Ascent by Jed Mercurio (24 page)

His universe is one of cold and almost total darkness. The faint glimmers of stars speckle the black sky, but the light is negligible. The interior of the cabin, even his own body, is invisible to him. The cold oppresses him. He feels it push into his throat and down into his lungs, turning his blood lukewarm. It is chilling his bones.

It seems an age but is in truth only a matter of minutes before the Sun rises over the Far Side. He presses against the porthole to claim every drop of golden syrupy light. The battered surface drifts below. Craters overlap craters, new on top of old. The back of the Moon bears the scars of the outer face of the Earth-Moon system, the shield of an eon’s meteorite strikes.

When the second stopwatch indicates he’s halfway round this revolution, he identifies the crater Tsiolkovsky directly below, and with the sextant measures its apparent diameter. This measurement he hopes will determine the high point of
Voskhodyeniye
’s orbit, the apocynthion.

An hour of sunlight illuminates Yefgenii’s toil, and then lunar night once again engulfs the spacecraft. He must stop, and cannot help contemplating his situation. If his orbital velocity is too slow,
Voskhodyeniye
will soon crash to the surface.

When day breaks again, he continues through his calculations:
Voskhodyeniye
is travelling an acceptable orbit, moving at close to the predicted velocity. His present situation appears stable. He must stop work. He must rest and take sustenance.

He consumes his food allowance. The surviving fuel cell has produced a pittance of water. Little frost is forming on the interior of the cabin now. What water vapor remains in the cabin atmosphere comes from his own breath. He removes his gloves and squeezes out of the spacesuit. The cold stings his flesh. He hurries, he shivers. He seals off and disconnects the filling pipe of his waste collection bag and removes the bag from his suit. A globule of straw-coloured fluid floats off the tip of the bag’s hose. He puts the hose of the waste collection bag in his mouth and opens the seal. He sucks out the liquid that’s a mixture of his urine and sweat. It amounts to only a couple of hundred millilitres. He chases the globule that escaped from the tube. It wobbles and shimmers. Spectra flash off streaks of grease. The surface is already frosting. He closes his mouth over the globule, taking it in one gulp.

After reinstating the waste collection bag, he struggles back into the suit. The material stretches but his muscles and tendons don’t. He contorts into it. The sunburn on his flank tears. He screams, tears come to his eyes, and he finds a way to drink those too.

By now the spacecraft is travelling through darkness again. When it emerges, he huddles in the sunlight. The Far Side rolls below. The Moon is small and the ship is close. He gains a sense of speed in contrast to the stately promenade of Earth orbit.

The Eastern Sea slides under the lunar equator. Earth rises again. He sets himself at the porthole with the telescope trained down on the surface. By eye he tracks the appearance of the highlands of the Ocean of Storms’ western coastline dominated by the crater Hevelius, 100 kilometres across. Without an atmosphere to burn them up, meteorites have struck the surface intact and gouged out great lumps of rock and dust.

He sees the land flatten. Through the eyepiece of the telescope he surveys the landing site. The lava bed ripples between Reiner and Marius to the northeast. No large craters or cliffs ruin the picture. Eastward streaks of ejecta begin to appear, diverging from their point of origin, Kepler. This closer survey supports the objective of setting down somewhere in a zone measuring about 200 kilometres by 300. No observable feature suggests the landing site is unsuitable.

Voskhodyeniye
leaves the Sun behind, and the dazzling yellow disc begins to slide behind the lunar horizon. The shadow is visible ahead, crossing the Sea of Islands east of the crater Copernicus. The illuminated portion of the Near Side is continuing to dwindle. The Ocean of Storms will remain sunlit for a further three days; in six days there’ll be a new Moon, when the satellite swings between the Earth and the Sun and the entire Near Side falls into darkness. At present, the Sun angle is optimal for the landing, being oblique to the Ocean of Storms so that craters and hills are thrown into relief, rather than being blasted into a flat panorama that gives an observer no sense of perspective.

Yefgenii is desperate for rest. His head aches with nausea, hunger and dehydration. His body aches from cold. His sunburn is bleeding and sore, he can feel the stinking dressing getting damper. He unfolds the mesh hammock and straps himself in. Darkness swallows
Voskhodyeniye
and, moments later, sleep its occupant.

HE SQUINTS IN THE SUNLIGHT. Ears of corn wave in the breeze. The crop is taller than him. He is running. A narrow path cuts through the cornfield, bordered by the tall stalks that catch on his elbows and spring back as he goes by. He is laughing. Though someone’s chasing him, he isn’t frightened, because she is laughing too. He feels her gentle hands hook him under the arms and swing him up into the air, so high he is whirling above the ears of corn. Together they are laughing and spinning. He gazes into her face but the sunlight bursts round the curls of her hair, burning out his vision of her. He squints into the glare, searching for her face, the woman laughing and swinging him, and he is laughing too, and so little, but he can’t see her because he is dazzled by the Sun.

Voskhodyeniye
is blazing with light. He wakes, blinking at the glare bouncing off the metal plates of the BO. He unstraps himself and floats off the mesh hammock. The Ocean of Storms drifts below. He glimpses the triangle of craters, Marius, Reiner, and Kepler, and they appear different to him. He wonders if the orbit has slipped somehow. He glances at his chronometer. He’s slept for six hours, making three revs of the Moon since he last surveyed the landing site.

He feels sick and starved. Part of him craves a return to the hammock and straps, so he can huddle in his suit for days as if taking to his bed to break a fever.

The sextant is angled as it was for his previous determination of the orbit’s pericynthion. The distinguishing features of the landing site are passing below. He has time enough only for a single measurement, so he chooses the angular separation between Reiner and Kepler: this being the largest angle, it will provide the most accurate comparison. He looks back over his handwritten notes and sees his suspicion confirmed. The angular separation has increased. The orbit is decaying.
Voskhodyeniye
is losing altitude and at some point yet to be determined will plummet down to the surface of the Moon.

He’s failed to achieve the orbit demanded by the flight plan. The error is grievous. Most likely his navigation has been imprecise, and he’s misjudged the course corrections and the lunar orbit insertion burn. He rues his arrogance, for persisting with the original mission when the more achievable option was always to keep on the free-return trajectory to Earth.

Now he straps himself into the pilot’s seat. He intends to fire the Block D engine for an arbitrary period of ten seconds in order to accelerate into a less unstable orbit. That at least will buy sufficient time to plan and execute trans-Earth injection with requisite precision, trans-Earth injection being the burn that will hurl him home.

First he needs to swing the spacecraft round. The engine stands at the leading edge of the stack, in combination with the LK.

The thrusters fail. He is getting no power indications from any of the LOK’s systems. He checks the circuit breakers and fuel cells. The LOK is dead. Out of sheer desperation he attempts to fire the thrusters once more, but the propellant doesn’t ignite. The electronic connections between the LOK’s command power grid and the ship’s thrusters have drained.

Maybe from the LK he can still fire the Block D, but he must also turn the ship round, or else the sole effect of ignition will be to decelerate
Voskhodyeniye
and crash it into the Moon. He attempts to power up the LK from the LOK. He throws the switches to open the circuits to the LK but no power lights blink on. Both modules appear lifeless, but the LK may still be in its dormant state; its batteries may yet drive its guidance systems and spark its engines, and its engines are capable of powering the entire stack out of lunar orbit and onto the trajectory home.

His only hope lies with the lander.

The Sun sets. He must wait an hour in pitch blackness, with the orbit decaying by the minute. In darkness he feels his way to the storage locker below the environmental control system. His gloved hands pat the smooth dome of the bubble helmet and the bulky padding of the Krechet-94 Moonsuit. He strips off the Orlan and lets it drift away while he pulls on the Krechet. The freezing atmosphere of the cabin deadens his flesh. He slides into the suit and connects the panels. Any stretching of his frozen skin is excruciating. He fumbles the bubble helmet over his head and onto the metal collar, and locks it in place.

He floats in the darkness, sealed inside his suit, feeling warmth creep back into his body. Blood returns to the muscles and tendons. He twists and stretches, doing what little he can to loosen up. In his enclosed universe he breathes pure oxygen, but he smells his own dank odor, and the blood and goo of his sunburn.

Sunlight explodes across the horizon. The Far Side ignites into gray and brown speckles. The land rolls beneath the ship. For the first time the Sea of Moscow is lit, a dark eye in the upper left quadrant. He wants to take it as an omen. Moscow is watching him.

He dons his Moon helmet. He mounts his backpack and plugs in its cable and hoses, then attaches his tethering line. He belays the line onto a secure handhold and ties it off, leaving only a short loop.

Without power to depressurize the LOK, he must blow the hatch by hand. He turns the first safety lever, then the second. The metal creaks. He hears the locks clicking loose. He grips the handhold to the side of the hatch and releases the final lock. The cabin atmosphere blasts out into space in a single gale that boosts him up into the hatchway. The tether snaps tight but the belay holds firm. The line and his grip strain for a second, perhaps not even that long, and the wind drops. The air has gone. No force propels him outward. All is calm again.

His suit is swollen and rigid; he feels it raking against his sunburn, rupturing blisters that ooze sticky fluid, while outside the spacecraft the expelled air has sublimated in an instant and now a shower of glinting ice crystals shifts in a cloud toward the surface of the Moon.

Silence surrounds him. He sees that the surface has changed motion. It is not only sliding lengthways along the stack, but also rolling toward him. The Eastern Sea is the only feature he can recognize among the crammed overlapping rings of craters, but the Sea is rolling, it is advancing up over the equator toward the lunar north pole.

Then the land drops away from the spacecraft. Empty space begins to roll in, a black void of invisible stars. Venting the BO’s atmosphere has set
Voskhodyeniye
into a slow roll; no doubt it has slightly modified its orbit as well.

Yefgenii wiggles his backpack through the gap and squeezes out of the hatch into space. The tether trails behind. He maneuvers onto the handrail and now he is hanging over the northern hemisphere of the Near Side. The Sea of Cold turns under him. He is the first man to conduct an EVA in the realm of the Moon.

He reaches the boom but the motor has no power. He maneuvers by hand along the rails of the LOK fuselage toward the LK. His breath rushes. His heart drums. He must enter the LK before night falls, or else he’ll be stranded in darkness on the outside of the revolving stack.

Yefgenii has learned the most efficient method from his previous spacewalk, and secures a first position at the LK’s docking array, from which he then floats in parallel to the hull.

The LK hangs silent, cold and airless. Yefgenii secures himself on the handhold outside the hatch and begins to turn the sequence of latches to open the port. The inside of his suit is warmer than the chill air of the LOK, but his limbs remain cold, weak and stiff. No sound travels from the latches; outside the noisy living system of his suit stretches a silent endless vacuum.

When the final lock releases, the hatch remains motionless. He pulls to open it. The heavy door takes an effort to move; it retains all the mass it possessed on Earth. He swings the hatch outward and then attempts to struggle through the elliptical gap into the LK. The Kretchet Moonsuit is even bulkier than the Orlan. He twists onto his side to squeeze through the port. His backpack catches on the frame. Pain sears his sunburn. He snakes and pulls. Suffering bolts through his lower back. For the first time in days of debilitating cold, he sweats.

Inside the LK, he rests. His boots still point out of the hatch. The Sea of Rain floats up into the framed segment of sky, then the Carpathians lift off the soles of his boots, then Copernicus. He is approaching the terminator.

Yefgenii pushes himself away from the hatch. His tether trails out into space, running back to the LOK, holding him back. He maneuvers to the control panel and activates the master switch. The LK draws power from its batteries. The cabin lights blink on. Gauge needles quiver, digital displays glow. He disconnects the tether, shuts the hatch and pressurizes the LK.

His suit softens and he removes his outer helmet, bubble helmet and space gloves. Taking a position at the pilot’s station, his priority is to arrest the rolling of the stack caused by blowing the LOK hatch. Flying
Voskhodyeniye
from the LK has never been simulated. The lander’s computer is coming online but it isn’t configured to the dynamics of the entire stack. He must work by trial and error.

Yefgenii fires the thrusters to oppose the roll. The roll slows but the stack yaws, swinging the LK — the bow of the stack — toward the Moon, and the stern — the LOK and power module — out into space. In the viewports of the lander the lunar surface sweeps into sight, and then the terminator, and then the spacecraft and the lone cosmonaut are in darkness, tumbling in roll and yaw, divergent on two axes, in a failing orbit less than 100 kilometres above the pitiless surface of the Moon.