Part 1 (2/2)
”Translunar injection,” Tessa whispered. ”They're going for the Moon.”
”Who's 'they'?” Rick asked. So far none of the telemetry indicated a live--or even a ghostly--pa.s.senger in the command module.
”It's got to be Neil,” Tessa said. ”And who knows who else is going with him.”
”Neil is in a box in Arlington cemetery,” Rick said. ”I saw them put him there.”
”And you saw the launch this morning,” Tessa reminded him. ”Neil being on board it is no more impossible than the rocket itself.”
”Good point.” Rick shrugged. Every dead astronaut from Gagarin on could be in the mystery Apollo capsule for all he knew. This bizarre manifestation was completely new territory; n.o.body knew the rules yet.
Enough people claimed to, of course. Psychics seemed to crawl out of the woodwork over the next few days, each with their own interpretation of the event. NASA had to close the gates and post guards around the perimeter of the s.p.a.ce center to keep it from being overrun by curious mystics, but that merely fueled speculation that they were developing a new super-secret s.p.a.ce vehicle at the taxpayers' expense.
The administration tried the silent approach at first, but when that charge was levelled they reluctantly admitted that for once the fruitcakes were closer to the truth than the whistleblowers. In a carefully worded press release, NASA's public relations spokesman said, ”What appeared to be a Saturn Five moon rocket seemed to launch from the deserted complex thirty-four. This alleged launch was not authorized by NASA, nor was it part of any program of which NASA is aware. A complete investigation of the incident is being made, and our findings will be made public as soon as we learn what actually occurred.”
That was Bureauspeak for, ”We don't have a clue either.” Rick spent days with the investigation team, going over his story again and again--careful to say ”appeared to” and ”looked like” at all the appropriate spots--until he could recite it in his sleep, but no one was the wiser afterward. They examined the launch pad, which revealed no sign of a liftoff. All they could do was listen to the telemetry coming from the s.p.a.cecraft and speculate.
Three days after its launch, the ghost Apollo entered lunar orbit. A few hours after that, the lunar module separated from the command module and made a powered descent toward the surface. It wasn't headed for the Sea of Tranquility.
It appeared to be landing at Copernicus, one of the sites proposed for further Apollo missions before the last three had been cancelled. But when it reached 500 feet, the telemetry suddenly stopped.
”What the h.e.l.l happened?” demanded Dale Jackson, the impromptu flight director for the mission. He stood beside one of the consoles on the lowest of the terraced rows, looking around at the dozens of technicians who were scrambling to reacquire the signal.
Tessa and Rick were watching from farther up, sitting side by side at unused consoles and holding hands like teenagers on a date at the best movie of all time. When the telemetry stopped, Tessa flinched as if a monster had just jumped out of a closet.
”What happened?” Rick asked. ”Did it blow up?”
Tessa shook her head. ”Everything stopped,” she said. ”The command module too, and it was still in orbit.”
”Five hundred feet,” Rick said. Something about that figure nagged at him. What happened at five hundred feet in a normal lunar descent? ”Got it!” he said, loudly enough that everyone in the room looked back up at the screens. When they saw no data there, they turned to him.
”Five hundred feet was 'low gate,' when the pilot was supposed to take over from the descent computer and actually land the LEM,” he told them. ”The computer couldn't take it all the way to the surface. It wasn't sophisticated enough to choose a landing site.”
Jackson asked, ”So, what, you think it crashed? It was still five hundred feet up.”
Rick hesitated. He'd been biting his tongue for days now, afraid of knocking himself off the Atlantis mission with a poorly chosen phrase, but he had grown tired of being timid. He cleared his throat and said, ”I think when the time came for a human to take over, it went back to wherever it came from.”
”Sure it did.” Jackson turned to the technicians. ”Get me that signal.”
They tried, but it quickly became apparent that there simply wasn't a signal any longer. Not even radar could find any sign of the s.p.a.cecraft. The mysterious Apollo had vanished without a trace.
NASA held back Rick's Atlantis mission an extra week while the ground crew checked the s.h.i.+p for damage from the shaking it had received, but at last they p.r.o.nounced it ready to fly. On the morning of the launch, Rick and four other astronauts rode the elevator up the gantry, climbed in through the hatch in the side of the orbiter, and strapped themselves into their acceleration chairs.
After a countdown that was only interrupted twice due to a defective pressure sensor in a fuel line, they finally lit the three main engines and the two solid rocket boosters and rode America's s.p.a.ce truck into orbit.
It was Rick's first time in s.p.a.ce. He had expected to be excited, and he was, but somehow not so excited as he had imagined. Instead of watching the Earth slide past beneath him, he spent most of his free time watching the Moon, now just past full. It had been lunar dawn at the landing site when the Apollo had lifted off, just the way it had been for the real flights over a quarter of a century earlier. That was to give the crew the best lighting angle for landing, and to make sure they had plenty of daylight to explore in. And to make emergency repairs if anything went wrong.
What a wild time that must have been, he thought as he floated between the pilot's and copilot's chairs and looked out the forward windows at the white disk a quarter million miles away. Flying by the seat of your pants, your life right at your fingertips and the entire world watching over your shoulder to see if you had the wits to keep yourself alive. Aldrin had accidentally snapped off the pin of the ascent engine arming switch with his backpack, and he'd had to poke a felt pen into the hole to arm the engines before he and Armstrong could leave the Moon. A felt pen! If something like that happened on the shuttle, ground control would probably order the crew to conserve power and wait for a rescue--except they still couldn't launch a second shuttle within a month of the first one. Maybe they could get the Russians to come up and push the b.u.t.ton for them with one of their felt pens.
He was being unfair. The Hubble telescope repair had taken some real ingenuity, and the s.p.a.celab scientists were always fixing broken equipment. But none of that had the same dazzle as flying to the Moon. Nowadays the shuttle astronauts seemed more like appliance repairmen than intrepid explorers. Rick had convinced himself that the shuttle was doing some valuable science, but now, after seeing a Saturn V launch only two weeks earlier, he realized that science wasn't what had thrilled him when he'd watched them as a kid, and it wasn't why he was here now. He was in s.p.a.ce because he wanted to explore it, and this--barely two hundred miles off the ground--was the farthest into it he could get.
He wished Tessa were on his flight. She would know what he was feeling. On their dates, they had talked a lot about their reasons for becoming astronauts, and she had admitted to the same motives as him. But she had been scheduled for Discovery's next launch in a month and a half.
He heard a shout from the mid-deck. ”Merde!” A moment later, Pierre Renaud, the Canadian payload specialist whose company had paid for his ticket, floated through the hatchway onto the flight deck.
”What's the matter?” Rick asked when he saw the look of dismay on Pierre's face.
”The toilet has broken,” Pierre said.
Rick was on post-flight vacation in Key West when the next one went up. The phone woke him from a sound sleep just after dawn, and when he fumbled the receiver to his ear and answered it, Dale Jackson's gravelly voice said, ”There's been another Saturn launch. Get your a.s.s up here so we can compare notes with the last time.”
Rick came instantly awake. Less than an hour later he was in the air headed north. By the time he crossed Lake Okeechobee he could see the ragged remains of the contrail, and when he arrived at the Cape the place looked like an anthill that had just been kicked. Cars zoomed up and down the service roads, and the public highways outside the gates were packed in all directions.
Two wide-eyed Air Force cadets escorted him from the airport to a meeting room in the headquarters building, where NASA's administrator, flight director, range safety officer, and at least a dozen other high-ranking officials were already deep in discussion over the incident. Rick noted with amus.e.m.e.nt that the flight surgeon was also present, and presumably taking notes. Jackson, the flight director, was talking about the difficulty of decommissioning a fully fueled Saturn V on the pad, should another one appear.
”We don't even have facilities there to store the fuel anymore, much less pump it,” he was saying. ”Especially not in the fifteen minutes or so that these things stick around. That's barely time enough to hook up the couplings.”
Tessa was there as well, and she smiled wide and waved when she saw Rick. He edged around the conference table and pulled up a chair beside her. ”What are you doing here?” he whispered.
”Getting the third degree,” Tessa answered. ”I was at the pad when this one lifted off.”
”Which pad?”
”Thirty-four.”
”You're kidding. You'd be toast if you were that close to the launch.”
”I was in the blockhouse.”
Rick supposed that would offer some protection. And besides, even that might not be necessary. The weeds hadn't been charred or blown away in the first launch.
”Why were you there?” he asked. ”How did you know it would happen again?”
She grinned, obviously proud of herself. ”Because ghosts usually repeat themselves until they get whatever they came for, and today was the next launch window.”
At the head of the table, Jackson was still talking. ”...Nor do we have crawler capability to remove the rocket even if we could pump it dry. We'd have to completely rebuild the access road, and in the meantime we'd be left with a thirty-six-story embarra.s.sment.”
Rick sized up the meeting in an instant. NASA saw these ghost rockets as a threat, and wanted them stopped.
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