The Orion Protocol (18 page)

35

NASA Station/West Australia

“Can you hear me now? Colonel Blake?”

The Aussie grad student and aspiring astronaut candidate yelled into the cell phone, steering his faded, aging Ford truck down the sun-slammed, wavery licorice blacktop road. Augie’s voice was breaking up.

“I’ll have to call you from the station . . .”

Two hours west and south of the University at Perth, Jonathan Quatraine rang off, hurtling on through the outback heat and trailing a plume of dust. It was easily 110 degrees, with the windows down.

He checked the odo and squinted out the windshield, keeping watch for a little blue-and-white sign that would probably say
NASA
on it.

“Shite. This is the back of beyond, eh?”

The overloaded red pickup hit a pothole and shuddered, sending a nasty jolt into the cab. Jonathan slowed down, glancing at Hudson, a four-year-old Labrador retriever, riding shotgun beside him.

“Sorry. Huddy? Care for a cool one?”

His sense of balance unfazed by the road’s bumpy assault on his four-legged center of gravity, the chocolate Lab perked up at the offer. In lieu of long-deceased air-conditioning, Jonathan kept them both hydrated with Broken Hill lager and handfuls of ice.

“Amber fluids it is.” From a plastic cooler on the floor, he fished out a beer, secured it between his thighs, and fed some ice to Hudson. Then he saw it.

“Hold on!” Jonathan stuck his arm out across the dog’s chest and
stood on the truck’s aged disk/drum-brake combo, coming to a stop twenty meters past the NASA ground-station turnoff.

Eyeing the ninety days of provisions still bungied down in the truck bed, he checked the time and his unflappable companion.

“No worries, Hud. Just chuck a yewy, right? Right!”

January was the hot season down under and he was excited about winning the NASA summer job: former Apollo astronaut Augie Blake had even come to Perth and personally recruited the grad student from over two hundred applicants.

“Here we go, mate.” Jonathan graunched his balky shifter into reverse, backed up past the blue NASA down-link sign, and turned off into the bush.

Less than a mile beyond, a huge gray dish peeked up over a stand of eucalyptus hiding the cinder block building that would be Jonathan’s home for the next three months.

36

Using the dual-processor Mac in his office, Jake had put the TOLAS/
Mars Observer
photo up on a high-res flat-screen monitor. From her perch in a refinished captain’s chair, Angela had observed his reactions to the Mars anomalies and fielded Deaver’s technical questions, some of which she could not answer.

Then she had one of her own.

“Jake?”

“Yeah.”

“You didn’t send this to me, did you?”

“Nope.” He turned to face her.

Angela knew he was telling the truth. But now he was looking at her, again with those wild-blue-yonder eyes, as if trying to divine her intentions, or testing her integrity, her character. It was a bit unnerving.

“What?” she said, shifting in her seat.

Jake leaned toward her, his voice as intimate as their proximity.

“Knowing changes everything, doesn’t it?”

There was an impish quality that rode along with the intimacy. Angela smiled and nodded, as if they were now part of a secret society of their own making. An unspoken trust was there, too, but there was more.

“Yes. Knowing changes everything.”

Jake leaned back and cocked his chin in the direction of her prodigious shoulder bag.

“Let’s see the other one.”

Angela produced the second image, showing two astronauts on the
Moon. She noticed his posture, how he became tense and still, losing the more playful quality he had flashed before as he began looking closely at the lunar photo.

“And you think this is from the same guy.”

“That’s my guess.”

Deaver read the handwritten caption out loud.

“And good luck, Mr. Grotsky, wherever you are . . .”

Angela told what she knew.

“I searched the employee databases at NASA and at JPL in California and couldn’t find any Grotskys. Then we tried looking up all the cosmonauts from the ‘60’s on, but as far as we could tell—”

“Stop . . . hold on a second.” Deaver struggled to keep a straight face.

“What? You think that’s stupid?”

“No, no, it’s just Grotsky . . .”

Jake was laughing out loud, like some kind of inside joke had been played more or less at Angela’s expense, and something about it really pissed her off.

“Then what is so damned funny?”

“Grotsky . . . is not a cosmonaut. The Grotskys were Neil Armstrong’s next-door neighbors when he was twelve years old.”

37

1950/Ft. Lauderdale, Florida

“Oh, no . . .”

Twelve-year-old Neil Armstrong couldn’t believe it. Practicing pitching, he had been doing pretty well, firing fastballs through an old tire hung from the grapefruit tree in his backyard with an almost boring accuracy. It was the curve that needed some work. Neil dried his sweaty hands on his T-shirt and changed his grip, felt the stitching of the seam snug up against the side of his middle finger, and stared down at the target. He then rocked from a stretch as if holding a runner on first and let it loose.

“Crap . . .”

As soon as it left his hand, he knew. Sailing high and bouncing off the rim of the worn-out tire, the ball made a dull thoink and caromed over the fence into the Grotskys’ yard next door.

“Crap on a crutch . . .”

Hoping to simply retrieve his baseball without the embarrassment of bothering the neighbors, Neil climbed over the fence in the direction of the ball’s last known trajectory.

Spying a flash of white in the bushes under an open window, he crouched down to get it. But before he could turn back for home he found himself frozen under the window, eavesdropping on a loud argument going on inside the house between Mr. and Mrs. Grotsky.

“Oral sex?”

He listened, rooted to the spot as Mrs. Grotsky’s voice rose in outrage.

“You want
oral sex?!
”

Young Neil Armstrong wasn’t exactly sure what she was referring to, but Mrs. Grotsky’s attitude about it was coming through loud and clear.

“The day you get oral sex is the day that kid next door walks on the Moon!”

Hearing himself being referred to, he felt a shock of self-conscious panic. Crawling out of the bushes on his hands and knees, he then ran as fast as he could across the yard and scrambled back over the fence.

But future Apollo Commander Neil Armstrong would remember that moment and the Grotskys for the rest of his life.

38

“And good luck, Mr. Grotsky, wherever you are.” Angela was now laughing as hard as Jake.

Trying to catch her breath, she couldn’t help thinking about Augie Blake, wondering why he had shined her on about Grotsky at the Blair House bash. Did he think she was a prude? That didn’t make any sense.

“Augie Blake would know that story, wouldn’t he?”

Deaver seemed to cool slightly at the mention of his old partner.

“It’s an old astronaut story.”

Angela refocused her attention on the astronauts in the Moon picture.

“All right, then, so this would be Neil Armstrong and . . . ?”

“No, no, this is 18,” Jake said. “That’s me and Augie at Sinus Medii.”

“Oh.”

Angela felt an odd sense of portent as Jake laid the print on a scanner bed and copied it to his computer. Once he could enlarge it and play with it on-screen, he gave her a tour, showing various lunar features in isolation.

“Look at our shadows on the ground. This was taken during the day. You see all those stars in the sky behind us?” Jake indicated an area just above the horizon. “The sun washes out the stars during daylight hours, so the sky should be completely black.”

“Meaning this picture’s been messed with?”

“Nope,” Jake said, “that’s how it was.”

His eyes invited her to solve the contradiction. Angela could feel the fine hair on her arms and on the back of her neck beginning to stand up.

“Jake, anything you want to say here is in complete confidence. Period. Until you say otherwise.”

He quit the computer without acknowledging what Angela had said. He looked wound up tight, like the insides of a baseball, and that deep, wounded feeling she had noticed before seemed to surface and then submerge itself. But it was clear they had an understanding. Deaver got up and headed for the door.

“I need some coffee. You want coffee?”

“Sure. Black, with Sweet’n Low. If you got it.”

Jake led the way back to the kitchen, passing framed photographs from his Apollo 18 days, samples of calligraphy, and Tibetan artwork.

“How about honey?”

“Fine. It’s about those stars, isn’t it?” She could feel it coming, whatever it was. Jake glanced back over his shoulder.

“Have you ever wondered why America went to the Moon eight times in four years and then came straight home and never, ever went anywhere again?”

39

1973/Sinus Medii/the Moon

Commander Jake Deaver and Colonel Augie Blake had gone to the Moon wearing the gold-embroidered mission patch of Apollo 18, which depicted their spacecraft rocketing away from Earth beneath the three belt stars of Orion.

There was overt science to do on the surface, months of tedious underwater spacesuit training in the Canaveral tanks finally about to pay off; exhaustive photo documentation, a moonquake monitoring system to set up, a protocol of instrumented readings, surface sample collecting, radiation and micrometer erosion testing, and more. And then there was the covert mission.

“Gentlemen, switch to ALTCOM Two. Do you copy? Over.”

“Going to ALTCOM Two. Roger that, Houston.”

Having achieved lunar orbit, Blake and Deaver were instructed over the secure channel to open a sealed envelope.

Diagrams and photographs inside showed that their landing site at Sinus Medii had been chosen because it was within rover distance of what was described as “possible anomalous objects” picked up by both Soviet and American lunar satellite cameras.

“Uh, Houston? What are we looking at? Over . . .”

The two astronauts hammered the mission director with more questions than anybody had answers for.

“What you see is what we got, gentlemen.”

Most of the answers would have to come from ground truth: Jake
and Augie were tasked with photographing and documenting whatever they saw at Sinus Medii and bringing back to Earth up to two hundred kilos of whatever “objects” or “artifacts” could be safely recovered.

This covert mission had to be accomplished in addition to the public science mission, but they were assured that if what the Apollo 18 mission discovered was extraterrestrial in origin, the artifacts would be made public “at the proper time” and the astronauts would be allowed to talk about it publicly “at that time.”

For now, however, everything about this was to be considered a state secret and national security concerns would dictate the timing and language of all communications and determine the scheduling and priorities of the mission.

“Nondisclosure. Do you copy?”

“Roger, Houston. Copy that.”

Jake and Augie switched back to the normal radio frequency and resumed preparations to set their spacecraft down on the Moon. They’d been told that nothing unusual would be visible from the landing site, so the fixed cameras on the Lunar Excursion Module were considered safe for live network transmission of Apollo 18’s Moon landing at Sinus Medii.

But NASA’s scheduled, worldwide broadcast soon turned into a nail-biting disaster watch akin to Apollo 13, thanks to an unexpected storm on the Sun.

The first intimations of trouble came moments after beginning their descent.

“Uh, Commander, maintain your present altitude and stand by. We’re monitoring some EM coming your way. We may lose you for a bit. Do you copy? Over.”

“Maintaining altitude and standing by. Over.”

Solar flares were an unpredictable hazard of space travel, wreaking havoc with satellite and spacecraft electronics, not to mention irradiating any astronauts caught in their wake.

This, however, was an M-class solar event, undeflected by the magnetic field of the Earth. As Jake and Augie hovered, burning precious fuel, the EM storm arrived at the Moon in full force, its relentless waves of electromagnetic particles leaving their spacecraft deaf and blind. All
voice and data communication with Johnson Space, including Earth-guided telemetry, was lost. Augie took the stick.

“Guidance is now internal.”

Standard procedure would be to do nothing until contact could be resumed, using their very limited thruster fuel to maintain a safe altitude: risk the mission, not the men.

“Houston, this is Apollo 18. Do you copy? Over.”

Jake and Augie heard nothing but white noise and settled in to sweat out the wait. Going by the book, they faced the real possibility of a scrubbed landing and a failed mission.

“How’s our burn minutes, Dog Man?”

“We’re at nineteen-point-five minutes of burn.”

They were using fuel fast just to maintain position and the margin of safety for the trip home was slipping. But after coming 300,000 miles and knowing how much more than Moon rocks might be awaiting them on the surface, the two men would have sooner augered in than turn back for home.

“Mission Control, this is Apollo 18. Over.”

After trying to make contact every ten seconds for two more long, excruciating minutes, Houston remained in blackout. Augie was a hundred percent ready to override the computer and land the spacecraft, but it was Deaver who had to make the call.

“Say the word, Daddy-o.”

Jake turned away from the instrumentation and tightened the racing-car harness that held him in his seat.

“Fuck it. Put her down.”

“Aye-aye. Manual override is a go. Grab something.”

Flying totally without external guidance, Augie fired the lander’s little attitude jets, pitching it over so he could eyeball the landing site through one of two tiny porthole windows. Then, righting the spacecraft and sighting on the horizon line, he set it down blind, as if he’d done it a thousand times, with Jake calling out the altimeter reading.

“Ninety meters . . . eighty . . . seventy . . . sixty meters . . .”

At the heart of it was a direct line drawn from the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, to Sinus Medii on the Moon, and the
audacious dead-stick landing would pass into NASA legend and the history of human flight.

Whether credited or criticized, Deaver’s command decision and pilot Augie Blake’s deft handling of the spacecraft would forever be dissected at the Air Force Academy for the benefit of gonzo freshman cadets.

Once radio contact with Houston was restored and all the shouting was over, the astronauts made a concerted effort to keep their heads down and stick to the script, hoping to dissipate unwanted distractions caused by such hotdog heroics.

But the real history being made by Apollo 18 would be made in secret: when Commander Jake Deaver and Colonel Augie Blake became the first human beings to walk among the ruins of an extraterrestrial city on another world.

After securing the spacecraft and completing the public aspect of their first day on the Moon, the two men suited up, switched to the secure channel for communications, and set out from the landing site in an open rover.

“My God,” Jake said, gawking as best he could through his gold helmet visor.

“It’s awesome.” Augie stopped the $20 million little Jeep-like rover with the huge wheels.

Looking up and out from this vantage point, they could now see what satellite photos only hinted at: they had set down inside the remains of a desiccated dome structure. In all directions, the two astronauts were surrounded by a construct of thin, spidery beams eroded to near invisibility and arching high up into the black daytime sky.

Jake lifted his protective visor, accepting the brief UV hit in exchange for a clearer view. It was breathtaking and hugely exciting. Both men were pumped up like Super Bowl athletes taking the field.

“Holy fuck. It’s big.”

“Houston, y’all should see this damn thing. Wish you were here.”

“We copy, Augie Doggie. You are our eyes and ears.”

But Augie had already hopped out of the Lunar Excursion Module and begun making a deliberate panoramic sweep of the site with a hand-wound eight-millimeter film camera.

“I’m taking a slow pan now. Looks like a lot of broken glass . . .”

“We copy. Commander, we show your visor in the up position. Over.”

“Roger that.” Deaver pulled the visor back down as he extracted a large-format seventy-millimeter Hasselblad still camera from its compartment in the rover and used the zoom to get close-ups of the long-abandoned alien biosphere.

“Augie’s right. Looks like glass panels on a convex-dome frame . . .”

In a vacuum, glass can be made hard as steel and would be a logical thing for space farers to build with. Jake documented several shattered silicate panels still clinging to lower sections of the dome, refracting and reflecting sunlight into the lens in smeary little flashes.

“How high is this thing, Dog Man?”

“Ten clicks, easy.”

The metallic-looking framework was also about twenty-five kilometers across at the base, and grew more and more skeletal as you moved up from the bottom to the top and it gradually became denuded of its glass panels. Jake photographed the biggest openings and noted their locations.

“Jesus, Augie. You see those gaps?”

“Hell, yes, podnah.”

The descending orbits of their programmed approach had been more hazardous than they’d imagined. Luckily, gaping sections of the broken dome yawned blackly open in all directions, some a mile in diameter or more. They had to have sailed blindly through one of these huge gaps, probably in their last orbital go-around before the final descent.

“Wouldn’t have known what hit us.” Augie stared up at the ravaged metal spires reaching out like anguished fingers, some as thin as peanut brittle from millennia of cosmic rain, other sections still sturdy enough to have meant certain death if Augie had crashed into them.

“Houston, do you copy that?” Jake said, suppressing his anger, but
adding a task to their already tight schedule: this structure would have to be thoroughly mapped in 3-D for the safety of the next mission. “Houston? We need to take altimeter readings. Over.”

After the few seconds of signal delay, the mission director and former Gemini pilot came back sounding strained and apologetic: better satellite reconnaissance would have put them less at risk.

“Uh, loud and clear, Commander. Get everything you can. Over.”

Jake secured the Hasselblad, released the altimeter from its cushioned Velcro cubby, and measured every dimension of the lunar architecture until their first day’s covert EV time was over and they had to head back.

Jumping lightly into the rover in the Moon’s one-sixth gravity, Deaver grabbed Augie’s bulky arm and indicated the gaps in the dome above them.

“You’re one lucky hotdoggin’ son of a bitch, you know that?”

Augie grinned and strapped himself in behind the wheel.

“Stick with me, Daddy-o.”