“I’d like to sign off for an hour or so, darling,” he said. There was no need for explanations; they understood each other too well. “I’ll call you back in—in plenty of time. Goodbye for now.”
He waited the two seconds for the answering goodbye from Earth; then he cut the circuit and stared blankly at the tiny control desk. Quite unexpectedly, without desire or volition, tears sprang into his eyes, and suddenly he was weeping like a child.
He wept for his loved ones and for himself. He wept for the future that might have been and the hopes that would soon be incandescent vapor, drifting between the stars. And he wept because there was nothing else to do.
After a while he felt much better. Indeed, he realized that he was extremely hungry; there was no point in dying on an empty stomach, and he began to rummage among the space rations in the closet-sized galley. While he was squeezing a tube of chicken-and-ham paste into his mouth, Launch Control called.
There was a new voice at the end of the line—a slow, steady and immensely competent voice that sounded as if it would brook no nonsense from inanimate machinery.
“This is Van Kessel, Chief of Maintenance, Space Vehicles Division. Listen carefully, Leyland—we think we’ve found a way out. It’s a long shot—but it’s the only chance you have.”
Alternations of hope and despair are hard on the nervous system. Cliff felt a sudden dizziness; he might have fallen, had there been any direction in which to fall.
“Go ahead,” he said faintly, when he had recovered. Then he listened to Van Kessel with an eagerness that slowly changed to incredulity.
“I don’t believe it!” he said at last. “It just doesn’t make sense!”
“You can’t argue with the computers,” answered Van Kessel. “They’ve checked the figures about twenty different ways. And it makes sense all right; you won’t be moving so fast at apogee, and it doesn’t need much of a kick then to change your orbit. I suppose you’ve never been in a deep-space rig before?”
“No, of course not.”
“Pity—but never mind. If you follow instructions you can’t go wrong. You’ll find the suit in the locker at the end of the cabin. Break the seals and haul it out.”
Cliff floated the full six feet from the control desk to the rear of the cabin, and pulled on the lever marked: emergency only-type 17 deep-space suit. The door opened and the shining silver fabric hung flaccid before him.
“Strip down to your underclothes and wriggle into it,” said Van Kessel. “Don’t bother about the biopack—you clamp that on later.”
“I’m in,” said Cliff presently. “What do I do now?”
“You wait twenty minutes—and then we’ll give you the signal to open the air lock and jump.”
The implications of that word “jump” suddenly penetrated. Cliff looked around the now familiar, comforting little cabin, and then thought of the lonely emptiness between the stars—the unreverberant abyss through which a man could fall until the end of time.
He had never been in free space; there was no reason why he should. He was just a farmer’s boy with a master’s degree in agronomy, seconded from the Sahara Reclamation Project and trying to grow crops on the Moon. Space was not for him; he belonged to the worlds of soil and rock, of Moon dust and vacuum-formed pumice.
“I can’t do it,” he whispered. “Isn’t there any other way?”
“There’s not,” snapped Van Kessel. “We’re doing our damnedest to save you, and this is no time to get neurotic. Dozens of men have been in far worse situations—badly injured, trapped in wreckage a million miles from help. But you’re not even scratched, and already you’re squealing! Pull yourself together—or we’ll sign off and leave you to stew in your own juice.”
Cliff turned slowly red, and it was several seconds before he answered.
“I’m all right,” he said at last. “Let’s go through those instructions again.”
“That’s better,” said Van Kessel approvingly. “Twenty minutes from now, when you’re at apogee, you’ll go into the air lock. From that point, we’ll lose communication: Your suit radio has only a ten-mile range. But we’ll be tracking you on radar and we’ll be able to speak to you when you pass over us again. Now, about the controls on your suit...”
The twenty minutes went quickly enough; at the end of that time, Cliff knew exactly what he had to do. He had even come to believe that it might work.
“Time to bail out,” said Van Kessel. “The capsule’s correctly orientated—the air lock points the way you want to go. But direction isn’t critical—speed is what matters. Put everything you’ve got into that jump—and good luck!”
“Thanks,” said Cliff inadequately. “Sorry that I—”
“Forget it,” interrupted Van Kessel. “Now get moving!”
For the last time, Cliff looked round the tiny cabin, wondering if there was anything that he had forgotten. All his personal belongings would have to be abandoned, but they could be replaced easily enough. Then he remembered the little jar of Moon dust he had promised Brian; this time, he would not let the boy down. The minute mass of the sample—only a few ounces—would make no difference to his fate; he tied a piece of string round the neck of the jar and attached it to the harness of his suit.
The air lock was so small that there was literally no room to move; he stood sandwiched between inner and outer doors until the automatic pumping sequence was finished. Then the wall slowly opened away from him and he was facing the stars.
With his clumsy, gloved fingers, he hauled himself out of the air lock and stood upright on the steeply curving hull, bracing himself tightly against it with the safety line. The splendor of the scene held him almost paralyzed; he forgot all his fears of vertigo and insecurity as he gazed around him, no longer constrained by the narrow field of vision of the periscope.
The Moon was a gigantic crescent, the dividing line between night and day a jagged arc sweeping across a quarter of the sky. Down there the sun was setting, at the beginning of the long lunar night, but the summits of isolated peaks were still blazing with the last light of day, defying the darkness that had already encircled them.
That darkness was not complete. Though the Sun was gone from the land below, the almost full Earth flooded it with glory. Cliff could see, faint but clear in the glimmering Earthlight, the outlines of seas and highlands, the dim stars of mountain peaks, the dark circles of craters. He was flying above a ghostly, sleeping land—a land which was trying to drag him to his death. For now he was poised at the highest point of his orbit, exactly on the line between Moon and Earth. It was time to go.
He bent his legs, crouching against the hull. Then, with all his force, he launched himself toward the stars, letting the safety line run out behind him.
The capsule receded with surprising speed, and as it did so, he felt a most unexpected sensation. He had anticipated terror or vertigo—but not this unmistakable, haunting sense of familiarity. All this had happened before; not to him, of course, but to someone else. He could not pinpoint the memory, and there was no time to hunt for it now.
He flashed a quick glance at Earth, Moon and receding spacecraft, and made his decision without conscious thought The line whipped away as he snapped the quick release; now he was alone, two thousand miles above the Moon, a quarter of a million miles from Earth. He could do nothing but wait; it would be two and a half hours before he would know if he could live—and if his own muscles had performed the task that the rockets had failed to do.