Suffocation, for example, started off as less than a one percent possibility. But within a month the chances began to rise fairly steeply. «The air scrubbers need replacement filters,» Sam explained, «and we’ll be out of them inside of two more weeks.»
«They’ll have us out of here in two weeks, for Christ’s sake,» Julio said.
«Or drop fresh supplies for us,» said Ron Avery, the taciturn pilot whom we called Cowboy because of his lean, lanky build and his slow Western drawl.
«Those are the odds,» Sam snapped. «The computer does not lie. Pick your poison and place your bets.»
I put fifty bucks down on Air Contamination, not telling the other guys about my earlier conversation with Sam. Julio took Starvation. Mickey settled on Dehydration (Lack of Water), and Ron picked Murder—which made me shudder.
«What about you, Sam?» I asked.
«I’ll wait. Let the other guys have a chance,» he said.
«You gonna let the skipper in on this?» Julio asked.
Sam shook his head. «If I tell him …»
«I’ll tell him,» Ron volunteered, with a grim smile. «I’ll even let him have Murder, if he wants it. I can always switch to Suicide.»
«Droll fellow,» said Sam.
Well, you probably read about the mission in your history tapes. Houston was supporting three separate operations on the Moon at the same time, and they were stretched to the limit down there. Old Stone Face promised us a rescue flight in a week. But they had a problem with the booster when they tried to rush things on the pad too much, and the blessed launch had to be pushed back a week, and then another week. They sent an unmanned supply craft to us, but the descent stage got gummed up, so our fresh food, air filters, water supply and other stuff just orbited over us about fifty miles up.
Sam calculated the odds of all these foul-ups and came to the conclusion that Houston was working overtime to kill us.
«Must be some sort of an experiment,» he told me. «Maybe they need some martyrs to make people more aware of the space program.»
We learned afterward that Houston was in deep trouble because of us. The White House was firing people left and right, Congressional committees were gearing up to investigate the fiasco, and the CIA was checking out somebody’s crackbrained idea that the Russians were behind all our troubles.
Meanwhile, we were stranded on Mare Nubium with nothing much to do but let our beards grow and hope for sinus troubles that would cut off our ability to sense odors.
Old Stone Face was magnificent, in his unflinching way. He was on the line to us every day, despite the fact that his superiors in Houston and Washington were either being fired directly by the President himself or roasted over the simmering coals of media criticism. There must have been a zillion reporters at Mission Control by the second week of our marooning; we could feel the hubbub and tension whenever we talked with Stony.
«The countdown for your rescue flight is proceeding on an accelerated schedule,» he told us. It would never occur to him to say, «We’re hurrying as fast as we can.»
«Liftoff is now scheduled for 0700 hours on the twenty-fifth.»
None of us needed to look at a calendar to know that the twenty-fifth was seventeen days away. Sam’s betting pool was looking more serious every hour. Even the skipper had finally taken a plunge: Suffocation.
If it weren’t for Sandi Hemmings we might have all gone crazy. She took over as capcom during the night shift, when most of the reporters and the agency brass were asleep. She gave us courage and the desire to pull through, partly just by smiling at us and looking female enough to make us want to survive, but mainly by giving us the straight info with no nonsense.
«They’re in deep trouble over at Canaveral,» she would tell us. «They’ve had to go to triple shifts and call up boosters that they didn’t think they would need until next year. Some senator in Washington is yelling that we ought to ask the Russians or the Japanese to help out.»
«As if either of them had upper stages that could make it to the Moon and back,» one of our guys muttered.
«Well,» Sandi said, with her brightest smile, «you’ll all be heroes when you finally get back here. The girls will be standing in line to admire you.»
«You won’t have to stand in line, Sandi,» Ron Avery answered, in a rare burst of words. «You’ll always be first with us.»
The others crowded into the command module added their heartfelt agreement.
Sandi laughed, undaunted by the prospect of the eight of us grabbing at her. «I hope you shave first,» she said.
A night or two later she spent hours reading to us the suggestions made by the Houston medical team on how to stretch out our dwindling supplies of food, water and air. They boiled down to one basic rule: lie down and don’t exert yourselves. Great advice, especially when you’re beginning to really worry that you’re not going to make it through this mess. Just what we needed to do, lie back in our bunks and do nothing but think.
I caught a gleam in Sam’s eye, though, as Sandi waded through the medics’ report. The skipper asked her to send the report through our computer printer. She did, and he spent the next day reading and digesting it. Sam spent that day—well, I couldn’t figure out where he’d gotten to. I just didn’t see him all day long, and Base Gamma really wasn’t big enough to hide in, even for somebody as small as Sam.
After going through the medics’ recommendations, the skipper ordered us to take tranquilizers. We had a scanty supply of downers in the base pharmaceutical stores, and Skip divided them equally among us. At the rate of three a day, they would last four days, with four pills left over. About as useful as a cigarette lighter in hell, but the skipper played it by the book and ordered us to start gobbling tranquilizers.
«They will ease our anxieties and help us to remain as quiet as possible while we wait for the rescue mission,» he told us.
He didn’t bother to add that the rescue mission, according to Sandi’s unofficial word, was still twelve days off. We would be out of food in three more days, and the recycled water was starting to taste as if it hadn’t been recycled, if you know what I mean. The air was getting foul, too, but that was probably just our imaginations.
Sam appeared blithely unconcerned, even happy. He whistled cheerfully as Skip rationed out the tranquilizers, then scuttled off down the tunnel that led toward our barracks module. By the time I got to my bunk, Sam was nowhere in sight. His whistling was gone. So was his pressure suit.
He had gone out on the surface? For what? To increase his radiation dose? To get away from the rest of us? That was probably it. Underneath his wiseguy shell, Sam was probably as worried and tense as any of us, and he just didn’t want us to know it. He needed some solitude, and what better place to get it than the airless rocky expanse of Mare Nubium?
That’s what I thought, so I didn’t go out after him.
The same thing happened the next «morning» (by which I mean the time immediately after our sleep shift), and the next. The skipper would gather us together in the command module, we would each take our ceremonial tranquilizer pill and a sip of increasingly bad water, and then we would crawl back to our bunks and try to do nothing that would use up body energy or air. I found myself resenting it whenever I had to go to the toilet: I kept imagining my urine flowing straight into our water tank without reprocessing. I guess I was beginning to go crazy.
But Sam was as happy as could be: chipper, joking, laughing it up. He would disappear each morning for several hours, and then show up again with a lopsided grin on his face, telling jokes and making us all feel a little better.