Shanghaied to the Moon Read online

  “Tower Control to FSF Seven Eight, you’re go for de-orbital burn.”

  My heart thumps hard. The scar throbs. That’s Mom’s flight signature!

  The Squid comes to life. The miniature readouts framing the window flash through a systems check. Rattled by that echo, the rapidly changing displays mean nothing to me. My guts clench like that time waiting in the wings at the school play—my cue was coming up, but I couldn’t remember a single line!

  The earphones crackle. “Here we go!”

  Hundreds of tiny explosive charges blow the top off the canister. The moisture in the air crystallizes, surrounding me in a glittering fog that immediately whisks out into space.

  The shuttle orbits upside down with the Squid riding like a bomb in a bomb bay. I’m looking straight down at the surface of the Moon and my arms instinctively try to jerk up to brace for a fall. But they’re pinned at my sides over the control boxes. Sharply slanting sunlight makes inky pools of shadow in the craters. Goose bumps erupt all over me.

  A thruster blasts and a sharp punch shakes the Squid. A quick surge of acceleration pushes my small ship out of the canister. The walls slide away. Black infinity slams into place around me.

  Val says, “You’re clear of the ship. DOI in sixty seconds.”

  But that other voice is in my head again, shadowing his words: “DOI looking good … on our way home, folks.”

  “Not home,” I tell the confused voice. “The Moon.”

  “Huh?” Val says. “What’s that, kid?”

  “Nothing.” That wasn’t Val’s voice! Another voice. Another ship. A different announcement of descent orbit initiation. It wasn’t a squiggle though. My view of the Moon; the controls of the Squid; everything stayed perfectly clear.

  A memory …?

  “Fifteen seconds until DOI,” Val says.

  Memory or not, I can’t afford to listen now! I force myself to focus on the readouts. The Squid is seventy miles above the Moon with an orbital velocity of thirty-seven hundred miles per hour.

  “Three … two … one … go.”

  I feel a light push against the soles of my feet. There’s no rattle and bump like on the shuttle. The thrust from the Squid’s tiny descent engine never reaches an uncomfortable level. The push ends in twenty seconds. The landing radar shows a slight bend in the orbital path. The altimeter reading drops … slow and steady.

  “Looking good,” Val says.

  “Sure is.”

  There’s nothing to do until perilune, the lowest point in the new orbit, eight miles up. There isn’t even much to look at. The Squid flies feetfirst with the window aimed at the stars. It’ll pitchover into touchdown position at five thousand feet above the surface. That’s when I might have to fly it, but only if the landing site is too rough for Val to deal with from above.

  “Hey,Val.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m probably the first person to go down to the Moon in a ship this tiny in years.”

  “Decades.”

  “Really?”

  “Hold the chatter.” The line goes silent. The displays flash a systems check. Then another one.

  “What’s wrong?” A biological alarm goes off along my nerves. Sweat moistens my skin. Heat flares all over my body.

  “Little glitch,” Val says. “Just breathe easy, kid, I’m switching to secondary control.”

  “We’re in for a little turbulence folks, nothing to be alarmed about,” the whisper says, calm and professional.

  That’s not Val talking. There can’t be turbulence—there’s no air on the Moon!

  Something’s happening to me. It’s like my brain has turned into a black box just like the broken one in the NavComp. Val’s words make sense going in, then become totally garbled. Except that whispery voice seems familiar somehow …

  “That did the trick,” Val says. “You showing green?”

  I sweep my gaze over the tiny instrument panel rimming the nose window. “All green here.”

  “Okay. Powered descent one minute.”

  Somewhere, things aren’t green. Something is going to happen. Something always does happen in 3-Vids, because disaster and close calls and steady-in-the-face-of-danger is what they’re all about.

  “Mark. PDI is go,” Val says and the rocket fires. The floor nudges my feet as the thrust gauge leaps, sliding quickly to one hundred percent. Forward speed slows. The Moon tugs. The altimeter starts dropping in one-hundred-foot intervals, nearly a mile a minute. Exactly according to the flight plan.

  “Right down U.S. One!” Val says.

  U.S. 1 was a famous highway back when there were automobiles. The astronauts named the approach to Tranquility Base after it. We’re reenacting the very first Moon landing!

  “Approaching pitchover. On my mark …”

  This is the most critical maneuver next to landing. My grip tightens on the joystick. I limber up the fingers on my right hand, ignoring the stabs of pain as the scar flexes. I lightly touch the keys, reviewing each position and its function. I’ve got to be ready to take over if anything goes wrong.

  “Mark.”

  A thruster pops. The horizon of the Moon comes into view. Another pop. The Squid whirls around until I’m looking along my line of motion. For an instant—then the horizon tilts. The thruster hasn’t shut off like it was supposed to! It knocks the Squid off course. Forces it into a downward spiral. Starts it spinning like a top. The view through the window goes crazy, flickering intense white from the surface, then the blackest black of space. Suddenly, the world turns Technicolor and I’m not crash diving at the Moon anymore …

  I’m next to Mom in a seat on Frisco Shuttle Flight 78, crashing. Terror holds my eyes on the dizzying scene out the window as the shuttle rolls over and over again.

  Clouds. Now blue ocean. A slice of horizon. Blue-black sky. Flare of sun. Clouds again.

  Tumble tumble tumble.

  I feel sick, like when I ate too much cake at my birthday. Mom got mad at the mess. So I don’t want to get sick. Some people are. I can smell it.

  I’m about to make Mom mad at me when the tumble stops.

  We’re hanging upside down. The seat harness hurts my shoulders. Some people fall onto the ceiling. They’re crying. A man is screaming.

  “You okay, honey?” Mom asks.

  “You’re squeezing too hard.” Mom lets go of my hand and suddenly she seems far away even though we’re hanging upside down right next to each other.

  “Commander Hale to flight deck. Commander Hale to flight deck.”

  That’s Commander Derrick calling for Mom. He sounds all funny, like he ate hot peppers. He needs some water. Mom and I visited him earlier in the flight. I sat in the pilot’s seat. Then he had to fire the big engines to take us out of orbit. Mom laughed when I wanted to do it.

  Good thing we’re strapped in or we’d be on the ceiling now, too. Only Mom is on the ceiling—reaching up to me. I reach down to her. She’s going away. I want Mom to help save us, but I want her to stay with me, too.

  The flight attendant grabs Mom’s arm. “For God’s sake, hurry! Derrick’s blinded! Grey’s hurt!”

  The pilot. The copilot. Nobody’s flying our shuttle.

  Mom goes up on tiptoes. She’s too short to reach all the way up to hug me. She squeezes the tips of my fingers and says, “I’ve got a job to do, honey. You be brave, like our hero, okay?”

  I nod and try to keep the tears squeezed tight inside. Mom wants me to be brave like Val Thorsten, who laughs in the face of danger.

  She turns away. She runs past the hurt people, then runs on the ceiling to the red door into the cockpit. Smoke comes out when she opens it. She walks right into the smoke and the red door slams shut behind her.

  “Go manual!” Val’s voice. The volume is so high, the words are like a cuff to the head. They bring me back into the Squid. “Go manual!”

  “Val! I was with her!”

  “Not now, kid. Forty seconds and you’ll hit the surface. I’ve lost
the link with your flight transponder. I can’t fly it by remote anymore. You’ve got to take over.”

  Just like Mom … I’ve got a job to do!

  I punch down on the hand controls to snuff the rocket. The astrogator spins and whirls as the Squid tumbles right side up, then upside down. I start hitting opposing thrusters, slow the spiral until it damps out like a coin spinning to a stop on a table.

  The Squid is under control—my control.

  Val says, “You’re dropping too fast.”

  Only seven hundred feet above the Moon. I kick in the rocket and throttle up to eighty percent to slow my fall, then lay on some thrusters to get my forward speed down.

  “Get your forward speed down,” Val says, then sees I’m ahead of him. “Nice maneuver. Confirm target.”

  “Dead ahead, Val.” Out the window is a big glittering square—the fence around Tranquility Base.

  “Five hundred dropping twenty per second … forty forward.” Val calls the readings so I can concentrate on managing pitch, roll, and yaw. Was anyone helping Mom? “Slow … slower …”

  I thumb the throttle to ease the descent rate. I don’t like what the radar tells me, though. The glitch altered my course enough that I might come down inside the fence. Can’t do that! The footsteps. The equipment. The flag. The rocket exhaust will wipe out all that carefully preserved history.

  I shove the throttle higher, trying to hover, buy some time. Got to nudge the Squid away from here.

  “What’re you doing?”

  The low fuel warning light flashes. Sixty seconds until the descent engine tank is empty.

  “Land!” Val yells. “Land!”

  I make the Squid sweep and bank like a helicopter. It comes broadside to the fence. I ram the throttle to full power.

  The Squid cartwheels over the fence. A landing strut jolts into the surface. Dust swirls outside the window. The engine coughs. Another jolt. The Squid starts to tip over. I fight that with everything the tiny maneuvering thrusters can put out. The engine coughs again. The Squid lifts, then comes down hard enough to jam my teeth together.

  I kill the power before the rocket sucks up another drop of fuel. The swirling dust whisks away like a swarm of silvery bees. Without any air to hold it, not a speck lingers to spoil the view.

  “Kid, you okay? Respond!” Val doesn’t sound calm and professional. “Stewart!”

  I’m alive!

  I pulled it out!

  “Tranquility Base to Old Glory.” Calm and professional. “The Squid has landed.”

  Val doesn’t respond for a second. Then he says, “Smart aleck.”

  20

  MISSION TIME

  T plus 41:11:20

  THE view through the tiny window is beautiful and very still. The gently rounded plain of the Sea of Tranquility stretches to the sharply curved horizon. Beyond the crisp white edge of the Moon, space is a jet-black wall—close and huge.

  The stillness outside seeps inside me, replacing the adrenaline rush from the wild landing. Tears come, pool, then spill out and run down my cheeks. In the low gravity, they flow thick and slow like the syrup I poured over my birthday waffles yesterday. But oh, these tears are not sweet as, alone on this dead sea, I remember the images from FSF Flight 78 that came to me in the crash-diving squid.

  They play before my eyes as if projected on the black lunar sky. And what I did not understand—could not even try to understand in the middle of that crisis—now comes clear to me: The NewsVid the Counselor kept forcing me to watch is a complete fake. That’s why I never felt the horror of it. I wasn’t on the ground with Mark and Dad. I was on the shuttle with Mom.

  A sob heaves itself out from deep within my chest.

  “What’s the matter, Stewart?” Val’s voice breaks in like a crack of thunder. “Are you hurt?”

  I fight down another sob. “Things keep coming in bits.”

  A long pause, then Val says harshly: “This is no time for a stroll down memory lane, kid. You’ve gotta move out.”

  “All you care about is your stupid mission!”

  “Not true, but LunaCom must’ve seen you scrawling that ship over half the sky. A hopper’s bound to be on the way.”

  A hopper is a fast, spidery runabout used by park rangers. Alldrives has the contract for maintaining the Humanity Parks. The rangers work for them. I’ve got to get refocused on the mission. Get the VT’s NavComp out of here. I’m sure that’s what Mom would want me to do.

  I swing my feet out the opening, bounce down on my rump, then scoot onto the small step made by the descent stage. It’s three feet to the surface from there. I jump and immediately sense the weird, slow tug of the Moon’s gravity compared to Earth’s. When I land, my boots sink into the thick layer of dust that covers the surface like frosting. Thousands of tiny grains fly up and make perfect, lazy parabolas before coming down again.

  I straighten up and … there’s the Earth! A crescent-shaped slice of stained glass against the nothingness. It seems just a step beyond the horizon.

  I’ve seen this before! With Mom, at the science museum. There’s an entire wall filled with the famous picture, “Earthrise,” that Bill Anders took from Apollo 8, the first manned ship to orbit the Moon. I remember Mom telling me, “When you stand on the Moon, Stewart, you feel like you can jump from the horizon right into an ocean on Earth.”

  The view swims in a kind of liquid ripple. I think it’s more tears, but then my space suit disappears!

  I’m at the space museum, standing with Mom in front of the giant mural of “Earthrise.”

  My hand reaches toward the beautiful Earth. Fingers touch glass, cool and smooth. My other hand rests in Mom’s, warm and comfortable. She finally found the mural she wanted to show me.

  “Someday I’ll take you there, Stewart.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise. When you’re six. No kids on rockets until they’re six. That’s my rule.”

  Silver, like liquid mercury, seems to flow over my bare fingers and I’m back in my suit, back on the Moon, full of new comprehension: The trip was my birthday present! We were coming back from the Moon!

  Mark knew! While we looked at this place in the HOOPscope. When 1 said, “Someday, I’m going there,” he knew I already had!

  Why would they take all of that away from me?

  My heart, so full of the remembered excitement of standing with Mom in the science museum, fills with hurt now. All those years, I could’ve been remembering …

  Did we stand right here, together?

  I look down. The surface outside the fence is packed down with the footsteps of a million tourists.

  “Move it, will ya?” Val snaps. There’s a camera on the Squid. I must look like a piece of a moon rock, frozen on the spot like a zombie. “Radar confirms there’s a hopper on the way. ETA twenty-one minutes.”

  I’ve got to get this job done. Get home. Get answers.

  That risky cartwheel maneuver dropped me about a hundred yards outside the fence. The descent stage of the LEM dominates the area inside. Sunlight glitters off the gold foil skirting. The flag with the fake ripple stands next to it, slightly tilted from straight up. Every fold and crinkle, each color, is incredibly clear. Sharper than things look on a perfect summer day.

  I almost expect it to flutter.

  Calling to mind Val’s treasure map instructions, I take a step toward the southwest corner post. The surface seems to flex, like walking on a trampoline, and I feel as if I might spring into the sky at any moment. It’s hard to balance, too. Then I remember … hop. That’s the best way to get around on the Moon.

  A few bouncy, nearly out-of-control rocking horse hops bring me to the southwest corner post. Stop. Stumble. A little tricky, this Moon walking!

  From there, I head out on a 45-degree diagonal for about thirty feet. By the time I plant my feet to stop, I’ve found my center of balance, made friends with the Moon’s weak grip. Activating the locator strapped to my wrist, I pass it over the surfa
ce to home in on the bore shell. Little lights tell me hotter or colder, then flash a bull’s-eye. A wobbly drop to my knees. I scoop away a few inches of dust. It clings to my gloves like soot.

  At the bottom of the hole, a neon bright orange ribbon lies curled on the hard rock. Leaning far to the side like Val warned me to, I tug it. Dust and shredded packing erupts. The ribbon rips from between my fingers as the end cap rockets out of sight, trailing it.

  In its wake, a different, neon bright blue ribbon floats slowly to the surface as if it is sinking through water. Attached to the other end is the NavComp core … the brains of one of the most amazing spaceships ever built. A criminal brain. Carefully, I draw it out of the bore tube.

  Oh wow!

  It slides into the sunlight, three feet of laser-etched microcircuit perfection. The polished surface glitters with color as if inlaid with a million jewels. I have to hate it for what it did to Val, but that was the corrupted programming, not this beautiful machine.

  I’m reluctant to touch it with my grimy gloves. Gripping it by the ends, I hop back to the Squid. I twist off the big cap from one of the storage tubes and slip the core in. Seal it up. The elapsed timer on the glove says that only took eight minutes. I don’t know why he had to hustle me. Lots of time to spare.

  Unless he’s worried about the oxygen supply. We gained a few more hours than he predicted at mid-course, but there’s not enough to get home—not enough, really, to go anywhere.

  What’s his plan? He has one, I’m sure. Kept secret, as usual. Only way to find out is to finish this.

  “NavComp secure, Val. How’s that for speedy?”

  “One more task, kid.”

  Uh-oh. A surprise.

  “What is it?”

  “The moneyman behind this mission wants a souvenir.”

  Of course! Two tubes. Can’t be a spare. Nothing on this mission has a spare. “You want me to grab a rock?”

  “No, kid. He’s already got rocks. He wants the flag.”

  “The flag!” I nearly fall down, spinning around to look at it. That flag? It’s the only real one from the Apollo missions to survive all these years. Taking it would be like stealing Plymouth Rock. I can’t believe he just asked me to do that.