He slides his hands into the water. His hands like the water. It is cool and soothes his scarred palms. He waits, knees on the ground, hands in the water, the last rain pattering on the back of his neck.
He is not there.
A cold softness brushes his hands.
His hands grab and lift. A fish flies over his head, wriggling, silvery. His ears hear it land with a thump on the grass behind him. He slides his hands back into the water. He is not there.
Reid Malenfant:
So here was Malenfant, for better or worse in space once again, flying ass backwards towards the Moon — a Moon, anyhow.
Nemoto and Malenfant sat upright, side by side, in a rounded bulge at the rear of the cramped, coffin-like, gear-crammed capsule. They were each encased in the heavy folds of their garish orange launch-and-entry suits, and a rubbery wet raincoat stink filled the air.
Malenfant gazed into the tiny, scuffed, oil-smeared rectangle of glass before his face, trying to make out the greater universe into which he had been thrust. There was no sense of space, of openness; surrounded by the womb-like ticking and purring of fans and pumps, immersed in the stench of rubber and metal, peering out through these tiny windows, it was like being stuck in a miniature submarine.
…But now Earth swam into view.
From the Station’s low orbit Earth had always been immense to Malenfant, a vast glowing roof or floor to his world, ever present, dwarfing his petty craft. But now Earth was receding. First one precisely curved horizon slid into his window frame, and then the other, so that soon he could see the whole Earth, hanging like a Christmas-tree bauble in the velvet black, blue patches peeking out from beneath the white swirl of clouds, painted with the familiar continent-shapes. Malenfant could see Florida, Africa, Gibraltar and even much of South America, his single glance spanning the Atlantic Ocean. The planet slowly shifted position, drifting from the top of his window to the bottom, so he had to crane forward to see it. Even from here he could see the damage done by the Tide: smoke was smeared over a dozen coastal cities, and he saw the cold gleam of white-tops as angry waves continued to pound the land.
Malenfant had been somewhat relieved that the launch had gone through without significant hitches.
He had lain in his couch listening to the flexing of the tanks as they were laden with cryos, then the roar of propellants like a distant locomotive, the whine of the pumps, the waterfall shout of the pad’s huge deluge system — and then the bursting roar of the engines. And he could think of nothing but the fact that this BDB booster stack on which he perched had never before flown in test, not even once — no time for that.
Anyhow they had gotten off the pad. The acceleration had been low at first. But as the engines far below had swivelled from side to side to adjust the direction of thrust, the two astronauts, stuck at the top of the stack, had been thrown back and forth, like ants clinging to the tip of a car antenna.
Then had come the violence of staging, as first the solid rocket boosters and then the big main engine cluster had cut out. Malenfant had been thrown forward against his harness, crashing his helmeted head against the curving bulkhead before him. After a heart-stopping moment of drift, the second stage had cut in, thrusting him back into his seat once more.
That second-stage burn had seemed to go on and on — six, seven, eight minutes, their craft growing lighter as fuel burned off, their velocity piling on. Not for Malenfant and Nemoto the old Apollo luxury of taking a couple of swings around the Earth to check out the systems; the BDB’s last contribution had been to hurl them on a direct-ascent trajectory all the way out of Earth’s gravity well without pausing.
Just ten minutes after leaving the pad at Vandenberg, the second stage finally cut out. Malenfant and Nemoto had listened to the clunk of the burnt-out stage disengaging itself from the lander, and the bull-snorts of nose-mounted attitude thrusters turning their little craft so it pointed nose-first to the Earth — ten minutes gone, and already Malenfant was bound irrevocably for the Moon.
Still the Earth shrank.
“There she goes,” he murmured. “I feel as if I’m driving a car into a long, dark tunnel…”
It struck him that Nemoto hadn’t said a single word since the pad rats had strapped them into their couches. Now, as they watched the Earth fall away, her small hand crept into his.
And then they broke. They began to work from panel to panel, throwing switches and checking dials, working through their post-insertion checklist, configuring the software that would run the craft’s life support systems. Necessary work without which they would not survive, not even for an hour.
New Moon or old, Earth’s satellite orbited just as far from the mother planet, and so it was going to take them three days to get there, just as it always had. But because they were flying backwards, they weren’t going to be able to see the Red Moon itself. Not until they got there.
For the first few hours the abandoned BDB second stage trailed after them, following its own independent path. It was scheduled to sail past the Moon and fly into interplanetary space. The stage was a lumpy cylinder, shining bright in the intense sunlight. Malenfant could clearly see the details of the attachment mechanisms at its upper face, and how its thin walls had crumpled during the launch. But it was venting unburnt fuel from three or four places. The small thrust of the fuel vents was making it tumble, like a garden sprinkler, and it was surrounded by a cloud of frozen fuel droplets that glimmered like stars.
The stage’s subtly modified path was bringing it closer to the lander than Malenfant would have liked, at one point no more than a few hundred feet away. He stayed strapped into his seat, watching this potential hazard, and weighing up options. But after a couple more hours the stage began to drift away of its own accord.
When the lander was alone in the emptiness, Malenfant felt an odd pang of loneliness, and almost wished the booster stage would come swimming back, like some great metal whale.
After six hours in space, twelve since they had been woken before the launch, they unbuckled.
Malenfant felt a surge of validating freedom as he found himself floating up from his couch. His treacherous stomach gave a warning growl, however. Throwing up in this confined space would be even more of a catastrophe than on Shuttle. He turned his back and popped a couple of tabs, trusting that the queasiness would pass.
Awkwardly, helping each other, they stripped out of their launch suits. Now they would wear lightweight jumpsuits and cloth bootees, all the way to the Red Moon.
The X-38, hastily modified from a Space Station bail-out craft, was just thirty feet long, an ungainly shape the pilots likened to a potato with fins. Malenfant and Nemoto had been given couches in the rounded bulge at the craft’s rear. The craft, designed for a couple of hours” flight down to Earth from low orbit, had been crammed with gear to keep them alive for ten, eleven, twelve days, the time it would take to reach the Red Moon, and come straight back again, if the natives didn’t look friendly. Much of its interior was too cramped for the crew even to sit upright — but then, in its primary bail-out mode carrying injured or even unconscious crew back to Earth, reclining couches would have sufficed.
To the rear end of the lander was fixed a liquid-rocket pack. The engine and propellants were based on the simple, reliable systems of the old Apollo Lunar Module. This engine would be used to decelerate them into lunar orbit, and then, if they chose to commit, to slow them further, until the lander began its long glide down into the atmosphere, shedding its heat of descent in a long series of aerodynamic manoeuvres, much like the Shuttle orbiter’s entry to Earth’s atmosphere.