Stetson trudged forward and used his suit’s built-in lamps to see the boot prints in the lunar dust leading around the lander to just the other side of the crumpled landing leg. Whoever made the burner had walked this way.
“Aha,” Stetson blurted out without thinking first. “I see MacGyver’s boot prints leading back toward the crew cabin. And that’s where I’m going now. I want to meet this guy.”
Carefully avoiding the many shards of broken metal sticking out from the damaged legs, Stetson made slow but steady progress toward the door of the cabin. Moving to his left to avoid a rather large piece of metal, Stetson momentarily lost his balance. Had he been on Earth in his ungainly suit he would have surely fallen. As it was, he merely tipped to the side and then eased himself back into an upright posture. As he did so, he bumped into a strut that was, fortunately, not sharp.
“Careful, Bill,” Chow spoke. “Those metal shards you are walking through look sharp enough to cut your suit. Is there another path?”
“Maybe, but there’s no time. I’m being careful. I have no intention of venting to vacuum when I’m this close.” Stetson’s reply sounded confident, but his mental comment was not. Please, God, don’t let me trip and cut my leg off.…
Inside the Harmony, as the crew huddled together looking at their suits’ power indicators drop mercilessly toward the red, they felt the thump of Stetson’s benign contact with the frame of the lander. It wasn’t much, but in a place where no wind has ever blown, it was the first movement other than their own since the crash. The large outcropping of boulders had effectively shielded them from the dust and debris kicked up by the Altair as it landed, and, since there was no atmosphere to carry sound, the noise of a rocket engine descending to the surface only a few hundred feet away was absent.
“Did you feel that?” asked Dr. Xu. His voice was muffled due to the fact that their visors were closed to retain heat within the suits and their suit radios were off to conserve power.
“Yes. Yes, I did. The lander is either settling or the Americans are here,” replied Hui Tian, her voice also muffled, as she rose and moved toward the door. The crew compartment was crowded and now very cold. Though her suit temperature was at the bare minimum required to keep her alive and not hypothermic, she was no longer aware of how cold she felt. Instead, she was focused on finding out what had bumped the lander and at containing her excitement at the thought that help had arrived.
She neared the cabin window and peered outside into the near-darkness. At first she couldn’t see anything, and then she saw motion—and an American astronaut carefully climbing over the remains of the lander legs toward the cabin door. She turned quickly to face her crewmates.
“They are here! The Americans are here!”
She moved to the cabin door and abruptly stopped. She stood motionless, staring at the metal door that separated her crew from the American astronaut.
“There’s no power. We cannot open the door without power.”
“Ha.” Engineer Zhi grunted. “Of course we can. Just use the manual override. We trained for that a million times. Are you not thinking clearly?”
“Who is not thinking clearly?” Hui responded. “Zhi, did being in your spacesuit for so long make you forget that the cabin is pressurized? We’ve got close to one atmosphere of air in here pushing on the door. And there is no pressure on the other side. When we EVA, we have to vent the cabin first, and that requires power. The door opens inward. Without venting the air, the pressure is enough to keep the door from opening even if I use the manual override.” Unlike the American lander, the Chinese did not have an airlock. When they exited for a surface EVA, the entire lander, like the Orion, vented to vacuum. The Chinese designers had not foreseen the need to design the door to open to vacuum when the cabin was still fully pressurized.
“Of course,” Zhi chortled. “So, our American saviors arrive, and we cannot even go out and meet them with dignity.” He lowered his head and appeared to stare at the floor in front of him.
“Let’s get this door open.” Dr. Xu gently moved the injured pilot to a resting position leaning against an instrument rack and rose to join his commander at the cabin door. “I am certain we can find a way.”
Hui removed the latch from the door handle and grasped it in her right glove. Xu moved close to her, grabbed the handle next to where she had placed her hands, and began to pull.
Nothing happened. The door remained stuck.
“It is basic physics,” Zhi said. “Atmospheric pressure is a little more than fourteen pounds per square inch. The door is about two thousand square inches. That means the total force pushing on the door is about thirty thousand pounds. Do you think the two of you can move thirty thousand pounds all by yourselves?”
Hui and Dr. Xu responded by trying again to move the door. Again, nothing happened.
“Enough.” Hui and Dr. Xu turned to face Zhi. Clearly frustrated, Hui spoke, “Zhi, do you have any ideas? What can we do to open the door?”
“Hmm.” Zhi looked up at his commander. His response bordered on insubordination. “Captain Hui, if I knew, I am not sure I would tell you. Who will recall what we did to get home when it will be the triumphant American heroes who get the credit? It is better to die than to let them have the glory that should have been ours.”
“I do not understand you, Zhi. You are the one who figured out how to keep the ship warm using the rocket fuel. You are the one who kept the fuel cells working far longer than they should have. You are the one who will get much of the credit for keeping this crew alive long enough for the Americans to give us a ride home. You are a hero of China! Do you not see that? Are you giving up? Why? You’ve done so much already!”
“Because it was pointless. It would have been better if we had died in the crash. This was supposed to be our day. China’s day.” He averted his gaze from Hui back to the cabin floor and said nothing more.
It was at that moment that they heard a banging sound come from the other side of the door. It sounded like whoever was on the other side had picked up a piece of metal and was using it to signal them.
Dr. Xu responded by banging his glove on the door.
“Without air, he won’t hear that.” Hui was frustrated with their predicament as well. She wanted to go home. “But he might feel it.”
“Or he might not,” Zhi added.
“We’ve got to let him know we are here and what our problem is. I’ll turn on my radio.” She raised her hand and turned on the power to the transmitter within her spacesuit.
“Hello? Can you hear me? This is Captain Hui of the Harmony. Can you hear me? Please respond if you can hear me!”
The banging on the other side of the door continued.
Standing on the other side of the door, Bill Stetson couldn’t tell if there was anyone alive or dead within the ship. The door was closed, and the ship was completely dark. He couldn’t get to the window to look in due to the fact that he was now a good fifteen feet off the ground, standing in what looked like the remains of a construction site after an earthquake, and if he were to try and reach the window, he would almost certainly fall to his death by being skewered on one of the many sharp edges of mangled metal that used to be the Harmony lunar lander.
He grasped the small aluminum rod that he’d picked up during his climb to the door and banged again.
Anthony Chow was sweating. It was a cold sweat, and it wasn’t caused by his work dismantling an experiment rack to be thrown overboard. Nor did the temperature within the Altair cause it. It was the cold sweat of fear.
Left alone in the lander for over an hour, Chow at first didn’t think much about anything other than getting the weight of the lander down to the point that would allow them to take on passengers. He’d already moved the easy stuff like the sleeping hammocks, the food rations that would have sustained the crew for an extended surface stay, and the containers that were to safely store the rocks and core samples they would have collected and returned to the Earth. There was still a lot to be done in order to get the lander off the Moon, even some modifications to the structure, but Chow couldn’t do those on his own. That would have to come later when Bill got the survivors back to the ship and they had a chance to assess and think on their situation a bit longer.