Abandon In Place Part 4

"Well, yeah, but--"

"But nothing. Every time you think we're going to jump-start the s.p.a.ce program with this little stunt, the ship disappears, and every time you think we're not, it comes back. Admit it."

Rick suddenly felt claustrophobic in the narrow access tunnel. He said, "No way!

There are a million other factors that could be operating here. My optimism or pessimism isn't controlling the ship."

"I think it is."

They stared at one another for a few seconds, then Gregor said over the radio, "Tessa's theory may be correct. Our studies indicate that ghosts are often closely tied to emotional states."

"Your studies of what?" Rick asked. "You can't put ghosts in a lab."

Gregor laughed. "No, but you can sometimes take the lab to the ghosts. You forget, Russia has been studying paranormal phenomena since the cold war. We may not know everything about them, but we have learned a thing or two."

Rick and Tessa looked at each other, both clearly amazed. The Russians had actually gotten results? Impossible. Rick said, "I don't believe you for a second."

The j.a.panese controller, Tomiichi, had not spoken up for some time, but now he said, "Believe it. The Russians aren't the only ones to investigate these matters."

The j.a.panese too? Rick looked at Yoshiko, but she merely shrugged and said, "I am an astronomer, not a parapsychologist."

"True enough," Rick muttered, wondering why she hadn't remembered that before when she and Tessa were brainstorming their crazy explanation for all of this.

But evidently someone in Russia--and maybe j.a.pan, too--thought they had a handle on it. "So what if you're right, Kaliningrad?" Rick asked. "What do you suggest we do?"

"Be aware that you could die out there," Gregor said. "And if Tessa is correct, then you should remind yourself occasionally that your death will also kill any chance of a resurgence in popularity for manned s.p.a.ce flight."

"I'm the one who made her turn off the camera," Rick reminded him. To Tessa he said, "I know we're in danger out here."

"You've got to feel it," Tessa said. "That's what matters to a ghost. You've got to remind yourself all the time that this isn't some kind of picnic."

Rick shuddered at the thought of the ship disappearing again, maybe for good, and of the three of them blowing away in opposite directions in the last puff of breathing air. "That won't be hard," he told her.

It turned out to be tougher than he thought. Over the next two days, as they coasted toward the Moon, the ship faded out twice more, once to almost transparency before whatever was responsible brought it back. Maybe it was him, Rick thought after the second time. It had happened while he was asleep, and when Yoshiko had shaken him awake he had to admit that he had indeed been dreaming about a colony on the Moon.

Both Yoshiko and Tessa were looking at him like hostages in a bank robbery or something. That accusing look, combined with the adrenaline rush from waking to their screams and his own fear of death, suddenly p.i.s.sed him off. As he rubbed the sleep from his eyes, he said, "All right, dammit, maybe I am in control of this thing. And if you're right about that, maybe you're right about experimenting with it, too."

"What do you mean?" Tessa asked nervously.

"I mean if I'm G.o.d all of a sudden, then why don't I use it for something? Like make us a bigger ship, or at least a more modern one. Something with a shower, for instance. Or how about the Millennium Falcon? Maybe we could go to Alpha Centauri as long as we're out here."

"Nyet!" Gregor said loudly. "Do not experiment! It is more dangerous than you can imagine."

Rick snorted loudly. "Well, comrade, if I'm in the dark then it's because you guys are holding back on me. If you know what's going on up here, then tell me.

Why shouldn't I dream up a nice, big fantasy instead of this cramped little can?"

"E equals MC squared, that's why," Gregor said. "Your ghost cannot violate the known laws of physics. We do not know where the energy comes from to create the...ah, the physical manifestation, but we do know that a clumsy attempt to manipulate it can result in a violent release of that energy."

"You do, eh? And how do you know that?"

Gregor conferred for a moment with someone else in the control room with him, then came back on line. "Let us just say that not all of our underground explosions in the 1970's were nuclear."

Rick looked out the window at black s.p.a.ce. "You've made a weapon out of ghosts?"

he asked quietly.

Gregor said, "Is an industrial accident a weapon? It is not useful unless you can direct it, and that's what I'm trying to tell you now. You are the focus of this phenomenon, but not its master. If you are careful you can maintain it, but if you attempt to manipulate it, the result will be disastrous."

"So you say."

"So we have come to understand. We do not have all the answers either."

Rick's mad was wearing off, but frustration made him say, "Well why don't you come up with some? I'm getting tired of being the scapegoat up here."

Gregor laughed softly. "We are doing our best, but you will understand if that is too little and too late. We are having trouble reproducing your situation in our flight simulators."

"Hah. I'll bet you are." Rick took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "All right," he said, "I'll try to be good. But if you learn anything more about how this works, I want to know it instantly. Agreed?"

"Agreed," Gregor said.

Rick rubbed his eyes again and unstrapped from his chair. Looking pointedly at Tessa and Yoshiko, he said, "Okay, then unless anybody has an objection, I think I'll have some breakfast."

"No problem," Tessa said, holding her hands out. Yoshiko nodded. They both turned away, either to give him some privacy or to escape his anger, but whichever it was he really didn't care.

Tessa pulled herself into the equipment bay and began taking a navigational reading while he re-hydrated a bag of dried scrambled eggs.

"Hey," she said a few minutes later. "We're on a polar trajectory again." She looked directly at Rick, who was sucking on a packet of orange juice.

"It's not me," he protested. "A polar orbit means we can't land. The command module wouldn't pa.s.s over our landing site again for an entire lunar day." That was twenty-eight Earth days, far too long for a crew to wait on the surface. In order to rendezvous with the command module, they would have to make an orbital plane-change in mid-launch, a much more tricky and fuel-costly maneuver. Either that or the command module would have to make a plane change, which was equally difficult.

Yoshiko acquired a rapt expression for a few seconds, then said, "Unless you land at the pole. The command module would pa.s.s over both poles on every orbit."

"We can't land at the...can we?"

"Absolutely not," Gregor's voice said. "Even I will not allow that kind of risk.

You would have bad lighting, extremes of temperature, no margin for error in landing sites, possibly even fog obscuring your vision on final approach."

"Fog?" asked Tessa.

"It is possible. Current theory predicts water ice in some of the deeper craters near the pole, where sunlight can never reach them."

"Wow," whispered Rick. "Ice on the Moon. That would make supporting a colony a lot easier."

"Rick." Tessa was looking intently at the walls, but they remained solid.

"Look, it's a fact," Rick told her, still put out with the whole situation. "Ice would make it easier to set up a colony. We wouldn't have to fly all our water up from Earth. That doesn't mean I think we're actually going to build one, okay?"

"All right," Tessa said. "I just want you to be careful." She looked out the window at the Earth, now just a tiny blue and white disk in the void. "So, Kaliningrad, what do you suggest?"

Gregor said, "Give us a minute." He took longer than that, but when he came back he said, "We want to check your guidance computer's program. Perhaps we can discover where it intends to take you."

So Rick, who had at least trained with the primitive keyboard and display, pulled himself down into the equipment bay and ran the computer while Kaliningrad talked him through the procedure, and sure enough, the program was indeed for a polar trajectory. And when they checked the computer in the lander, they learned that it was programmed for a descent to the rim of the Aitken Basin, a 6-mile-deep crater right on the Moon's south pole.

"That's ridiculous," Rick said when he heard the news. "How could we be expected to land on the south pole? Like Gregor said, the light would be coming in sideways. Shadows would extend for miles, and every little depression would be a black hole."

Tessa, who had been running the computer in the lander, said, "Well, maybe this switch labeled 'Na inject' could provide a clue. If it sprays sodium into the descent engine's exhaust plume, it would probably light up like a candle flame and provide all the light we need."

"You're kidding." Rick pulled his way through the docking collar into the lunar module to look for himself, and sure enough there was the switch, right next to one labeled "Hi-int Floods."

Tessa said, "It looks like landing lights to me. Two separate systems for redundancy."

"Those weren't on the simulator I trained with," Rick said.

"Of course not. NASA would never plan a polar landing. Too dangerous."

They knew that NASA had been listening in on their broadcast all along, and sure enough, now Laura Turner in Houston said, "Well, maybe not, Tessa. We've been digging through the old paperwork here, and in fact one of the mission proposals was for a polar landing. You're right, there was a lot of argument against it, but it was considered a possibility for a later mission after we'd gained enough experience with the easy ones. Of course it got axed along with everything else when the budget cuts came down, but if we'd had the support for it, we would eventually have gone."

Rick felt a shiver run up his spine. "The last two ghosts went to Copernicus and Aristarchus. Those were on the list too, weren't they?"

"That's right."

"So basically we're re-enacting what the U.S. should have done all along."

"That's a matter of opinion, but yeah, I guess you could say that."

Gregor asked, "Houston, can those guidance computers be reprogrammed for a less difficult landing site?"

"Negative," Laura said. "The programs are hard-wired in core memory. There's only two kilobytes of erasable memory, and they need that for data storage."

"So it's a polar landing or nothing," Rick said, his breath coming short. He looked at the controls again. They were solid as a rock now.

"Looks that way," Tessa said. She grinned at him. Even with the added danger, it was obvious what she would choose.

Rick gulped. Her wide smile and intense, almost challenging stare were incredibly alluring, but at the same time he couldn't help wondering how deep a hole they could dig themselves into on this flight, anyway? Deeper, apparently, than he had first thought. But they were already in quite a ways; he couldn't back out now. "All right, then," he said. "A polar landing it is. I just hope we find something worth the risk."

Tessa laughed, and leaned forward to kiss him. "Just going is worth the risk,"

she said. "That's what exploring is all about."

Both Houston and Kaliningrad were unhappy with their choice, but Houston didn't have any say in the matter anymore, and Kaliningrad was caught in a dilemma of its own making, for bailing out now would amount to abandoning an international rescue in the middle of the attempt. So they reluctantly set up their own computers to match the course wired into the onboard ones, and on the eighty-third hour of the flight Rick, Tessa, and Yoshiko strapped themselves into their couches for the long rocket burn that would slow them into orbit around the Moon. That had to happen after they had rounded the horizon, which meant they would be cut off from Earth for the burn. The computer would count down the time and fire the engine automatically, but just in case it didn't, they all set their watches to keep track as well.

The last few minutes dragged by. The moon wasn't visible in the windows; they had turned the ship end-for-end so it was behind them now, their course missing the horizon by a mere hundred miles. Rick kept glancing at his watch, then at the computer display, then at the att.i.tude indicators, making sure they were still lined up properly for the burn.

Yoshiko took careful notes. If Rick and Tessa crashed or couldn't return from the surface, she would have to fire the trans-Earth injection burn herself and make the homeward flight alone.

Just before the burn, the computer asked Go/No-go? again, and Rick pushed "Proceed." The three astronauts watched the countdown continue to zero, but Rick didn't feel the engine kick in. He stabbed at the manual fire b.u.t.ton hard enough to break his fingernail on it, and then he felt the thrust.

Tessa looked over at him, her mouth open. "The computer didn't fire it on time?"

"I didn't feel it," Rick said. "Not until I--"

"It did," Yoshiko said. "I felt it before you pushed the b.u.t.ton. The computer's okay."

"Are you sure?" It had been a split-second impression on Rick's part, and his body was so high on adrenaline that he might not have felt the thust immediately, but he'd have sworn it hadn't fired until he hit the b.u.t.ton.

"I'm sure," Yoshiko said.

Rick looked to Tessa, who shrugged. "Too close to call, for me."

Rick laughed a high-pitched, not-quite-panicky laugh. "What the h.e.l.l," he said.

"We got it lit; that's what counts. Are we still go for landing?"

Tessa nodded. "I am."

"You still comfortable with the idea of staying up here by yourself for a day?"

Rick asked Yoshiko.

"Yes," she said.

"All right, then, let's do it."

They didn't mention the possible computer glitch to Gregor when they rounded the back side of the Moon and reacquired his signal. They reported only that they had achieved orbit and were ready to proceed. Gregor had them fire another burn to circularize their orbit, and that one went off automatically, so Rick began to relax about that anyway. He had plenty else to keep him occupied. The flight out had been a picnic compared to the constant checklists they had to follow and the navigational updates they had to key into the computers before they could separate the two ships. They hardly had time to look out at the Moon, its gray cratered surface sliding silently past below. But finally after two more orbits, two hours each in the lighter lunar gravity instead of the hour and a half they were used to in Earth orbit, they were ready.

They had named the lunar module Faith, to go along with Hope and to signify their trust that it would set them down and bring them back again safely. So when Gregor was satisfied that everything was ready, he radioed to the astronauts, "You are go for separation, Faith."

"Roger," said Rick. He and Tessa were both suited up again and standing elbow to elbow in front of the narrow control panel.

In the command module, Yoshiko said, "Going for separation," and she released the latches that held the two ships together. A shudder and a thump echoed in the tiny cabin, and they were free.

Faith's computer rotated them around to the right angle, and when the proper time came the engine lit for a thirty-second burn that lowered their orbit to within eight miles of the surface. They coasted down the long elliptical track, watching the cratered surface grow closer and closer, until their radar began picking up return signals and Gregor finally said, "You are go for powered descent."

Rick pushed "proceed" on the keyboard, and the computer fired the engine again, slowing them to less than orbital velocity. They were committed now.

Tessa reached out and punched Rick in the shoulder. "Break a leg, buddy," she said. "It's showtime."

It was indeed. Rick gave her a quick hug, clumsy in the suits but nonetheless heartfelt, then gave his attention completely to the controls. Their course was bending rapidly now, curving down toward the surface, which this close to the pole was a stark pattern of white crater rims holding pools of absolute blackness. Rick's gloved finger hovered near the sodium inject switch, but he didn't flip it yet. He didn't know how much he had, and he wanted to save it for the actual landing.