Legacy (9 page)

JET PROPULSION LABORATORY, PASADENA, CALIFORNIA

At 9:10 in the morning California time, the press room was full of reporters, not because of the excitement of America’s robotic return to the Moon, but simply because it was a very slow news day. As everyone watched the rovers on four different high-definition monitors arrayed around the large press room, they saw one view go askew. The press on hand had no idea that
Ringo
was in the midst of what Pasadena called “a hissy fit.” Inside the mission control room, a hundred men and women who had worked on the Peregrine mission for the past ten years watched as a problem they didn’t need with the press on hand started happening right before their eyes.

“Ooh, we have
Ringo
going off mission here,” said one of the men watching the telemetry board in front of him instead of the video being broadcast. “Jesus, according to my telemetry he’s … oh, there he goes.”

Stan Nathan, the director of the mission, switched his view to that being broadcast by
George
, the closest beetle to
Ringo
. As he watched, he saw the 450-pound rover slowly start sliding off the edge of the crater.

“Becky, stop that damn thing,” Nathan said, trying to be as calm as he could. “If it gets down inside of there, we’ll never be able to get its telemetry. Those crater walls will stop any signal from getting to it. Hurry up, because Houston’s going to start screaming in just about one minute.”

Dr. Becky Gilickson, remote operator and programming technician in charge of
Ringo
, turned to her six-person team and frowned. There was nothing she could do. She tried sending out a command to reverse its track and override its program, but with the one-and-a-half-minute delay in communication, all she could do was watch as
Ringo
started a head-first run down the steep incline inside Shackleton Crater. Instead of typing in the remote command, she turned toward Nathan, who was standing in the middle of the darkened room.

“Flight, our command just hit
Ringo
, but it’s too late, he’s starting to slide. We recommend we run with it. If he tries to reverse track now at that speed he may roll over.”

Nathan hurriedly turned to the live shot of
Ringo
as it traversed the slope of the crater. For the moment it was running straight; its large six-limbed arms with the tri-rubber tracks seemed to be handling the rough terrain with ease.

“I concur. Let him go. I want a command sent now that once it hits the bottom of the crater I want it to turn—”

“Stan, Hugh Evans is on the line from Houston,” his assistant said as he looked up from the large phone console.

“Put him on speaker.”

“Stan, Hugh here,” said the senior flight director calling from his personal console at the Johnson Space Center. “Look, this could be very embarrassing. Let
Ringo
run and do not, I repeat, do not order it out of the crater. It’ll be down there, so let the press know that we decided to explore the base of Shackleton. Tell them it was my decision to send
Ringo
off mission, clear?”

Nathan was relieved that the flight director for the Peregrine mission had taken control. With the press watching this, it was a potential public relations disaster in the making. If they couldn’t control their robots, how the hell could they keep men alive out there?

“Clear.
Ringo
’s running free. It looks like he’s going to make the half mile journey pretty quickly.”

“Okay, get your press people out there and explain that we intentionally sent
Ringo
off on its own to explore the inside of the crater, nothing more. That ought to keep the dogs away until we can figure out how to recover the rover.”

The phone line went dead as Nathan turned his attention back to
George
’s video. The descending rover just went past its line of sight as it slipped and slid down the steep slope.

“Switch main viewer to
Ringo
so we can see what it sees.” Nathan turned to his left at the last telemetry station in the long row. “REMCOM, start getting a communications relay established between
George
,
John
, and
Paul
. We have to align them so we can continue to receive telemetry from the little guy once it hits bottom, because it’ll never be able to broadcast out of the damn hole.”

The remote control communications station began sending out signals interrupting the programming of the three remaining rovers. The scientists would introduce a “burp” in their existing program and send another order to span that gap. They would arrange the rovers around the edge of the crater to receive the telemetry signals from
Ringo
and then relay that signal to earth. It had never been done before, but that was the business they were in.

“Estimate thirty-five feet, plus or minus a foot, until
Ringo
hits bottom,” Communications called out. “Signal strength on telemetry is weak. Okay, signal lost at 0922 local time.”

“Come on people. Let’s get the rest of the Beatles in on this,” Nathan called out as he closed his eyes, hoping that
Ringo
didn’t go belly-up in the last thirty feet of its unscheduled walkabout.

“We have a patch through from
Paul
,” Communications said. “Okay, we now have video from
Ringo
 … it stopped. It looks like—”

“The damn thing’s sideways—it’s hung up on something,” Nathan said angrily. He was trying his best not to take it out on his people.

On the monitor, the video streaming from
Ringo
showed the side of the crater. As they relayed a signal down into Shackleton from
Paul
, they ordered the camera to rotate 60 degrees. They wanted to see what they were hung up on before trying to extricate
Ringo
from its current 10 degree tilt position.

“Okay, at least we know it’s on the bottom and in one piece,” Nathan said as he stepped toward the large monitor, watching the area around the rover as it panned its view to accommodate its orders from Earth. “Goddamn big crater,” he mumbled as he looked at the darker than normal picture surrounding
Ringo
. “We must be in the lee of the crater’s northern wall.”

As the camera completed its 180-degree sweep, it stopped. Its lens was automatically trying to focus on something that would be oriented to its left side. It was obviously the obstacle that had arrested
Ringo
’s run down the slope.

“Okay, there it is,” Nathan said, as he tried to get a clear picture. “Is that all we have on focus?” he asked.

“Without the external lighting, that’s it,” REMCOM said as he turned in his seat and looked at the flight director.

“Well, the batteries be damned,” he said, looking at the remote communications specialist. “We have to get
Ringo
into the sunlight anyway to charge the damn thing. Turn on external lighting and see what we’re snagged on,” Nathan said in frustration, because he knew battery life was
real
life when you’re on the Moon.

“Relaying the order,” REMCOM called out.

As they waited for the delay in communications, Nathan sat on the edge of one of the consoles and rubbed his face. He hoped this would be the only glitch of the mission, but he knew when you were dealing with robots and remote technology, anything could go wrong, so he figured this whole endeavor could take years off his life.

As everyone in mission control in both Pasadena and Houston watched, and with the press yawning, displaying their boredom in both press rooms,
Ringo
turned on the powerful floodlights rigged to the top of its camera tower. The lens refocused and the picture suddenly turned to red and blue.

“Color? What in the hell is color doing on the Moon?” one of the technicians said as she stood up to get a better view.

Of all the photos from the Apollo program and countless views from the Moon, with the exception of anything man-made or views of the Earth, there was never anything of color to be broadcast from the lunar surface, just the white, grays, and blacks of its geology. But here was
Ringo
, the little remote designed for the search and testing of water deposits, sending out a full color image of something that had reached out and grabbed it on its way into the crater.

“Pull the view back by a foot,” Nathan ordered, as a sliver of recognition came into his mind. He stared intently at the color image

As the view pulled away from the object holding
Ringo
in place, more detail started to emerge. The colors were from what looked like some kind of material, possibly nylon in nature.

“Pan to the right,” Nathan ordered.

After a minute the camera view turned away from the colorful material, eventually settling on something white. Then it focused its high definition camera onto something jagged and dark.

“Damn it, what the hell is that?” Nathan asked, his heart beating faster. “Pan back another foot.”

A minute later the picture adjusted. That was when the first reaction was heard. Someone dropped a coffee cup and it shattered the stillness of the control room. The view on the screen was shocking to say the least. The jagged darkness the camera had picked up was the shattered remains of a sun visor attached to a white helmet, and the colorful material-looking pattern was an environmental suit, not unlike those every man and woman in the room had seen at one time or another in old footage of the Apollo program.

“Jesus Christ,” Nathan said as he felt his heart start to race.

As the camera focused on the white helmet with the shattered face shield, the bone-white structure of a grinning skull came into view, the eyeless sockets staring at the camera as the bright floodlights cast eerie shadows on the skeletal remains.

Suddenly the speakerphone came to life, making most in the control center jump.

“Pasadena, this is Houston, do you realize that whatever this is, it’s being shown to the press, cut the feed to your press center, now!”

“You got it, Hugh,” Nathan said as he started shouting out orders.

In the press room a floor down in the JPL building, the members of the media stood dumbfounded as they watched the remote video of the skeleton, buried up to its waist in the lunar dust of Shackleton Crater. The image went from living color to a slow fade to black.

EVENT GROUP COMPLEX, NELLIS AIR FORCE BASE, NEVADA

Dr. Niles Compton stood only five foot eight inches, but every man and woman in the massive hallway of the underground complex watching him cut the ribbon for the new vault section on Level 75 saw him as a much larger man. His reputation as the no-nonsense leader of the department was legendary. With his thick glasses pushed onto his forehead and his white sleeves rolled to the elbow, Niles looked the part of a harried and very tired accountant. As his predecessor, Senator Garrison Lee, once told him, when in this position of responsibility the director of the Event Group needed to relax and smell the roses; otherwise, what was the point in holding and storing the most prized antiquities in the history of the world and the knowledge that went with them. So today Niles took time out from his normal duties overseeing the blackest department in the federal government to be present at a ceremony to open a new set of storage vaults, and the excavation that housed them almost two miles beneath the sands of Nellis Air Force Base, just outside Las Vegas, Nevada.

He smiled for the first time that morning as his deputy director, Virginia Pollock, handed him an ordinary pair of office scissors. He looked past the tall head of the Nuclear Sciences Division and at the other sixteen department heads and tried desperately to smile. Then he nodded toward the men and women from the Army Corps of Engineers attached to Department 5656. He quickly reached out and cut the yellow ribbon that had been strung across the security arch leading to the new but empty vaults beyond.

“Now, let’s get busy and fill some of these up before certain people in the federal government catch on to us and fire everyone.”

The men and women of the Event Group laughed as Niles handed the pair of scissors back to Virginia. Then he turned abruptly to a thin man with a pair of horn-rimmed glasses similar to his own. He had the same harried look as Niles, but his smile was genuine while the director’s was not. Pete Golding was the head of the Computer Sciences Division of the Group and held the same position Compton himself had many years before.

“What did Europa say about the images?” he asked Pete quietly, while taking him by the arm and walking him away from the milling men and women.

“We dissected that image from here to St. Petersburg, and all Europa had to say was the environmental suit was not of any known design. Not ours, the Russians, nor the People’s Republic.”

“You mean we have a Cray computer system worth two and half billion dollars and all it can do is agree with what we already know?”

Pete looked hurt and taken aback. He knew it wasn’t just the images sent from Shackleton Crater that stunned and shocked everyone at the Group; it was the condition of Senator Garrison Lee that was weighing heavily on the director’s mind. Pete took a deep breath and looked down at the man that he admired above all others.