At the garden of descent stages, Peterson halts before the first ALM. Dust puffs out around his feet and then drops abruptly to the ground. It occurs to him that he will finally learn which of these gold-skirted machines landed here first. They need to check every one, and one of them has that plaque on its leg. But for now…
He reaches up and begins to strip the gold mylar from the descent stage’s side.
Peterson hung beneath the belly of a North American B-70 Valkyrie, strapped into the cockpit of his Lockheed Martin SR-91 Aurora, five minutes away from being launched on a high-speed high-altitude reconnaissance flight over the USSR. According to his instruments, the B-70 was flying at Mach 2.5 at 60,000 feet but the SR-91’s mission would take Peterson and his reconnaissance systems operator to hypersonic speeds and three times that altitude, far out of range of Soviet interceptors like the MiG-25 Foxbat. This was Peterson’s first flight in the SR-91 but he’d spent hundreds of hours in the simulator and he knew his way round this cramped cockpit with a familiarity that made him long for the simplicity of his F-108D Rapier—or even the Habu, the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, he’d been flying until last year. If it wasn’t for the buffeting, this could be another simulator run, another chance for him to out-think the guys running the computers, as if there weren’t enough opportunities for something to go wrong anyway with an aircraft like this, which flew so high and so fast. Nor were the Soviets going to sit and watch him as he flew over them at Mach 6, they were going to try and bring him down, send up interceptors, though they had nothing capable of speeds greater than Mach 3.6, at least both NATO and the Pentagon thought so, but there was always the chance they’d rolled out some super-black interceptor in the last few months. The USSR had nothing like the SR-91, that much was certain—the details of the Aurora’s Pulse Detonation Wave Engine were so secret not even Peterson knew how it worked, although the first time he’d seen the aircraft’s distinctive “doughnuts on a rope” jet exhaust it had come as a shock since it resembled nothing he’d ever seen before, and he could almost believe the lame-ass disinformation USAF had put out about flying saucers and aircraft reverse-engineered from UFOs which had crashed at Roswell back in 1947. There was not much Peterson could see from the SR-91’s office, as his only view of outside was provided by a television screen on his instrument panel, and the small periscope he’d use for landing this bird. Since he’d climbed into the SR-91 back on the ground back at Groom Lake, he’d been going through one checklist after another, keeping himself busy as the aircraft was carried up into the air and north to the pole and his launch point, which had just been reached according to the B-70’s commander, who told him to prep for release. So Peterson put one hand to his stick and the other to the throttle, and stared so hard at the TV screen his vision blurred until he was looking at an impressionist landscape of clouds lit by a pointillist sun. His reconnaissance systems operator, “rizzo”, seated behind him in a sealed compartment of his own, began counting down the moment until separation and, as the moment grew closer, it struck Peterson that for all the artificiality of this sealed cockpit, in which he sat in his S1030 pressure suit, and its televised view of the sky outside, this was a real mission—if an interceptor shot him down, if a missile got him, he couldn’t just raise the canopy and walk away laughing and joking. At that moment, the rizzo called out, Now; the SR-91 shook, there was a loud “clunk”, and Peterson felt his stomach lurch upwards as the plane plummeted; but the TV screen still showed only that placid sea of cirrostratus. Clear, the B-70 commander told him, and the rizzo confirmed that the mothership had banked and was climbing for the return flight to Nellis AFB. Peterson ignited the PDWE, pushed the throttle forward, and gently brought the stick back; and there was a kick in his back and acceleration pressed him into his encapsulated ejection seat, fiercer than anything the F-108D or the Habu could have pulled, and he heard his rizzo let out a grunt over the intercom. His instruments told him they were approaching Mach 6 and were already over one hundred twenty thousand feet as they arced over the North Pole, and crossed the Arctic Ocean towards the Kara Sea. They were firmly in the mission envelope now, flying hypersonic thirty-five miles above the ground, halfway to space, the TV screen as dark as night, but he was on autopilot and would be all the way south one thousand eight hundred miles into the USSR. The Soviets were up to something near Saratov, but the last two satellites to over-fly the area had been shot down by Soviet hunter-killer birds, and the Pentagon didn’t want to risk another one—not that the SR-91 had a much lower price-tag than a spy satellite, but it was easier to get into the air. At two hundred thousand feet they started on their loop down to the Caspian Sea, which would take them back up over Poland and Norway, and over Saratov his rizzo says, Wow look at all them birds; and Peterson himself can see on the PIR display lines and lines of Tupolev Tu-22KP Blinders on the dispersal areas at Engels Air Force Base. A week later, those Tupolevs were flying south, and they sent Peterson off again from Groom Lake to find out what they were up to, and he watched as the Tu-22KPs repeatedly flew across Georgia and Azerbaijan and into northern Iraq, where they fired their As-4 Kitchen anti-radiation missiles in support of a ground invasion. Peterson went back a number of times and from on high he witnessed the Soviet tanks rumble into the oilfields near Mosul and Kirkuk, the clashes between the Turks and the Soviets on the border near Silopi and the Habur frontier gate, and even the NATO forces clearing the area of Kurds and putting them in camps. It got nasty down there, though from two hundred thousand feet up all he could see were fires and thick black smoke, battlefield wreckage and sprawling bases of Soviet troops. They sent up MiG-25s each time, but the interceptors topped out at eighty thousand feet and Peterson could only grin and wonder why they even bothered.
Peterson stands at the commander’s position in the ALM and gazes out at the lunar surface. Etched across the window is the LPD, reticulations and markings graded in feet, as if life on the Moon can be subjected to measurement. And then he thinks: the days and months of isolation, the miles he has ranged across Mare Imbrium and the foothills of the Apennines. He has counted every moment and every footstep, and though he cannot remember their number, he has indeed measured his exile here.
That ends now.
Fifty feet away stand eight figures in white spacesuits dusted with dark grey. As he watches, one figure bounces slowly up a couple of feet and then back down. Another, feet wide, one arm out from his side, raises a hand to his golden visor in a salute. Peterson is reminded of a photograph from the old Apollo days, and he wonders if that picture led him to his current situation. He tries to remember, but the memory has long since been lost: what did he think back then? That he too wanted to visit that dead world, to stand in that gray sand beneath that black sky?
For the past two years, he has done just that on a daily basis.
That ends now.
It is time to go. Everything has been checked and checked again. Alden and Peterson have spent hours entering data into the PGNS and AGS. Alden has also provided him with a cue card for the flight. He has aligned the ALM’s inertial guidance platform using Polaris as a referent. Though the ALM’s guidance computer has a program for the flight, Program 12, Powered Ascent, he cannot use it as it controls the APS and he will be flying with the DPS. There is, unsurprisingly, no program to use the Descent Propulsion System for an ascent. For the seven and a half minutes he is in flight, he must rely on the accumulated velocity, altitude rate and altitude displayed on the DSKY, and he must fly by hand so they match the figures Alden has written on the cue card.