Falling to Earth

^orbit.

Falcon was so light, a pulse of their thrusters rattled them around. So it was easier for me to dock using Endeavour. I slowly slid toward them, so gently that we barely touched. Then, with a touch of my thrusters, I pushed forward into a hard dock.

The rendezvous and docking had been fast, and perfect. “Good show, Endeavour,” Dave radioed to me. “Welcome home,” I replied. That might seem like an odd choice of words—after all, we were still a quarter of a million miles from Earth. But Endeavour had become my home, and Dave and Jim were returning from a great adventure. “The Falcon is back on its roost and going to sleep,” Dave added with a poetic flourish.

I’d kept our home clean and tidy for them. But now, as I opened the hatches between the spacecraft I saw two grimy faces. Their spacesuits were dirty, and I could smell the moon dust in the air. It was a new, peculiar odor to me, dry and gunpowdery. I kept the hatch closed as much as possible while we began to transfer equipment, hoping the floating dust would not spread. I was mostly successful, but the creep of dust was unavoidable. Dave and Jim floated long sample tubes of lunar dirt and boxes of moon rocks through the hatch, which I stowed inside Endeavour under the couches. Mindful of the new rules after the Soyuz 11 depressurization tragedy, we kept our spacesuits on.

While busily running SIM bay experiments, I also stored Falcon’s flight plans and checklists, food, priceless photos in film magazines, and—less priceless to me—Dave and Jim’s used urine and fecal bags. Of all the things to return from the lunar surface, did we really need their crap?

Finally, Dave and Jim floated into Endeavour. I was elated to see them. But Dave didn’t look happy. In fact, while Jim looked away sheepishly, Dave began to loudly berate me about the distracting tune piped into the Falcon during liftoff. Didn’t I know I had jeopardized the whole mission, he thundered, by playing that darn music?

This wasn’t the reunion I had expected. I could only apologize and explain that I had only radioed it to Houston, with no clue they would patch it back to the Falcon. My explanation seemed to satisfy Dave for the moment. I guess he eventually forgave me, because months later at an awards ceremony with the Air Force Association Dave bragged about playing the tune.

There wasn’t time for me or Dave to dwell on the argument. We had too much to do. Dave and Jim were busy ensuring they had moved everything in from the Falcon. But they missed some items. Some of their PPKs, including personal items they had kindly taken down to the surface for me, were overlooked.

We wouldn’t discover that mistake for a long time. Behind in the timeline, we hustled to close the hatches and pressurize our spacesuits. Dave’s suit did not pressurize properly on the first attempt, nor did the spacecraft hatch seal correctly, possibly due to some lunar dust on the seal. After more time-consuming checks, we finally seemed to have the problems solved, and Dave and Jim could remove their helmets and gloves. They had started their day with a demanding moon walk, and they hadn’t eaten for eight hours. They were ready to stop for a while and grab some food.

Then it was time to finally undock from Falcon. “It’s away clean, Houston,” I reported as the lunar module separated with a bang. I felt sad to see it go; it was a magnificent spacecraft. Now it would be steered to a final crash on the lunar surface.

I was also acutely aware that we were now down to one engine. The big engine in the service module was our only way out of lunar orbit. So far, it had worked well, day after day. But if it stopped working.

No point thinking about that. The separation had taken longer than planned, so instead of our scheduled rest break, we jumped back into our chores, including some more SIM bay experiments.

Dave and Jim didn’t seem weary to me, but it was hard to tell when we all had so much to do and were zipping around getting it done. I put Dave’s slight ill humor down to his annoyance with me over the tune.

But then we heard a familiar, gruff voice over the radio, which only got in the loop when there was something important. “This is Deke,” the voice growled to Jim. “I’d like to have you and Dave, at least, take a Seconal here before you go to sleep so you can really power down for the night. You guys need it. It’s up to Al whether he wants one or not.”

Dave immediately looked puzzled. Seconal was a sedative drug we carried on the flight. Why would Deke ask two of us to take it and not all of us? Without an explanation, Dave decided against it. We continued running experiments and stowing equipment. Meanwhile, at mission control the doctors grew alarmed. Watching their instruments, they could see something wrong with Jim’s heartbeat. Both sides of his heart were contracting at the same moment. They’d spotted similar, minor blips with both Jim and Dave while they were on the moon. But this irregularity looked worse. Jim could be heading for cardiac arrest.

The doctors didn’t tell us. Neither did Deke, who simply requested we take the sleeping pills. We only had one other clue that something might be wrong, when the ground told me, “We’d like to make sure tonight that Jim is on the EKG for the evening.” They wanted to keep monitoring Jim’s heart via his biomedical harness. Again, they never said why. By this time, we all felt dead tired and didn’t ask questions.

Jim and Dave would have worked until they dropped, they were so dedicated to the mission. “We’re still trying to get cleaned up in here and get suits put away, and all that sort of stuff,” I told the ground. “It’s awfully cramped quarters, and there’s an awful lot of stuff to move around.” The spacecraft seemed very different now that three of us were crammed in again. “I kind of liked it here by myself,” I added wistfully.

If Jim were having a heart attack, it was about as good a place as he could be—weightless, breathing pure oxygen, wired to a heart monitor. Still, the ground should have told Dave. As commander, he needed all available information about his crew. By the time we got to sleep, I’d been awake for more than twenty-one hours, and my crewmates for twenty-three. If we had known of Jim’s serious condition, we would have stopped much earlier. Instead, we slogged on for three and a half hours after Deke’s call before we finally finished our day. It was later determined that the physical stress of working on the moon, combined with the brutal training before launch, had left Jim’s and Dave’s hearts depleted of potassium.

We felt exhausted and slept deeply for nine solid hours. But it may have been too late for Jim. We can never know for sure, but it is possible Jim’s heart was permanently damaged that day, and the countdown to his premature death had already begun.

The next morning, we all felt much better. Still wary of Jim’s condition, the ground asked him to continue to wear biomedical sensors, instead of a planned switch with Dave. Without an explanation given, Dave overrode the request. He knew how uncomfortable the sensors could be after a number of days and gallantly took Jim’s place.

Because I had changed orbit to rendezvous with Falcon, we now passed over new regions of the moon. “Dave and I are looking like mad and taking pictures,” I told mission control as we glided across the ever-changing landscape. The laser was failing, so we cycled its power switch in a last futile effort to keep it working. I still struggled with booms refusing to retract. Equipment was starting to deteriorate. But with three of us in the spacecraft, we could run SIM bay experiments and take photos out of the window at the same time, so we stayed very busy. I wasn’t too upset about the failing equipment. We’d already gathered so much information, I was just happy with what we had.

With all three of us scrambling to accomplish tasks, my day seemed much more complicated. I felt very happy to have Dave and Jim back alive, but I began to miss working alone, when we didn’t all have overlapping tasks.

We still had a lot of film left, so we eagerly recorded many interesting geological features. While we did, the ground continued to ask cryptic questions about Jim. “Can you guys give us any estimates on the water that you and Jim consumed on the surface,” mission control asked, “and any differences between this and what Al’s been consuming?” Still unaware of the reason for the questions, Dave brushed them off with, “I think that is probably a good discussion for the debriefing after the flight.”

We were once again asked to take sedatives for the sleep period, and once again Dave responded, “I think that’s unnecessary.” The nearest to an explanation we received was, “We are anxious for you all to continue eating