Lunar Descent (2 page)

(1.) MAIN OPERATIONS CENTER (Subcomp A third level)

(2.) SUBCOMPLEX A (two levels)

(3.) DORM 1 (two levels)

(4.) DORM 2 (two levels)

(5.) DORM 3/VIP QUARTERS (one level; includes emergency airlock)

(6.) GREENHOUSE

(7.) EVA READY-ROOM/AIRLOCKS

(8.) SPACECRAFT MAINTENANCE (unpressurized)

(9.) TRAFFIC CONTROL CUPOLA

(10.) VEHICLE GARAGE/MAINTENANCE (unpressurized)

(11.) FACTORY DOMES (unpressurized)

(12.) MASS-DRIVER (unpressurized)

(13.) NUCLEAR POWER STATION (unpressurized)

(14.) LANDING PAD THREE

(15.) LANDING PAD TWO

(16.) LANDING PAD ONE

Not Pictured:

SOLAR CELL ARRAY

SPACECRAFT FUEL TANKS

MINING AREAS

PART ONE

One of These Days

Sunrise (Montage.1)

There is a place, within sight of all the world's oceans, where the seabreeze has never flown.…

Descartes Traffic, this is LTV oh-five-eleven on primary approach, do you copy? Over
.

High mountain ranges, colder at night than the glaciers of Antarctica, hotter at daytime than the Sahara, yet lifeless and still, never having felt the touch of snow or wind …

We copy, LTV oh-five-eleven, and we have you on our scope. Beacons are on and you're cleared for touchdown on Pad Two, over
.

Deep canyons where water has never rushed, vast plains where neither bison nor antelope nor elephant has ever stampeded, long-dead volcanoes whose last lava flow hardened millions of years ago …

Shift Two, this is your final call. All work crews are to clock in by twelve-hundred hours or face late-work penalties. Shift One workers, please use Airlocks One and Two at Subcomp B for your return. Please remember to clock out before you proceed to Subcomp A
.

A dead world: gray, colorless, sterile, its barren wilderness illuminated only by weak blue light cast by the half-full Earth perpetually hovering at near zenith. Yet there
is
life, there
is
motion and change.…

By the way, for employees on the first and second shifts, the first game between the Atlanta Braves and the St. Louis Cardinals will be shown live tonight in the rec room, beginning at nineteen-hundred hours. For the benefit of third-shift workers, the game will be simulcast on LDSM, on comlink channel four, and videotaped for your enjoyment after your shift
.

In the middle of the plateau of the Descartes highlands, warm lights glow from a cluster of buried buildings and domes; more lights are in motion around it, casting strange shadows across boulders and tiny micrometeorite impact craters, as men and machines move continuously across the night-darkened, silent landscape.…

Sunrise coming up at twelve-oh-one hours. Repeat, we've got local sunrise in fifteen seconds, so please adjust your suit thermostats accordingly. Hope y'all enjoy the view, it's gonna be a nice one
.

On a mountainside overlooking the plateau and the encampment, a lonesome, still figure stands in the darkness: a space-suited figure, yet no light is cast from its lamps, nor does the radio cross talk reach its antenna.…

Descartes Traffic, this is LTV oh-five-eleven. We're on final approach at angels five, range one-five, bearing six-south by fifteen east and closing. Looks mighty nice from where we are. Time to break out the lotion and beach blankets, boys and girls. Over
.

A single light in the sky, racing from east to west, is reflected in the helmet visor of the lone figure, yet it doesn't move, apparently not even noticing.…

Five seconds to local sunrise. Four … three … two … one
…

All at once, the blinding, white-hot orb of the sun ascends above the eastern horizon, sending shadows racing away from it, and suddenly there is light on the wasteland; the gray rocks and soil are tinted with silver with just the vaguest hints of brown and orange as the sunlight moves, as a straight curtain, across the Descartes highlands, closing upon the mountain and the figure standing near its summit.…

Heeeey, that's gorgeous! Beautiful, just beautiful! Welcome back, Mr. Sun, we sure missed you
!

The light reaches the lonely figure on the mountain, and as it does, the figure fades from sight, as if evaporating in the abrupt, harsh heat, leaving behind not so much as a single footprint to show that it had ever been there.…

Gonna be another beautiful day here on the Moon, ladies and gentlemen. Hope you enjoyed the show. Time to go back to work now
.…

1. The Diversion of Spam-Can S31CO18

The next incident of piracy began early Friday morning-May 17, 2024, to be exact, just a few hours before sunrise. An appropriate time for vile acts by unspeakable men.

“Fast Eddie” Delany leaned over the railing of a catwalk high above the floor of Bay Four of Skycorp's Orbiter Processing Center and watched as the bridge crane just below his feet lowered a cargo pallet into the payload bay of the Skycorp shuttle
Jesco von Puttkamer
. He absently reached into a breast pocket of his work vest and pulled out a stick of Wrigley's spearmint as the big crane cranked and whined and beeped, the ruckus barely heard through the ear protectors clamped over his balding head. Seventy feet below, at the bottom of the vast pit formed by the tiered work platforms surrounding the shuttle, two other cargo loaders standing in the open bay of the Boeing S-202B “Humpback” reached up to grasp the leading edges of the massive pallet and gently guide it down. Fast Eddie curled the stick of chewing gum into his mouth and slid back the right sleeve of his cotton shirt to check his watch. Almost 0300. Time to get things rolling here.…

He looked down again to make sure the pallet was going into the stub-winged shuttle without a hitch. One of the grunts in the
Puttkamer
's bay glanced up at him and quickly gave him the O.K. sign with a free hand. Eddie returned the gesture, then stood up from the railing and began walking down the catwalk toward the top platform of the big hangar. Up here in the rafters, he could peer above the corrugated sheet-metal walls dividing the hangar, into the bays where the other shuttles were going through the post-landing and prelaunch turnaround cycle.

In the far distance to his left the red-striped vertical stabilizer of an older ship, the Boeing S-201A
Willy Ley
, could be seen between the levels of the rear swing-away platform; the old boat had come home Saturday afternoon, and from what he had heard from the Bay Two techs during his last coffee break, its electronics were giving out almost faster than they could find and repair the faults, and whole sections of the multilayer thermal protection tiles on the lower fuselage were all but shot to shit. Somebody would have to soon make up their minds whether to keep Willy operational or decommission it for cannibalization and eventual donation of the hull to some museum. Damn shame if they took it off the flight line; the
Willy Ley
had a lot of history behind it. To his immediate right he could see the smaller, blue-and-green striped fuselage of the Orbital Services spaceplane
Deke Slayton
over in Bay Five, leased from Skycorp until Orbital Services fixed the damage suffered by its own OPC hangar, on the other side of Merritt Island, from the violent tropical storm which blew over Florida's northeast coast two weeks ago. The mini-shuttle was ready to be towed to the Vehicle Assembly Building for mating with a booster, as soon as the two almost-rival companies got the paperwork out of the way and NASA found a window in the Cape's crowded launch schedule. Fast Eddie grimaced and shook his head as he glanced away from the OS-32 shuttle. All dressed up and no place to go, aren't you, Little Deke?

But it was Bay Three, immediately to his left between the
Puttkamer
and the
Ley
, which demanded his attention. As Fast Eddie reached the stairway leading down from the work platforms to the hangar floor, he paused to rub imaginary dust from his right eye while he furtively studied the floor of Bay Three. From here he could see the blunt nose of the Boeing S-202B
Sally Ride
protruding through the forward tiers. Like the
Puttkamer
, the
Ride
was a second-and-a-half generation shuttle; raised payload bay on the top aft fuselage, no vertical stabilizer, long delta wings with tip fins, advanced avionics designed for quick turnaround at the Cape. In the trench underneath the fuselage he could see jumpsuited technicians making last-hour adjustments to the landing gear hydraulics. The doors of the humpbacked payload bay were open, and sure as hell, Eugene the Dork was waddling down the mobile ladder out of the shuttle and down to the hangar floor. Right on time.

The Dork paused on the lowermost platform to ask a question of the bay foreman—Fast Eddie could make out Lynn Stoppard's pained expression, even if Eugene missed it entirely—and to fuss over his datapad with his lightpen. Eddie took the opportunity to relish his target of opportunity. Eugene Kastner was the king nerd of Skycorp's graveyard shift at the Cape, the wanker to end all wankers. This was a guy who probably tucked his Fruit of the Loom undershirt into the waistband of his baggy shorts before he went to bed in the morning. He was an assistant scoutmaster for the local Boy Scout troop, took his Sunday day-off to attend the Baptist church in Titusville, voted Republican across the ballot even for municipal dogcatcher, rarely wore anything which wasn't white, gray, or brown (and secretly cheated on company dress code for management by using a clip-on tie instead of learning how to tie a decent knot), always kept a half-dozen colored pens (no two alike) in his breast pocket, and couldn't keep his weight down because his darling wife always made sure that there was a packet of Sara Lee double-fudge cookies in his dull gray lunchbox. Eugene hummed along with Muzak when he thought he was alone, stopped reading science fiction when he thought all the writers were becoming liberals, and once bared his soul to a couple of other cargo inspectors in the NASA cafeteria to tell them that, if it weren't for them, Lord knows
what
would get into the cargo canisters lifted to orbit by the shuttles during their weekly supply missions.

The last was utter hypocrisy because there were two secrets in Eugene Kastner's life, and one of them was that when he completed his meticulous inspection of the contents of the cargo bays of outbound shuttles—usually at 3
A
.
M
., if there were no severe holdups in the launch cycle—he would retire to his office, close the door, and steal a half-hour of sleep in his desk chair. You could tell it was coming when he yawned. Fast Eddie had to smile as he watched the Dork slowly walk away from the
Sally Ride
and head for the door to Bay Four. Just before he reached the door, Eugene stopped in his tracks and yawned. He then glanced at his watch before opening the door.
Lord
, Eddie thought as he headed down the stairs,
I love a man who keeps to a tight schedule. Shows strength of character
.

But there was another, darker secret which Eugene kept: He had been bribed a long time ago to ignore certain outbound payload canisters. As unbelievable as it seemed, this prosaic Baptist Republican no-nonsense family man was on the take from someone.
The trick to finding out which Spam-can
, Fast Eddie mused as he jogged down the stairs,
is to watch the Dork carefully when he makes his inspections
.

Eddie made it to the floor just as the Dork was heading for the mobile ladder leading up into the
Puttkamer
's payload bay. “Morning, Gene,” he called out over the barrage of noise, pulling the ear protectors down around his neck. “Ready for your look-see?”

The Dork turned and cast a disdainful look at the approaching bay foreman. It was Eddie Delany's job to accompany the cargo supervisor during the inspection. Eugene knew that, but it didn't mean he had to like it, or like Eddie either for that matter. The Dork just nodded, then glanced down at his datapad. “You had trouble earlier getting the pallet into the cargo container,” he said, peering over his horn-rimmed glasses at Eddie.

“Uh-huh.” Eddie pointed up at the shuttle; the bridge crane had lowered the pallet the rest of the way into the payload bay and the two cargo grunts were disengaging the cables. “A couple of bolt holes were misaligned in the forward section by about a quarter of an inch either way.…”

“
About
a quarter of an inch?” The Dork couldn't tolerate generalizations. He preferred people to speak to him in metric terms—this was a person who, if asked on the street by a driver for directions to the nearest charge station, would tell the man how far it was in kilometers—but he had come to reluctantly accept the fact that he was working with other Americans.

“Three-point-four tenths of an inch,” Eddie automatically replied. “Anyway, we got NASA to give us a waiver to drill new holes, so it isn't a problem anymore.”

The Dork nodded his head, moved his lightpen across the pad and double-checked to see if a NASA waiver had indeed been issued, and nodded again. “Okay. Send me a memo on this so we can bill the supplier for the work.” Then he turned and began walking up the ladder.

Eddie was about to follow him up when he heard a sharp whistle. He glanced over his shoulder and spotted Lynn Stoppard standing in the doorway to Bay Three. The other foreman quickly shook his head, then ducked back out of sight. Eddie got the message; Eugene had thoroughly inspected the payload canisters in the
Sally Ride
. If there was contraband in any of the Skycorp shuttles, it had to be in the
Puttkamer
.

The Dork was in the bucket of the cherry picker by the time Fast Eddie made it up the ladder. As Eddie watched, Eugene checked the serial number stenciled on the outside of the first of the two cargo canisters strapped to the pallet—nicknamed Spam-cans because of their general shape—against the list on his datapad, then reached down and unlocked the hatch. He pulled a tiny flashlight out of the penholder in his shirt pocket, bent over the railing and shined the beam across lashed-down plastic crates containing ball bearings, spare computer breadboards, toilet paper, glove linings, and whatnot destined for Olympus Station, the powersat construction base in geosynchronous orbit. He glanced up at Eddie, then pulled a jackknife out of his pocket, selected a box at random and sliced open the plastic sealing tape. His flashlight roved briefly over stacks of folded paper underwear. The Dork looked at his datapad again—no unauthorized jockstraps were going to make it into orbit if
he
could help it-then he clicked off the penlight and stood up. “Reseal that box and have the hatch locked down,” he commanded Eddie as he moved to the second Spam-can.