Ascent by Jed Mercurio (25 page)

FIVE DAYS since Mission Control lost contact with
Voskhodyeniye
, the widow will have accepted his death. She’ll be grieving. She’ll have sat the children in the living room of the apartment and said she has something very sad to tell them. She explains that their father has gone to a secret place and they will never see him again. The boy stares back at her with big blue eyes. “Where has he gone?”

“I don’t know,” she says.

“Is he dead?” asks the girl.

The widow nods. “Yes,” she says. “He is dead,” she says.

Already they are controlling their feelings. The boy is turning tough; he will become a man like his father who erects barriers to emotion. The girl is earnest; she will become more so, more austere. Yefgenii longs to burst into the apartment in their moment of grief and gather them all into his arms and give them the news that he’s alive and that he loves them and, in holding them and murmuring to them, reverse the emotional damage wrought by his obsessive pursuit of the perfect mission.

In the flight plan, he would make the landing and then return to orbit for rendezvous with the LOK. But he is losing his battle with the LK’s controls. He cannot correct
Voskhodyeniye
’s trajectory, so the LOK will not maintain orbit. It will crash down onto the surface of the Moon. It will not be here when the lander returns from the surface, and the lander itself cannot carry him home. It is too fragile to enter the atmosphere. The flight plan is no longer achievable. It has driven him through the past few days, the plan, always the plan. This thing has been the shape of his life, or his death, and even that has gone. Now it must either be the landing or the return home; it cannot be both.

Major Yefgenii Yeremin undocks the lander. He activates the controls of the Kontakt docking system to effect release of the LOK’s male probe from the LK’s female grid. He feels a bump as the probe rears away from the grid. Through the upper viewport he gazes at the LOK as it begins a slow drifting recession. The dark vessel turns as it falls behind. The two ships progress into night. Then the LOK — lifeless, powerless, lightless — vanishes.

Deploying its thrusters, he stabilizes the LK. The lander responds; it is nimble, flying under its own control at last, but in the same doomed orbit as the LOK. The computer fails to align the spatial navigation platform. He must assume the system has developed a fault, or has been faulty all along. He shuts it down and carries out a reboot. The computer fails to orient itself once again. He activates the Planeta landing radar. At present the craft’s altitude is too great for the system to acquire the surface. That will occur only toward the end of the descent.

The Sun rises. He catches a glint of metal far behind and far below. It’s the LOK, now sunk into an even more precarious orbit. The Sea of Moscow stares up at him. He is sailing over the Far Side in the most tiny and fragile craft imaginable. Its fuselage is paper thin. In all it weighs only 5 tonnes.

On impulse he claims an act for himself: he waggles the lander’s control sticks. The nimble craft rocks in pure Newtonian motion unmodified by lift or drag, proclaiming there’s a man flying this ship, a pilot at the pinnacle of his profession. Yefgenii smiles to himself and presses on.

Next comes the earthrise. He gazes at the blue and white disc gliding from behind the curve of the lunar horizon. No man has come so far away without returning. He crosses onto the Near Side, the Earth Side. The top of the lander points back, the base is leading. He ignites the LK’s Block D engine. The craft decelerates and begins the descent toward the surface. He pitches the craft more upright and now he’s falling feet first and face down with his back to the direction of the orbit. The lunar terrain scrolls upward through the lower viewport. Through the upper window the Sun plunges toward the edge of the Moon; the Earth glows in the fading light of lunar dusk. The celestial bodies are falling, he is falling.

Without the computer, he cannot judge his altitude. He must keep the radar active. The descent will be gradual over the course of a revolution; he doesn’t expect to receive an altitude signal till he’s closing in on the Ocean of Storms.

He endures the long lonely night, the cosmonaut in the tiny fragile craft. He stands perched in the straps and braces, a fist round each control stick, his gaze trained on the indifferent quadrangles of black space and black land framed by the upper and lower viewports. The roar of the engine reverberates through the LK’s narrow struts and thin metal sheets.

Gray bodies rupture the blackness framed by the lower viewport. They appear like whales rising from the ocean. At first he is uncertain if the forms lie outside the lander or represent reflections created within, and then the shapes gather detail, the clusters of craters, the lines of ridges. They are unrecognizable. The light is too weak and the lander’s position beyond determination.

He rolls the craft round and pitches it over so he’s plunging facedown and leaning forward into the realm ahead, where a brilliant bomb is detonating at the edge of the Moon. The craters and highlands begin appearing under him in relief in a narrow curving splinter of gray, and then they ripple and burn up in the expanding ball of sunlight, blasting through the tinted glass of the viewports. For a moment the terrible fire burns him up too; he disappears in the flood of rupturing light that blasts into the cabin, and then he is there again, haloed by the brilliance of his final dawn.

Yefgenii drops his gaze to the lower viewport. The collimating lens at its center blots out the scattering rays of sunlight. Looking down past his waist he scans the terrain behind, the craters, the overlapping overwritten rings that mottle the Far Side. The Sea of Moscow slides behind, the eye is averting.

As he crosses the Far Side, the Sun arcs through the sky in an accelerated celestial cycle. Lunar dawn becomes lunar morning in a matter of minutes. The Sun blasts the land in light, destroying the visual relief of rilles and depressions, of craters’ rims and their basins, until it has arced over the LK in lunar noon and crept behind. By the time he nears the landing site in the Ocean of Storms, the Sun will hang approximately 10 degrees above the western horizon, the optimum lighting conditions for judging an approach and landing.

Only minutes pass before he hears the first pings of the Planeta. The landing radar has acquired the surface. The digital readout blinks four dashes over and over again until the system’s computer interprets the returning signal. The numbers appear. The LK is operating at just over 3,000 metres above the surface, still skittering over the craters of the Far Side. He is far lower than expected, and it terrifies him. He has misjudged the final orbit, has fallen farther still in the lunar night, and now he faces the certainty that he will undershoot the landing site. In simulations he studied every crater and hummock on the approach to the planned touchdown, but here the surface panorama is beyond recognition. In the lower viewport the craters sweep beneath him, heaped one on top of another, gray and indistinct.

The Planeta rates his speed as over a 100 metres per second. He is too low and too fast. The Ocean of Storms remains on the other side of the world. The landing site lies thousands of kilometres ahead. The Far Side seems a far more desolate and forbidding place because of it.

For the first time he glimpses the LK’s shadow. Like some bizarre deformed insect, the angular black shape skitters across the rims and hollows of craters. He is down among the surface features that to this point have been remote and barely imagined. The hills undulate. The peaks and ridges are smooth, not jagged. Shadows gather in crater basins, like the openings of wells.

Next the roar of the engine cuts out. The Block D engine is spent. He jettisons the Block D and ignites the Block E. The LK flies onward, now only a couple of kilometres above the surface. Far ahead appears the foreshortened form of a broad lava plain. It can only be the Eastern Sea. It seems to reside at the very limit of his range, yet even this plain lies many kilometres short of the Near Side.

Out of the corner of his eye he glimpses something, another vehicle, and reacts with shock, then realizes it’s the Block D stage, a blackened husk, tumbling toward the surface. It is flying through the vacuum in a long arc and will take nearly a minute to crash.

Moment by moment the LK sheds speed and height. Yefgenii stands perched at the pilot’s control, fixed in a meshwork of straps and braces. He rolls to starboard, pointing toward the Eastern Sea, hoping to stretch the descent just far enough to reach its more hospitable terrain.

The Block D stage strikes the surface, throwing up a plume of dust that falls in centrifugal lines of ejecta. A new crater has formed. He gives it the widow’s name.

Firing at full thrust, the Block E opposes the LK’s descent, but the craft continues its long parabola toward the ground. The Planeta readout counts down: 1,500 metres, 1,400, 1,300… He must slow the descent. He pitches the lander back, standing on its engine.

The lava plain broadens and becomes more foreshortened. It holds its position in the upper viewport. He knows he can make it. The Block E arrests the lander’s vertical velocity. The altimeter readout maintains 500 metres.

Yefgenii slows the craft’s forward velocity with thrusters. The forces balance. He throttles back the Block E to 850 kg thrust, balancing the lander’s weight in lunar gravity. The LK hangs in a hover some 500 metres above the surface, on the perimeter of the Eastern Sea. A crest of hills arcs to either side of him. Ahead, boulders cover the plain. His fuel gauge estimates he has a minute’s worth remaining.

Now he must pitch the LK forward again, and it begins to advance over the terrain ahead. The low rush of the engine whispers through the craft. He glimpses boulders ahead separating into an open field of dark gray basalt scarred by numerous craters. With his right hand he holds one control stick in its forward pitch. The ground scrolls through the lower viewport, that now points almost straight down. He is hanging off the straps and braces, his weight tipped forward, the ground sweeping under him.

A fuel alarm sounds. If the computer was operational, it would call an abort, but he presses on. The fuel restriction stipulated by the flight plan is reserved for the ascent from the surface and orbital rendezvous with the LOK. There can be no rendezvous.

The LK slips into its final descent, the altimeter counting down to 300 metres, 200, 100… A stray thought visits him for an instant, the realization that because he cannot reach the Near Side he’ll never see the earthrise, he’ll never see the blue Earth again.

The shadow of the LK tracks toward him, slithering over the boulders and into the open ground of his target area. He sees shadows of the spindly legs of the LPU landing gear shortening as he pitches the LK back to the vertical, and then growing like vines over the ground below as he descends.

The engine fires up dust. A cloud swells and swirls around the LPU, blotting out his view of the surface. He flicks his gaze to his instruments, those that are operational, watching that the craft is level and sinking with graceful steadiness toward the surface. A wire sensor dangles below the footpads of the LPU. It brushes the surface and a blue contact light blinks on his control panel, and he shuts down the engine at once.

He falls. The craft drops 3 metres under one-sixth gravity and strikes the surface with a bang that shudders every strut and panel. He hears the vehicle creak as it starts to angle over. For a moment he fears that a footpad hangs over a crater, or that the ground is subsiding, so that the lander will topple over, but then the motion ceases and the craft settles, listing only a few degrees to starboard.

Silence surrounds the LK. The dust settles back to the surface in sheets. No wind tosses it back and forth or carries it into the distance. No rains will wash it away. The footpads of the lander will never rust. The cosmonaut’s body will never decompose.

The craft carries an immediate postlanding checklist that, according to the flight plan, must be hurried through in under a minute to determine whether the cosmonaut is safe to stay or must ignite the ascent engine at once. Yefgenii disregards the checklist. There is no option but to stay. The LOK’s orbit is decaying so fast it can only be a matter of hours before it crashes into the lunar surface. There is nowhere else in the universe left for him to go.

HE SLEEPS. The stillness cradles him. He cannot even be certain that he remembers his mother’s touch. He searches for moments in which her arms cradled him, or her fingers caressed his cheek, but he can’t find them. He recalls a night terror, then her soft voice calming him; he begged her not to leave him alone in the dark, so she slept nearby. He sees her there in the gloom, her outline changing shape as she turns, perhaps asleep or just pretending for his benefit. He remembers that her presence gave him the strength to face the darkness, to face terror and loneliness, but his eyes cannot penetrate the gloom, he cannot see her, only her outline changing shape as she turns.

When he wakes, he is tired. He remains as tired as he was when he fell asleep. The fans hum. He lifts his head from the narrow mesh hammock and sees that some of the instrument lights have gone out. The batteries are draining down. The lander is running out of power.

He peers at the blinds covering the viewports. When he moves to them, he senses the strange effect of low gravity, like walking in a dream. He lifts the blinds. It is not a dream.

The eerie terrain of the Eastern Sea stretches to the horizon. In the distance, long escarpments slope up from the plain into blunt hills that curve in gray bands one behind the other. Above them the sky is dense, black and empty. He is in a land of extreme contrast but no colour. The surface gleams, the sky is matte black, and the Sun blazes with no mediating atmosphere to diffuse, refract or blur its radiance.

He’s slept in his suit and boots. He replaces his bubble helmet and then mounts the outer shell on the metal collar, a Moon helmet bearing three eyeshades and two protective visors to deflect the Sun’s unfiltered ultraviolet and infrared radiation. He lifts on the backpack and connects its oxygen and water hoses and plugs in its electricity cables, then dons his gloves and locks.