Samantha Kumiko and the Wetherby scientists watched the rocket rising on the large screen in the common room. Occasionally the image would break up into pixels as the live feed struggled to make it across the world via the fragmented and badly overloaded global communications network, but then it would stabilise, showing the column of fire and smoke climbing into the sky. “First stage separation in five seconds,” said one of the Mahdia technicians and the scientists tensed up, relaxing a moment later when the separation took place, the spent section of the rocket deploying parachutes to land safely in the Guyana jungle where it would be collected for re-use. “All systems looking good,” the technician added. “SP 1402 is on course. All systems nominal.”
The rocket disappeared into the clouds a moment later, and the image on the screen changed to show the launch facility’s control room as seen from a camera mounted high on the wall. Samantha had been expecting something similar to an Apollo era control room, and so was rather disappointed to see four men in a small office sitting in front of computer screens. A large screen mounted on the wall in front of them showed an overview of the mission as a whole, with a blinking point of light showing the rocket’s current position on its curving path into space and with lines of data displayed beside it.
Mark Pigeon walked into the image, turning to wave at the camera before turning his attention back to the main screen. He, and the Wetherby scientists, watched anxiously as the second and third stages also separated successfully, those sections also landing softly by parachute for re-use. The entire rocket, apart from the payload module, was normally reusable, and the first three stages might fly again as soon as three months from now, if the world was still able to afford to launch satellites by then. For this mission, though, the fourth stage, with the Mercury capsule welded to it, would be lost. It would burn up on re-entry, somewhere over the equator.
“Stage four is functioning properly,” said Mark Pigeon, again turning to look at the camera. “I think he’s out of the woods. Our biggest worry was that the rocket would be aerodynamically unstable, that it would refuse to fly true. The engines are virtually foolproof. So long as they previous stage separates successfully and they ignite properly, there's virtually nothing in them that can go wrong. The fourth stage will just burn until it runs out of fuel, and then Eddie just has to exit the capsule and climb aboard the shuttle that'll take him to the space station.”
“Is he on course to make it to orbit?” asked Ben.
“Not quite, but there's not enough of a shortfall to make a difference. If he's not picked up by the shuttle he’ll fall back to Earth and burn up an hour or so later, but he'll have run out of air long before that anyway. He'll be up there easily long enough for the Shenzou to pick him up.”
“How's Eddie holding up?” asked Frank.
“He's not responding. He's probably passed out. We knew that might happen, it's not a concern. He should wake up pretty soon, but even if it takes him longer to come out of it, the Harmony crew are fully capable of picking him up and taking him aboard while he's asleep.”
“He'll be fine,” said James, although he looked worried. “A normal, healthy person can take six gees with no lasting Ill effects and he had doctors crawling all over him, looking for any health problems. They gave him a clean bill of health.”
“Reluctantly, in a couple of cases,” pointed out Frank.
“Reluctantly or not, they passed him for the launch,” said Ben. “I’m sure he’ll be fine...”
“Hello?” said a groggy sounding voice from the speaker. “You there, Mark?”
“We're all here!” said Frank with relief. “How you feeling, Eddie?”
“Got one hell of a headache. I assume that's normal.”
“Perfectly normal,” said one of the ground controllers. “It should pass quickly. You're down to three gees now, and that'll disappear in approximately twenty seconds when the fourth stage runs out of fuel. Then you’ll be weightless. Try not to throw up. Try very hard!”
“How can I throw up when I haven't eaten in two days?”
“There's always something in your stomach. You'd be surprised.”
“Well, don't worry, I have no desire to share a helmet with my own stomach acids. I quite like having eyes.”
“Whatever happens, do not take your helmet off,” warned Mark sternly. “Remember that we couldn't guarantee the capsule would be airtight. There wasn't time to do the proper tests.”
“I remember. You were quite firm on the subject the first time. I can hear sounds coming from outside my space suit, though. I'm quite sure there's air in here.”
“Well, let's not take any chances.”
“The engines just stopped,” said Eddie.
“Confirmed,” said another of the ground controllers. “Engine cut off has occurred.”
“Fantastic!” said Mark Pigeon, sounding very relieved. Ben began to suspect that the odds had been rather higher than he'd let on. “PigeonCo is now officially a manned space company! In your face, Jason Strong!”
Ben had no idea who Jason Strong was and didn't care. “You still there, Eddie?” he asked.
“Still here. I'm weightless. Wow, it feels great!”
“I've got the Shenzou on another channel,” said Mark. “They're fifteen minutes away. Nothing for you to do but sit there and wait for them, Eddie.”
“Fifteen minutes?” said Ben. “That's cutting it pretty close, isn't it?”
“He doesn't have the altitude we hoped he'd have. It was raining when he launched, the rocket was wet. That's a lot of weight we weren't counting on. I didn't say so at the time, but we almost cancelled the launch. We were worried the shuttle wouldn't be able to reach him at all.”
“You risked his life!” said Frank angrily.
“You know what's at stake here. There’s more than one life at stake. We took a calculated risk.”
“You did the right thing, Mark,” said Eddie. “The others understand. Right, guys?”
“We weren't counting on a cold hearted businessman willing to risk other people's lives for his own personal glory,” said Frank.
“Frank, that’s unfair!” said Ben sternly. “We all knew it was a risk. Eddie knew the risk he was taking. He was willing to take that risk.”
Frank nodded unhappily. “I know,” he said. “I just wish it was me up there. He's risking his life because I was too much of a fat slob to go up.”
“Frank, you’ve got to get over this!” said Eddie. “I'm thrilled to be up here! I'm glad you're a fat slob!” Frank gave a guilty chuckle and smiled weakly. “So relax. I'm going to be fine, and if I'm not, then that’s fine too. I'm having an experience worth dying for. God, but I wish these tiny little portholes were bigger. What I can see through them is incredible!”
“You'll have plenty of time for sightseeing when you're aboard the space station,” said Mark. “It'll take the crew several days to finish adapting the Colibri. You don't have the skills to help them, you’ll have nothing to do but play the tourist.”
“And eat,” said Eddie. “And drink. I hope they've got plenty of water on that shuttle.”
“We're about to lose you, Eddie,” said one of the flight control engineers. “We no longer have the satellites for continuous communications. You'll have to tell us how it went when you come above the horizon again.”
“Roger that,” said Eddie. “You're already breaking up...” Eddie's voice was also breaking up, and a moment later there was nothing coming from the Mercury capsule but static.
“Well, that’s it for now,” said Mark Pigeon. “We'll let you know when we hear anything.”
“Thanks, Mark.”
Ben left the channel open, but nothing came from the speakers but the low voices of the flight control engineers talking amongst themselves. Ben stood. “They're doing their jobs,” he said. “Time for us to do ours.” He turned to face Samantha. “We need you to tell us where to land on the moon.”
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“Have you got a table computer?” she asked.
“Yes, in the main lab.”
Samantha stood, followed by the other senior researchers, and Ben led the way out of the room.
☆☆☆
The table computer was six feet across. They all gathered around it while Samantha pulled up a pre-Scatter Cloud map of the moon.
“Okay,” she said. “The thing is, the moon is way more fractured than most people think. It's been bombarded by meteors and small asteroids for four and a half billion years, and every impact breaks up the crust a little bit more. On earth, the crust heals itself. Water flows through cracks and fissures depositing dissolved chemicals, gluing the pieces together again. This doesn't happen on the moon. Any fissure that forms in a piece of rock stays there forever.”
“Isn't there vacuum welding on the moon?” asked James.
“Vacuum welding isn't what most people think. Two surfaces in a vacuum can stick together, but they don't join. They can still slip and slide. The only things on the moon that can stick bits of rock together are ice and magma, and with the temperature up there rising all the time we can’t count on ice.”
“But there's certainly enough magma up there at the moment,” said Frank.
“Indeed, but we need magma that’s flowed into ancient cracks and solidified again. We need places that have been flooded by magma and that have suffered very little cratering since.”
“The seas,” said Ben. “The maria.”
“Indeed. The sites of massive impacts billions of years ago. Places where an asteroid punched clean through the moon's crust, allowing molten rock to well up and fill the crater.” She indicated the dark areas on the lunar map. “Also, it has to be somewhere in this area, the area directly opposite the magma ocean, because this will be the centre of the prograde area during apogee.”
“The...?” said Alice.
“Sorry. The part of the moon's surface facing forward as it moves through space. And apogee is when the moon’s furthest from Earth. Sorry, I'm so used to talking to people familiar with astronomical terms...”
“Yes, of course,” said Alice, smiling. “I remember now. I just needed my memory jogging.”
Samantha touched the table and rotated the image to bring the moon's eastern hemisphere to the front. “The largest sea in that area is this one. Mare Fecunditatis. The Sea of Fertility. Fortunately, it is very lightly cratered. It’s a vast basin of solidified magma eight hundred and forty kilometres across. It has a region here, on its north west. A place called Sinus Successus. The Bay of Success. Almost exactly in the area you want.”
Ben nodded. “Yes, I was already thinking that. The Bay of Success is a hundred and thirty kilometres across, though. We need to narrow it down a little.”
“Well, I assume the closer to the prograde point, the better. Also, even the maria are covered by a layer of loose rock, regolith, that can be several metres deep. I assume you need an area of bare bedrock. Something you can firmly attach a cable to.”
“That would be correct,” said Kate.
“So you need a small meteor crater. Something small enough to have cleared the regolith from the area but not big enough to have seriously fractured the bedrock itself. A crater around a hundred metres across, say.” She zoomed in closer. From far out, the Bay of Success looked smooth and featureless, but as she zoomed in features that had been invisible came into view. Craters, wide but low ridges and valleys. Fissures where the ancient magma bedrock had shrunk as it cooled. The occasional boulder thrown up by a large impact elsewhere on the moon.
“Well, as you can see, there are quite a few craters of the right size,” said Samantha. “A couple of dozen, actually. Will any of them do or are there other criteria they have to satisfy?”
“There has to be an area within easy walking distance where the shuttle can land,” said Ben. “It doesn't matter if the landing gear’s wrecked. They'll be using the Chinese shuttle to land back on Earth. They just need a place a couple of miles long that they can belly flop on. Somewhere reasonably smooth and flat and without any boulders large enough to do any really serious damage to the craft. It needs the crew to survive and for the engines to still work. Other than that, it doesn’t matter how smashed up it gets.” He leaned forward to see the image on the table better. “I thought at first that the whole area looked promising, but now...”
“How will they take off again?” asked Samantha.
“Very easily. They'll have the mass dampener, don't forget. They’ll be able to just push themselves back up into space.”
“They may not even have to do that,” said James. “The atmosphere will expand upwards when the dampener's on. It'll probably carry the shuttle up with it.”
Samantha stared at him, then nodded and returned her attention to the map. “Well, even the very best maps, the ones sent back by the Copernicus probe, only have a resolution of about fifty centimetres, but boulders tend to follow the scaling rule, just like everything else. Ten small boulders for every large one, ten large ones for every very large one, and so on. That means that where there are large boulders there are likely to be smaller ones, and places without large ones are unlikely to have smaller ones. There's always the possibility of getting a nasty surprise, of course, but any place that looks smooth and level at the very highest resolution will probably be suitable...”
Suddenly she gave a start. “I just remembered! The moon's such an active place now! An atmosphere blowing things around, the Chinese turning the moon's gravity on and off causing the whole place to erupt in turmoil. While the gravity was turned off, boulders the size of houses could have been carried from one side of the moon to the other! This whole map must be hopelessly out of date!”
“Can’t be helped,” said Ben. “We just have to do the best we can with the information we have.”
“I've gotten so used to the moon being eternal and unchanging.” Samantha stared from one of the scientists to another with pure anguish in her eyes. “The footprints of the astronauts lasting for millions of years, stuff like that. All my life, that’s been the most basic fact about the moon, and now it’s no longer true. It's become a completely different world.”
“You're still the world’s best expert. If anyone can help us, it’s you.”
“You don't understand! I'm an expert on the moon as it was! Everything I knew, everything I learned from a lifetime of study, it’s now worse than useless. It could actually lead us astray. You'd be better trying to find a landing site yourselves. You won't have false preconceptions caused by knowledge that’s no longer true.”
“We understand the situation,” said Ben gently. “We can take it into account while we deliberate. We are fortunate in that the part of the moon we’re interested in may be the very place that’s changed the least. It's the place where the winds converge, where the weather's the calmest. That also means that any boulders that found themselves up in the air while the moon was almost massless will have come down close to their original positions. Most of your knowledge will still be accurate.” Samantha stared at him, still looking anxious, and Ben put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “Proceed on the assumption that the knowledge we have is still accurate,” he said, “and we’ll bear in mind that things might have changed.”
Samantha nodded. She put her hands over her face, swept back her hair and took a deep breath. “Okay then. I'll tell the computer to search for areas within the Bay of Success more than two miles across without boulders. That didn't have any boulders. Before last week.”
“How long will that take?” asked Ben.
Samantha was already linking her phone to the University of Bristol computer, though, and downloading some analysis software. “Wish I still had my old phone,” she muttered. “This stupid little thing is barely up to it.”
“Karen,” said Ben, “Get her a proper phone, top of the range. A tablet too.” Karen nodded and left the room.
“Okay,” said Samantha. “That's it. Shouldn't take a moment...” Even as she spoke, areas of the map displayed on the table changed colour, becoming overlapping squares of bright orange. “Those are areas without large boulders. So far as we know. Now I'm telling the computer to show craters smaller than one hundred and fifty metres across.” Small circles of red popped up, almost none of them in the orange areas. One of them was right alongside one of them, though, and Samantha brought it to the centre of the map. “I think that’s our best shot,” she said. “Designated crater 0834, 6133. Ninety five metres across, six metres deep. Looks like bare bedrock at its centre. I'll look up the Copernicus data, see if there's anything else I can tell you about it.”
“Good,” said Ben. “If you find anything to rule it out, please tell me immediately, but in the meantime that’s our destination. I’ll go inform the people who need to be informed. Thanks, Sam.”
She smiled at him, then turned back to her phone and went to work.
☆☆☆
The others left her to it. As they left the room, Ben strode ahead of the rest, keen to start making phone calls, but James called out to him. Ben paused and waited for the wheelchair to catch up to him. “Something on your mind?” he asked.
“Yeah. What she said about the moon having suffered turmoils is quite right. What she forgot to mention is the effect the Earth's gravity might have had on it during the close approach. Look at what happened on Earth. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis. The moon's likely to have suffered a hundred times worse. The entire surface of the moon might have changed out of all recognition.”
“Yes, it might,” replied Ben. “What do you suggest?”
“For all we know, the Bay of Success might not even exist any more. The whole region might have been broken up into tilted slabs by massive earthquakes, er, moonquakes. There may be nothing, anywhere, that a shuttle can land on.”
“Are you saying we should abort the mission? Tell Eddie to just give up and come home?”
“I'm saying we need to know more. We can’t see the surface of the moon because it’s covered by clouds, but maybe we can do a radar mapping.”
Ben looked thoughtful. “Like the way they mapped Venus? Can a normal radio telescope do that? Just point it at the moon and do a scan?”
“I've got no idea, we'd need to ask someone who knows about that kind of thing, but we need to do it while the Bay of Success is facing the Earth. The longer we wait, the closer it gets to the limb of the moon and the harder it'll be to get an accurate map, and we need an accurate map! We can’t plan a mission like this when we have absolutely no information on the current state of the region.”
“And if we find that the whole area has been broken up into tilted slabs?”
“Then there’ll be no point in risking Eddie's life any more. We can bring him home.”
“One thing I do know about radar mapping is that it’s very low resolution. About a hundred metres a pixel, something like that. There might be new escarpments dozens of metres high that wouldn't show up. Even a cliff just one metre high would destroy the shuttle.”
“But if hundred metre cliffs showed up on the scan, then we'd really know the landing site is totally screwed up. As it is, Eddie won't know until the shuttle breaks through the cloud cover. Yes, I know they could turn on the mass dampener and just turn around, but they'll still have made a two day journey for nothing, with another two day journey to come home. We might be able to spare him that.”
Ben nodded. “You're right,” he said. “I'll make some calls. There's a guy I know. Even if he doesn't know himself, he'll know people who do.”
“And probably best not to worry Samantha with this just yet. She's in enough of a state as it is.”
Ben nodded again and strode off to his office.