The image dissolves, leaving Borman alone in the room. Now the plinth is alive. The focal point in the chamber, its black surface still solid, is a TV screen of rippling quicksilver. He moves toward it and notices what looks like a touch pad on top of it, tilted up at him like an invitation. On the top of the touchpad is an indentation in the shape of a human hand. He tries to get a glove to it, but it’s just out of easy reach. He feels like a child grasping reaching for a sweet jar. Finally, he jumps for it, but only succeeds in throwing himself into open freefall above the plinth. He floats all the way to the roof of the chamber.
Reaching out with his glove, Borman becomes fixed in place by the monolith’s gravity. There he finds himself in the curious position of hanging above the floor. Ignoring the compelling sensation that letting go will mean falling to his death, he pushes himself back toward the podium and spreads his legs as wide as his suit will allow in an effort to hook his boots around the top. It’s not pretty, but it does the job. He reaches down and places his glove on the touchpad.
Everything around him changes.
9
Light floods the chamber. The ground beneath Borman shakes as if it’s undergoing some sort of massive seismic disturbance. He’s thrown into the air as a blinding white light surrounds him. It’s like a chunk of the sun has somehow made its way inside the room. It’s painfully bright. He’s forced to shut his eyes. The light is everywhere and it’s impossible to look away.
A noise accompanies the light. The crackle of electric static, lightning in a tube amplified to the point of deafening loudness. The sound is only momentary, but the blinding light persists and he is gripped by vertigo. He feels himself drift down to the chamber’s stony floor, where he spreads out his arms, dizzied by the sensory assault.
He keeps his eyes clamped shut until he sees through closed eyelids that the light is starting to fade. When he finally opens them, the chamber is different. Its walls are now transparent. Through them he sees a glorious vista of an entirely new planet outside. The Red Planet is gone. In its place, a blue green planet just like Earth. The planet in the film that had just played. Is this Mars as it used to be? Has he travelled back in time?
He feels heavier. There is gravity on the floor of the chamber, where a moment ago there was none. Not strong, but noticeable nonetheless. He rises to his feet. Remembering the quake and infused by a sudden sense of fear, he rushes to the edge of the room to check the surface of Phobos. As close as Phobos was to the red Mars, this new planet is closer still. Its much denser atmosphere reaches further out into space, such that its outer layer is now right at his feet, touching the monolith.
Phobos itself is starting to disintegrate before his eyes. Directly below him, a massive section of the moon has fallen away, skipping through the atmosphere like a vast pebble dancing across a pond. The Martian moon is breaking apart, and doing so with alarming speed.
“Your re-entry vehicle awaits.” A woman’s voice, loud and clear in his spacesuit comms unit. Almost like she’s standing beside him. Instinctively, he looks around, but there is nobody in here with him.
“Who is that? Come in? This is Colonel Frank Borman… Can you hear me?”
No response. Wherever that voice had come from, it wasn’t Earth. Over that distance, radio transmissions take anywhere between fifteen to thirty minutes. Whoever is speaking to him seems aware of his circumstances. There’s only one other alternative; someone much closer is monitoring his progress.
He walks along the perimeter of the chamber, trying to take in as much of his surroundings as possible. At the second internal wall of the monolith, he finds himself facing the area outside where he stood minutes earlier. Here he sees a part of the moon still holding together, clinging to the underside of what now looks to be a long black gantry that extends away perpendicular to the monolith.
This is the hard structure he had felt when his head hit the ground. But as he watches, this large fragment of the moon also explodes. A million meteors shoot off in many directions at once, but somehow all the debris thrown spaceward quickly arcs back down toward the planet — apparently its gravity is impossible to resist. The fragments immediately start burning long fiery ribbons across the Martian atmosphere.
The monolith is all that remains now. It has become a space station in an unstable orbit, already being rapidly decayed by the planet’s atmosphere. The floor beneath him shifts. His view changes as the monolith turns away from the planet’s surface toward outer space. The wall behind him is now taking the full force of the atmospheric friction. Within moments, that part of the structure is glowing red from the enormous heat generated by its contact with the outer atmosphere.
He turns back around to move closer to the gantry, which now points out into space, away from the furnace behind him. But now he notices something else out there. He blinks to make sure he’s not imagining it. It’s still there when he opens his eyes.
“Is that what I think it is?” The only response he hears is the sound of his own heart pounding in his ears as he tries to control his breathing.
Tethered to the end of the gantry is an Apollo Command Service Module. It couldn’t have been there before; the gantry had been embedded in the surface of Phobos. Impossible or otherwise, at this point it would appear to be his only hope of staying alive.
The floor beneath him jumps. Another tremor. Atmospheric friction, or the last fragments of the moon breaking away. He checks his air again. About fifteen minutes left. Using the wall of the monolith to steady himself, he takes a few more steps so the gantry is right outside.
“I need to get out of here.” He has no idea who he’s talking to and hopes like crazy he’s not just whistling in the wind. That someone or something is providing him with a means of escape. A door-sized section of the monolith’s translucent wall slides open, allowing him to exit.
He places a boot half outside the chamber, making sure to keep it firmly in place as he slowly swings the other leg out to meet it. He can still feel some force beneath his boots pulling him down. He has no idea whether this is gravity or some strange electro-magnetism, and at that moment he couldn’t care less. All he knows is it feels strong enough to hold him steady while he makes his way along the space platform toward the CSM. He steps through the open door and, moving slowly and carefully, with one foot planted at all times, he begins the walk to the end of the gantry.
It looks to be a distance of about 200 yards.
10
How is he still alive? And what on God’s blue-green Earth is that CSM doing out here? It’s an orbital vehicle. It’s simply not designed to touch down on the lunar surface. None of it makes sense, but he doesn’t have time to waste on trying to reason it out.
He keeps placing one foot in front of the other, moving closer to the impossible. Only a precisely executed sequence of events in the next few minutes will keep him alive — all of it predicated on his blind acceptance of the reality now confronting him.
It feels like it takes an eternity to reach the end of the platform, although in truth it’s more like five minutes. He knows this because his RCU tells him he has just under ten minutes of air remaining. Every passing second brings him closer to the agonizing panic of asphyxia. The platform beneath his feet is vibrating with the friction of the monolith bouncing across the planet’s outer atmosphere.
The CSM is identical to the ship he flew with Anders and Lovell. The gleaming metal surface of the conical command module is so highly polished, he can see his own reflection staring back at him. He’s examined the exterior of this beautiful flying machine countless times, but never before from the vacuum of space. It feels reassuring and terrifying at the same time. The spacecraft is not actually on the lunar surface at all. It’s clamped to the end of the gantry by its nose probe, the connector designed to dock with a Lunar Module. In theory, it should be easy enough to detach and fly to safety.