Back to the Moon-ARC

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