Part 5 (1/2)
Tessa called out their alt.i.tude, dropping rapidly at first, then slower and slower, until at six hundred feet they were only falling at twenty feet per second. Five seconds later she whispered, ”Low gate,” and Rick rocked the controller in his hand, switching out the computer.
He held his breath. This was when the previous two lunar modules had disappeared, at the point where the pilot had to take over. He waited for that to happen again, but the lander dropped another fifty feet, then seventy-five, and it was still there.
”Whew,” he said. ”We made it.”
”What do you mean?” demanded Tessa. ”We're still four hundred feet up!”
”Piece of cake,” Rick said, looking out the window at the landscape slowly moving past. It was impossible to tell which little arc of crater rim was their target, and the tiny triangular windows were too small to give them an overview of the larger picture, so Rick just picked one that looked reasonably wide and brought the lander down toward it. It was strewn with boulders, but there were plenty of clear s.p.a.ces between them, if he could just hit one.
”Quant.i.ty light,” Tessa called out. He had only a minute of fuel left, less than he was supposed to have at this alt.i.tude, but it was still plenty at their rate of fall.
He slowed their descent to ten feet per second and rotated them once around. One big boulder right on the rim had a wide flat spot beside it, so he angled over toward it. Flying the lander felt just like the simulator, save for the s.h.i.+fting of weight, and that actually helped him get a feel for the controls.
”Two hundred feet, eleven down,” Tessa said.
Too fast. Rick throttled up the engine a bit.
”One eighty, six down. One seventy, three down. One sixty-five, zero down--we're going back up!”
”Sorry,” Rick said, dropping the thrust again. While he was at it, he flipped on the sodium injector, and sure enough, the landscape exploded in bright yellow light. Even the bottoms of the craters were visible now, though they seemed fuzzy, out of focus.
No time to sightsee now, though. Tessa kept reading off the numbers, her voice rising a little in pitch. ”Forty-five seconds. One sixty feet, four down. One fifty, five down; one forty, six down...you're picking up too much speed!”
”Got it,” Rick said, nudging their thrust up a bit.
”One hundred, five down. Thirty seconds.”
Rick did the math in his head. At this rate of descent he had ten seconds of fuel to spare. Far less than regulation, but still enough if he didn't waste any more. ”Piece of cake,” he said again, holding it steady for the spot he had chosen.
The descent went smoothly through the next fifty feet, but with only fifty feet to go, the ground began to grow indistinct. ”What's that, are we kicking up dust?” Rick asked.
”I don't know,” Tessa said. ”It looks more like fog.”
”Fog? d.a.m.n, Gregor was right.” Rick held the controls steady, but they were descending into a white mist. The big boulder he'd been using for a marker disappeared in the cloud swirling up from the crater floor. Rick couldn't tell if they were still going to miss it or not; they could be drifting right over it for all he could tell.
Tessa's hand hovered near the Abort Stage b.u.t.ton. That would fire the ascent stage's engine, smas.h.i.+ng the lower half of the lander into the surface as it blasted the top half free and back into orbit.
”We're too low for that,” Rick said. ”We'd crash with the descent stage if we tried it. Just hang on and call out the numbers.”
”Roger. Twenty, five down.”
That was pretty fast, but Rick didn't budge the controller. If he s.h.i.+fted them sideways in the process, they could hit the boulder.
”Fifteen...ten...contact light!”
The feelers at the ends of the landing legs had touched the surface. Rick let the engine run for another half second, then shut it down. The lander rocked sideways just a bit, then lurched as they hit the surface hard. ”Engine off,”
Rick said, his eyes glued to the ascent engine fuel level. It held steady. No leaks, then, from the shaking, and no warning lights on any other systems.
Looking over at the descent engine's fuel gauge, he saw that they had six seconds left.
Tessa glared at him. ”Piece of cake?” she asked. ”Piece of cake?”
Rick, at a loss for words, could only shrug.
Yos.h.i.+ko's voice came over the radio. ”Faith, Are you down?”
Tessa laughed. ”Yes, we're down. Through fog as thick as soup, with six seconds of fuel left.”
Fog. There was water on the moon. Rick looked out the window, pointed. ”Look, it's blowing away.”
Without the rocket exhaust and the harsh sodium light to heat the ice in the crater floor, what had already vaporized was rapidly expanding into the vacuum, revealing the rubble-strewn crater rim on which the lander had touched down.
Rick looked for his landmark boulder, saw it out of the corner of his window, only a few feet away from the side of the lander. They had barely missed it. In fact two of the legs had straddled it. If one of them had hit it the lander would have tipped over.
Rick put it out of his mind. They were down, and they had more important things to worry about.
Time seemed to telescope on them as they ran through another checklist to make sure the ascent stage was ready to go in an emergency, then they depressurized the lander and popped open the hatch to go outside. Rick went first, not because it was his Apollo or because he was in any way more deserving, but for the same reason that Neil Armstrong went first on Apollo 11: because in their bulky s.p.a.cesuits it was too difficult for the person on the right to sidle past the person on the left in order to reach the door.
It was a tight squeeze, but he made it through the hatch. The corrugated egress platform and ladder were in shadow, so Rick had to climb down by feel. He pulled the D-ring that lowered the outside camera, and Gregor radioed that they were receiving its signal back on Earth. Rick figured he was probably just a silhouette against the side-lit background, but he supposed that was about as good as the grainy picture of Neil taking his first step.
He was on the last rung when he realized he hadn't thought up anything historic to say. He paused for a moment, thinking fast, then stepped off onto the landing pad and then from there onto the frozen lunar soil. It crunched beneath his feet; he could feel it, though he couldn't hear it in the vacuum.
Tessa had made it through the hatch, too, and was watching from the platform, obviously waiting for him to speak, so he held his hand up toward her--and symbolically toward Earth, he hoped--and said, ”Come on out. The water's fine!”
The water was indeed fine. Fine as powdered sugar, and about the same consistency. Brought to the Moon's surface in thousands of comet strikes over the millennia, it had acc.u.mulated molecule by molecule as the vaporized water and methane and other ga.s.ses froze out in the shadowed crater bottoms at the poles. It was too cold, and the Moon's gravity was too light, for it to pack down into solid ice, so it remained fluffy, like extremely fine snow. When Rick and Tessa walked out into it they sank clear to their thighs, even though they only weighed about fifty pounds, and they would probably have sunk further if they'd gone on. But they could feel the cold seeping into their legs already, so they had to scoop up what samples they could in special thermos bottles designed for the purpose and turn back. The sample equipment packed in the lander was designed for a polar mission, but their s.p.a.cesuits were made to keep them warm in vacuum, not against ice that could conduct heat away.
So they walked around the crater rim, bounding along in the peculiar kangaroo-hop gait that worked so well in light gravity, looking for anything else that might prove interesting. That was just about everything as far as Rick was concerned. He was on the Moon! Every aspect of it, from the rocky, cratered ground underfoot to the sharp, rugged horizon, reminded him that he was walking on another world. He looked out toward the Earth, about two-thirds of it visible above the horizon, about two-thirds of that lit by the sun, and he felt a s.h.i.+ver run down his spine at the sight. He had thought he would never see it like that except in thirty-year-old pictures.
They were making pictures of their own now. Tessa carried the TV camera and gave a running commentary as they explored. Gregor said that everyone in Russia and Europe was watching, and Tomiichi said the same for j.a.pan. And surprisingly, Laura said the same about the United States. ”They even pre-empted Days of Our Lives for you,” she told them.
”Hah. Maybe there's hope for our country yet,” Rick muttered.
”Watch it,” Tessa said, but whether for fear of him offending their watchers or for fear of him getting too hopeful she didn't say.
Rick didn't care. He felt an incredible sense of well-being that had nothing at all to do with whether or not they made it back alive. They were on the Moon, he and Tessa, at the absolute pinnacle of achievement for an astronaut. Higher than anything either of them had ever expected to achieve, at any rate. No matter what they faced on the way home, or after they got there, nothing could alter the fact that they were here now. And Rick couldn't think of anyone he would rather share the experience with. He and Tessa would be spoken of in the same breath forever, and that was fine with him. He watched the way she bounded along in the low gravity, listened to her exclaim with delight with each new wonder she discovered, and he smiled. He wouldn't mind at all sharing a page in the history books with her.
They collected rocks and more ice from all along their path. At one stop Rick packed a handful of snow into a loose ball and flung it at Tessa, who leaped nearly five feet into the air to avoid it. When the s...o...b..ll hit on the sunlit side of the crater, it burst into a puff of steam.
”Wow,” Tessa said as she bounced to a stop, ”did you see that? Do it again.”
Rick obligingly threw another s...o...b..ll past her, and she followed it with the camera until it exploded against a rock.
”Did you guys back home see it too?” she asked. ”What makes them blow up like that?”
Gregor said, ”Heat, I'd guess. And vacuum. Without an atmosphere to attenuate the sunlight, a rock will heat up just as much there at the pole as it would at the equator, so when the snow touches the hot rock it flashes into steam.”