It was one hell of a legacy to manage.
“Let me see if it will open now,” Aldrin said. Clumsily, he reached down for the hatch handle. He tugged on the thin metal door, but it stayed firmly shut. Aldrin pulled vigorously, and Hadamard feared he might rip the thin metal shell of the Lunar Module. Finally Aldrin peeled back one corner of the door to break the seal.
The next part of the litany was Hadamard’s. “The hatch is coming open,” he said, and he heard, spontaneously, excitement creep into his voice.
As if it were all real.
A flurry of ice particles gushed out into the lunar vacuum beyond the hatch, the last of the LM’s atmosphere.
Aldrin held the hatch open, and Hadamard sank to his knees and carefully moved his suited bulk backwards through the opening. It was awkward, confining, more like struggling to escape from the neck of a sack than leaving an aircraft.
The Aldrin simulation gave him running guidance. “Jake, you’re lined up nicely. Towards me a little bit. Okay, down. Roll to the left. Put your left foot to the right a little bit. You’re doing fine…”
Hadamard crawled out onto a large platform called the porch, which bridged the gap between the hatch and the ladder to the surface. He groped backwards with his boots, and found the top rung. He got hold of the porch’s handrails and raised himself upright, cautiously.
“Okay, Houston, I’m on the porch.”
Before him was the blocky, shadowed bulk of the LM. Beyond that, reaching all the way to the close horizon, was a pocked, rock-strewn, tan brown surface. There were craters everywhere, of all sizes, right down to the little micrometeorite pits on the sides of the rocks that the astronauts had called zap pits. On some of the rocks he saw an exotic sparkle, like a glaze. The colors, though, depended on which way he looked, on the angle to the sun, as if he was looking through a polarizing filter.
He knew this representation had been beefed up from the original photographs with fractal technology. Those zap pits weren’t real, for instance. But it looked pretty convincing to Hadamard. He could well believe this place had been gardened, pulverized by meteorite strikes, for billions of years.
The land, he saw, actually curved, gently but noticeably, all the way to the horizon, and in every direction from him. He was standing on a rocky sphere, no more and no less. This was a small world indeed. The sky was utterly dark, save for the blue Earth, which was almost directly overhead, visible only if he tilted back his head…
“What do you think of it?”
He turned. An astronaut had come bounding around the far side of the LM, her suit glowing white.
“Paula?”
“Hi, Jake.”
He felt an odd reluctance to come out of the illusion. “Disney-Coke have done a good job.”
“Yes,” she said. “Maybe this was what it was all about in the first place, do you think? Circus stunts, entertainment? And maybe in a few more years these visitors’ centers will be all that’s left…”
“Oh, how symbolic. And that’s why you’ve dragged me here today, Paula. Correct?”
“Did you read my recommendation?”
“Not past the management summary. No.”
“Then,” she said coolly, “you’re going to have to. Like it or not that recommendation is the result of eighteen months’ study, and it comes with a lot of management weight behind it.”
“Paula, I just couldn’t believe what I read. I don’t see how I’m going to be able to justify the costs, even of defining the proposal fully. It’s ridiculous. You’re talking about a manned mission to Saturn, for God’s sake. Who’s going to take that seriously?”
“There are costs associated with everything we do,” she said. “Just mothballing the orbiters is going to cost. Probably we’ll even make a loss out of scrapping the launch complexes, turning the VAB into a jungle gym… Jake, this is your job. But I know you’ve retained unexpended funding from the shut-down manned space program, from the last couple of fiscal years. Funding that’s still at your discretion; funding above and beyond what you disclosed to me when I took on this job.”
“You’re aware of that, huh.”
“It’s not so hard to trace. We can cover this financially. It’s just a question of whether you want to do this, or not. Whether you’ll back it… You’re getting behind your timeline.”
“Oh, yeah.” A prompter scrolled discreetly across the base of his visor, with his next few lines. The next part of the sequence was to pull a D-ring on the side of the Eagle. “I’m going to pull the camera out now.” An equipment storage tray lowered on its hinges, bearing a small TV camera. “Houston, the MESA came down all right.”
Hadamard could hear the capcom, Bruce McCandless, exclaim: Houston, roger, we copy and we’re standing by for your TV. Man, we’re getting a picture on the TV!
“That’s a little gruff,” Benacerraf observed. “McCandless was just a rookie astronaut in 1969. That sounded a lot older.”
“Disney-Coke brought the real McCandless out of retirement, and got him to overdub his contributions. So I guess you have a clash of authenticity measures,” Hadamard said drily. “Of course, McCandless went on to fly Shuttle. He was actually more expensive to get than Buzz Aldrin.”
There’s a great deal of contrast in it and currently it’s upside down on our monitor, but we can make out a fair amount of detail… Okay, Jake, we can see you coming down the ladder now.
Hadamard began to descend the ladder, one rung at a time. His primitive suit, inflated like a big white balloon around him, was so stiff he had trouble bending his legs, and he found he had to just let go and drop from rung to rung.
When he got to the bottom rung he was still more than three feet off the ground. He could see the big dish of the foil-covered footpad beneath him. He dangled one foot, trying to build up the courage to take this final step. Then he pushed himself away from the ladder, gently.
He went into a slow-motion fall. It took maybe a second to drop to the footpad, but on Earth it would have taken less than half that. The difference was pleasingly noticeable. He couldn’t feel the invisible harness supporting him at all.
He was in deep shadow here.
“I’ve also been receiving more proposals from the USAF for disposing of the Shuttle fleet,” he said to Benacerraf.
“Proposals that went straight to you, over my head,” she said mildly.
“I guess so. Well, that’s the way it works, Paula. Those guys play for keeps.”
“The USAF proposals are entirely destructive.”
“I don’t think that’s entirely fair,” he said. The USAF had given up on their grandiose L5 schemes. Now they proposed to use the remaining orbiters as unmanned testbeds, on suborbital flights inside and outside the atmosphere, probing hypersonic, high-altitude flight regimes which were still only partially understood. “We could get some good data out of there.”
“For what purpose? The data, such as it would be, would sit locked away in big USAF databases. And for that dubious benefit they would destroy the orbiters, a national treasure.”
But it would get Al Hartle off my back, he thought. “Give me a single good reason why I should recommend we go to Titan,” he said.
“Because it represents the true high ground,” she replied immediately. She turned, and started to Moonwalk; she drifted across the glowing lunar ground, dreamlike.
“That’s a worn old phrase.”
“But in this case, I think it applies,” she said. Titan is the key to the rest of the Solar System. You’ve seen Rosenberg’s detailed plan—”
“Yes.”
“It’s almost like a business plan,” she said. “On the surface it seems fantastic. But in fact it’s orderly, logical.”
“It’s a dream,” he said. “You’re talking to an accountant, remember. It’s not a business plan at all.”
“Jake, we’re overdue for a breakthrough in booster technology. That’s been obvious for a couple of decades. The Shuttle system uses technology that goes back to Goddard in the 1920s. The Shuttle is just a V-2 with air conditioning. Somebody’s going to make the breakthrough, sooner or later, to routine, cheap access to space. And once that happens, there will be an explosion off-world. You’ll see factories, farms, power stations in LEO… and the next words spoken on the surface of the Moon will be Chinese. Or Korean, or Vietnamese. Soon after that, those guys will make it to Mars, the asteroids. We aren’t investing in the right stuff, the core technologies. Any Americans who want to go will have to book passage.