Abandon In Place Part 3

"Why?"

"You want another Challenger?"

"Oh." Tessa shut off the camera. She understood him perfectly. The biggest catastrophe with the Challenger, in terms of the s.p.a.ce program as a whole, was not that it blew up, but that millions of people watched it blow up. NASA had never really recovered from that. If the whole world saw the Spirit of Hope kill its crew, it could destroy any renewed interest in s.p.a.ce they had managed to create as well.

"It's too late," Tessa told him. "They already know what killed us."

But even as she said it, the walls grew distinct again. Yoshiko stopped struggling into her suit, and Rick simply stared at the metal walls that once again enclosed them.

"Hope, what is your status?" Gregor asked.

"It's back," Rick said. "The ship is solid again."

"What happened? Do you know what caused it?"

"Negative, negative. It just faded out, then came right back."

"Did you do anything that might have influenced it?"

Rick looked at Tessa, then at Yoshiko. Both women shook their heads. "Hard to tell," Rick said. "We screamed. We scrambled for s.p.a.cesuits. Tessa shut off the camera."

"We all realized we were going to die," Tessa added, and when Rick frowned at her she said, "Well, we're dealing with a ghost here. Maybe that's important."

"Maybe so," Rick admitted.

Gregor said, "Do you have any abnormal indications now?"

Rick scanned the controls for any other clues, but there were none. No pressure loss, no power drain, nothing. "Negative, Kaliningrad," he said. "According to the dashboard, we've got a green bird up here."

Gregor laughed a strained, harsh laugh. "I begin to regret my hasty decision to oversee this mission. Never fear! I will not desert you. But this is troubling.

Should I consult the engineers, or a medium?"

"Why don't you try both?" Rick said.

Gregor paused a moment, then said, "Yes, of course. You are absolutely right. We will get right to work on it."

The astronauts sat still for a moment, letting their breath and heart rates fall back toward normal. Rick looked over at his two companions: Yoshiko half into her s.p.a.cesuit, Tesssa holding the TV camera as if it were a bomb that might explode at any moment. Yoshiko reached out and touched the control panel, rea.s.suring herself that it was solid again, then she turned up the cabin temperature. "I'm cold," she said.

Rick chuckled. "That's not surprising. Ghosts are supposed to make people feel cold."

Tessa narrowed her eyes.

"What?"

"I was just thinking. Ghosts make people feel cold. They repeat themselves. What else do they do? If we can figure out the rules, maybe we can keep this one from disappearing on us again until we get home."

Maybe it was just relief at still being alive after their scare, but the intense look in Tessa's eyes was kind of a turn-on. All the same, Rick tried to pay attention to what she was saying. They did need to understand the rules. "Well,"

he said, "they sometimes make wailing noises."

Tessa nodded. "And they leave slime all over everything."

Rick wiped at the edge of his couch. Bare metal and rough nylon webbing. No slime. "I don't think we're dealing with that kind of ghost," he said.

Yoshiko asked, "Aren't ghosts supposed to be the result of unfilfilled destiny?"

"Yeah," Rick said. "I think that's pretty clear in this case, anyway."

"You mean Neil Armstrong, right?"

"Who else?"

"I don't know. Armstrong doesn't make sense. He already made it to the Moon. If this was his unfilfilled destiny, I'd think it would be a Mars ship, or a s.p.a.ce station or something."

"Good point," Tessa said. "But if it isn't Armstrong's ghost, then whose is it?"

Rick snorted. "Well, NASA thinks it's theirs. Maybe the organization is really dead, and we just don't know it."

"Was there another budget cut in Congress?" Tessa asked facetiously.

Rick laughed, but Yoshiko shook her head vigorously. "No, no, I think you have it!"

"What, it's NASA's ghost?"

"In a sense, yes. What if it's the ghost of your entire s.p.a.ce program? When Neil Armstrong died, so did the dreams of s.p.a.ce enthusiasts all over your nation.

Maybe all over the world. It reminded them that you had once gone to the Moon, but no longer could. Maybe the unfulfilled dreams of all those people created this s.p.a.ceship."

Rick looked out his tiny triangular window at the Earth again. Could he be riding in some kind of global wish-fulfillment fantasy? "No," he said. "That can't be. Ghosts are individual things. Murder victims. People lost in storms."

"Shipwrecks," Tessa said. "They can be communal."

"Okay," Rick admitted, "but they need some kind of focus. An observer. They don't just pop into being all by themselves."

Tessa's hair drifted out in front of her face; she pushed it back behind her ears and said, "How do you know? If a ghost wails in the forest..."

"Yeah, yeah. But something made it fade out just now, and come back again a minute later. That seems like an individual sort of phenomenon to me, not some nebulous gestalt."

Yoshiko was nodding wildly. "What?" Rick asked her.

"I think you're right. And if so, then I know whose ghost this is."

"Whose?"

"It's yours."

Rick, expecting her to name anyone but himself, laughed. "Me?"

"Yes, you. You're the commander; it makes sense that you would control the, um, more spiritual aspects of the mission as well."

Both women looked at him appraisingly. A moment ago Rick had found Tessa's intensity compelling, but now those same eyes seemed almost accusatory. "That's ridiculous," he said. "I don't have any control over this ship. Except for the usual kind," he amended before anyone could argue the point. "Besides, the first two launches didn't have anybody on board. And I wasn't even there for the second one."

Tessa said, "No, but you were there for the first one, the day after Neil's funeral. And you'd just gotten back from your shuttle flight--depressed about all the things that went wrong--when the second one went up. If anybody was convinced the s.p.a.ce program was dead, it was you."

Rick steadied himself with the grab handle at the top of the control panel.

"What, you think I'm channeling the combined angst of all the trekkies and fourteen year old would-be astronauts in the world?"

"Maybe. What were you thinking just now?"

"When it faded? I was thinking--" Rick wrinkled his forehead, trying to remember. "I was thinking how good it felt to have people interested in s.p.a.ce again."

"There, you see?"

"No, I don't see," Rick said, exasperated. "What does that have to do with anything?"

"It's a perfect correlation. When you thought n.o.body cared, that s.p.a.ce exploration was dead, you got your own personal Apollo, but when you thought maybe the rest of the world did want to go into s.p.a.ce after all, it went away."

Yoshiko said, "And it came back when you thought our deaths would ruin that renewed interest."

Rick's head felt thick, abuzz with the crazy notion that he might be responsible for all this. The way Tessa and Yoshiko presented it made a certain sort of sense, but he couldn't bring himself to believe it. "Come on," he said. "This is a s.p.a.ceship, not some...some vague shadow in the mist. It's got rivets, and switches, and...and...well, hardware." He gestured at the angular walls enclosing them.

Tessa said, "So? We already know it's a ghost. That's not the question. The question is whether or not you're behind it."

"I'm not," Rick said.

"No? I think you are. And it'd be easy enough to test. Let's experiment and find out."

Rick felt his heart skip a beat. Any emotion he had felt for Tessa a moment ago was drowned out now by unreasoning panic. Ghostly hardware was one thing--he could accept that even if he didn't understand it--but the notion that he might somehow exert some kind of subconscious control over it scared him to death.

"Let's not," he said.

Tessa pulled herself closer to him. "You agreed that we should figure out the rules so we can keep it from disappearing on us again. We've got a theory now, so let's experiment and see if we're right."

Rick looked out the window again. Black s.p.a.ce all around. No stars. Earth visibly receding. He shivered at the sight. For the first time since the launch, he really understood how far they were from help. Whether or not he was responsible for the ghost, he was now responsible for three lives. And maybe, just maybe, a few dreams back home as well. He turned back inside and said, "We've got plenty to do already without crazy experiments. We've got to get this ship rotating or we'll overheat on the side facing the sun, and we've got to take a navigational fix, and check out the lunar module, and so on. Right, Kaliningrad?"

"Yes," Gregor said. "Portside skin temperature is rising. Also--" Voices just out of microphone range made him pause, then he said, "Our engineers agree with your theory, but suggest that you refrain from testing it at this time."

"Your engineers agree?" Tessa asked.

"That is correct."

"You're kidding, right?"

"Nyet. I--" More voices, then Gregor said, "--I cannot tell you anything more yet. But please give us more time to study the problem here before you do anything, ah, unusual."

Rick nodded and pulled himself down into his couch again. Gregor was obviously hiding something, but whether he was hiding information or ignorance, Rick couldn't tell. Either way, he was glad to be let off the hook. He said, "I agree one hundred percent. All right, then, let's get to work. Roll maneuver first, so strap in."

Tessa looked as if she might protest, but after a few seconds she stowed the camera and belted herself into her couch as well. Yoshiko smiled and shook her head. "You beg the question," she said, but she strapped in too.

Rick knew she was right. As they worked to set the s.p.a.cecraft spinning, he considered what Yoshiko and Tessa had said. Logically, if any single person were responsible for the Apollo manifestations then he was as good a candidate as anyone, but despite his fear of uninformed experimentation he couldn't make himself believe it. He didn't feel responsible for anything; certainly not the fade-out they had just seen. His own life was on the line, after all, and he didn't have a death wish.

He began to wonder about that as they went through their checklist. Would he be here if he didn't? So many things could go wrong, nearly all of them deadly.

Even the most routine tasks contained elements of danger. For instance, when they blew the bolts separating the spent S-IVB third stage from beneath their lunar module, the long tube began to tumble, spinning end over end and spraying unused propellent uncomfortably close to them. They had to use the thrusters twice to push themselves away from it before they finally watched it recede into s.p.a.ce. The "barbecue roll" went off without a hitch, and the ship's skin temperature evened out, but when Rick unbuckled and pulled himself over to the navigation instruments in the equipment bay he discovered that all their maneuvering had driven them off course.

"It looks like we're closer to a polar trajectory than an equatorial one," he reported to Kaliningrad after he had sighted on a guide star and a lunar landmark and let the computer calculate their position. A polar course was no good; landing and rendezvous would be much easier if they stayed close to the Moon's equator. That way the command module would pa.s.s over the landing site on every orbit, and they would have a launch window every two hours without having to do a fuel-wasting plane change.

Gregor said, "Da, our radar confirms your measurement. Wait a moment, and we will calculate a correction burn for you."

"Roger." Rick strapped back into his couch and they used a short burst from the the service propulsion system engine to bring themselves back onto an equatorial course. That, at least, provided some relief from another nagging worry; the SPS engine was the last link in the multi-stage chain that had brought them this far, and if it had failed to ignite they wouldn't be able to brake into lunar orbit, or even make course corrections for a slingshot trajectory back home.

After the burn they had to check out the lunar module. With Yoshiko steadying her feet, Tessa opened the hatch between the two s.p.a.ceships, then removed the docking probe so they could fit through the tunnel. Rick stowed the probe in the equipment bay and followed the two women into the lander, but it had even less room than the command module so he stayed in the tunnel, feeling a bit disoriented as he looked down from above on the angular instrument panel and flight controls. The ascent engine was a big cylinder between the slots where pilot and copilot stood, sort of like the way the engine in an older van stuck out between the driver and the pa.s.senger.

"Is this what you sit on during descent?" Yoshiko asked.

Tessa laughed. "No, you fly it standing up, with bungee cords holding your feet to the deck."

"You're kidding."

"Nope."

Yoshiko looked around at the spartan furnishings. To save weight, everything not absolutely essential had been omitted, including switch covers and wiring conduit. Bundles of wires were tied into place, fuel and air lines ran exposed along the walls, and the few storage areas were covered with nylon nets rather than metal panels. The whole ship looked fragile, and in fact it was. A person could shove a screwdriver through the walls if they wanted to. Yoshiko said, "I think I'm glad you two are flying this one."

They hadn't talked before this about who would stay in the command module while the other two went down to the Moon. Though keeping Yoshiko in the command module where her docking skills would be most useful was the logical choice, Rick said, "Are you sure? I was prepared to draw straws for it if you wanted."

She shook her head. "No. This is adventure enough. And who knows, if we inspire enough people I may have another chance to land later, when my own country sends a mission."

Rick wondered what a j.a.panese lander would look like. Probably a lot slicker than this, he figured, though to be fair he had to admit that anybody's lander would be slicker if it were built with modern materials. Most of the equipment--the engines and the computers and so forth--could be bought straight off the shelf nowadays. It would be so much easier to build a lunar lander now than it had been the first time, if people just wanted to.

Well, maybe they would. Who could say?

"You'll certainly have a better chance than we will," Tessa said. "Rick and I will be lucky to stay out of prison when we get--whoa!"

For a second, the Moon had shone brightly through the flight control panel. It was just a flicker, gone as soon as it had appeared, but the ship had done it again.

"It is you," Tessa said, pointing accusingly at Rick. "You were thinking positive again, weren't you?"

His heart had begun to pound, and a cold sweat broke out on his body as he said, "Jail isn't exactly my favorite dream."

"No, but I'll bet money you were thinking good stuff just before that."