Back to the Moon (40 page)

She raised her head, looked him in the eye. “Listen, Jack. Don't go down there, okay? Let's just go home.”

“No, we have to finish this.”

She squinted at him, then, in a spasm of despair, reached out and slapped him hard across his face. “
You
finish it,” she hissed while he held his cheek and stared at her. “You and your damn Kate!”

BACK ON-LINE

JSC

At the entrance to Johnson Space Center Sam confronted a guard wearing the PSS patch. Shirley scrunched down in the passenger seat of his pickup, trying to get as small as possible. Behind Sam's truck was a traffic jam. Two more PSS guards came out of the guard shack, holding up their hands. “The base is closed!” they yelled. Shirley saw another PSS guard settle in behind a small sandbag barricade just behind the shack. He had a rifle. The line of pickups, the universal transportation choice of Houston mission controllers, idled furiously. “I have a right to be here,” he yelled at the guards. “You don't. Who the hell hired you, anyway?”

“I'm warning you, mister,” the guard who had stopped him said, and then pulled a pistol from the holster strapped to his waist. Then the guard with the rifle cut loose with a round, hitting Sam's windshield. Shirley screamed and scrambled to the floor, her hands over her head. The doors of the pickups behind suddenly were thrown open, Tate's Turds all armed with pistols and rifles leveled at the guards. “Fire!” somebody yelled, and the PSS guards ducked for cover while a rain of lead shredded the shack and the barricade. Sam helped Shirley back into her seat. “Guess this outfit don't know we got a law here in Texas, says we can carry concealed weapons in our vehicles.” The PSS guards had run for their lives.

Sam raised his hand, waved the convoy on.

“You're not authorized to enter,” the PSS guard at Shuttle Mission Control growled. Sam walked past him. The guard went for his pistol and then stopped when the dozen mission controllers came trundling in behind their leader. They were all carrying guns. The guard meekly put his pistol back into its holster and found an exit door.

Sam burst into the empty SMC. “Baby, I'm back!”

Tate's Turds followed, went to their consoles, fired them up, tucking their guns away. Sam stood proudly above them, vulturing grimly until he could no longer restrain himself. To the astonishment of his people he suddenly did a little jig and clapped his hands. “C'mon, folks! Let's go back to the moon!”

BATTLE IN SPACE (4)

Columbia

In the glare of the cargo bay spotlights Jack went hand over hand down the guide wire of
Columbia
's starboard sill. Below, in shadow, was the far side of the moon. In preparation for the descent he had lowered the shuttle's orbit to nine miles mean altitude and then rolled her over, bay down, tail forward. Getting that close to the surface made the timeline very tight but also allowed a quicker descent. Little Dog didn't have the fuel reserves to allow a leisurely landing.

Jack could still feel the sting of Penny's slap. He told himself to ignore it, put it aside, that it didn't matter, never had. There never had been a chance for them. He had momentarily been fooled that she could be a part of his life, but the truth was Jack knew that he had no life; only this mission to the moon. He had to keep his focus. This was all that mattered. It was all that had ever mattered since the day he had caused Kate and their child to die. Jack went grimly ahead, one hand over the other. There was nothing aboard
Columbia
for him, nothing back on earth. Everything that meant anything was below, on the moon. He had to concentrate on only that.

He went past the ATESS tether boom, back in its locked position. Virgil had gone out, climbed the boom, and disentangled the BEM to let it go. Starbuck had signed off, anxious not to interfere with communications, critical in the next hour of operations. He had boosted the BEM's orbit and reported he was following, keeping an eye on
Columbia
's wake. It was clean. Jack heard him report as he did on the hour. “BEM on patrol,
Columbia.
Everything's clear.”

Jack inspected the Elsie dome, especially the ragged places left by the first BEM attack. The damage wasn't critical. There were a dozen layers of material and only the first few seemed to have been breached. He moved down and inspected Little Dog. The compact rocket engine looked solid and powerful. It had better be, he thought.

Jack remembered the debate that had raged on Cedar Key as to the design of the landing system. One faction had demanded that there be two dog engines on the landing craft performing the same role as the two engines that had been aboard the
Apollo
Lem. The argument had to do with weight versus redundancy. Two engines would give Jack a chance to abort. One engine meant less weight. Jack had settled the argument. Only one engine would be used, and to lighten the load further, there would be no heavy landing gear. Instead, three inflatable spheres attached to the Elsie/Dog interface collar would be used. The spheres were made of the same tough material as the Elsie. There was also an extra ablative covering capable of withstanding the Little Dog's fiery exhaust plume.

Jack inspected the landing spheres. Made out of the same material used by the Mars
Pathfinder
mission to land its payload, the spheres were designed to take the impact of the Elsie landing on the moon. A collapsible steel rod protruded from the collar to a tip ten feet beneath the spheres. When the rod touched the lunar surface, Little Dog would shut down automatically. It was a piece of KISS hardware that Jack always strived toward
—Keep It Simple, Stupid.

A nylon Jacob's ladder was rolled up at the hatch. Jack had never tested it but wasn't too concerned. He wouldn't be as far off the ground as the
Apollo
astronauts had been. If necessary Jack planned to simply sit down on the landing spheres and slide off. To get back on he would do what was needed, either taking advantage of the low gravity to jump back to the hatch, or, using the tethers around the collar, pull himself back up. He'd figure it out when he got there.

Jack climbed inside and inspected Virgil's setup. Sunlight streamed through the double-pane portholes.
Columbia
was in the light zone, coming around over the
Apollo 17
track. A laptop counted down. It was time for Jack to take his position in the footloops. He pushed the comm button. “Ready when you are, Virg.”

Virgil was at the controls of the RMS. “Roger that, Jack.”

Jack steadied himself as Virgil picked up the Elsie, rotated the arm over the bay. He watched the sill of the bay slip past and then he was looking at the moon below.

“Ready for release, Jack?”

It had been a long time since Jack had prayed. He did so now, a long stream of incomplete thoughts that included a jumble of hopes, dreams, requests.... ”Kate...” he whispered.

“Say again, Jack?” Virgil called.

Jack gripped the Elsie's hand controller.
Time to get this done.
“I'm ready for release, Virg,” he said.

Farside Control

Starbuck kept his eye on the virtual video screen. His BEM was still trailing
Columbia.
A glint of sun caught the shuttle just before it went into shadow. The BEM followed dutifully behind. All seemed serene.

“Starbuck,” BEM Lead called. “Got something curious going on here. Memory's being used in prodigious chunks by the HOE team.”

“How could that be?” Starbuck had told the HOE team to go home, the game over.

“Somebody is running the HOE full-up. They must have solved their circuit problem. But I can't figure out how they're getting in on our mainframe.”

Starbuck knew. They were doing it the same way he would have done it. They were hacking him, breaking in and using his mainframe from a remote terminal. An easy job: they knew all the passwords. He thought of Carl Puckett. Puckett had gotten to the HOE team, bought their expertise. They were somewhere out there, hacking in on him. They had finally fixed HOE. It was a dangerous weapon that could tear
Columbia
to pieces.

Starbuck considered the situation. He could break off the modems but he was using them for at least one critical comm channel. He could simply shut down the computer. That would do it.
Or would it?
Starbuck would be off-line but the HOE team might have been copying the software to their own machines and could keep going. There was only one thing for him to do: go surfing.

The Elsie

Jack punched in the go-ahead and the Elsie's verniers puffed briefly, rotating him into a head-down position. Little Dog fired for thirty seconds and then the Elsie's laptop commanded verniers to pitch them back upright. Jack saw all the landmarks he'd memorized: the Lincoln Scarp came into view first, a long sinuous valley that snaked down to the Taurus-Littrow range, then the North Massif of the Sculptured Hills. It was an awesome sight, glorious. Jack's heart raced. He was going to land on the moon. The Elsie gave him a tone, offering manual control. He took it.

Farside Control

Starbuck was surfing the code. He called up the HOE program and was not surprised to find himself locked out. He tried some obvious passwords, failed, and then dropped down into the initiation phase of the disk operating system. He'd written it himself and had left a back door so wide, a tractor trailer could drive through it. He called up the DOS and simply wiped out every password there and put in new ones. Maybe he couldn't knock the HOE team off but if they dropped out for a nanosecond they'd have the devil to pay to get back in. He kept surfing, taking a curl through the disk directory, deleting anything that looked like HOE memory. He got a lot of it, but it was minor stuff and he knew it. The main HOE system was in use and the central processor wasn't going to let him delete, change, or move any part of it until it stopped being used. By then, Starbuck figured, it wouldn't matter.

He brought HOE up on the virtual panel. It was ahead of the BEM, and much lower. It was tracking something. It wasn't the shuttle.

“Dammit,” Starbuck swore. “They're going after the lander!”

“Give me a position!” BEM Lead called.

“No,” Starbuck said. “HOE has a built-in signal generator. Feed in that frequency to the BEM as priority tracking and let it go. It's all we can do. Things are happening too fast for us now.”

BEM Leader signaled the BEM its new instructions.

letmego letmego letmego letmego letmego letmego letmego letmego letmego letmego letmego letmego

“You got it, Lover!' BEM Lead cried, sending the release command.

The Elsie

Jack wiggled the hand controller. He had come in a bit too far north and needed manual control to find the landing site. Elsie stopped and hovered, waiting for his command. Jack pushed the stick forward. Little Dog swiveled on its gimbals and the Elsie moved laterally across the North Massif. The large crater named Shakespeare scrolled past and then a flat plain, covered with craters. The photographs Jack had studied of the landing site had shown only a few craters of only medium size but he saw hundreds, and it was difficult to judge how big they were. He checked the Little Dog. There was plenty of propellant left.

A large crater passed below with a smaller one bisecting it. He knew it because he had named it himself during his study of the
Apollo 17
photographs. “I've got Onizuka,” he announced, the first words he had spoken since he started his descent. Ellison Onizuka had been one of Jack's friends at NASA. El had died aboard
Challenger.

The reply from Virgil was filled with crackles and pops.
Columbia
was about to go over the lunar horizon. “We copy, Jack.”

Jack switched back to automatic pilot to allow the Elsie to stabilize herself while he made a quick survey. He was in the triangle of Camelot, Steno, and Sherlock craters. A little nudge north and he should be at Shorty. He used the hand controller to pitch the Elsie down so he could look things over. The site below was as smooth as a baby's butt. He took a deep breath and gave the Elsie the go-ahead to land. He felt like cheering.

Space

BEM XJ-251, released from Farside Control, made a quick scan and picked up HOE's scent, then cut in its thrusters, dropping low and accelerating. It came out of the shadow of the moon in a rage.

The HOE, also on automatic, took no note of the BEM. It worked to get an exact fix on the lander. At a distance of five kilometers its nose cone blew off and a fifteen-foot web of metal strips spun up to buzz-saw velocity.

XJ-251 sensed that its propellant would be depleted in twelve seconds. It accounted for the lunar gravity, its own acceleration, and the velocity of its target, predicting a new intersection. It screamed ahead. With one second of propellant remaining it cut itself off to ensure a smooth transition to unpowered flight. Silently, the BEM coasted, its silvery eyes staring seriously ahead.

HOE closed in on Elsie, aiming for the center of its radar return, but jumping to its heat sensors every nanosecond in case the radar failed. When it was still one hundred meters away from the lander, the BEM struck it. HOE, made of composite material, broke up on impact. Pieces of it and the BEM flew in an embrace, crashing into the lunar surface.

The HOE web, broken loose from the main body, kept spinning chaotically, answering only the call of the tumbling gyroscope that it had become. Along the way it caught the base of the Elsie. It did not puncture the spheres—they were too tough for that. It tore two of them away from the collar, knocking Elsie awry, sending her wandering.

The Elsie

Jack felt a thump, checked the laptop, but no caution and warning messages were showing. He pushed his feet into the footloops and clutched the hand tethers. Little Dog kept firing but Elsie seemed to be drifting. The guidance package seemed confused. Little Dog's gimbals shuddered as if trying to throw off its worry and then Jack saw the light that indicated the contact sensor rod had struck the regolith. Little Dog shut down and Elsie fell to the moon.