that she hoped was Sam Tate. As she neared, she cut her engine too early but at least she drifted to within hailing distance. “Sam? Sam Tate? Is that you?”

Sam didn't hear her. Lost in his thoughts, he hadn't even bothered to bait his hook. He was just sitting there, remembering the glory days, from
Thor
to
Saturn.
Shoved aside now, probably forever, he couldn't help but think of the tough old guys of
Apollo-Saturn.
He'd heard from some of them over the years, some still nursing the bitterness of working their youth away on a magnificent achievement that had been treated like a dead end by the country, shoved into the history books almost from the moment Neil Armstrong had placed his boot on the regolith of the moon.

Still, he thought, sighing, even though it was true that his newbies were more likely to celebrate a successful mission with sparkling water than cigars (which had been banned, in any case, from Mission Control in 1990), he had gotten to like those kids, like them in his way, that is, which meant snarling and growling at them most of the time while they grinned and ducked their heads over their consoles. But he wondered what the old guys would have done if a pissant like John Lakey had tried to kick them off their consoles. The thought made him smile, despite his doldrums. “God, I miss the old days,” he moaned to himself.

“Sam?”

Sam looked up and was shocked to see a woman wearing what appeared to be his wife's straw gardening hat struggling with a bass boat that looked suspiciously like his neighbor's rig. She had gotten a paddle out and was trying to manhandle the boat closer. “Stay there,” Sam said. “I think I'd better come to you.”

Sam fired up the outboard, eased over, and tied off. He climbed into the bass boat. “Yes, ma'am, what can I do for you? Is that Geraldine's hat?”

The woman doffed the hat. “Geraldine was kind,” she said, and then introduced herself. “Sam, I work for the vice president of the United States. He wants you to reopen Mission Control.”

“Why?”

“Because there's an American spacecraft in orbit around the moon and very soon there's going to be a landing.” She handed him a manila envelope. “I think they're going to need help from Houston. If you'll look at the letter in this envelope, you'll see that the vice president has authorized you to go back into business.”

Sam looked at Shirley, saw that she was serious, and sat down, his long legs astraddle. He opened the envelope, read over the letter Shirley had prepared and the veep had signed. She had also provided a summary of everything she knew that Medaris was doing and why. After he'd finished, he slowly raised his long face, looked off into the distance, back toward Johnson Space Center.
“Gawdalmighty!”
he said. It sounded to Shirley like a cheer.

MET 8 DAYS AND COUNTING . . .

PENNY'S CONFESSION

Columbia

In the cockpit, before the vast moonscape, Jack tried to relax by watching the craters and rilles scroll beneath him. Before long he didn't even notice them. He was thinking of Penny, how it had been so easy to take her into his arms, how good and right it felt. But it couldn't be right. Kate was so close now, after all these years and miles. He forced himself to think of Huntsville. He needed to remember the test stand on that cold night, how it was, what he was thinking, Kate....

Inside the control room the panic had just begun....

The engineer nervously tapped at his keyboard, and then touched the screen, pulling up a schematic of the countdown network. “TCDC's still counting. My override won't work.”

Jack moved urgently to his master console. He initiated his own hold but the power to the pumps kept going. He looked at the numbers counting down. Shaking his head, he reluctantly went to his big gun, the icon marked TEAC. TEAC meant terminal deactivation. Clicking on TEAC was the same as jerking the power plug out of the wall. It was a hard shutdown of the TCDC and all the controller software. Not only would it shut everything down, but reconfiguring would take hours.

It went against his grain, but Jack had no choice. A gremlin was playing games with the TCDC software and would need ferreting out. All the dog engine software had been written quickly, a lot of it patched in from older programs. It had been tested in stages but never all at once. Jack cursed under his breath. He should have had an end-to-end software test run before he'd hooked up the hardware.

He bowed to the inevitable, moved the cursor over the TEAC icon, a clock face. Better fix it, no matter how much it hurt. He'd be talking to some software engineers this night, and not kindly either! The clock icon disappeared when he clicked on it. That wasn't right. Then it winked back on. In the upper right-hand corner of the screen the TCDC showed one minute, zero seconds until activation. It kept counting down. Frantically, Jack went active on his headset, lighting up every push. “Clear the test stand—now!” he ordered. “This is Jack. All personnel, clear the test stand now!”

“Jack,” Paul Dalton, his assistant, said over his push, “what's wrong?”

“Kate doesn't have a headset,” Jack said in sudden realization. “The TCDC jumped ahead, Paul, and I can't kill it. We've got less than a minute. Get everybody off the stand.
Now!”

Other engineers were picking up on what he'd seen. Their fingers were punching up the test-stand loops, ordering everybody who could hear them to get away.

Jack threw down his headset and headed out the door, yelling at Paul to keep trying the TEAC. The test stand stood like a giant praying mantis above him as he came through the blast door. It rattled metallically as team members hurried down its steel steps. On the first level he stopped one of them. “Have you seen Kate?” The woman shook her head. Jack looked up into the shadowy maze of tubing and support beams and then saw a row of fire-retardant suits. He grabbed a jacket and gloves, pulling them on while he charged up the steps, two at a time.

He was almost knocked off his feet by a running technician. The man grabbed him. “Jack! We've been ordered off the stand!”

He shrugged him off. “Keep going! Go!” he yelled, and then flew up the steps, heading for level six, where the exhaust nozzle of the dog engine hung like a church bell, an impossibly complex maze of tubing and ducting running to it, preparing to nurture it into white-hot fury.

Then he saw Kate! She was at the bell, a clipboard in her gloved hands, scrutinizing the fine distribution pump. She was wearing sound-suppression earmuffs, to protect her ears from the high-pitched whine of the pumps. The engineer with her, also wearing the muffs, turned toward him, perhaps hearing the vibration of the steel platform as Jack raced toward them. He looked with openmouthed curiosity as Jack yelled and waved for them to get away. Jack heard the groan of the pumps coming up to speed, smelled the strangely sweet fumes of the oxidizer flushing through the pipes. He screamed another warning. Kate turned, saw him.

The engineer accompanying Kate was running. Jack passed him, reached for Kate when the nozzle bell suddenly became rigid with pressure, a shower of yellow sparks turning into a blue-white gush of fire. A gigantic shock-wave blew Kate toward him. For a moment he had hope she was going to escape. He reached for her as she opened her arms for him to embrace her.

And then, before his horrified eyes, a luminescent halo enveloped her, defining her shape, and then began to devour her. Her hand stretched out to him. An insane thought reached him: If he could just reach her, he could pull her out of the halo, protect her with his body.

Then he had her! Tendrils of fire ran over his gloves, up the arms of his coat, to his unprotected neck and face. He felt his flesh burning, the skin on his neck crackling like bacon. He ignored the pain, bringing her into his protective embrace. He reached for her waist, to pull her all the way to him. She felt sticky, soft, like hot dough. And then she fell backward. She was a shadow, black as the farthest reaches of space.

The great nozzle bell fell silent, as if its fury had been sucked up inside it. And then the luminance around Kate faded, leaving behind a dark shape that broke into two pieces and fell away. Jack's glove was covered with a charred, dripping material. Something black and horrible seemed to writhe beneath him. When he started to scream, he thought he'd never stop....

Jack started awake. He had fallen asleep but his mind had kept going, reliving the old nightmare. Virgil was patting his face. “Jack, time to get with it, son.”

It took Jack a moment to remember where he was. Then all the rest came cascading back. He heard a noise, looked around, saw Penny floating past. If he expected at least a warm smile from her, he was disappointed. He looked after her, confused.

“I safed number two fuel cell,” Virgil said, coming up beside him. “I'll troubleshoot while you eat breakfast. Number one is working just fine. If we can't get number two up, we'd better head for home, at least by all the rules.”

“I guess we're not much for rules on this mission,” Jack said, still watching Penny. She was gazing at the moon, her back turned.

“Sorry about yesterday, partner. I guess it got to me,” Virgil said.

He looked at the big man's wide, expressive face. “You just had to let off some steam, Virg. No problem.”

Virgil nodded toward Penny. “I told her everything, Jack. About Kate and what's down there. I'm sorry. I got tired of lying to her.”

Now Jack understood. “That's okay, too, Virg. I don't blame you.”

Virgil got busy elsewhere. Penny pulled herself away from the view ports and came determinedly hand over hand across the ceiling. She settled down in the pilot's seat beside Jack. She stared straight ahead. “I want you to know I understand there's no place for me in your heart, Jack—”

“Penny—”

“No. Let me have my say,” she said angrily, her eyes wetting. “You're not going to find Kate down there. You already have her”—she turned to him, reached across the console, and touched his chest—”right there in your heart.”

He opened his mouth but no words came out.

“It must be wonderful to have someone love you so much that they would risk everything in life for you even after you're dead. I've never known a love like that. I'm sure I never will.”

“Penny, will you just listen to me?”

“I am so envious of her. It's insane but I am.”

He took her hand. “Don't you understand that everything's different now”—the words just leapt from his mouth, surprising him—”that I love you?”

She looked at him long and searchingly, then pulled her hand away. “Well, I don't love you.”

Jack's heart felt as if it were being squeezed.

“I can't fault you, Jack,” Penny said sadly. “I have my own reason for being here too.” She peered ahead, watched the moon unscrolling below, craters piled on craters, sinuous rilles, soft-contoured mountains. “This is what I've always wanted, I think. What could be better than running all the way to the moon?”

She turned to face him. “I'm going to tell you something about myself. It's important to me that you know.” She smiled ruefully. “There was this boy in high school. He... I got pregnant. My grandmother insisted I have an abortion, said there were enough half-breeds. They told me at the free clinic it would be so easy. I've hated myself for it ever since.” She bit at her lower lip, the tears floating from her eyes. “Everybody said I was doing the right thing, that a baby would ruin my life, keep me from getting an education. I'm sure it was a little boy, Jack. I just can't get him out of my mind. I keep trying but I just can't. All my adventures have been just me running away from him.” She looked at her lap. “You can't love me, Jack. Because I don't know how to love you back. I have to keep running.”

Jack touched her shoulder, tried to find the words. He couldn't. “I'm sorry” was the best he could do.