Venture’s landing on Keanu was different from that dark, threatening approach to Cape Canaveral in a T-38—the computer was still flying the vehicle, something pilots never liked.
“Two hundred, down at fifteen. Horizon looks close.” Now, at a height of less than two hundred meters, the NEO still looked round! For a moment, Zack had the feeling Venture was edging sideways up to a giant white ball. He literally had to shake his head.
His twitching must have been visible even in the thick EVA suit. He felt a reassuring pat on his shoulder. Tea. There was no way to acknowledge it—which she must have known.
“Coming up on one hundred, down at ten,” Zack said. “Electing manual.”
According to the flight plan, manual landing was the backup mode, but Zack and Pogo had privately decided that human eyeballs and reflexes were better suited to the delicate task of accomplishing a safe landing than a computer. Zack’s words gave Pogo the go-ahead to click the “pickle switch,” making his hand controller come alive, while also telling Houston that this was a decision, not a systems failure.
“Venture, go for manual.” Zack knew that Shane Weldon would agree with the decision. Besides, if they were wrong, they were dead.
“Hovering,” Pogo said, just as Zack was about to note that Venture was at forty meters with zero rate of descent. Instead he said, “Will you look at that!”
Twice as far across as a football field, Vesuvius Vent lay in front of them, a big black hole in the ground, its bottom lost in shadows.
“Do I turn on the windshield wipers?” Pogo said, stunning Zack— and no doubt millions of people listening, for years to come—with his coolness.
“Just set her down,” Zack said, entirely unnecessarily. “Fuel at eleven percent.” They’d burned almost ninety percent of Venture’s liquid hydrogen and oxygen, but had enough for a safe landing. (Fuel for takeoff was in separate tanks and fed a separate ascent engine.)
Gently, the snowy field rose to greet them. Zack could see individual rocks now—again, none tall enough to be worrisome.
“Ten meters.” He wasn’t bothering with rate of descent now. “Making some steam!” The invisible but hot four-lobed plume of Venture’s engines was vaporizing Keanu surface snow. Wisps of vapor rose, reminding Zack of Lake Superior on a winter day.
“Shutdown,” Patrick announced, as the RL-10s quit abruptly, and the shuddering and vibration inside Venture ceased.
“Contact!” The traditional blue indicator lit—
—Then went dark. “Shit!” Patrick said.
Zack could feel it in his stomach, the roller-coaster sensation. “We’re bouncing!”
Suddenly they were shaken by three quick booms—Pogo manually firing the small reaction control rockets spaced around the Venture cabin. “Keep her upright!” Zack shouted.
“Coming down again—”
Zack watched Venture’s squat, four-legged shadow rushing to meet them. There went the contact light—
“Goddammit!” They bounced again.
“It’s lower this time,” Zack said, almost convinced himself.
Sure enough, this time Venture settled and slid.
And stopped, safely upright on the surface of Keanu, fifty meters from the well-defined edge of Vesuvius Vent.
“Houston, Vesuvius Base here—Venture is on the surface and, ah, tied down.”
He patted Pogo on the forearm. He could see his pilot grinning, making a quick sign of the cross. Only now did Tea and Yvonne speak, letting out whoops of relief.
Then Weldon finally responded. “Venture, Houston. As they said the first time, you’ve got a bunch of people about to turn blue here. Next time, drop the anchor.”
Zack pointed to Pogo, who said, “Copy that, Houston. Tell ops I want credit for three landings.”
For the next few minutes, they ran through the postlanding checklist, making sure not only the two main engines but the RCSs were shut down, that Venture was level and not settling into a pool of water now turning back to ice. “I think we’ve got rock under the pads,” Yvonne said. “That’s a good thing.”
They also removed helmets and gloves, though two of them would be donning them again for the first steps on Keanu.
Zack stepped away from forward position and slipped past Tea and Yvonne. The Venture cabin was cramped—it would be very close quarters for the weeklong mission—but designed to be divided in two.
He pulled the privacy curtain, creating a vague “room.” With his gloves off, he reached for the keyboard to tap out a private message to Racheclass="underline" MADE IT—INFLIGHT MOVIE TERRIBLE BUT HAD A WINDOW SEAT XOXO DAD.
He hit send. Then the tension of the past several hours, the past four sleepless days, the past two years, slammed him like a sudden squall. He buried his chin in his chest and shook with sorrow over the miracle of what he’d just lived through . . . the looming challenges ahead of him . . . and the fact that his wife would never know any of it.
Worst of all, that it was her accident that gave him this opportunity. She had to die so he could risk death.
Megan . . . we made it.
When he thought back two years, he still found himself angry—at God, at the universe, at whoever or whatever was in charge. He was crying from sorrow, but also from fury.
“Zack, how are you doing?” It was Tea, having slipped behind the curtain, speaking so quietly that Patrick and Yvonne couldn’t hear.
The typical male response would be to shrug off the question with a noncommittal answer. But he and Tea knew each other too well. “Been better.”
“It’s been a tough road.” She patted Zack’s arm, then turned away, leaving him in this brief bubble of privacy.
He took a breath and wiped his eyes. They had made the landing; now they had to explore a whole new world.
Oh, yes, and wait for whatever Brahma might pull.
Well, he had been able to establish one important scientific principle: Tears don’t fall in a NEO’s gravity field.
Part Two
“LONG, GENTLE THUNDER”
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return to the earth, out of which thou wast taken: for dust thou art, and into dust shalt thou return.
GENESIS 3:19
TWO YEARS AGO
Tropical Storm Gregory was approaching the Houston area the day Megan Stewart was buried. The hot rain fell in sheets rather than drops, sweeping across the roiled waters of Clear Lake, obscuring the headquarters building at the Johnson Space Center, turning streets into rivers of slick menace.
It also transformed the procession from St. Bernadette’s to the cemetery from a stately ceremony into a ragged retreat. Zack felt a surge of sympathy for the more casual mourners, such as parents from Rachel’s school who felt obligated to attend the services but whose empathies would be sorely tested by hot rain blowing directly into their faces.
Not that the ceremony would be underattended. Zack had had no idea how many people would turn up, but St. Bernadette’s had been jammed. Not with just local friends, but workers from JSC and people Megan had worked with over the years: editors, producers, even a few characters who had been subjects of various profiles and interviews. Zack was not the type to judge the success or failure of a funeral by the number of attendees, but . . . there it was.
Of course, the shocking and public nature of her death contributed. The headline had made every news outlet. “Moonbound Astronaut’s Wife Dies in Florida Car Crash.” The story had a media throw-weight equal to the overdose death of some Hollywood actress/model/whatever. Megan herself would have approved of the perfect storm of tragedy and notoriety.