Moonfall Read online

  She shut the machine down.

  “Can we meet somewhere?”

  “For lunch?”

  “One o’clock,” he said. “Willoughby’s.”

  Moonbase Spaceport. 10:03 A.M.

  “Any problems, Tony?” Bigfoot was waiting for them as they debarked.

  Tony shook his head. “Running like a good little puppy,” he said. The program for landing at Moonbase was standardized, and the attitude jets were therefore not extensively used. They did generate enough vapor that Tony got more bogus readings on his way down. But it seemed trivial, and time was now of the essence.

  “Okay. Glad to hear it. We’ve got enough to worry about.” Bigfoot made a rumbling sound deep in his throat. “The space planes are here. And so are your passengers. Take ten minutes and be ready to go.”

  Saber smiled. “Plenty of time to relax, huh? Couldn’t ask for more, Bigfoot.”

  “Sorry, babe,” he said. “We’re a little pressed.”

  SSTO Berlin Flight Deck. 10:17 A.M.

  Willem Stephan arrived on station and reported in. Copenhagen had already rendezvoused with one of the buses, call sign Wobble, and was taking on its first passengers. The schedule called for the buses to load as the most efficient windows came open. Copenhagen would depart lunar orbit Friday afternoon, and Berlin, Friday night.

  He looked down at the lunar terrain. “I never thought I’d get here,” he told his copilot.

  The copilot was Kathleen Steadmann, from Bremerhaven. Kathleen squinted at the comet. “Just in time, looks like,” she said.

  L1, SSTO Arlington Flight Deck.10:23 A.M.

  Arlington had also required a midcourse correction to compensate for the programming, but nevertheless she arrived at L1 almost exactly on time.

  The station did not have standard docking facilities for the SSTO. Station personnel had converted a truck bay, and George guided the rounded prow of the big spacecraft into it. An airtight fit wasn’t possible, so the area couldn’t be pressurized. He still had red lights on his board when he’d gotten in as far as he could. He killed the engines on command and watched a group of technicians in p-suits swarm over the wings and hull, using cutaway cables to secure the spacecraft. The bay was located in the hub, which was stationary and therefore a zero-g area. The plane swayed and occasionally bumped against its mooring. Now a second team appeared, drawing a Fleming tube out from the boarding ramp. They connected it with the main airlock.

  The Fleming tube was a pressurized, flexible, accordion-like walkway constructed of metal and plastic, designed to gain access to vehicles whose normal means of entry had been damaged. This one was about thirty meters long. George went back and stayed by the main door, which was somewhat forward of the center of the spacecraft. When the lights on the door went green, signifying pressure on the other side, he opened up.

  A young woman in a dark blue uniform, similar to the one worn at Skyport but with an L1 patch, smiled out at him. “Welcome to LaGrange One, Captain,” she said. “We’re glad to see you.”

  An hour and a quarter later, George and his crew had cleaned up and returned to their plane. Two hundred twenty-four passengers were now on board. A few of the operational people remained at their posts until Arlington was clear.

  “Do you have transportation?” George asked the radio voice with whom he’d been talking.

  “Oh, yes. We’ve got the Antonia Mabry warmed up and ready to go. We’ll be right behind you, Arlington.”

  “See you at Skyport, then,” said George. He guided the plane onto its return heading and began to accelerate. Behind him, the lights of the space station were going out.

  MOONBASE BULLETIN. ISSUED 10:30 A.M.

  Luggage allowance per person win be fifteen pounds. Personal items, if deemed of excessive weight at time of boarding, will be prohibited. Save a life: Travel light.

  Approved, John C Chandler, Director

  4.

  Manhattan. 10:36 A.M.

  Marilyn Keep was a copy editor for GrantTempo Publications. She was attached to GrantQuasar, the historical novel division. Her husband was an account executive for Bradley & Boone, a rising securities firm. They had a comfortable, but not lush, two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan, just off Central Park West. Marilyn was twenty-nine years old, had been married four years, and wanted more than anything else to get pregnant. When we’re in a little better shape financially, Larry had been saying.

  She worked at home. Her assignments arrived every other Wednesday toward the end of the afternoon. Currently she was trying to get through Shadow of the Betrayer, a murder mystery set in the court of Charles XII of Sweden. Although she enjoyed her job, and liked reading historical novels, she could not appreciate the subtleties of GrantQuasar titles in the same way as those she might casually pick up in a bookstore. She was too caught up in detail for that, ensuring that eye colors and speech patterns stayed consistent, assembling time lines, running down anachronisms. What she did was more technical than literary. She knew that, of course. But she did her job well, and she’d saved more than one high-priced writer from a red face. Although nobody seemed to appreciate her efforts.

  Ordinarily she worked against a background of nativist stereo music, the kind of stuff that sounded like mountain streams and windblown forests set to drums and chants. But that day the drums and chants had given way to CNN, which murmured contentedly in the background. While she imposed her magic, her subconscious listened for words like comet or falling rock or possible tidal waves.

  There was almost nothing else on except reaction to the coming collision. Was New York safe? a host was asking a needle-nosed man. Was there a coverup?

  The needle-nosed man thought there was.

  A woman on one of the talk shows originating in Los Angeles, in a voice just this side of hysteria, proclaimed that everyone near the Pacific was going to die. She was not an expert, merely someone in a studio audience, but her fear so unnerved Marilyn that she called Bradley & Boone to ask Larry whether they shouldn’t think about getting out for a few days.

  “Everything seems normal,” Larry said maddeningly.

  She looked out the window. The streets were certainly normal, which is to say, jammed with commercial traffic. (Private vehicles had been prohibited from coming into the city in 2010.)

  “I think we ought to get away until it’s over,” she said.

  She could hear him breathing on the phone. In fact, she could see him staring at the instrument with that look he got when he concluded once again that he’d married an alarmist. “Why don’t we talk about it tonight?”

  “I’m not sure we should wait to talk about it tonight. If we’re going to get out of town, maybe we should do it while there are still airline tickets available.”

  “Oh, come on, Marilyn.” He sounded annoyed, as if this were somehow her fault. “We can’t just take off in the middle of the week and go run into the woods. We don’t have the money for something like that. And anyhow, I’ve got commitmeats here. I’m not able to just walk out the door because everybody’s getting excited about a comet.”

  “It’s not the middle of the week. It’s Thursday.”

  “Shoot me. I missed by a day.”

  “They’re saying New York might get hit by tidal waves.”

  “Marilyn, listen to yourself. The city’s going to be here next week, just like it always is. But I tell you what: Get tickets for tomorrow night. Where do you want to go?”

  She didn’t care. As long as it was higher ground.

  “Try Columbus,” he said, his voice suggesting that she had panicked, but that it was all right, he’d go along with it. “We can stay with my folks.”

  She called TransWorld. They were booked through the weekend. So was every other airline at JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark.

  So was Amtrak.

  NEWSNET. 12:30 P.M. UPDATE

  (Click for details.)

  SSTOs, LOWELL RESCUE EFFORT

  Space Planes Make First Flight Beyond Earth
-Orbit

  Lowell Enroute To Skyport When Evacuees

  Moonbose Not Expected To Survive Collision

  PACRAIL TO SEEK NEW FARE INCREASE

  LA. Monorail Still Losing Money In Third Year Of Operation

  SIDNEY PAUL DIES IN COMMUTER PLANE CRASH

  47-Year-Old Actor Remembered As Octavius In Battle Eagles

  Wind Shear Blamed

  CONGRESS APPROVES SOCIAL SECURITY FUNDING BILL

  $30 Billion Infusion To Keep System Afloat Until ’28

  PRICE OF GAS DROPS FOR NINTH STRAIGHT MONTH

  Solarcors, Public Transport, Powersats Credited With Turnaround

  COMPOSER RESCUES CHILD IN LONG ISLAND FIRE

  Karen Baker Won Emmy For “I Left My Heart On The LTA”

  WOLFZIGER INDICTED FOR GENETIC RESEARCH VIOLATIONS

  Madison DA Will Ask Maximum 20-Year Sentence

  FBI SURROUNDS ANTI-TAX GROUP’S ENCLAVE

  Church Of The Universal God Does Not Recognize IRS

  “Caesar Has Forfeited His Right To Tax”

  CLINTON RETURNS TO WHITE HOUSE FOR EDUCATION BILL CEREMONY

  78-Year-Old Former President Applauds Bipartisan Effort

  “This Time We Must Make It Work”

  San Francisco. 9:31 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time (12:31 P.M. EDT).

  Jerry Kapchik was chief of the personal tax branch for Bennett & McGee accountants. He was young and energetic, and was on the inside track for the department manager’s job when it would become vacant at the end of the summer. Jerry made friends easily, enjoyed Wednesday night bridge at the club, and was a rabid 49ers fan. Life was good. But the host on the radio in his office was talking about the comet, and his listeners were calling in and saying things were a lot worse than anybody knew. Get away from the ocean, they were saying.

  Jerry wasn’t much inclined to take his talk shows seriously. But one of the file clerks had gotten a call from home and asked for the rest of the day off. Before she left, she told Jerry that the situation wasn’t good, and she didn’t think she’d be back next day either. “Tell you the truth, I’m getting out of town until everything blows over.”

  Worst possible time, of course: Filing day was Monday.

  “It won’t help your career,” he’d warned her, but she only shrugged.

  He’d wondered if she understood how absurd she looked. And it was absurd, like one of those movies about the Middle Ages where there’s a comet or an eclipse and everybody falls on the ground in a panic. Still, he’d heard the reports that they might lose the Moon. It was hard to believe that pieces from the Moon could fall all the way into San Francisco Bay. But what did he know?

  For Jerry, the world was a happy place. He’d learned from his father to make sure he lived in the present and not exclusively in the future. So he took time to smell the roses. He had Marisa, two bright kids, a lovely Tudor home in Pacifica, a clutch of orange trees, a two-car garage, a perfect lawn, a playhouse for the kids, and a healthy bank account. The only thorn in his side was a series of allergies against which he was constantly taking medication.

  He could see the Bay from his office window. It was a beautiful, sun-splashed day. A few sails were sprinkled across the calm blue sea, and a freighter moved against the horizon. It was impossible to believe anything was amiss. But he wondered whether it wouldn’t be a good idea to put some things in the cars, to get ready to clear out. Just in case.

  Micro Flight Deck. 12:36 P.M.

  Tony needed two orbits instead of one to achieve rendezvous with Berlin. The Micro came up from behind and off the port quarter. The sight of the big SSTO ahead, its wings and tail fins gleaming in the sun, introduced a surreal quality to the moment. It was like the automobile commercials that show a small family van jouncing across a cratered moonscape.

  He exchanged greetings with the pilot, and turned docking over to the onboard computer. Then he activated the PA. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “as you can see if you look out the right-hand windows, we’ve caught up with your ticket home. It’s going to take a while, though, before we can hook up with her. As you’re aware, the space plane has been running a little behind, and we’ve come in on a course that’s going to require some maneuvering on our part. It’ll probably be forty minutes or so before we dock. So just relax. If you need to go to the rest room or leave your seat for any reason, this is a good time. Once we begin to move, we’ll want everyone buckled down. I’ll be putting on the warning light shortly. Enjoy your “flight home.”

  “You know,” said Saber, “these people are going to be on that plane a long time. It’ll be thirty-some hours before departure. Plus whatever the flight time is to Skyport.”

  “Yeah,” said Tony. “I hope they brought a lot of sandwiches.”

  Saber made a face. “I hope they have good ventilation.”

  The computer announced a countdown to the maneuvering sequence. Tony went down into the passenger cabin and affected a studied casualness with the passengers. He had sensed during boarding that some of them were uneasy, and he wanted to reassure them that nothing unusual, and certainly nothing dangerous, was going on here.

  The Micro would move into a position perpendicular to the space plane’s long axis. That wasn’t a problem for the computers, but it presented a point of view guaranteed to sicken the passengers. He explained that they might experience some queasiness if they watched the operation, and suggested they draw the blinds on their windows. When one of the fathers tried to do so, his son complained loudly. The father backed off, but picked up a magazine and buried his head in it.

  Tony returned to the flight deck for the approach. The autopilot made a minor adjustment to the intercept course, using a series of short bursts from the main engine. Then it began firing the attitude jets in a long, complicated sequence. This was the first time since the faulty valve had been installed that extensive maneuvering was required.

  The Micro rotated and brought the docking port into line. Its sensors scanned the SSTO while the onboard computer communicated with its counterpart on the space plane and compared the Micro’s actual and ideal approach attitudes. Meantime, unburnt fuel again leaked out of the twelfth jet.

  It was in the form of a fine haze, which began to interfere with the sensors, introducing a degree of uncertainty, and occasionally of contradiction, into their readings. The onboard computer, trying to compensate for the contradictions, fired and then refired the jets, pumping still more powdered aluminum into the Micro’s immediate environment.

  Tony gradually noticed the unusual activity. He frowned, but assigned it to the fact that they’d changed the flight plan and had come at the plane at less than an ideal angle. He was puzzling over it when Saber called his attention to the radar returns.

  The space plane’s image on the display had lost its sharpness. The returns were still timed right, but they’d begun to fade in and out.

  “What’s going on?” he asked, running a quick instrument check. Everything seemed okay.

  The jets fired again. Stars burned in wisps of fog. Saber shook her head. “Something’s wrong,” she said.

  Tony finally saw the gray haze of powdered aluminum just as the fuel warning lamp lit up again. He checked his board. The radar returns were getting worse, spreading out all over the screen.

  “We’ve got a burst line somewhere,” said Saber.

  The radar screen was becoming pure soup.

  He switched to manual and looked out into a sheet of fog. “Where’s the goddam plane?” They’d been within fifty meters, but now it was lost in the haze, invisible to both their eyes and their scanners. He opened a channel. “Berlin, this is the Micro. We have a problem.”

  Static. Then the pilot’s voice. Tony could make out only a few words over the interference: “…read you, Micro…drifting…advise.”

  “Can’t see a thing.” Saber switched from screen to screen. Everything had clouded over. The viewports now looked like poorly silvered mirrors.

  Tony went
to manual and tried the radio again. The transmission broke up completely. He needed to get away from the cloud, but he was too close to the plane to try his main engine. If he guessed wrong…

  “What do we do?” asked Saber.

  “I hope they can see us,” he said. “We stay put, and let him pull away.”

  5.

  Lunar Orbit. 2:51 P.M.

  The cloud that had settled around the Micro did not dissipate. The SSTO pilot, unable to communicate with the blinded vehicle, accelerated away to a distance of six hundred kilometers. Bigfoot dispatched one of the moonbuses, after it had offloaded onto Copenhagen, to help. But chasing down, and then getting close to, a vehicle that couldn’t see and couldn’t communicate but might decide to move at any time, was a tricky, time-consuming business. It looked as if the situation would require sending someone across. The bus’s copilot was in the process of getting dressed for the attempt when Tony roared out of the haze, still leaking fuel.

  By then Bigfoot had located the problem.

  There were only so many things it could have been. And Bigfoot nailed it on the first guess by the simple expedient of checking the inventory.

  Fortunately, no one had been injured in the incident, and repairs would be simple enough. But they’d lost several hours. And he knew whose fault it was.

  They made up part of the time by transferring the Micro’s passengers to the moonbus, which, after another two-hour chase, delivered them to Berlin. “Not in a very good mood,” Stephan reported from the plane.

  Since the Micro had already docked successfully at both Moonbase and L1, Bigfoot knew there was no risk bringing it directly back.

  No problem, he told Tony. You’re probably a little short of fuel, but not enough to matter.

  Well, there was some good news. The Micro would be operational again as soon as they installed the correct valve.

  But it was scant consolation. The flight schedule, with its carefully arranged windows, had been trashed; and by six P.M., Bigfoot still had not been able to devise a new one that got everybody off.