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.
