Back to the Moon-ARC

Chapter 24

“Houston, this is Mercy I. All systems look good for LOI,” Bill Stetson said calmly into the microphone. LOI, Lunar Orbit Insertion, would be the first time the Altair’s engines would fire during the mission. In a few minutes, the modified Aerojet RL-10 rocket engines, burning liquid hydrogen and oxygen, would begin to slow the mated Orion/Altair Mercy I spacecraft so as to allow it to enter orbit around the Moon.

“Copy that, Mercy I. All systems look good on our end. How’s the view up there?”

Stetson looked at Chow and then briefly out the window before replying, “Awesome. But it sure as hell would be a terrible place to spend eternity.”

“Nice place to visit and all that…,” Chow added.

Stetson and Chow had been watching the Moon grow larger, and the Earth grow smaller, with each passing hour. As the Moon now dominated the view from their windows, so did its gravity dominate the little spaceship the astronauts inhabited.

“Couldn’t agree more, Mercy I. Let’s get you guys in orbit and down to the ground for that visit.”

A few minutes later, the engines fired, and the Mercy I began to slow. At first, though Stetson could feel the engines firing and the resulting acceleration, it was not clear that it was having much of an affect. The Moon’s apparent size was still changing—getting larger. Looking at the instruments to confirm that the engines were, in fact, working and slowing the vehicle, Stetson tried to hide his nervousness. He knew the engines were functioning and that they were slowing—but his innate Earth-evolved senses could not tell that anything was happening.

After the burn, the instruments confirmed that they had entered orbit, and Stetson breathed a sigh of relief. Looking out the window, Stetson could finally perceive that they were not going to fly by the Moon and off into deep space; rather, they were clearly circling the gray world for the first time. He thought again about Gene Cernan and his bittersweet departure from the Moon almost fifty years ago.

With that, Stetson and Chow once again had to run through their endless checklists. They were going to leave the Orion parked in lunar orbit while they went to the surface in the Altair. Unlike Apollo, there would not be anyone in the orbiting Orion while they were gone, and Stetson wanted to make certain everything was in perfect working order before he left. He looked at the solar-array status screen and saw that it was still working normally—to his great relief.

“Mercy I, do you copy?” asked one of the controllers in Houston.

Chow replied, “We haven’t gone anywhere. What’s up?”

“According to the orbital-analysis guys, you should be in a good position to see the Harmony in about twelve minutes. Look aft, as you’ll be flying almost directly over it, crossing from eleven o’clock to about four o’clock in your field of view. The sun angle will be favorable, and if you use the terrain imager you should get a good view. If the Lunar Mapper hadn’t failed, we’d have some great pictures of the whole area for you. Unfortunately, all you’ll have before descent are the images you get on the next two passes. You might say hello to the folks on the ground there while you’re at it.”

“Roger that. We’ll make a phone call or two before dropping by.” Bill looked at the surface and squinted, trying to see something, but eyeballs weren’t anywhere near big enough to detect the downed spacecraft at the orbital distance of the Orion/Altair.

The terrain imager, on the other hand, was a different story. It was on the Orion to allow the crew to perform last-minute inspection of the planned landing site with ultrahigh resolution. From lunar-orbital altitude, the terrain imager could capture the license number on the old Lunar Rover—if it had had one, and if the spaceship happened to pass over the Rover during the lunar day. Night imaging was still good, but not as good as what would be possible in full sun.

“Imager is coming online,” Chow said. “Okay. Upload the targeting data and we’ll see what she sees.” Chow then used the touch-screen display to bring up what the terrain imager was viewing. With the imager tracking the ground, and with it set to nearly maximum magnification, the ground whizzed by dizzyingly fast. The onboard processors were able to extract still images from the video, making inspection of any particular spot relatively easy to accomplish.

Bill Stetson had been listening to the exchange in the background while he was checking out his suit for the surface EVA that would begin in just a few hours—once they were on the ground. He pushed off and floated over to Chow, stopping just behind him so that he could easily see the terrain-imager pictures as they came in. He also keyed at the microphone and tuned the digital transmitter across the band the Chinese were using while leaving the homeward-pointing communications links still in place.

Chow looked at the display, noting that mission control had synchronized a countdown clock to the time at which they should be able to see the Harmony. The camera would then lock on to the crashed ship and track it as they flew over, providing images from several viewing angles and giving the crew a good idea of where they should land the Altair. On the next pass, their orbital position would be different and provide yet another complete set of viewing angles. To complete their mission, they would leave the command capsule Orion and land on the surface in the Altair lunar surface access module. Then, if all went according to plan, they would bring the Chinese survivors back up in the Altair, dock with the Orion, and successfully complete their mission of mercy by getting everybody back to Earth safely.

“Harmony, this is NASA spacecraft Mercy I. Do you copy?” Bill and Tony kept their eyes focused on the imager screen. Still no sign of the downed vehicle.

“Harmony, this is NASA spacecraft Mercy I about to orbit over your position. Do you copy?”

“Not seeing it, Bill.”

“Keep looking, Tony. It’s there.” Bill tried not to show any pessimism in his voice. “Harmony, this is NASA spacecraft Mercy I. Do you copy?”

At almost the same time that Stetson and Chow spotted the Harmony on the imager, a signal burst over the intercom.

“There it is!” Bill pointed at the screen.

“Mercy I, Mercy I, this is Harmony! It is great to hear your voice!”

Though the surface was in darkness, the camera’s infrared augmentation and automated signal-processing algorithms were able to provide the two men with an image that was clearly identifiable as a manmade spacecraft sitting on a plain. It looked very small. As the camera locked on to the Harmony and tracked it, the image became relatively motionless as their ship flew overhead.

“Harmony, be advised that we are beginning our decent after the next orbital pass and will land as close to you as possible. Do you copy?”

“Copy that, Mercy I. We are eagerly awaiting you. Good luck with your landing procedure. Be aware that there are several crater rims to our north and west. There are boulders as large as automobiles scattered about to our east.”

“Roger that, Harmony. Thanks for the advice. It’s a little dark down there, so if y’all want to turn on the runway lights, it would help.”

“If only we had the power to spare, Mercy I.” Bill wasn’t sure the Chinese taikonaut understood his light levity. Rather than easing the mood, it might have been more unsettling to them. He made a mental note to forgo the jokes for the time being.

“We’re moving quickly out of range, Harmony. We’ll see you on the next orbit.”

“Understood, Mercy I. Harmony out.”

Chow looked at Stetson as they flew out of range and said, “Are we ready?”

“Damn right we’re ready. Let’s go get those people before they freeze to death. We’re supposed to start descent just after the next pass. Suit up!”

On the surface, Hui and her crew were elated that the two American astronauts were directly overhead and looking down upon them. But they were too cold for that elation to help much. It would take a couple of orbits for the Americans to land, and they might not land very close. Help was coming, but it would still be a little while.

They huddled together in the crew compartment watching the power indicator fade to nothingness. With the lander’s last battery drained, and the fuel cells fully depleted, they were now totally dependent upon their spacesuits for warmth. If nothing were to go wrong, they should be able to survive in their suits for another eight hours.

“Americans. How are we supposed to light up the runway when we can’t even heat our suits?” Hui asked Dr. Xu.

“I think that was an attempt to lighten the mood.” Xu smiled at his captain.

“Humor? At a time like this? Americans.” Hui shook her head. “How’s Ming Feng?”

“Hard to say.” The doctor peered through the listless pilot’s faceplate and didn’t look too happy. “He’s still breathing. The breaths are rapid and fitful, but he’s breathing. I don’t know the extent of his injuries, and I fear that even if we get off the Moon, he might not survive the trip back to Earth. Hopefully, we can get him out of his suit and examine him better once the Americans are here.”

“Carried home by the great Americans. Coming to the rescue of those poor, backward Chinese, saving us all and heaping shame and embarrassment on our country.” It was the first time Zhi Feng had spoken in several hours, and the bitterness was impossible to escape.

“Zhi, we’re going home. We’re not going to die! And we got to the Moon ahead of all of them. Our countrymen will be proud—and it is better to come home to our families than to die here. I miss my family, and now that I have a chance to see them, I will not begrudge those who are coming to help us.”

“I will. It is shameful. I will not be able to face my father—he served his country proudly and never had to bow before the Americans or anyone else.”

“Would you rescue the Americans if they asked?” Dr. Xu joined the conversation. “My job is to save lives. Though it grieves me that our moment of glory is now one of humility, I will gladly accept help to save Ming’s life as well as my own.”

“We took China to the Moon!” Hui said, more than a bit frustrated with the younger man. “Besides, we survived! We crash-landed on the Moon—two hundred and forty thousand miles from home—and have survived longer than we would have thought possible. And we owe that survival to you, Zhi. Without your engineering skills at keeping us warm, we would never have made it. You will be a hero!”

“Some hero. I kept us alive long enough for the Americans to get the glory. We would have been better off dead. At least then our countrymen could have come to get our bodies in a Chinese spaceship.”

“You will be quiet now, engineer!” Hui, now clearly angry, asserted her command position. She calmed herself but left the edge to her tone. “Zhi. That is enough. We will not let misplaced pride stand in the way of doing what we must do to survive. We will not serve our country by being buried here. Enough! Need I remind you that I am in command of this mission? We will carry ourselves appropriately with the Americans and represent China with pride. That is an order.”

Zhi did not appear to be impressed or affected by her order. But he did quiet and for that, Hui was grateful.

“It is not long now,” she said. “They will be on the ground within the next three hours or less.” Hui was reviewing the information provided from their last radio contact with Earth. Her colleague had stayed with her on the radio until she had to switch it off due their rapidly fading power. Had their counterpart on Earth not told them precisely when the American ship would arrive, they would not have had the power to communicate with them. She looked out the window and into the darkness.

“There are quite a few boulders out there. I hope they can avoid them on their way in.” The thought of trying to pilot a lander in the lunar darkness terrified her. They had not been equipped for a night landing, and they had certainly not planned on staying until nightfall. She then thought about the American Apollo program and recalled that none of them had landed at night, either. The Apollo missions were carefully choreographed to occur during the day and at locations that would provide direct line-of-sight communication with the Earth. Did their current lander even have landing lights?

Chow and Stetson were in their suits and in position for the Altair’s separation from the Orion and their descent to the surface. All systems checked out, and they were ready to go.

Stetson was worried, but not about going down to the Moon. He was worried about the timing and the fact that the taikonauts had less than five hours of power left in their suits. He’d have to get the Altair on the ground close to the Harmony, walk to the Chinese lander, and help the four taikonauts get back to the Altair. While he was taking care of getting the stranded Chinese, Chow would begin off-loading the equipment from the Altair that would enable them to get off the Moon and back to Earth. Once he returned, they would have to break out some tools to remove a few panels on the exterior of the spacecraft. That was a two-man job at a minimum, and none of them had ever tried it. Stetson was worried about the timing and the actions. If everything went according to plan, they would have about an hour or two to spare to get to the downed Chinese. That wasn’t much margin.

“Tony, separation in five seconds. Four. Three. Two. One. Separate!” called Stetson. The Altair jolted as it separated from the Orion. There was a slight roll as the two vehicles moved apart and then a low rumble—the Altair’s engines were lit, and they were beginning their descent.

“How many times did you simulate landing in the dark?” asked Chow.

“This is my first,” said Stetson. Unlike during any of their simulations, Stetson and Chow were descending to the surface in total darkness. “This was a mission scenario that was never supposed to happen,” he said.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Nope. All the sims had us landing and taking off during the day. We don’t have enough power to last through the night, and it’s just too dangerous to land in the dark. Why on Earth would we simulate such a thing? It was never on anyone’s mission plan!”

“So this will be your first time,” said Chow.

“Yep! But, like I said, don’t worry. We got pretty good pictures of the landing site from the Lunar Mapper before it crapped out, and now we can compare them with those we just took to make sure we don’t put this monster down on any rocks or a crashed Chinese lander. We’ve also got the terrain-mapping radar and some pretty good lights that I am supposed to switch on now.” Stetson paused long enough to activate four halogen lights pointing downward in their direction of travel.

Stetson continued, “The lights were put on here to help us avoid tripping on something in the shadow of the lander as we walk around. Depending upon the time of year and where you are on the Moon, the shadows can be rather long. We’re going to use them to help us land instead. Can’t talk anymore; I’d better pay attention to what I, er, the computer is doing as we land.”

Stetson returned his attention to the view screen and the altimeter data. Though the lights were bright, the ship was still too far away for them to reflect from anything on the ground. The radar told him that they were five miles from the surface and descending rapidly. The automated system was taking them to a site about three hundred meters from the Harmony, in an area that was relatively free of boulders.

As the descent continued, Stetson closely watched the cameras for any sign of the ground beneath them. He was painfully aware of what had happened the first time an American astronaut descended to the surface of the Moon. That commander had been Neil Armstrong, and he had had to manually bring the lander down to avoid some boulders that weren’t supposed to be in the way. They’d made it, but with far less fuel remaining than planned for. That’s why we have margin, thought Stetson.

“I see the ground,” said Stetson. And he saw it appear rather suddenly. One minute they were coming down through near-total darkness, and the next they could see the ground, and some boulders, just beneath and ahead of them.

“I don’t see Harmony. Tony, look aft and see if you can find them.” Stetson was hoping the computer had put them down in the right place.

The ship lunged upward as the engines further slowed their rate of descent. They were now dropping slowly toward the surface and, fortunately, the patch of ground they were headed toward looked wide open, with no boulders large enough to matter to the twenty-five-foot diameter Altair. Hopefully.

“Holy cow!” Chow exclaimed. “Look at the dirt we’re kicking up. I don’t see Harmony.” The engines were now kicking up an ever-increasing amount of dust as the ship drew nearer and nearer to the surface. Some of the debris was undoubtedly being blown far enough to impact the walls of the Harmony only three hundred meters away.

With a thump, the Altair reached the surface and the engines shut off. The lights illuminated the area around the lander, and, over the next couple of minutes, most of the airborne dust and debris kicked up during descent settled to the surface. The Altair was on the Moon, and neither Chow nor Stetson said a word for at least thirty seconds.

“We’re here.” Chow exhaled and relaxed just a little.

“Right. Touchdown,” Stetson replied. “We don’t have much time. Let’s go through checkout, and I’ll get ready to get out of here and over to the Harmony—if we’re in the right place. I never did see the ship as we were coming in.”

“Houston, this is Mercy I. We’re on the Moon.” Stetson knew that history was being made, and he was being very careful in his choice of words. “We don’t yet see Harmony, but I am preparing an EVA to find them.”

“Mercy I, this is mission control. Good luck. You’ve got some very happy people back home who want to see you and your passengers get back home safe and sound.”

“Roger that.” Stetson reached forward and turned off the microphone. “Now that the perfunctory remarks are concluded, let’s run through the checklist and make sure we don’t screw anything up that will keep us from going home. See if you can contact Harmony on the radio again.”

Chow adjusted some settings on the ship’s transmitter and spoke into it. “This is Mercy I. Captain Hui, are you there? Can you hear me? Please respond.”

The speaker remained silent. Chow repeated the message while gazing out the window at the lunar landscape. After another thirty seconds, he repeated it again.

“Bill, if they’re still with us, then they’re not able to respond for some reason. Their batteries and fuel cells must be totally out of power.”

“I was afraid of that. According to what we saw when we flew over, we should be only about a thousand feet from them. Their ship should be just over there. Right?” Stetson said while pointing out the window toward an outcropping of rocks about one hundred and fifty feet away. “I guess I’ll just have to go out there and find them.”

For the next thirty minutes, Chow helped Bill Stetson check out his spacesuit. As during Apollo, spacesuits were custom designed to fit each astronaut. Each connection had to be secure and airtight; there was no room for error in the unforgiving lunar environment.

“Okay. I think I’m ready to go.” Bill tapped a gloved hand against his sun shield, pushing it up and locking it out of the way. He certainly wouldn’t be needing it. “Any issues with the airlock?” Unlike the Orion, from which the in-flight EVA had to commence, the living space in the Altair lander did not have to vent to vacuum for each EVA. Instead, the lander was equipped with an airlock.

“It’s clear. Nothing but green lights on the panel.”

With that, Stetson finished making the last suit connection and walked over to the airlock’s inner door. It was barely large enough for him to enter fully encumbered, but he managed. Once inside, he closed the inner door and began preparations for opening the outer door—into the vacuum of space that was the Moon’s natural environment.

“Alright,” Stetson said as the door opened. “Tony, I’m on my way. While I’m gone, go ahead and start piling up the stuff we’re throwing overboard. Just don’t put any in the airlock yet. We may need to get our guests into the lander quickly, and I don’t want any crap in the way. After we cycle them in, we can off-load. We’ll assess their conditions, and then we’ll do the mods to the skin of the ship.”

“Sure thing. Good luck.”

“Thanks.”

With that, Stetson stepped out of the airlock. He had been totally ready for the outer door to open, but when it had, he reacted with a startle reflex. He carefully walked over to the door and peered out. But stepping out, on the other hand, was a whole different thing. As eager as was to step on the Moon, he felt a sense of hesitation, like looking down at a swimming pool below from the high dive and swallowing the butterflies in order to just dive in.

“Damn. What were those stupid-ass engineers at NASA thinking when they put the crew compartment on top of this monster?” Stetson said, forgetting that the live microphone was recording his words for posterity.

He was reminded by the voice of mission control. “Bill, is there a problem?”

Realizing what he’d just said into an open microphone, including the “damn” part, he replied, “No, there’s no problem. Sorry about the chatter. I’m just looking out the door and down at the ground—the view surprised me is all.”

But that was not what Bill Stetson was thinking. He was standing on the exit platform in front of the airlock and looking twenty feet straight down to the ground. I told those jackasses that putting the crew compartment on top was a stupid idea, and they wouldn’t listen. Falling twenty feet to the ground on Earth could kill you instantly. Falling twenty feet to the ground on the Moon in one-sixth of Earth’s gravity would break bones, and, since you’re three days from a hospital, it could still kill you. Dead would be dead. Stupid jackasses.

Stetson moved across the platform to the elevator that would take him down to the surface. To call it an elevator was actually an undeserved flattery. It was more of a moving cage that would take astronauts from the crew compartment to the ground and back again. Though there was a ladder, the lander designers had realized the risks of a clumsy astronaut wearing a spacesuit attempting to use one on the Moon.

Stetson entered the elevator, closed the gate, and pushed the down button. With a clank, the elevator began to move slowly downward. After a painfully slow few minutes, which to Stetson seemed like an hour, he reached the surface.

A few minutes later, Bill Stetson became the first American to walk on the Moon since Gene Cernan. He tried not to think about the external cameras on the Altair recording his every move. He didn’t make any pithy comments for posterity, nor did he think he needed to say anything. He was focused on his rescue mission.

He headed toward the boulders and, hopefully, the crew of the Harmony.

The boulders were farther away than they appeared. Without the usual reference points of houses, trees, or even clouds, it was very difficult to determine how far away an object on the Moon really was. The fact that it was nighttime further complicated gauging the distance.

Now acutely aware that he was potentially speaking to about six billion people listening back on Earth, he said, “It’s not as dark as I thought it would be. The sun is not visible, and the Earth is only about one-tenth visible on the horizon here at the limb. But the reflected light from the Earth is more than enough for me to see. It’s sort of like taking a midnight walk under a full Moon. It’s tranquil. It’s serene. It…it’s beautiful.”

Stetson had been walking for ten minutes, and he couldn’t discern that he was any closer to the boulders than when he first left the Altair. He trudged on, alternating skipping and walking, depending upon how the mood struck him. Skipping along wearing a two-hundred-pound backpack was relatively easy on the Moon, where it weighed only thirty-three pounds. He managed to cover more ground that way to boot.

Approximately thirty minutes after leaving the lander, Stetson reached the outcropping of rocks on its left side. Now walking much more slowly due to the increased number of loose rocks near the base of the outcropping, Stetson moved around the boulders. As he made his way around, he saw the Harmony.

Clearly a copy of the Altair design, the lander was also, clearly, severely damaged. Instead of sitting proudly on the lunar surface as was the Altair, this lander looked like a silver wounded animal trying to get back on its feet while dragging a broken leg behind it. The front leg of the Harmony was crumpled; the remaining three legs were bent at impossible angles. What was once a hopeful symbol of China’s emergence as a world power was instead a mangled mess on the lunar plain. Stetson was humbled, momentarily imagining that it was he and his crew similarly trapped so far from home.

“Tony, I see the lander. It is totally dark, and there is no external sign of life. I’m going forward. They’re bound to be in the crew compartment. Camera working okay?”

Stetson tapped his helmet near where the camera was installed. The camera was broadcasting and recording everything he saw.

“Camera working fine. What a mess. Be careful.” Chow kept his reply brief.

Stetson began walking toward the lander, and, as he got closer, he could see where the Chinese had run a hose from the ascent engine’s propellant tanks to what appeared to be a small rocket test stand, complete with an improvised rocket engine, pointing straight toward the lower left wall of the crew compartment. The connections to the fuel tanks were crude and, from all appearances, leaky. Whoever had made the connection had found a way to puncture the tanks and insert what looked like aluminum air hoses into the openings. The hoses looked to be in pretty good shape as they snaked across the ground and connected to the bent metal of the improvised “engine.” He couldn’t tell from what the engine was made, but since it was so obviously charred, it couldn’t have been aluminum. Aluminum would have melted during the resulting combustion.

The scorched sides of the compartment’s outer wall were clearly visible just in front of the improvised engine’s exhaust nozzle. Stetson immediately realized what they had done.

“Brilliant,” he said. “Tony, do you see this?”

“Bill, I see something, but I can’t tell what it is.”

“It’s a Bunsen burner. They built themselves a furnace to keep warm. A furnace! If their ship is like ours, and it clearly is, then they may not have had power, but they sure had fuel. The fuel they would have used to get back into space. Do you get it?”

“Um, no. I don’t.”

“Doctors,” Bill muttered under his breath.

Not wasting any time, Stetson explained as he continued to navigate around the crashed lander, trying to find a way to get inside. “Like us, they used hypergolic fuel in their ascent stage because it has to be simple. Cryogenic fuel has to be kept cold, and it still boils off. They kept their system simple, and, from the looks of it, they used the same thing we do—N₂O₄. Mix it with hydrazine and, poof, it lights. Simple. Only instead of using the fuel to get off the Moon, they kludged it to make a Bunsen burner to keep warm. The flame was aimed at one wall of the crew compartment, and I bet I’ll find them all huddled around that one wall. The flame is out now. And I can’t tell from looking at it for how long. If it had been us, the flame might have burned right through the thin skin of the lander.”

Stetson trudged forward and used his suit’s built-in lamps to see the boot prints in the lunar dust leading around the lander to just the other side of the crumpled landing leg. Whoever made the burner had walked this way.

“Aha,” Stetson blurted out without thinking first. “I see MacGyver’s boot prints leading back toward the crew cabin. And that’s where I’m going now. I want to meet this guy.”

Carefully avoiding the many shards of broken metal sticking out from the damaged legs, Stetson made slow but steady progress toward the door of the cabin. Moving to his left to avoid a rather large piece of metal, Stetson momentarily lost his balance. Had he been on Earth in his ungainly suit he would have surely fallen. As it was, he merely tipped to the side and then eased himself back into an upright posture. As he did so, he bumped into a strut that was, fortunately, not sharp.

“Careful, Bill,” Chow spoke. “Those metal shards you are walking through look sharp enough to cut your suit. Is there another path?”

“Maybe, but there’s no time. I’m being careful. I have no intention of venting to vacuum when I’m this close.” Stetson’s reply sounded confident, but his mental comment was not. Please, God, don’t let me trip and cut my leg off.…

Inside the Harmony, as the crew huddled together looking at their suits’ power indicators drop mercilessly toward the red, they felt the thump of Stetson’s benign contact with the frame of the lander. It wasn’t much, but in a place where no wind has ever blown, it was the first movement other than their own since the crash. The large outcropping of boulders had effectively shielded them from the dust and debris kicked up by the Altair as it landed, and, since there was no atmosphere to carry sound, the noise of a rocket engine descending to the surface only a few hundred feet away was absent.

“Did you feel that?” asked Dr. Xu. His voice was muffled due to the fact that their visors were closed to retain heat within the suits and their suit radios were off to conserve power.

“Yes. Yes, I did. The lander is either settling or the Americans are here,” replied Hui Tian, her voice also muffled, as she rose and moved toward the door. The crew compartment was crowded and now very cold. Though her suit temperature was at the bare minimum required to keep her alive and not hypothermic, she was no longer aware of how cold she felt. Instead, she was focused on finding out what had bumped the lander and at containing her excitement at the thought that help had arrived.

She neared the cabin window and peered outside into the near-darkness. At first she couldn’t see anything, and then she saw motion—and an American astronaut carefully climbing over the remains of the lander legs toward the cabin door. She turned quickly to face her crewmates.

“They are here! The Americans are here!”

She moved to the cabin door and abruptly stopped. She stood motionless, staring at the metal door that separated her crew from the American astronaut.

“There’s no power. We cannot open the door without power.”

“Ha.” Engineer Zhi grunted. “Of course we can. Just use the manual override. We trained for that a million times. Are you not thinking clearly?”

“Who is not thinking clearly?” Hui responded. “Zhi, did being in your spacesuit for so long make you forget that the cabin is pressurized? We’ve got close to one atmosphere of air in here pushing on the door. And there is no pressure on the other side. When we EVA, we have to vent the cabin first, and that requires power. The door opens inward. Without venting the air, the pressure is enough to keep the door from opening even if I use the manual override.” Unlike the American lander, the Chinese did not have an airlock. When they exited for a surface EVA, the entire lander, like the Orion, vented to vacuum. The Chinese designers had not foreseen the need to design the door to open to vacuum when the cabin was still fully pressurized.

“Of course,” Zhi chortled. “So, our American saviors arrive, and we cannot even go out and meet them with dignity.” He lowered his head and appeared to stare at the floor in front of him.

“Let’s get this door open.” Dr. Xu gently moved the injured pilot to a resting position leaning against an instrument rack and rose to join his commander at the cabin door. “I am certain we can find a way.”

Hui removed the latch from the door handle and grasped it in her right glove. Xu moved close to her, grabbed the handle next to where she had placed her hands, and began to pull.

Nothing happened. The door remained stuck.

“It is basic physics,” Zhi said. “Atmospheric pressure is a little more than fourteen pounds per square inch. The door is about two thousand square inches. That means the total force pushing on the door is about thirty thousand pounds. Do you think the two of you can move thirty thousand pounds all by yourselves?”

Hui and Dr. Xu responded by trying again to move the door. Again, nothing happened.

“Enough.” Hui and Dr. Xu turned to face Zhi. Clearly frustrated, Hui spoke, “Zhi, do you have any ideas? What can we do to open the door?”

“Hmm.” Zhi looked up at his commander. His response bordered on insubordination. “Captain Hui, if I knew, I am not sure I would tell you. Who will recall what we did to get home when it will be the triumphant American heroes who get the credit? It is better to die than to let them have the glory that should have been ours.”

“I do not understand you, Zhi. You are the one who figured out how to keep the ship warm using the rocket fuel. You are the one who kept the fuel cells working far longer than they should have. You are the one who will get much of the credit for keeping this crew alive long enough for the Americans to give us a ride home. You are a hero of China! Do you not see that? Are you giving up? Why? You’ve done so much already!”

“Because it was pointless. It would have been better if we had died in the crash. This was supposed to be our day. China’s day.” He averted his gaze from Hui back to the cabin floor and said nothing more.

It was at that moment that they heard a banging sound come from the other side of the door. It sounded like whoever was on the other side had picked up a piece of metal and was using it to signal them.

Dr. Xu responded by banging his glove on the door.

“Without air, he won’t hear that.” Hui was frustrated with their predicament as well. She wanted to go home. “But he might feel it.”

“Or he might not,” Zhi added.

“We’ve got to let him know we are here and what our problem is. I’ll turn on my radio.” She raised her hand and turned on the power to the transmitter within her spacesuit.

“Hello? Can you hear me? This is Captain Hui of the Harmony. Can you hear me? Please respond if you can hear me!”

The banging on the other side of the door continued.

Standing on the other side of the door, Bill Stetson couldn’t tell if there was anyone alive or dead within the ship. The door was closed, and the ship was completely dark. He couldn’t get to the window to look in due to the fact that he was now a good fifteen feet off the ground, standing in what looked like the remains of a construction site after an earthquake, and if he were to try and reach the window, he would almost certainly fall to his death by being skewered on one of the many sharp edges of mangled metal that used to be the Harmony lunar lander.

He grasped the small aluminum rod that he’d picked up during his climb to the door and banged again.

Anthony Chow was sweating. It was a cold sweat, and it wasn’t caused by his work dismantling an experiment rack to be thrown overboard. Nor did the temperature within the Altair cause it. It was the cold sweat of fear.

Left alone in the lander for over an hour, Chow at first didn’t think much about anything other than getting the weight of the lander down to the point that would allow them to take on passengers. He’d already moved the easy stuff like the sleeping hammocks, the food rations that would have sustained the crew for an extended surface stay, and the containers that were to safely store the rocks and core samples they would have collected and returned to the Earth. There was still a lot to be done in order to get the lander off the Moon, even some modifications to the structure, but Chow couldn’t do those on his own. That would have to come later when Bill got the survivors back to the ship and they had a chance to assess and think on their situation a bit longer.

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.”

“I understand.” Hui didn’t hesitate. “You will, of course, use mine.”

“Of course.”

Hui at that moment realized what she was committing to. Without power, not only would the temperature in the suit start to drop, but also the air would stop circulating. Unlike deep-water suits, spacesuits didn’t just let compressed air from the tanks in the backpack diffuse into the suit. That would have been too wasteful and would severely limit how long astronauts could remain in them. Spacesuits had fans and carbon-dioxide scrubbers that required continuous airflow—and power. Without power, the air in her suit would slowly become poisoned by carbon monoxide, and she would suffocate. That is, if she didn’t freeze to death first.

“Dr. Xu, get Ming ready to travel. We will need to move quickly.”

Zhi was good. In less than ten minutes he had the access panel open, some insulation removed from the wires providing power to the pump that would vent the cabin’s air, and had found the connectors and wires he would need to send power from Captain Hui’s spacesuit battery to the pump.

“Captain Hui. Step over here and face away from me. I need to connect your batteries to the pump.”

“Understood.” She complied, and he continued his work.

“I’m first going to shut off the power to the rest of your suit. Once I’ve done that, I’ll connect the pump, and we’ll see if it works. Are you ready?”

“Yes.”

The next thing Hui heard was the sound of silence. She’d been hearing the spacesuit fans since sealing herself in as the Harmony’s cabin began to freeze, and she’d gotten quite used to their reassuring white noise. Now there was silence. The suit was well insulated, so she did not yet feel any colder. It was too soon for that.

Behind her was the rustling of the engineer as he scrambled to make the necessary connections. When he was on a technical task, it was easy to forget that he was also the ship’s political officer. All signs of his previous defeatist demeanor were now absent.

“Here goes,” the engineer said. The next thing they all heard was the whirring sound of the vent pump. As the air pressure began to drop, the crew could see some of the lighter objects in the cabin flutter in the ensuing wind. After just a few moments, the sound began to drop in frequency as the pump slowed and the air pressure dropped to the point that sounds would no longer propagate. The cabin pressure was now essentially the same as that of the lunar surface—zero.

Hui felt the engineer fiddling with something in her backpack. Then he tapped her on the shoulder and said something she could not hear.

“I can’t hear you! The air is gone, and we’ll have to use our suit radios.” She tried to turn on her radio, the one she’d used to speak with Tony Chow, and nothing happened. She was completely out of power. Her heart sank. Her life had only tens of minutes remaining unless she could either get more power or out of her spacesuit.

Hui moved quickly to the door and once again tried the emergency exit handle. This time it moved, and after just a few seconds the door was open. Standing on the other side was an American astronaut wearing a grin that only an American could possibly have conjured up under the circumstances.

He said something she could not hear. He then said it again, emphatically.

Not knowing the specifics, but understanding what he was probably saying, she turned and pointed toward Dr. Xu and the wounded pilot. She then made the universal hand motion indicating that they should leave first.

Not waiting for additional prompting, Stetson moved toward the doctor and the wounded pilot. He reached down and helped Dr. Xu lift Ming so that they could carry him out the door. With some effort, and guidance from Captain Hui, they were able to get him outside the cabin for the first time since they landed.

Captain Hui looked out and down at the remains of her beautiful lander and sighed. We will be back, she thought. But for now, we will get home! She shivered, and then she realized that her fingers and toes were starting to get cold.

She followed Stetson out and around the side of the lander and down what remained of the stairs to the lunar surface. This was the path she and Zhi had taken when they had built the makeshift furnace. This time it was much more difficult because Dr. Xu and the American astronaut were burdened by the limp mass of Ming Feng. Taking care to not drag Ming’s deadweight across anything sharp enough to puncture his suit, they finally reached the ground.

Hui’s feet were getting very, very cold, and she could no longer feel her fingers. Her head was also noticeably colder. She realized that her entire body was cooling rapidly, but the relatively poorly insulated extremities were the first things she noticed. In her mind, the pace was on one hand too slow—she would surely freeze to death or suffocate before getting to the American lander at this rate. On the other hand, if they were to rush and injure someone, then it could be a death sentence. She would have to be patient.

It was then that she noticed that Zhi was not with them. He was still in the lander. She ran up and tapped Dr. Xu on the shoulder to get his attention. He looked back at her as she pointed up to the lander’s now-open door and waved her arms. Xu looked back at her and grimaced. She could tell that he understood. There was nothing they could do. He could not go back because of his need to help carry Ming. If she went back, it would be a death sentence—she simply did not have time to spare.

“If he wishes to remain here and die, then that is his choice,” she said aloud to herself.

The group of four made their way around the boulders that separated them from the Altair and began their march across the lunar desert toward it.

In the distance sat the Altair, dimly illuminated from above by the reflected Earthlight and brightly lit from below by its own floodlights. To Hui, it was beautiful. It looked safe and warm. It was how they were going to get home. It was also intact. The four legs were upright, and there were no signs of any of the problems experienced by the Harmony.

Hui was now very cold. She was also getting light-headed. For a brief moment, she even forgot where she was. Hypoxia, she thought. Oxygen deprivation. But she was too relaxed to panic.

“Help!” she said aloud. “I’m starting to poison myself on my own carbon dioxide.”

No one could hear her.

Still, she trudged on toward the lander. Consciously putting one foot in front of the other, she kept up with the group. Left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot, right foot…” A nap about now would be nice. Darkness overcame her.

“Tony! We’ve got a problem. Captain Hui just collapsed. I’m about one hundred feet away, helping to carry one of their injured, and now we’ve got two down. I’m going back to see what happened,” Stetson said into his radio.

Stetson released his hold on the wounded pilot, forcing Dr. Xu to stop moving and simply hold him. Even on the Moon, carrying a limp deadweight like a person was almost impossible without help. This was especially true if the deadweight was encumbered with a two-hundred-pound spacesuit. Stetson cautiously quickly moved back toward the fallen Chinese captain, wondering what had happened.

He reached her and bent over to see if she was conscious. He then tried to figure out what might be the problem. Using his headlamp, he peered through her visor and saw that she was not conscious. She looked very pale. It was then that he noticed the status lights on her suit—they were not powered on.

“Tony! I’m with Captain Hui, and her suit is completely out of power. I don’t know how long it’s been that way, but long enough for her to pass out from oxygen deprivation. She has to be getting pretty damn cold. I’ve got to get her into the ship now. Can you talk to the other Chinese on the radio?”

“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.

He disconnected her from the tether and carried her to the airlock. Once she was inside, propped against the inner door like a rag doll, he quickly backed out and closed the outer door. He then said into his radio, “Tony. She’s in the airlock. Get her inside as quickly as you can.”

“Roger.”

Stetson grabbed the tether and moved quickly to the ladder that led to the ground. Looking down and wondering how he and Dr. Xu were going to get the pilot up to the top deck, he again cursed the engineers who designed the lander with the crew compartment so far off the ground, this time with the microphone off. “Jackasses.”

By the time Stetson reached Dr. Xu and the motionless pilot, they had been without power for about twenty minutes.

Tony’s voice coming through the radio startled him. “Bill, I believe the captain is going to be okay. I put her on oxygen the minute I could get to her, and her color is starting to return. It was close. She’s still out cold, though.”

“That’s good news, Tony. I wish we could tell her friend here. Let’s hope we are as lucky with these two. I don’t know how long she was without power, but it can’t have been very long or she would have been dead.”

Not wasting any time, Stetson had been working with the doctor in pulling Ming Feng up from the lunar surface and placing his bulky spacesuit arms over their shoulders. He looked over at the Chinese doctor and saw from the look on his face through the suit’s visor that he was ready to go.

Hearing only his breathing, Stetson and Dr. Xu walked across the dimly lit lunar surface toward the Altair lander. The walk seemed to be taking a long time to Stetson; he could only imagine how long it seemed to the doctor. Finally, they reached the base of the lander.

“Tony. I’m trying to tell the doctor to take the end of the tether and to start climbing the ladder. But without a radio, I’m not sure how to explain it.”

“Bill! Touch your faceplates and scream!”

“Think that’ll work?”

“Try it.”

“Okay.” Bill faced the Chinese astronaut and leaned his faceshield over until they touched. At first Dr. Xu started to back away, but Stetson shouted as they came into contact, and the man paused. “Can you hear me?”

“Yes, but barely.”

“Damn, Tony, it works.”

“How about that.”

“Listen!” Bill shouted again. “Take this up the ladder! Then I’ll attach the other end to him. Once on top, loop it over a strut and start pulling while I push him up from underneath. Understand?”

“Understand! Will do!” was Xu’s reply.

Moments later, Dr. Xu, holding the tether in one hand, began climbing. The first five feet went smoothly, but then he abruptly stopped. After pausing, he resumed his ascent, but at a slower and more clumsy-appearing gait.

“Tony, can you see him? What is going on?”

“He looks to be confused as best I can tell, Bill,” Tony said.

“He stopped being much help and has become real damn clumsy.”

“His extremities must be getting very cold, Bill. He probably has to watch his hands and feet on each and every step since he isn’t getting any feedback from them. One misstep near the top and we may lose him.” Bill was beginning to be glad he had brought Anthony Chow, M.D. along.

Dr. Xu was moving very slowly at this point. He was only slightly more than halfway up and Stetson was starting to doubt that he could make it. Stetson looked around, trying to come up with plan B.

“He’s taking too long,” said Stetson.

Painfully slowly, the doctor climbed to within the last few rungs of the ladder from the top. He swayed, and Stetson steeled himself for what seemed inevitable—a twenty-foot fall to the lunar surface. The swaying stopped and the doctor reached for the next rung. Finally, he made it to the top and the relative safety of the platform, upon which he collapsed. Miraculously, he did not drop the tether.

Stetson paused, not sure of what he should do next. Without the Chinese doctor pulling while he pushed, it would be impossible to get the unconscious pilot to the top of the ladder.

The tether moved, slowly at first, and then it rapidly became taut. Looking up, Stetson was surprised to see Tony Chow’s faceplate looking down at him. Chow gave him the thumbs-up sign.

“Bill, let’s get your guy up here, and then one of us can go through the airlock with him. If you’re ready, then let’s get this done.” Tony’s voice sounded fresh, enthusiastic, and very, very good.

Stetson grabbed and lifted the limp pilot’s body as Tony pulled it from above using the rope. Slowly they lifted him up to the platform that surrounded the habitat.

Once on top, they carried the two Chinese to the ship’s airlock and stuffed them inside. The airlock was designed to hold two fully suited astronauts who were standing under their own power. Getting two limp bodies upright and into a room that was only slightly larger than a broom closet with a third astronaut was quite a challenge.

As he waited for the airlock to cycle and his turn to enter, Stetson looked out over the lunar surface toward the boulders that obscured the damaged Chinese lander. It is so beautiful, he thought.

At first Stetson thought his eyes were playing tricks on him, but he soon realized that the motion in the distance was real. The shape of another spacesuited human was now clearly visible as it walked toward the American lander.

“What the…?” Stetson said. “Tony, I think the fourth taikonaut has decided to join us. He’s walking toward us now.”

“I wonder what took him so long. Does he look like he’ll need help? He’s bound to be out of power like these guys.”

“Don’t know,” Stetson said. “I can’t tell. He doesn’t look like he needs help. When you get inside, give him a shout.”

Another five minutes went by before Stetson heard anything from Chow. In the meantime, the Chinese taikonaut had gotten much closer. From what Stetson could tell, he didn’t look like he was going to need any help.

“Bill. I’m in. I’ve got three unconscious Chinese in here. They are all breathing, but it’s too early to tell if there has been any brain damage. But everywhere I step, there’s people.”

“Good work, Tony.” This drew a smile from Stetson and was really the first good news he’d had in an hour or two. “That’s a good problem to have. There’ll soon be two more of us in there. Hopefully, we will be able to stand under our own power.”

“That’s a good thing. It’s getting pretty crowded in here,” Chow replied.

“Hey, how’d you know we could touch helmets and talk like that?” Bill asked Chow.

“I read it in a science fiction novel once when I was a kid. Have Spacesuit Will Travel or something like that.”

“I’ll be damned.”

“Well, if you are, it’ll be standing room only.”

Stetson figured it must be very crowded at maximum capacity inside the Altair now. The simple fact of the matter being that the Altair’s ascent stage was designed to hold four people under very Spartan conditions. To sleep, the astronauts would string hammocks and sleep two on each side with one directly above another. There was not enough room to have four cots on the floor. For getting back into space, it was assumed that the four astronauts would be standing. Six standing astronauts would be a tight fit, but doable. Having one or more of their number lying on the ground could make things complicated. Having three on the floor was something he hadn’t planned on.

“Agreed, Tony,” Stetson replied. “That’s a good problem to have. I’m just glad that we’ll be coming home with all of them.”

Stetson walked to the ladder and looked down as taikonaut number four approached. The Chinese astronaut looked briefly upward and began to climb the ladder toward Stetson.

A few minutes later, Bill Stetson and Chinese Political Officer Zhi Feng cycled through the airlock and into the Altair.