Lunar Descent (34 page)

Darkness would not remain in this area for very much longer. Lester turned and looked south, past the nose of the LRLT where it had buried itself in the ground. Beyond the horizon, the first light of the rising Earth was just appearing; the distant rim of Aristotle Crater was already touched by a thin silver glow. Aristotle was only a few miles away. Looking at it, Riddell again felt relief. The crash had been rough—both he and Mighty Joe had been knocked cold by the impact—but at least they hadn't slammed into the crater wall. Such a crash would have surely destroyed the LRLT; all three of them would be crushed, burned corpses by now if that had happened.

“Any landing you can walk away from is a good one,” he murmured to himself.

Pardon
? Butch Peterson's voice said in his earphones.
What was that
?

“Nothing. Just thinking aloud.” Butch didn't say anything, and Lester added, “Something they always say to you in flight school, usually just before you make your first solo. How are you making out in there?”

Well
… He heard her sigh over the comlink.
Joe says the left side of his chest still hurts, so I think he's definitely got a cracked rib or two. I've given him some Demerol and made him lie down in back, but he keeps wanting to come up here
.

“Tell him to lie down and shut up,” Lester said. It appeared that Mighty Joe had been the only one of them to suffer serious injury. The pilot had been wheezing and complaining of stabbing chest pains from the moment he had regained consciousness, but if it had been anything worse than broken ribs, they would have known by now. If Butch had shot him up with Demerol and put him in one of the bunks in the aft cabin, that was the best they could do for the time being. “What about the radio?” he asked.

Negative. I've tried the voice bands and also the data-relay frequency, to shoot back the stuff I got from the station just in case we
—She stopped herself abruptly.

“Don't even think about it, kiddo,” Lester said. “We're gonna get out of this, don't worry.” He thought for a moment. “Ummm … keep working the frequencies, and if that doesn't work, see if you can get Joe to tell you where the circuit-breaker panel is located. Maybe the transponder augered out when we hit. Ask Joe, he'll tell you what to do.”

Sure, Les
. Butch didn't sound very encouraged. At least she was over the hysterical fit she had thrown on the way down.
When are you coming back in
?

“Gimme a few minutes,” he replied. “I want to check the cargo module and make sure it survived. Keep the channel open if it makes you feel better. Okay?”

All right. Sure
. There was another pause.
Ahh
…
just one more thing
, she said hesitantly.
I gotta go
.

“Huh? You want to go EVA?”

No, no, I don't want to do that
. More hesitation.
I mean … I gotta go. You copy
?

“Aw, hell.” Lester shook his head in his helmet. There was a standard-issue spacecraft head located in the aft cabin, just beyond the bunks where Joe was lying. Like all zero g toilets, it operated by univalve suction attachments which drew urine and feces back into a septic tank; normal gravity-dependent toilets didn't function in spacecraft. However, in hopes of preserving the life of the batteries, Lester had shut down all the noncritical functions of the LRLT. That included the toilet, which depended upon a power supply just as much as the computers. Funny how certain bodily functions tend to creep up on you at inopportune times, he reflected.

“Uh-huh,” he said. “Okay, listen. There should be some sample-collection bags stowed back there. I know it's messy, but you'll have to use them. Tell Joe to turn his head and …”

Right
, she said tersely.
I guess. Over and out
.

He heard a soft click as the comlink was shut off. The old Butch Peterson was back among them. Lester chuckled despite himself; he could just imagine the exchange between Butch and Mighty Joe which was going on right now in the crew cabin. For the moment, it was better to be out here.

In more ways than one, Lester was glad he was out of the crew cabin. It had been many years since he had been out on the surface of the Moon by himself. Here was darkness, peaceful and everlasting, and now that Butch was attempting to pee in a plastic bag there was only silence, unbroken except for the thin hiss of his air regulator.

Hell of a time to be enjoying himself. Yet, despite the criticality of their situation, he found within himself a certain elation.
I haven't felt this way in twenty years
, he thought …

Cut it out, he reprimanded himself. Time to look over the ship. Not that there was much left of the LRLT to be examined. The hull had remained intact, but on the whole, the spacecraft was totalled. They had come down in a shallow dive which had dug a furrow a quarter-mile long across the mare, leaving behind bits and pieces of the landing gear in a deep trench. Joe had accomplished a nose-up belly landing which would have done a carrier pilot proud; the destruction of the landing gear had helped to brake the LRLT and save the fuselage from the worst damage. Still and all, it didn't take an expert to see that the spacecraft would never move from this spot again. The trusses which comprised the midsection strongback above the cargo module were bent in the center; his helmet lamps shined across the buckled framework as he walked closer for another look. Out here in the boonies, there was no way this craft could be salvaged.

Lester bounced away from the lights, hop-skipping around the rock-battered cones of the main engines toward the starboard side. He rounded the aft end of the craft, and as he did, his helmet lamps captured a lone figure in a spacesuit, standing just outside the cone of light cast by the lamps.…

“
Whaaa …
?” Lester yelped in mid-leap. His knees turned to jelly; his jump took him a few more feet; then he sprawled on his butt on the hard, stony ground, legs outstretched and arms cast back to catch his fall. Dirt kicked up around him, falling back around his feet and legs like soft gray rain.

He felt the impact even through the rigid carapace of the hardsuit, but it hardly mattered. Lester stared straight ahead, his helmet lamps again finding the spacesuited figure. The suit design was obsolete; Skycorp had stopped using that type at least five years ago. The overgarment was caked and soiled with dirt, as if the wearer had crossed—impossibly—hundreds of miles of lunar terrain; dust clung to every crease and fold as if it had been stamped in. The helmet's faceplate was scoured; Lester could see eyes, a nose, and a mouth, but nothing that suggested a personality, except …

His heart thumped loudly in his ears. His breath came as a harsh rasp. There was a warm jet of fluid in his crotch; he was pissing in his urine-cup, but it barely registered on him, for at that moment his helmet lamps captured, for the briefest of instants, the faded black-nylon name patch sewn on the suit's overgarment.…

Sloane, S.K
.

“Sam,” he whispered.

Very slowly, the figure's right arm rose, forefinger thrust out as if in accusation, pointing at Riddell.… Then, after hovering for a moment, it rose to point again, beyond Riddell, toward the wrecked spacecraft behind him.

Then, before Lester could force another word through his parched throat, the specter stepped backward. One step, two steps, three …

As, at that very moment, the sun rose above the far eastern horizon, casting a bright silvery haze above the terrain, extending long shadows from the rock and boulders of the mare and the wall of the giant crater in the distance. The first rays touched the figure …

And it faded, dissipating like smoke in a place where there had never been air. Gone, forever gone.

Heart still pounding in his ears, Lester sat up on the ground and slowly turned around to look in the direction the specter had pointed, at the LRLT. At the top of the forward fuselage where, for the first time since he had gone EVA, Lester noticed the bent-over mast of the high-gain radio antenna. The antenna had been broken by the crash. All he had to do was climb up there and fix the thing with duct tape, and they had telemetry again. The Moon Moths would find them once radio contact was established.

Lester looked around again. Nothing. Not so much as a footprint.

“Sam …” he breathed.

Mighty Joe's snores rumbled from the aft cabin, a counter-point to the electronic crackle of the radio in the flight compartment:
hronnk
!…
hrronnnnk
!…
hrronnnnnnk
! Butch had gone back twice already, once to prod him and tell him to shut up, the second time to attempt to roll him over on his stomach. The first time, Joe had muttered something obscene and had quit snoring for all of two minutes; the second attempt had been futile, since he was too big and the fold-down bunk was too small. Finally she had given up and resigned herself to enduring the nasal foghorn.

“What do you want me to say?” Butch asked quietly as she finished typing the last instructions into the computer keyboard in front of the co-pilot's seat and tapped the
ENTER
button. The LCD readout flashed as the data she had collected at Byrd Crater were transmitted via satellite comlink with Descartes Station. As soon as Lester had repaired the high-gain antenna on top of the spacecraft, she had insisted on relaying the all-important data back to the base for safekeeping. “You saw a ghost? Okay. You saw a ghost.”

“I don't know,” Lester said. “Maybe I just want you to say that you believe me.”

“Oh, I believe you, all right.” Butch sat back on the couch and propped her sneakered feet up on the dashboard. The cabin was dark except for a few instrument lights and the half-light of the rising run, filtering through the polarized canopy windows. “I mean, I don't think you're making this up,” she added as she sipped from the straw in the water bottle in her lap, “but I don't believe in ghosts, either.”

Lester was looking out the window. “Neither do I,” he admitted. “At least I didn't until …” He stopped and shrugged. “I saw what I saw, Susie.”

“Susie.” Butch grinned. “Nobody's called me that since I was a little girl. Thanks.” The smile left her face. “Did you check your suit's air feed? Maybe the mixture was a little …”

“I already covered that,” Lester replied. “No, the oxygen-nitrogen ratio was copacetic. Right by the manual. Of course, I had been working out there, and then was jumping around a bit, and maybe I hyperventilated, so it's feasible that I could have …”

He paused, then shook his head. “No. It's conceivable, but I know what I saw. That was no hallucination. That was Sam Sloane out there.”

They were both silent for a minute. Once the antenna had been fixed, they had been able to reestablish contact with Descartes Station, which in turn passed the information to the Moon Moths. The search-and-rescue team had the crash-site pinpointed now; it was just a matter of waiting until they arrived. With Mighty Joe doped-up and asleep in the back, they had plenty of time to kill. Time for a few ghost stories, Lester reflected. All we're missing now is a campfire and some marsh-mallows.…

“You knew Sam personally, didn't you?” Peterson asked, interrupting his train of thought. Lester nodded his head. “Were you here when he …?”

She didn't finish the question. “Uh-huh,” Lester said. He propped a foot up on the instrument panel and clasped his hands around his raised knee. He hesitated, then added, “You could even say that I was responsible for his death.”

“Umm.” Butch put down the water bottle and laid her head back against the headrest of the upholstered couch. “I heard part of the story. He got stranded in a crevasse and a rescue party didn't go out for him until it was too late. That was when you were in charge of the first base, wasn't it?”

“Yeah. In a nutshell, that's what happened.” Lester cleared his throat. “There were twenty-five of us back then. It was a much smaller base and the workload wasn't that heavy, so we had a lot of time on our hands. We had a good pipeline for getting dope shipped up to us from the Cape, so we had all the drugs we wanted. Uppers, downers, Ecstasy, crank, coke … we were always ripped to the tits on something or another.”

“Sounds like fun,” Peterson said drily.

Lester shook his head. “Naw. Not really. I've listened to a lot of so-called drug experts in my life, heard them yap on about how people get into dope because of … y'know, social pressures or media influences or all those theories about an innate human need to expand their consciousness. But they're full of shit, when it comes right down to it. Any doper can tell you that. You get into the stuff because you're bored with life.” He waved a hand at the bleak landscape beyond the windows. “I mean, look at this place. How boring can you get? A quarter of a million miles to the nearest decent cheeseburger.”

Butch cracked up. “Never heard it put that way before. Two hundred and forty thousand miles to the nearest dill pickle.” She shook her head and rubbed her eyes, still giggling, then regained her composure and looked back at him again. “So you were high all the time,” she asked in a more somber tone.

He blew out his breath. “High. Wasted. Fucking cross-eyed. Spent hours lying on my back in my office with a pair of headphones on my head, listening to old punk-rock tapes. Everyone else was in the same condition.”

Lester stopped, remembering eight years gone by. “Except Sam,” he added. “He didn't want any part of that shit, so he went out exploring by himself.” He sighed. “Must have been fun. More entertaining than frying your brain. But we thought he was a dink. I mean, I didn't care what he did. Not as long as I had enough pills and coke to get me through another day …”

He reached over and picked up Butch's water bottle. “Then one day he didn't come back on time.” He took a sip from the bottle and went on. “We had just gotten another load of dope from our ever-friendly source at the Cape, so we didn't notice.
I
didn't notice … until someone bothered to check the EVA logbook and noticed that Sam had left the base twenty hours earlier.”