The only sound had been a faint creaking from the metal walls: to anyone who had endured the thunder of a rocket launch from Earth, the silence was uncanny. And when the weary voice of the launch director came over his helmet radio to announce, “T plus five seconds; velocity 500 meters per second,” he could scarcely believe it. In the traditional English units still natural to Cliff, he was going over a thousand miles an hour!
A thousand miles an hour in five seconds from a standing start–with nineteen seconds still to go as the generators smashed their thunderbolts of power into the launcher. He was riding the lightning across the face of the moon. And when the acceleration finally ceased and Cliff was suddenly weightless, it was as if a giant hand had opened and released him gently into space.
He’d ridden the lightning five times in six months, and although he was far from blasé upon this sixth and final occasion, he was resting almost comfortably in the accelerating capsule. But this time, at T plus twentytwo seconds, the lightning failed.
Even in the womblike shelter of his acceleration couch, Cliff knew instantly that something was wrong. The capsule had not ceased hurtling along the track, but in this final kilometer before acceleration was to cease there came a moment of stomach-lifting drag.
He had no time to feel fear or even to wonder what had happened. Free-fall lasted less than half a second, before acceleration resumed with a jolt. A corner of the cargo net tore loose and one of his bags walloped onto the floor beside him. The final burst of acceleration lasted only one more second, and then he was weightless again. Through the little triangular windows forward, which were no longer “overhead,” Cliff saw the peaks of the ring-wall of Mare Moscoviense flicker past in a wink. Was it his imagination? They had never seemed so close.
“Launch control,” he said urgently into his radiolink, “what the devil happened?” The launch director’s midwestern American voice held no hint of boredom. “Still checking. Call you back in half a minute.” Then he added belatedly, “Glad you’re okay.”
Cliff yanked at the buckles of the webbing that held him to his seat and stood up, weightless, peering through the windows. Was the moonscape really significantly closer, or did it just seem that way? Through the window the surface of the moon was falling smoothly away, and the field of view was filling with stars. At least he had taken off with most of his planned speed, and there was no danger he would crash back to the surface immediately.
But he would crash back sooner or later. He could not possibly have reached escape velocity. He was rising into space along a great ellipse–and in a few hours he would be back at his starting point. Or would be except that he’d never get through that last little bit of solid rock.
“Hello Cliff, Frank Penney talking to you.” The launch controller sounded almost cheerful. “We’ve got a first fix on it–we got a transient phase reversal in the fine acceleration sector, God knows why. It put enough drag on you to lop about a thousand klicks off your final velocity. That orbit would bring you right back down on top of us in a little under five hours if you couldn’t change it, but no sweat. Your onboard retro’s got enough delta-vees stored to kick you into a stable orbit–heck, you could even make it on verniers alone. Your consumables are fat, you’ve got air enough in there for three people plus safety margins. All you’ll have to do is sit tight until we can get a tug from L-1 into your neighborhood.”
Slowly Cliff allowed himself to relax. In his panic he’d forgotten all about the retrorocket, although he didn’t intend to admit that to launch control. Low-powered as they were, even the maneuvering rockets could easily put him into a rounder orbit that would clear the moon by a comfortable margin. Though he might fall back closer to the surface than he’d ever flown–except when landing–the view as he skimmed over the mountains and plains would be breathtaking. He’d be perfectly safe. He just had to keep telling himself that.
“Good, that means whatever we do here is off-line. Nothing’s gonna go boom before we’re ready. Now I want you to find the toggle marked MAN/AUTO, at the top right of the panel, and confirm that it’s on AUTO. The toggle’s got a light in it, and that light should be yellow.”
“Yes, I’ve got it. It’s on AUTO and the light is yellow.”
“Good. What we’re going to do here is insert a new program so that when we engage again, the maneuvercontrol system will initiate a burn at our command. We’re looking at sort of a minimax situation here, Cliff. The later we burn, the better we can fine-tune your orbit. But at the same time we prefer to do this by line-ofsight transmission rather than routing through the transfer stations–I won’t bore you with the technicalities. So anyway, let’s first confirm that the MCS is receiving our transmissions as it should. Is the BC narrowband flat-screen showing a green light? That’s a little square liquid crystal window down at the lower left of the panel, and it’s labeled BC NARROW.”
“Well, we sent our test message three times and apparently you did not get it. We’ve queried your narrowband with telemetry and we are not getting anything but noise–sounds like the sizzling rice dish in the dining hall last night. So tell you what, just shove that REM/LOC toggle over to LOC, would you, buddy?”
“I’ll tell you what, Cliff”–Penney’s voice was, if anything, cheerier yet–“why don’t we stick this thing in MAN and ENGAGE and see if we can’t just go around the barn. I mean, cut the computer out of the command loop.”
The safety cover was painted in diagonal black and yellow stripes; the stenciled label beneath said MAIN ENG. With his right hand Cliff reached out and flipped it up. His left hand gripped the cargo net harder. The fingers of his right were trembling when he pushed the big red button.
Cliff barely restrained himself from screaming, begging the controller not to go away. But the man wasn’t going anywhere, and there wasn’t anything for them to talk about. For whatever reason the capsule’s rockets, which a moment ago Cliff had believed would carry him to safety, were utterly useless. In five hours he would complete his orbit–and return to his launching point.
Cliff floated weightless in the tiny tin can, peering out its window as the moon receded. I wonder if they’ll name the new crater after me, thought Cliff. I suppose I could ask them to. My last request: “Crater Leyland: diameter . . .” What diameter? Better not exaggerate–I don’t suppose it will be more than a couple of hundred meters across. Hardly worth putting on the map.
Launch control was still silent, but that was not surprising. They clearly didn’t have any bright ideas, and what do you say to a man who’s already as good as dead? And yet, though he knew that nothing could alter his trajectory; even now Cliff could not believe that he would soon be scattered over most of Farside. If that were true, they would have more to be worried about than he did. He was still soaring away from the moon, snug and comfortable in this little cabin. The idea of death was incongruous–as it is to all men, even those who seek it, until the final second.
For a moment Cliff forgot his own problem. The horizon ahead was no longer a mottled curve of cratered rock. Something more brilliant even than the blazing sunlit lunar landscape was lifting itself against the stars. As the capsule curved around the edge of the moon, it was creating the only kind of earthrise possible, an artificial one, no less beautiful for being a product of human technology. In a minute it was all over, such was Cliff’s speed in orbit. As his capsule climbed above the moon, the Earth leaped clear of the horizon and swam swiftly up the sky.
It was three-quarters full and almost too bright to look upon. Here was a cosmic mirror made not of dull rocks and dusty plains but of snow and cloud and sea. Indeed it was almost all sea, for the Pacific Ocean was turned toward Cliff, and the blinding reflection of the sun covered the Hawaiian Islands. The haze of the atmosphere– that soft blanket that was to have uplifted the wings of the atmospheric shuttle bringing him home–obliterated all geographic details; perhaps that darker patch emerging from night was New Guinea, but he could not be sure.
There was bitter irony in the knowledge that he was heading straight toward that lovely, gleaming apparition. Another thousand kilometers an hour and he would have made it. One thousand kilometers per hour–that was all. He might as well ask for a billion.
The sight of the rising Earth brought home to him with irresistible force the duty he feared but could postpone no longer. “Launch control,” he said, holding his voice steady with great effort, “please give me a circuit to Earth.”
This was one of the stranger things he had done in his life: to sit here above the moon and listen to the ringing of the phonelink in his own home, 400 thousand kilometers away on the opposite side of Earth. To save money he’d only written faxgrams before; a direct phonelink was an expensive luxury.
The phone kept ringing. It was near midnight down there in Africa, and it would be sometime before there would be any answer. Myra would stir sleepily; then, because she’d been on edge ever since he’d gone into space, she’d wake instantly, fearing disaster.
But they both hated to have a phone in the bedroom, much less wear an earlink like half the self-important people in the world did these days. So it would be at least fifteen seconds before she could switch on the light, pull a wrapper around her bare shoulders, close the nursery door to avoid disturbing the baby, get to the end of the hall, and . . .
Her voice came clear and sweet across the emptiness of space; he would recognize it anywhere in the universe. He detected at once the undertone of anxiety.
“Mrs. Leyland?” said the Earthside operator. “I have a call from your husband. Please remember the twosecond time lag.”