“Ten minutes until we're at the de-orbit point,” said Benny. “Are we good to go or do we want to take another orbit first?”
The voice from Jodrell Bank was still coming from the cockpit speakers. It was giving a different message now, messages of good luck and well wishing from various people including their families, Eddie's new friends at Wetherby, the three astronauts left behind on the space station and the Jodrell Bank staff themselves. Benny had left it on, in case any new messages came in, but had turned it down low so that they could barely hear it. Consequently, the voices were almost drowned out by the noise of the air recycling fans.
“The sooner we get this done, the sooner we'll be back on Earth,” said Eddie. “Relaxing on a beach on a small island in the south pacific with a pina colada in one hand and the other stroking the hair of a scantily clad dusky maiden.”
“And a heavily armed security man standing behind you, ready to shoot you in the head if he thinks you're about to reveal the secrets of the mass dampener to terrorists,” said Paul, who had taken Eddie’s earlier comments to heart. Eddie nodded soberly.
“If we're doing it, let’s just do it,” said Susan. “Waiting to die is a lot worse than dying.”
“And on that cheerful note, our heroes sprang into action,” said Eddie, but he immediately regretted his flippant tone when he saw Susan looking hurriedly away, not quite fast enough to prevent him from seeing the look of fear on her face. Fear just barely held in check. A terror of what lay ahead and the knowledge of just how slim their chances really were. Eddie reached over to lay a hand on her shoulder, but she jerked out of his reach without looking around at him.
“It's going to be okay,” he said. “We're going to survive this. We're going to make it back home and we'll be heroes.”
The tone of his voice made Paul and Benny look back at them. ‘Everything okay back there?” asked Paul.
“Fine,” said Susan, forcing a smile. “If the rest of you have decided to go through with this, then let’s do it.”
“If we've decided?” asked Benny. “Are you suggesting we maybe shouldn't? That, after coming all this way, we should just turn around and go home without completing the mission?”
“Give her a break, Benny,” said Eddie, a little too sharply. “She's just scared, which just means that she’s a lot smarter than the rest of us. There is a very real chance that we're not going to survive this. We need to face up to that fact before we go any further, before we decide whether we want to proceed.”
“Are you saying you want to turn back as well?”
“Nobody wants to turn back,” said Eddie. “I'm just saying that we should go in with our eyes open, fully aware of exactly what we're going into.” Susan turned her head to look sharply at him, then looked away again as if he'd uttered a profanity.
“What about you, Susan?” asked Benny. “Are you good to go on?”
“Just out of curiosity,” she replied, “What would you do if I said no?”
“If you said no?” asked Benny, sounding genuinely confused.
“If I said I wanted to go back, what would you do?”
“We're all in this one little ship together,” said the Swede. “We can't split up. You can't go back alone while the rest of us go on without you.”
“So what would you do?” insisted Susan.
“We'd all go back, of course,” said Eddie. “Right, Benny?”
“Yes, of course,” said the Swede, sounding doubtful. “But you don't want to go back, do you Susan? You're good to go on. Right?”
“Of course she is,” said Paul. “She knows how many people are depending on us. The whole world's watching us. They're preparing parades and speeches, medals, picking out high schools to be named after us. Imagine if we went back and said we decided not to do it after all because we were too scared.”
“There's no shame in turning back if the danger’s just too great,” said Eddie.
“You just said you wanted to go ahead!” said Paul.
“Yes, and I still do, but we might not all feel the same way.”
“Because I'm a weak and feeble woman?” said Susan, glaring at him.
“Hey, I'm the one sticking up for you!”
“If you're brave and manly enough to want to go ahead, then so am I.”
“If you're sure,” said Eddie hesitantly.
“Yes, I'm sure!”
“Shush!” hissed Benny. “They're saying something.”
He was turning up the volume of the cockpit speakers and they all leaned forward to listen. “...taken by the PLA telescope at the Atacama radio observatory complex and infra red images of the moon taken by the Vista 2 telescope show that there is a river of molten rock flowing towards your intended landing site. We estimate that you have approximately twelve hours in which to complete your mission before it arrives. I'm told that should still be plenty of time, but be on the lookout just in case the moon still has surprises for you. Good luck and Godspeed. Message repeats. Attention, crew of Lunar Rescue Two. This is Geoff Holland at Jodrell Bank. Laser radar images of the moon taken by the PLA telescope at the Atacama radio observatory complex...”
“Oh great!” said Paul. “That's just what we need!”
“Twelve hours!’ said Eddie. “Can we do it in that time?”
“If no unexpected problems crop up,” said Benny, “but I would have preferred a little more breathing space, just in case. In fact, I'd be amazed if everything went without a hitch! Also, I was hoping we could have a nap on the ground after landing, so we could get to work with clear heads. We're probably not going to have time for that now.”
“So we're going ahead?” asked Paul, looking around at the others. “No last minute doubts? No changes of heart?”
“We're coming up on the de-orbit point just about now,” said Benny, “So we need to either decide now or wait for the next orbit so we can think about it a bit more.”
“We can’t wait,” said Paul, though. “Not if we've only got twelve hours. We have do decide now. So are we going or not?”
“We go,” said Benny. “Right?”
Eddie looked across at Susan. “You sure you're okay to go?”
“Yes!” she snapped back angrily. “Let's just go and get it over with!”
Eddie nodded. “Let's go, then,” he said. “Go!”
Benny touched the control screen to fire the engines and they were gently pressed back in their seats. Eddie reached down to the mass dampener, then remembered that it was now a mass amplifier and settled back in his seat sheepishly. Without the assistance of the device, the acceleration he was feeling was noticeably less than it had been before, but the numbers said that it would still be perfectly adequate to drop them down until they were skirting the outer fringes of the atmosphere. After that, air friction would complete the job of slowing them down until they were able to glide and land.
“We still have around ten minutes in which to change our minds,” said Benny. “We won't be committed until we start to feel the atmosphere. If necessary we can cut the engines, turn around and climb back up to orbit. Of course, if we do that, we won't have enough fuel left for a second attempt. If we abort the descent, we abort the mission completely.”
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
“We're not going to abort,” said Paul confidently. He had evidently decided that he'd consulted with the others enough. “We're going down.”
Eddie looked out through the small porthole beside him and saw the wildly rushing cloudscape below them gradually growing. He felt a pressure on his hand and looked around to see that Susan had reached over and was gripping it tightly. She had closed her eyes and her breathing was coming shallow and fast. Her face was white. Eddie squeezed her hand and felt her squeezing back, as tightly as though she were going into labour.
God, she's terrified! he thought in shock. It had been obvious that she was scared, but he hadn’t realised just how great her fear was, great enough that it must have taken an almost superhuman effort to hide it. He began to feel a new apprehension growing within him. He was pretty sure that having a crew member terrified almost out of her wits was bad news for their chances of getting back alive. Too late now, though. There was no way they could go back to the space station to swap her for one of the Chinese astronauts. Besides, the Americans had been insistent that she come to the moon, to take charge of the alien mass dampener. They hadn’t wanted it left in the hands of a foreigner, even though there was zero chance of anyone somehow smuggling it back to Earth. And now poor Susan was paying the price for their paranoia.
A few minutes later the engines fell silent again. “Trajectory looks good,” said Benny, looking at the altitude readout. “Three hours until touchdown.” Nobody answered him.
“Whether this goes well or whether it goes badly,” said Eddie to Susan, “Twelve hours from now it'll all be over. We’ll either be dead or on our way home.”
She gave no sign of having heard, though, and so he simply ignored the pain in his hand as she squeezed it even tighter. He tried to settle down in his seat. After a while the shuttle began to shudder as it felt the outer fringes of the moon's atmosphere.
☆☆☆
“The shuttle has completed its de-orbit burn,” said the commentator’s voice on the tablet.
The screen that Margaret and the rest of her family was watching was completely filled with a telescope image of the shuttle. A tiny white triangle against the backdrop of the moon's hurtling clouds, which now looked even more terrifying now that there was a familiar object to put them into perspective. It looked at though the slightest eddy from those supersonic gales would throw the shuttle to destruction and then scour the wreckage to oblivion with the vast load of sharp dust it was carrying.
The shuttle, which was travelling backwards in order to point its engines in the right direction, then began to slowly turn, bringing its nose to point forward. “Pilot Benny Svanberg is performing the yaw manoeuvre,” said the invisible commentator. No-one else in the studio was speaking, and neither was anyone in the tiny prefabricated house. All across the country, all across the world, the majority of the human race was glued to the nearest device capable of displaying a television picture. All but essential work had stopped as employees bowed to the inevitable and allowed their employees to return home to watch the coverage with their families.
Crowds were gathered in the centres of every great city, staring up at the huge television screens that had been mounted on the tallest buildings. In many cities, the crowds were standing on sand and dried out scraps of seaweed, a reminder of why the shuttle was there and what would happen if they failed in their mission. In London, where it was late in the evening, the lights were on in buildings whose lower storeys had, very recently, been twenty metres underwater. It was a statement of optimism and defiance, but few people had any illusions about how well normal life would be able to continue if the floods returned.
The shuttle had been shining brilliantly in the sunlight, but then it abruptly darkened as it crossed the terminator and passed into the moon's shadow. It could still be seen, though, lit now by the reflected light of the Earth. The voice coming from the tablet commented on this in his hushed, reverential voice. “Very soon now, the shuttle will be lost from sight altogether as it rounds the curve of the moon and passes behind it. The next time we see it, it will have hopefully accomplished its mission and will be returning, triumphant, to Earth. The entire human race must now be holding its breath, willing them on, and those who still believe in God will be praying for them, begging for Him to lend His assistance. There's certainly nothing that anyone else can do for them now. The brave crew of the shuttle Pluvier are on their own, with only their own courage and resourcefulness to rely on, and whether they succeed or fail their names will certainly be remembered for as long as human life continues. Eddie Nash, Susan Kendall, Benny Svanberg and Paul Lewis...”
“How come dad gets mentioned last?” said Richard angrily.
“For God’s sake, Richie!” said Cathy. “Don’t start that again!”
“And golden boy Eddie gets mentioned first, of course...”
Richard was deflecting, of course, Margaret knew. Trying to hide his fear by getting angry at something else. She reached out and took his hand. He instinctively snatched his hand back. It had been years since he'd held his mothers hand like that, but then he reached out again and took her hand in his. A moment later his wife took his other hand, Hazel took Margaret's other hand and Len took hers until they were all linked together, all drawing strength from the people on either side of them.
On the tablet, standing on the makeshift table in front of them, the shuttle was now pointing nose forwards, but it was also growing shorter as the moon's surface curved away from the telescope in Australia that was taking the images. They were now seeing the shuttle's back end, the large nozzles of the now useless main engines pointing back at them, flanked on either side by the hastily replumbed manoeuvring engines, the only functioning engines the spacecraft now had. The shuttle’s underside them began to glow softly as it was heated by the friction of the outer fringes of the moon's atmosphere.
“The shuttle still has to complete half an orbit before it arrives at its landing site,” said the commentator. “Very soon now, though, we will lose sight of it as it passes beyond the curve of the moon's surface. Even now we can see it becoming obscured by layers of high altitude haze. The brightness of the heat shield as it protects the shuttle from the heat of re-entry will allow us to see it for a little longer, but that will only extend its visibility for a few moments.”
The shuttle was nothing but a tiny smudge of light now, gradually fading as it dropped behind the moon and more and more layers of dusty haze came between it and the anxious observers on Earth. “He's so far away,” murmured Margaret softly. She gently disengaged herself from her children and went to the window, to see the full moon rising in the clear, eastern sky, once again shrunk back to its normal size, for the time being at least. Once, there would have been patches of dark and light on it, highlands and seas, but now it was a uniform disk of dull grey. Just four weeks before, the moon had been quiet and still. A dead world on which millions of years would pass with nothing to mark their passage. Now, though, the cloud tops hid a world of unimaginable violence in which ferocious winds blew across an almost endless ocean of storm tossed lava and Paul was going down there, into that hell. It wasn't fair! Why did he have to be the one?
“The shuttle has now disappeared from view,” said the commentator. “The next time we see it, if it reappears...”
“When will we know?” asked Margaret, returning to the others. “Whether he did it or not.”
“When they turn on the orbiting mass dampener again,” said Richard. “The one aboard the Chinese rocket. When we see the moon's atmosphere pulsing again, we’ll know they've successfully attached the cable and have begun pulling the moon.”
“It'll be a few hours,” added Len. “If everything goes well, it might be as little as three or four hours. If they have problems it might be twice that. It won't be more than twelve hours, though. That's when the river of lava arrives at the landing site. If that’s when they reappear, we’ll know they've failed.”
“But they'll still be heroes for trying,” said Hazel. “When you think about it, what it is they're actually trying to do, it would be a miracle if they succeeded, so failing would be no shame. They're heroes just for trying.”
Margaret nodded, but noted that no-one was giving voice to what they were all thinking, that the shuttle might not reappear at all. That Paul might die on the moon. It was even possible that he was dead already, that someone had miscalculated the shuttle's ability to fly in the strange, alien atmosphere. Maybe the pilot, she couldn't remember his name, had already failed to hold the craft steady and it had burned up like a meteorite, the brief glory of its final moments hidden from the people of Earth by the intervening bulk of the moon. She put the thought firmly out if her head. If he was dead, she'd know, she told herself. Paul was alive. She could feel it in her soul.
“So what do we do now?” asked Hazel. “Do we just sit here and wait?”
“There's nothing else we can do,” said Len. “We could pray, perhaps, if we thought it would do any good. It would at least give us the illusion that we were doing something, which is the main purpose of prayer. It might make us feel better.” Nobody took him up on his suggestion, though. Little Timmy chose that moment to wake up and start crying. Cathy picked him up and began rocking him in her arms.
“The other three people in that shuttle probably have families,” said Hazel. “They must be going through the same agonies we are.”
“Is it too late to talk to them?” asked Len. “They might welcome hearing from people who are going through the same thing they are.”
“They’ve probably got their phones set to reject calls from unknown numbers,” said Richard. “Like we have. Because of the reporters.”
“Maybe they've been trying to contact us!” said Hazel in horror. “Damn the reporters! Damn them!”
“We can try,” said Margaret, pulling her phone from her pocket. She tried Eddie Nash first, as he was British, like them. His family might even be fairly nearby, maybe even within easy travelling distance. The phone replied to her enquiry by telling her that the information she wanted was not in the public domain, though, and she had no more luck trying to contact Susan and Benny's families.
“They must have put a block on people looking for them,” she said, disappointed. “We should have thought of that.”
“Arndale might be able to help us,” said Len. “He could send the request up the chain of command. Sooner or later it’ll reach someone who can put us in touch with their families.”
He took his own phone from his pocket and selected the number the Group Captain had given them in case they needed something. They were deflecting again, Margaret knew. Fixating on something else to stop themselves thinking about the danger Paul was going into, but she couldn't bear the thought of just sitting there, doing nothing but stare at the tiny screen and listen to the commentator saying nothing of any note. And chances were that the families of the other three crew members, if they had families, felt the same way. Talking to each other would keep all of them sane while they waited for the hours to pass, each one an eternity, until they knew whether the people they loved were still alive.