Matt Eaton - Apollo 8.1

Think .

Menzel. The desert. He remembers their car pulling off the road… at White Sands Missile Range. Was that the launch site? If so, the Air Force would have known about it.

He checks his air again — twenty minutes in the tank. It makes no sense to be out here with so little time, but it would appear there’s no going back. He’s here for a reason, even if he can’t remember what it is.

Without doubt, it has something to do with that giant rock towering over him. It’s hundreds of feet high… like some gigantic version of the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey . The Apollo 8 crew were special guests at the movie preview. Seems like a lifetime ago. Strangest film he’s ever seen. Boy oh boy, that Stanley Kubrick fella is weird. Did someone tell Kubrick this thing is out here?

Focus. Work the problem .

He gets up slowly, lest his next step turns him into a Martian moon in his own right. He inches forward like he’s on tiptoes.

What else would cause him to black out? Medication? Did someone leave him in this state deliberately? Maybe the Russians made it a condition of their cooperation. They’d be worried he might reveal their secrets to NASA. Damn right he’d reveal their secrets, the bastards. Mars. Neil and Buzz would have kittens. But how? Have the Russians mastered cryosleep? It could explain why he remembers nothing.

How long has he been away from home? It must take months to fly this far into space. What have they told Susan? She’ll have written him off for dead by now.

The wall of the monolith facing him remains deep in shadow, but even from here he can see its surface is incredibly smooth. Could be stone. Or metal. Or some strange mineral. But way too smooth to be a natural feature. Somebody put it here.

He takes a few more steps, until a light flickering above him stops him in his tracks. A bolt of lightning strikes the monolith about halfway up. There is no sound, but he feels a tremor vibrate the ground beneath his feet. A blackness almost like charring starts to spread across the monolith from the lightning’s point of impact, then fades slowly away like it’s absorbed into the surface. It’s as if the structure itself is fluid.

Lightning can’t travel in space. It needs ionized particles to carry the electrical charge across a distance. Does Phobos have some semblance of atmosphere? He doesn’t want to waste time thinking about it, and he definitely doesn’t want another bolt to strike him down where he stands. He begins to move as quickly as he can toward the base of the structure.

His movement is painfully slow, and he’s acutely aware of his limited air supply. He’s still a good fifty feet from the base of the monolith. It’s not a huge distance, but at the rate he’s moving it will take too long to get there. He has to take a chance.

Crouching as far as the suit will allow, he launches himself, aiming for lateral movement more than vertical. He aims too low on his first attempt and merely ends up sprawled in the lunar dust again. He gets up and tries again, aiming slightly higher. This time he avoids the ground but starts to feel himself gaining a lot more altitude than he’d like. As he closes in on the monolith, he moves his arms forward to take the impact. But the sudden movement sends him into a spin.

His boots are the first thing that hits the surface. He bends his knees to absorb as much of the impact as possible, hoping to avoid simply bouncing off into space. To his enormous surprise and relief, his feet remain fixed on the face of the monolith.

It has its own gravity field.

He catches his breath, relieved by this unexpected turn of good luck, and bends down to touch the surface beneath his boots. It’s like polished metal. He tries lifting his boots one by one. Careful to make sure one foot remains in contact with the surface, Borman takes a step forward. In this way, he finds he can move much more rapidly. He walks to the side, and then tries to carefully step from one face to the next. But it proves too tricky to get his boot around 90 degrees and flat to the next face, without losing his footing on the other face. He doesn’t dare risk it. He edges back onto the dark face and walks himself quickly down to ground level. The sensation is truly strange — his entire frame of reference is tilted at a right angle in relation to Phobos. The comforting and familiar sense of gravity leaves him with the sensation that the monolith is the solid structure here, and Phobos just a pile of dust gathered around it.

He’s about ten feet from the surface when the face of the monolith starts to shimmer directly beneath him. Solid turns to liquid. As if taking a leap into a lake, he finds himself sinking into the surface. Before he even has time to reach out for something to hold onto, he is completely immersed. As his helmet passes beneath the surface, he sees tendrils of green light all around him, like roots spreading in all directions. Like it’s alive.

The structure is hollow, the wall that swallows him no more than one or two feet thick. He passes through it in less than a second to find himself inside what seems to be a large translucent chamber. The momentum of his “fall” carries him some fifty or sixty feet, all the way to the far side of the monolith. Once more his feet meet firmly on its surface, except now on the inside. In here, the walls of the structure are like windows, giving him a perfect view of the crater. Where the monolith and the moon intersect, he sees a black plinth rising from the floor, like a model of the larger structure. He turns around and finds himself staring directly at the immensity of Mars itself, as if he might simply walk all the way down to the planet’s surface.

What is this place?

He turns and starts to walk back toward the floor of the chamber, his sense of up and down now utterly confused. Embedded in the chamber’s base are pictograms reminiscent of Egyptian hieroglyphs. There is a logic to the images and he feels he might make sense of them if he had more time. He steps off the wall and onto the floor. To his surprise, the base of the chamber, like the moon itself, has almost no gravity. Like it’s inside the monolith but not a part of it.

He starts to shuffle his way closer to the plinth. When he is no more than a few steps away, a three-dimensional movie begins to play all around him. A blue-green planet the size of a truck wheel floats before him, turning slowly, no more than an arm’s length away. He reaches out and his glove passes straight through it. He sees oceans, clouds and polar ice caps. It could almost be Earth, except he knows it’s not. The land masses are unrecognizable. Something amazing and terrible is happening to the planet — asteroids of increasing size begin crashing down upon its surface.

Some of the projectiles burn up in its atmosphere, but many make it all the way to the surface. Their impacts cause increasingly catastrophic levels of destruction. Finally, there is an explosion terrible enough to consume the planet’s atmosphere and it’s like the air itself is on fire. Dark clouds surround the surface and lightning crackles through the clouds, until another massive explosion tears the atmosphere apart. Clouds of fiery gas tear away into space like layers from an onion. The planet’s surface is fractured by violent seismic upheavals of such a magnitude it would surely destroy anything alive on the surface.

When the smoke finally clears, all that is left is a red world of dust. The planet Mars as it is now known to everyone on Earth, a deadly world of rock and ash newly freed from its outer living shell.

The image dissolves, leaving Borman alone in the room. Now the plinth is alive. The focal point in the chamber, its black surface still solid, is a TV screen of rippling quicksilver. He moves toward it and notices what looks like a touch pad on top of it, tilted up at him like an invitation. On the top of the touchpad is an indentation in the shape of a human hand. He tries to get a glove to it, but it’s just out of easy reach. He feels like a child grasping reaching for a sweet jar. Finally, he jumps for it, but only succeeds in throwing himself into open freefall above the plinth. He floats all the way to the roof of the chamber.