Part 5 (2/2)
”Hah, I suppose so. Looks pretty wild.”
”It might also give us a good idea what ga.s.ses are in the snow. Rick, could you set a sample down a bit more gently on a sunlit surface and let us see how it boils off?”
Rick did as he asked, packing a double-handful of snow and setting it on a boulder's slanted face. Steam immediately began to rise from it, then stopped after a few seconds. The s...o...b..ll s.h.i.+fted slightly and more steam sublimed off, then another few seconds pa.s.sed before the remaining snow melted into a bubbling puddle.
”Aha!” Gregor said. ”Three separate fractions, at least. I would guess methane for the first, then ammonia or carbon dioxide, and finally water. That is wonderful news! All four ga.s.ses will be useful to a colony.”
”If we ever send one,” Rick said, trying to suppress his silly grin so Tessa wouldn't grow afraid of his optimism, but that in itself made him laugh out loud.
”d.a.m.n it, Rick, you're scaring me half to death!” she said. They both turned to look at the lander, glittering like a gold and silver sculpture on the concrete gray crater rim, but it remained solid.
”Don't worry,” Rick told her. ”I may be having fun, but I'm still just as scared as you are.”
”Good.”
They explored for another hour, but before they had even made it a tenth of the way around the crater they had to turn back. The suits only held another two hours of oxygen, and they would need that time to return to the lander, climb back inside, and pressurize the cabin again. And after that their time on the Moon would be over, because they had to get back to Hope as quickly as possible and blast off for Earth again before the plane of their polar orbit s.h.i.+fted too far away from a return path. Their SPS engine had enough fuel for a plane change of a few degrees, but the longer they waited the more it would take.
They had done enough already. They had discovered water on the Moon, and had gone a long ways toward proving that it could sustain a colony if humanity wanted to send one. Now all they had to do was get home alive, but that in itself was a big enough job to keep them occupied full-time.
Yet as he waited for Tessa to climb up the ladder and kick the dust from her boots, Rick thought of one more thing he could do. His heart leaped in his throat at the thought, but it would be the perfect cap to a perfect day--provided he really wanted to do it. And provided he'd read Tessa's signals right as well.
He had no time to decide. It was now or never. He gulped, muttered, ”He who hesitates is lost,” and moved back away from the lander.
”What?” Tessa asked. She had reached the egress platform.
”Don't go inside yet.” Rick paced a few yards away, then began scuffing five-foot-high letters into the crunchy soil with his boot. They showed up beautifully in the low-angled light.
”What are you doing?” she asked him.
He didn't answer. It would become obvious in a moment, if he could just remember how to spell. That was no sure bet; his head buzzed like an alarm going off, and his breath came in ragged gasps that had nothing to do with the exertion of drawing in the dirt. This would change his life even more than the trip to the Moon. Maybe.
”Oh, Rick,” Tessa said when he completed the first line, but she grew silent when she saw him begin a second. She was still silent when he finished his message: Tessa, I love you.
Will you marry me?
He was still standing on the final dot below the question mark. He looked up at her, a dark silhouette against the darker sky, her gold-mirrored faceplate reflecting his own sunlit form and the words he'd written. He couldn't see her expression through it, couldn't tell what she was thinking. He waited for some indication, but after the silence stretched on so long that Gregor asked, ”Rick?
Tessa? Are you okay?” she began to climb down the ladder again.
”Stand by, Kaliningrad,” Rick said.
Tessa stepped back onto the lunar surface, walked slowly and deliberately over to stand beside Rick. Even this close, he couldn't see her face, but he heard her sniff.
”Tess?”
She didn't answer him, at least not over the radio. But she shook her head a little and stepped to the side far enough to scratch a single word in the soil: Yes.
Rick echoed it aloud. ”Yes!” All his apprehension died in an instant. He bounded over to her and wrapped her in a bear hug. ”Tessa, I love you!”
”Oh, Rick.”
”Are you two getting mushy again?” Yos.h.i.+ko asked.
Rick laughed. ”Mushy, h.e.l.l, we're getting married.”
The radio burst into a jumble of voices as everyone spoke at once, then Gregor's voice cut through the rest. ”My sincere congratulations,” he said, ”but your launch window is fast approaching.”
”Roger,” Rick said. ”We're going inside now.”
He helped Tessa climb back into the lander, then he climbed up and kicked off as much dust as he could. Before he ducked in through the hatch he looked down at the words they had written on the ground, their declaration clearly written for all to see. Those words could stay there for a billion years or so, the way things weathered on the Moon. Or if people actually came up and mined the crater for ice, they could be obliterated within a decade. That would depend quite a bit on what happened on the trip home.
Rick thought again of all the things that could yet go wrong. Engine failures, docking failures, computer failures--the list seemed endless. Despite his excitement over his and Tessa's future, if their personal welfare over the next few days made any difference then he would have no trouble staying sufficiently pessimistic to keep the ghost from fading away on them.
The number of possible disasters shrank with each stage of the mission: Faith's ascent engine carried them into orbit, and Yos.h.i.+ko docked smoothly with the lander, and the SPS engine fired on time to send them back homeward; but the way Rick figured it, infinity minus a few was still infinity. Plenty of things could still go wrong.
Including, of course, the ghost disappearing. Twice more on the return trip, both times right after Gregor reported that ”Moon fever” was once more gripping the world, the s.p.a.cecraft's walls grew indistinct around them, and both times they came back only after Rick convinced himself that their deaths could still squelch humanity's renewed enthusiasm for s.p.a.ce. All the evidence seemed to support Yos.h.i.+ko's and Tessa's theory that he was somehow in control of the apparition, whether or not he was directly responsible for it.
Gregor would say no more about it, save that he should listen to them. Tessa took that as carte blanche to control his every action, including sleep, which she wouldn't let him do. She was afraid he would start dreaming of the bold new age of s.p.a.ce exploration and they would all die of explosive decompression before he could wake up. She refused to let Gregor or Tomiichi or Laura tell them anything about the situation on Earth, and she kept inventing elaborate new scenarios in which humanity would decide not to follow their lead after all. And now that they were engaged, she seemed to think Rick's personal s.p.a.ce was hers to invade in whatever imagininative ways she could think of as well. She would tickle him if she thought he was drifting off, or kiss him, or brush against him seductively. Rick found it alternately amusing and annoying, depending on which stage of his sleep deprivation cycle he was in at the time.
To keep himself busy, and to keep his mind on other things, he made her an engagement ring out of one of the switch guards, which were already nearly the right size and shape. He snapped one off from beside a third-stage booster control that didn't connect to anything anymore, and with a little filing on a zipper he buffed the rough edges down enough for her to wear it.
”I'll treasure it forever,” she told him when he slid it onto her finger, but Rick was too befuddled from lack of sleep to know if she was fooling or serious.
Finally, less than a day out from Earth, Tessa could no longer stay awake either. As she drifted off to sleep, she admonished Yos.h.i.+ko to continue the job, but as soon as her breathing slowed, Yos.h.i.+ko told Rick, ”Go ahead and sleep if you want. I think you'll be more valuable to us tomorrow if you get some rest now.”
Rick, groggy with fatigue, tried to focus on her face. ”Why?” he asked. ”What's tomorrow?”
She grinned diabolically. ”Re-entry. Twenty-five thousand miles an hour, smack into the atmosphere. Sleep well.”
Rick slept, but just as Yos.h.i.+ko had intended, all his dreams were of burning up in a fireball as the Apollo capsule hit the atmosphere at too steep an angle, or of skipping off into interplanetary s.p.a.ce if they hit too shallow. Or of hitting their window square on and still burning up when the ghost s.h.i.+p proved incapable of withstanding the heat. The gunpowdery smell of the lunar dust they had tracked inside on their s.p.a.cesuits didn't help any, either; it only provided another sensory cue that they were on fire.
When he woke, Earth was only a couple hours away. It still looked much smaller than it had from the shuttle, but it felt so much closer and it looked so inviting after his hours of bad dreams that Rick almost felt like he was home already.
With that thought, the capsule grew indistinct again. Tessa screamed, ”Rick!”
and punched him in the chest, and Yos.h.i.+ko said quickly, ”Remember the consequences!”
The s.h.i.+p solidified once more, and Rick rubbed his sore sternum where Tessa's ring had jabbed him. ”Jeez, you don't have to kill me,” he said. ”I get scared just fine on my own when that happens.”
Tessa snorted. ”Hah. If you were as scared as I am the s.h.i.+p would never disappear in the first place.”
”Well I'm sorry; I'll try to be more terrified from now on.” Rick turned away from her, but there was no place to go to be alone in an Apollo capsule. After a few minutes of silence, he looked back over at her and said, ”Okay, I'll try harder to control this. But don't look at me so accusingly when it happens, okay? I'm not trying to make it disappear.”
Tessa sighed. ”I know you're not. It's just--I don't know. I don't have any control over it, except what little control I have over you. My life is in your hands. h.e.l.l, at this point the entire s.p.a.ce program is in your hands. And all you have to do to kill it is get c.o.c.ky.”
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