Saucer: The Conquest

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.

4

The passengers and crew had to walk from the spaceplane to the base air lock. The fact that Jeanne d'Arcwas sitting on her tail complicated matters somewhat. Base personnel maneuvered the cargo gantry alongside so that the people could be lowered to the surface on the cargo elevator.

While Charley Pine and Florentin went through the post-flight checklists, the other members of the crew maneuvered the sedated Lalouette toward the ship's air lock. Two people from the lunar base came into the ship to assist.

The pilot was near the ragged edge of exhaustion. It took intense concentration to work through the checklists with Florentin. The checks took over an hour to complete, and by that time Lalouette and the others were gone. Florentin exited through the air lock, leaving Charley alone in the spaceplane.

The lunar base would have to wait, she decided. She was about to sign off with Mission Control when Bodard passed her a message for Pierre Artois from the French premier. Congratulations, the glory of France, and all that. She copied it down, promised to give it to him and signed off.

'Another day, another dollar,' she muttered as she maneuvered herself out of her seat.

The descent of the main passageway was not difficult in the weak gravity of the moon. After shedding her space suit, she made a pit stop to answer nature's call, then proceeded to the bunkroom she had shared with Courbet. She crawled into her hammock. In seconds she was fast asleep.

She awoke to the sound of hatches opening, metal scraping against metal. She knew what the noise was — base personnel were unloading the cargo bay. Who had done the checklists, to ensure the bay was properly depressurized and that the rest of the ship was maintaining pressure?

Galvanized, she struggled from her hammock and made her way to the flight deck. Florentin was in the pilot's seat, which he had tilted forty-five degrees so that he wasn't lying on his back.

'Bonjour, Sharlee,' the flight engineer said.

Charley muttered a bonjour. For the first time since waking, she looked at her watch. She had been asleep for five hours. Not enough, but she felt better. And hungry and thirsty.

They spent a few minutes talking about the main engine and what Florentin and the engineers from the base were going to do to check out the malfunction; then Charley lowered herself down the passageway.

In the weak gravity of the moon, getting into her space suit was easier than it had been on Earth. Actually the suit consisted of two pieces, an inflatable full-body pressure suit and a tough, nearly bulletproof outer shell that protected the pressure suit and helped insulate the wearer from the extremes of temperature present in a zero- atmosphere environment. Air for breathing and to pressurize the suit was provided by a small unit worn on a belt around the waist.

The unit hung at the small of the wearer's back and was connected to the suit by hoses.

Donning the suit alone was strenuous. Only when Charley had triple-checked everything did she enter the air lock. With the pressure suit inflated, she felt like a sausage.

When the exterior door opened the light blinded her. She remembered her sun visor and lowered it with her eyes closed. After her eyes adjusted she got her first real view of the lunar surface. She had seen the photos many times, yet the reality was awe-inspiring. The land baking in the brilliant rising sun under an obsidian sky — she had never seen a place more stark, or more beautiful. And the day was going to be two weeks long!

The cargo gantry was alongside, so she used that for a ladder. Standing on the surface, she bent and examined the impressions her boots made in the dirt. Then she turned and looked for Earth.

There it was, behind the spaceplane. She bounded several paces away and looked again. Should have brought a camera, she thought. Mesmerized, listening to the sound of her own breathing, she turned slowly around, taking in everything. She saw the air-lock entrance to the lunar base, an illuminated bubble that looked like a large skylight, a radio tower, the gantry and the jagged horizon. In the absence of an atmosphere, the visibility was perfect.

'Yeah, baby!'

Charley Pine pumped her fist and headed for the air lock, which was in the side of a cliff. She promptly fell. It was a slow-motion fall, at one-sixth the speed that she would have toppled on earth. Instantly she was all business. Impact with a sharp stone might tear the outer shell and damage the interior pressure suit. If the interior suit lost pressure, her blood would transform itself into a gas; death would follow in seconds.

She had come too far to die in a freak accident between the spaceplane and the base air lock. Adrenaline pumping, she caught herself with her gloved hands, then pushed herself back erect.

Concentrating fiercely, taking care not to overcontrol, Charley walked — or leaped — toward the air lock and entered it. She had to wait for a forklift to bring a container from Jeanne d'Arc into the lock; then the door closed and the operator on the other side of the thick glass began pumping in air.

The air lock led into an underground cavern that had been carved from solid rock. Supplies in containers were stacked along one side of the capacious corridor. Charley stopped to remove her helmet and looked the containers over as she walked toward the locker room. The containers were stacked with their numbers facing out. She was looking for a specific four-digit final number, and didn't see it. The reactor was still on the plane.

After wriggling out of her space suit — one of the base personnel helped her and chatted freely while she did it— Charley got directions to the mess hall.

Just moving along the corridors took a great deal of getting used to. Too vigorous a step would send her to the ceiling; a misstep would send her crashing into a wall. Clearly the lunar gravity was going to take some getting used to. The people she met seemed to have adjusted well, so perhaps the learning curve would be steep.

In the mess hall, which doubled as a lounge, she filled a tray made of superlight, composite material with a judicious quantity of food — better keep an eye on the figure. The food was French, and yet it wasn't what she had