Sea of Crises (15 page)

He’d been at it for a few hours when he was suddenly startled by the intense sensation of something latching onto his foot - something alive. He looked below the table in alarm, only to discover, to his immense relief, that Buster had somehow found his way down from the cabin and was now scrabbling at his ankle, his stubby tail wagging wildly.

From behind, he heard a laugh. He glanced back just in time to see Maggie descend the last few steps of the path from the cabin. In one hand, she held a plate covered by a paper towel, in the other a tall glass.

“You looked like you were about to come out of your skin,” she said, an expression of amusement on her face.

Embarrassed, Nate took a deep breath, his heart still pounding.

“Didn’t hear you coming,” he acknowledged, after a moment.

“I’m sorry about that,” she said lightly. She set the plate and glass down on one of the few spots of the table top not covered in paper and slid onto the bench opposite him. “I really should have given you some warning.”

Chuckling, she added, “But it did look pretty funny.”

Unsure what to say in response, Nate took in the plate and the glass. “For me?” he asked.

She nodded. “You’ve got to keep up your energy.”

And, for the first time, it dawned on Nate that he was, in fact, hungry. He lifted the paper towel and saw a sandwich on the plate. “Thanks,” he said, reaching for it and taking a bite. Peanut butter and jelly. It tasted remarkably good.

Maggie was studying the piles of paper he’d arranged on the table.

“You were really concentrating hard,” she said, looking back up at him.

Nate took a sip of ice tea and shrugged. He gestured to the paperwork with the hand holding the sandwich. “There’s definitely something missing. But I haven’t figured it out yet. And it’s bugging the heck out of me.”

She nodded, her gaze not leaving him. For reasons he couldn’t identify, Nate felt a little self-conscious.

To cover his discomfiture, he added, “I think if I can just isolate…”

“Stop,” she said quietly.

That took him by surprise.

She continued studying him.

Nate opened his mouth to say something, then paused. Her look shook him in an unfamiliar way.

“Don’t you ever let up?” she asked finally.

The question was a little confusing. But, though he was loathe to make the acknowledgement, it also struck an uncomfortable chord.

“I…” he started to say, then stopped. Her green eyes bore into him.

She glanced down at the table, then back up at him.

“You’re so serious all the time,” she said.

A familiar pang of self-criticism stabbed at him. “I’m sorry,” he offered.

To his surprise, she laughed. “There you go again.” To Nate, her eyes seemed to sparkle with merriment.

“I don’t mean it as an insult,” she amended quickly. “I think it’s endearing.”

Nate looked at her closely. She seemed sincere.

“But,” she added, “don’t you think you ought to cut yourself some slack every now and again?”

Despite himself, Nate chuckled. Impossibly, Maggie’s face lit up even further.

“Now that’s what I’m talking about,” she said.

And for the next half hour or so, while Buster happily splashed in the shallow water along the lake’s edge, Nate and Maggie spent the time talking about nothing in particular. When she left, Nate found himself surprisingly refreshed, and he re-applied himself to the research with a renewed vigor.

As he’d reviewed the documents, Nate had organized them into a collection of stacks. Now he moved them from one to the other, shuffling and discarding. He was certain, as he’d explained to Maggie, that there was something lurking just beyond the written pages. But he couldn’t quite put a finger on it.

A thought that had been gnawing at him for some time again intruded. He set down the stack of papers he’d been perusing and reached for one of the piles he’d earlier pushed to the side. He rifled through them quickly and found the one he was looking for. It was an innocuous internal memorandum, but for some reason, it was one to which he’d kept coming back. He retrieved another stack of memoranda that he had assembled earlier. He’d done so purely on instinct and without a basis he could identify at the time. There wasn’t an immediate connection among them, at least not an obvious one. The subjects were a myriad jumble. The persons to whom they were addressed were all different.

As were the authors.

Or were they?

With a tingle of excitement, Nate pulled a stack of engineering reports he’d slogged through that morning, deadly dry and painful to read. Right there on top was the one he’d just remembered. He flipped to the last page and read the concluding summary. Then he returned to the beginning and carefully read through the entire document. He’d been right. The person who had written the report had not written the conclusion. He knew it for a certainty.

Why not?

More importantly, why had the conclusion been written by the same person who’d anonymously penned the series of memos he’d just reviewed?

Someone, Nate realized, had not only fabricated several documents, but had altered others. The author - could have been a man or a woman, but for reasons Nate couldn’t identify, he was convinced it was a man - had a unique and distinctive writing style. Nate picked up the next document in the stack of reports. This one, he saw, had also been written in part by the mystery author. Not just the conclusion, though. Two pages in the middle of the document were in the same unmistakable style.

The writer was clever. In the section he’d inserted, he’d easily picked up the narrative from the preceding page, which had ended not only in the middle of a paragraph, but in the middle of a sentence, and he’d done likewise melding his last partial sentence on the second page he’d written into the one written by the original author that began the next page in the report. Obviously, there had been something in the middle of the report that someone didn’t want the world to read. But what?

Having identified the mystery writer’s style, Nate doubled back through the documents he’d earlier culled from Peter’s materials, isolating the pages that bore the man’s distinctive prose. He now had the key gaps in the story, but he still needed to fill them in. On a legal pad, Nate began organizing the documents containing the replacement pages, using, for lack of a better regimen, a strict chronology. When he was done, he had several pages of notes, but he was still missing the essence of the story.

He sat back, thinking, allowing the old instincts to take over. The one piece of information he did have - and that the mysterious author of the replacement pages wouldn’t have known his reader would possess - was Mason Gale. The man was not who he’d been represented to be, or that these documents would have one believe. He’d had some connection with The Organization, that was clear. For all Nate knew, he’d been an operative just as Matt had been. That was the key. Using it as a starting point, Nate returned his attention to what he now viewed as a puzzle with a series of missing pieces.

With a sudden intuition, he jotted down a note next to the entry he’d made on his pad for the report whose conclusion had tipped him off to the unknown author. It was more a question than a note, but no sooner had he written it, than he knew the answer. Two entries below was the memo that had started it all. Nate drew an arrow from that entry to the question he’d just posed to himself. And then he took in a sharp breath.

“Oh, my God,” he said quietly to himself.

The dominoes fell quickly after that. The mystery writer had been too clever by half. Nate suspected that someone with as much talent as the man obviously possessed had probably chaffed at the task he was undertaking, and he’d begun to pepper his contributions to the record with little hints. Probably, Nate thought, he hadn’t even realized he was doing it. And nobody would have been the wiser had it not been for the disclosure about Gale.

Finally, as the sun was setting, Nate stood, returned the papers to the box where they’d resided since he and Peter had printed them, and walked to the cabin.

Patricia, Peter and Maggie were in the kitchen, preparing a meal. Tim had found a comfortable chair and was reading. When Nate stepped in, Matt appeared at the top of the stairs.

“Anything?” Matt asked.

Nate nodded. Tim set his book aside as Matt descended the stairs. Patricia, Peter and Maggie dropped what they were doing and immediately made their way to the family room. Maggie sat on the edge of an ottoman and looked up at him expectantly. When he had their full attention, Nate took a deep breath.

“You’re not going to believe this.”

PART TWO

8

“Houston, we are standing by for pitchover.”

As he said it, Bob Cartwright unconsciously flexed his gloved right hand and set it on the pistol-grip controller in front of him.

“Roger,
Concord
,” came the steady voice of Rick Delahousse. “Looking good from here.”

Though it was slightly distorted by the speaker in his helmet, Cartwright could just make out Delahousse’s soft Texas drawl, and he found the familiar voice reassuring. He and Delahousse had been friends since the two of them had entered the astronaut program almost seven years earlier. They’d been an unlikely pairing, the affable country boy from the hills outside Austin and the overly-serious hard-charger from the Midwest. But each had found in the other a perfectly balanced counterweight, and they’d thrived in the competitive environment sponsored by NASA. Cartwright had always assumed that, when he finally made the journey into space, it would be at the side of the mild-mannered Texan. Instead, however, through circumstances he still did not fully understand, Rick Delahousse was now 250,000 miles away, in the large mission control room in Houston, serving as the capsule communicator, or Capcom, while Bob Cartwright was minutes from guiding the Apollo 18 lunar module to its landing spot on the moon near the northern edge of the
Mare Crisium
.

“And there’s pitchover,” said Mason Gale. His voice, like Delahousse’s was altered slightly by the speaker. But he, unlike Delahousse, was not hundreds of thousands of miles away. Instead, Gale and Cartwright stood shoulder to shoulder in the cramped space of the small vessel hurtling toward the surface of the moon. Both men were in full spacesuits. Elastic cords extended from hooks at their waists to anchors on the cabin floor so they would not drift away from the controls in zero gravity. Both were concentrating intently.

Arrayed in front of them were a series of switches, knobs and displays filling a broad instrument panel, to either side of which were small triangular windows. As the craft slowly pitched forward, assuming an upright position for the final descent, the bright, jagged surface of the moon rose dramatically into view through the left hand window in front of Cartwright. It was an awe-inspiring moment. And, with a rush of excitement, he immediately recognized familiar features.

“I have the Needle in sight,” he announced.

The “Needle” was a tall, narrow rock outcropping that jutted up at the far end of the Sea of Crises. It sat just to the left and downrange of their landing site. During the countless simulations they’d gone through in preparation for the mission, it had been their primary visual cue. If they were on course, the Needle would appear in the center of the window in front of Cartwright when the module pitched over. And, sure enough, there it was. Dead center. God bless the engineers at NASA, Cartwright thought.

“Three thousand,” Gale called out, “at seventy-five.”

They were now three thousand feet above the lunar surface, descending at the rate of seventy-five feet per second. The module was under the control of the onboard computer, a device officially called the Primary Guidance and Navigation Section, but referred to by the astronauts as “pings.” It was, Cartwright knew, a first rate autopilot. However, he was poised to override it if, as they got closer, the landing site did not appear safe.

“Passing through one thousand,” Gale intoned. “And we’re at forty-five.”

Though the reconnaissance photographs the mission planners had used to select their landing site were generally good, the resolution of the photos was simply not sufficient to allow details to be picked out below a certain size. And those as yet undiscovered details could have a dramatic impact on their landing. Of particular concern were boulders. The lunar module required level ground to be set down safely. But it was possible objects as large as sixty feet across would not have shown up in the photos. Even a rock as small as three feet wide could, if they were unlucky enough to come down directly on top of it, overpressure the descent engine bell and cause an explosion. Cartwright peered forward, all senses alert.

“Five hundred at thirty-two,” Gale reported.

They would be at “low gate” when they reached two hundred feet, the last point at which the decision could be made to select either automatic or manual control.

“Four hundred at twenty-eight.”

In the distance, Cartwright spotted their landing site. To his relief, it appeared to be clear of large rocks.

“Three hundred at twenty two.”

Suddenly, Cartwright stiffened. Directly ahead of them, just before the spot where they intended to land, a dark line had appeared. As they approached, the feature came into sharp focus. It was a crack in the lunar surface, commonly referred to as a rille. In the couple of seconds available to him, Cartwright studied it. At its closest point, it appeared to be just a few feet in width, but it quickly widened, and, from this angle, it looked deep. The computer was guiding them straight into it. He made his decision.

“I’ve got P-66.” He increased his grip on the controller in his right hand and clicked it three degrees forward, overriding the P-64 control program that had been guiding them down. He knew he didn’t want to go left, as the opening of the fissure trended in that direction, so he nudged the controller to the right. As he made each adjustment, a series of small 100-pound thrust motors mounted in clusters of four on the ascent stage of the module fired in different combinations. With his left hand, he pushed up the thrust/translational controller, increasing the burn in the main engine and slowing their rate of descent.