I hit the “auto” button on the dash and leaned back, hoping that the computer would follow the radar blip of the rocket rather than a flock of gulls. One malfunction was all we needed to have a major catastrophe. After vowing never to ride a machine-controlled rocket, I was now hurtling through the atmosphere chasing a rocket controlled by a machine in a van controlled by a computer. I whispered a silent prayer to ask forgiveness for my stupidity.
I also wished that we’d had room for three parachutes.
“Phil,” Nikki said.
“Uh.”
“Your helmet. Or are you planning on holding your breath for the round trip.”
The choice wasn’t hard to make. I got my helmet off the floor and turned it the proper direction.
“Phil, just a minute.”
As I turned to look, Nikki leaned over and gave me a long, passionate kiss, then pulled on her bubble helmet before I had time to try for a second kiss. I wished I could see her face in the dark van; Nikki was an enigma wrapped in a space suit. All that showed on her mirrored helmet was the reflection of the lights from the dash panel and the various odds and ends of instrument lights on the equipment we’d added to the van.
Satisfied my helmet was fastened, I sat back for our ride as our van accelerated upward, following the directions fed to it by our computers. Jake gave a long yelp for joy that threatened to ruin our suits’ communications gear as we started our journey toward the Moon. And after Nikki’s kiss, I felt like I could have flown to the moon without the van.
Chapter 10
Although we were hurtling around the Earth at orbital speed, the blue and white globe below us looked like it was only slowly meandering by while we hung in space. We had followed the passenger rocket up through the atmosphere and then passed it from a distance as it stopped its acceleration and started its downward descent back toward the ground. We continued to accelerate as we headed on around the Earth picking up more velocity to jump free of the Earth’s gravity and commence our jump across space into the gravitational field of the Moon. Soon, the sun sank behind us and we spiraled over the nighttime sky, through the Earth’s cold shadow and outward, toward the Moon.
That sounds exciting. It was. For a few hours. Then we discovered the boredom of space flight in cramped quarters. We did little during our flight. We sat and talked, tried to get the pasty food through the intake port of our suits (Jake was the only one who was very successful at this), and tried to discreetly use the waste disposal system in the suits with a minimum of fuss. (After having a pint bottle of urine escape my grasp and nearly vanish into the back of the van—save for the fast action of Jake in grabbing it—I was not too impressed with the freedom enjoyed by the glamorous astronauts of the 3V shows. And there is nothing like a plastic sack of excreta sitting in a pouch on your suit to take the romance out of things.) We didn’t suffer having to be totally weightless. While we weren’t under anything approaching zero G, Nikki and Jake had plotted our course with an eye toward maximum speed since the van didn’t have to worry about expending its motivating energy. Because of this, we had almost constant “gravity” as the van pushed ahead and our bodies tried to stay behind. About the only time we were in micro-gravity to the point of being weightless was for the few moments when the computer maneuvered the van about—so we wouldn’t feel like we were hanging on our heads—to start pushing against the Moon’s gravity as the lunar gravity overcame that of the Earth.
I was thankful for the lack of weightlessness; after the few moments of weightlessness there was little doubt in my mind that I would have endured space sickness while Nikki and Jake sat beside me perfectly blissful of my sufferings. Whining about stomach ailments is not a good way to impress either an attractive member of the opposite sex or an old space pirate.
So about the only major problem was cramped muscles; you can’t just stop and step out to stretch when you’re hurtling through space. It wasn’t fun, but it wasn’t as bad as it might have been.
During the first few hours of our flight, Nikki was quite busy with an electronic astrolabe and a computer file which gave the correct coordinates that we needed to take. After a while she became convinced that the computer was doing a perfect job of flying us and only made an occasional sighting in for my peace of mind. (And I noticed that once she didn’t even bother to turn the astrolabe on, thus proving it was only being done for my benefit; talk about trying to soothe the pilot’s nerves… Nikki knew all the navigator tricks.) We orbited the Moon one time to allow the computer to adjust our speed and then located our first destination. Our whole trip took less than 24 hours—considerably less than the three days taken by conventional rocket flights to the moon.
Our computer dropped us quite close to the airless surface of the Moon; I tried not to scream as we dropped through space. We skimmed across the barren, pock-marked gray land whose lack of atmosphere made it hard to judge distances. After the computer made one last, stomach-wrenching adjustment and burped a warning in our helmets’ radios, we found ourselves hanging over the Copernicus Mining Base a little off the Equator of the Moon in the Carpathian Mountain range between the Oceanus Procellarum and the Mare Imbrium, east of Kepler Crater.
It had happened. The computer had flown us flawlessly to our destination on the Moon.
“Well, you and Jake did a perfect job in calculating and programming our flight,” I announced needlessly.
Jake gave a grunt that a frog would have recognized as meaning “thanks.”
Nikki, a bit more conventional, spoke English, “It’s nice to have a new type of problem for a change. I’m afraid rocket-flight navigation made me a little rusty at figuring orbits. Ready to go down for a landing?”
“Yeah. Now or never, right? I hope I can do as well as you guys did in programming the computer.” I wiped my hands against my legs, even though the sweat remained on my palms thanks to the fact that they were wrapped in heavy space gloves. “Everyone ready?”
“Take her down, Captain,” Jake’s voice said in my helmet’s speaker.
I flipped the turn signal out of its hover position and we slowly fell downward. Though there was really nothing to worry about, it seemed a bit anti-climactic after the long, computerized trip to get to where we were going with a flip of a turn signal. Hardly first class. I decided to have Jake get us some flashing lights to wire into the van’s dashboard before we took anyone we really wanted to impress on a flight.
The mining base was dwarfed by the sheer size of the Copernicus crater. The one-sixth gravity of the Moon made for spectacular contrasts of heights with the scraggly, un-weathered crater walls jutting up unlike any mountain range on Earth. Because of the greater curvature of the Moon, the far side of the crater walls dropped almost out of sight as we neared the rough floor where a giant meteor had impacted on the Moon before mankind had even started chipping away at flint knives.
The rocket sled ramp soon came into sight and the artificial smoothness of man’s handiwork showed on the rock around it. The ramp stretched down toward the base which was nestled in the northern end of the crater. Though the sled had been designed to launch the metal ingots mined and processed on the Moon, Jake said that the base had been closed just before it had gotten ready for automated production. (And the question none of us could answer sprang up to puzzle my mind again. Why had the base been closed down? Earth needed the resources. The best guess among the three of us was that the powers-that-be on Earth just couldn’t make enough money at it. It was easier to let people starve on Earth, perhaps. Who knows? ) After an eternity, we reached the floor of the crater and I carefully steered the van to land on the smooth field built for supply rockets. It was nestled among the huge boulders that jutted from the lunar dust that had filtered in around them. Beside it was the small, solar-powered beacon that had allowed our computer to home in on the base.