Lunar Descent (8 page)

The Star Whoops usually goes away in a day or two, as long as you don't eat anything or move your head too much. You've begun to feel better, but now you're faced with two days of excruciating boredom. Unless you've made friends with the crew … (
laughs
) fat chance, because we don't want to know you … the flight deck is off-limits, so you're confined to mid-deck, which is about the size of a small den.

Up on the flight deck, we're keeping pretty busy much of the time, and since we've got windows, we can watch Earth receding in one direction and the Moon getting closer in another. But down below … well, it gets pretty fucking boring for the cattle. If you've thought ahead, you tossed a nice, long paperback novel into your duffel bag before you left the Cape. If you haven't, you're shit out of luck. There's a couple of windows on the mid-deck, but they won't do you much good. The LTV is flying backwards, so you can't watch the Moon as it gets closer, and there's radar and S-band antennas sticking out from the fuselage which prevent you from getting a last good look at Earth. Cislunar space is almost dark as pitch … can't hardly make out any stars, despite what you've seen on the TV shows … so mostly all you can see beyond the glass is this great, black void. It's about as exciting as watching a dead TV screen.

So you've got two days of hanging around in the mid-deck, plenty of time to consider whether you've made a serious career mistake. You spend the time getting acquainted with your fellow passengers, reading and re-reading the moonbase orientation guide … which is about as exciting as reading a computer maintenance manual … and anticipating the next tasty meal of rehydrated beef stroganoff or reconstituted shrimp cocktail, neither of which are exactly four-star. You eventually find yourself practicing zero g somersaults, which is fun until one of us sticks his head through the forward hatch and tells you to cut it out before you break something, and after that there's really nothing left to do except to sleep. And that's how you go to the Moon … catching zee's.

That's why in the saying about only making the trip to the Moon once, it's considered to be a blessing. And that's another one of the reasons why, when we heard that Descartes' new GM was a NASA and Skycorp veteran who had been to the Moon twice already, we were pretty leery of him. This is his second tour of duty? He's gotta be out of his mind! Who would want to go back to
that
dump again?

4. The Promised Land

Lester awoke to the sound of an electronic cricket chirping in his ear. His eyes opened to soft, warm darkness; he pushed back the black cotton eyeshades from his face. The lights of his compartment in the
Collins'
mid-deck had been turned low; he was wrapped in a nylon sleep restraint. Lester heard the cricket chirp again, and he reached up to his ear to touch the lobe of his headset. “Riddell,” he muttered.

Good morning, sir
. It was the commander of the
Michael Collins
, Alli James.
We're at six minutes till AOMV separation. We thought you might want to join us up here
.

“Hmm.” Lester's mouth tasted greasy, as if he had been eating bad fried chicken the night before. He ran the tip of his tongue across his front teeth, wiping away a thin, sticky sheen of grime. He could have used a toothbrush right now, but there wasn't enough time to visit the head. “Yeah. I'll be right down … um, up. Whatever.”

Do you need help
? she asked, not unkindly.

He winced. The
Collins
had been in space for two days, and during that time its crew had silently watched Descartes Station's new general manager struggle to reacclimate himself to the big and small problems of spaceflight. He had been sick as hell for the first day, and when his stomach had finally stopped flip-flopping, there had come the fight to regain his zero g reflexes. But even if he had needed help now, it would be over his dead body before he asked for it. Ready or not, he had to be the man in charge now.

“No, thanks,” Lester replied. “I'll be right up.” He touched the headset lobe again, signing off the intership comlink, then unzipped the bag and reached for the overhead handrail. He was fully dressed in his jumpsuit; prior experience had taught him never to get undressed for sleep, since it could hinder a person in the event of an in-flight emergency. He glanced at the luminous face of his wristwatch and saw that he had been asleep for only four and a half hours, yet he felt as if he'd caught a full eight hours of sleep. Another effect of spaceflight; in microgravity, the body requires less time to recharge. The dream of American industry realized: less rest, more work …

As Lester shoved aside the curtain of his compartment and floated out into the mid-deck, the recessed overhead lights brightened. Someone on the flight deck had thoughtfully decided to provide him with a semblance of morning. He passed storage bins decorated with taped-up postcards of sunny beach scenes and mountain trails, and noticed that the curtain had been pulled open in the compartment which had been occupied by the only other passenger on this trip; apparently she had also been invited to the flight deck for the landing. Across the narrow aisle, the curtain hiding the toilet was also open. He had the urge to make a visit, but he dismissed it. He could hold his bladder for another twenty or thirty minutes until they landed, and he had never enjoyed whizzing into a suction hose.

Riddell grasped the ladder with his hands and hauled himself up through the hatch onto the flight deck. The low, cramped compartment was dimly lit; most of the illumination came from tiny red and green status lights on the wraparound dashboards and from the silver-blue glow of the computer screens. The flight deck was a netherworld of thin, stark shadows; the pilot and copilot were two vague lumps sitting in high-backed seats in front of the angular, multipaned windows. He felt his way to an unoccupied seat behind the commander's seat on the left, lowered himself into it, and searched for the harness straps which dangled like dead tapeworms on either side.

Alli James looked around and favored him with a wide, bucktoothed grin: a homely Texarkana farm girl who had managed to get herself out of the soybean fields and onto the high frontier. “Get enough sleep?” she asked politely. Lester nodded. “Good. Three minutes to AOMV separation, better strap in tight.” She turned back to her station. “How's it looking there, Ray?”

“Systems copacetic. Internal electrical is powered up, batteries on standby.” The pilot's head was encased in a bulbous VR helmet; a fiber-optic cable led from the back of the helmet to the dashboard before him, and only his mouth could be seen below his opaque black visor. Inside the helmet, he was seeing the hallucinatory panorama of virtual-reality: a 3-D computer-simulated horizon, a gridwork of XYZ line coordinates, navigational beacons, guidance parameters, and artificial imagery. Like a mime artist imitating a pilot at work, Ray Carroll lifted a gloved hand, pointed his finger to an invisible console in midair, and made a couple of jabbing motions. Lester felt the moonship jar slightly as the RCR's on the outer hull fired to correct their trajectory.

“LTV tank pressurization complete on all four,” Ray drawled. “Guidance primary is on, abort sequence is off. Status is go. Ready to decouple AOMV.”

“Good deal,” Alli replied. “Okay, we're on full internal. Ready to come off autopilot.” As commander, Alli flew without wearing a VR helmet, to verify that Ray's electronic vision wasn't deceiving him. She reached up and snapped toggles which disengaged the autopilot, tapped a couple of digits into the flight computer, then pulled back the candy-striped safety cover from the booster-release bar above her head and watched as the digital timer on her main board counted down. “Autopilot off, manual descent system engaged. Y'all ready there?” Carroll nodded. “All right. AOMV separation minus five … four … three … two … one …”

Holding the yoke steady with her left hand, she yanked the release bar down with her right hand. There was a sudden jar as the pyros ignited to separate the
Collins'
lunar lander from its aerobraking orbital maneuvering vehicle, the unmanned first-stage booster which had brought them from Earth to the Moon.

James gently moved the yoke in a shallow arc; as the lander slowly turned around, the cylindrical booster floated past the windows, receding as it entered its parking orbit. Strapped to trusses behind the huge round disk of the heat shield were four squat, mylar-wrapped cargo canisters. A tug from the base would rendezvous later with the AOMV to unload the Spam-cans and bring them down to Descartes, a two-step system which saved on the LTV's reaction mass. Alli studied the AOMV for a few seconds as she fired the control jets to distance the lander from the booster. “AOMV and the Spam-cans look good,” she said. “No damage.”

“Distance five hundred six,” Ray reported. “I read you go for LOI.”

“Good 'nuff for me if it is for thee.” The commander flicked back the safety cover from the engine-arm toggle and flipped it, then rested her right hand on the throttle next to her seat. “Okay, let's take her around. Primary descent engine armed and ready. Counting down for LOI burn, on my mark. Six … five … four … three … two … one … mark.”

She eased the throttle forward, and there was a long, shuddering jar as the lander's main engine fired. For a couple of minutes there was the sensation of gravity. Lester felt his butt settle into the seat, and heard some unsecured object drop to the floor in the mid-deck below. Through the front windows he saw the gray, curving face of the Moon as it hove into view—upside down, about fifty miles below them and closing.

The standard flight plan for lunar descent called for the
Collins
to make a single, elliptical orbit around the Moon; since the Apollo days, this was done to effect a steady, fuel-conservative deceleration before final approach and landing. The LTV had already overshot the Descartes highlands. To the south, Lester recognized the brown-gray maria of the cloud to the north lay the vast plains Ocean of Storms, pockmarked by the crater Copernicus and, just beyond that, the shining rays of kepler. The tiny shadow of the moonship rapidly coasted across the maria until it merged with the deeper shadows of the Cordillera mountain region when, abruptly, the ship passed the daylight terminator and they were flying over the night-shrouded lunar farside.

Riddell heard a low moan from the seat beside him. For the first time since he had entered the flight deck, he noticed the young woman strapped into, the passenger seat beside him.

If Alli James was homely in a fetching sort of way, then Tina McGraw, the new Skycorp lunar worker, was just plain homely: wide face, wide body, short-cropped mouse-brown hair, and a figure which bordered on masculinity. She had said very little to Lester over the last couple of days; in fact, she had almost been rude in her stand-offish attitude. She was saying even less now. McGraw stared fixedly at a point between her knees, her jaw muscles working as she clenched her teeth. Lester smiled a little. McGraw had been battling space sickness when the two of them had transferred aboard the
Collins
from Skycorp's LEO station; it had been only yesterday that she had been able to keep anything in her stomach. Now, seeing the Moon upside down, she was fighting Star Whoops again.

“That's right,” Lester said softly. “Keep your eyes on something that's not moving. I'll let you know when it's safe to look up again.” McGraw nodded her head slightly, but said nothing.

The graphic readout on the dashboard computer screen between the pilots showed that the LTV was steadily rolling over on its axis; they were now traveling close to six thousand miles per hour. “Pitchover one-sixty, roll zero, yaw zero,” the copilot murmured. “One-forty … one-ten …”

“Coming up on pericynthian,” Alli murmured offhandedly. “By the way, Les, there's Hawking Station.”

Lester craned his neck to peer over her shoulder. Farside was a darker-than-dark mass between them and the sun. He could see nothing … then, for a moment, he glimpsed the cruciform light which marked the unmanned lunar observatory. The long, dotted lines of the very-low-frequency radio telescope array spread out for fifty miles in compass-point directions from the semiautomatic observatory poised near the edge of Krasovsky Crater. “Yeah, I see it.”

“Uh-huh,” Alli said distantly. She was through playing tour guide; back to business. “Altitude fifty-five thousand feet.”

“Roger that,” Ray said. “Pitchover one hundred forward, roll minus twenty, yaw ten. Compensating for drift. Coming up on nearside terminator. Get ready for powered descent burn, on my mark.” He paused. “I'm picking up LDSM's signal, too,” he added with a smile. “Sounds like the Moondog McCloud show.”

“Moondog McCloud?” Riddell asked.

“The jock on the lunar radio station.” Alli glanced over her shoulder. “You
have
been away a while, haven't you?” She chuckled a little. “What's he playing, Ray?”

“Chuck Berry.”

“Oooh! I
love
Chuck Berry. I'll put it on the cabin speakers.” She touched the communications panel keypad, setting the volume low, and the opening riffs of “The Promised Land” squalled through the cabin.

“Good tunes. Okay, Ray, ready for PDI on your mark.” Alli once again grasped the engine throttle. She let her left hand glide to the communications board and toggled a couple of switches without looking. “Descartes Traffic, this is Skycorp LTV oh-five-eleven, requesting clearance for primary approach, over.”

“Pitch ninety-four,” Ray continued. “Ninety-three, ninety-two, ninety-one … mark.” Alli moved the yoke forward again, the main engine fired again, braking their approach for landing. They could see only stars through the window; the lander was flying backwards now, its forward hull facing away from the lunar surface.

Sunlight abruptly broke through the windows, casting long, quick-moving shadows across the cabin before the photosensitive filters kicked in and reduced the glare. Riddell checked the screen again; the simulations confirmed that the ship had passed over the terminator. They should be somewhere over the highlands region separating Smyth's Sea and the Sea of Fertility by now, just south of the equator. He glanced at McGraw, who was cautiously beginning to raise her head. “Not yet, Tina,” he said quickly.