“Good work, Rick.” Trying to reassure himself as much as Carlton, Stetson added, “Let’s take it one step at a time. Since we can’t look at the board until the Orion returns from the Moon, let’s not sweat it too much. Once the team gets it in front of them on a workbench, they’ll be able to make that call.”
Carlton stood up, picked up his papers, and started to walk out the door. He almost made it before Stetson called out his name and asked another question.
“Rick, what other hardware might be affected?”
“Uh…” Carlton frowned and looked toward his feet before answering. “Lots. The Orion attitude-control system and solar-array pointing system, the Altair attitude-control system, both communications systems, and just about every other piece of hardware that has to be concerned with pointing in one direction or another. It’s all over the place.”
“Okay. Thanks,” Stetson responded. The tone of his voice conveyed both concern and that the discussion was over.
“I guess I’ve been dismissed,” Bill overheard the man mutter to himself as he hurried out the door and down the hallway toward his office. Bill paid it no mind at all. He had more important things to deal with.
Elsewhere, the now-docked Orion and Altair lunar-lander vehicles, thousands of miles away in space, separated from the EDS and began the remaining part of their journey toward the Moon.
Chapter 3
“Where’s Bill?” Astronaut Jim England was looking for his longtime friend. England was a tall, lanky man with a noticeable “hillbilly” accent that he seemed able to turn off and on at will depending upon the situation. Presently, his pronunciation of “Bill” would make listeners swear it was a two-syllable word. He’d known Stetson since their first flight to the International Space Station together back in the shuttle days and had immediately become a part of Stetson’s inner circle of close friends. England never seemed to meet anyone he didn’t like, and almost everyone responded to his warm personality by counting him as a friend.
“Hi, Jim.” Stetson’s secretary looked up from her computer screen at the astronaut. She had been Stetson’s secretary, or, to be politically correct, his management support assistant, for almost five years. Married for over thirty years, with a grandchild on the way, Millie Lawford was cordial, worldly wise, and very good at her job.
“How’re things?” England asked. “You look perplexed.”
“Bill’s calendar.” She grunted as she tapped at her keyboard and then clicked her mouse several times. “It’s a frustrating experience that I’d say is more like herding cats while being overrun by mice than trying to actually schedule adult professionals in the same place at the same time.” She managed a smile for England.
“Ha.” Jim laughed out loud. “Try tuna and milk.”
“He’s in the office. Shall I tell him you’re here?” She started to rise from her seat.
“No, that’s okay,” Jim said. “I’ll go on in. Unless you think I shouldn’t?”
“No, I’m sure it’s fine. Go on in.” She looked back at her screen, forgetting about Jim, and immediately frowned. “NASA just has too many meetings,” she half muttered to herself. “How the heck is he possibly supposed to be in all these places in one short ten-hour day?”
“Good luck.” England shook his head. Taking her inattention to him as dismissal, he walked up to the closed simulated-wood-grain door to Bill Stetson’s all-too-government-issue office. He knocked on the door and reached to open it in one quick, fluid motion. If Stetson were doing something that he didn’t want anyone to see, then he would certainly be caught by surprise.
Fortunately, Stetson was simply sitting at his desk looking at his thirty-inch computer monitor with a mild grin upon his face. He looked up and motioned for Jim to join him on the other side of the desk.
Stetson, though an astronaut and commander of the next flight to the Moon, the first flight “back to the Moon,” was still only a civil servant and subject to civil-service rules regarding office space and accoutrements. The simulated-wood-grain desk and generic cream-colored filing cabinets were the primary features of the room. On the walls were framed pictures of a shuttle launch, the International Space Station, Stetson floating in the U.S. Laboratory Module of the ISS, and many, many pictures of his wife and two children. In the family photos, there were none that didn’t have Stetson surrounded by the satellites that were his family. And in all of them, his wife and children wore great big smiles.
Jim rounded the corner of the desk and heard a voice talking from what sounded like a deep well. The audio was crackly. He knew what he was listening to an instant before he saw the screen and had his guess confirmed. From the speakers came “…forged man’s destiny of tomorrow. And, as we leave the Moon at Taurus-Littrow, we leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind. Godspeed the crew of Apollo 17.” The voice of Gene Cernan trailed off as Stetson pressed the pause on the touch screen.
“Watching Apollo 17 again?” Jim smiled and shook his head at the same time. “God, how many times have you watched that video? A hundred times?” He reached behind Stetson and pulled forward a chair. Though good-naturedly teasing his friend, he didn’t really take his own eyes from the screen as he sat down. After all, no modern astronaut had ever made it higher than a few hundred miles above Earth. Cernan had walked on a body about two hundred and forty thousand miles away. What astronaut wouldn’t be in awe of the Apollo-era groundbreakers?
“I have no idea what you are talking about, Jim. This is the first time I ever saw this,” Stetson replied with a smile. He pulled himself to an upright position and turned to face his friend.
“You know how long it has taken us to get here. Jesus, what took so long?” Jim said. “You know, I’ve been thinking about the Moon since I was a twelve-year-old kid listening to Reagan announce that NASA was going to build a space station. To think that man walked on the Moon just a year or so before I was born is almost bizarre.”
“Hell, Jim, I was five the first time I saw this, and it was live. If we wait much longer I’m gonna be too freakin’ old.” Stetson pointed to the frozen image of the lunar surface. “I’m ready. I’ve never been more ready, and I’m getting impatient.”
“Amen shouted somebody from the choir,” England replied. They’d had this conversation, or a variant of it, many times before, pretty much as long as they had known each other.
“Mankind just does stuff in fits and starts historically. We went to the Moon for a grand total of three years and then stopped. We just stopped! We took apart the greatest machines ever built by man and put them in museums. Heck, one of them is standing up as a marker for the Alabama/Tennessee state line. Can you believe that?” There were Saturn V rockets in the museums across the country and the Saturn IB at the Alabama Welcome Center.
“Been there. Seen ’em.” Jim could tell what sort of mood Bill was in. He’d also heard this part before.
“Did you know that that SOB Nixon decided to kill the Apollo program before Armstrong ever set foot on the Moon? I guess he just couldn’t stand the thought of Kennedy getting all the credit. What a vindictive sonofa—”
“Whoa, just a minute here.” This direction for the conversation was a twist on the usual one. “This is a new one, Bill. What the hell are you talking about? Nixon?” Though they had talked about how the lunar missions should have continued so that today they’d be having this discussion about going to Mars, and not back to the Moon, Nixon being an SOB had not come up before. At least not in this context.