Gary Gibson - Final Days

Saul looked around with a growing sense of dismay as Lester collapsed into one of the two front seats, studying a battered manual held in one hand while he began flipping toggle switches on an instrument panel with the other. Everything here was hard-edged and intensely physical, a direct contrast to the soft, rounded edges of most technology he had encountered throughout his life.

After a moment Saul’s UP locked into the capsule’s data network, and a series of softly glowing displays, rendered in three dimensions, materialized around both the pilot and the co-pilot seats. He felt himself relax a little, realizing it was like Lester had said – it might look primitive, but appearances could be deceptive.

He noticed Amy watching him. ‘It looks basic, but only on the surface,’ she said, tapping at a check-list floating in the air before her. ‘Ito;s like Lester said, a lot of what you see here is just for show.’

Saul nodded in appreciation, working hard not to let her see just how scared he really was. His mouth felt paper-dry, his heart hammering so hard in his chest he wondered if he was in danger of having a stroke.

Frank finished strapping Lester into the co-pilot’s seat, then performed the same task for Amy before finally exiting the capsule and securing the hatch behind him. A moment later Saul heard Ginny speaking to Lester over a shared A/V link.

‘All electrical systems look fine,’ he heard her say, ‘but we should have run a proper pre-launch check on the engines. Shit like that can get you killed.’

Amy cackled. ‘Any problems with those and I’ll be too busy decorating the desert to worry about them. Just set us a countdown, and we’ll be on our way.’

‘Yeah, roger that,’ said Ginny, her voice tense. ‘You’re go for launch in one hour. And . . . good luck. We’ll see you there in a couple of day’s time.’

‘That we will, sweetheart,’ Saul heard Lester say with undisguised fondness. ‘Good luck to all of you as well.’

Amy and Lester spent the better part of the next hour going over a series of interminable system checks. They talked about heat exchangers, fuel mixes, control valves and power assemblies. If Saul had really wanted to know what they were referring to, he could have checked with the how-to, but instead he stared up at the capsule’s ceiling, waiting for it to all be over.

Once the countdown fell below ten minutes, Saul’s helmet began showing him the last seconds ticking away prior to liftoff. Thirty seconds before the display indicated zero, the capsule lurched very softly, while a crescendo-ing roar grew to such a volume that further thought became almost impossible. The countdown passed zero and they began to climb and, before very long, an invisible block of iron began to press down on Saul. Powerful vibrations shook his couch with such force that his vision blurred.

‘Hey, Dumont,’ Amy called over the shared comms, ‘any history of heart problems? Anything like that?’

Saul struggled to form a coherent answer in the face of what he felt certain was his imminent death. ‘No,’ he finally managed. ‘Not that I know of.’

‘Good answer,’ she replied. ‘Because, under normal circumstances, no way in hell we’d have let you get on this boat without six months of medical check-ups and a daily work-out in the gym.’

‘He got checked out just fine before we went on our jump,’ Saul heard Mitchell announce.

That was ten years ago , Saul wanted to say, but his throat refused to form any words.

Finding he could access a ground-basedvideo feed of their launch through his contacts, he was shocked to see how far the Saturn had already climbed. A pillar of flame billowed out from its engines, nearly overloading the filters of the cameras as they angled upwards to follow their progress.

The whole craft meanwhile shook with an insane violence. All Saul could do was stare fixedly at the back of Amy’s and Lester’s heads, visible through the clear polycarbonate shells of their helmets, while they continued to throw technicalities at each other with enthusiastic abandon.

After another minute, a loud metallic boom jerked him hard against his restraints. His heart nearly stopped from sheer fright.

‘That’s first-stage separation,’ explained Lester. ‘Second stage kicking in now. And a nice even burn, if I may say so,’ he added with clear approval. ‘We’re doing good, folks. On any other day, I’d be popping champagne corks for a flight this smooth. So just hang in there.’

The shuddering began to diminish, and the intense pressure slowly began to abate. Lester had the grace to at least warn him of what was coming next, when the module shook with even more furious force.

‘What the hell is going on?’ Saul yelled.

‘We’re dumping our second stage now,’ Lester explained. ‘They’re so much dead weight once you’ve used the fuel they contain, so down they go. Check your how-to and you’ll see a live feed of it falling behind us. Only the best for our customers, right, sweetheart?’

‘Except he ain’t payin’,’ said Amy. ‘Nothing less than the end of the world’s going to get you a free ride in this firework.’

Saul distracted himself once more with the how-to, which showed him a cylindrical section of the craft falling behind them, spinning away as it receded. The Earth was falling behind as well, a storm front fast spreading along the North-west Seaboard.

The roar had now faded, but the air was filled instead with the sound of pinging metal and creaking bulkheads. Saul felt his weight slipping away. His stomach lurched as he remembered his long drop to the ground, years before, and he fought a surge of panic, clenching and unclenching his fists until it passed.

‘Not much of a head for heights, has he?’ he heard Amy remark.

‘Yeah, well,’ said Mitchell, ‘that’s probably my fault.’

Before long they were unstrapping themselves and changing out of their spacesuits into loose-fitting overalls handed out by Amy. Lester and his wife kept them both busy after that, occupying their minds with small, routine maintenance tasks; but only those, Saul suspected, unlikely to result in any life-threatening failures.

Over those first several hours of their journey, he came to know the three of them better than he’d ever really wanted to know any other human being. The cabin was too cramped and space too valuable for anything resembling privacy to be remotely possible, although, when they ate, the food proved to be distinctly more palatable than he might have reasonably expected. It was far from being high cuisine, mostly consisting of reconstituted dried food meant to reflect the diet of the original Apollo astronauts but, for all that, Saul felt considerably calmer after finishing his first meal in zero gravity.

They climbed back into their seats while Lester first separated the lunar lander, then spun the command and service modules together through a hundred and eighty degrees to rejoin with the lander via the docking hatch. Once the air pressure had balanced, he opened up the docking tunnel to the lander and pulled himself through, returning a few minutes later.

‘Once we’re in lunar orbit, we’ll separate the lander again and it’ll take us all down to the surface of the Moon,’ he explained to Saul and Mitchell. ‘Any time you want to rest, or need the extra elbow space, you can head through to the lander. There are some sleeping bags there you can hook up to the bulkheads.’

‘I’ve decided,’ announced Saul, ‘that if I live through the next couple of days, I’m never wearing clothes again. Wearing that damn suit put me off them for life.’

He floated at a ninety-degree angle to Mitchell inside the lander, his brain tissues liberally soaked in barbiturates Amy had provided him with from her medical kit. Their pilot and co-pilot were still in the command module, talking with the crew of the last VASIMR to lift off. Almost every surface in the lander was covered in banks of toggle switches and dials, leaving Saul terrified of bumping into any of them.