Ian Sales: Adrift on the Sea of Rains

You’ve been saying that for over a year, snaps Peterson, and we’re still stuck here.

Awkward in the lunar gravity and moving like a man underwater, Kendall rip-walks across to a locker. He opens it, fetches out a plastic crate, turns about and holds the crate at an angle to show its contents: milspec integrated circuits. The code printed on their backs means nothing to Peterson.

When these have gone, Kendall says, I’ll have to engineer something to take their place. I don’t even know if I can do that. I can promise it’ll take me weeks, months maybe, to come up with something.

The man, Peterson thinks, and not for the first time, should have a German accent, a thick German accent. Not that grating Midwestern drawl. It makes it hard to take him seriously—as if the goddamn Nazi Bell were not already difficult to take seriously. Peterson is a USAF astronaut, he knows aircraft and spacecraft and their attendant sciences. All the rest is mumbo jumbo.

Kendall returns the crate to the locker and continues: Let me try a couple of evolutions with the power dialled down. Let’s see if I can recalibrate the torsion field generator to get maximum evolution distance without blowing components.

We’ve got four months, Peterson wants to say, we’ve got supplies for four more months; and then we’re dead. There’s no one to come for us, and nowhere for us to go.

Unless the Bell finds us a home.

Colonel Vance Peterson did not see the end of the world, although he was on duty in the command centre, sitting at his desk and listening to Lieutenant Robert McKay, USN, read out his latest report to Vandenberg—and even then he heard little of what the man said. He had put his hands behind his head and stretched his back, thinking: another three weeks and he’d be rotated back home, where he’d once again see blue skies, the good green earth, his blonde wife and tow-headed son. He was looking forward to it, that was no surprise—it had been exciting at first, living here on the Moon, but the novelty had soon worn off, although he still found EVA fascinating, being out there on the surface, such a visceral confirmation of his presence here on Luna. There were, of course, plenty of clues within the base itself: the sense of lightness, as if his body felt a continual need to escape and return to Earth, the rip-rip rip-rip of the Velcro slippers as he walked, the confinement within these eight cylinders, the ever-present knowledge that outside existed an environment which would kill him in a heartbeat… He imagined life aboard a nuclear submarine on patrol might be the same, although he suspected sailors received better food, and certainly their days were better-filled with tasks to perform. Much of the life here at Falcon Base was make-work, as there was only so much they could do to maintain the systems of the base, or safeguard Kendall’s incomprehensible experiments with the Bell, or keep a weather eye on Earth as the USA and USSR manoeuvred for war. From here, they could only imagine Soviet bombers testing US defences, NATO on full alert as Warsaw Pact forces lined up behind the Iron Curtain from East Germany to Syria, or diplomats leaving tables in disgust as talks failed again and again. From here, they could see only what appeared in orbit: no ICBMs yet, but plenty of recon satellites and the occasional Soyuz or TKS spacecraft flying a tad too close to Space Station Freedom. They were not scientists at Falcon Base, which might at least have given them more of a purpose, a mandate to explore this small world they had colonised, to discover its makings, its origin and its uses. Instead, their eyes were focused on the Earth—and it seemed a natural consequence of living on this airless “sea”, where nature had not intended life to live, for thoughts to dwell on worries and daydreams of their home world. This in turn led to a blankness in the gazes of the men in Falcon Base, not a thousand-yard stare but a variation on “lonely sky”, that strange overpowering sense of solitude which overcame fighter pilots, in which they no longer felt bound to, or by, the Earth, but briefly believed themselves to be creatures of the heavens, beyond the fears and vicissitudes of a terrestrial existence. Here on Luna, the astronauts were of Earth no longer, albeit temporarily, but they had concerns, both immediate and a quarter of a million miles distant—the systems of the base, the Moon’s inimical environment, the situation back home, the brink of war, the war, the war, the war… Which McKay demonstrated at that precise moment, as he clicked through channels on the radio and said insistently, Repeat, Vandenberg, repeat, over. Peterson sat up straight, all thoughts of his impending return forgotten, and asked what was happening. McKay spun round from his station and said, They just went dead on me, I’m not picking anything up on VHF or S-band—there was this long burst of static and then nothing on any of the frequencies. Peterson did not understand; he considered the probability of a catastrophic equipment failure, but every system had triply-redundant back-ups and the likelihood they had all failed was… astronomical. It occurred to him the fault might lie at Earth’s end, some malfunction in the Deep Space Network, but that too had back-up upon back-up and separate facilities in different countries. Such failure was not an option. Keep trying, Peterson told McKay, and then he called Scott on the intercom and told him he needed a hand prepping for EVA—he was going outside, although there was no good reason to do so.

Peterson sits at his desk in the command centre, mapping the boundaries of his cabin fever. Soon he will have to go EVA again, but for now his awareness still resides within the curved bulkheads of the base’s cylinders. It is the lightheadedness brought on by the one-sixth gravity, it makes him feel as though his mind occupies a space bigger than that of his skull, as though it fills the room, the cylinder, Falcon Base, Rima Hadley, cislunar space…

He puts his hands on the desk-top, splay-fingered, and gazes down at them. The last five evolutions have taken them to dead Earths, and salvation remains elusive, as precarious as their existence. Now that he has the Bell recalibrated, the more kilowatts Kendall pumps into it, the further each evolution takes them. But push too far and he’ll burn out more than those integrated circuits. The main power bus, perhaps. The SP-100 nuclear reactor, maybe. And without that they’re finished. The fuel cells might last a week, eight days, but once they’re drained…

A scrape of sound across the command centre catches his attention. McKay at the radio shack has just moved a clipboard. As Peterson watches, McKay picks up a pen and scribbles something on the page attached to the clipboard. He is not following orders—Peterson ceased giving them: he abdicated his authority over nine months before, no longer seeing a reason for it. They are all highly-trained officers—USAF, USMC and USN; pilots and aviators—and they know what needs to be done. They follow their daily routine, the unwritten orders of the day, because it fills their waking hours, because it provides some small sense of purpose, some small reason to go on living. It makes bearable the desolate landscape around and about Falcon Base, the tubular prison of the base itself. Without routine, they would have no reason to monitor and maintain the systems which keep them alive.

That note McKay has just scrawled is the result of the hourly scan of the S-band. It reads, Nothing to report. As it has done since they witnessed the death of the Earth.

Ripping noises rise lightly through the hatch to the floor below. Moments later, Scott’s head appears and he climbs up into the command centre. He is followed by Captain Gordon Curtis, USMC, who has a ring-binder tucked under one arm. They are to spell Peterson and McKay, to take the watch for another four fruitless hours. McKay leaves without a backward glance, and Curtis settles before the radio and begins scanning frequencies.