DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

WHEN it was decided, back in 1961, to launch the predicted Apollos from Canaveral, the engineers and scientists of America faced a tantalizing problem. The vehicle would be so massive, 363 feet high, which was longer than a football field, that if it were assembled in one place, say Denver, it would be so big and weigh so much-3,150 tons-that it could not possibly be transported across the country. It would have to be built at six separate locations and brought to Canaveral for final assembly.

The original plan had called for this assembly to take place in the open, at the launch site itself, but even a cursory analysis of this proposal uncovered its dangers. Dr. Mott had served on the review board and had helped draft the condemnatory report:

One must remember that the Apollo will reach the Cape in six huge parts, with thousands of air- and water-tight connections still to be effected. Even one rainstorm would be disastrous, and in the five months required for assembly the local weather bureau estimates that we will encounter not less than sixteen rainfalls of varying strength. More important, the winds here are incessant, forty- and fifty-mile gales [594] being common and 130-mile hurricanes not uncommon. The smaller parts would simply fly away. Undercover assembly is obligatory.

We confess that the problem of moving the completed Apollo, weighing some 6,300,000 pounds, will present a problem which should be attacked immediately.

The first problem was solved majestically. Beside a canal into which barges could come bringing the components, a stupendous white cube was built, rising from the Canaveral swamps like some modern-version pyramid, preposterously big. Silent, isolated in the landscape, an abiding symbol of the space age, it became the mammoth barn-like building in which the Apollo complex would be assembled, and square though it was, it rose in the air almost as high as the needle-like spire of the Washington Monument. The face of the cube to the east contained doors half again as high as a football field is long; the covered interior provided a work space of 130,000,000 cubic feet. In many respects it was the largest building in the world, and it had been completed at breakneck speed.

In it, six extremely complicated machines would meet for the first time; none would ever have been in proximity to any other, and not until they were intricately fitted together, with each bolt and wire in one component interfacing with its mate in another, could the spacecraft be said to be in existence. One workman had calculated that some 22,000 joinings had to be completed, tested and approved before Apollo 18 became a whole.

The constructors of this giant machine, working in six widely separated sections of the nation, required 30,000 different complex documents to ensure congruent fittings from one manufacturer to the next. The massive Stage I was put together in Louisiana by Boeing; the powerful Stage II was built in California by North American; Stage III, containing the crucial single engine which would send the spacecraft toward the Moon, once it got aloft, was built in a different part of California by Douglas. And the instrument unit, built by IBM in Alabama, was so huge and complicated that one traditional engineer said, “That had to be built by some kid with an Erector set.”

[595] Those four basic parts comprised only the rocket, but the process was the same for the two craft in which the astronauts would actually fly. Their command and service module was built in Downey, California, by an independent branch of North American and was broken down into two intricately related parts: the command module in which the men lived, and the service module which kept most of the gear out of the way. The astronauts considered this a single unit, the CSM, and spent days in its simulator, for upon it they must depend. The lunar module in which two of the men would drop down to the Moon and fly back to the orbiting CSM was built on Long Island by Grumman.

It was a preposterous way to construct one of the most intricate machines ever devised by man, for no one could predict whether the system would work until the six pieces-seven, really-were assembled in the waiting cube on the Florida swamplands. As Randy Claggett said irreverently, while orbiting his first Apollo when his companions were walking on the Moon, “Here I am tooling along in a machine with four million different parts, each one supplied by the lowest bidder.”

And how did NASA bring these widely separated items together at the Cape? The instrument unit was placed on a barge on the Tennessee River, sent north to the Ohio River, then floated down the Mississippi, and around the southern tip of Florida to Canaveral. Stage I followed the same route, starting at New Orleans. California forwarded its segments two ways: by ship through the Panama Canal and by a huge Boeing Stratocruiser converted into what NASA people called our “Pregnant Guppy”; its belly could accommodate a completed Stage III.

In fact, NASA was in the transportation business with a fleet of five full-time vessels, one Pregnant Guppy and innumerable T-38s.

Claggett’s Apollo 18 was scheduled to lift off on 23 April 1973, and as soon as the time was announced, Randy endeared himself to the press by saying, offhand, “What a lucky date for us. Shakespeare’s birthday. If he was alive today, he’d write a play about it. ‘The still-vext Bermoothes.’ ”

“That’s from The Tempest, isn’t it?”

“It is.”

“How do you happen to know that?”

[597] “They learn us things at Texas A and M,” and on the spur of the moment he told the reporters of an elderly man who taught Freshman Lit: “He said, ‘It don’t matter whether you remember anythin’ else, but please, each year, remember that April 23 is the birthday of one of the noblest minds that ever existed, and pay him homage.’ Some smart ass-”

“Scrub that!” Tucker Thompson cried.

“Some wise guy said, “But I thought everyone knew Sir Francis Bacon wrote the plays,” and the old gentleman never batted an eyelash, just said, “Then for the love of God celebrate Bacon’s birthday, but at least once in your narrow, cornfed lives, pay respect to someone bigger than you are.” And he took us all to a saloon and treated us to ale, which he said was what Shakespeare drank.”

The six components had to reach the assembly building four months prior to launch, and it was an exciting Christmastime when the barges came up the canal and the gigantic airplanes dropped down with their precious cargoes. Engineering teams from each contractor’s home office arrived for extended duty at Canaveral, responsible for seeing that their part of the system functioned, and for three months the meticulous work proceeded as the disparate units were introduced one to the other and fitted together.

In February, Senator Grant and his committee factotum, Penny Pope, visited the assembly building to compile figures for presentation to the Senate budget officials, and for the last time in the Apollo program they watched the intricate labor being done in the assembly building. Grant was not unhappy to see the vast program grinding to a halt. It had been necessary in its day, to remind the Russians and the rest of the world that America was still competent, but the last few missions had been merely flourishes, and he knew it. However, this farewell flight, to the other side of the Moon, was going to be a dandy: “We’re going out with an appropriate bang.” He then handed the press a statement containing statistics collected by Mrs. Pope:

In mounting this tremendous effort to overtake the Russians, our nation has not stinted, and when we observe this vast assembly of buildings, what we see [598] is the imaginative effort a tree nation can make when it feels itself under the gun. Cost of the land, 140,000 acres at $72,000,000. Cost of the shell of this magnificent building in which we meet, $89,000,000. Cost of the equipment inside, $63,000,000.

Look at that supertractor on which Apollo will be carried to its launch site, $11,000,000, and we must have an extra for backup. Total cost of ground installations alone, $800,000,000. Number of persons working here, 26,500. Number of high-powered experts needed to supervise the forthcoming launch, 500 here, another 1,500 in Houston.

The statement then dealt with support systems elsewhere in America and around the world, relying on such estimates as local officials could provide:

Number of radio ships dispersed around the world, four. Number of communications aircraft in flight during an Apollo mission, five. Number of ground stations in various foreign countries, thirteen. Number of eligible target ships positioned in various oceans, seven. Total number of men and women involved one way or another in this mission, 450,000. Total number of men who will finally stand on the Moon, two.

However, despite the staggering cost, this senator is more than pleased with the results of our national effort. He is especially gratified by the caliber of astronauts who will fly this final mission. He has known Captain John Pope, USN, all the latter’s life and considers him one of the finest young men our nation has produced. His commander, Colonel Claggett of the Marines, has already flown three times in space, with outstanding results. But he is particularly honored that the third crew member is the nephew of a man he had the honor of serving with at the Battle of Leyte Gulf, Dr. Gawain Butler, Superintendent of Schools in Mesa County, California. As our first black astronaut, Dr. Paul Linley occupies a proud niche in our program.

[599] His final paragraph summarized this thinking, and although Mrs. Pope urged him to soften it, he refused, reminding her: “You’re loyal to your husband, as you should be, but I must be loyal to the nation as a whole.”

It is appropriate now for the United States to wind down this extremely costly adventure, which was amply justified in 1957 when Sputnik invaded our skies but which has trailed off into mere exhibitionism. We’ve reached the Moon. With this daring voyage we shall explore its dark side. Now we must direct our attention to equally pressing problems here on Earth.

In mid-February the experts in the vast assembly building reported: “All okay”-and this became the signal to initiate an operation of ponderous elegance, one which always caused gasps of approval from the hordes of visitors allowed to watch from a safe distance. The gigantic doors of the building drew aside, 456 feet tall, to reveal, standing erect inside in the darkness, a gleaming white masterpiece, heavy at the bottom but tapering to a delicate point 363 feet in the air. The simplicity of the streamlined exterior, each surface honed smooth, belied the extreme complexity within, and often at this moment of revelation watchers applauded.

Through the vast doors they could see that the Apollo ,had been assembled attached to a massive gantry, both structures resting on a heavy metal base supported by pillars which kept them well above the floor, and now the tremendous supertractor-each of its four sets of what should have been normal cleats being individual tractors of gigantic size-moved from its waiting place outside the building, up a gentle gradient, and right into the heart of the building. There it eased its way under the waiting spacecraft, activated its hydraulic lifts, and tenderly assumed control of the entire mighty structure, Apollo and gantry alike.

At that moment even the workmen cheered, but now a most difficult problem arose. Tractor-plus-Apollo-plus-gantry weighed 18,480,000 pounds-9,240 tons-and how could such a burden be moved three and a half miles across Florida swampland?

[600] “What we did was call in the best roadbuilders in the world, and they said, ‘Simple. You build a road wider than an eight-lane superhighway. You go down nine feet, line the bottom of your trench with big rocks, then seven feet of aggregate, then eight inches of pebbles. Cost? We can do it for about $20,000,000.’ ”

Gingerly, the massive tractor and its precious cargo edged its way out of the assembly building, down the incline and onto the waiting roadbed, where its four corner tractors, each carrying more than 2,000 tons, ground into the surface and inched its way along.

It required a crew of fifteen to operate it at a speed of not quite a mile an hour, but when it came out into the February sunlight, moving purposefully like some majestic dinosaur, watchers cheered as the great thing went past: “It moves fast enough to do the job.”

Slow, vast, creaking, grinding its massive cleats into the especially hard pebbles imported from Alabama, it carried on its back the soaring white Apollo nestled into the even taller launching gantry that would keep everything in order until the moment of launching: “There she goes! Destination Moon!”

As gently as if it were carrying the child Moses along a canal of rushes, the supertractor moved out toward Complex 39, where the launch would be made, and as it passed majestically through the Florida sunshine, three men watched with special interest, for they would ride inside the capsule mounted at the top; they would guide this exquisitely beautiful thing to the other side of the Moon. “The last and the best,” Claggett said.

John Pope, still amazed by the actual size of this giant, whispered, “It’s a privilege to be associated with it,” and Claggett reminded him, “You named it, son. There goes your Altair.” This would be their home, their responsibility, the last noble bird of its breed, and they watched with love as it crept along. “It wants to fly,” Randy said. “Twenty-five thousand miles an hour, not crawl at twenty inches a second.”

After it had traveled three very slow miles, the importance of the top eight inches of pebbled rock and sealer became evident, for now the crawler was required to take a smooth curve to the north, and if the surface had been [601] concrete, or macadam, as originally planned, the twisting of the cleats would have torn the road to pieces. As it was, the tremendous torque pulverized the top pebbles, but the metallic beetle inched ahead.

When it reached the approach to Pad A, from which the rocket would be fired, it faced a five-degree ramp up which it must move to the launch position, and now a score of computers, pumps, hydraulic systems and controls sprang into operation, lowering the front end of the crawler and raising the back so that an absolutely level platform was maintained.

When the climb up the ramp was completed, the crawler delivered the great Apollo with its gantry to the proper point, lowered it onto its stand, then backed slowly away as if it were some fairytale bullfrog who had saved a princess. Job done, it retreated groaningly back across the marshes, never again to bring a gleaming Apollo from its place of birth.

Among the 450,000 persons who were more or less directly responsible for the success of Apollo 18, including the Australians, Madagascans, Spaniards, Guamanians, Antiguans and Ascension Islanders who manned stations at their various locations, was a crew-cut Colorado farm boy from the little village of Buckingham in the drylands. An astronomer since his ninth birthday, when an uncle gave him Japanese binoculars and the Norton Star Atlas, he had won a scholarship to the agricultural college at Fort Collins, where like so many of the support team, he had graduated with honors.

His name was Sam Cottage, and his parents, immigrants from the German settlements along the Volga River in Russia, had worried about what kind of job their son could land with only a degree in astronomy, but he surprised them by quickly finding work at the Sun Study Center in Boulder, where high in the clear air of the Rockies, he studied the Sun. It was his responsibility, four times an hour, to focus his sixteen-inch solar-patrol telescope, with its special filter and obscuring disk, to see if any flares had arisen anywhere on the visible side of the Sun or along its perimeter, throwing disturbances a hundred thousand miles into the air; and then, through a restricted lens and carefully darkened eyepiece, to record patiently [602] any spots which might have appeared on the surface of the Sun itself. Special attention had to be paid to regions that might conceivably erupt later into major flares which would produce what astronomers called solar proton events.

The United States government judged it profitable to keep Sam Cottage at such work because the significance of sunspots was just beginning to be appreciated: they caused northern lights, which sometimes halted radio transmission; they seemed to disrupt the Earth’s magnetic field; and what was of great importance now, they had the capacity to launch a particularly vigorous flare which would discharge a dose of radiation so powerful as to be lethal to any human being caught unprotected. That was why Dr. Feldman, NASA’s medical expert on radiation, had been so eager to have Claggett and Pope retrieve that dosimeter from the flank of Agena-A during their Gemini flight: “We needed to know how much radiation accumulates during a long flight.”

Astronomers had to be consulted before the schedule of any flight could be fixed, because only they could say that the timing within the sunspot cycle was favorable. Spots had been meticulously counted since the year 1843, when astronomers first became aware that they varied within an eleven-year cycle, and these cycles had been numbered, so that Apollo 18 would lift off during the fading years of Cycle 20. This cycle had begun with a marked low in 1964, had achieved a below-average peak in 1970, and was now in swift decline, but as Cottage’s office warned NASA:

Even in the latest stages of a cycle, there is always a possibility of an unexpected solar proton event which might cause you to abandon a mission if it were still on the ground or terminate it if in flight, but Cycle 20 has been notably less violent than Cycle 19, which produced a heavy concentration of flares in 1957. We judge you can proceed with your plans for Apollo 18 with some feeling of security, but we shall maintain a close watch on the Sun’s behavior.

So each day young Cottage compiled four reports on what the surface appeared to be doing, and at the close of day helped prepare a summary to be distributed to interested observers throughout the world.

[603] In his spare time Cottage pursued advanced studies with a man who knew as much about the Sun as anyone on Earth, a soft-spoken Ph.D. named Jack Eddy, who worked atop a spacious hill outside Boulder in a research unit operated by a consortium of American universities. Cottage had been advised by one of his superiors: “There won’t be many advancements in our field for a young man who has only a B.S. degree. You’re bright. Get your master’s and then a doctorate.” He was now working with Eddy, through the University of Colorado, for his master’s, and he was struck by the imaginative work his professor had done in reconstructing the life history of the Sun through the last three thousand years. As Sam told the coed from Wyoming he was dating:

“This guy Eddy is fantastic. He’s reviewed every study ever made about the Sun since we’ve had writing, and even some like tree rings that don’t require writing. There was this guy Maunder at the end of the last century who claimed that in the late 1600s sunspots almost disappeared for a period of seventy years. People laughed, but Eddy proved that Maunder was right. That was the age of bitter cold on Earth. Glaciers edging down.

“The Maunder Minimum was a real thing. I suppose in the centuries ahead we’ll have other minimums, but right now I’m trying to predict what will happen from year to year, and I’m getting nowhere.”

He had an affinity for mathematics, and under Eddy’s guidance, had compiled mounds of data which he ran through the computer, satisfying himself but not others that over long stretches of time the Sun’s activity balanced out and that a minimum of energy here was corrected by an abundance later on. He was convinced that the significant cycle was really twenty-two years and not eleven, for during the first half the magnetic character of sunspot regions followed one pattern, reversing during the second half. He was also much impressed by studies from Germany indicating that a superior cycle of eighty-eight years might be operating, but whatever he did, whatever theory he followed, his statistics showed that Cycle 20 was grossly [604] aberrant and could he brought back into balance only if a major proton event erupted in these dying days of its existence.

Daily he gazed at the Sun’s impassive face, trying to deduce what was happening there, but he could discover nothing, so he returned to his piles of data with what was almost anger, for he knew they were hiding information, if only he could unravel it.

In some irritation he telephoned Dr. Eddy, but found him unavailable; he was at Kitt Peak in Arizona pursuing his own studies. So Sam was left alone with his data, and late one night he left his work and wandered to the dormitory where his Wyoming girl friend slept and rousted her from bed by throwing pebbles at her window: “No matter what cycle I use, eleven years, twenty-two or eighty-eight, I keep reaching the conclusion that we’re due for a really major event.”

“Why don’t you report it?”

“Because no one would believe me. I haven’t a single solid fact to go on, only theories.”

“Ask Eddy what he thinks.”

“He’s in Arizona, dammit. I’ve called twice but he’s on a field trip.”

“Your problem will wait till he gets back.”

“Wait? Do you know what a real major event can be”? A region on the face of the Sun fifty times bigger than the entire surface of the Earth. It explodes. In thirty minutes it can throw masses of material a hundred and fifty thousand miles out into space. In less than an hour it sends forth enough energy to supply every electricity need in the United States for a hundred million years. That’s titanic.”

“And dangerous?” the girl asked.

“Our atmosphere protects us. But if you were in an airplane very high, real danger.”

“And astronauts, like Apollo 18 maybe?”

“Deadly.”

So during the last weeks of March, Sam Cottage watched with extra care his Sun’s behavior, but when nothing exceptional occurred he put that month to bed with a reassuring summary:

[605] All solar activity low during past 24 hours. Only small subflares. Magnetic field has been only mildly disturbed. General activity should remain low. Potential for major events low. However, it could increase if new Region 396 should amalgamate with neighboring regions.

“Two committees had been convened, the first composed of scientists to determine what instruments Apollo 18 should carry to the Moon in order to acquire data that would help explain the genesis of that satellite and perhaps the universe. They began their discussions on a sober note:

“On earlier explorations, the astronauts could place the instruments, point their antenna toward the Earth, and expect that radio signals would carry the data direct to our stations in Australia, Spain or the United States. And they were correct. As of last week our Moon stations were sending us nine million separate bits of data every day, throughout the year. We are getting to know the Moon as well as we know Rhode Island.

“But from the other side we can have no direct contact. Everything will depend upon the two or three satellites we place in orbit about the Moon. If they fail, we fail. To state it another way, if they fail, the whole Apollo 18 flight fails.”

 

NASA brought in communications experts, who promised that the three proposed satellites would be at least as reliable as the other devices they were gambling on, and with this assurance they reached a most sensible decision:

“Since experiments initiated by previous Apollo missions have succeeded much better than we had a right to expect, with every instrument functioning four times longer than predicted, it is essential that we receive the same kind of data from the other side of the Moon. We recommend these duplications:

“A suprathermal ion detector to measure the mass and energy of any gases on or near the lunar surface.

[606] “A solar-wind spectrometer to measure the flux and energy of atomic particles from the Sun, an experiment of greatest significance.

“A lunar-surface magnetometer to measure fluctuations in the magnetic field at the Moon.

“A passive seismic experiment to measure lunar vibrations from whatever source.”

They then turned to a series of experiments specifically designed for the new side of the Moon: using a device that sent radio impulses into the body of the Moon to see whether any ice or water existed below the surface, and conducting a fascinating experiment which might help to decide a furious lunar debate: Are mascons merely impacted meteors, suggesting that the Moon had a cold origin, or are they submerged lava flows, indicating a hot origin? Ten years earlier the word mascon did not exist; it meant mass concentration and referred to mysterious but ordinary-looking locations on the Moon where the force of gravity noticeably increased. Obviously, something unusually heavy lay hidden below the surface, and it was given the name mascon. The scientists wanted to know about the mascons on the other side.

Dr. Mott was a member of the second committee, which had perhaps the more exciting assignment: to select the spot on which Claggett and Linley would try to land, for it was imperative that a location be chosen which would yield a rich variety of rocks and afford good terrain observations. The two astronauts attended every meeting because they must become familiar with the area they were to explore, and as they studied the new maps, constructed from data supplied by the Russians after their successful photographic flight to the far side in 1959 and by the American flights of the 1960s, they realized that almost every site they might want to explore carried a Russian name-so awarded because the Russians had got there first. Claggett asked, “You mean, whenever anyone goes to the back of the Moon, he’ll be using Russian street signs?” And when the committee members nodded, he said, “Now I understand why Senator Grant was in such a sweat to catch up.”

[607] Landing a spacecraft on the Moon presented unusual problems, as the astrophysicists explained:

“You will be faced by the same constraints as the earlier Apollos. You must bring your module down a very narrow corridor. If the Sun is below 7°, your landing area will be in shadows so deep you won’t be able to distinguish dangers like big boulders. If the Sun is higher than 25°, landing is quite impossible, for you lose shadows, and without them you cannot ascertain what lies ahead.

“The ideal is a space only 4° wide-12° to 16°-because then the Sun behind you acts like a helpful flashlight, pointing out the dangers.

“Of course, if you reach your desired landing spot too late, so that the Sun is high and blazing, quite simple. You just speed farther ahead to your alternate landing site, and as you approach the terminator line, you find yourself once more just where you want to be, 12° to 16°.”

When Paul Linley heard these very exact limitations, comparable to those restricting the capsule when it tried to return to Earth, he said, “From our takeoff spot that day we fly 238,848.7 miles and have to land at precisely 70 hours, 37 minutes, 45 seconds after takeoff, and right in relation to the crater Gagarin.”

“And don’t be a minute late,” Claggett said, “or the damned Sun will be too high in the heavens.”

It was only then that Linley appreciated how that requirement of sunlight and shadow on a remote valley on the other side of the Moon determined when, four days earlier, Apollo 18 must ascend into the air at Cape Canaveral. “We climb into this machine weighing 6,300,000 pounds,” he wrote to his wife, “and we fire engines producing 7,500,000 pounds of thrust, and we’re restricted by minutes and seconds. Space flight is an exact science.”

When the two committees submitted their reports, NASA was highly pleased, because everyone now saw that Apollo 18 promised exciting rewards, a worthy capstone in every respect. But when it dawned on people that this [608] would probably be the last Apollo that would ever fly, engineers from all over America came to the Cape to see it standing in majesty beside the ocean at Complex 39.

Two carloads of engineers from Langley Field drove down non-stop-nineteen hours-to see the splendid thing they had visualized years before, without having had a reasonable clue as to how it would ultimately be effected. Dieter Kolff had government orders to fly to Canaveral, but he preferred to ride, so he organized an expedition from Huntsville of old Peenemünde hands, nine of them driving straight through in thirteen hours, to see the glorious rocket they had built, and when they stood looking at it, Kolff said, “When this goes, we’ve launched fourteen of our Saturn-Apollos, and not one has failed. We’ve gone to the Moon and we could have gone to Saturn. Look at it!”

He stayed at the Cape to supervise the final touches to his masterpiece, the last in a proud series, and sometimes when he wiped dust off the giant, as engineers will do, he grieved that of all the men who had pioneered this great machine, not one had ever ridden on its high nose: A group of American boys who weren’t born when we started work. They get to go and we don’t. He prayed that the culminating flight would be a good one and that it would bring further honors to Von Braun.

One evening as he ate alone at the Bali Hai a handsome Oriental woman in a gray linen jumpsuit asked if she could sit with him, and although he expressed his astonishment at her daring, she drew up a chair and introduced herself as Rhee Soon-Ka from Asahi Shimbun of Tokyo: “Could I ask a distinguished German scientist a few questions?”

Dieter was flattered, and they talked for many hours, for she had a knack of guessing what a man like him would want to speak about in these days of beautiful tension.

“What kind of man was Von Braun?” she asked.

“He never betrayed anyone who worked for him.”

“Or anyone he worked for?”

“All of us who reached Huntsville alive, we owe it to Von Braun.”

“When the rocket lifts off, in April, what will you think as it soars into the air?” She spent almost an hour on this [609] question: the things that could go wrong, that had indeed gone wrong with the many failures of the A-4 at Peenemünde; the emotions that overcome a man when a long-sought goal is attained; his feelings toward his fellows who joined the Russians in 1945; the relative costs of an A-4 and a Saturn V.

She took few notes, for she suspected that she would use very little of what Kolff was telling her, but she needed his insights to provide a solid underpainting for what she would write, and it was almost dawn when she asked, as good reporters often did, “What would you like to tell me that I haven’t asked?” and he said, “You know it’s all wrong? Pointed in the wrong direction?” and she said, “I’ve known that all along. It’s exhibitionism. Little boys showing off.”

They discussed this for some time, and finally Kolff asked, “What do you see in them? The way they live and die?”

And now she wanted to talk, for this had been a night of enrichment. “They are so small. Herr Kolff, have you noticed how small these wonderful young men are?”

“They have to be, to fit into our capsules.”

“But the rest of America’s heroes are so tall, so huge.” he stopped speaking and drummed on the table for some moments. “I’ve been developing a theory that whenever a nation elects great giants as its heroes, it’s doomed. Tall Prussian cavalrymen. Those pathetic Swiss guards at the Vatican. The huge gladiators of Rome. And the ridiculous sumo wrestlers of Japan.”

“I have little regard for giants,” Kolff said.

“In America it’s all monstrous football players and hyperthyroid basketball players.” She became quite excited. “I was in the Atlanta airport when a basketball team, the Boston Celtics, I think-they came through as a team, and I had to look up like this to see them. Those gods, those great muscular gods.” She laughed nervously. “It was quite revolting, really. America and Japan both electing their heroes by weight. Both societies doomed.”

She spoke more on this subject, analyzing it from various angles, and concluding, “I think Europe may be saved “because they make heroes of little, ordinary men like soccer stars and bicycle racers. They have sense enough to look at Goliath and his Philistines with suspicion. They [610] see the merit in normality, and I think that’s why I’m so infatuated with the astronauts. They’re so little and so ordinary and so very brave.”

Kolff had not thought of this before, having accepted the government’s decision to select small men for the capsules, but he found that he liked the idea, for he had never been able to see merit in a man simply because he was seven feet tall or weighed two hundred and seventy pounds.

They sat quietly for a while, both weary from the long night’s talk, then Kolff said, sighing, “When you’re a young man, you imagine that when you grow old and fill a position of responsibility, all discussions will be like this one tonight. Instead, we waste our time in trivialities. I am indebted to you.”

“On the contrary.”

On 3 April 1973, Sam Cottage, working at his telescope in Boulder, spotted on the receding western limb of the Sun at a point 10° above the solar equator, a new collection of sunspots and he duly noted them: “Region 419, horseshoe shaped. Below average in luminosity.” And that evaluation was forwarded to numerous stations around the world.

As always these days he asked himself as he filed his report, “Could this be the big one?” but the modest appearance of 419 forced him to answer no.

On 4 April the collection of spots had moved closer to the extremity from where it would move around to the invisible side of the Sun, and Sam needed to be sure how many days would pass before it reappeared at the eastern limb. His calculations would have surprised some who thought they knew the Sun well.

Because the Sun, like all other visible stars, is gaseous and not a solid, it rotates on its axis at sharply different speeds, depending on how far from the solar equator a spot is. It is as if Ecuador had a day of 22 hours, the United States 24 hours, and Greenland 27 hours.

At its equator the Sun requires only 26.7 days to complete a revolution, but at any point approaching a pole, it takes 32.1 days. Region 419, which stood just north of the equator, would make its circuit in 27.6 days, which meant that it would be out of sight for at least 14.

On 5 April, Cottage caught his last glimpse of 419 as [611] it disappeared, and although the amount visible was minimal, he thought he detected in it substantial variations from what he had seen previously, so after filing his routine reports, he went to headquarters and said, “I caught just a glimpse of 419 as it went around the bend, and I thought it had become more active.”

“Damn,” the manager growled. “Fifteen days and we’ll see nothing. It could come back at us on the east limb a full-fledged terror.”

“All we can do is guess.”

The manager sat clasping and unclasping his hands. “Twenty years from now we won’t be so powerless. We’ll have monitors up there checking all sides at all times.” He left his desk in some agitation, looked at various photographs, then shook his head. “Cottage, the Sun is the single most vital item in our universe ... to us. And we know so little about it. The only star among the trillions that we can study close up, and we practically ignore it.”

He stomped about the room for additional minutes, then hopped abruptly and snapped, “You want me to issue an advisory, don’t you?”

“I’m very nervous, sir.”

“But have you any hard evidence?” He answered himself: “None.” Then he asked, “What was this eighty-eight-year cycle you mentioned the other day?”

Cottage outlined his nebulous theories, but even as he voiced them he had to acknowledge how tentative they must sound. The manager, apprehensive himself about the dying gasp of Cycle 20, wanted to find substance in the young man’s ideas, but could not.

“Sam, do you agree that we have no justification for issuing an advisory?”

“I do.”

So none was issued.

Nine days before the flight was scheduled, the three astronauts were placed in quarantine to protect them against germs, especially colds and measles, which might be brought to them by others, and in this time they went through daily drill in the simulators. Pope, as the most Methodical, shuffled his three-by-five single pages made a very high quality fireproof French paper, summarizing and indexing ninety-six different contingency [612] sequences covering every emergency for which he would have any responsibility, and although he knew these procedures by heart, he kept cutting the pages arbitrarily, as if they formed a deck of cards, and rattling off the steps he would have to take if that accident occurred. For example, the first paper reminded him of exactly how high and how far down range the rocket ought to be at crucial stages during the first two hours:

At this point Altair will still have 236,245 miles to go before ignition for lunar orbit. That’ll take us 60 hours, 36 minutes, 7 seconds, or 60.61 hours. We’ll start out at a speed of 24,247 mph and constantly diminish to 1,398. That’ll give us-and he worked the small circular slide rule he had bought in Japan during his Korean duty-an average made-good speed of 3,898 mph.

When Claggett saw what Pope was up to, he asked, “You proposin’ to replace the computer?” and Pope said, “If I have to,” and Randy said, “Don’t lose them slips of paper.”

On 20 April, three days before lift-off, Region 419 reappeared almost coyly on the extreme eastern limb of the Sun, as if it were a high-school-freshman girl peering around a corner in her first modish dress. Cottage, staring with the keenest interest, could detect nothing, but when [613] he alerted the manager that the region was again visible, three experts crowded into the telescope area to compare judgments.

“Lots of regions on the Sun more active than that,” one old-timer said.

“Granted,” the manager said, “but is there any evidence of significant change?”

“None,” Cottage said. “If you’ll compare photographs of fifteen days ago, you’ll see it’s less active now.”

“Thank God. Anything could have happened on that other side.”

The astronauts went to bed on the night of 22 April with such a wealth of information that only young men in the finest physical condition could have hoped to keep it in order and available. Claggett, for whom this would be his fourth trip, told the NASA people who dined with them, “In raw data to be handled, if Gemini was indexed at 1.0, my Apollo flight was 2.3, but this one, to the other side of the Moon, it’s got to be 3.3. This is really complex.”

They were wakened for breakfast at 0400, and Deke Slayton with five other NASA officials was surprised when Claggett lifted his glass of orange juice and toasted: “To William Shakespeare, whose birthday we celebrate with a mighty bang.” Slayton helped them dress and accompanied them to Complex 39, where a score of searchlights played on the waiting rocket and nearly a million spectators gathered in the pre-dawn to watch the last flight of this majestic prototype as it headed for regions doubly mysterious.

Despite NASA’s unhappiness with the inaccurate description Expedition to the Dark Side of the Moon, this had become the popular designation, and more than three thousand newsmen and women waited in and around the grandstand erected on the far side of protective lagoons, five miles distant. Automatic cameras, emplaced in bunkers around the Complex, would ensure excellent shots of the historic moment.

By elevator the astronauts rode 340 feet in the air, walked across a bridge to the White Room, and with hardly a pause, proceeded directly to the capsule. Without ceremony, Claggett eased himself into the left-hand seat, and while he adjusted his bulky suit Dr. Linley awaited his [614] turn, assuring Deke Slayton, who had picked him for this flight, that he would surely bring back rock samples which would answer some of the questions about the Moon’s structure and perhaps its origin. Then he slipped into the right-hand seat, after which Pope eased himself into the one in the middle.

When the men were finally in place, strapped flat on their backs to the seats specially molded to their forms, the critical moment of the countdown arrived. In a bunker below, Dieter Kolff looked stolidly ahead, assuring himself that his final Saturn would soar as planned. At 00:00:00 he saw a blinding flash of fire and felt the ground tremble, as 28,000 gallons of water per second gushed forth to quench the flames, and another 17,000 gallons protected the skin of the machine. From this deluge the rocket began to rise.

Inside the capsule the three astronauts barely felt the lift-off, and Linley, who had not flown before, said, “Instruments say we’re off,” and Pope, busy with check sheets, tapped the geologist on the arm and nodded.

At this moment, when it was assured that Apollo 18 would be successfully airborne, control passed from Cape Canaveral, whose engineers had done their job, to Houston, where Mission Control had hundreds of experts prepared to feed information and instructions into the system:

HOUSTON: All systems go.

APOLLO: We’re getting ready for jettison.

In less than three minutes the huge Stage I had discharged its obligation, lifting the entire burden of 6,300,000 pounds eight miles straight up, and now it was useless; indeed, it was worse than useless, for it constituted dead weight and had to be discarded before Stage II could be fired. So Claggett watched as automatic switches-he had more than six hundred above and about him-blew Stage I away, allowing it to fall harmlessly into the Atlantic some miles offshore. With satisfaction, Pope noted that all events so far had adhered to his schedule.

Since Apollo 18 developed no pogo, these first moments of flight were extremely gentle, no more than a G and a half developing, but when Claggett ignited the five powerful engines of Stage II, the rocket seemed to leap upward from an altitude of a mere eight miles to a majestic 112 and to a velocity of more than 15,000 miles an hour. The flight was on its way.

[615] Now Houston began to feed in data, all suggestions being delivered by a team of three CapComs, and it had been agreed that Hickory Lee and Ed Cater would conduct most of the communication. Lee was speaking:

HOUSTON: Okay, Apollo 18. You must be doing everything right.

APOLLO: We were happy to avoid pogo.

HOUSTON: Sometimes our engineers develop real smarts.

APOLLO: Pope speaking. This craft is sure roomier than Gemini. I can hardly wait for the signal to run about.

HOUSTON: You stay put, Bunny Rabbit.

Now Claggett jettisoned Stage II with its five massive engines and Apollo was powered by only the single strong engine in Stage III, the one that would be burned once to insert the vehicle into orbit around the Earth and once more to thrust Apollo into its course to the Moon, after which it, too, would be discarded. But of course the system as a whole would still have the smaller engines in the modules, and after Stage III was jettisoned, about three hours into the flight, these smaller rockets would control until the landing capsule returned to Earth.

At the 84-minute mark a conversation of immense importance began:

HOUSTON: All systems say go.

APOLLO: We read the same.

HOUSTON: We’re ready to make the big decision.

APOLLO: No opposition here.

HOUSTON: It’s go for the Moon.

APOLLO: We read 17,432 speed at an altitude of 119.6 miles.

HOUSTON: Roger. Fire at 01:26:28. And you’ll be on your proper trajectory.

With everything set for a long, leisurely drift to the Moon, the men turned to an exercise that was fundamental to the flight but which might have terrified one not accustomed to space. The components of the vast machine had been packaged in a way that would provide the best aerodynamic surface for climbing through the dense atmosphere, and this required that they be packaged in what one might call an upside-down position; Claggett called it ass-backwards. But now, since frictional drag in space was negligible, one shape was as good as another for drifting [616] through the reaches, and it was advisable for the astronauts to take their monstrous machine apart-massive pieces drifting independently at nearly 18,000 mph-and reassemble them properly, at which time the cumbersome unnecessary portions would be jettisoned and allowed to fall back and burn up in the atmosphere.

“Wish me luck,” Claggett said as he began this preposterous maneuver, and when the parts had been separated and the command and service modules, as a single unit, had been turned completely around, he edged them gently against the lunar module and docked them. Then with great skill he pulled his entire package away from the useless Stage III and watched as it started its swift descent to destruction. The astronauts were alone in the small vehicles that would deposit them on the Moon.

But there was one further obligation. As the tricky maneuver ended, Claggett and Pope did something that no former astronauts had ever done: with the most careful timing they fired the explosive bolts, knocking open the hatch cover and allowing the three spring-loaded communication satellites to eject from the Apollo. Utilizing the same forward thrust that their mother ship had, they would in due course reach a position near the Moon, but much too high and too speedy to attain orbit. At that time Claggett would send a radio signal which would activate a small retrorocket in each satellite, causing it to drop dutifully into its assigned position around the Moon. There it would serve as the vital connection with Earth when the astronauts were working on the other side.

“Now we can go to sleep,” Claggett said, for it would be a slow, methodical, totally supervised trip that Apollo 18 would engage in for the next sixty hours. Claggett would play country music on his tape machine, Pope the symphonies of Beethoven when it came his turn. Dr. Linley monitored communications with Houston and took note of the NCAA basketball scores as CapCom Cater read them off. On the second night, to coincide with prime-time television in the States, Dr. Linley activated Altair’s television camera and relayed to Earth a fifty-minute program depicting life aboard the spacecraft. Claggett told some rather dreadful Texas jokes, mainly about his uncles, but the highlight was an exposition by Pope of the consequences of weightlessness. He showed how a spill of water [617] formed a globule, how one than would sleep with his head in one position, his companion upside down relatively, and the special problems of eating and drinking in space. To delight the children he added, “Going to the bathroom isn’t simple, either.” He used the word urine and showed how it was expelled from the capsule, and then he asked Linley to carry his camera behind his, Pope’s, head, so that the children could see the absolute welter of switches the astronauts had to memorize. He stressed the device which had come late in the space program, a kind of metal bar behind which each switch hid, protected against accidental activation. With a grand sweep he brushed his left arm across one bank of switches and showed how such a careless gesture would leave the switches undisturbed.

He then took the camera and asked Linley to explain the heart of the system, the computers which stored the data necessary for such a flight, and as the scientist detailed the amazing amount of information the computer held, Pope said, “In a few minutes Colonel Claggett is going to fire an engine for eleven seconds, no more, no less. How does he know when and how long to fire? The computer tells him, and after he fires it, we’ll be on dead target to the Moon.”

Claggett felt the program was getting somewhat professorial, which was bound to be the case when Pope was in charge, so he took a bite of cracker, producing large crumbs, which hung in the capsule. “Catch the crumbs,” he yelled at the other two. “That’s how we do our housework up here. Catch the crumbs, you limeys. I’m Captain Bligh.” And he held the camera while Pope and Linley tried to capture the errant bits.

On the next day things sobered considerably, for the men of Altair were about to attempt something never tried before, a walk on the other side, and as the Moon loomed ahead, enormous in their small windows, they could identify areas where the earlier Apollos had landed, and they felt momentary remorse that they were not headed for any of the sites they had memorized as beginning astronauts. But when they swung around the edge of the Moon and saw for the first time the strange and marvelous mountains awaiting them, they gasped with delight.

Flight plan called for them to make many orbits of the Moon before actually descending, and in this waiting [618] period they talked with Hickory Lee in Houston:

APOLLO: Things couldn’t look smoother.

HOUSTON: Who wrote Claggett’s lines for the television show?

APOLLO: Joe Miller, two hundred years ago.

HOUSTON: The show was an enormous success. Editors liked Pope’s explanation of weightlessness.

APOLLO (Claggett speaking): So did we. I never understood it before.

HOUSTON: Could you see any debris from previous landings?

APOLLO: None. And we really searched.

HOUSTON: That’s hard to believe. When you drop to lower orbit, of course ...

APOLLO: Our landing spot is in darkness now, but what we can see of the lighted area looks reassuring. Totally different from the Earth side. Many, many more craters.

HOUSTON: We want you to make four sunlight passes.

APOLLO: You can be sure we want to.

HOUSTON: Any glitches?

APOLLO: None whatever. Fingers crossed, but this has been a perfect mission so far.

There was a glitch. Sam Cottage, monitoring the Sun on the morning after lift-off, saw with interest that Region 419 had maintained its horseshoe configuration, with signs indicating that a sunspot big enough to see with the naked eye might be developing, but there was no indication that a solar proton event might erupt. His summary that day informed the world and NASA scientists:

Region 419 produced several subflares. New spots are appearing in white light. Region exhibiting mixed polarities. Geomagnetic field likely to remain unsettled. Region likely to produce moderate flares.

But on the next day, as the astronauts were preparing their approach to the Moon, Region 419 subsided dramatically, so that the summary contained nothing to alert the NASA scientists that anything of importance might be impending.

However, Cottage could not sleep, and during the hours when Claggett and Linley were preparing their descent [619] to the Moon, he was alone in his workroom, reviewing all the data regarding Cycle 20 and the behavior of Region 419, and the more mathematics he applied to what was before him, the more apparent it became that if his theories were correct, Region 419 must soon erupt as a major flare.

He had nothing to work on except his correlations, but in the morning he carried them to the manager and said, “Here I am again. Statistically, everything would balance out if 419 did go bang.”

“We’re not gypsies telling fortunes.”

“All right, disregard my figures. What do you think?”

“It’s a troublesome region, but dammit, we don’t have enough here to warrant an alert.”

And again none was issued.

On 26 April, as the two astronauts were making their final decisions regarding a descent to the Moon, Sam Cottage did not leave his watching post for lunch, because a routine event was occurring on the Sun which, although it involved no specific danger, did produce a period of maximum risk to the two men who would be walking on the Moon. Region 419 was moving from the eastern half of the Sun’s visible surface to the western, and this made it triply threatening. First, because of solar rotation the paths followed by energetic atomic particles thrown out by the Sun are curved, so that those originating on the western half are more directly channeled toward the Earth and Moon. Even a truly massive flare on the eastern half would do little damage, for its ejecta would curve outward and away from Earth, to be lost in space. Second, the travel time for deadly particles originating on the western half is much shorter than those coming from the eastern, so that the likelihood of their overtaking the astronauts before they could seek shelter was much greater. Third, solar-flare particles reaching Earth or Moon from the western side are just more energetic than those from the east.

The most threatening single position for a flare is twenty to forty-five degrees west of the Sun’s central meridian, and that was the ominous area into which Region 419 now entered.

When Sam missed his lunch, his girl friend appeared with a sandwich and watched the Sun with him. “I was [620] jittery yesterday,” he said. “Took all my data to the boss and showed him nothing. He told me we weren’t gypsy fortunetellers, and he was right. Look. It’s a calm Sun. Region 419 is transiting from east to west in an orderly fashion. This time we’re going to escape, but I’m still convinced that before Cycle 20 ends, there has to be a bangeroo.”

“Lucky for the guys up there it skips us this time,” she said.

“Why, are they on the Moon?”

“Not yet. But I heard the broadcast from Houston and they’re on their way down.” She hesitated. Seeing that he was bleary-eyed and nervous, she said, “Why don’t you take a walk with me over to the library? You could use a break.”

“I want to see this thing vanish off the western limb.”

“How many hours?,

“Six more days.” Then he broke into a laugh and surrendered. “All right, off we go, but only for an hour.”

At about the time that Sam Cottage was going to the library with his girl, Claggett and Linley were slipping through the chute that carried them into the landing module, and after they had satisfied themselves that everything was in readiness, they signaled Pope that he could cast them loose, but he was so busy verifying the check lists that governed his solitary command of the capsule, that he asked for more time: “I’ve got three more pages. I want this place to be locked up when you pull away.”

“We want it, too,” Claggett said over the intercom. “Something to come home to.”

At the conclusion of his meticulous checking Pope cried, “Randy, it’s everything go. Contact Houston.”

So the word was given; the computers aloft and their mates in Houston concurred, and the Luna broke away to start its descent to what Tucker Thompson had told his readers was “the dark and dangerous chasm in which unknown forces threaten the life of any trespasser.” Dr. Mott, reading the report in Folks, growled, “The basic forces are identical with those which govern Brooklyn. Only the landscape is different.”

It certainly was. As the Sun began to illuminate regions farther and farther into the hemisphere, Claggett and [621] Linley could see a Moon very different from the Earth side they had once studied so assiduously. Here there were no vast seas, no multitude of smooth-centered craters, no rilles leading out in tantalizing patterns. This was a brutish Moon composed of great mountain ranges, valleys perilously deep. The Earth side had been known for twenty thousand years and mapped for three hundred. Grammar-school children could make themselves familiar with their side, but only scientists studying the Russian and American photographs could say that they knew much about Luna’s chosen landing spot.

With unmatched skill, Claggett brought the lander right down the middle of the corridor-enough Sun to throw shadows that identified every hillock-and as the long delicate probes which dangled from the bottom of the landing pads reached down to touch the Moon and alert the astronauts to turn off their power, lest they fly too hard onto the rocky soil, the final conversation with Houston took place:

LUNA: Everything as ordered. God, this is different.

HOUSTON: We read perfection. Soon now.

LUNA: No signals from the probes. Could they be malfunctioning?

HOUSTON: You’re still well above the probe level. All’s well.

LUNA (Claggett speaking): Too busy to talk now. Drifting to left. Too much.

LUNA (Linley speaking): No strain. Straighten up, dead ahead I see it.

LUNA (Claggett speaking): I can’t see a damned thing. We’re tilted.

LUNA (Linley speaking): You are tilted. Left. Five degrees.

LUNA (Claggett speaking): I thought I was. There, that’s better. Houston, I see now. All is copasetic.

LUNA (Linley speaking): Perfect landing.

HOUSTON: Great job.

As gently as if he were parking a large car at a supermarket, Randy Claggett had brought Luna to rest at the extreme far edge of the Sun’s rays. Ahead lay darkness, soon to be converted into dazzling sunlight; behind lay the areas which had been bathed in sunlight but which would later pass into the terrible cold and darkness of space [622] where no atmosphere reflected light.

LUNA: We’ve had a close look through the windows. Same only different.

HOUSTON (Ed Cater as CapCom): You must get some shut-eye.

LUNA: We want some.

HOUSTON: All systems shut down?

LUNA: All secured.

HOUSTON: We’ll waken you in seven hours. Egress in nine.

LUNA: That’s what we came for.

So eager was Sam Cottage to see what his Sun was going to offer the morning of 27 April that he unlimbered his solarscope an hour before dawn, then spent his time nervously waiting for the great red disk to appear over the flatlands to the east. For about an hour after sunrise it would be fruitless to take photographs, for the Sun would be so low in the east that a camera would be unable to penetrate effectively the extreme thickness of atmosphere. Later, when it stood overhead, the thickness would be at a minimum and good photographs would become possible. Even so, he studied the Sun through its blanket of haze to see whether any conspicuous event had happened overnight.

Against the possibility that he might have to issue an alert, he spent his time reviewing the data on radiation; the present thinking of the world’s experts was summarized in The Rem Table (Roentgen Equivalent in Man), from which sample lines read:

100-150 Rems: Vomiting, nausea but no serious disability.

340-420 Rems: All personnel sick. 20% deaths within 2 weeks.

500-620 Rems: All personnel very sick. 50% deaths within 1 month. Survivors incapacitated about 6 months.

690-930 Rems: Immediate severe vomiting, nausea. Up to 100% fatalities ...

6,200 Rems: Total incapacitation almost immediately. All personnel dead.

[623] These data, of course, referred to “an unprotected white male,” and the dosage could be dramatically reduced by various kinds of protection: 560 Rems striking an unprotected human drop to 400 if he wears his astronaut’s suit; to 128 if he can get back inside the lunar module; to 26 if he makes it to the command module, with its solid sides and ablative shield; and to an inconsequential 7 if he stands behind the stone wall inside a well-constructed house.

When Cottage had digested both sets of figures he concluded: That’s why they keep people like me on watch. Early warning. If the man’s caught unprotected, he’s dead. If we can get him back inside that command module, he survives.

In the fading darkness, while he waited for the blazing appearance of the Sun, he thought of himself as an ancient Aztec priest on the highest altar at Tenochtitlán waiting in darkness for the return of the life-giver, and he thought: They knew what they were doing. They knew where the power came from.

When light filled the room Cottage walked nervously about, stopping now and then to study the remarkable series of photographs taken on 23 February 1956 showing several stages of the greatest solar flare ever recorded. It would have generated, Cottage estimated, a total dose of more than 2,000 Rems as measured on the Moon.

Now came the Sun, this all-powerful agency, this source of light and heat and life and continuance which most men accepted so casually and understood so poorly. Sam, unusually captivated by the power of his star, stared at it naked-eyed as it rose orange-red, and paid his tribute:

What a powerhouse! I still don’t believe it. During all the billions of years you’ve been in existence you’ve thrown into space six million tons of matter every second. And you can go on doing it for another ten billion years without using up even 1/100^th of 1% of your mass. Please, please restrain yourself for three more days.

[624] While Cottage was pleading for days of grace, Hickory Lee from Houston was trying to awaken his two astronauts with a persistent “Luna, Houston. Luna, Houston.” And when he succeeded he warned them not to skip breakfast; then he confirmed schedules as they opened the hatch on the lunar module and lowered their ladder.

Randy Claggett’s style was to be irreverent about everything: marriage, fatherhood, test-piloting or engaging Russian MiGs in Korea, but when he felt his heavy boot touch the surface of the Moon and realized that he was standing on a portion of the universe which no one on Earth would ever see, not even with the most powerful telescope, he was overcome with the solemnity of the moment:

LUNA: Nothing could prepare you for this moment. The photographs weren’t even close. This is ... it’s staggering. An endless landscape of craters and boulders.

HOUSTON: And not a dark side at all?

LUNA: The Sun shines brilliantly, but it’s sure dark in spirit.

As soon as Paul Linley joined him on the surface, a curious transformation occurred: up to now Claggett had been the skilled test pilot in command, but here among the rocks of a wildly unfamiliar terrain, the geologist assumed control, and he reminded Claggett that their first responsibility was to collect rocks immediately, lest they have to take off in a hurry. Placing the scientific instruments and doing the systematic sample collecting could come later.

Only when the emergency bags were filled with rock samples and stowed aboard did the two men proceed to perform an act which seemed miraculous when it was flashed by means of the orbiting satellites to television watchers back on Earth: at an opening in the base of the lunar module they opened a flap, activated a series of devices, and stood back as a most bizarre creation started to emerge like a chrysalis about to become a butterfly. It looked much like a frail shopping cart that had been run over in some truck accident, compacted and twisted, but as it came into sunlight, its various parts, which were spring-loaded, began to unfold of themselves: four wheels mysteriously appeared, a steering handle, a tonneau with [625] seats. Like a child’s toy unfolding at Christmas, a complete Moon rover materialized, with batteries strong enough to move it about for three days or eighty miles, “whichever comes first,” as Claggett reported to Houston.

When the rover stood clear, the astronauts did not leap into it for a gambol across the Moon; in fact, they ignored it as they went about the serious business of unloading and positioning the complex of scientific instruments which would make this journey fruitful for the next ten years. In each of the preceding Apollo missions, men had placed on the Moon devices which were expected to send messages to Earth for up to a year, but they had been so beautifully constructed, with so many sophisticated by-passes if things went wrong, that all of them were still functioning long after their predicted death. “Sometimes we do things right,” Claggett said as he emplaced the instrument which would measure the force of the solar wind.

“You seem to have the wires crossed,” Hickory Lee cautioned from Houston. “Red to red.”

“I had it ass-backwards,” Claggett said, and Lee had to remind him: “We’re working with an open mike.” Prior to every flight, NASA officials had warned Claggett that since what he said would be heard by millions or even billions of people around the world, he must censor his ebullient speech, and this he promised to do, but occasionally a test-pilot phrase crept in and NASA shuddered, for the men in charge knew that every vulgarism would bring thousands of protests and even questions in Congress: “How could you men who stood closer to heaven than men have ever stood before use such language?” And Mott, listening to the exchange, knew exactly what Claggett would reply: “Senator, it was a serious moment. Houston was right. I was about to muck up the whole experiment because I did have the wires ass-backwards.”

When the eight separate scientific devices were placed and the antenna which would relay their findings were oriented so that the satellites could intercept their transmissions, the two men were ready to send test signals.

HOUSTON: We read you loud and clear.

LUNA: Voltages in order?

HOUSTON: Could not be better.

LUNA: We’re going to rest fifteen minutes.

[626] HOUSTON: You earned it.

LUNA: Then we start on Expedition One. Seven miles to the reticulated crater.

HOUSTON: Roger. Are you checking your dosimeters?

LUNA: Regular.

The astronauts gave this much-used word its Mexican pronunciation reg-u-larrrr, with heavy accent on the last syllable, which made it a fine-sounding statement: not good, not bad, nothing out of the way, just regularrrr. If someone had asked Claggett what kind of test pilot he had been at Pax River, he would have said, “Regularrrr,” flipping his right palm face-up, face-down. “Nothing special. Regularrrr.”

After their rest, taken to avoid perspiration or heavy breathing which might consume too much oxygen, the two men climbed into the rover with Dr. Linley at the controls, for the machine was his responsibility, and as the rover pulled away, Houston received a remarkable message:

LUNA: Linley speaking. Please someone inform my uncle Dr. Gawain Butler, who would not allow me to drive his used Plymouth, that I am now chauffeuring a jalopy with a sticker price of ten million clams.

HOUSTON: Obey all traffic signs.

Each trip had been constructed with almost every minute accounted for; the men would work incessantly, searching for specific things that would illuminate the history of this other side. The distances to be traveled had been carefully studied, for a basic consideration had to be the point of safe return, that point so far removed from the module that if the rover broke down completely, the astronauts could still hike back, taking into account exhaustion and oxygen supply. On previous flights six miles out had been the limit, but Claggett and Linley were in such superb physical shape, and their traveling gear had been so improved, that seven miles was being authorized.

This carried them to one of the most interesting small craters on this side, one whose flat central section was so reticulated like a mud flat in August that the astronauts had named it the Giraffe Crater. When they climbed a small mound at its edge Linley gasped with pleasure, and informed Houston that it was even more exciting than they had supposed when studying photographs.

[627] LUNA: Magnificent. We have a whole new world here.

HOUSTON: Better change that to Moon.

LUNA: Corrected. We’re going down on foot to collect samples.

HOUSTON: Too steep for the rover?

LUNA: We think so.

HOUSTON: Roger. We’ll follow you with the television camera.

LUNA: We’re going left. To get those rocks that look yellowish.

It was truly miraculous. The two astronauts left the rover and descended gingerly into the crater, but as they went, technicians in Houston sent electronic commands to the television camera mounted on the side of the rover, and obediently it followed the progress of the men. Its electrical impulses were dispatched by a special antenna on the rover to one of the waiting satellites, which reflected them to collecting stations at Honeysuckle in Australia and Goldstone in California, where they were transformed into television pictures for commercial stations. And the linkage was so perfect that operators in Houston were able to point the camera and activate it rather more meticulously than a man could have done had he stayed in the flimsy rover.

At the Sun Study Center in Boulder, Sam Cottage turned the cranks which moved his solarscope into position, brought the hydrogen-alpha filter into the optics in order to obtain the most sensitive view of activity on the Sun, and waited for the great star to lose its redness so he could get a clear look at its face, and when he did so he saw that Region 419 had reached the precise spot from which it could create the maximum danger. It had edged across the mid-line at which it would have stood closest to the Moon but still remained close enough to deliver a powerful shot, and it had entered the ultra-dangerous western hemisphere from which extra-powerful discharges were possible.

With every minute successfully negotiated, the possibility of danger diminished, and Sam was pleased to see that 419 remained quiescent; however, for his morning summary he did consult his charts to make an estimate [628] of the size of the region, and was surprised at his figure: “Region 419 is now 63 times larger than the entire surface of the Earth.”

Before filing his report he looked back to verify the astonishing size of this disturbance, and as he did so he saw the area expand significantly: “Jesus, what’s happening?”

He reached backward for his telephone, but his attention became riveted on that distant battleground where primordial forces had reached a point of tension that could no longer be sustained. With one mighty surge, Region 419 exploded in titanic fury. It was no longer simply a threatening active region; it was one of the most violent explosions of the past two hundred years.

“Oh Jesus!” Cottage gasped, and while he fumbled for the phone, figures and delimitations galloped through his head: Sun to Moon, less than 93,000,000 miles. What we see now happened 8.33 minutes ago. But radiation travels at speed of light, so it’s already hit the Moon. Oh Jesus. those poor men! Rems-5,000, maybe 6,000 total dose? And in the brief seconds it took for him to pick up the phone, two thoughts flashed across his mind: What else might have happened during the eight minutes it took that flash to reach here? and God, God, please protect those men.

He spread the alarm, but by the time his superiors could alert NASA, two other observatories and three amateurs in the Houston area had already reported that a gigantic solar proton event was under way.

 

HOUSTON: Luna, Altair, do you read me?

ALTAIR: I read.

HOUSTON: Why doesn’t Luna answer? Altair, can you see Luna at this point?

ALTAIR: Negative.

LUNA (breaking in): I read you, Houston.

HOUSTON: There seems to have been an event on the Sun. Have you checked your dosimeters?

LUNA: Uh-oh!

HOUSTON: We read your telemetry as very high.

LUNA: So do we. Dosimeter is saturated.

ALTAIR: Confirm. Very high.

HOUSTON: We now have confirmation from different [629] sources. Major solar event. Classification 4-bright, X9 in x-ray flux.

LUNA: What probable duration?

HOUSTON: Cannot predict. Wait. Human Ecology says two days, three days.

LUNA (Claggett speaking): I think we may have a problem.

HOUSTON: The drill is clear. Return to lunar module. Lift off soonest. Make rendezvous soonest.

LUNA: We do not have data and time for lift-off. We do not have data and time for rendezvous.

HOUSTON: Our computers will crank up and feed you. What is your ETA back at lunar module?

LUNA: Distance, seven miles; top speed, seven miles. Yield, one hour.

HOUSTON: How long to button up?

ALTAIR: Am I to drop to rendezvous orbit?

HOUSTON: Stand by, Altair. We’ll handle your problems later.

ALTAIR: Roger. Wilco.

HOUSTON: Repeat, how long button up, Luna?

LUNA: Abandonin’ gear, twenty minutes.

HOUSTON: Abandon all gear. Luna, there is no panic, but speed essential.

LUNA: Who’s panickin’? We’re climbin’ out of a crater, rough goin’.

HOUSTON: Manufacturer assures rover can make top speed eleven miles per hour.

LUNA: And if we break down? What top speed walkin’?

HOUSTON: Roger. Maintain safe speed.

LUNA: We’ll try nine.

HOUSTON: We’re informed nine was tested strenuously. Proved safe.

LUNA: We’ll try nine.

Now the Sun reminded Earthlings of its terrible power, for it poured forth atomic particles and radiation at an appalling rate, sending them coursing through planetary space and bombarding every object they encountered. Wave after wave of solar-flare particles and high-energy radiation attacked the Earth, but most of this was rejected by our protective atmosphere; however, enough did penetrate to create bizarre disturbances.

[630] ... In northern New York a power company found its protective current breakers activated by huge fluxes of electrical power coursing along its lines, coming from no detectable source to disrupt entire cities.

... An Air Force general, trying vainly to communicate with a base one thousand miles away, realized that the entire American defense system was impotent: “If Russia wanted to attack us at a moment of total confusion, this would be it.” Then he smiled wanly. “Of course, their system will be as messed up as ours.”

... Taxi drivers in Boston, listening to the radios connecting them with their home offices, received instructions directing them to addresses in Kansas City.

... A world-famous pigeon race between Ames, Iowa, and Chicago launched 1,127 birds, with a likelihood from past experiences that more than a thousand would promptly find their way home. But since all magnetic fields were in chaos, only four made it, bedraggled, confused and six hours late.

... People in Florida reported seeing the aurora borealis for the first time in their lives, and in northern Vermont the display was so brilliant that people could read by it.

... And in Houston the knowing men in charge of Apollo 18 assembled quietly, aware of how powerless they were. The mission controller and Dr. Feldman looked at the dosimeter reports and shuddered. More than 5,000 Rems were striking the Moon. Very calmly the controller said “Give me the bottom line.”

Dr. Feldman ticked off on his fingers: “Highest reading we’ve had is 5,830 Rems,” and a NASA scientist said, “Absolutely fatal,” but Feldman continued his recital: “If, and I repeat if, 5,830 strike a naked man, he’s dead. But our men have the finest suits ever devised. Enormous protection. Plus their own clothes. Plus the most important aspect of all. It isn’t radiation that might kill them. It’s the outward flow of protons from the Sun. And they will not reach the Moon for another fifty minutes.” He ticked off his last two points: “We rush our men into their Moon lander, where they find more protection. Then we rocket them aloft to the orbiter with its heavy shield.”

Throwing both hands in the air, he shouted, “We can save those men!”

The controller summoned his three CapComs and said, [631] “No fluctuation in voice. No hysteria at this end.” To the hundreds gathering, he conveyed the same message: “I want all ideas and I want them quick. But only the CapComs are to speak with the astronauts.”

Turning to the chief astronomers, he asked, “Could this have been predicted?”

“No,” they said. “Closing months of a quiet cycle. It should not have happened.”

The controller wanted to say, “Well, it did. Six thousand Rems.” But he knew he must betray neither anxiety or irritation. “Now it’s our job to get them home safe.”

By the time Claggett and Linley reached their rover and turned it around, they no longer bothered with their dosimeters, because once the reading passed the 1,000-Rem mark, any further data were irrelevant. They were in trouble and they knew it, but they did have a chance if they did everything right.

For nearly an hour their rover crawled back toward the waiting lunar module, itself attacked by the solar outpouring, and the two men wanted to talk about their predicament but could think of nothing sensible to say. So they took refuge in trivialities: “Men have absorbed large doses of this stuff, haven’t they, Linley?” and the scientist replied, “Every day, in dentist’s offices,” and Claggett asked, “Do those lead blankets they throw over you do any good?” and Linley said, “We could profit from a couple right now.”

And then Houston heard raucous laughter coming from Luna. It was Linley: “Hey, Claggett! Did you see those medicals they threw at us last week? Said that a man with black skin had a 23.41 better chance of repelling radiation than one with white skin. Hot diggity! At last it pays to be black.”

Then Claggett’s voice: “Move over, brother, so I can sit in your shadow.”

Alone in Altair, John Pope carefully shuffled his summary sheets until he came to one bearing the elegant printing he had learned at Annapolis: RADIATION PRECAUTIONS, and when he had memorized his instructions to himself, he took down the massive volume of additional advice and went through each line, so that by the time his two companions reached their module he would be as prepared as [632] any man could be. Like them, he felt no sense of panic, only the added responsibility of doing the right thing in an emergency.

HOUSTON: Altair, have you cranked in the data we sent?

ALTAIR: Affirmative.

HOUSTON: You have the drill on turning the CM around so the ablative shield keeps facing the Sun?

ALTAIR: Affirmative.

HOUSTON: Execute immediately rendezvous has been established.

ALTAIR: Will do.

HOUSTON: What is your dosimeter reading now?

ALTAIR: As before.

HOUSTON: Excellent ... your reading is much lower than Luna’s. You’re going to be all right.

ALTAIR: All ready for rendezvous. Get them up here. The CapCom, up to this point, had been one of the older astronauts, a man with a stable, reassuring voice, but the NASA command felt that it would be advisable to use in this critical situation someone with whom the men upstairs were especially familiar, and Hickory Lee took over:

HOUSTON: This is Hickory. All readings are good. (This was a lie; the dosimeter readings were terrifying. But it was not a lie, either; the prospects for an orderly rendezvous still existed.)

LUNA: Good to hear that Tennessee voice. We can see the module. ETA fifteen minutes.

HOUSTON: I will read lift-off data as soon as you’re inside. You don’t have a pad available now, do you?

LUNA: Negative. Pads not a high priority aboard this bone-rattler.

LUNA: Linley here. We have terrific rock samples. Will salvage.

HOUSTON: Appreciated, but if transfer takes even one extra minute, abandon.

LUNA: We will not abandon.

HOUSTON: Neither would I. What’s that? Who? (After a pause): Luna, Dr. Feldman is here. He asks, “Dr. Linley, is your voice sort of drying up?”

LUNA: Affirmative.

HOUSTON (Dr. Feldman speaking): Imperative you swallow spit.

[633] LUNA: Fresh out of spit. Send orange juice.

HOUSTON (Lee speaking): Dr. Feldman says, “Dr. Linley, keep your mouth moist.”

LUNA: Mouth! Be moist!

Mission Control in Houston had received, in the past hour, a flood of additional men rushing to emergency posts, each determined to get the two astronauts into the slightly better environment of the lunar module and headed for rendezvous with Altair. But when they saw the shocking data from the dosimeters they could not be sanguine; this was going to be a tough ride, a very tough ride.

HOUSTON: Park the rover close to the module.

LUNA: Roger.

HOUSTON: Inform me the moment Claggett steps into the module. I will start reading data for check. Nothing is to be done without full check.

LUNA: I have always been one of the world’s most careful checkers. Call me Chicken Claggett.

HOUSTON: Give me the word.

As soon as Linley stopped the rover, Claggett dashed for the module, climbed in, and started taking down the instructions Hickory Lee transmitted. Since NASA could not wait for an ideal lift-off time, when Altair would be in maximum position to achieve rendezvous, schedules had to be improvised for second best, and when Linley saw that his commander would be occupied for some minutes, he welcomed the opportunity to return to the rover to rescue the precious cargo he had collected at the reticulated crater. He had been sent to the Moon to collect rocks and he proposed to deliver them, but as he heaved aboard the second batch, he seemed to tremble and reached for a handhold that was not there.

LUNA: I think Dr. Linley has fainted.

HOUSTON: Inside the module or out?

LUNA: Halfway in.

HOUSTON: Drag him in, secure all and lift off immediately.

LUNA: I have only partial data. He’s in. You can do wonders in one-sixth gravity.

HOUSTON: Lift off immediately.

LUNA: I am using Runway 039. Ain’t a hell of a lot of traffic on it.

[634] John Pope, coming from the Earth side of the Moon, which was now in darkness, used the sextant as a telescope to spot the module, and when he had it fixed he reported to Houston: “Everything regularrrr,” but he had already heard that Linley was unconscious and that Claggett would be making the complicated maneuvers alone: “If anyone can do it, he can.”

LUNA: Linley out cold.

HOUSTON: Have you completed your check? And his, too?

LUNA: Shipshape.

HOUSTON: It’s go.

LUNA: You ready up there, Altair?

ALTAIR: Three orbits should do it.

LUNA: Here we come.

And then, as Pope watched and the world listened, Randy Claggett, working alone, lifted the lunar module off the surface of the Moon and brought it six hundred feet into space.

HOUSTON: All readings correct. One hell of a job, Randy.

LUNA: I feel faint.

HOUSTON: Not now, Randy. Not now. You dare not.

LUNA: I ...

HOUSTON: Listen, Randy. Hickory here. Hold the controls very tight.

LUNA: It’s no good, Houston. I ...

HOUSTON: Colonel Claggett, hold tight. You must not let go. You must not let go.

LUNA (a long silence, then a quiet voice): Blessed Saint Leibowitz, keep ‘em dreamin’ down there ... (A choking sound) ...

John Pope, who had heard this conversation, stared at the module through his sextant, saw it waver, turn on its side, sort of skid through space, and descend toward the Moon with fatal speed.

HOUSTON: Hold on, Randy. You must not let go. Randy, you must not let go. Randy ...

ALTAIR: Luna has crashed.

HOUSTON: Location?

ALTAIR: East of landing. Mountains.

HOUSTON: Damage?

[635] ALTAIR: Obliterated.

HOUSTON: This is Hickory. Altair, climb to orbit.

ALTAIR: Negative. I must stay low to check.

HOUSTON: I’m talking with Dr. Feldman. He asks, “Is your voice sort of drying up?”

ALTAIR: Obliterated. My God, they were obliterated.

HOUSTON: Hickory here. Altair, you must ascend to orbit. You are wasting fuel.

ALTAIR: I will not leave until I see where they are.

HOUSTON: You’ve already told us. East of landing. Mountains.

ALTAIR: I will not leave them.

HOUSTON: I think he turned off his mike. John, John, this is Hickory. It’s imperative that you proceed to orbit and prepare to ignite engine. John, John, this is Hickory.

For two orbits John Pope flew alone through the intense radiation being poured out by the errant Sun, and each time when he headed directly toward the Sun he realized the heavy dosage he must be absorbing, for his dosimeter was running wild, but when he slipped behind the Moon, putting that heavy body between him and the Sun, he knew that he was reasonably safe from the extreme radiation.

On each pass he stared for as long as he could at the site of the crash, and although he was at an altitude from which not much could be seen clearly, it was nevertheless obvious that the astronauts’ suits had been ripped by the crash and that death must have been more or less instantaneous, and he chanted to himself.

“How different death is there. No worms to eat the body, no moisture to corrupt. A thousand years from now, there they’ll be, the first, the only. When wanderers come from the other galaxies, there our two will be, immaculate, unburied, waiting for the resurrection, all parts intact.

“Oh, Randy, how I loved you. Warring together in Korea. The mock fights over the Chesapeake. The flights across the country, you pilot out, me pilot home. Those sixteen days in Gemini, with you drinking nothing but orange juice and farting in my face.

[636] The hours of simulation. Drinking beer with Debby Dee.

“Jesus, Randy, it can never happen again-but it happened once.”

In hurried consultations NASA agreed that they would explain these two orbits of silence as a radio blackout caused by the Sun flare, which had now reached catastrophic proportions. Astronomers all across the world were focused on it, and scores of photographs were showing television viewers just how titanic the explosion had been, so that John Pope’s temporary silence must not be construed as anything untoward. Without discernible agitation, Houston asked all its stations to try to make direct contact with Pope, and a welter of international voices sped toward the drifting Altair. Pope listened dully, but snapped to attention only when a familiar one echoed:

HONEYSUCKLE: This is Australia. (Or-stry-lee-uh, the voice said) Calling Altair.

ALTAIR: Aren’t you the man who watched over Claggett and me in Gemini?

HONEYSUCKLE: The same.

ALTAIR: I remember you pronounced it Jimmin-eye.

HONEYSUCKLE: How else?

ALTAIR: I love your talk.

HONEYSUCKLE: Houston is eager to speak with you.

ALTAIR: I’d like to speak with Houston.

HONEYSUCKLE: Everything roger?

ALTAIR: Copasetic.

HONEYSUCKLE: Good on you, Cobber.

The hearty voice with its cheery brightness brought Pope back to attention, and when Houston reached him again, he was ready to talk:

ALTAIR: Luna crash confirmed. They bought the ranch.

HOUSTON: Any possibility of survivors?

ALTAIR: Negative. Luna completely fractured.

HOUSTON: Hickory speaking. John, we want you to go immediately to orbit.

ALTAIR: Roger. Wilco.

HOUSTON: John, during the blackout we calculated every mile of your way home. It looks good.

ALTAIR: I’m ready.

[637]  HOUSTON. it will be obligatory for you to get some sleep. Will you need sedatives?

ALTAIR: Negative. Negative.

HOUSTON: Can you stay alert for the next six hours?

ALTAIR: Affirmative. Six days if we have to.

HOUSTON: Six days you’ll be in a feather bed. Now, John. Do you read me clear?

ALTAIR: Affirmative.

HOUSTON: And you understand the burn sequence?

ALTAIR: Affirmative. Repeat, my mind is clear. I comprehend.

HOUSTON: You’re going to have to do everything just right. Exactly on the times we give.

ALTAIR: I intend to.

HOUSTON: And if there is anything you do not understand ...

ALTAIR: Lay off, Hickory. I intend to get this bucket safely home. You take it easy. I’ll take it easy.

HOUSTON: God bless you, Moonshiner. Bring it down.

ALTAIR: I intend to.

As methodically as if he were in the seventeenth hour of a familiar simulation, Pope ran through his check lists, took note of his fuel supplies and when the firings were to be made to correct his course so that he would enter the Earth’s domain correctly. When all was secure, so far as he could control, he said quietly to Houston, “I think it’s go all the way,” and at the signal he fired the rockets which inserted him into the orbit that would carry him about 238,850 miles back to the safety of the Pacific Ocean.

He now faced some eighty hours of loneliness, and from the left-hand seat the capsule seemed enormous; he was surprised that anyone had ever felt it to be cramped. Aware that he had been motionless for a long time while Claggett and Linley had been active on the Moon, he began to worry about his legs, and for two hours he banged away on the newly provided Exer-Genie, which produced a real sweat.

He then turned on his tape, listening to Beethoven’s joyous Seventh, but remembering how Claggett had objected to what he called spaghetti music, he found it distasteful. Instead, he routed out some of Claggett’s tapes and listened to hillbillies singing “D-i-v-o-r-c-e,” which not even his longing to see Claggett again could make [638] palatable. When CapCom Ed Cater came on from Houston to ask if he wanted to hear the news, he said curtly, “No!” So Cater said that Dr. Feldman wished to ask a few questions.

ALTAIR: Put him on.

HOUSTON (Dr. Feldman speaking): Are you experiencing any dizziness?

ALTAIR: Negative.

HOUSTON: Any excessive dryness in the throat? Any spots in the eyes?

ALTAIR: Negative.

HOUSTON: Any blood in the urine?

ALTAIR: Who looks?

HOUSTON: I do. And I want you to. Report as soon as you check.

ALTAIR: Will Comply.

HOUSTON (Cater speaking): Your favorite shrink says it’s very important he talk with you.

ALTAIR: Shoot. He may know something I don’t.

HOUSTON: Crandall is here.

ALTAIR: I remember him. Joe Rorschach.

HOUSTON: He says, “Only reason you’re up there is because he passed you.”

ALTAIR: Ask him if he remembers Claggett? Toward the end of the test Crandall showed us that blank sheet of white paper, and guys like me said, “Outer space” and “The face of the Sun,” and stuff like that, and Claggett took one quick look and said, “Two polar bears fornicating in a blizzard.”

HOUSTON: Open mike.

ALTAIR: That’s why I said fornicating. You remember what he said.

HOUSTON: Dr. Crandall says, “Claggett was stable all the way.” (No comment) And he says it’s imperative that you remain stable. You have much work to do, coming up.

ALTAIR: I’ll do it.

HOUSTON: This is Hickory. You’re doing just fine. But we want you to sleep regularly, John. We want you to listen to the news.

ALTAIR: Hey, knock it off. I’m not depressed. There’s nothing wrong with me.

HOUSTON: For sure there isn’t, John. But you ate nothing yesterday.

[639] ALTAIR: I was vomiting.

HOUSTON: You refused to listen to the news. You cut me off and you cut Cater off.

ALTAIR: I’d like to talk with Cater. I always like to talk with Cater.

HOUSTON: Cater here. We’re not kidding, John. Thirty-six hours from now you have three men’s work to do. When you give me the word, I want to go over four special check lists with you.

ALTAIR: You mean one-man emergency reentry?

HOUSTON: It could be a little tricky, you know.

ALTAIR: I figured that out a year ago. I have it programmed on my papers.

HOUSTON: You really are a straight arrow. But we can’t just let you drift along up there for all these hours ... well, alone.

ALTAIR: Plans called for me to be alone over the Moon for about this length of time.

HOUSTON: Roger, but things were different then.

ALTAIR: They sure were. Excuse me.

He refused to speak any further, but when Hickory Lee came on again they talked freely about the familiarization trip to the Amazon:

ALTAIR: If I put this bucket of bolts-Remember how Claggett used to describe his test planes? If I land this in the Amazon jungle, I’ll know how to live on hearts of palm and raw iguana.

HOUSTON: They wanted to ask you if anyone had taken any alcohol aboard?

ALTAIR: Do they want me to take it or not take it?

HOUSTON: They thought it might calm things, but I told them you never touched the stuff.

ALTAIR: Roger. I had this wild-eyed football coach who preached that the worst enemies a young man could have were cigarettes, booze, fried food, refined sugar and girls. And I was dumb enough to believe him. I’ve continued to avoid the first four.

HOUSTON: Penny’s here at Houston with us.

ALTAIR: She’s not putting on a big act, I’m sure.

HOUSTON: She’s with Debby Dee.

ALTAIR: I would expect her to be. Tell her I’ll see her May second.

[640] HOUSTON: You’re due to land May first ... remember?

ALTAIR: Hawaii, May first. Houston, May second.

HOUSTON: They’ll probably fly her out to Hawaii.

ALTAIR: Negative! Negative! She wouldn’t want to come anyway.

It seemed as if the entire nation, and much of the rest of the world, was watching as John Pope prepared to bring his Altair back to Earth. Prayers were said and cartoonists hailed his solitary effort; television provided meaningful analyses of his situation, and various older astronauts appeared on the tube to share their estimates of what the real danger points would be. All agreed that a practiced hand like John Pope, who had tested scores of experimental planes and engaged the enemy in combat over Korea, was not likely to panic at the necessity of doing three men’s work. The highlight of the return trip came on the last full day, when Hickory Lee was serving as CapCom:

HOUSTON: Altair, our double-domers have come up with something everyone here thinks has merit.

ALTAIR: I’m listening.

HOUSTON: They think it would be good for the nation, and for you, too, if you would turn on your television camera and let the people see what you’re doing.

ALTAIR: I wouldn’t want to leave the controls and move around.

HOUSTON: No, no! Fixed focus. (A long pause) It was our unanimous opinion ...

ALTAIR: You suggesting this to keep my mind occupied?

HOUSTON: Yes, I recommended it. Strongly.

ALTAIR: You usually know what you’re doing, Hickory.

HOUSTON: Tomorrow can be a very demanding day.

ALTAIR: What could I say on television?

HOUSTON: You have a thousand things to say. Read your emergency notes. Let them see.

ALTAIR: Does Cater concur? He’s a solid citizen.

HOUSTON: We present it to you together.

ALTAIR: The hours pass very slowly. They are very heavy. (His voice sounded weak and hollow.)

HOUSTON: That was our guess. Altair, set up the [641] camera. Make some notes. Get your ideas under control, and in forty minutes we go.

ALTAIR: Does Dr. Mott approve such a scheme?

HOUSTON: He says it’s obligatory. It will bring you all together.

ALTAIR: Roger.

At nine o’clock on the night of 30 April, prior to the time when Pope would make an important course correction, he turned on the television that stared down at him from a holding place on the bulkhead just aft of his right shoulder, and no more effective spot could have been found, for the camera did not reveal his full face, but it did display most of the capsule, especially the welter of switches and devices which confronted him.

He could not bring himself to use the pronoun I, so he fell naturally into the we, and this produced a riveting effect: “We are bringing this great spacecraft back to Earth after an abbreviated visit to the other side of the Moon.” It was clear to everyone who saw the missing seats whom he meant by we.

“Dr. Linley should be in the right-hand seat, over there. And our commander, Randy Claggett, would be riding in the middle seat. He brought us to the Moon. It was my job to bring us back.”

Then came the most dramatic segment: “When we lifted off from Cape Canaveral our two spacecraft, this one and the one going down to the Moon itself, weighed 17 tons empty. We carried 35 tons of fuel, just for these two little machines. We had to know where 40 miles of electrical wire ran, in and out. We had to memorize how 29 different systems worked, what every one of them did and how to repair each of them. Look, we had 689 separate switches to flick off and on. We had 50 separate engines to speed us through space. And we had, I believe, more than 4,000 pages of instructions we had to memorize, more or less. No one, I’m sure, could memorize that much.”

Although it was not looking at his features, the camera gave an excellent portrait of an astronaut: smallish, slim, shirt sleeves, short hair, strong, firmly set jaw which flexed now and then, showing muscles, small hands which moved masterfully, a sense of competence and a startling command of detail: “I have a diagram here of the spacecraft [642] as it was when we started out on what will be a 200-hour voyage. Here it is, 363 feet in the air. In the first two minutes we threw away the entire Stage I. Its job was to lift us into the air, and when that was done, we didn’t have to use the escape tower, fortunately, so we dropped it off at three minutes. It had no further purpose. Stage II was finished after eight minutes, and down it went. Stage III, which sent us off on our way to the Moon, lasted for about two hours, then we got rid of it. The lunar module had two parts, one we left on the Moon on purpose. The other was supposed to rejoin us, but as you know, it didn’t. If it had, we would’ve dropped it, too.

“So that leaves us only these two small parts, the service module, which carries all the things that keep us going, and tomorrow we’ll throw that away. That’ll leave this little portion I’m sitting in, and we’ll fly it down through the atmosphere backward, to fight off the heat. It will be 25,000 degrees outside tomorrow, but we won’t even feel it in here.

“And then a drogue parachute will open, a little one, and it will pull out a bigger one, and we’ll land west of Hawaii like a sea gull coming home at the end of the day, and ships will be waiting there to greet us.”

He then turned and looked directly into the camera. “Some years ago a hundred and ten of us, all test pilots, volunteered to be astronauts. Six of us were lucky enough to have been selected. Harry Jensen, perhaps the best of us, all round. He was killed by a drunken driver with God knows how many previous accidents. Timothy Bell, the only non-military man among us, flew into a radio tower. Randy Claggett, who was a legend long before this flight, got hit by a wayward Sun. That leaves Hickory Lee of Tennessee and Ed Cater of Mississippi, and me, and if the three of us could persuade NASA to send us to Mars in a craft as good as this one, we’d lift off tomorrow.

“Mankind was born of matter that accreted in space. We’ve seen dramatically these past few days how things far off in space can affect us deeply. We were meant to be in space, to wrestle with it, to probe its secrets. I’d like especially to say to Doris Linley that her husband was coming home with a multitude of secrets and new theories, and we feel his loss most grievously. The world will have to wait till next time, Doris!”

[643] He turned back to his console with its 689 separate switches, and he let the camera run, ignoring it as he went about his work, and after a while on Earth they stopped transmitting.

The men at Houston who were guarding his welfare had been prudent in asking him to make the television broadcast, for he awakened on the morning of 1 May relaxed and eager to start his last demanding tasks, and although he was now approaching an operation which had previously proved exacting for three men, he neither brooded about it nor sought to avoid thinking about it.

When the time came for his stripped-down craft to plunge into the atmosphere at the tremendous speed generated by a return from outer space, it would have to hit that semi-solid layer, upon which all life on Earth depends, at exactly the right angle. If it came in too directly, pointed straight at Earth, it would encounter so much opposition, it would burn up almost instantly, and if it came in at too shallow an angle, it would fail to cut into the atmosphere at all and would become like a stone that boys skip across a pond of water: the craft would bounce once, twice, five, six times, and go careening off into space, flying endlessly, Never to be seen again, and when the limited supply of oxygen vanished, the man would lie there in his couch, unbroken, unsullied, uncontaminated, moving through space forever.

Pope checked the approach once more: No steeper than 7.3° or we burn up. No shallower than 5.5° or we bounce off. This means hitting a corridor 27 miles in diameter at the end of 238,000 miles at a speed of better than 24,000 mph. Let’s hope our computer’s working.

Laymen, when they first heard of this delicate problem of reentry, often asked, “If you come in too shallow and bounce off, why not turn around and make a second try?” and they were shaken by what astronauts told them: “You won’t believe what we do just before we try to reenter.”

John Pope was now preparing for this remarkable act of faith. With about ninety minutes before scheduled splashdown, he consulted his computer and fired rockets briefly to make the final small correction in his orbit. When the computer confirmed that his capsule had responded correctly, he activated explosive devices which [644] blew off the service module, blew it right off into space. where it would burn up as it entered the atmosphere. This left him without any support system, any large supply of fuel, any of the instruments he would require for extended flight. If he missed the proper angle at reentry, he could do nothing to correct it, for all the impedimenta of flight would have vanished with the explosion. He was alone and almost powerless in a speeding vehicle heading for near-destruction.

He had rockets left for one life-saving maneuver; he could turn the capsule around so that it flew backward. presenting the big curved end with the ablative material to the incredible heat.

HOUSTON: Lee here. You never looked better, Moonshiner.

ALTAIR: Things going so well I’ve got my fingers crossed.

HOUSTON: This is your day, Moonshiner. Bring her down.

ALTAIR: I intend to.

With quiet confidence he slammed into the atmosphere. and even though he had been warned many times that it would be tougher than Gemini, he could scarcely believe it when it happened. Great flames engulfed the capsule. wiping out the sky. Huge chunks of incandescent material. 25,000° hot, roared past his window, reveling in the oxygen they were finding for their flames. More colors than, a child has in a crayon box flashed past, and at one break in the tremendous fireworks he caught a glimpse of his trail, and he calculated it must be flaming behind him for five hundred miles.

It was impossible to tell Houston of the great fire; the heat was so intense that all radio communication was blacked out; this was the flaming entry that astronauts had to make alone, and the flakes of ablated material became so thick that he felt sure that everything was going to burn up, but the interior temperature did not rise one degree.

The flames stopped. He could feel the G’s slacking off as the capsule was braked, and when he activated the drogue parachute, he felt with satisfaction and almost joy its first sharp grip.

USS TULAGI: We have you in sight, Altair. Three good chutes.

[645] ALTAIR: Quite a reception committee you arranged. All the Roman candles.

USS TULAGI: Looks like you’re going to splash down about six-tenths of a nautical mile away. Perfect landing.

ALTAIR: That’s what I intended.

The NASA high command was outraged when they learned that the intrusive Japanese newspaperwoman Cynthia Rhee intended being present at Arlington when Marine Colonel Randolph Claggett was to be buried, as it were, and Dr. Stanley Mott and Tucker Thompson of Folks were sent to her hotel in Washington to try to dissuade her from attending.

In the cab on the way, Thompson said, “I’d call it the biggest surprise of my life. The way this Debby Dee has risen to the occasion. Hard drinker, hard talker, you’d have expected her to louse up the whole procession, but what does she do? She comes on like Melanie in Gone With the Wind. Perfect picture of genteel Southern womanhood.

“I’ve been through nine NASA tragedies now, and no astronaut’s wife has played her role better than Debby Dee. It would be disgraceful if that goddamned Dragon Lady showed up to ruin the funeral.”

Thompson had proved twice that Folks knew how to handle the funerals of its astronauts, once in the Jensen case, once when Tim Bell flew into the tower; he knew where to catch the young widows to evoke the awful loss, how to photograph the kids, the minister at the graveside, and he better than most sensed what a jarring note it would be if Debby Dee were confronted by her dead hero’s mistress: “I wouldn’t blame her if she swatted Madame Butterfly right in the kisser, but I would sure hate to see it photographed. Especially by Life. They’d drive us into the ground with a shot like that.”

He explained, when the cab neared the hotel, how diligently he had worked to keep the threatening scandal out of the press. “You got a man like John Glenn, a winner like John Pope, they stand for something. People make fun of us for cultivating the Boy Scout image, but dammit, that’s what this nation wants. This man Pope, bringing that Apollo back alone, that’s heroic. Give me two million bucks, I could elect him President.”

In Cynthia’s room, an inexpensive one rented by the [646] day, Mott spoke first, and in his gentlest voice: This is terribly embarrassing ...”

“Not for me,” the Korean girl said softly.

Thompson then launched his campaign, as unctuously as possible: “Now, Miss Rhee, we know how you slipped back into America ... illegally ... and we know where you came over the border ...”

She moved a step nearer her tall adversary, a porcelain hand grenade ready to explode. “Mr. Thompson, don’t talk like a fool.”

Tucker sucked in his gut. If it was to be warfare, he was prepared with some salvos of his own. “You show your face at this funeral, Madame Butterfly, out you go ... right on your ass.”

“Why?” she asked brazenly.

“Because the senators do not want a scandal.”

“Don’t they have one already?” When Dr. Mott looked bewildered, she said, “I mean your young farmer, Sam Cottage. I’ve been talking with him about the warnings he tried to issue, but I suppose your spies have told you that.”

“Rumors,” Thompson said. “We’ve already looked into the Cottage case.”

“You hope it’s rumors. You hope there’s nothing in writing.”

“Miss Rhee,” Thompson said in a fresh attempt at conciliation. “When America has two bona-fide heroes like Claggett and Pope, you wouldn’t want to ...”

“I am attending the funeral,” she said firmly.

“Then Senator Grant is going to order you arrested.”

“What for? Hundreds of people slip across the border from Canada ... and Mexico, too.”

“I’m warning you that he’s going to hit you with the heavy stuff. Like being a prostitute.”

She laughed. She had been a world-ranging newspaperwoman, and that was all. True, she had traveled with the six astronauts exactly as she had traveled in Europe with Fangio and the other racing drivers in order to catch their unadorned stories, but if any senator tried to expel her on trumped-up charges, she would create a real scandal. “A great man lies dead on the Moon. I loved him, and it matters very little who knows it. Because one day I shall write about him, and his widow will thank me.”

[647] Thompson grew furious. “For you to appear at Arlington ... Scandal sheets are just waiting for something like this.”

“It will be very difficult for you to stop me, or for your senators, either.”

Dr. Mott felt he had to speak. “This is a solemn moment, Cindy. I’ve always aided you, when I could. Now I’m begging you to stay away.”

“Impossible. Because I’m being escorted by John Pope.”

“Pope?” Thompson yelled. “Have you been messing around with Pope, too?”

“During the flight to the Moon, Randy told John-I’ll let him tell you. He’ll be here shortly.”

Within a few minutes Pope entered, accompanied by Penny, and as soon as they saw Mott and Thompson they could guess what was happening. Pope said, “We’ve come to take Cindy to the ceremonies,” and Mott protested: “Senator Grant and Senator Glancey expressly asked that she be kept away.”

“I believe I was Randy’s best friend, and I’m prepared to say who-”

“John,” Mott interrupted, “you could make some people very high in NASA most unhappy.”

“This is the funeral of my friend. The nation is honoring a sensational man, and I know he’d want Cindy to attend.”

“How can you know such a thing?” Thompson asked, red of face.

“Because on the flight to the Moon he told Linley and me, “Soon as I get back to Earth, I’m chucking NASA and the Folks contract and marrying the Korean.” When we argued against it, especially Linley, who’d seen a lot of interracial marriages fail, Claggett said, ‘When I was flying in Korea, I shacked up with this Jo-san-’ ”

“What’s a Jo-san?” Penny asked.

“A Korean whore,” Thompson interjected, and Pope stared at him venomously: “You use that word again, Thompson, I’ll take you apart. I met Claggett’s Jo-san. Two years of college. Caught up in the war. Impossible to live, so she took a job slinging hash for the American flyers and Claggett fell in love with her. Told Linley and me she was the best loving he’d ever had, and he was mortally ashamed he hadn’t married her. Told us he didn’t want to lose happiness twice, so he was going to marry this other [648] Korean woman,” and he bowed toward Cindy.

“Mrs. Pope,” Thompson pleaded. “Can’t you bring some sense-”

“I can vouch for what my husband has just said because after you men and my two senators put the arm on Randy not to leave Debby before the flight, he took me aside in the committee room and said, and I quote with great accuracy: ‘Tell your boys they win now, but when I get back they can all go fuck a duck.’ ”

Thompson gasped. “Are you in this with your husband?” he asked weakly.

“I sure am. And so is Debby Dee, it may surprise you to hear. I had the decency to warn her over the phone that John was determined to escort Cindy, and she said, ‘Bring the slant-eyed sonnombeech along. I think Randy would’ve had a lively time with that one.’ ”

“Pope!” Tucker Thompson shouted. “I warn you, the big men aren’t going to like this!” and Penny said, “My husband’s a big man now, and I’m his wife, and we’re taking Cindy right into the front row where she belongs.”

“Your senators will fire you if-”

“I work for my senators,” Penny said. “I do not allow them to dictate how I behave.” And when Debby Dee arrived, mascara running and blouse awry, Penny took charge. “Debby Dee, this is Miss Rhee,” and Debby Dee said gently, “I suppose you could say we’ve already met ... through a third party.”

Tucker Thompson charged right into battle. “Mrs. Claggett, do you want this woman at your funeral?” And he jabbed an accusing finger at Cindy.

“I invited her,” Debby said. “Wouldn’t I look cheap as hell if I disinvited her?”

Before Tucker could launch his moralities, Senator Grant entered, bearing on his arm the beautiful widow of Dr. Paul Linley, a tall ebon-faced woman of thirty. His voice choking, he said, “I encouraged my dear friend Gawain Butler to place his nephew in our NASA program. So in a sense I feel responsible for his death.”

“And for his chance to prove his heroism,” Doris said and Penny, comparing the two widows, thought: How wonderfully American they are. Debby Dee, rock-hard from deepest Texas; Doris Linley, survivor of the Detroit ghettos. Which one made the greater journey to get here? And [649] although she knew it was exhibitionistic, she could not restrain herself; dashing across the room, she embraced them and for just a moment there were tears which could not be contained.

After the stately ceremonies with the seventeen-gun salutes and the muffled drums, Debbie Dee, a blowzy woman of forty-seven, who had maintained a gracious, solemn posture for Thompson’s cameras during nine heartbreaking days, grabbed Doris Linley’s hand and growled, “Let’s get the hell out of here and find some beer.” They drove in their government limousine to Penny Pope’s Washington apartment, where with John and Cindy Rhee they guzzled beer through the night.

“Randy Claggett was one of the world’s basic men,” Debby Dee said, “and I was privileged to know him. Good times and bad, he was one hell of a man.”

“What was it like, Deb, when you were widowed the first time?” Cindy asked, and after this had been explored for more than half an hour, she wanted to know how they had lived at Pax River.

“Ask them,” Debby Dee said, pointing to the Popes, and for two hours they reminisced about the days at Solomons Island, the old cars, the Pax-Jax-Lax routine, the dogfights above the Chesapeake.

“What was it like?” Cindy asked Doris. “I mean, his being black and not a military man?”

“Everything Paul did, and he did so much, he started way behind. Black boys always do. But he caught up fast. At the end he was as good as any of them.” And she looked to Captain Pope for confirmation.

“In brains he was better than most,” John said. “In courage no one surpassed him.” When he tried to visualize Linley, all he could see was the irrepressible comedian leading cheers for Albuquerque Technological Institution, and he had to subdue a smile, but after a while he said, “For sixty-six hours and seventeen minutes he was my seatmate in space. None better.” Then he walked across the room and kissed Doris.

When the night was almost gone, Cindy said, “I loved him in a different way. The symbol ...”

“If there was one thing Claggett wasn’t,” Debby said, “it was a symbol. That sonnombeech was basic.”

“He was the astronaut,” Cindy said. “Not Glenn, not  [650] Shepard, not you, John Pope. He spent more hours in space than any other man, and I watched him. He approached a spacecraft as if he owned it. Once he said as he left for the sixteen-day flight with you, Pope, ‘Well, let’s see how we fly this bucket of bolts.’ ”

Debby Dee wiped her eyes, and later, in her hotel room, Rhee Soon-Ka started her manuscript about the Solid Six:

They took a dark stone and stood it in a dark place, publishing to the world that Randy Claggett was dead. But we who knew him were convinced that his spirit still stunned and startled and confused the ribbon clerks, as always.