Back to the Moon-ARC (28 page)

“Maybe, but there’s no time. I’m being careful. I have no intention of venting to vacuum when I’m this close.” Stetson’s reply sounded confident, but his mental comment was not.
Please, God, don’t let me trip and cut my leg off.…

Inside the
Harmony,
as the crew huddled together looking at their suits’ power indicators drop mercilessly toward the red, they felt the thump of Stetson’s benign contact with the frame of the lander. It wasn’t much, but in a place where no wind has ever blown, it was the first movement other than their own since the crash. The large outcropping of boulders had effectively shielded them from the dust and debris kicked up by the Altair as it landed, and, since there was no atmosphere to carry sound, the noise of a rocket engine descending to the surface only a few hundred feet away was absent.

“Did you feel that?” asked Dr. Xu. His voice was muffled due to the fact that their visors were closed to retain heat within the suits and their suit radios were off to conserve power.

“Yes. Yes, I did. The lander is either settling or the Americans are here,” replied Hui Tian, her voice also muffled, as she rose and moved toward the door. The crew compartment was crowded and now very cold. Though her suit temperature was at the bare minimum required to keep her alive and not hypothermic, she was no longer aware of how cold she felt. Instead, she was focused on finding out what had bumped the lander and at containing her excitement at the thought that help had arrived.

She neared the cabin window and peered outside into the near-darkness. At first she couldn’t see anything, and then she saw motion—and an American astronaut carefully climbing over the remains of the lander legs toward the cabin door. She turned quickly to face her crewmates.

“They are here! The Americans are here!”

She moved to the cabin door and abruptly stopped. She stood motionless, staring at the metal door that separated her crew from the American astronaut.

“There’s no power. We cannot open the door without power.”

“Ha.” Engineer Zhi grunted. “Of course we can. Just use the manual override. We trained for that a million times. Are you not thinking clearly?”

“Who is not thinking clearly?” Hui responded. “Zhi, did being in your spacesuit for so long make you forget that the cabin is pressurized? We’ve got close to one atmosphere of air in here pushing on the door. And there is no pressure on the other side. When we EVA, we have to vent the cabin first, and that requires power. The door opens inward. Without venting the air, the pressure is enough to keep the door from opening even if I use the manual override.” Unlike the American lander, the Chinese did not have an airlock. When they exited for a surface EVA, the entire lander, like the Orion, vented to vacuum. The Chinese designers had not foreseen the need to design the door to open to vacuum when the cabin was still fully pressurized.

“Of course,” Zhi chortled. “So, our American saviors arrive, and we cannot even go out and meet them with dignity.” He lowered his head and appeared to stare at the floor in front of him.

“Let’s get this door open.” Dr. Xu gently moved the injured pilot to a resting position leaning against an instrument rack and rose to join his commander at the cabin door. “I am certain we can find a way.”

Hui removed the latch from the door handle and grasped it in her right glove. Xu moved close to her, grabbed the handle next to where she had placed her hands, and began to pull.
 

Nothing happened. The door remained stuck.

“It is basic physics,” Zhi said. “Atmospheric pressure is a little more than fourteen pounds per square inch. The door is about two thousand square inches. That means the total force pushing on the door is about thirty thousand pounds. Do you think the two of you can move thirty thousand pounds all by yourselves?”

Hui and Dr. Xu responded by trying again to move the door. Again, nothing happened.

“Enough.” Hui and Dr. Xu turned to face Zhi. Clearly frustrated, Hui spoke, “Zhi, do you have any ideas? What can we do to open the door?”

“Hmm.” Zhi looked up at his commander. His response bordered on insubordination. “Captain Hui, if I knew, I am not sure I would tell you. Who will recall what we did to get home when it will be the triumphant American heroes who get the credit? It is better to die than to let them have the glory that should have been ours.”

“I do not understand you, Zhi. You are the one who figured out how to keep the ship warm using the rocket fuel. You are the one who kept the fuel cells working far longer than they should have. You are the one who will get much of the credit for keeping this crew alive long enough for the Americans to give us a ride home. You are a hero of China! Do you not see that? Are you giving up? Why? You’ve done so much already!”

“Because it was pointless. It would have been better if we had died in the crash. This was supposed to be our day. China’s day.” He averted his gaze from Hui back to the cabin floor and said nothing more.

It was at that moment that they heard a banging sound come from the other side of the door. It sounded like whoever was on the other side had picked up a piece of metal and was using it to signal them.

Dr. Xu responded by banging his glove on the door.

“Without air, he won’t hear that.” Hui was frustrated with their predicament as well. She wanted to go home. “But he might feel it.”
 

“Or he might not,” Zhi added.
 

“We’ve got to let him know we are here and what our problem is. I’ll turn on my radio.” She raised her hand and turned on the power to the transmitter within her spacesuit.

“Hello? Can you hear me? This is Captain Hui of the
Harmony
. Can you hear me? Please respond if you can hear me!”

The banging on the other side of the door continued.

Standing on the other side of the door, Bill Stetson couldn’t tell if there was anyone alive or dead within the ship. The door was closed, and the ship was completely dark. He couldn’t get to the window to look in due to the fact that he was now a good fifteen feet off the ground, standing in what looked like the remains of a construction site after an earthquake, and if he were to try and reach the window, he would almost certainly fall to his death by being skewered on one of the many sharp edges of mangled metal that used to be the
Harmony
lunar lander.

He grasped the small aluminum rod that he’d picked up during his climb to the door and banged again.

Anthony Chow was sweating. It was a cold sweat, and it wasn’t caused by his work dismantling an experiment rack to be thrown overboard. Nor did the temperature within the Altair cause it. It was the cold sweat of fear.

Left alone in the lander for over an hour, Chow at first didn’t think much about anything other than getting the weight of the lander down to the point that would allow them to take on passengers. He’d already moved the easy stuff like the sleeping hammocks, the food rations that would have sustained the crew for an extended surface stay, and the containers that were to safely store the rocks and core samples they would have collected and returned to the Earth. There was still a lot to be done in order to get the lander off the Moon, even some modifications to the structure, but Chow couldn’t do those on his own. That would have to come later when Bill got the survivors back to the ship and they had a chance to assess and think on their situation a bit longer.
 

It wasn’t until he began to review the service manual for the experiment rack—so as to figure out how to disassemble it for throwing overboard instead of fixing—that he began to consider his situation. There was a little bit of tightness in his throat, and Tony could tell that he was starting to sweat.

What if Bill didn’t come back? What if his friend were to have an accident and never return? What if the engines don’t start on the lander, making the trip home impossible? He really didn’t want to die on the Moon.

Alone. Trapped. Facing death. No way out.
It was his nightmare, and at that moment, Chow stopped working and stared out the window at the dimly lit lunar landscape. Fortunately for him, it was very dimly lit and he could only see the area immediately around the ship due to the lights. Being inside the lit ship, his eyes were dilated and couldn’t gather enough light to really see how vast the lunar wasteland around him truly was. Tony leaned forward and pulling himself closer to the window.
 

He was letting himself go unchecked in a downward spiral of despair and fear without having other tasks to keep his mind occupied. He was so absorbed in his fear, that he almost didn’t hear the voice on the ship’s radio. Slowly, his mental faculties overcame the fear, and he was able to focus. He did hear a voice. It was the voice of the
Harmony
’s captain.

The female voice was weak and barely audible as it came over one of the radio frequencies that the Altair was monitoring. “…hear me? Please respond if you can hear me!” The only reason Chow could hear her was because the Chinese engineers had told their NASA counterparts what channels the taikonauts would be using in their systems. This was the reason they’d heard them before while orbiting. After losing them following the first orbit, they had left the system on autosearch mode. The Altair’s radio was programmed to scan these frequencies and to stop on whichever one was active. This was the Chinese suit-to-suit communications channel.

Chow didn’t react quickly, but he did react. He slowly pulled himself together and moved toward the radio. At one point he even shook his head and took a couple of deep breaths.
 

“Get it together,” he told himself out loud.

“Please respond…”

“Captain Hui. This is Anthony Chow of the
Mercy I
. Can you hear me?”

“Yes, yes! I hear you! Thank God you can hear me. My suit is almost out of power. Are you the one banging on our door?”

“No, that would be Commander Stetson. I’m back in the lander getting the ship ready to carry you and your crew home.”

“Can you tell your commander that we hear him, but we cannot open the door. We have no power to run the depressurization system and evacuate the cabin. And with the cabin pressurized, there is no way to open the door for us to get out.”

“Uh, I think I understand. I’ll relay that to Bill. Hang on. His suit won’t work at this frequency, so I will have to be the middleman and relay information between the two of you.”

“Understood,” Hui answered. “Thank you.”

Chow was now sufficiently recovered from his lapse to relay the information to Stetson, whose reply was classic. “Damn!”

“Bill. You mentioned that there is a lot of debris. Can you use something to smash their window or to puncture the skin of the lander? If we can get the pressure down, then they can open the door.”

“Uh, let me look around,” Stetson replied. “There is no way I can even get close to the window. It is too dangerous. And I doubt that I can get sufficient force to puncture the skin of the lander. I’m fifteen feet in the air, bouncing around like a beachball in this pressurized suit, and I can barely keep myself from falling every time I bang on the door. There is no way I can get this can to open from out here. Wish I’d brought some tools with me. We didn’t plan this well.”

“Unfortunately, they are saying the same thing on the inside. They tried breaking the glass, but it didn’t work. That stuff is almost as strong as steel. They’re still looking around for something they might be able to use to puncture the skin from the inside.”

“Well, then I’ll just come back and get the power tools we brought with us. That’ll take some time.” Bill grunted.

“It’s worse, Bill,” Tony continued. “You may have time and power left, but they don’t. Captain Hui told me that they have less than an hour before their suits run out of power and they start to freeze. And at minus two hundred degrees, that’ll happen quickly.”

“That’s not enough time for me to get back to Altair, find the right tools, get back here, then figure out how to cut through the hull, and then get them safely back to Altair. Not enough time.”

“We have to do something, Bill.”

“I know, I know. Tony, do they have any ideas?”

“Not so far as I can tell. Sounds like they’ve tried everything and used up their last drops of extra power,” Tony explained.

“Come on, let’s think on this. You might toss it back to Houston and see if anybody there has any ideas.”

“Done. But they aren’t sure what to do without power, either. Or tools. Picking up some of the stuff around their crashed ship puts you at more risk than Houston wants.”

“I don’t disagree with them on that.” Then it hit him. “Power is the key! Tony, I’ve got an idea.”

“We need one.”

“Well, I’ve got one, and it’s because of something you said. You said I’ve got power and they don’t. But they do. If they have enough power to run heaters in their suits for another hour, then surely they have enough power to run a pump long enough to get the air out of the cabin. They can use the power from one of their suits to vent the air, and then they can open the door.”

“I’ll relay the message.”

Hui listened intently to Anthony Chow relay Stetson’s suggestion. Her excitement and optimism grew. She looked around the room at her crew and settled her gaze on the engineer—the political officer who, in her mind, was suddenly being more of a political officer than an engineer.

“Zhi, can it be done? she asked.

“Yes.” Without removing his gaze from the floor, he replied, “It can be done.”

“Will you help? We can’t do this without you. I don’t know the lander systems and where the control circuits are for the pump. I could look it up if the computer had power and I could pull up the manual. But then, if we had power for the computer, then we could open the door. You’re the engineer. Do the job for which you were trained.
Be
an engineer
.”

Zhi looked up from the floor and gazed directly into Hui’s eyes. Like two dogs trying to decide which was alpha, they stared at each other long and hard. Finally, Zhi averted his gaze.