Harvest Moon
by William Barton
Of his latest tale, William Barton tells us, “The twentieth century holds a lost world, a real SF world dominated by a familiar dream of science and space, a world in which you and I might have lived, if only the mortals who ruled the world of that long-gone age hadn’t been fools. This is one version of that lost world, whose bright dream was killed off by those accursed men.”
* * * *
I was the first man to walk on the Moon back in 1965. Nine years ago, and I’m still here, still walking.
I’d been one of the four men aboard Gemini M-1, dropping down out of a dead black sky on the western edge of that little scrap of mare in the northern half of the bottom of Crater Riccioli, the first of ten manned flights that would set up the Army’s Moonbase over the next two years. Project Harvest Moon, the best damned impossible dream a moonstruck boy ever had, a dream I’d been dreaming at least since I was in high school, during the War, and first heard about those mysterious “flying gas mains,” the V-2s falling on London.
Oh, hell, earlier than that. Since I was a kid in the thirties, reading Amazing, Astounding, all that crap, wondering if we’d see a man in space before I was dead from old age (or maybe dead a whole lot sooner in the war everyone watching the Munich Olympics said was sure to come).
Well, the War ended when I was eighteen years old, and when I was thirty-seven, I flew to the Moon, the only civilian aboard the first ship to land, getting my seat through politics, more than anything else. President Nixon told them to pick a civilian, so they picked me, not so much because I was such a hotshot planetary geologist, as because I was the one detailed to teach them geology, and the astronauts already knew me pretty well.
Let’s take Bill. He’ll be okay.
So. Thirty-seven years old, wife, teenage son, two button-cute little daughters, and there I was headed for two years’ duty on the Moon, flying up with the base commander, some major from the Corps of Engineers, and a warrant officer pilot who’d’ve been flying Hueys in Vietnam if he hadn’t been going to the Moon.
All right. You’ve slept as long as you’re going to. Might as well get up and get started.
I stayed still, hands behind my head laced in stiff, sweaty hair, staring up through almost-dark at the criss-cross of wires eight inches from my nose, holding up the bunk above me. They’d been a wonderful improvement when the first dormcans set down. For the first few months, we’d slept in the landers, supposedly in our acceleration chairs, though most of us just curled up on the deck.
Nobody sleeps well on the Moon. Oh, maybe me, maybe not. I spend most of my time outdoors, twelve thousand hours over the past decade, the EVA Champion of the Universe, and that makes you tired enough, sometimes.
I pulled the little curtain open and slid out of my rack, the same sort of bunk you see on a nuclear submarine, bare feet on the deck, yawning, stretching, hands pressed against the upper bulkhead. Christ, I smell skunky again already. And it’s five more days before my turn in the shower comes round.
Somebody in one of the other curtained-off bunks farted softly in his sleep. Great.
I got a set of coveralls out of my drawer, one of six new ones I had left, Dunbar neatly stenciled on every breast pocket, pulled on my felt deck shoes, turned and opened the tunnel hatch, crawled in and pulled it shut behind me. Swell. Light’s burned out again. Wonder if there’s any more left? How long ‘til the next consumable supplies lander shows up? Two months?
Weird prickle in the back of my neck: I’ll be gone by then.
Pushed open the other hatch and crawled into the messhall. It was just another dormcan, with a kitchenette and some tables, bright fluorescent tubes lining the overhead.
My old buddy Meade Patterson called out, “‘ bout time you gotcher ass out of bed, Dunbar! Getcher coffee so we can get going!”
“Up yours.” That got me the usual bird. Hell, you got to wonder about a man in his forties still wants everyone to call him “Meat.” I said, “You’re just pissed off because I’m senior geologist on the planet.”
He snickered, “Not for long, ole buddy.”
Oh, yeah. Right. Time to hurry.
* * * *
Outside, it was a bright and sunshiny day, daylight now seventy hours old, sun well above the eastern horizon, grazing-incidence reflection gone from the landscape, though the shadows were still quite long, black fingers and smears reaching away from the rubble of Moonbase.
I pushed up my gold sunvisor, so I could get a true-color look at the mooncar, and was struck by the mess we’d made of the place in only ten years. Not just the humps of buried habitats, but the trash and tracks, footprints of forty men churning up charcoal dust year in and year out. And lander stages. As far as the eye could see from ground level, lander stages. Since 1965, counting the three crashes, there had been over a hundred landings here, mostly setting down south and east of the Moonbase site, out on the mare part of the crater floor, ten manned, the rest supplies and hardware.
I was always glad the crashes had been just supplies, fresh fruit, fresh underpants, whatever. Imagine having to bury someone here? Imagine that.
Buckling vinyl straps over the instrument payload and the supply canisters we’d be dropping off at the observatory, Meat said, “Damn! These EVA suits are the best thing ever to come out of fucking Apollo!”
I got in the left-hand seat and started clipping carabineers to D-rings on my suit. “How about the only thing?” Lot of bitterness about Project Apollo on the Moon. Seemed like a good idea at the time. The Army’s Project Harvest Moon would use the Gemini M/C configurations to deliver men and hardware starting in ‘65. Meanwhile NASA would have the time to get the kinks out of Apollo, so we could use its five-man reentry capsules and three-man landers, would get quarterly crew rotations started in 1967.
Meat got in beside me and started hooking up. “Oh, these mooncars are pretty good. Lot better than that Stirling jeep we started out with. That fucker never worked right!”
I remember when they sent up film of the fourth and last Saturn C-5 exploding in the blue sky over Florida, big, bright, orange-and-black puff-ball blossoming above the pretty white clouds, bits and pieces showering into downtown Miami, starting all those fires.
I remember thinking we should’ve known better, when Apollo 1 burned on the pad in January ‘65, killing those three NASA astronauts, but Apollo 2 flew just fine come August, and in September, me and three other guys climbed on top of a Titan IIIZ and set out for the Moon, with no way home.
They’d sent us some tape, too, of the Senate hearings in 1970, when the Army was authorized to develop Gemini R and start bringing us back.
So, meanwhile, I’ve been on the God-damned Moon for nine years.
Meat said, “Let’s get going. Sooner we can get up there, the sooner Carl can finish talking and we can be on our way. Jeez. That boy is nuts!”
I slid the hand controller forward and the mooncar started rolling, wire tires flexing gently over the bumpy ground. “Oh, he’s all right. You know Drake told me the both of them wanted to skip their rotation and stay on here even after the Gemini R comes on line?”
“Both of ‘em are nuts.”
“Maybe so.”
Meat reached over and tried to clap me on the shoulder, but the Apollo suits weren’t flexible enough to support that much arm rotation, so he patted my steering hand instead. “Well, you won’t have to wait, buddy-boy! You’ll be on your way home with the Russkis, this time next week.”
My eyes went up to the black sky reflexively. Nothing. Bright sun. Blue sliver of Earth hanging perpetually seven degrees above the middle of the western horizon. But Almaz 9 had been up there for two weeks already, the fourth manned Russian spacecraft to fly around the Moon, the first one to launch atop their new UR900 superbooster, with one of those big Oryol landers aboard.
I think maybe the government wouldn’t have agreed to a Russian “rescue mission,” but Gemini R-1, the first unmanned test, had come down in the middle of Riccioli, making no attempt to stop, leaving nothing but a big, bright star pattern in the dust. R-2 had worked, only a month ago, actually bringing home two tons of Lunar samples, but by then it was a done deal.
Meat said, “Ole Wild Bill, by this time next month, you’ll be home, docs’ll be through with you, and that old wife of yours’ll be so sore she’ll need a wheelchair!”
Old wife. As if we had nine years of catching up to do together? By this time, we were clear of the last layer of lander stages and space junk, and I slid the controller forward toward its stop.
Meat said, “Hey, take it easy, Wild Bill! You crash our asses, neither one of us’ll ever smell pussy again.”
I pulled back a little, though not before we took a good four-wheel bounce that made my teeth snap together, and said, “Meat, I ever tell you how much I hate being called ‘Wild Bill’?”
He laughed, “About ten million times, Wild Bill.”
* * * *
From the observatory at Site 5, fifteen klicks up into the north ringwall mountains, you get a good view back downslope to the mare floor of Riccioli. From up here, Moonbase looks like someone emptied a car trash bag full of old soda cans and crap all over a parking lot.
I remember when they’d faxed up an illustration of the moonbase the Russians said they were going to build over at Mare Smythii, we’d all gotten a good laugh. So neat and orderly and clean. Compared to it, ours looked like some redneck trailer park.
The observatory itself was just a mess of hardware, antennas, and telescopes scattered around on the dirt, no blue sky, no atmosphere, no reason for a dome. The pressurized part was just a hump with an airlock door in it, where Carl and Frank dragged an inflatable shelter up here and buried it by hand, with honest-to-God shovels.
Nuts, all right.
There’d been some discussion about stopping them from moving up here, radiation exposure and crap, but no one wanted to put them under arrest, so ... Sagan’s voice crackled in my headphones, “Welcome to Emerald City! You got my stuff?” He was in one of the old Gemini moonsuits, of course, complete with vulcanized patches where the thing had gotten ripped, limited to ninety-minute EVAs. It’ll be a long time before there’s enough of the new ones to go around.
Meat said, “Where’s Drake?”
Carl lifted a thumb, motioning at the shelter. “Inside soldering up a black box for the new radiotelescope project.” Another gesture, at the half-assembled steerable dish we’d trucked up here in a hundred pieces over the last few months.
“You guys are taking a big risk, soldering inside a pressure tent. He burns a hole, the birm’ll come down on him. All we’ll be able to do is put up a marker.”
He shrugged, plainly visible in the pathetic old suit. “It’s our risk. We’ll take it.”
Meat said, “What’s this new one do?”
You could see Carl’s eyes brighten right through the clouded old faceplate. “We’re calling it Ozma II. Once we get the dish finished, Frank has this idea about some stuff we can look at. Tau Ceti. Maybe Epsilon Eridani...”
“Great, more woo-woo.”
He said, “Bill, I showed you the equation.”
“Yeah, you did. Half the terms are unknowns. Wishful thinking.”
“Well ... we’re on the fucking Moon. Can you think of a better place for wishful thinking?” He waved his arms up at the dead black sky. “Christ, you can see it at night, Bill! There are billions and billions of stars out there! Surely...”
Meat said, “Don’t call me Shirley.”
“What?” He’d already been lost in his dream, ready to treat us to another half-hour diatribe, that would wind up with him riding a spaceship, not to Mars, but to Barsoom.
Meat said, “Ah, hell. Let’s get this crap unloaded, so we can get on upslope and start setting out our own crap.”
* * * *
It was quiet in the radio shack, and private, privacy something men wanted for their monthly call home. Anyway, we’d all learned to operate the equipment and didn’t need help from Moonbase’s lone Signal Corps officer, who was kept busy repairing all the old junk continually wearing out and breaking down.
On the black and white TV screen, my son Billy was looking different than the last time we’d talked. He’s good at this. Looking at the camera lens, not the TV screen on his end. Hard around the eyes still, though he’d been home from Viet Nam for three years, almost done with pre-med, I guess.
He said, “You trimmed your beard again.”
I smiled and fluffed it with my fingers. It felt like steel wool. “Ah, it was starting to fill up my helmet.”
A grin. “Well, you look more like Castro now, less like the Old Man of the Mountain.”
“Where’s yours?”
He rubbed his narrow, square chin, preened a skinny little Cisco Kid moustache. “They’re going out of fashion. I think I may chop the pony tail next.”
When he was a kid, everybody said he looked just like me; I don’t think so. His chin was flatter, less cleft, nose narrower, straighter, longer, a lot more like his mother’s brother Fred, if you ask me. “What the hell kind of shirt is that?” It looked like some kind of military tunic, complete with gold braid on the collar and cuffs.
He smirked. “Polyester.”
“You mean like Ban-Lon?” I’d liked my Ban-Lon golf shirts.
“Nah. Stiffer.”
“What color is it?”
“It’s purple, Dad.”
I snickered. “What, no more beads and sandals?”
“Times change.”
I could see a shadow forming behind those hard eyes, even in the grainy TV picture, and figured I’d better talk about something else. “Times change, and we are changed within them.”
The eyes cleared suddenly. “Right. Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis. Childeric, King of the Franks.” We’d always had that, Billy and me, if nothing else. No matter what else was wrong, I could take my son on a walk in the woods and we could chatter about smart-guy stuff.
I said, “You still seeing that girl, uh...” Jesus, try hard ... “Sarah?”
I could see he was pleased I remembered her name. “I am.”
“I liked the picture you faxed up. She’s real pretty.” Tall blonde girl, with bright blue eyes. Kind of a big nose, but it fit her face. “How’s your mother?”
A frown. A little shrug. “Doing all right, I guess. Parts manager at a tractor place now.”
“That’s good. Uh. She still seeing what’s-his-name?”
The frown deepened. A slow nod. What do I want him to do, tell me about his little half-brother now? The kid had been born in late 1966, well before we knew I was going to be stuck on the Moon, so even if Apollo had worked...
I said, “School?”
A sudden brightening. “I got early admission to Johns Hopkins, Dad! UVa’s graduating me a year early so I can start med school in the Fall!”
“Jesus, that’s great!”
He said, “I’ve applied for a NASA Space Medicine Fellowship. They say with my ten veteran’s preference points, I’m a shoo-in.”
I’d only had five points when I got into BU in 1948. Then again, I wasn’t wearing a Purple Heart, much less a Bronze Star. The Army faxed me his citation, but I still hadn’t got him to talk about it. I said, “Why? I thought you were going into trauma medicine.”
He nodded. “That too. The Space Medicine Fellowship requires a double major.”
“I still don’t understand.”
“Dad, there’s a lot more talk, these days, about funding Nova/Rover as a real project. Since the Russians let Dr. Chelomei publish his book last year...” Vladimir Chelomei, Chief Designer of Spaceships, whose Almaz 9 and Oryol 1 would be coming to carry me home, already orbiting overhead. “Target launch date of the proposed Mars Expedition One is November 12, 1984.”
I said, “I’ll believe that when I see it.” Then, “Jesus. I’ll be fifty-six years old by then.”
Another slow nod. “Yeah. And I’ll be thirty-four.”
I’d been thirty-seven the day I left for the Moon. “And you’d like to go.”
“Yeah. They’ll be gone for three years. Twelve men, and they’ll need a doctor. A good one.”
That future started unfolding in front of me. Oh, Christ. “Sure will. We’ve got a field surgeon, a physician, and a pharmacist up here, three out of forty.” Too old! I’ll be too fucking old. “If it’s not just a God-damned dream.”
I could see those hard eyes watching me carefully. Then he said, “There’s something you need to know, Dad. Last month, they finally flight-qualified the Rover 1 nuclear rocket engine. The 75,000-pound thrust prototype is ready to go.”
“The solid-core jobbie from Project NERVA?”
“Yeah.”
“So...?”
“Dad, they’re talking about bolting a Rover 1 on the back end of an S-IVB stage, mounting leftover equipment from the Apollo Applications Program, some of the Orbital Workshop components, on the front. There’s enough Apollo/Saturn hardware left over in protected storage to fly three missions, now that they think they figured out why the rockets were blowing up. They’re calling it Project Starover.”
I grunted. Starover. Jack London? No, not that. Those Dig Allen Space Explorer adventures that NASA engineer had written in the early sixties, when I was training for Gemini. Joe something. Green? Was that his name? I said, “No one’s going to Mars with that setup.”
“No. Anyway, the Mars Excursion Module won’t be ready before 1982, no matter how much money they throw at it. They’re talking about flying precursor missions to three near-Earth asteroids, starting in 1977.”
All I could do was sit there.
He smiled again, “There’ll be a three-man crew for each mission. An astronaut-engineer, some kind of scientist, and a geologist.”
I said, “And this is funded.”
A shrug. “Almost. They won’t vote on the next fiscal budget ‘til Fall anyway.”
“Doesn’t sound like something McGovern would approve of.”
“He’s been pretty quiet since the impeachment hearings.”
Damned hard to justify impeachment of a newly-inaugurated President, McGovern’s anti-war ticket having made Bill Miller into a one-termer, despite the fine economy handed him by Nixon, but the Republicans, controlling both houses by slim margins, had tried. “Well, the hearings didn’t go to the full House.”
“No. You did hear Vice President Eagleton’s going to resign?”
“No!”
“On the news this morning.” He was tapping his temple, giving me a knowing look. Hell, there’s a limit to what we can say. This is an open circuit.
“So, who...?”
“Sargent Shriver, they say.”
“The Peace Corps guy?” Great, another fucking Kennedy. You gotta wonder what people are thinking, with Jack and Bobby both holding Senate seats these days, one each in Massachussetts and New York. If Teddy hadn’t run his car off that bridge and drowned, there’d be three of them by now.
“They say McGovern will never run for re-election now, since he made a fool of himself trying to pull us out of Viet Nam just when we were winning.”
“1976 is a long way off. Anything can happen.”
He smiled. “Maybe so, but the Democrats are already talking about Ed Muskie as their nominee.”
“Uh ... Maine?”
“Yep. And the Republicans are looking at Ted Agnew.”
“Who?”
“Governor of Maryland.”
“Never heard of him.”
He laughed. “I think he was still on the Baltimore School Board when you left for the Moon.”
“Jesus.” Time flies when you’re stranded on another planet. “A Polack and, what? French?” Agnieux, maybe?
“Greek. If he wins it, we’ll go to Mars, Dad. And in the meantime, the Republicans say they want to be true to Nixon’s vision.”
God damn Nixon’s the one who got me stuck up here. But I didn’t say that. Watch your mouth now. “So you think I should apply for this ... Starover, when I get back home?”
“Yeah. You and Mr. Patterson are the world’s only experienced field planetologists. It’ll be you and him and a rookie.”
“I don’t think Meat’s going to want to go anywhere again anytime soon.”
He shrugged and grinned. Looked away from the camera for a second. Frowned. “Um. Time’s about up.”
I said, “Yeah. It’s good talking to you, Billy. When you were in Nam, I missing seeing you.” Missed seeing anyone, no calls from home for almost eighteen months.
“Well. I’ll be back soon. I’ll get them to fax you the Starover details as soon as they’re available.”
“Thanks. Hey, next time can you bring your sisters with you?” Millicent was almost sixteen now, little Beatrix ... what? Twelve? Jesus.
His eyes softened at last. “I’ll try, Dad. I’ll sure try.”
The picture suddenly turned to static.
* * * *
Meat and I were at the turnaround point of our final traverse together, way up in the hills west of Moonbase, just below the crest of the rimwall. It’s funny how little the Moon looks like the illustrations in all those science fiction magazines I read as a kid, or the movie George Pal made out of Heinlein’s book Rocketship Galileo. What’d they called it? Destination Moon? I’d liked Rocketship XM better.
Did I really think I’d one day walk on Mars? Maybe so.
Flat lava plains, jagged mountains, untouched by wind and weather? What a laugh. We’d known enough to predict the dusty hills and low, rolling slopes of the Moon, even if we couldn’t see them in telescopes. There’s not much force to the solar wind, but it’d been blowing down on the mountains of the Moon for four billion years.
I snapped the big, boxy color TV camera to the top of the tripod’s altazimuth mount, while Meat held it steady, trying to get it aimed back toward Moonbase, toward the edge of the wreckage field beyond, where we expected Oryol 1 to set down.
“Hold up the color card. Let’s see if we can get the damn thing focused.”
He rummaged in the small toolbin, found the card, and stepped back, holding it at arm’s length, while I pushed up my sunvisor and leaned in to put the clear glass of my bubble against the rubber viewfinder mount. “Heh. No perspective. Looks like you’re standing on the edge of an abyss.”
“You find an abyss here, lemme know.”
Yeah. Real tired of this place. “Okay.” When he was out of the way, I twisted the lens, watching the scene magnify. About a klick beyond the last old lander stage, not far from where the R-1 crashed, they’d laid out shiny scrap metal for a target, X marks the spot. I stood up.
Meat, standing with his back toward the crater, looking up toward the crest of the rim, a few hundred meters west, rising maybe fifty meters above us, said, “By this time next week, I’ll be out here with that damn Russian kid.”
“Musa Borodin.”
“Moosa! What a name! Doesn’t even sound Russian.”
“You like Georgii Volynovskii better?”
“That the pilot?”
“Yeah. A two-star general.”
“Christ.” He turned and looked at me, pushed his own sunvisor up, so we could see each other. “I won’t say I’ve enjoyed being stuck up here all this time, but I always liked working with you, Wild Bill. We made a good team.”
I nodded. Nothing to say. And you’ll be up here for at least another year, before your rotation turn comes, won’t you Meat?
He smiled, maybe reading my thoughts. “Hell, Billy-boy, think of me when you give the wifey what for, huh?”
Just chit-chat. Ain’t no secrets up here. When we were in college, Meade Patterson hadn’t been known for his sensitivity, and he hadn’t done much growing up since. So I smirked like you’d expect, and said, “Hell, Meat. It’s been so long I probably don’t remember how.”
“Maybe it’s like riding a bicycle?”
I started to say after nine years in one-sixth gee, I probably couldn’t ride a bicycle either, but my eyes started to crinkle up hard. Jesus, if I start to cry in a space helmet, I won’t be able to clear my vision and run the camera when the time comes. Shook my head and focused on swallowing everything.
Meat’s voice softened. “Hey...”
I said, “Given when that little bastard of hers was born, she must’ve been in bed with that God-damned construction worker, and pregnant, less than three months after we came up here.”
Meat said, “Easy, Bill. I’m sorry if I...”
I tried smiling. “You know, Meat, I was pretty busy the last couple of years before we left. I wouldn’t be surprised if...”
He said, “Well, yeah. But at least you had a wife. You’ve got those three kids to go back to. You can think about grandkids for when you get old. Me, all I ever had was sluts in barrooms, and that’s all I’ve got to go back to. And in case you forgot, I’m forty-six years old, too.”
The two of us just staring at each other. “Jesus.”
“Yeah.”
I said, “Maybe you should reconsider applying for a berth on Starover?”
That got a grimace. “Not me. If I’d known I was going to be up here on the Moon for ten years with no pussy, I wouldn’t’ve come.” He stared at me. “And I can see you would, no matter what.”
I nodded.
He said, “Barroom sluts may not be much, but I miss the hell out of them. What’ve I got left, fifteen, twenty years before I’m an old man? I’m going to go home and fuck women until they won’t have me anymore, then I’ll goddam pay for it ‘til I can’t get it up no more.”
I laughed. “Then what?”
“Then I’ll sit around and remember all the pussy I had ‘til they shovel dirt in my face.”
“Hell, Meat, the Starover missions are only going to be a few months long!”
“Yeah? Well, this one was only supposed to be two years. I was supposed to be home by ‘68.” Another long look. “You think they might let you go to Mars with your kid, don’t you, you silly bastard?”
I looked away, back toward Riccioli and the Moonbase mess, like some kid’s toys in a dirty sandbox. Almost time. “It’s a long shot.”
“You think about what it’d be like to see your kid die on Mars right in front of you?”
“I thought about what it’d be like to sit home and drink beer and watch him die on TV.” That shut us both up. I switched over to the base’s general frequency, and said, “Base? Traverse 2271. We’re all set.”
Jilson the Signal Corps officer’s voice crackled in my headphones, “Roger, Traverse. Switch to 778. We’ve set up a patch to the Soviets’ ground-to-orbit. You’ll be able to hear the Oryol/Almaz traffic.”
“Can they hear us?”
Jilson laughed. “No. It ain’t magic, Dunbar. It’s wires on my console.”
“Ho-ho. Plagioclase in your sock come Christmas, bucko!”
“Not from you, my boy.”
No, not from me. I told Meat, then turned my comm dial to the new frequency. “Hear anything?”
“Nope.”
“Maybe they’re not really up there.”
“Maybe we’re not really on the Moon.”
Jilson said, “There’s some guy down in New York getting a lot of TV time, claiming there’s no Moonbase, and no forty Americans stuck on the Moon. Claims we faked it, to fake out the Russians.”
Meat said, “Damn right! This is fucking Nevada! Hey, you guys wanna go over to Reno tonight after work? I hear there’s this place called the Mustang Ranch...”
Jilson said, “Open circuit, Meat. They’re going to put everything on national TV, starting about two minutes before touchdown.”
“Er. Sorry.”
I got behind the camera, putting myself in position, elevating it slightly, so the viewfinder showed black sky and a scrap of horizon, looking almost white by contrast, though moonsoil is very nearly black. “What a waste of color.”
“I heard the Russian exhaust is a kind of orange-violet.”
“Hydrazine.” I was outside when R-1 crashed. It was pretty while it lasted, a hemisphere of transparent bluish fire that expanded and dissipated in an eyeblink.
Jilson said, “Azimuth one degree. Thirty seconds. They’ll go high gate less than fifteen seconds after they come over the horizon, so be ready.”
“Roger that.” I lowered the camera to take in more horizon, hoping I was aimed for the right spot, over the far crater wall, well south of my own position. “Keep an eye peeled, Meat. If you see a dot of light, sing out.”
“Right.”
There.
“Bill!”
“I see ‘em.” Just a white fleck, kind of wavering, rising over the horizon. Not really rising. Coming toward us in a flat trajectory across the landscape. And, in the earphones, someone said, “Da, khorosho. Kuda mne itti napravo ili palevo?”
Not a word. I’d taken Latin in high school and German in college, of course. Practically nobody was taking Russian in the forties. But the voice sounded as if it were, I dunno. Puzzled?
Meat said, “That’s strange...”
Another voice said, “Idite pryamo.” Sounding a little nervous maybe.
The first voice said, “Shto?”
The second voice, suddenly louder, sharper, words coming very fast: “Vtaroi povorot naprava!”
Meat said, “Jesus! Uh...”
The image in the viewfinder was more than just a wavering splotch of fire now. Four spidery legs sticking out of pastel flame, two of them pointing up at the sky. I muttered, “More’n fifteen seconds, I think...”
The first voice, almost panicky, said, “Ya zabludilsya...”
I had to tip the camera back sharply to keep them from going out of the top of the picture. Suddenly realized I could see the body of the lander beyond the flame, two bulgy, baggy greenish spheres stacked one on top of the other. I pulled my face out of the viewfinder and looked. “Holy shit!”
Jilson said, “You’re losing them, Bill.”
I went back to the viewfinder, as the same panicky voice said, “Eta ochen stranno ... Ya ... ya ... Idite vperyot! Pzhalst...”
I realized the camera was at its backstop, pointing as close to straight up as it could get.
Meat said, “Jesus, guys! Punch out!”
When I let go of the camera, it started tipping over, and I let it fall, turning, looking ... “My God!” Oryol was sailing right overhead, maybe two hundred meters away, looking big as an airliner. The fire ... suddenly it guttered, throwing off little streamers of orange and pink, then went out, and smaller sparks twinkled here and there.
RCS jets. The ship started tipping forward, trying to come upright. Getting in position to abort, get the hell out of here.
One of the Russian voices shouted, “Bozhe...!” Then, very much quieter, “Gde mne slezt? Pozhaluista otkroite okno—”
There was a flare of sparks as Oryol hit the crest of the rimwall, then nothing. Darkness. And, of course, silence.
From over by the mooncar, Meat, looking at our instrument package, said, “Interesting. Two big seismic events, and three smaller ones. No aftershocks.” He looked over at me. “You know, he made a joke, right there at the end.”
I shook my head, looking up at the rimwall. You could barely see the little scuff where they hit, and I wondered just how many little bitty pieces of my ride home we’d be finding on the slope beyond.
* * * *
I stood the camera tripod back up, started pulling plugs, unclipping fittings, putting stuff away. Nothing. Nothing. Now somebody’s buried on the Moon. Funny how, despite everything, nobody’d ever died outside the Earth’s atmosphere before. Oh, sure, Komarov died when Voskhod 6 crashed in ‘67, almost two years to the day after the Apollo 1 crew burned on the pad, but what killed him was running into Kazakhstan at four hundred miles an hour.
I remembered the Russians had been having a bad time, during the year after Sergei Korolyov died on the operating table, while Mishin and Glushko struggled to take control, fighting each other, every step of the way. First the Voskhod 4/5 rendezvous and docking mission failed so badly, then the Komarov crash. For a while, it looked like they were done, and we were all startled when Almaz 1 rode Chelomei’s UR500 to low Earth orbit toward the end of 1968. Space station, we said. Until they put one around the Moon, three years later.
Jilson’s voice crackled in my headset, “Guys? The Almaz pilot says he’s still getting telemetry from Oryol.” Somewhere in the black sky overhead, Valeri Bykovskii would be flying by himself, looking at his consoles, and realizing he’d be going home alone.
Meat said, “Voice?”
“No. Just engineering data.”
I said, “Didn’t you guys look at the Pravda diagram they faxed up last week? Voice and biomed go through the ascent stage high-gain. Everything else is through omnidirectional stub and whip antennas.” I turned and looked up at the ridge crest. Though they were fresh, and wouldn’t change for geologic ages, I still had a hard time spotting the little scars where they’d clipped the ground.
Jilson said, “Pilot says it’s baseline ascent guidance data. He says they apparently had a staging event after they bounced off the mountaintop ... uh, no way to tell if it was triggered by the impact or by their on-board computer. Says they’d initiated the abort guidance system command sequence, but...”
Meat said, “Boy, I wouldn’t want to fly with a Russian computer.”
“I wouldn’t want to fly with one of ours, these days.” The Gemini Rs were using a modified Apollo diskey computer, early sixties technology at its best, but a couple of months ago, Billy’d held up his new Rockwell calculator, sung me the “big green numbers” song and told me how much it cost. I’d told him to get me one as a coming-home present.
Looking down at the charge gauge on the mooncar console, I said, “We’ve got just about enough juice to make the top of the ridge and still get back to base. You guys listening?”
Meat got in the passenger side and started clipping his D-rings. “Let’s go.”
Jilson said, “Right. Stay line of sight, Bill.”
From the top of the rimwall ridge, you could see Oryol on the slope beyond, in the beginnings of the Hevelius Formation, a jumble of Mare Orientale ejecta, all cracks and crags, that was one of the main reasons Moonbase was sited at Riccioli. Somebody’d thought they’d spotted outgassing here back in the fifties, and imagined there might be a volcano somewhere. Of course, that was back when people were still arguing about the origins of Arizona’s Coon Mountain. They call it Meteor Crater now, and there aren’t any volcanoes on the Moon.
Meat said, “Eight, maybe ten clicks? Good thing they’re out of the rimwall shadows. We’d never spot ‘em otherwise.”
Jilson said, “What d’you see? You’re still on open mike, guys.”
“Right.” So try not to say fuck too much. Some congressdork might not like it. I said, “The ascent stage looks intact in binoculars. Lying on its side, of course. No sign of the descent stage.”
Meat pointed off to one side, and said, “I’d say that bright scar over there might be it.”
“There’s some debris scattered around. Too small to identify, kind of in an arc between the ascent stage and the explosion scar, if that’s what it is.”
Meat said, “You see those ripples up slope of the mess? Looks like they rolled for a while.”
I panned around, looking at little sparks and twinkles of torn metal. “I see the high gain antenna. Maybe five hundred meters from the intact crew cabin.”
Jilson, voice sharp: “Intact?”
“Well. Not broken into pieces.” I put the binoculars back on the thing and tried focusing carefully. “Too damn many scratches on these lenses. These are the ones I brought up in ‘65.” I turned my aim carefully, getting Oryol into the clearest patch of glass. “The green thermal blanket is torn, but I can make out the hull underneath. Not well enough to see if it’s cracked.”
Meat said, “These Russian pressure vessels are a lot tougher than ours. They use a full one-atmosphere environment.”
“So if they get a puncture, there’s all that much more force exerted on a potential tear?”
“Well.”
I walked back to the mooncar and looked at the gauge again. “We got enough juice to drive down there and maybe get three-quarters of the way back up the rimwall.”
There was a long silence, then Jilson said, “Guys? We’ve had President McGovern on the horn. He says it’s your call.”
Meat said, “That figures.”
I got back into my seat, and said, “Meat?”
“Yep.”
“Okay. Jilson, you guys have two charged-up mooncars down there. Bring ‘em on up to the ridge line. Just sing out when you’re line of sight.”
Long silence, then he said, “Roger that.”
Meat said, “Time we went, Wild Bill?”
I said, “If you’re going to call me that, you have to be Andy Devine, and your line is, ‘Hey, Wild Bill, wait for me!’”
Jilson laughed nervously in our earphones.
* * * *
It was a relatively easy drive down, there are few slopes greater than fifteen or twenty degrees anywhere on the Moon, and we managed to get within a kilometer or so of the wreck of Oryol before we had to stop, parking at the edge of one of those few.
Standing at the precipice, looking down into the dark, Meat said, “We were right on top of it before it looked like anything but a shadow. Good thing we were going slow.”
Good thing. You could see that little story playing out, like the famous scene from that James Dean movie, and me with no comb to hold in my teeth as we fell.
It’d been a little dicey driving in the deep shade, and I’m always afraid machinery will seize up in the cold. We have to spend two weeks out of every month holed up in the birmed shelters as it is, and usually wait until the sun’s been up for a dozen hours or so before we try to start anything that might break. Give the graphite lubricant time to thaw out.
The mess below us, kind of a big crack, with a jumble of huge rocks beyond, was one of the “vents” that made the astronomers think there might be a volcano here, just a big pile of rubble, kilometers deep, tossed from the Orientale impact, eons ago. No more than a void in the regolith, that’s all. Oh, maybe they didn’t imagine that “outgassing.” Maybe there’s old cometary ice under the ejecta blanket. Maybe it gets crushed and heated by moonquakes from time to time. But there’d been decent-sized moonquakes while I was here to watch, and I’d never seen a damned thing.
Meat was pointing off to our right, northward along the ledge, toward a big area of bright rock, where the topsoil seemed to be gone. “Maybe they clipped the edge and bounced over?”
Just beyond it, the crevice narrowed, turned to a crack and disappeared under dark gray dirt. I said, “We’ll need the Hasselblad, I guess, all the lanyards and wire rope...”
He pushed up his sunvisor, looking at me. “You really think we can make it across that?” A gesture, at the jumbled boulder field between us and the crash site.
I wanted to shrug inside the suit, shook my head instead. “One of us, at least.”
“Nice try.” He walked back to the mooncar and started pulling lines and cable out of the bin, and said, “Let’s clip together with the twelve-footer.”
“Right. I’ll take the camera.”
We started walking, staying far enough apart to keep the lanyard from dragging on the ground, stopping every now and again so I could shoot a picture. Sixty frames on this roll. I need to keep count.
After we cleared the end of the crevice and started down toward the broken rocks, Meat said, “I sure as hell am glad we’re not in those old Gemini suits.”
“Yeah. Gotta give those Apollo guys credit, at least they watched us on TV and figured out they’d be falling down a lot.”
On foot and unplugged from the extended-EVA subsystem of the mooncar, the Apollo suit portable life support system can manage about seven hours on its own. It took us three hours to walk the last kilometer to Oryol, climbing over the scree below the so-called vent.
I guess we stood there for a good three minutes, just staring at the thing, me thinking how much more like real spaceships these Russian vehicles looked than ours. This one was on its side, two big spheres, maybe eight feet in diameter, made of some dark-painted metal, originally shrouded by green quilting that looked like it had pink attic insulation stuffing exposed where it was ripped, which was most everywhere. There was a canister on one end, an obvious docking drogue, and a big cone on the other, fat end clamped to one of the spheres, little end pointing away, showing the muzzle of a small rocket engine. There was a little window on the lower sphere, a small porthole really, and it was dark inside.
Finally, Meat said, “You’d think it’d be hard to fly without windows.”
I said, “They use TV. Can you read the Russian printed on the hull? I can sort of sound out the Cyrillic characters, but...”
“Nah. I took Russian-for-Lit as my main non-science elective sequence. No technical vocabulary. All I can do is talk like Stinking Lizaveta.”
“Hmm?”
“Never mind.”
I pointed to a recessed T-handle, next to which was printed a big black arrow. “Spaseniye. Rescue?”
“I don’t remember. It’s a noun, I think.”
I started to reach for it, hesitated, feeling my fingers cramp. Sure. What then? Hatch pop open, or is it explosive bolts? And what happens if the hatch hits you in the helmet? I turned and looked at the other sphere. “Maybe we can unseat the drogue and get in through the docking adaptor.”
Meat pointed. “The airlock hatch has a handle on the outside.”
“Yeah. No keyhole, either.”
He snickered. “I don’t imagine it locks. Still, you’d think it’d have a big lever, like ours.”
“Russian hatches open inward.” Ours don’t. We’d always relied on having the latches work. Or we had, anyway. Apollo 1’s hatch opened inward, just like in a science fiction story, which was why those three guys were toast.
Meat stepped forward, reached up, turned and pulled. Nothing.
“Inward.”
“Oh. Right.” And when he pushed, it opened on darkness. No air, then.
I took hold of the upper hatch rim, and pulled myself up, reached in and grabbed some boxy thing just inside, tried to go through, bumped everywhere all at once. Maybe Russian PLSS backpacks are littler’n ours? “Shit. Can you guide me in?”
He said, “Lemme grab you by the legs. Just hold on. If I turn you just so...”
I slid through the hole, suddenly filling up the space inside. Belatedly clicked on my helmet light. It was big for the inside of a spaceship, an American ship anyway, where you barely had room to sit, much less turn around, but full of clutter, lockers and control panels bolted haphazardly around the inside of the sphere, wherever there wasn’t a hatch.
Meat said, “Anything?”
“Hang on. I’m going to try to open the hatch to the command module.” There was an L-handle, like on a cheap screen door. Turn. Pull. Nothing. Think. It’s an airlock. Pressure equalization valve? There was a knob next to the hatch. When I twisted it, seemed like a little dust flew out. Okay. When I pulled the handle this time, the hatch swung open toward me, revealing a circular space beyond, maybe ten inches deep, with another hatch on the other side.
“Well?”
I said, “The CM hatch has a handwheel. I, uh...”
“What?”
“There was pressure in the tunnel. If there’s pressure in the CM...”
He said, “And what if they’re not in suits?”
“Right.”
“What are our options?”
“None.”
“Well, then.”
Laconic, like Hemingway heroes. I said, “They’re probably dead anyway.”
“Yup.”
I found the valve and twisted. Nothing. Held my hand over the little hole, but could sense no pressure. I said, “I can’t tell, Meat. I’ll just open it up.”
He said, “Anyway, if there was air in there, there ain’t no more.”
“Right.” Spun the handwheel. Nothing. I gave the hatch a push and it fell open on a dark space, my helmet’s wan light glinting off irregular surfaces. There was a flat control panel, above it, two acceleration couches bolted to the vertical surface beyond, strapped into them, neatly folded up, two motionless bodies in spacesuits.
I said, “Christ.”
“Dead, are they?”
I slid through the tunnel, leaning toward them, getting my knees through, then my feet, bracing myself so I was heads up. The guy on the left had a star pattern on his faceplate, with a long sinuous crack leading away from it. Inside was a pale, clean-shaven man with a lot of black freckles on his face, eyes shut, as though sleeping ever so peacefully. I pulled back, looking at the nametag on the suit. “Bojib-something...” Cyrillic. Idiot. “Volynovskii, I guess.”
“Dead?”
“Yeah.” Not freckles at all. Petechiae. “Looks like something let the air out before we got here, anyway.”
“No surprise. What about Borodin?”
I leaned to the right and looked in through the faceplate, my light picking out a boyish face with a big, dark goosegg over one eye, a smear of blood coming off one corner of his moustache. His eyes were shut, but not quite all the way, showing just a sliver of white. “Mmmm ... no crack in the faceplate.”
“Well, they sure as hell got banged around.”
“Yeah.” I reached out and took him by one shoulder, giving it a squeeze. Felt a hard pang in my chest as his lids fluttered, dark brown eyes rolling, suddenly seeming to find my face against the light.
Meat said, “Bill?”
Borodin’s lips worked slowly, mouthing something.
I leaned in, putting my bubble against his faceplate, just like in the movies, and heard that faint, tinny, bottom-of-the-well voice say, “Thanks, Yank. I knew you’d come.” His eyes rolled up, and he seemed to slump in the suit.
“Bill?”
I looked around. “Jesus!”
“The other one alive?”
“Yeah. There’s a rip in his suit sleeve, though. He managed to get a tourniquet in place before he blacked out.”
Meat whistled softly, then said, “There’s a coldpatch kit on the mooncar.”
“If he lives that long.”
I started unbuckling his seat harness.
* * * *
I’d been up for about forty hours by the time all was said and done, tireder’n fuck, but unwilling to sleep, lie down, eat, anything. Just sat there in my longjohns in the med module, looking at the tear sheets mission control faxed up.
The Washington Post headline just said, “Russian Saved,” and had pictures of Borodin and Volynovskii above the fold. Nice pictures. Russian publicity photos of two handsome boys in their neat dress uniforms. The Evening Star said, “Cosmonaut Rescued on Moon,” and had one of my photos of Oryol 1’s ascent stage lying on its side. The photo credit said, “Courtesy U.S. Army.”
The Daily News, being the cheap tabloid that it is, said, “American Heroes!” and had pictures of me and Meat. Unfortunately, it was our Project Harvest Moon publicity photos, the two of us still in our early thirties, in dark suits, with skinny 1962-style ties looking like a couple of black ribbons, Meat with his crewcut, me with my black hair slicked straight back so everyone could admire my widow’s peak. My suit, I remembered, had been navy blue.
I looked away, my eyes feeling like they were full of moondust. Go to bed, you God-damned fool. Looked back at the pictures again, and wondered how much they’d help, when I asked for my next assignment. Felt obscurely ashamed for wondering.
Heard Meat’s voice in my head, snickering, “It’s how the world works, Wild Bill.” Looked at my watch and realized we’d been back for six hours already.
The partition to the operating theater accordioned back and Micky Linville ducked through. Dr. Linville had been forty-seven when we came up here, the oldest man on the Moon, a full bird-colonel thinking to round out his last two years of service in Outer Space and go out in a blaze of glory. Now he’ll be retired as a three-star general.
I said, “So.”
He wiped his face, looking exhausted. “He’s awake. Asked to see you.”
“Me specifically?”
He smiled, “By name? He just wants to see the guy with the gray beard filling up his helmet.”
I rubbed the thing. “Jeez. You know, I don’t know whether to cut it off or take it home with me.”
“Come on. He needs to get back to sleep.”
“Right.”
Borodin was on the table, covered with a worn old sheet, clean white bandages around his chest and shoulder, wrapping the stump where his left arm had been. I couldn’t help glancing at the plastic garbage bag on the floor nearby, at the suggestive shape inside. His arm? Or maybe just rolled-up bloody towels.
I flinched away, and when I looked at his face, the dark eyes were open, looking at me, skin pale as paper, grayish lips smiling through the mustache. “How you doing?”
He tried to shrug, winced, smiled again, and said, “Don’t speak Russian?”
“Sorry.”
“That’s okay. Sorry we can’t take you home now.”
“I guess I’ll be taking you instead.”
You could see a momentary shadow cross behind his face, quickly pushed away. Right. When R-3 splashes down in the Pacific, this boy is home for good. I suddenly realized I was glad to be here, despite the years, that’d I’d do it again, that I wouldn’t mind coming back.
Worth it then? Really worth it?
Maybe so.
I said, “You get some sleep. We’ll see you in the morning.”
He reached out and touched my hand briefly, “Yes. And you.” And said, Bolshoi-something, like he was talking about the ballet. “Bolshoye spasebo,” maybe.
* * * *
There was a lot of static in the little black-and-white TV screen, solar activity gradually increasing over the years as we moved from minimum to maximum, but I could see Billy grimace. “Where’s your beard, Dad?”
I said, “Somebody told me they were out of style on Earth. Don’t you think it makes me look younger?”
A level stare for a few seconds, then he said, “Maybe once you put on a little weight.”
I’d been startled by all the lines that’d been hiding under my beard all these years. That and the fact that I was fishbelly white, from having been either indoors or hiding behind a UV-opaque faceplate for the past decade.
He said, “You get all the forms I faxed up?”
“Yeah. I was thinking of bringing them back in R-3. Handing ‘em in in person.”
A frown. “Fax them back today, Dad.”
“Uh...” Trying to tell me something? “All right. As soon as we’re done.”
He said, “There’s more news.”
“Yeah?”
“They approved the Grand Tour. And the Voyager unmanned Mars probes.”
“Wow!”
A slow nod. “They think the Democrats are going to take back the Senate this fall, and Muskie will be Majority Leader. Since you and Mr. Patterson saved that Russian, the space program’s popular again. Even McGovern says it’s worth doing.”
I said, “Imagine that.”
“Dad, maybe you shouldn’t underestimate what this could be worth to you.”
“I’ll try not to blow it, Billy.”
His face suddenly brightened and softened. “Well, another surprise...” He got up and moved out of the stationary frame.
A young woman sat down in his place, very pretty, with a heart-shaped face, tip-tilted nose, dark almond eyes, wavy hair I knew was chestnut brown. Not smiling. She stared at me, then said, “Hello, Dad.”
I sat back hard in my chair. “Millicent.”
She said, “It’s Millie, Dad. Nobody calls me ‘Millicent.’”
“Sorry. Jesus, you look great! All grown up.”
She looked away, at someone out of the frame, and I thought, a total stranger. Maybe always a stranger. I remember when she was little wondering about the hair and eyes, the little nose. Her mother and I both had black hair, green eyes, long noses, and this little changeling ... well, sixteen now.
She looked back, obviously uncomfortable, and said, “There’s someone else to see you.”
“Millie...”
But she got up anyway. Long, empty moment, then another little girl, skinny as a stick, with long black hair, green eyes just like mine, long nose, one hand holding a cane, so very awkward as she sat, wincing briefly, then giving me the biggest grin. “Daddy!”
“Oh, Beatrix.” I had to clench my teeth for a moment. “Is it Bea, now?”
She smirked at someone out of frame. “Beatrix, Daddy! I love my name.” More big smile, “Besides, anybody tries to call me ‘Aunt Bea’...” She lifted the cane, miming a crack on the head. Ant Bee. Christ. Is that show still popular?
I said, “How’s your back, kiddo?”
The smile didn’t falter, maybe remembering how I’d called her that when she was little. Maybe not. “As good as it’s going to get.” Then, before I could go on, “It’ll be great to have you home again!”
She was just shy of four years old when I left. Is it me she wants home, or just any father at all? Well. There’s the little brother. And our friend the construction worker. Softly, I said, “It’ll be great to be home, Beatrix. I’ve missed you all.” Maybe a little scrap of time to see her grow up? Uh. Yeah. But Starover 1 will be leaving in 1977. I’ll be a busy little beaver for the next four-five years. And if ... and if...
She looked away, seeming dismayed, then back. “Billy says time’s getting short. I love you, Daddy!”
She struggled to her feet, moving out of the frame, while I swallowed a hard lump. Her brother leaned in, head sideways in the image. “One more visitor, Dad.”
“Hello, Bill.”
I don’t know why I didn’t expect it, but I didn’t.
Bushwhacked.
Hard to tell in the crappy TV picture, but she seemed a lot thinner, a hell of a lot older than the last time I’d seen her, the night before launch, when they’d let the wives into the barracks for a couple of hours, violating quarantine. “Hello, Harriet. How’ve you been?”
A long frown, a look away.
Unhappy. Is someone else out there too? A little boy, maybe seven years old, and a beefy, red-faced man?
She said, “I’m all right.”
I smiled, “You going to be there when I get home?”
I could see her swallow. “President McGovern’s flying us out to the Enterprise when you land. You’re the first American to come home from the Moon.”
I nodded. And then what? Then what, wife of mine? Little boy coming too, or will you leave him home with the construction worker? My home. My bed. My life.
I said, “I’ll see you then. Maybe we’ll talk.”
“I...” She looked down, away from both the camera lens and the TV screen. “It’s almost time. I have to go. I’ll ... I’ll see you soon.” She stood, stepped off camera, and was gone.
Billy gave me a long look. What the hell were you expecting? I said, “Thanks, son.”
A nod, then he said, “Fax those papers down, Dad. It’s important.”
“Right. Be seeing you.” And thought, some of his Viet Nam buddies will have been in the same boat. He must know, understand. Right? I got up and went to fill out my mission application forms.
* * * *
The voice in my headphones, Jilson’s, crackled, “R-3? T-minus three minutes and counting.” In the olden days, the early days of the Project Adam flights, the Army flight controllers had said X-minus in the countdown, a holdover from the days of the big-gun artillery, but they switched to “T” at the start of the Gemini A flights in 1962.
“Roger, Moon. Minus three.” Jesus. Sweaty. Itchy. I hadn’t been in my old Gemini suit since the first Apollo EVA gear came up, three years ago. Baggy. Wrinkled. Sticky inside.
I glanced over at Borodin, pale and staring in his borrowed suit, much newer than mine, one sleeve rolled up and tied off. Grinned. “You okay?”
He smiled back. “Horrowshow ... Comrade Command-Pilot.”
A joke. A literary reference. Either he’s not as nervous as he looks, or he’s whistling past the graveyard. Well, I’m sure this tin can seems mighty flimsy to a man who’s flown in an Almaz, or survived a balls-up crash landing on the Moon.
These Gemini Rs are a lot different from the M I flew up in. More cramped inside. No airlock, for Christ’s sake. You just depress the reentry capsule and climb on in, sit in your seat, slam the door, and turn on the air.
A different voice, with a lot more static, said, “R-3? Telemetry says you haven’t reset your breaker panel yet. Page seventy-four in the manual.”
“Uh, roger, Flight, wilco.” I turned to the right page, reached up and started flipping switches to the indicated positions. Looked at Borodin, “First time for everything, right, pal?”
He looked a little sick. Looked away from me, out through the hatch porthole at the lunar surface he’d never see again.
“Two minutes, R-3.”
“Roger, Moon.”
Will I ever see it again? How lucky do I have to get?
Lucky enough.
Even the inside of the control room was changed, back in the direction of the old Gemini A, lacking the rear hatch implemented in the B model, continued in the M. An integral heat shield, ceramic over titanium, they said, able to withstand direct reentry at translunar velocity. No skip-lob. No aerobraking. No chance of winding up a meteor, or, worse, a manned interplanetary probe...
“One minute.”
“Roger, Moon.”
No more forward docking tunnel, either, and no more little rendezvous windows. Just a round porthole in the hatch, and a big TV screen at our feet, for “approach-and-landing.”
The other voice said, “R-3? You need to be on page 212, beginning at Roman numeral one.”
“Roger, Flight.” Turned to the right page and started looking over the instructions. Flip this, twist that. Read something else. If such and such, go to page nine hundred, Roman numeral LXXVII, see “Abort to Lunar Surface.”
Well.
“Thirty seconds.”
“Roger. See you later, Jilson.”
“In about three months, Bill.”
“Right.”
I glanced at Borodin. Eyes still open. Not too green around the gills. How would I feel if I was going home in a Russian spacecraft, leaving my best friend and my left arm behind on the Moon?
Bykovskii was still orbiting overhead, had lowered his pericynthion to around 50,000 feet, and would try to film our liftoff. Hope it works out. I’d like to see that someday.
Jilson said, “Ten ... nine ... eight...”
Felt my heart suddenly speed up like mad, trying not to imagine what an “abort to lunar surface” might be like. Hell, Borodin already knows.
“Three ... two ... one...”
Something thumped behind my back. I looked up, out through the hatch porthole in time to see a big splash of brilliant yellow sparks flying up and away, then the lunar surface dropped, like the ground seen from one of those elevators they sometimes stick on the outsides of big buildings.
“Holy shit!”
I could feel myself sinking into the seat, arms and legs like lead. Glanced at the accelerometer. It said, point-eight gee. Great.
Jilson, sounding nervous, said, “Everything okay, Bill?”
“Yeah. What a ride! You’ll love it!”
I glanced over at Borodin. Eyes shut, mouth open slightly. Fainted? Hope his stump’s not bleeding again. That’s all we need.
“R-3? Telemetry shows you haven’t done Roman numeral eight yet. Turn the page and try to stay focused.”
“Roger, Flight.”
When I couldn’t see the control panel and the manual at the same time, I picked the book up, holding it overhead, and started flipping switches and taking readings, just the way the checklist said.
Well. It just feels funny. I’ll get used to being heavy again.
When I looked out the window next, there was nothing but black sky. The TV screen, however, showed only Moon, shrinking Moon, full of craters and rilles, starkly lit up by brilliant sunshine, slowly rocking back and forth as we flew higher and faster, up and away.
Homeward bound.
I put the book back in my lap, and thought, if I can get out through the hatch under my own steam, stand on my own two feet on Enterprise’s flight deck, shake President McGovern’s hand, smile and wave to the TV cameras...
I could see that future unfold all the way, if only I had the will to make it so. Starover 1 to a near-Earth asteroid. And maybe, just maybe, they’d let a fifty-six year old planetary geologist...
I could picture that, too, standing on Mars with my son.
That one bright dream.
Worth all the rest of it?
That loss of everything else you once dreamed about?
That home, family, security, love?
Maybe so.
The ascent engine shut down with a gassy thump, leaving us in sudden silence, and I was on my way.
* * * *
Copyright © 2005 by William Barton.
Author’s Note: 
As with most so-called Alternate History, everything in this story is “possibly true,” in the sense that at least the kernel of the thing existed in our real timeline. How these things would have played out is a matter of conjecture, bordering on fantasy. 
“Harvest Moon” is based on a 1959 Army feasibility study called Project Horizon, initially known as Project Mountain Top, which called for the construction of a space station and permanent moonbase in the mid 1960s, using technology then under development. It proposed using a conceptual Saturn vehicle, consisting of a Saturn C-1 first stage, with a Titan ICBM booster as the second stage, and a Centaur third stage to land small cargo packages on the Moon, with men following in a two-man vehicle using the Earth-orbit rendezvous technique. It would’ve required hundreds of launches, at an average rate exceeding sixty per year. And, oh yes, Horizon included a return capability from the start. There was also a real Project Adam, proposed by the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, and it sort of really flew, as the two Mercury-Redstone suborbital missions of 1961. 
The real Project Gemini was remotely descended from the Air Force’s Project MISS of the 1950s, MISS standing in Phase I for Man in Space Soonest, and in Phase II for Man in Space Sophisticated. In the story, Gemini A is our Gemini, which flew ten missions in 1965-1966. Gemini B is based on the Manned Orbiting Laboratory, whose hardware was actually built, but never flown. The real MOL was considerably heavier than what I describe here. Gemini C and M are the B variant stripped of reentry hardware and mounted on a hypothetical lunar descent stage. Gemini T is based on the “Big Gemini” proposal put forward when it looked like Apollo might never fly. Gemini R is a hodge-podge of MOL and Apollo LM hardware. 
I think everyone of a certain age will remember the Air Force’s X-20 DynaSoar, a reusable spacecraft proposed to be launched atop a Titan II ICBM. There was an unmanned version called Asset that really flew, and these, along with various lifting-body testbeds, were ancestral to the Space Shuttle. 
The Titan IIIZ of the story is based on the Titan IIIC, a Titan II ICBM with two strap-on segmented solid rocket motors, and a transtage whose engines were the same ones used in the Apollo Lunar Module. The IIIZ comes from a proposal to build a much bigger version, by scaling the Titan tankage from ten to fifteen feet diameter, and bolting on four solids. The US really did build nuclear rocket engines under the aegis of Project NERVA. The Rover 1 engine, with 75,000 lbs. thrust, was ready for flight testing in 1973, but the program was canceled. 
In our timeline, Project Apollo succeeded partly because a certain German engineer politicked to have his brainchild become the American space program, but mostly because it was associated with a certain American president who was murdered in public.
The Soviets, on the other hand, really did have multiple, competing space programs, including two complete, hardware-and-everything Moon projects. When Korolyov died in 1966, the Russians had a chance to recognize the technical superiority of Chelomei’s Moon/Mars program, and go with it. Instead, Mishin was allowed to fumble what Korolyov left behind, and to be displaced by Glushko, who spent a Moon program’s worth of money building Buran, which flew once, unmanned, in 1988. Chelomei was taken off space work, and his Almaz/TKS spaceships were used as “military” Salyuts. On the other hand, while Korolyov’s N-1 died in a series of spectacular explosions, while Glushko’s Energiya wound up so much scrap metal, Chelomei’s UR500 continues to fly. We know it as the Proton, one of the most reliable space launch vehicles ever built. 
One more thing: there was a real Project Harvest Moon. In the early 1970s, a group of private investors proposed to buy an Apollo/Saturn V stack from one of the canceled missions, fly it with borrowed NASA astronauts, and profit from the sale of moonrocks. One of the more interesting parts of the proposal was to erect a dome on the Moon, fill it with moonsoil, air, plants, and animals, and leave it behind to be observed by remote-controlled cameras. 
That would’ve been cool.
—William Barton