Back to the Moon (43 page)

“You're a genius, Charlie,” Perlman said.

“So are you, Doc,” Charlie replied.

Perlman shrugged. He guessed he was. He had, after all, solved the most difficult energy problem known to mankind. “So here we are,” he said, smiling, “just two geniuses standing a hundred feet beneath the Montana prairie waiting for a man on the moon to come to our rescue.”

“That pretty much sums it up, Doc,” Charlie said. “And you know what? If he's still alive after all these days, I think he'll make it the rest of the way.”

If he was still alive. Now, there was the question. Perlman looked up toward the gurgling lake forming above him. That was indeed the question. Otherwise, everything else was academic.

THE ROVER

Taurus-Littro

After attaching the new batteries, Jack used a brush from the toolkit to sweep all the dust he could from the electric motors attached to each of the Rover's wheels. He also rocked the Rover back and forth to break loose any corrosion that might have formed in the wheels or axles. There wasn't much else he could think of to do—except try the power switch.

He sat down in the port seat and toggled the switch. The gauges registered no change. He tapped them and the needles responded, swinging up into the green. Scarcely believing it, he eased the hand controller forward and the wire wheels dug in, the Rover lurching forward. He kept his eye on the gauges but all stayed in normal range. The Rover had been alternately baked and frozen for decades and all Jack had done was change out the batteries and kick the tires and it was ready to go. Jack had to laugh. Who said the USA couldn't build a quality vehicle?

Cernan had busted the aft starboard fender and fixed it with a map and duct tape. Then he'd taken the fender as a souvenir with him when he left. Jack fashioned another fender out of a folded map he found beside the Rover, used lots of duct tape, and hoped his fix would work. The Rover kept trundling forward and no spray of dust was hitting Jack in the back. His map fender seemed to be holding. He kept the controller eased back, not wanting to put any more stress on old fuses than was needed. He estimated it would take him six hours to travel down the path of
Apollo 17
's second EVA, to Shorty.

Jack had brought along water and food. A drink port in his helmet allowed him to suck liquids, his food in the form of soups laced with vitamins. His most immediate problem was the need for sleep. Already groggy with fatigue, he knew he would have to rest soon or risk making possibly deadly mistakes.

Cernan and Schmitt had made stops along their journey to the North Massif, parking and hiking to interesting geological features. At the base of the mountain Jack found a parking spot and boot prints that led off to a huge boulder. It was then Jack realized his mistake. He had followed the track of EVA-3 to what was designated Station 6 on the maps. At the end of the tracks were two huge craggy boulders butted up against one another. Schmitt and Cernan had spent a lot of time at the site. Jack realized he hadn't made a disastrous miscalculation. He had enough air to backtrack to Shorty. The only problem was he doubted if he could stay awake long enough to do it.

He circled the boulders, noting where the astronauts had sampled, the scars on the rocks as fresh as if they had just been made. He spotted a scooplike device, one of the tools Cernan and Schmitt had used to pick up small rocks. The prongs were bent, probably the reason why it had been discarded. He walked around into the shadow of the biggest boulder and took in the view, the mounds of the Sculptured Hills off to his left, and the hulking South Massif across the cratered plain. The
Challenger
Lem and his Elsie were only about two miles away and in plain sight.

Jack chose the regolith in the shadow of the big boulder for his bed, calling and telling whoever was listening his plan.

Columbia
was behind the moon. Houston answered. “We copy, Jack,” Sam told him. “You want us to wake you?”

“Negative.”

“Roger that. By the way, we're still working the rescue plan. Want to hear what we're thinking about?”

Jack smiled grimly, certain that whatever Tate was coming up with was about as useful as the rescue plan he had imagined for the
Titanic.
This was a done deal. “Thanks, Sam,” he said tiredly, “but I'll pass. I want to keep my mind on things here.”

“If you stayed in one place, it would make it easier for us,” Sam replied gently.

Penny broke in,
Columbia
apparently just coming around the rim. “Jack, there really are some things happening. We've been loading software for the last hour—”

Jack interrupted her. “You still here? Virgil, I thought I asked you to take off.”

“Virgil's busy working to save your butt, Medaris!” Penny came back. “Be advised we're not leaving the moon without you!”

Jack sighed, wearily shook his head. “Whatever you say, Penny. Let me get some sleep now, okay?”

“Oh, God, Jack,” she said, despairingly.

“Let me sleep, okay?”

She relented. “Okay, Jack.”

Jack found it difficult to sit in the EMU suit, so he simply sprawled on his back in the shadow of the boulder. He looked up at a black sky strewn with stars and planets.
What a fantastic place for an observatory the moon would be!
The Hubble Space Telescope whizzed around the earth at five miles a second trying to focus on constantly moving targets while being knocked around by its own solar panels swiveling desperately to aim at the sun. Why hadn't NASA simply lofted a telescope to the moon? It was almost as if the agency had been afraid to go back to the site of its greatest triumph.

Jack wiped NASA politics from his mind, tried to get comfortable. He was so tired, he thought he would drop off immediately, but instead his mind kept turning. The suit's aluminum neckring hurt, and anyway, he had always disliked the moments just before sleep. It seemed a form of giving up and he hated to give up on anything. For some reason he thought of the Sinai Desert, where once he and Kate had dived the crystal waters and rainbow reefs of the Red Sea, and explored the dry wadis and mountains of the surrounding desert. Now that he thought about it, those old brown hills and dry creek beds had looked a hell of a lot like the moon.

Go to sleep, Jack!
he ordered himself.

His mind puttered on, then finally gave in to his fatigue. He had a final, fleeting thought:
Don't call me. Old not-quite-dead Jack will call you.

MET 9 DAYS AND COUNTING . . .

HIGH EAGLE'S DECISION (3)

Taurus-Littrow

Jack lay on the moon and overhead there was nothing but stars....

Kate was with him on a night dive, their two flashlights cutting the darkness, sweeping across the great reefs that lined the deep chasm of the Red Sea between the Sinai and Saudi Arabia. Creatures wandered in and out of the lights—great, sleek sharks, pulsating sea hares and nudibranchs, schools of darting squids, brooding lionfish. Phosphorescent fishes near the surface flitted about like underwater fireflies. Jack ascended with her. When they broke the surface, Kate's delighted laughter made him laugh too. “I love you, Jack,” she called. “Thank you for bringing me here.”

Her voice receded. Jack couldn't find her. “Kate!” Panicked, he turned in the water. “Kate!” He plunged underneath the surface, saw her far, far below. He kicked harder, heading down into the endless blue. He had to catch her, had to or she would die....

Jack jerked awake. No fish swarmed over his head, only millions of stars, so many it was as if a dam filled with glitter had collapsed and flooded over the black sky. Stiff and sore, he groaned as he rolled over on his side. He reached back to rub his neck. When his gloved hand struck the back of his helmet, he remembered where he was and that this was the day he was going to die.

He rocked his head back and forth, scrunching up his shoulders, trying to work some blood back into his neck and upper body. Then he looked at his watch. “Dammit!” He had wasted four hours on sleep, hours that were counting down to zero for him forever. He struggled upright, moving his arms and legs, trying to work out the kinks. He gave Houston a call, just to let them know he was awake.

“Jack, good morning!” Molly Peterson, an astronaut, identified herself. In the background Jack heard the sounds of excitement in the Mission Control. “Great news! We've made progress on your rescue!”

Peterson's chipper tone reinforced Jack's dark mood. “I don't need rescue, I need coffee,” he growled. He hoped there was some in the food pack he'd stowed on the Rover. He crunched out of the shadow of the boulder and pulled down his helmet sunshade. He looked out across a bouldered plain. If there had been a moon crow flying in a line from where he stood, the fictitious bird would have taken a straight shot across that plain for a distance of about four kilometers. In the interest of time that was the way to go, but it would mean crossing new ground. He eyed a possible path.

Peterson was doing her best to ladle good cheer. “Do you want to hear our plan, Jack?”

“No.”

“Okay,” she chirped, “we'll get back to you.”

“How's
Columbia
?” Jack asked irritably, but trying not to growl.

“Super!”

He'd always hated trite astronaut chitchat. “Listen, Houston. Concentrate on
Columbia.
Get 'em home!”

“We copy!” Peterson practically bubbled.

Jack grumbled and clumped to the Rover, changed his air pack and scrubber, drank water when, despite a desperate search, he failed to find any coffee in his pack, took a satisfying leak, and jumped on board his trusty steed. The sleep had been too long by half but it had at least left him refreshed. He scrutinized his maps, made his decision on the route, and headed south by southwest.

Columbia

“Sam, that's the way it's going to be!” Penny stated flatly.

“Penny, I can't let you do it,” Sam declared just as flatly. “I'm giving you a direct order. Elsie-2 will go down unmanned.”

Penny was at the airlock hatch, already in her coolant underwear and cloth communications helmet. “In case you haven't noticed, Sam,” she said, “we aren't exactly very good at following orders up here. Now, listen to me. Jack's getting low on air and there's no guarantee he'll be able to reach the supplies in the Elsie-2. Someone might be needed to carry them to him. I also know how everything is supposed to go together. I have to go down.”

Penny was angry and determined. She was going after her man and nobody, not Virgil or Tate or every fudpucker engineer in NASA, was going to stop her. They either needed to help or get out of her way. She climbed inside the airlock, started getting into her suit. Since there was only one MEC-designed coverlet for the EMU suit, and Jack was wearing it, Virgil had fashioned something made out of a parachute shroud to protect her suit joints from dust. He'd used duct tape to wrap the pieces around the suit and the result looked as homemade as it was. “I must look like the first hobo in space,” Penny complained.

“You look fine,” Virgil said encouragingly, watching her through the airlock porthole.

“Penny, don't do this,” she heard Tate in her earpiece. “An unmanned Elsie-2 will give Jack a chance and you'll still be safe. That's the way he'd want it.”

“I'm going,” Penny snapped. “Just get that through your head. Drop out if you can't take it.”

There was a moment of silence. “Nobody down here is going to drop out,” Tate said.

“Fine,” Penny said sharply.

“Give 'em hell, Penny,” Virgil said, grinning at her through the porthole. He'd done his share of arguing with Penny about her decision, too, but had ultimately seen the wisdom of it. He'd then argued that he should be the one to go but Penny wasn't having any of it. It was her idea and she was going to do it.

Penny finished her prebreathe, depressurized the airlock, and crawled through the hatch.
Columbia
was turned tail-forward to her orbital flight vector, her cargo bay turned down toward the moon. The RMS arm was stowed and everything else battened down except the tether apparatus and the Elsie-2. The spare moon lander was attached to the ATESS tether spool by a cable made out of the EVA guide wire that ran along
Columbia
's starboard sill. The Italian builders of the ATESS in the Huntsville POCC had done their calculations and determined that the tether could take the load.

Penny worked her way up the ATESS boom and into the Elsie-2. Being a spare, the sphere had none of the controls in the Elsie Jack had flown down. Virgil had done the best he could to prepare it for its mission, stowing inside everything that Houston had ordered including the cabling and connections he had worked on for hours, mostly cobbled together from middeck experiments. It had all been packed away along with additional oxygen tanks taken from
Columbia
's own air-system spares. The airlock primary oxygen system valve had been disconnected and attached to one of the tanks to allow replenishment of Penny's backpack supply. All of the equipment was secured tightly with heavy straps already inside the dome. It had been a quick engineering job, but a thorough one.

Virgil had also strung a web of straps for Penny. She zipped up the airlock tunnel and pressurized the dome. The internal pressure gauge indicated no leaks. She clipped herself into the straps and stabilized her feet into the footloops. “Ready,” she said.

Tate came back on-line. His voice was resigned but deliberate. “Penny, we're about thirty minutes away from release. We're going through both the ATESS and the OMS prefiring checklist now.”

“Roger,” Penny replied stolidly.

Houston had determined that the shuttle's standard OMS rocket engines would be used for the maneuver, the Big Dog engine in her tail held in reserve. Mission Control knew all there was to know about the OMS propulsion system but Big Dog was not trusted. Virgil had told Penny that he thought this was a mistake, that a “Not Invented Here” syndrome was affecting the NASA troops because they didn't know anything about the Big Dog. A message on the SAREX told them that the MEC people had fed their calculations to
Columbia,
were standing by with Big Dog just in case the OMS crapped out. Sally Littleton also said their eighteen-wheeler was headed for Huntsville, flank speed. MEC Control had been offered a back room in the POCC.