It was much more difficult than she’d expected. The capcom was the only person allowed to speak to the crew. She was the funnel for inputs from all around the MOCR, and beyond; she had to be alert, to think constantly, to filter and integrate all the information she received. Nobody was writing her a script; she had to figure it for herself, in real time.
So far, she reckoned, she was doing fine. But nobody was noticing her, one way or the other. They wouldn’t until she screwed up.
I just hope you make the right choices today, Mike. For Christ’s sake, it’s Ben up there…
Jones and Priest drifted down to sleeping compartments in the equipment bay. Each of them was actually just a six-foot-long shelf with a foot of clearance, big enough to take a body-sized mesh hammock.
Dana strapped himself into the left couch, in front of the control panel. He knew that being in the couch he’d drawn the most comfortable sleeping berth. But as Command Module Pilot, Dana had to keep his headset on during the night, in case the crew had to be woken by Houston. And even if Houston restricted their chatter, there was always a dull roar of static, which wasn’t going to help him sleep.
None of that mattered.
My first night in space. All around him the cabin of the Command Module hummed and glowed, gray and green and warm, a small boy’s dream of the perfect den. A loose page from a checklist came drifting over his head, on some random air current; when he blew toward it, the page crumpled a little and drifted away.
He turned to the window. Apollo-N was flying over a mountain range. He could see the wrinkles in the land, as if the world were some huge, sculptured toy beneath him; thick clouds lapped against one side of the range, like a turbulent fluid.
He felt detached from the frustrations and complexities of his life below: the routine, the time-eating training, the press stuff he hated so much, the endless waiting he’d had to endure for this, his first flight. All of the problems seemed flattened, two-dimensional, like the surface of the Earth, and he felt a warm love reach out from him to envelop Mary and the kids, his parents, the whole of the glowing planet of his birth.
Christ, it’s true. I was born to be up here. None of the rest of it — the engineering, the science, even the prospect of going to Mars — none of it counts, compared to this moment.
I never want to go back down.
They’d checked out everything they could, and all the telemetry looked good, and the inertial table was lined up, and the subsystems checked out, and all the backroom guys and the engineers and the contractors with their test rigs were saying, yes, we know what went wrong; and no, we’re confident this mission is going to throw you no more curve balls.
I’ll tell you how we can achieve zero risk, Donnelly thought. We won’t fly.
Donnelly stood up and turned to face Bert Seger, who stood behind him in Management Row.
“Bert, I’m going to recommend we proceed with the mission. All the parameters have fallen into line.”
Seger, hollow-eyed with jet lag, just nodded.
It was 4 A.M. The decision was obvious.
Donnelly sat down. He’d been resting his hands on sheets of his flight plans; when he lifted his hands he found he’d left behind two perfect, wet images of his palms.
Monday, December 1, 1980
Adam Bleeker was the first of the Moonlab crew to eyeball the approaching Soyuz. “Hey, Phil, Joe. Come see.”
Stone drifted down to the wardroom’s big picture window.
Soyuz T-3 was silhouetted sideways-on against the pale brown Moon, which slid liquidly past.
Soyuz was shaped, Stone supposed, something like a green pepper shaker, a cylinder topped by a squat dome. The cylindrical body was the Instrument-Assembly Module, containing electrical, environmental, propulsion systems. Two matte black solar panels jutted from the flanks of the instrument module, like unfolded wings. A parabolic antenna was held away from the ship, on a light gantry. Stone was able to make out the flat base of the craft; there was a toroidal propellant tank fixed there, surrounding small engine bells. The dome at the top of the pepper shaker was the Descent Module: living quarters for the cosmonauts, and the cabin that would carry them through reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. For Earth-orbit missions the Descent Module would have been capped, Stone knew, by a large, egg-shaped Orbital Module, a work and living area.
The body of the ship was a light blue-green, an oddly Earthlike color set against the bleak uniformity of the Moon.
Soyuz looked, frankly, like a piece of shit to Stone. The solar cells were big black squares, crudely tiled onto the panels, and thick wires ran along the edges of the panels; Stone could see fist-sized big blobs of solder where some greasy technician had finished his job crudely.
The engineering was agricultural. The approaching Soyuz was like something out of a parallel universe, he thought.
The crew pulled away from the window; there was still work to do before the Soviets arrived.
Stone went up through the hole in the open mesh floor and climbed the fireman’s pole to the Multiple Docking Adapter at the far end of the hydrogen tank, the main experiment chamber. The adapter had three clusters hanging from its ports. There was the Apollo, which had brought the crew up from Earth, known as Grissom to thousands of schoolkids. Grissom had actually been adapted to carry five men home if need be, with two additional couches stowed in the Command Module’s lower equipment bay. Then there was the Telescope Mount, a small lab module with four wide solar arrays and a battery of science experiments and sensors. The mount had been adapted by Grumman engineers from a leftover LM ascent stage; in a different reality, that LM would have carried the astronauts of Apollo 16 up from the lunar surface.
The third component fixed to the adapter was a short, squat cylinder called the Soyuz Docking Module, an interface between the incompatible atmospheres and docking kits of Soyuz and Apollo. Viktorenko and Solovyov were going to have to dock with this module, and use it as a kind of airlock to get into Moonlab.
Stone began putting the docking module through a final checkout. As such assignments went, it wasn’t too frustrating. At least the module was a new piece of kit. People had lived and worked in the rest of Moonlab for the past five years, and it showed.
When he’d finished, Stone drifted back down to the wardroom. His next job was to run a visual sextant check of the Soviets’ position.
As he made his observations, Soyuz maneuvered away from the backdrop of the Moon and floated against the stars.
“Moonlab, this is Komarov. Moonlab—”
Muldoon replied for Moonlab. “We hear you, Komarov. The VHF link is working fine.” Viktorenko, on Soyuz, had used English; Muldoon replied in halting Russian.
Muldoon went through a four-way conversation between Moonlab, Soyuz, and the two ground control stations at Houston and Kaliningrad, testing out links and confirming system status.
Soyuz wheeled around so that it faced Moonlab. “Moonlab, Komarov. We are ready for the final docking maneuver. I will turn on my beacon.”
A light began to flash on the spine of Soyuz, easily visible through the picture window.
“I see you, Komarov.”
“And I you, Joe. Your elegant Moonlab is difficult to miss. We have our space suits on, all ready for docking. And our bow ties on top, for we are ready for a fine dinner with you.”
Houston and Kaliningrad both called up “go” for the docking. Soyuz spun slowly on its long axis, rolling through sixty degrees to align correctly with the docking module. The solar arrays made Soyuz look almost birdlike, swooping around the Moon like some unlikely metal swallow.