Adrift on the Sea of Rains (Apollo Quartet) (2 page)

Peterson sits at his desk in the command centre, mapping the boundaries of his cabin fever. Soon he will have to go EVA again, but for now his awareness still resides within the curved bulkheads of the base’s cylinders. It is the lightheadedness brought on by the one-sixth gravity, it makes him feel as though his mind occupies a space bigger than that of his skull, as though it fills the room, the cylinder, Falcon Base, Rima Hadley, cislunar space…

He puts his hands on the desk-top, splay-fingered, and gazes down at them. The last five evolutions have taken them to dead Earths, and salvation remains elusive, as precarious as their existence. Now that he has the Bell recalibrated, the more kilowatts Kendall pumps into it, the further each evolution takes them. But push too far and he’ll burn out more than those integrated circuits. The main power bus, perhaps. The SP-100 nuclear reactor, maybe. And without that they’re finished. The fuel cells might last a week, eight days, but once they’re drained…

A scrape of sound across the command centre catches his attention. McKay at the radio shack has just moved a clipboard. As Peterson watches, McKay picks up a pen and scribbles something on the page attached to the clipboard. He is not following orders—Peterson ceased giving them: he abdicated his authority over nine months before, no longer seeing a reason for it. They are all highly-trained officers—USAF, USMC and USN; pilots and aviators—and they know what needs to be done. They follow their daily routine, the unwritten orders of the day, because it fills their waking hours, because it provides some small sense of purpose, some small reason to go on living. It makes bearable the desolate landscape around and about Falcon Base, the tubular prison of the base itself. Without routine, they would have no reason to monitor and maintain the systems which keep them alive.

That note McKay has just scrawled is the result of the hourly scan of the S-band. It reads, Nothing to report. As it has done since they witnessed the death of the Earth.

Ripping noises rise lightly through the hatch to the floor below. Moments later, Scott’s head appears and he climbs up into the command centre. He is followed by Captain Gordon Curtis, USMC, who has a ring-binder tucked under one arm. They are to spell Peterson and McKay, to take the watch for another four fruitless hours. McKay leaves without a backward glance, and Curtis settles before the radio and begins scanning frequencies.

Peterson rises from his desk and gestures for Scott to take his seat.

There is a protocol to these handovers, but they can only say, Nothing to report, so many times, in so many different ways. Scott silently takes Peterson’s chair, and it’s as though what little personality the XO possesses drains from him. As Peterson watches, the man turns into an automaton, and sits there blank and unblinking.

Peterson leaves him to it. They all have their own ways of dealing with the situation. Deep inside each of them, hope has been eroded away to a tiny nub, as useless as an appendix. Peterson loses himself in the lunar landscape. McKay locks himself in his room and listens to mournful country music, as if their misery renders his own smaller and more manageable. Scott has put away his personality, consigned it to some corner of his mind where it cannot be battered and bruised by their slow descent into despair. Curtis reads, working his way obsessively through every manual and technical document in the base. Kendall has his torsion field generator, the Bell, whose arcane workings he claims to understand more with each passing week.

The others—Alden and Fulton, Bartlett and Neubeck—each have their own methods to counter the madness. For now, those four are hidden away somewhere—perhaps in their own rooms, in the gym, the workshop. Peterson doesn’t know and he doesn’t want to know. He considers visiting Kendall in his lab, but he doesn’t like the man and the feeling is mutual. He makes his way down the corridor to his own room, feeling like he’s walking on tiptoe though the soles of his feet adhere strangely to the carpet.

He reaches his room, slides open the flimsy door, stretches out on his bunk, and thinks black thoughts. Every now and again, his breath seems to catch in his throat, as if expecting vacuum. These brief panic attacks have become increasingly common, are now waking him several times each night. Only in his spacesuit, wrapped in its protective embrace and soothed by the whirr of its pumps and fans, does he feel peace. The polycarbonate helmet, with its LEVA, is his window on the world, and gives him distance from the lifeless landscape. He needs to be able to divorce himself from his surroundings, to put up barriers—physical and emotional and mental—between himself and the world. Without that, he thinks he might die. He refuses to invest too much emotion in the Bell. For months now, it’s taken them to one dead Earth after another.

Yet still he believes escape is possible.

Peterson had only three weeks left of his tour when Kendall arrived at Falcon Base, although he’d known of the man’s arrival for several weeks in advance, and he’d repeatedly argued the Moon was not the place for a scientist, that if his experiments were so vital to national defence they needed to be somewhere secure, the Moon’s only defence being its remoteness. There was little stopping the Soviets launching one of their Proton boosters, sending a warhead all the way to Mare Imbrium and creating a new crater right where Falcon Base lay buried in the wall of Rima Hadley. After all, the situation was getting real bad down there, Peterson could see that even from his distant eyrie—no, nothing in orbit yet, no rain of ICBMs, horizon to horizon, rocketting East to West, immediately answered with a retaliatory launch, speeding West to East. No ten minute warning, no classrooms silent but for the whimpering of kids huddled beneath their school-desks, no slamming hatches echoing across yards as people waited for the end in inadequate fall-out shelters—it had not gone that far yet; but NORAD had been at Defcon 2 for the last five months, and there was fighting in Anatolia between Soviet forces and NATO-backed Kurdish rebels, and it was only a matter of time before the rest of NATO pitched in and the battle spread north along the Iron Curtain. Vandenberg claimed they’d spot any warhead launched on TLI, and they’d give Peterson plenty of warning, which didn’t answer what they’d do at Falcon Base after an alert—hide in the Apennine Mountains? in the depths of Archimedes Crater? learn to breathe vacuum and live off the regolith? There were a dozen men at the base but only a single ALM with an ascent stage—which could lift four into orbit and, now they were using the new Block IV 5-man command modules, they could get those four back to Earth in one spacecraft. But it didn’t take a rocket scientist to see the math didn’t add up. For all those hours Peterson had spent in classrooms at JSC and the Cape and Vandenberg, learning his way round the Apollo spacecraft and Falcon Base, he’d travelled to the Moon as much on faith as on Aerozine 50 and dinitrogen tetroxide, on an unshakeable conviction that if it all went SNAFU on the Moon, Vandenberg would do their damnedest to get every man home. Once he was on Luna, of course, he saw the error of his ways—if it broke on the Moon, you fixed it on the Moon, you couldn’t send it off to the repairman a quarter of a million miles away—if you didn’t fix it, you died. That wasn’t the case for the equipment they sent with Kendall for his experiments; if that broke there’d be a nasty bill for the Pentagon, but no one was going to find themselves sucking vacuum, which was a relief, except… The Bell was a Saturn V launch all its own, a LM Truck that could have, and should have, carried supplies—though they had close to two years’ worth on hand in Falcon Base. The one hundred kilowatt SP-100 nuclear reactor was good for twenty years, and they recycled their air and water so effectively both would last them years too; but food, that was the problem, if it could be called food, all freeze-dried or flash-frozen and about as appetising as a Pan-American economy class meal consumed somewhere over the Atlantic in a Boeing 2707 SST. As commander, Peterson felt it incumbent on him to be there to see Kendall land, so he was outside in his spacesuit, with lunar dust all over his boots and shins, as the ALM came hurtling over the horizon, the most ungainly flying craft he had ever seen and each time he saw it in flight the same thought struck him anew. As it approached, it pitched up and began to descend, throwing out a pancake cloud of grey dust, and it all happened in complete and utter silence, an absence of noise broken only by the steady hum of the fans and pumps of his PLSS, and not the rocket’s red roar his eyes told him he should be hearing. They got Kendall out of the ALM—he’d bought Alden and Neubeck with him, and he needed their help getting prepped for EVA and then moving about in the one-sixth gravity—and Peterson knew with the sort of sinking feeling brought on when reading orders written by some asshole with no situational awareness, he knew they’d skimped on Kendall’s training and the man was going to be a liability. Then the LM Truck flew over the horizon at two hundred feet, pitched over from twenty degrees to vertical, and began its computerised descent on its invisible flame, and, sitting on its cargo platform, was some bell-shaped thing that looked so unlike anything Peterson had ever seen before, he knew it had to be Kendall’s. When he later found out what the Bell was, he wondered just how bad it was on Earth, just how desperate was the Pentagon. This was ultra-deep black, not even the President’s advisors knew, but Vandenberg had to tell Peterson something, especially when he saw the small swastika and eagle embossed on the Bell, and Kendall later admitted the device was over forty years old and had been discovered in a Nazi underground facility in Silesia at the end of the Second World War. Kendall himself had been working on it for the last twenty years, mostly up at Montauk on Long Island, with the surviving members of the Project Rainbow team, who had apparently done weird shit with a destroyer in Philadelphia in 1943. It was Kendall’s contention the “torsion field generator” could only fulfil its potential in vacuum, so the Pentagon had moved his entire project, lock, stock and Bell, to the Moon, even though he’d never wanted to come in the first place. And Peterson gazed at this professor of exotic physics, a man who made Tesla look like a high school science teacher, and then looked out the window in the lab at the Bell sitting in its framework in the bottom of Rima Hadley, all a-glow violet, and he thought, he was here on the Moon and it had all turned into goddamned science fiction.

Five more evolutions and the Earth still throws its unforgiving silver gaze down upon the Moon, as the Moon itself had once looked down upon the Earth. They’ve tried further back in time, as Kendall proposed, selecting decision nodes they remembered from the newspapers of their youth.

To no avail.

Peterson stalks the corridor which stretches the length of Falcon Base—as much as he
can
stalk in Velcro slippers and one-sixth gravity. Frustration sweeps through him, and he swings out an arm at the nearest locker, relishing the impact of his fist on the metal. In the gym, he pushes himself until his arms and legs burn, until even the weak lunar gravity seems to drag heavily on his aching muscles.

Needing the wide-open monochrome vistas of the surface, he goes EVA. He walks along the edge of the Apennine Front—it’s more of a jog, bouncing from side to side, sliding one foot forward and then the other—and doesn’t stop until he is past the last of the tyre tracks made by Apollo 15’s LRV. Falcon Base, the garden of descent stages on the Sea of Rains, both are lost to view, hidden behind a soft feminine shoulder of the mountains. He is in a desert, leached of life and colour, and not even the star-speckled blackness above can offer anything but emptiness within and without.

He turns back while he has enough air in the PLSS to return.

Scott makes no comment, just vacuums the grey dust from the spacesuit in tight-lipped silence.

On his next watch, Peterson sits at his desk and gazes at McKay at the radio. Neither has spoken. They came on duty, relieving Alden and Fulton, and silently took their places; and they have said nothing since. It occurs to Peterson that he is as isolated within Falcon Base as he is out on Mare Imbrium. But it is not the solitude of EVA which draws him, it is the sense of safety he feels when wrapped in his spacesuit’s nurturing cocoon. No matter which way he looks—to the west, across the Palus Putredinus; or north towards the LMs on the Sea of Rains—whichever direction, his view is framed by the LEVA of his helmet. He cannot fully engage with the lunar landscape because he is forever shielded from it. His fingers will never feel in situ the fine cordite dust of the regolith; his face will never experience the pure beat of the sun’s rays. Though he lives here, Peterson will never be of the Moon.

His reverie is cut short by a rhythmic rip-rip-rip from the chamber below. Peterson has grown to hate that noise. It is as irritating as McKay endlessly clicking the end of his pen. But unlike McKay’s pen, he cannot demand it cease.

Kendall’s head appears in the hatch from below. He halts once his shoulders are above floor-level, scowls at Peterson, and then pulls the rest of his body into the command centre. He crosses to Peterson, walking like a man much stouter.

I think I can do it, he says, still with that scowl on his face.

Peterson remembers no promises from their last conversation. He recalls only bluster and excuses. When Kendall first arrived at Falcon Base, Peterson mistook his arrogance for assurance, but after two years of the man he knows now that the scientist operates the Bell as much on guesswork as he does using the scientific method.