Sea of Crises (16 page)

Off to the right, Cartwright knew, was a field of immense boulders. Not good. The area beyond, however, had appeared in the reconnaissance photos to be clear. Then, again, so had the landing site they’d just overridden. Doing quick calculations, Cartwright decided they would have to take their chances past the boulders. Worst case, he knew, they’d jettison the descent stage, fire the main ascent rocket and abort the landing. There was no way Cartwright wanted that to happen. It would render the mission a complete failure.

The response of the lunar module was sluggish, but familiar. They skimmed across the boulder field. After a short time, the size of the rocks diminished, but the clusters below them were still too big and concentrated to allow a safe landing. He worked the toggle switch to further slow their rate of descent.

“Two hundred,” Gale called out. “Now down three, twenty-one forward.”

“How’s the fuel?” Cartwright asked.

“Seven percent.”

Cartwright winced. They were running out of time. To hammer the point home, a light on the instrument panel began to glow. They had ninety seconds of fuel left, and twenty seconds of that had to be saved for an abort. The damn boulder field seemed to go on forever.

“One hundred. Down two, nineteen forward.”

They weren’t going to make it.

Then, ahead of them, appeared a clearing. Not large. Maybe a hundred feet square, if that. It was, however, the only site that offered any chance of level ground. Cartwright quickly weighed their options. There really weren’t any. Putting the module down here would be a little like threading a needle. But it would have to do. He eased back on the controller.

“Coming through eighty,” Gale said. “Down two, seventeen forward. Now fifteen.” There was a new tension in the man’s voice.

He heard Delahousse. His voice also sounded strained. “Thirty seconds.”

They had less than half a minute of fuel.

Cartwright fixed his sights on a large, jagged rock that thrust upward beyond the clearing. This would have to be his focal point. To put them in the clearing, he would need to come down perfectly horizontal, and he wouldn’t be able to see the landing site as he dropped. As if to emphasize the problem, the area below them was suddenly obscured, the blast from the descent engine stirring up particles of dust on the surface. With no atmosphere to lift it skyward and little gravity to pull it downward, the dust shot out in straight lines in every direction, creating a solid moving blanket and concealing all details on the surface. He kept his concentration on the jagged rock, which now looked like an island in a blurry sea.

“Sixty feet,” said Gale. “Down two and a half, three forward. Now two.”

Eyes locked on the jagged rock, Cartwright halted their forward progress. The dust being kicked up by their engine had the effect of distorting his sense of motion. He suddenly felt as if they were moving backwards. Shifting his attention to the instruments, he resisted the urge to nudge the controller forward.

“Forty feet,” Gale called out. “Down two and half. Down two.”

“Fifteen seconds,” Delahousse’s voice announced with undisguised concern.

It was now too late to abort. Cartwright prayed that the clearing, and not some immense boulder, sat below them.

“Twenty feet. Down one.”

Involuntarily, Cartwright braced himself.

“Ten feet. Down one.”

A blue light on the console illuminated. It meant that one of the probes dangling a few feet below
Concord’s
footpads had crunched into something, the impact completing an electrical circuit.

“Contact,” Gale exclaimed.

Hoping it was the surface and not a rock, Cartwright reached out and hit the engine stop button. He experienced a moment of otherworldliness. Then, with a solid thump, the pads of the module made contact with the surface, and they were no longer moving. Thankfully, they were upright and level.

There was a second of stunned silence. Then the men’s training kicked in.

While Gale read off the items on the post-landing checklist, the two men quickly set a series of switches and typed numbers into the computer.

Finally, Cartwright keyed his mike and announced, “Houston,
Concord
is safely down in the Sea of Crises.”

“Roger,
Concord
, we copy you on the ground. Thank God, and good work.”

“Thanks Rick,” Cartwright said with real emotion. And he took his first steady breath on the surface of the moon.

He looked over at his crewmate. The man was a good three inches shorter than Cartwright, but stocky and solidly built. Behind the visor of his helmet, the visage that peered back up at him was classic Mason Gale, complete impassivity. Nothing, it seemed, would ever rattle the man. Then, to Cartwright’s surprise, a rare grin split Gale’s face. Awkwardly, the man reached his right hand across his body and held it out. Cartwright put his gloved hand in Gale’s, and they shook.

“Nice job, Commander,” Gale said with an odd formality.

#

Though he was tired, sleep eluded Bob Cartwright. He’d been anxious to start their lunar exploration as soon as they landed, but the mission profile called for the two astronauts to rest first. They wouldn’t take their initial steps on the moon for another seven hours. In the meantime, they were expected to get some sleep.

Once they’d confirmed the lunar module was secure, he and Gale had climbed out of their bulky space suits, stripping down to their long-johns. The gravity on the moon was only one-sixth that on earth, but it was just enough to enable Cartwright to lie comfortably in the hammock strung in the confined space. After the disorientation of weightlessness that had plagued him over the past few days, he was grateful for the relief it offered. Still, he was too keyed up to nod off.

In the hammock below him, Gale apparently had no such problems. Cartwright could just hear the man’s rhythmic breathing over the whir of the cabin recirculation motor.

After all these months, Cartwright still did not know what to make of Mason Gale.

To say the man was an enigma was putting it mildly.

Cartwright remembered the day they met. How could he forget? It was one of the most extraordinary days of his life. It had been Cartwright’s thirty-sixth birthday, the first day of April, 1976. Cartwright had landed at Ellington Field in Houston a few minutes earlier after a cross-country flight from Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, his thoughts dominated by the family gathering to which he was already late. After he descended from the cockpit of the T-38 he’d checked out the day before, a member of the ground crew approached and informed him that he was wanted immediately in the office of Stuart Overholdt, the Director of Flight Crew Operations. Still dressed in his flight suit, and wary, as always, of practical jokes - a residual effect of having been born on April Fool’s Day - he arrived a few minutes later at the office of his boss, the man in charge of the astronauts.

At one point in time, the office had been the center of a maelstrom. Much lobbying and intrigue had gone on in and around the place. There had been a tremendous controversy over who might serve as the commander on the first manned mission to the moon. And, though the stakes might have been, on balance, somewhat smaller, there were nevertheless huge consequences, not to mention egos, involved in the selection of the crews who would man the various moon missions that followed.

By 1976, however, the frenzy had died. Overholdt’s predecessor had retired. The U.S. space program was in a bit of a hiatus. Skylab had come and gone, and the Space Transportation System, which would become known as the space shuttle, was still in development. While there was a certain amount of jockeying going on for seats on the shuttle missions, all of which were still conceptual, the crown jewel, the Apollo program, had died a painful and premature death, and with it went the ultimate goal: A shot at landing on the moon.

In early 1970, just a month after Cartwright entered the astronaut program, the Apollo 20 mission was cancelled, the victim of budget cuts. Then, in September of that same year, the Apollo 15 and Apollo 19 missions were eliminated. The remaining missions were re-numbered, leaving Apollo 17 in December of 1972 the last hurrah for the U.S. manned lunar program.

In the years subsequent, many of the men, most of whose initial service predated Cartwright, had seen the writing on the wall and packed it in. The effect had been to elevate Cartwright quickly to a senior status among the remaining members of the program.

In the hallway outside Flight Crew Operations, he found Steve Dayton sitting in one of the padded chairs, reading a magazine. Dayton, who had the day off, was in casual clothes. They greeted one another warmly.

Dayton and Cartwright had served together on the second backup crew for the Apollo-Soyuz mission the year before, a joint U.S./Soviet venture that employed some of the unused Apollo program hardware. Cartwright had been the crew commander, and Dayton had served as command module pilot.

Shortly after Cartwright arrived, the door to Overholdt’s office opened, and he and Dayton were asked to come in. There were four men already in the room. Overholdt, whom Cartwright had known for years, made the introductions. To Cartwright’s surprise, one of the men waiting for them was a United States Senator, Harrison Burton. With him was Adam Huffman, the Deputy Administrator of NASA. Both men Cartwright recognized from photographs. The fourth man he’d never seen before.

“Bob, Steve,” Overholdt said, “I’d like you meet Mason Gale. You’ll be working closely together.”

Cartwright reached out a hand, and Gale practically crushed it with a powerful grip. Stifling a grimace, and still harboring lingering suspicions about practical jokes, Cartwright turned to the director. “And what, may I ask, sir, will we be working on?”

Overholdt smiled broadly. “That, Bob, is the proverbial sixty-four million dollar question, give or take a few million.”

It was apparently a private joke, as the senator and deputy administrator chuckled. Gale’s expression, Cartwright noticed, did not change.

Overholdt motioned them all to take seats at the long table that took up half of his office. “What you’re about to hear is not yet public. I don’t need to remind you of your security clearances and your obligations to maintain classified information.” With that, he turned matters over to Huffman.

The deputy administrator cleared his throat. “I’m pleased to announce that, thanks in large measure to the considerable assistance of Senator Burton here, additional funding has been put in place to enable the Agency to revive the Apollo program. There will now be at least one additional mission, Apollo 18. And,” he paused, fixing Cartwright, Dayton and Gale with level looks, “each of you has been selected to serve together as the primary crew for that mission. Gentlemen, you’re going to the moon.”

If that, Cartwright thought, was a practical joke, it was the best one anyone had ever played on him.

But it had become quickly clear that it was no joke. Though the mission was not announced to the public until over three months later, the men were immediately plunged into an intense regimen of training. With less than six months to liftoff, the normal schedule that attended preparation for such a mission was dramatically compressed. For Cartwright and Dayton, much of the training was familiar. For Gale, it was all new.

When the opportunity first presented itself, Cartwright privately questioned Overholdt regarding the selection of a man who had previously not been attached to the astronaut program, particularly given the fact that he was taking the seat Cartwright believed should have rightfully gone to his friend, Rick Delahousse.

“Believe me, Bob,” Overholdt said, “it wasn’t my call. This came down from the administrator’s office. Apparently, to sell this additional mission, we’ve got to show it has an overwhelmingly scientific focus. That means taking a qualified specialist in lunar geology. On the one hand, I know you and Rick have attended the trainings and done the field work, and I have every confidence that you two would do a fine job.”

Over the years, Cartwright and Delahousse, like most of the Apollo astronauts before them, had undergone extensive instruction, both in the classroom and in the field, learning how to recognize and describe geological features and how to select the samples that would be brought back to earth with them. Delahousse, in particular, had become something of a standout among the current group of astronauts.

“On the other hand, though,” Overholdt continued, “we have to convince a skeptical public that, with all the other demands on the federal budget, this is a worthy expenditure. If the choice is that you go with Mason Gale or you don’t go at all, you go with Gale.

“But,” he added, “if Gale doesn’t cut it in training, then I won’t hesitate to ground him, the consequences be damned.”

It had been a reasonable arrangement. And, to ameliorate things, Delahousse had been given command of the mission’s backup crew. Furthermore, Delahousse would have first shot at Apollo 19 if that mission ever got the green light.

In fairness, Gale gave them no reason to question his selection. The man was certainly competent, and he tackled the training with a vigor. He wasn’t the friendliest of crewmates. In fact, he was, on his best days, remarkably brusque and could at times be downright rude. But he’d earned Cartwright’s grudging respect, and, as Cartwright now lay in his hammock struggling unsuccessfully to find sleep, he had no doubt that Gale would perform his duties well.

Cartwright’s thoughts turned, as they frequently did, to the boys. Once again, he questioned whether it was fair for them that he take the risks associated with what he was doing. What if, God forbid, something did go wrong and he didn’t return? It was a possibility he freely accepted. But the boys were given no say in it. And if he didn’t come back, they would be all alone.

It would be so much better, he reflected, if Barbara were still around.

For Cartwright, even after seven years, the pain of Barbara’s death was fresh. And bitter. The autopsy on the driver of the tractor-trailer had confirmed that the man was hopped up on amphetamines at the time of the accident. According to the trucking company records, he’d been on the road for over twenty hours when he allowed his vehicle to drift across the center lane of the highway, where it slammed headfirst into the little Volkswagen Barbara was driving back from a luncheon at the naval station. The doctors told Cartwright that Barbara had died instantly, and he took some slight comfort in that. The truck driver had not been so lucky. He’d been pinned in the cab by the collision while gas from his ruptured tank had spread around him. The gas ignited about a minute after the crash, but before anyone could get to him. According to onlookers, the man screamed for at least three minutes, first in terror, then in agony. His official cause of death was searing of the lungs, as he breathed in the fire that was in the process of consuming his body.