Clarke, Arthur C - SSC 04 (14 page)

Confession, it is said, is good for the soul.
I shall certainly feel much happier when I have told the true story behind the
timing of the first lunar flight, about which there has always been a good deal
of mystery.

As everyone knows, the American, Russian and
British ships were assembled in the orbit of Space Station Three, five hundred
miles above the Earth, from components flown up by relays of freight rockets.
Though all the parts had been prefabricated, the assembly and testing of the
ships took over two years, by which time a great many people – who did not
realise the complexity of the task – were beginning to get slightly impatient.
They had seen dozens of photos and telecasts of the three ships floating there
in space beside Station Three, apparently quite complete and ready to pull away
from Earth at a moment’s notice. What the picture didn’t show was the careful
and tedious work still in progress as thousands of pipes, wires, motors, and
instruments were fitted and subjected to every conceivable test.

There was no definite target date for
departure; since the moon is always at approximately the same distance, you can
leave for it at almost any time you like – once you are ready. It makes
practically no difference, from the point of view of fuel consumption, if you
blast off at full moon or new moon or at any time in between. We were very
careful to make no predictions about blast-off, though everyone was always
trying to get us to fix the time. So many things can go wrong in a spaceship,
and we were not going to say goodbye to Earth until we were ready down to the
last detail.

I shall always remember the last commanders’
conference, aboard the space station, when we all announced that we were ready.
Since it was a co-operative venture, each party specialising in some particular
task, it had been agreed that we should all make our landings within the same
twenty-four-hour period, on the preselected site in the Mare Imbrium. The
details of the journey, however, had been left to the individual commanders,
presumably in the hope that we would not copy each other’s mistakes.

‘I’ll be ready,’ said Commander Vandenburg,
‘to make my first dummy take-off at 0900 tomorrow. What about you, gentlemen?
Shall we ask Earth Control to stand by for all three of us?’

‘That’s OK by me,’ said Krasnin, who could
never be convinced that his American slang was twenty years out of date.

I nodded my agreement. It was true that one
bank of fuel gauges was still misbehaving, but that didn’t really matter; they
would be fixed by the time the tanks were filled.

The dummy run consisted of an exact replica
of a real blast-off, with everyone carrying out the job he would do when the
time came for the genuine thing. We had practised, of course, in mock-ups down
on Earth, but this was a perfect imitation of what would happen to us when we
finally took off for the moon. All that was missing was the roar of the motors
that would tell us that the voyage had begun.

We did six complete imitations of blast-off,
took the ships to pieces to eliminate anything that hadn’t behaved perfectly,
then did six more. The
Endeavour
, the
Goddard
, and the
Ziolkovski
were all in the same state of serviceability. There now only remained the job
of fuelling up, and we would be ready to leave.

The suspense of those last few hours is not
something I would care to go through again. The eyes of the world were upon us;
departure time had now been set, with an uncertainty of only a few hours. All
the final tests had been made, and we were convinced that our ships were as
ready as humanly possible.

It was then that I had an urgent and secret
personal radio call from a very high official indeed, and a suggestion was made
which had so much authority behind it that there was little point in pretending
that it wasn’t an order. The first flight to the moon, I was reminded, was a
co-operative venture – but think of the prestige if
we
got there first.
It need only be by a couple of hours….

I was shocked at the suggestion, and said
so. By this time Vandenburg and Krasnin were good friends of mine, and we were
all in this together. I made every excuse I could and said that since our
flight paths had already been computed there wasn’t anything that could be done
about it. Each ship was making the journey by the most economical route, to
conserve fuel. If we started together, we should arrive together – within
seconds.

Unfortunately, someone had thought of the
answer to that. Our three ships, fuelled up and with their crews standing by,
would be circling earth in a state of complete readiness for several hours
before they actually pulled away from their satellite orbits and headed out to
the moon. At our five-hundred-mile altitude, we took ninety-five minutes to
make one circuit of the Earth, and only once every revolution would the moment
be ripe to begin the voyage. If we could jump the gun by one revolution, the
others would have to wait that ninety-five minutes before they could follow.
And so they would land on the moon ninety-five minutes behind us.

I won’t go into the arguments, and I’m still
a little ashamed that I yielded and agreed to deceive my two colleagues. We
were in the shadow of Earth, in momentary eclipse, when the carefully
calculated moment came. Vandenburg and Krasnin, honest fellows, thought I was
going to make one more round trip with them before we all set off together. I
have seldom felt a bigger heel in my life than when I pressed the firing key
and felt the sudden thrust of the motors as they swept me away from my mother
world.

For the next ten minutes we had no time for
anything but our instruments, as we checked to see that the
Endeavour
was forging ahead along her precomputed orbit. Almost at the moment that we
finally escaped from Earth and could cut the motors, we burst out of shadow
into the full blaze of the sun. There would be no more night until we reached
the moon, after five days of effortless and silent coasting through space.

Already Space Station Three and the two
other ships must be a thousand miles behind. In eighty-five more minutes
Vandenburg and Krasnin would be back at the correct starting point and could
take off after me, as we had all planned. But they could never overcome my
lead, and I hoped they wouldn’t be too mad at me when we met again on the moon.

I switched on the rear camera and looked
back at the distant gleam of the space station, just emerging from the shadow
of Earth. It was some moments before I realised that the
Goddard
and the
Ziolkovski
weren’t still floating beside it where I’d left them….

No; they were just half a mile away, neatly
matching my velocity. I stared at them in utter disbelief for a second, before
I realised that every one of us had had the same idea. ‘Why, you pair of
double-crossers!’ I gasped. Then I began to laugh so much that it was several
minutes before I dared call up a very worried Earth Control and tell them that
everything had gone according to plan – though in no case was it the plan that
had been originally announced….

We were all very sheepish when we radioed
each other to exchange mutual congratulations. Yet at the same time, I think
everyone was secretly pleased that it had turned out this way. For the rest of
the trip, we were never more than a few miles apart, and the actual landing
manoeuvres were so well synchronised that our three braking jets hit the moon
simultaneously.

Well, almost simultaneously. I might make
something of the fact that the recorder tape shows I touched down two-fifths of
a second ahead of Krasnin. But I’d better not, for Vandenburg was precisely the
same moment ahead of me.

On a quarter-of-a-million-mile trip, I think
you could call that a photo finish….

We had landed early in the dawn of the long
lunar day, and the slanting shadows lay all around us, extending for miles
across the plain. They would slowly shorten as the sun rose higher in the sky,
until at noon they would almost vanish – but noon was still five days away, as
we measured time on Earth, and nightfall was seven days later still. We had
almost two weeks of daylight ahead of us before the sun set and the bluely
gleaming Earth became the mistress of the sky.

There was little time for exploration during
those first hectic days. We had to unload the ships, grow accustomed to the
alien conditions surrounding us, learn to handle our electrically powered
tractors and scooters, and erect the igloos that would serve as homes, offices,
and labs until the time came to leave. At a pinch, we could live in the
spaceships, but it would be excessively uncomfortable and cramped. The igloos
were not exactly commodious, but they were luxury after five days in space.
Made of tough, flexible plastic, they were blown up like balloons, and their
interiors were then partitioned into separate rooms. Air locks allowed access
to the outer world, and a good deal of plumbing linked to the ships’
air-purification plants kept the atmosphere breathable. Needless to say, the
American igloo was the biggest one, and had come complete with everything,
including
the kitchen sink – not to mention a washing machine, which we and the Russians
were always borrowing.

It was late in the ‘afternoon’ – about ten
days after we had landed – before we were properly organised and could think
about serious scientific work. The first parties made nervous little forays out
into the wilderness around the base, familiarising themselves with the
territory. Of course, we already possessed minutely detailed maps and
photographs of the region in which we had landed, but it was surprising how
misleading they could sometimes be. What had been marked as a small hill on a
chart often looked like a mountain to a man toiling along in a space suit, and
apparently smooth plains were often covered knee-deep with dust, which made
progress extremely slow and tedious.

These were minor difficulties, however, and
the low gravity – which gave all objects only a sixth of their terrestrial
weight – compensated for much. As the scientists began to accumulate their
results and specimens, the radio and TV circuits with Earth became busier and
busier, until they were in continuous operation. We were taking no chances; even
if
we
didn’t get home, the knowledge we were gathering would do so.

The first of the automatic supply rockets
landed two days before sunset, precisely according to plan. We saw its braking
jets flame briefly against the stars, then blast again a few seconds before
touchdown. The actual landing was hidden from us, since for safety reasons the
dropping ground was three miles from the base. And on the moon, three miles is
well over the curve of the horizon.

When we got to the robot, it was standing
slightly askew on its tripod shock absorbers, but in perfect condition. So was
everything aboard it, from instruments to food. We carried the stores back to
base in triumph, and had a celebration that was really rather overdue. The men
had been working too hard, and could do with some relaxation.

It was quite a party; the highlight, I
think, was Commander Krasnin trying to do a Cossack dance in a space suit. Then
we turned our minds to competitive sports, but found that, for obvious reasons,
outdoor activities were somewhat restricted. Games like croquet or bowls would
have been practical had we had the equipment; but cricket and football were
definitely out. In that gravity, even a football would go half a mile if it
were given a good kick – and a cricket ball would never been seen again.

Professor Trevor Williams was the first
person to think of a practical lunar sport. He was our astronomer, and also one
of the youngest men ever to be made a Fellow of the Royal Society, being only
thirty when this ultimate accolade was conferred upon him. His work on methods
of interplanetary navigation had made him world famous; less well known,
however, was his skill as a toxophilite. For two years in succession he had
been archery champion for Wales. I was not surprised, therefore, when I
discovered him shooting at a target propped up on a pile of lunar slag.

The bow was a curious one, strung with steel
control wire and shaped from a laminated plastic bar. I wondered where Trevor
had got hold of it, then remembered that the robot freight rocket had now been
cannibalised and bits of it were appearing in all sorts of unexpected places.
The arrows, however, were the really interesting feature. To give them
stability on the airless moon, where, of course, feathers would be useless, Trevor
had managed to rifle them. There was a little gadget on the bow that set them
spinning, like bullets, when they were fired, so that they kept on course when
they left the bow.

Even with this rather makeshift equipment,
it was possible to shoot a mile if one wished to. However, Trevor didn’t want
to waste arrows, which were not easy to make; he was more interested in seeing
the sort of accuracy he could get. It was uncanny to watch the almost flat
trajectory of the arrows; they seemed to be travelling parallel with the
ground. If he wasn’t careful, someone warned Trevor, his arrows might become
lunar satellites and would hit him in the back when they completed their orbit.

The second supply rocket arrived the next
day, but this time things didn’t go according to plan. It made a perfect
touchdown, but unfortunately the radar-controlled automatic pilot made one of
those mistakes that such simple-minded machines delight in doing. It spotted
the only really unclimable hill in the neighbourhood, locked its beam onto the
summit of it, and settled down there like an eagle descending upon its mountain
aerie.