Joe took over. He ffipped the ship over, using the maneuvering rockets, then started backing in to a landing, using the jet in the tail to kill their still tremendous speed. The moon was below them now and Cargraves could see nothing but the stars, the stars and the crescent of the earth—a quarter of a million miles away and no help to him now.
He wondered if he would ever set foot on it again.
Morrie was studying the approach in the radar scope. "Checking out to nine zeros, Captain," he announced proudly and with considerable exaggeration. "It's in the bag."
The ground came up rapidly in the scope. When they were close and no longer, for the moment, dropping at all, Joe cut the main jet and flipped them over.
When he had collected, himself from the wild gyration of the somersault, Cargraves saw the nose jets reach out and splash in front of them and realized that the belly jets were in play, too, as the surge of power pushed the seat of the chair up against him. He felt almost as if he could land it himself, it seemed so much like his first wild landing on the New Mexico desert.
Then for one frantic second he saw the smooth, flat ground ahead of the splash of the plowing nose jets give way to a desolation of rocky ridges, sharp crevasses, loose and dangerous cosmic rubble... soil from which, if they landed without crashing, they could not hope to take off.
The sunlight had fooled them. With the sun behind them the badlands had cast no shadows they could see; the flat plain had appeared to stretch to the mountains ahead. These were no mountains, but they were quite sufficient to wreck the Galileo.
The horrible second it took him to size up the situation was followed by frantic action. With one hand he cut the automatic pilot; with the other he twisted violently on the knob controlling the tail jet. He slapped the belly jets on full.
Her nose lifted.
She hung there, ready to fall, kept steady on her jets only by her gyros. Then slowly, slowly, slowly the mighty tail jet reached out—so slowly that he knew at that moment that the logy response of the atoumatic pilot would never serve him for what he had to do next, which was to land her himself.
The Galileo pulled away from the surface of the moon.
"That was close," Morrie said mildly.
Cargrave swiped the sweat from his eyes and shivered.
He knew what was called for now, in all reason. He knew that he should turn the ship away from the moon, head her in the general direction of the earth and work out a return path, a path to a planet with an atmosphere to help a pilot put down his savage ship. He knew right then that he was not the stuff of heroes, that he was getting old and knew it.
But he hated to tell Morrie.
"Going to put her down on manual?" the boy inquired.
"Huh?"
"That's the only way we'll get her down on a strange field. I can see that now you've got to be able to see your spot at the last half minute—nose jet,and no radar."
"I can't do it, Morrie."
The younger man said nothing. He simply sat and stared ahead without expression.
"I'm going to head her back to earth, Morrie."
The boy gave absolutely no sign of having heard him. There was neither approval nor disapproval on his face, nor any faint suggestion.
Cargraves thought of the scene when Ross, blind and bandaged, had told him oft. Of Art, quelling his space sickness to get his pictures. He thought, too, of the hot and tiring days when he and Morrie had qualified for piloting together.
The boy said nothing, neither did he look at him.
These kids, these damn kids! How had he gotten up here, with a rocket under his hand and a cargo of minors to be responsible for? He was a laboratory scientist, not a superman. If it had been Ross, if Ross were a pilot—even where he now was, he shivered at the recollection of Ross's hair-raising driving. Art was about as bad. Morrie was worse.
He knew he would never be a hot pilot—not by twenty years. These kids, with their casual ignorance, with their hot rod rigs, it was for them; piloting was their kind of a job. They were too young and too ignorant to care and their reflexes were not hobbled by second thoughts. He remembered Ross's words: "I'll go to the moon if I have to walk!"
"Land her, Morrie."
"Aye, aye, sir!"
The boy never looked, at him. He flipped her up on her tail, then let her drop slowly by easing off on the tail jet. Purely by the seat of his pants, by some inner calculation- for Cargraves could see nothing through the port but stars, and neither could the boy -he flipped her over again, cutting the tail jet as he did so.
The ground was close to them and coming up fast.
He kicked her once with the belly jets, placing them thereby over a smooth stretch of land, and started taking her down with quick blasts of the nose jets, while sneaking a look between blasts.
When he had her down so close that Cargraves was sure that he was going to land her on her nose, crushing in the port and killing them, he gave her one more blast which made her rise a trifle, kicked her level and brought her down on the belly jets, almost horizontal, and so close to the ground that Cargraves could see it ahead of them, out the port.
Glancing casually out the port, Morrie gave one last squirt with the belly jets and let her settle. They grated heavily and were stopped. The Galileo sat on the face of the moon.
"Landed, sir. Time: Oh-eight-three-four."
Cargraves drew in a breath. "A beautiful, beautiful landing, Morrie."
"Thanks, Captain."
Chapter 12 - THE BARE BONES
ROSS AND ART WERE ALREADY out of their straps and talking loudly about getting out the space suits when Cargraves climbed shakily out of his chair—and then nearly fell. The lowered gravitation, one-sixth earth-normal, fooled him. He was used to weightlessness by now, and to the chest-binding pressure of high acceleration; the pseudo-normal weight of a one-g drive was no trouble, and maneuvering while strapped down was no worse than stunting in an airplane.
This was different and required a little getting used to, he decided. It reminded him a little of walking on rubber, or the curiously light-footed feeling one got after removing snow shoes or heavy boots.
Morrie remained at his post for a few moments longer to complete and sign his log. He hesitated over the space in the log sheet marked ‘position'. They had taught him in school to enter here the latitude and longitude of the port of arrival—but what were the latitude and longitude of this spot?
The moon had its north and south poles just as definitely as the earth, which gave any spot a definite latitude, nor was longitude uncertain once a zero meridian was selected. That had been done; Tycho was to be the Greenwich of the moon.
But his navigation tables were tables for the earth.
The problem could be solved; he knew that. By spherical trigonometry the solutions of celestial triangles on which all navigation was based could be converted to the special conditions of Luna, but it would require tedious calculation, not at all like the precalculated short cuts used by all pilots in the age of aircraft and rocket. He would have to go back to the Marc St. Hilaire method, obsolete for twenty years, after converting laboriously each piece of data from earth reference terms to moon reference terms.
Well, he could do it later, he decided, and get Cargraves to check him. The face of the moon called him.
He joined the little group huddled around the port. In front of them stretched a dun and lifeless floor, breaking into jagged hills a few miles beyond them. It was hot, glaring hot, under the oblique rays of the sun, and utterly still. The earth was not in sight; they had dropped over the rim into the unknown side in the last minutes of the impromptu landing.
Instead of the brassy sky one might expect over such a scene of blistering desert desolation, a black dome of night, studded brilliantly with stars, hung over it. At least, thought Morrie, his mind returning to his problem in navigation, it would be hard to get lost here. A man could set a course by the stars with no trouble.