Saucer: The Conquest

3

Two hours into her watch on the flight deck of Jeanne d'Arc, Charley Pine learned the subject of Artois' and Lalouette's conversation. The French pilot was sick. She listened in on the three-way radio conversations between Artois, the physician at the lunar base and Mission Control. Although she didn't understand the French medical terminology, she understood the diagnosis well enough. Lalouette was suffering a gall bladder attack.

Artois sat beside her in the pilot's seat on the flight deck wearing Lalouette's headset during this discussion. Aborting the mission and returning to earth was one possibility weighed by the decision makers. The other was to proceed to the moon. The physician at the lunar base was equipped to operate, and could as soon as Lalouette arrived.

This development meant that Charley Pine was now in full control of the ship. She would have to pilot it into lunar orbit and thence to the surface without Lalouette's help. Artois asked her bluntly, "Can you do it?"

"Of course," she said firmly.

"Safety is paramount. If you prefer, we can skip the lunar landing, slingshot around the moon and return directly to earth." Both she and Artois knew that reversing the ship's course without the use of the moon's gravity would take more fuel than they had. "As the pilot, you are responsible for the lives of everyone aboard," Artois continued. "The decision to land or return immediately is yours to make."

She had flown the entire mission in the simulator numerous times; the computers and autopilot were working perfectly. Charley, Lalouette and the controllers monitoring telemetry data had only identified seven gripes on the space-plane, none of them major. If the spaceplane were experiencing serious mechanical problems, she would not be as confident as she was, but she was in no mood to share that thought with Artois.

"I can hack the program," she told him now. "I can fly this bucket anywhere we have the fuel to go. You know the state of the medical facilities at the lunar base, not I. If you feel Lalouette will get adequate care there, then we can go on."

Wearing a trace of a smile, Artois asked, "Did you know that the simulator instructors referred to you as Captain America?"

Her look of surprise widened his smile. Apparently satisfied, he keyed his headset microphone to tell Mission Control and the lunar base physician of his decision. "We continue," he said. "Our destination remains the moon." With that pronouncement, he gave Charley a nod and flashed another smile, then left the headset on the top of the instrument panel and went aft to check again on Lalouette.

Charley Pine took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. Whew! Double whew! She was going to have to be on top of her game — she had certainly been there before — and she was going to walk on the lunar surface. She would be the first American to do so since the Apollo astronauts left their footprints in the lunar dirt thirty-two years before. No doubt the footprints were still there. "Hot diggity dog," she muttered, and smiled broadly.

All alone in the cockpit, she took off and stowed her copilot's headset. Although it would function perfectly if plugged into the pilot's radio jacks, she wanted Lalouette's. She transferred to the pilot's seat and retrieved the headset from its glare shield bracket. She settled it on her head.

It fit perfectly.

She punched up a navigation computer display. The ship was within a minute of crossing the invisible boundary that separated the pull of earth's gravity from the pull of the moon's. Alone, covered with goose bumps, she watched the seconds tick down. Then they were across. As it crossed this invisible boundary, the ship had coasted to its slowest speed of the journey; now under the pull of lunar gravity, it would accelerate. Just for grins, she began monitoring the speed on the navigation readout. Within a minute it began to respond, picking up a few dozen feet per second with every passing minute. Only fourteen hours to go to lunar orbit insertion.

The voice of the mission controller crackled in her ears. "If you are going to go it alone, we need to begin now on the systems function tests and checklist items." His name was Bodard. Charley had spent many hours with him during training. He had a paunch and always smelled of garlic and tobacco.

Charley's mood instantly shifted to all business. "Let us begin," she said.

"Are you ready?" Egg called. He was standing in front of the hangar aiming a video camera mounted on a tripod.

"I guess," Rip Cantrell answered, loudly enough to be heard over the sound of the idling truck engine. He was seated in Egg's old Dodge in the center of the grass runway. He had removed the batteries from the truck bed and installed two large generators in the engine compartment of the pickup, with sheaves and belts to power them from the fan-belt takeoff.

"Any time," Egg shouted, and bent to his viewfinder.

Rip wiped the perspiration from his forehead, so it wouldn't get into his eyes, and tightened the belts in his three-point harness. His stomach was tied into a knot. He goosed the engine a couple of times with the accelerator, watching the amp meter rise and fall. Oil pressure okay, radiator temp okay. He did it one more time, allowing the engine RPM to rise. The truck rose a few inches, then settled back onto the tires as he let the RPM drop.

He had a small control box he had salvaged from a model airplane radio-control unit mounted on a piece of metal, a joy stick, protruding from the dash to the right of the steering wheel. He moved the stick back and forth, left and right.

"Here goes nothing," he muttered, and jammed the accelerator to the floor.

The truck rose into the air as the electrical power from the generators energized the antigravity rings under the pickup. The truck began to tilt backward. Rip moved the small control stick forward, lowering the truck's nose and stopping rearward movement.

The truck rose until it was about a dozen feet in the air. The natural gravitational field of the earth and the man-made one he had induced in the truck were repelling each other. As the engine under the hood roared at full power, Rip kept the pickup level and stationary by using the stick.

Ha! Satisfied he had control, he moved the stick ever so slightly to the right. The truck tilted and began drifting in that direction.

Now he leveled the truck, then tilted the nose down a trifle for forward movement. The truck obediently began moving. Slowly at first, then faster and faster. He jockeyed the stick to control the rate.

After he had gone a hundred feet, when he was doing perhaps fifteen miles per hour, he laid the truck into a left turn. He had enough room. The nose of the truck obediently swung around, turning back toward the hangar.

He had just gotten it stabilized when a cloud of steam rose from under the hood. Water and steam sprayed on the windshield. The radiator temp gauge needle pegged right. Rip let up on the accelerator.

Not quickly enough. He heard a loud bang, then the engine noise stopped dead.

Still slightly nose down, the bottom fell out and the truck dropped toward the earth.

The shock of impact snapped his head forward and stunned him.

In the silence that followed the crash, he became aware of his uncle leaning in through the window. He had trouble focusing his eyes. Part of the reason was the dirt in the air— he seemed to be sitting in the middle of a dust cloud.

'You okay, Ripper?" his uncle shouted, only inches from his head.

"Yeah. Sure."

"Let's get you out of this thing. I smell gasoline. You may have fractured the fuel tank."

Soon Rip was sitting in the grass fifty feet from the wreck with his uncle seated beside him. As his head cleared, Rip stared at the smashed Dodge. Gray smoke and white steam wisped from the engine compartment. There was no fire.

"Blew the engine, I guess," he said to his uncle. "Seemed like the radiator blew. Before I could react the crankshaft froze."

"Locked up tighter than the hubs of hell," Egg said, nodding vigorously. 'You were at least ten feet in the air."

"Sorry about your truck."

"I'll take it out of your allowance," Egg said, then laughed. When he laughed his belly quivered.

Rip joined in. He lay back in the grass and laughed and laughed.

"It's good to be alive, isn't it?" Egg said when they finally calmed down.

'Yeah, Unc. It really is."

"So what are you going to do now?"

"Gonna put that system on the Extra. The airplane engine is designed to turn at high RPM all day. Won't blow it like I did the truck engine."

"Need any help?"

"Well, sure. But let me lie here another five minutes. And I want to see that video."

The moon was a giant orb hanging in the black sky when Charley turned the spaceplane and lined it up for the lunar orbit injection burn. When she had it perfectly aligned according to the computer display, she ran through the checklist again, studying the items, fingering switches, assuring herself for the tenth time that they were in the right position. It would have been comforting to have a second pair of knowledgeable eyes examine each switch, yet the eyes she was burdened with were Artois'. He sat beside her in the copilot's seat, watching everything, knowing nothing.

Both wore space suits complete with helmets, just in case Charley blew the landing and crashed on the moon, cracking the pressure hull. A sudden depressurization wouldn't kill them. Assuming they survived the crash.

Jeanne dArc was closing rapidly on the moon. Even though this was the dark side, it was a massive presence, only sixty-

five miles from the spaceplane. For the first time since they had left earth orbit, the presence of the world off the left wing gave her the sensation of motion.

The pilot checked the navigation display again, ensuring that the low point of the trajectory would be at precisely sixty miles, exactly at the point of the burn, which would occur on the back side of the moon, the side opposite the earth. All was as it should be.

She cracked her knuckles in anticipation, a gesture that startled Artois.

Poor devil, she thought. He had signed up an American female pilot to fob off the demands of French politicians, and now Charley was all he had. She couldn't see his face inside his helmet, but she sensed his concern. She flashed him a grin that he couldn't see.

"Nothing to sweat," she said. "The program is working perfectly. There is nothing for us to do but sit and watch."

"So anyone could fly these planes?" he said acidly.

"As long as all the computers work perfectly," she replied carelessly. "If they don't, then you hand-fly it." Of course, Artois knew this already. He had been intimately involved in the design and engineering of the spaceplanes that made the lunar base possible. "That's why you spent the money for the very best sticks you could find, isn't it?"

Artois didn't answer that rhetorical question.

"Fifteen seconds to loss of telemetry," Bodard said from Mission Control. At ten seconds to go he began counting, and his voice faded at two. Jeanne d 'Arc was no longer in communication with anyone on planet Earth. She would be out of communication for sixteen minutes, until she swung out from behind the moon.

Charley keyed the intercom and announced, "Everyone in their seats, strap in and report, si'l vousplait. The lunar orbit injection burn will occur in seven minutes."

All six of the people not in the cockpit reported within the next five minutes. Claudine Courbet reported for Lalouette, who had been strapped in for hours and sedated. All were ready. They would remain in their seats unti\ Jeanne d'Arc was on the surface of the moon.

The waiting was the hardest part, Charley Pine thought. She sat watching the display, her thoughts totally absorbed in the piloting problem.

Pierre Artois rubbernecked out the window at the moon. Since the spaceplane was hurling backward through space at the approaching burn point, the lunar surface slid by from rear to front. It was disconcerting, to say the least, to people used to viewing the earth from the window of an airplane.

The sun line appeared suddenly on the lunar surface, and reflected light filled the cockpit. Charley glanced at the lunar surface, adjusted the brightness of the displays and said nothing.

The seconds ticked down. The spaceplane dropped closer and closer to the lunar surface. Right on cue the rocket engines ignited, pressing Charley and Artois back into their seats. The Gs felt good after three days of weightlessness.

But the middle engine was not firing. Only the four smaller, outboard engines had ignited. Charley Pine instantly punched up a display that gave her a percentage of planned power. Only seventy percent. This meant that she would have to burn the engines thirty percent longer to get the required deceleration. She disconnected the autopilot, taking manual control of the ship and the burn. One of the engines was producingjust slightly less power than the other three, which was to be expected. No four engines would produce exactly the same amount of power. Without conscious thought she adjusted the controls to hold the ship in the proper attitude.

The seconds ticked down, and she stopped the burn as the clock read 0:00. She didn't even notice the absence of G, so intent was she on checking the orbit. It would be a few moments before she knew precisely how well the burn had gone, how close to the desired lunar orbit they actually were.

The sensors were still locked on their guide stars. The distance to the moon from the radar seemed correct. She had only to wait for the computers to calculate the trajectory, which took time. The numbers were sorting themselves out, the display was moving, stabilizing… yes. They appeared to be within half a percent of the desired orbit, which was presented as a maximum and minimum distance from the planet. Now the graphic display stabilized.

She checked to ensure the orbit would take them to the desired burn point to begin the descent to the lunar base.

"We're going to need another small burn," she muttered, pointing at the display. "There. At that point." She looked at her watch. "In eighteen minutes."

"How long?" Artois asked, which was his first comment since before the orbit insertion burn.

"Two seconds."

"That is very good. Congratulations."

Charley didn't have time. She keyed the intercom. "Flo-rentin," she said, calling the flight engineer by name, "the main engine refused to start. Please check it out."

Artois tried to remain as calm as she was. "What if it won't start for the descent burn?"

"We'll just burn for a longer period."

"And the ascent from the moon's surface?"

Charley was stunned that he asked that question. "The moon only has a sixth of earth's gravity," she answered. "We need all our power to get off the earth's surface, not the moon's."

He should have known that, she thought dispassionately.

Rip Cantrell was asleep in the old control tower near Egg's hangar when he heard his uncle's heavy tread upon the stairs. "You awake up there, Rip?"

'Yeah, Unc." Rip rolled out and reached for his jeans.

The little room with windows on all sides was a nice private bedroom. It contained a narrow bed, one chair, a bookcase and a small desk. The restroom that Egg had installed years ago was on the ground level. When Egg topped the stairs he lowered himself heavily into the only chair and sighed. Rip was seated on the bed. The moon was five days old and still above the western horizon. Moonlight filled the small room when gaps occurred in the low clouds racing overhead.

"Been watching television," Egg reported as he regained his breath. "The French pilot is sick. Charley flew the space-plane into lunar orbit."

"Good for her." Rip meant it.

"They're also having trouble with the main engine. The news is on all the channels."

Rip found himself staring at the moon. "Shouldn't be a problem," he said. Since Charley left for France, he too had been reading everything he could find on the French space-planes. "Still, something's wrong."

"I think it's the heaters," Florentin said to Charley.

They were in the crawl space forward of the engines, between the engines and the fuel tanks. "Looks to me as if the heater circuit got a short and the temp is too low in the engines for the igniters to fire."

"Terrific."

"If that is the problem, sitting on the surface of the moon should thaw the engines. The surface temperature during the day is about 107 degrees Centigrade."

"How about the other engines?"

"The heaters seem to be working."

"Okay," Charley said, and flippered backward out of the tunnel.

She regretted ever agreeing to a hurry-up training schedule. Eighteen hours a day for forty-two days, and it didn't seem nearly enough. Sure, if Lalouette were not sedated, she would merely be backing him up. Now she was the pilot in command and she had no backup at all, no one to tell her to slow down or rethink a problem. The pressure to get it right the first time was building inexorably, and it was beginning to take its toll. For the first time since that overwhelming first day in the simulator, she wished she hadn't agreed to do this.

True, she had been working for this day all her life. If she screwed up and the error cost her life, so be it. She had come to terms with that risk the very first time she went up alone in an airplane. Pilots have to believe in their own abilities and come to grips with their own mortality. That goes with the territory. Yet there were seven other lives at risk here. If I get there, they will too, but if I don % I will have killed them.

On the flight deck she committed the spaceplane to another orbit while she read the mission-planning manual again and talked the situation over with Bodard in Mission Control. In her mind's eye she could see his intense eyes, revealing the fire and intelligence he brought to his job.

"We think the problem is the heater," Bodard said finally. "You can reprogram the flight computers to compensate for your seventy percent power capability. Once that is done, we will check your data."

"Roger."

Charley began programming the computers. In five minutes she had finished. The solid-state computers readily took the new parameters, but the spaceplane was now out of radio contact behind the moon. Both the parameters and the navigation solutions would be automatically relayed to Mission Control when radio contract was regained.

She had been awake for twenty hours and was tired, so she rechecked her entries twice, keystroke by keystroke. If she screwed up the approach to landing she would have to abort. There was only fuel for one shot. Landing too far away from the lunar base was not an option, not if she expected to have the fuel remaining to get back to the fuel tank in earth orbit. Crashing on the surface was not an option, either.

Artois offered her an insulated bottle of coffee. She accepted it gratefully, stuck the straw through the port in her face mask and sucked gingerly. Ahh. Then she sat looking through the windshield at the lunar surface sixty miles below. She could see the lava flows and craters quite plainly, stark places that didn't resemble any terrain on earth because there had never been any erosion. Without the eternal erosion of wind and water, the land was jagged, the mountains taller and steeper than any on earth, their relief exaggerated by the stark brilliance of the unfiltered sunlight.

Artois maneuvered himself into the copilot's seat and said nothing. Charley ignored him. Her thoughts were occupied with the task before her, and with thoughts of Rip.

"We have telemetry again." Bodard's voice sounded in her headset, ending her reverie.

Five minutes later he told her, "Looks good. You are go for landing."

"Roger that." Her voice sounded flat, she thought. She was very tired.

After Charley manually aligned the spaceplane for the approach burn, the autopilot refused to engage. She punched the button futilely. The ship was again behind the moon in the radio dead zone, so there was no one to complain to except Artois, sitting in the copilot's seat, and he would be no help.

"It's enough to piss off the pope," she muttered in English. She reached behind her on the overhead and found the circuit breaker, recycled it, then tried again to engage the recalcitrant device. Nope. Well, she would just hand-fly this garbage scow.

At least all three flight computers were in perfect agreement. Thank God for modern computers! How the Apollo astronauts did it with the primitive junk they had was a mystery.

The clock ticked down. "Here we go," she said over the intercom, and punched the button on the yoke to start the engines. The four small engines fired off, pushing her into her seat. Yeaaah! She concentrated on keeping the crosshairs centered on the display in front of her. Flying bark-ward takes some getting used to.

On the completion of the burn, she waited impatiently for the new trajectory data to become reliable.

"Tres bien," Bodard said when the spaceplane came out from behind the moon. He was looking at the telemetry data on the trajectory.

Satisfied that she wouldn't need another burn, she waited. Waiting is the hard part, she thought.

The ship was descending at about a thousand feet per second. She had fifty more miles of altitude to lose. She checked the three-dimensional display on the trajectory computer and ensured that the remote cameras were on— she would need them in the final phase of the landing — and that the radar and laser backups were functioning properly.

The base site was still over the lunar horizon, nearly six hundred miles away.

The nose was well up now, the ship flying backward down the glide slope. Through the windshield she could see only stars. The earth was behind her, over her head. Now any burst of engine power would slow the descent. What she needed was the ability to finesse the power, so she selected a lower level of engine power, just thirty percent, so that the timing on the burns would be less critical.

The ship plunged on toward its rendezvous with the moon. The engines had to fire now when she asked for power or the ship would crash into the surface at this rate of descent.

Another burn was coming up. Fifteen seconds… ten… five…

She waited. And lit the engines. They fired. A two-second burst. Too much would shallow the descent and carry the ship far beyond the target landing area; too little would require more power later on and screw up the trajectory. She adjusted the ship's attitude to keep it perfectly aligned.

So far, so good.

Two minutes later she gave the engines another burst. The trajectory was almost perfect, just a little shallow.

The rate of descent was still a thousand feet a second, only twelve miles up now. She checked the altitude on the radar, cross-checked with the lasers. Due to the irregularities of the surface, the readings were merely averages.

Coming down, coming down… bringing the nose up as the speed over the surface dropped, using power to slow the descent rate, coming down…

Now the landing area came into view on the radar. It didn't look as she expected. The land was all sunlight and long, deep shadows; the mission had been timed to arrive just after the lunar dawn.

Cross-checking everything, she was shocked to realize that the computer had somehow mislocated the target landing area. Or had it?

She had an instant decision to make. Was the trajectory right or wrong?

Still flying the bird, she punched up the landing zone's coordinates. They looked right. The trajectory looked right. She looked again at the radar picture and keyed in the camera that was slaved to the radar's point of sight. Yes, the landing area looked as she had seen it in the simulations.

She was overthinking this, she decided. Rely on your instruments! Don't panic!

Later she couldn't remember the exact sequence of the final phase of the landing. She used the engine, monitored the displays, kept the ship's nose rising toward the vertical while she monitored her ground speed. The objective was to zero out speed, drift and sink rate at touchdown — and land at the proper place. And use as little fuel as possible doing it.

With a final burst of power she slowed the descent to fifteen feet per second. Now she was glued to the television cameras. There was the mobile gantry for unloading cargo, the radio tower and the bank of solar panels for charging the base's batteries—don't hit them! Still moving forward at twenty feet per second, no drift, three hundred feet high… two hundred, engines on low, just ten percent power… dust began to rise… one hundred feet, fifty… zero groundspeed.

At fifteen feet Charley killed the engines and let lunar gravity pull the ship down. It contacted the surface sinking at one foot per second. The shock absorbers in the landing gear had no trouble handling this descent rate.

As the dust slowly settled on the television monitors, she keyed the intercom and the radio. She had to clear her throat to speak. "Jeanne d'Arc has landed."

Beside her Pierre Artois exhaled explosively. " Tres bien," he muttered, then decided that phrase didn't describe his emotions. "Magnifiquer

Rip and Egg were glued to the television in Missouri, even though the time was a few minutes after three in the morning.

They heard Charley Pine's words two and a half seconds after she said them, which was the period of time it took a radio signal to reach earth.

Rip's shoulders sagged. He looked at Egg and saw that he had tears streaming down his cheeks.

He patted his uncle on the shoulder and wandered out into the night. The clouds had cleared somewhat. The moon was well below the horizon now. He blew Charley a kiss at the sky anyway, then walked down the hill toward the control tower and bed.