It wasn’t until he began to review the service manual for the experiment rack—so as to figure out how to disassemble it for throwing overboard instead of fixing—that he began to consider his situation. There was a little bit of tightness in his throat, and Tony could tell that he was starting to sweat.
What if Bill didn’t come back? What if his friend were to have an accident and never return? What if the engines don’t start on the lander, making the trip home impossible? He really didn’t want to die on the Moon.
Alone. Trapped. Facing death. No way out. It was his nightmare, and at that moment, Chow stopped working and stared out the window at the dimly lit lunar landscape. Fortunately for him, it was very dimly lit and he could only see the area immediately around the ship due to the lights. Being inside the lit ship, his eyes were dilated and couldn’t gather enough light to really see how vast the lunar wasteland around him truly was. Tony leaned forward and pulling himself closer to the window.
He was letting himself go unchecked in a downward spiral of despair and fear without having other tasks to keep his mind occupied. He was so absorbed in his fear, that he almost didn’t hear the voice on the ship’s radio. Slowly, his mental faculties overcame the fear, and he was able to focus. He did hear a voice. It was the voice of the Harmony’s captain.
The female voice was weak and barely audible as it came over one of the radio frequencies that the Altair was monitoring. “…hear me? Please respond if you can hear me!” The only reason Chow could hear her was because the Chinese engineers had told their NASA counterparts what channels the taikonauts would be using in their systems. This was the reason they’d heard them before while orbiting. After losing them following the first orbit, they had left the system on autosearch mode. The Altair’s radio was programmed to scan these frequencies and to stop on whichever one was active. This was the Chinese suit-to-suit communications channel.
Chow didn’t react quickly, but he did react. He slowly pulled himself together and moved toward the radio. At one point he even shook his head and took a couple of deep breaths.
“Get it together,” he told himself out loud.
“Please respond…”
“Captain Hui. This is Anthony Chow of the Mercy I. Can you hear me?”
“Yes, yes! I hear you! Thank God you can hear me. My suit is almost out of power. Are you the one banging on our door?”
“No, that would be Commander Stetson. I’m back in the lander getting the ship ready to carry you and your crew home.”
“Can you tell your commander that we hear him, but we cannot open the door. We have no power to run the depressurization system and evacuate the cabin. And with the cabin pressurized, there is no way to open the door for us to get out.”
“Uh, I think I understand. I’ll relay that to Bill. Hang on. His suit won’t work at this frequency, so I will have to be the middleman and relay information between the two of you.”
“Understood,” Hui answered. “Thank you.”
Chow was now sufficiently recovered from his lapse to relay the information to Stetson, whose reply was classic. “Damn!”
“Bill. You mentioned that there is a lot of debris. Can you use something to smash their window or to puncture the skin of the lander? If we can get the pressure down, then they can open the door.”
“Uh, let me look around,” Stetson replied. “There is no way I can even get close to the window. It is too dangerous. And I doubt that I can get sufficient force to puncture the skin of the lander. I’m fifteen feet in the air, bouncing around like a beachball in this pressurized suit, and I can barely keep myself from falling every time I bang on the door. There is no way I can get this can to open from out here. Wish I’d brought some tools with me. We didn’t plan this well.”
“Unfortunately, they are saying the same thing on the inside. They tried breaking the glass, but it didn’t work. That stuff is almost as strong as steel. They’re still looking around for something they might be able to use to puncture the skin from the inside.”
“Well, then I’ll just come back and get the power tools we brought with us. That’ll take some time.” Bill grunted.
“It’s worse, Bill,” Tony continued. “You may have time and power left, but they don’t. Captain Hui told me that they have less than an hour before their suits run out of power and they start to freeze. And at minus two hundred degrees, that’ll happen quickly.”
“That’s not enough time for me to get back to Altair, find the right tools, get back here, then figure out how to cut through the hull, and then get them safely back to Altair. Not enough time.”
“We have to do something, Bill.”
“I know, I know. Tony, do they have any ideas?”
“Not so far as I can tell. Sounds like they’ve tried everything and used up their last drops of extra power,” Tony explained.
“Come on, let’s think on this. You might toss it back to Houston and see if anybody there has any ideas.”
“Done. But they aren’t sure what to do without power, either. Or tools. Picking up some of the stuff around their crashed ship puts you at more risk than Houston wants.”
“I don’t disagree with them on that.” Then it hit him. “Power is the key! Tony, I’ve got an idea.”
“We need one.”
“Well, I’ve got one, and it’s because of something you said. You said I’ve got power and they don’t. But they do. If they have enough power to run heaters in their suits for another hour, then surely they have enough power to run a pump long enough to get the air out of the cabin. They can use the power from one of their suits to vent the air, and then they can open the door.”
“I’ll relay the message.”
Hui listened intently to Anthony Chow relay Stetson’s suggestion. Her excitement and optimism grew. She looked around the room at her crew and settled her gaze on the engineer—the political officer who, in her mind, was suddenly being more of a political officer than an engineer.
“Zhi, can it be done? she asked.
“Yes.” Without removing his gaze from the floor, he replied, “It can be done.”
“Will you help? We can’t do this without you. I don’t know the lander systems and where the control circuits are for the pump. I could look it up if the computer had power and I could pull up the manual. But then, if we had power for the computer, then we could open the door. You’re the engineer. Do the job for which you were trained. Be an engineer.”
Zhi looked up from the floor and gazed directly into Hui’s eyes. Like two dogs trying to decide which was alpha, they stared at each other long and hard. Finally, Zhi averted his gaze.
“I’ll help. First I need to open this access panel.” Zhi pointed to Hui’s right at one of the instrumentation panels that ran along the wall of the lander. He rose from the floor, picked up a screwdriver from where he’d left it after a previous power-scavenging activity, and moved toward the panel.
“And one of you will have to give me access to the batteries in your backpack. There isn’t much time, and whichever battery I use will have even less power remaining—perhaps none.”