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.
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.
On the completion of the burn, she waited impatiently for the new trajectory data to become reliable.
Satisfied that she wouldn't need another burn, she waited.
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.
