‘Where exactly are they now?’ she asked, when Lenina had gone into Prevezer’s bedroom.
‘Where else but at the beginning?’ he said. ‘In the RLV, approaching the Descartes Crater.’
3
I
Simworld: Elapsed Time
00:00 Hours
‘Three, two, one, switch...’
Dallas opened his eyes to find himself seated on the flight deck of the Mariner RLV. In front of him were Gates, in the commander’s seat, and Lenina’s surrogate, in the pilot’s. Leaning slowly forward in the authentic microgravity conditions of a Moon space flight, he touched Gates on the shoulder. The big man started as he saw that they’d made the switch to the simulated world, but instinctively checked the controls first before turning to face Dallas.
‘Welcome to the unreal world,’ smiled Dallas, although to his touch, it felt real enough. Gates’s shoulder, the pressure suit he was now wearing, the back of his own flight-deck chair, the payload bay window behind his helmet, the whoosh of the RLV’s air-conditioning on his face, and the familiar stench of inefficient waste management in his wrinkling nostrils — all of these were reassuringly substantial.
‘Thanks,’ said Gates, adjusting the microphone in front of his mouth and then his seat belt. ‘Feels like we were never in TB at all. Like we dreamed the whole thing, y’know?’
‘Except that I had the same dream,’ offered Dallas. ‘What’s our position?’
It was Lenina who answered him, her voice sounding perhaps a little inhuman.
‘We’re on automatic pilot,’ she said. ‘Approaching the Descartes Crater along a south-by-southwest course. Our current position is ten degrees latitude by twenty degrees longitude. Altitude one thousand feet. Horizontal velocity, one hundred and twenty miles per hour. Sixty-five miles to target. We’ll be there in half an hour.’
Gates pulled off his glove and touched Lenina’s cheek experimentally with the back of his hand.
‘Hey,’ she said. ‘What’s the deal?’
‘How are you feeling?’ he asked, amused at how her skin felt as smooth and cool as it had when he’d first met her. She was not wearing makeup and there was no trace of the Three Moon phase of P2 that threatened to kill the real Lenina back at the hotel.
Lenina glanced at him, puzzled. ‘I feel fine,’ she said. ‘Why do you ask? Is this some kind of joke?’
‘No reason, no joke. Go to manual.’
‘Going to manual,’ said Lenina and, taking hold of the flight stick, she switched off the autopilot.
‘Prepare for Abort to Landing,’ he ordered.
‘Preparing for ATL,’ confirmed Lenina.
‘Simou? You there?’
‘Of course, I’m here,’ said a voice in Gates’s headset. ‘Where the hell did you think I’d be? I mean, the Galileo’s nice, but I signed up for the whole trip, remember?’
Gates turned to grin at Dallas. ‘This takes a little getting used to,’ he admitted. ‘So far this is a pretty realistic simulation.’
‘Let’s hope so,’ said Dallas.
‘You ready with that circuit board?’ Gates asked Simou.
‘It’s loaded and ready to roll.’
‘Listen up, everyone,’ said Gates. ‘On requesting an ATL from the Descartes computer we’ll have to provide cockpit conversations and instrument readings, so from now on, all communications are for real.’ He shook his head. ‘Whatever that means.’
‘What’s the matter with you?’ Lenina frowned. ‘Have you been drinking, or something?’
‘Nothing’s the matter with me. Just fly the plane.’
The First National’s landing facility was a high-security area and strictly forbidden to all lunar flight traffic. Permission to land was given by the Descartes computer only after it had received an authorized descent-to-landing code, at which stage the high-explosive mines that lay underneath the surface of the landing area would be electronically disabled. Any approach by a spaceship that was unauthorized drew the risk of a missile attack. Only in cases of real emergency did the computer have the discretion to allow a ship to put down without the necessary landing codes. However, this required the stricken craft to send the Descartes computer all its in-flight data, as well as cockpit voice recordings. In a matter of seconds, the computer could assess whether the emergency was genuine: first, by analyzing the flight data, and second, by subjecting voice recordings to a polygraphic lie-detector. If it became evident to the computer that a deception was being perpetrated, an emergency landing would be denied and the vehicle fired upon.
To an experienced pilot like Gates, Dallas’s solution to this problem was frighteningly straightforward: Simou was to engineer a real in-flight emergency that would trigger itself close to the Descartes Crater. Nothing else but a genuine emergency would do, Dallas had argued, something sufficiently serious that would necessitate an immediate ATL, but that could still be repaired by Simou in the time it took to execute the remainder of the plan. The danger was that a real emergency might force them down short of the landing site: For a spaceship the size of the Mariner and in a highland area lacking suitable alternative landing sites, that would be a disaster. A great deal was going to depend on Gates’s skill as a pilot, and very possibly, as a liar. Either way, there was a considerable amount of risk involved, something the real Simou had already stated.
‘If you balance a pencil on its point, it will always fall down. It always obeys the law of gravity — at least, it does when you’re on Earth. The trouble is that you can never predict which way the pencil will fall. The law of gravity’s a very precise law, but with a very imprecise outcome. In other words, without knowing the exact condition of the Mariner, not to mention the precise flight conditions and a whole load of other variables that frankly can’t be calculated, it’s impossible to predict how this RLV — like the pencil — will behave in the circumstances. What we have here is a system that contains an extreme sensitivity to its starting conditions, so that the smallest variation in those conditions might lead to some very different outcomes. We might explode. We might implode. We might crash-land. We might make it to the landing area and be unable to carry out repairs. I don’t know what the rest of your plan entails, Dallas, but if it’s anything like this part, then we have our work cut out for us.’
‘No one ever said this was going to be easy,’ Dallas had answered. ‘I always thought that this would be the most hazardous stage of the plan, not least because it puts everyone at risk, instead of just me and Gates when we break into the main facility. But calculated risk is part of the strategy. That’s why we’re trying things out in the simulation first. To assess the risks and, where possible, to minimize them.’
For several minutes the simulated flight proceeded in silence as everyone waited for the emergency: a tiny explosive charge, designed to imitate the impact of a grain-sized meteorite traveling at ten miles per second, placed by Simou on the RLV’s nose, just below the cockpit window, between the aluminum skin of the fuselage and the ceramic-hafnium heat shield. The chances of such a thing happening for real were almost insignificant, but the consequences extremely serious.