Ian Sales: Adrift on the Sea of Rains

But the sun here is too bright; the horizon is too close.

Five seconds, says Scott.

Peterson counts them down beneath his breath. He watches the earth… sees it shimmer and change…

To blue .

For one brief moment, he cannot speak. He opens his mouth but can think of nothing to say. He’d imagined he would never see a living Earth again; they had all thought so. Even Kendall. But the delicate planet above the lunar horizon is the blue marble he remembers.

Phil, he says thickly, I think this is it.

The earth shines, it shines . Blue, mottled with small patches of brown and marbled with white clouds.

Someone lets out a whoop over the radio. Peterson winces at the volume. He opens his mouth to bark an order, but closes it without saying a word. There is cause for celebration, after all. He stares at the Earth, afraid it might return to lifeless black, that it is an illusion. He wills it to remain. A light-headedness comes over him.

Another voice on the radio. It is a moment before Peterson identifies it as Bartlett.

Got it, Bartlett crows. On the high gain. Some radio show, and it’s American, by God!

Peterson can remain outside no longer. He turns his back on the Earth and, beneath its newly benevolent blue gaze, he jogs back to Falcon Base. He springs from foot to foot, leaping high in his urgency, dangerously near losing his balance with each balletic step. In the suiting up area, he unlocks and pulls off his polycarbonate helmet, and abruptly hears loud conversation in the command centre above. He struggles out of his A7LB alone, wondering at Scott’s absence, and leaves the spacesuit sprawled like a victim on the floor. At the foot of the ladder, he halts and looks up through the hatch. That noise, it seems so alien, a direct affront to the monasterial quiet which normally pervades Falcon Base.

They are all in the command centre, pale wraithlike men, driven insipid by isolation, with haunted eyes and deep creases bracketting unaccustomed smiles. Peterson wades in among them, slapping backs and shaking hands, hard enough and tight enough to bruise flesh and grind bones.

We’re going home, goddamn it! he tells them repeatedly.

Kendall clambers up through the hatch and gazes in awe at the officers’ celebrations.

Well? he demands. Well? What happened? Can someone tell me what happened?

Curtis, who has put down his manuals, breaks the news. Kendall nods in acknowledgement, frowns darkly in thought, and then a slow smile evolves on his face.

We’re saved, he says in wonder.

It soon transpires that the men of Falcon Base can listen, but they cannot be heard. They try to contact someone using the S-band, but no one responds. They have no idea why—perhaps their equipment is faulty, although the self-tests say not. Perhaps the Earth no longer listens on those frequencies, perhaps the Earth has no dish directed at the Moon. It doesn’t matter. Now the men of Falcon Base have a home to return to. All it requires is for someone to go there and tell them about the castaways on the Sea of Rains.

Do they even have a space programme? asks Kendall. We don’t know how far we’ve evolved from our Earth.

So we show them how to do it, replies Alden with a grin; big Alden, always the most serious of them all. The corn-fed Mid-Westerner who says little, and then only after great deliberation. The dedicated engineer test pilot who is always worth listening to. The man Peterson is sure he has not heard say a word for nearly a year.

Neubeck at the telescope lets out a whoop. They crowd round him like kids, demanding to know what he’s found.

Cain’t be sure, he says with glee, but I reckon we got there a space station in orbit.

Peterson pushes his way through the unruly astronauts. He tugs at Neubeck’s shoulder. Let me see, he orders. Is it Freedom?

No, no. Too small. Neubeck glances down at Peterson’s expectant face and adds with a cheerful insolence, Sir . Too small, but it’s an orbital platform for sure.

They can make out little detail. The space station is indeed smaller than Freedom, a collection of perhaps seven or eight modules, with only three or four pairs of solar cell wings. This Earth’s space programme, it seems, is less advanced than theirs.

They gaze at each other in wonder. The same thought is written on their faces in the different languages of their features: it can be done . There’s an ALM with an ascent stage out there on the Sea of Rains, an ALM for the trip from the Moon to the Earth. The ALM can’t land, but there’s no need.

Because there’s a space station in LEO.

Imagine their faces, Peterson thinks, imagine the expressions on the faces of those guys in the space station when they hear a knock on the hatch and there’s some guy in a spacesuit outside. Imagine what they’ll say when they hear there’s a whole bunch more on the Moon.

He looks across at Kendall and the resentment, the simmering anger, is gone. It’s clear space now, like that abrupt luminous moment he used to feel as his North American F-108D Rapier pierced the clouds and he found himself flying above a landscape of pillowy white. Sound has fallen away; vision, of preternaturally sharpness, is all. Then hearing would return: the muted roar of the YJ93 turbojets, the hiss of his headphones, the vibration of the airframe.

Peterson is not ready to feel gratitude. Kendall and the Bell may have brought them all home, but Peterson will not thank the man yet. Later, perhaps. Once they stand on the soil of the good green Earth.

Perhaps by then he will have come to terms with the debt he owes the scientist and his Nazi weird science.

Higher, further, faster—Peterson’s career had taken him one step beyond the last with each move, which was neither an unusual nor an unexpected career-path for an officer of his calibre. After flying hypersonic reconnaissance missions thirty-five miles above the earth, close enough to space the sky about him was black and the only blue lay beneath his aircraft, as though he were skimming across the surface of a vast curved lake—after flying so near to space he could almost touch it, the only step up was orbit, and USAF plainly thought he had the right stuff because they asked him to try out for their astronaut corps. They’d been launching Saturn IBs out of Slick Six at Vandenberg for over a decade, they even had their own line of Apollo spacecraft called Phoebus, though they would have preferred to throw spaceplanes into orbit. All that research at Edwards AFB they’d paid for, lifting bodies like the Martin Marrietta X-24 and Northrop M2-F3; and even the Boeing X-20 Dyna-Soar, though it never flew—so instead USAF happily bent the technology of North American and Grumman to its own uses, adding military hardware to Apollo capsules, turning ploughshares into swords. And now Peterson lay on his back, feet in the air, wedged between two other astronauts, an expanse of grey instrument panel before him, and waited for the gentle push in the back which would tell him the S-IB’s eight H1 rocket engines had ignited. He’d spent the last twelve months training for this mission and he knew more about this Apollo spacecraft than he had ever known about the aircraft he’d flown, the interceptors, the reconnaissance planes—he knew the placement and function of every switch, dial and readout. Yet if anything malfunctioned during the launch, he could do nothing, he was merely a passenger, and all his training had done was teach him facts and figures over which he had no control or influence. From somewhere far below him came a low rumble, as if a distant trapdoor to Hell had just opened, and he felt a slow pressure begin to build between his shoulder-blades. The capsule jerked from side to side, only fractions of a degree but noticeable, as those eight engines gimballed on their 1,600,000 lbs of combined thrust, and everything was vibrating, the readouts a blur, and he imagined the launch tower slowly sliding past as the S-IB rose on a tower of flame and thunder. One hundred and forty-six seconds later, Peterson was jerked forward against his straps, and then moments later kicked painfully back into his seat as the second stage ignited—but the ride now was smoother, although the roar transmitted the length of the S-IVB was louder. Ten minutes after they had launched, the J-2 engine cut off, and the silence felt to Peterson like a presentiment of catastrophe, a flame-out perhaps, and his hands itched for a stick to hold, for a means to control this errant craft. He’d brought hypersonic planes down to deadstick landings at Groom Lake after crossing the oceans at Mach 6, he’d hit the ground at two hundred knots in F-108D supersonic interceptors after Mach 3 dashes to the DEW Line, and he felt his present lack of control, his inability to pilot, keenly. Something rose past him, a washer, floating serenely across his vision, so he relaxed his arms and they lifted up of their own accord until his hands bobbed and swung before his face, and he felt a momentary fear as though he had lost control of his limbs and jerked his hands back down and balled them into fists. As he shifted in his seat, he realised he could no longer feel his rear pressing into the surface beneath it, and he began to relax, and revelled in this strange new freedom, his ties to the Earth so weak he could no longer feel them, and they no longer affected him, and it was enough to make him forget he was only a passenger on this trip. This was a taxi mission, the spacecraft would rendezvous with Space Station Freedom, and the three astronauts aboard would spend the next eight weeks in the station’s military module, although Peterson had spent so long in mock-ups and simulators and USAF’s own Weightless Environment Training Facility at Vandenberg he felt as though he had already completed his mission. This detailed and exhaustive training the astronaut corps practiced still took some getting used to, going through everything he would be doing in space again and again and again, until it was written into the fabric of his muscles, until every possible eventuality had been studied and plotted and planned and documented. It meant he felt like a puppet when it came to the actual doing of it, a weird sense of déjà vu accompanying every flick of a switch, every meter reading taken, every report made to Mission Control… And yet the mission itself was easy enough, just spy on the USSR and its forces in Iraq using Space Station Freedom’s powerful telescopes and cameras; it was only the location which dictated the depth of training, only the best of the best allowed in LEO, and even then they could not go without the most extensive preparation for all that they were the elite of elites. All that training, education and skills, applied only to a watching brief: though whatever they saw they could do nothing about as they had no weapons, no means of attack aboard the space station, and would be powerless bystanders should the Soviets finally bite the bullet and use those occasional border clashes with NATO troops on the border between Turkey and Iraq as provocation for war.