“I don’t know. She’s been the only one to answer up until now. I’ll try. Stand by.” The signal went blank as Tony switched channels back in the lander.
Stetson left the fallen Hui and went back over to Dr. Xu. He grasped the shoulder of the only other person standing on the lunar surface and began to motion toward his fallen comrade. Looking into Xu’s face, Stetson realized he was talking to someone—it had to be Tony. Xu said something and then nodded his head in understanding.
Stetson helped lower the pilot to the cold and gray lunar surface. As he did so, he realized that the fallen Chinese would likely lie there, losing heat through his suit into the cold lunar surface for at least the thirty minutes it would take to get Hui to the Altair and into the airlock. He’d hoped to cycle two at a time into the Altair, but clearly Hui would not live long enough to get both her and the other stricken Chinese through the airlock at the same time. This was getting complicated.
Stetson and Xu quickly bounded back to Captain Hui, using a combination run and skipping motion. Once there, they picked her up, one man under each of her arms, and began carrying her toward the Altair. They passed the other injured man on their way, causing Stetson to wonder if they would be able to get back to him before his suit went dead.
After what seemed like an eternity, they reached the Altair and the lift that would carry Stetson and Hui up twenty feet to the airlock.
“Tony, tell the other taikonaut that the lift will only carry two people at a time and that I need to get Hui up and into the airlock as soon as possible. He needs to wait here for me to come back so we can get his other colleague. Okay?”
“Roger that.” Tony’s reply was brief. “I’m on it.”
Stetson eased Hui from Xu’s shoulders and dragged her onto the lift. He then gently pushed Xu away and closed the gate. It was clear from looking at Xu that the doctor understood, though he was starting to look worried.
Knowing that the man would not hear him, Stetson nonetheless said, “I’ll be back.”
With the push of a button, the lift moved upward toward the Altair’s airlock. Stetson took that brief moment to look back toward the man they’d left on the surface. He was lying there, unmoving—a silent testament to the frailty of man.
Stetson, with a scant few seconds available for self-reflection, thought to himself, For all this hardware and technology, it all still comes down to this. People. With all our frailties and weaknesses, we still come and do the hard things. Let’s see those damned robotic probes do this! Thank God for our manned program.
The lift jolted and abruptly stopped.
Stetson was startled out of his introspection. He quickly pressed the start button. Nothing happened. The lift didn’t budge. He pressed the stop button and then the start button. Nothing.
“Come on! Does nothing work on this damn ship!” Bill slapped the wall of the lift in frustration. “Tony! The lift stopped. We’re almost to the top, perhaps eight feet from the platform. I messed with the buttons and nothing happens. It’s stuck.”
“Can you get the captain to the platform? Do I need to suit up and come help?”
“There’s no time for that. I’ll have to figure something out. Stand by.” He looked around him on the platform and didn’t immediately see any way to get the elevator working again. The eight feet between him and the platform that led to the airlock wouldn’t have been a huge problem if it had just been him stuck. He could easily jump up, grasp the platform’s ledge, and then pull himself up. But it wasn’t himself he was trying to save. It was the unconscious and likely suffocating Captain Hui that he was trying to save, and she was, at this point, no different than a three-hundred-and-fifty-pound sandbag.
“Tony, I’m going to try to hoist Hui up on the platform. In one-sixth gravity, she won’t really weigh all that much, maybe sixty pounds, but it’ll be a bulky sixty pounds to push up. Here goes.”
Stetson leaned forward and pulled Hui upright. He lifted her apparently lifeless body over his shoulder and maneuvered himself toward the side of the elevator closest to the platform above. He then took a deep breath and shoved. As he was lifting, his right foot slipped suddenly backward, causing him to lose his balance. He and Hui’s body wavered and slipped to one side, running into the wire wall of the elevator and then tumbling to its floor.
“That didn’t work so well,” Stetson muttered under his breath.
Without any more hesitation, he grabbed Hui and tried again. This time neither foot slipped and Hui’s upper body did land on the platform. But it didn’t stay there. As Stetson shifted his hands to push on her lower body, she slipped off and fell back on top of Stetson, once again causing him to lose his footing and fall backward into the wire wall.
“There’s got to be a better way. I need a rope or something.”
“A rope? We’ve got a rope. It’s with the surface-exploration kit that we’re throwing overboard. I can get it in the airlock in just a few minutes. Leave her on the platform and come on up. I’ll cycle the airlock so you can come in and get it.”
“I don’t see another way.” Stetson was already lowering Hui gently to the elevator floor. “On my way.”
Looking like a comic-book character, Stetson bent his knees and sprang upward toward the platform in a maneuver that would have been simply impossible to achieve under normal gravity conditions. The upper two-thirds of his body landed on the platform and bounced almost a foot in the air. He had to quickly reach out and grab one of the crisscrossed diagonal beams on the walkway next to where he landed to keep from falling back down to the elevator.
“I feel like the Michelin Man. Somebody’s got to invent a better damned spacesuit!”
Stetson pulled himself up and walked quickly toward the closed airlock door. Just as he arrived, the door opened slightly, and he saw a cloud of dust poof outward around the edges. Tony had vented the airlock so Stetson could quickly get the tether he needed to save Captain Hui. He reached down, grabbed the tether, and started back toward the stuck elevator.
“Bill, I just lost communication with Dr. Xu. He just lost power in his suit while we were talking. I bet that probably means that the injured pilot has lost power also.”
“Great. Just great. Thanks for telling me. We’ve got to move faster.”
While talking, Stetson maneuvered himself back to the upper portion of the platform and clipped one end of the tether to a support strut. He tossed the other end down onto the elevator platform next to Hui’s body. Taking a pose that would appear very awkward on the live television feed from the external cameras, Stetson dropped onto his stomach with his legs dangling in the open space above the elevator platform. He then lowered himself back down. It was not graceful, but it worked.
He quickly secured the tether to Hui’s suit and attached it to where he thought its Chinese equivalent tether would be designed to attach. Though he was tempted to peer again through the visor to assess Hui’s condition, he did not. There was simply no time.
He again hoisted himself up from the elevator and onto the platform. This time, he was not so ungainly. Once there, he looped the tether around a nearby strut to provide some mechanical advantage, and began to pull. It was not the smoothest of ascents—Hui’s body dangled to and fro and even banged into the sides of the elevator cage as it rose toward the open top and to within Stetson’s reach. Once she was just below the platform, he secured the tether.
Since she was now tied into position, he didn’t have to worry about dropping her, and he could concentrate on grabbing her suit in the right place to hoist her up and to safety. After a few unsuccessful attempts, he was able to get her up and on the platform with him. He was out of breath.