Sea of Crises (25 page)

“I appreciate,” the young man said, weakly, “but, is no use.”

“Oh, yeah,” Cartwright said, “why’s that?”

“I am,” Kruchinkin paused, taking a couple of labored breaths, “what is expression? A goner, yes?”

“No, you’re not.” Cartwright gave him a stern look. “You’re not.”

Kruchinkin looked down, as if studying the unfamiliar suit, almost completely covered in Gale’s blood. He looked back up at Cartwright.

“Is no use. I am dead.”

“You’re not dead until I tell you you’re dead, do you understand that, cosmonaut?”

Kruchinkin stared back, pain and uncertainty vying with one another on his face. And something else, Cartwright could see. Hope.

“But I am…”

“You are,” Cartwright interrupted, “a ramblin’ wreck from Georgia Tech.”

The faint smile returned to the young cosmonaut’s face. After a long moment, he concluded in a weak voice, “And a hell of an engineer.”

“Damn right,” Cartwright said, sliding on the overboots. “Now, you’ll have to help me. I’m going to get your helmet on and pressurize your suit. Then I’ll bleed out the atmosphere in this air lock. When I’ve got the outer door open, you’ll need to stand. I’ll assist. The rover is just outside. Are you with me?”

Kruchinkin gave a slight nod.

“Good,” Cartwright said, as he positioned the helmet over the Russian’s head and snapped it into place.

#

At the landing site, Kruchinkin, obviously in a great deal of pain and extremely weak, nevertheless put forth a heroic effort, climbing the ladder on his own. At no time had he expressed any complaints or balked at doing the things Cartwright asked of him.

Cartwright settled the cosmonaut in a half seated, half reclined position on the ascent engine cover. He removed the man’s helmet and backpack, but left the blood-soaked space suit on. He was tempted to keep the suit pressurized, thinking that it might help with the wound, but he opted for comfort. Kruchinkin nodded his thanks, closed his eyes and, it appeared to Cartwright, again slipped into unconsciousness.

Cartwright had still been unable to effect radio contact with Earth. He wondered whether Dayton had been right about the interference originating from their landing site. Could some sort of device have been installed in the module to jam the 48-kilobit signal needed to beam messages back home? If so, could he find the thing and disable it? Possibly, he thought, if it were here in the pressurized crew compartment. The space was tiny and there were limited places it could have been hidden. But he didn’t think there was much reason for it to have been stowed here. More likely, it was concealed somewhere in the balance of the module, and it could take hours to find, assuming he even knew what to look for, which, he reflected ruefully, he didn’t.

Fortunately, he still had the ability to speak with Steve Dayton in the command module. For whatever reason, the Comm 2 frequency had not been jammed, perhaps because the people pulling the strings had concluded there was no reason to hide short wave communications on the moon. After all, at its peak, there were only five people in the universe who could have tuned in to listen anyway. Now, there were only three, and one of them was unconscious.

Cartwright checked his timer and confirmed that the command module had cleared the horizon.

“
Concord
to
Lexington
,” he said, “do you read me Steve?”

“Loud and clear,” Dayton replied in his Maine accent. “Are you back at the module?”

“I am,” Cartwright said. Then he amended, “We are.”

When he’d had the chance to re-connect with Dayton, Cartwright had informed the man about the events that had transpired on the moon’s surface. Dayton had been appropriately shocked. Since being briefed, Dayton had completed numerous orbits, and he obviously had a lot of time to think while on the far side of the moon, because each time he’d emerged after the first several passes, he’d cooked up increasingly more fanciful theories regarding the motives and participants behind the whole thing. Finally, the two astronauts had come to the realization that they didn’t know what was going on, and they’d concluded that the best they could do was rendezvous and get home. There, to use a phrase Gale had earlier employed, everything would be sorted out.

“Are you ready to go through the checklist?” Cartwright asked.

“Affirmative.”

In the absence of a lunar module pilot, the role Gale had filled, Cartwright had asked Dayton to retrieve his copy of the ascent pre-launch protocol, and the two now started through the tedious process of verifying that all systems were ready for the lift off. As Dayton read each item, Cartwright manually verified the applicable readouts and set the appropriate switches.

They were nearing the end of the list, and, thus far, everything had checked out.

“Ascent helium, tank one,” Dayton called out.

Cartwright toggled the switch and froze. “Negative,” he said, after a moment.

“Did you say ‘negative’?”

“I did,” Cartwright replied, cycling the switch on and off. “Zero pressure.”

There was a long silence. Cartwright guessed Dayton was consulting the manual. Finally, Dayton said, “Ok, check ascent helium, tank two.”

Cartwright toggled that switch and got the same result. He took a deep breath. “We have a problem, Steve.”

Dayton didn’t immediately reply. They both knew the seriousness of this news. The ascent engine on the lunar module was fueled by a hypergolic mixture of propellant and oxidizer, Aerozine 50 and nitrogen tetroxide, respectively. When the two materials were brought into contact, they ignited spontaneously, providing the thrust needed to push the ascent stage of the module off the lunar surface. Earlier in the checklist, Cartwright and Dayton had confirmed that there was plenty of propellant and oxidizer contained in the storage tanks of the module. The problem was, without something to force the two together, the fuel was useless. The transferring agent the module relied on was helium.

And Cartwright had just determined that there was, apparently, no helium onboard.

That wasn’t logical. As bizarre as the whole thing with Gale had been, Cartwright couldn’t imagine that helium had not been loaded onto the ascent stage of the lunar module and that the two of them had, in effect, been sent on a one-way mission. If that had been the case, he thought, why would Gale have gone to the efforts he did after completing his tasks at the Soviet base? The man had certainly been expecting to live. And, to do so, the ascent engine would have had to function.

No, Cartwright told himself, something else was wrong. Think, Bob.

And, after a long moment, a thought did occur to him. As soon as it did, he wished it hadn’t.

“Steve, I may know what the problem is. Or at least the root of the problem.” He checked his timer. He was about to lose Dayton anyway. “I’ve got to go outside again. I’ll check back in with you when you re-emerge.”

“Ok,” Dayton replied. Cartwright could hear the anxiety in the man’s voice. It matched his own.

Cartwright once again positioned the helmet on Kruchinkin and repressurized the man’s suit. The cosmonaut stirred briefly, then returned to a fitful sleep. When Cartwright had his own suit pressurized, he dumped the cabin atmosphere, eased out the front hatch and clambered back down the stairs. He made his way around the module to the rear, where the pale, broken body of Gale lay in the gray dust, naked but for the soiled fecal containment subsystem around his midsection that looked vaguely like an adult diaper. Cartwright stared at the corpse for several seconds. It looked forlorn and pathetic. He felt no sympathy.

He positioned himself near Gale’s body and looked up. It took only a couple of seconds to see it. Just to the side of the aft equipment bay, below a cluster of reaction control thrusters, there was a small hole in one of the panels.

Just great, he thought. Now he knew where the bullet that Gale had intended for him had gone. It had apparently entered a compartment on the side of the module that housed a series of tanks containing oxygen, propellant, oxidizer and, of course, helium.

When Gale had fired the weapon, Cartwright had believed he’d escaped death. Perhaps, he realized now, he had simply postponed it.

To know the extent of the damage, he needed to check inside the compartment the bullet had entered. That compartment, however, sat well above the lunar surface, a good twelve to fifteen feet higher than where he now stood. There was no good way to access it from here. He considered the problem for a minute. Then he returned to the front of the module, stopping at the rover to retrieve a tool kit. He climbed back up into the crew compartment. Kruchinkin, he could see through the clear shield on the man’s helmet, was awake, but apparently too exhausted to do anything but follow him with his eyes.

When they’d returned from the Soviet base, Cartwright had stowed the tethers that had most recently served to bind the suit he’d removed from Gale. He now pulled them out again, running them one at a time through his hands, gauging their respective lengths. He selected one he thought would work and clipped an end to the metallic buckle at his waist. Then he threaded the other end of the line through a loop on the tool kit he’d brought from the rover, pulling the kit close to him. He gathered up the balance of the tether and shoved it into the utility pocket at his thigh.

He reached up, unlatched the overhead hatch, and opened it. Planting a foot on the engine cover, he pushed himself up, forcing his way through the narrow opening. This one was smaller than the forward egress hatch, and he experienced a moment of panic when he thought he might get stuck. But he was able to wriggle his way through, and he emerged into the small circular area at the top of the vessel that would, if they were ever able to get back to the command service module, serve as a short tunnel to the command capsule.

Taking a seat on the top of the module, Cartwright withdrew the tether and attached the clip at the other end of the line to a small utility bar inset along the side of the access tunnel. He checked to make sure the line was holding at both ends, then swung his legs up and over the edge, rotating his body so that he was facing the module, and he slowly lowered himself down the side of the structure. He’d had to estimate the length for the tether, but it wound up being just about perfect. At full extension, he was able to reach down and plant his boots on one of the support members at the top of the descent stage. Using the tether to steady himself, he stood upright, facing one of the side panels to the compartment into which the bullet had been fired.

When he had himself situated, he pulled from the tool kit a socket wrench, the end of which he positioned over the nearest of the fasteners holding the panel to the side of the module, and he worked the fastener loose, allowing the small piece to fall free and drop slowly to the lunar surface below. He repeated the process with the other five fasteners, and, when the last of them came away, he also allowed the panel to drift to the ground. Then he worked his way over to the rear of the compartment he’d just exposed.

The bullet Gale had fired had pierced the aft helium tank near its base and had passed clean through. It had just missed a small container of liquid oxygen that sat between the two helium tanks and had embedded itself in the side of the second tank. The first tank, he knew, would have drained immediately. It looked like the second may have taken longer to discharge, but he feared that it too was probably empty. In that case, he and Kruchinkin were dead men. But he had no idea how to determine what was left in the tank or, more importantly, what to do about it.

A sudden movement to his side made his heart jump. Then he realized that Kruchinkin had somehow managed to follow him out of the docking hatch and was in the process of lowering himself down to his side. When the cosmonaut reached him, Cartwright could see the man wincing inside his helmet. After a moment, though, Kruchinkin found a foothold, turned and looked at him.

“Is problem, yes?” he asked, his voice in Cartwright’s earpiece still extraordinarily weak.

“Yes,” Cartwright said, simply, pointing to the bullet that had flattened itself against the second tank. Kruchinkin squinted, then blinked. After a moment, he raised his head and studied the other contents of the compartment, then returned his attention to the damaged tank. He reached in slowly and ran his hand across a device attached to the top of both helium tanks.

“Pneumatic control assembly,” he said softly, apparently by way of explanation. With two fingers, he slightly rotated a threaded piece protruding from the side of the device. Then he pointed to the bullet. “Tank is not yet empty. You have patch for space suit?”

Cartwright nodded. The kit was still in his utility pocket.

“We patch now,” Kruchinkin said. “Quickly.”

Of course. Cartwright kicked himself for not thinking of it. With a newfound sense of hope, he reached into his pocket and withdrew the small kit. He selected one of the patch sets, tearing open the first half and withdrawing the clean strip of gauze that it contained. He reached in and rubbed the area around which the bullet had come to rest, wiping away the accumulated dust and debris. Then he tore open the second half and withdrew the actual patch, quickly placing the dull adhesive side against the tank and pressing it into place with the heel of his gloved hand. When he pulled his hand back, the patch had sealed over the spot, conforming to the shape of the spent bullet embedded in the side of the tank.

Kruchinkin had continued to study the layout of the compartment. He now turned his head toward Cartwright and said faintly, “Is very little left in tank. Maybe thirty seconds.” He winced. “Maybe less.” A cough caused him to grimace, and he shut his eyes for a moment before opening them and refocusing on Cartwright.

“Maybe less,” he repeated.

Cartwright was doing quick calculations. An ascent burn took seven minutes. The standard profile called for the module to rise straight up from the lunar surface for about twelve seconds, before being taken through a pitch program that would eventually elevate the craft to 50,000 feet, at which point it would enter a coasting transfer orbit in preparation for rendezvous with the command module. The adjustments necessary to bring the module into proper course alignment would normally be performed by the reaction control system, consisting of the various thrusters located in clusters around the vessel.