Adrift on the Sea of Rains (Apollo Quartet) (7 page)

Imprisoned in his ALM as it rockets toward freedom—though not, it seems, toward Freedom—Peterson has plenty of time to reflect. He reports in to Falcon Base at regular intervals; the voices of McKay, Curtis, Fulton, all their voices, translated into the same sing-song aviator speak on the radio. When he is not talking to them, there is little else to do but think. The ALM is not built for comfort, it is not built for interplanetary journeys. It has only enough room for four men standing upright. Peterson, already familiar with its cramped interior, now knows it intimately—the function of every switch and readout and valve, what is stowed where, the electronics hidden within the featureless boxes affixed to the walls. Only the micro-gravity makes it bearable. He floats in his spacesuit, without helmet and gloves, his breath chill, blind to the relentless grey of the cabin walls.

He spends his days hovering over the drum of the APS, his feet to the rear of the cabin, watching the Earth through the docking window. His destination corkscrews across the heavens as the ALM rotates in “barbecue mode”. Moment by moment, the Earth circles into view, larger than the moment before, and his heart grows stronger and beats more powerfully with each mile he draws nearer. He thinks about the good Earth and his house in Lompoc, his blonde wife Leigh and his young boy Mikey. Perhaps some version of Leigh and Mikey live on this Earth; perhaps even a version of himself does too. Right now, however, he is not capable of considering the consequences of that.

He remembers sitting in his backyard, beside the pool, a cold beer in his hand and a barbecue sizzling. He recalls looking up at the cloudless blue sky, seeing a spectral Moon and knowing he would soon be there on its surface. Now he approaches an Earth he believed he had lost forever, and he marvels at its jewel-like brightness in the dark and vasty deep. He feels a visceral connection to the blue planet, though it may well be a world as strange to him as the Moon. Intellectually, he knows it is not the Earth he lost, it is not the Earth of his dreams and desires; but neither can it be a truly alien world.

As the ALM speeds closer, so time seems to compact. The hours pass through him and are lost. He performs his housekeeping tasks like an automaton, with no memory of his actions afterward. The Pre-Advisory Data for the mid-course correction he enters on the DSKY as though he were nothing but a conduit for Alden’s numbers. Always that blue beacon beckons. His senses seem to pour out of him and through the docking window into cislunar space. His aspirations speed on ahead of the ALM, and he imagines a hero’s welcome, a loving reunion, a revitalised career, a real life again. Perhaps this Earth has no Bell—in which case, the Wunderwaffe is not a curse, but a prize beyond compare.

Whenever the astronauts in Falcon Base speak to Peterson, they cannot hide their excitement. He feels their eagerness as he hurtles between two planets at twenty-four thousand miles per hour. As the ALM draws ever nearer, he senses emotions stronger still stirring within, beneath deep and placid waters. His heart beats faster, the chill within the ALM bites at his exposed flesh more sharply. It takes an effort of will to prevent his hands from shaking. He can no longer bear to float motionless in the centre of the cabin: it is far too passive. So he pulls himself down to the commander’s position, fastens the waist-restraints and with the RCS pitches the ALM up so he now faces forward. With one gloved hand on the the Thrust/Translation Hand Controller and the other on the Attitude Controller, he surrenders to the illusion he is flying the spacecraft toward the Earth. Though the ALM is far too frail to survive atmospheric re-entry, he pictures himself piloting the spacecraft to the ground, bringing it to a gentle touchdown on the parking lot at the MCC. And then he remembers he left the descent stage in lunar orbit…

At the correct time, Earth captures the ALM and pulls it from its interplanetary flightpath to swing about its massy presence. Blue, smeared with white clouds, fills the spacecraft’s two windows. Peterson can see the shapes of the continents, the sere desert, the green of agriculture and the sprawling hatchwork of conurbations. Everything looks as he expected it, as he imagined it, as he had dreamed of it. He fires the EOI burn to put him in Low Earth Orbit above the space station, and waits for it to catch up with the ALM. Using the RCS, he rotates the ALM until the windows face the ground, and he spends the time waiting for the space station gazing in wonder at the Earth’s surface.

He can see the space station now below him, stark against the Earth, cut by shadows. In shape, it is something like a cross, with a shaft and four arms at right angles to each other. Some of the modules are white, some are green. He frowns.

As he draws closer, he can make out writing on one of the modules. He cannot read it. He blinks. Perhaps this Earth is too far removed from his own, perhaps they have entirely different writing systems. But no, he can make it out clearly now:

Mир

He recognises it. Cyrillic! This is not Freedom, nor any version of it. It is a Soviet space station. An unreasoning anger fills him. The Soviets have won the war. He tries to picture a world dominated by the Reds, all starkly functional buildings and interminable queues of poorly-dressed people. Does the US still exist? Or is it now the United Socialist States of America? How many needed to die for his nation to relinquish its freedom? This is not the world he knows, nor any world he wants to know. The wonder he had felt on approach has gone, replaced by sour hate-fuelled rage.

He reaches for the Thrust/Translation Hand Controller and the Attitude Controller. A manual docking manoeuvre would have been tricky, but this is much easier. He fires a burst from the RCS and drops into a lower orbit. The Soviet space station is no longer moving away from him as quickly. As he decreases his altitude, so his velocity increases, and he begins to gain on the Soviet station with each second. He wonders what the Soviets are saying to each other, to their ground control, as this alien spacecraft approaches them at speed. Do they even recognise it? Did the US of this Earth go to the Moon? He will never know.

Five minutes before impact, Peterson bails out. He pulls on his helmet, backs into a PLSS and secures the straps. He evacuates the cabin air and squeezes out through the exit hatch. As he drifts away, he watches the ALM continue on its trajectory. He has dropped to a lower orbit and begins to overtake the space station. Re-orienting himself so he is travelling backwards, he sees his spacecraft, an ungainly fragile thing, hit one of the station’s modules. It crumples, but so too does the side of the module. Something tears loose. Docking adaptors bend and snap. A solar-cell panel folds gracefully, hitting another module. Something blows and a brief blossom of silent flame ruptures yet another module.

Peterson wonders how many orbits he will make before the Earth captures him and drags him down. He is still pulling away from the space station, which has now broken into several pieces. He rolls over to look at the land so far below. He will never reach it. At the speed he is travelling, he will burn up. He cannot feel sad: he is coming home, and he will never leave. He imagines he can feel rising heat, can see the first tinge of orange and yellow on his helmet’s visor. But it will be many hours yet before he is low enough for that.

At least he has had his revenge. The Soviets killed his world, and the world of his dreams, but he has struck back. He tries to remember what the Russian word on the space station meant… Mир… Mir…
World
, he thinks.

Or,
Peace
.

Appendices

ABBREVIATIONS

A7LB
the spacesuit worn by Apollo astronauts

AFB
Air Force Base

AGC
Apollo Guidance Computer

AGS
Abort Guidance System

ALM
Augmented Lunar Module

APS
Ascent Propulsion System

CDR
Commander

CMP
Command Module Pilot

CSI
Coelliptic Sequence Initiation

CSM
Command/Service Module

DEW
Distant Early Warning

DPS
Descent Propulsion System

DSKY
Display and Keyboard for the AGC and LGC

EOI
Earth Orbit Insertion

EVA
Extra Vehicular Activity

LCG
Liquid Cooling Garment

LEO
Low Earth Orbit

LEVA
Lunar Excursion Visor Assembly

LGC
Lunar Module Guidance Computer

LM
Lunar Module

LMP
Lunar Module Pilot

LOS
Loss Of Signal

LPD
Landing Point Designator

LRV
Lunar Roving Vehicle

MOL
Manned Orbiting Laboratory

NORAD
North American Aerospace Defence Command

PLSS
Personal Life Support System

PNGS
Primary Navigation and Guidance Section

RCS
Reaction Control System

SAC
Strategic Air Command

SAGE
Semi Automatic Ground Environment

SALT
Strategic Arms Limitation Talks

SPS
Service Propulsion System

SRW
Strategic Reconnaissance Wing

SST
Supersonic Transport

TAC
Tactical Air Command

TEI
Trans Earth Injection

Tig
Time to ignition

TLI
Trans Lunar Injection

USAF
United States Air Force

USAFE
United States Air Force in Europe

USMC
United States Marine Corps

USN
United States Navy

VHF
Very High Frequency

XO
Executive officer

GLOSSARY

Apollo 1
Intended to be the first manned Apollo mission, it never left the launch-pad after a fire in the Command Module during a plugs-out test resulted in the deaths of all three crew. Crew: Virgil ‘Gus’ Grissom (CDR), Edward H White (senior pilot) and Roger Chaffee (pilot).

Apollo 4 to 6
These three launches were unmanned tests of the hardware: the Saturn V launch vehicle, Lunar Module and Command Module.

Apollo 7
This was the first manned Apollo mission, although it used a Saturn IB as a launch vehicle rather than the Saturn V needed for the lunar missions. The crew spent eleven days in LEO. Crew: Walter M Schirra (CDR), Walter Cunningham (LMP) and Donn Eisele (CMP). Command Module no callsign (CM-101). Launched 11 October 1968.

Apollo 8
Rumours of a possible Soviet attempt to send a cosmonaut round the Moon, and the delay of a Lunar Module for testing in LEO, prompted NASA to re-task Apollo 8 to orbit the Moon. This made its crew the first human beings to leave Earth orbit. Crew: Frank Borman (CDR), William Anders (LMP) and James Lovell (CMP). Command Module no callsign (CM-103). Launched 21 December 1968.