Free Lights in the Deep by Brad R. Torgersen

I feared. They’d maroon me on the ground, like poor Deke. Only worse. Deke didn’t have the added pressure and expectation that came with being black. My failure was black America’s failure. And how in the hell was I going to look Vic’s wife Alice in the eye? She’d admitted before we went up that she had a funny feeling about this mission.
    I kept my voice calm as I relayed information back and forth to the ground. I was shocked when Director Kraft himself got on the horn.
    “We’ll proceed,” my boss told me in no uncertain terms.
    “Sir?”
    “Mal, the CIA liaison says the Soviets sent up one of their N1 boosters an hour ago. You know what that means.”
    “Yessir,” I said. Kruschev wasn’t kidding around. We’d known for months that the Russians were rushing to get a capsule to the moon before we did. Only, none of us thought they’d be ready to go before Gemini 17 had already splashed down.
    I considered my dead friend. “What about Vic?”
    “Since you can’t get him back onboard, and since I really don’t think you’d want to be sitting next to his body for the next eight days, you’ll just have to cut Astronaut Hemshaw loose.”
    “Jesus. Does Alice know?”
    “Not yet. We’ll tell her.”
    “With just me to run the show, we’ll have to chop a lot out of the itinerary.”
    “Agreed. Look, Mal, under better circumstances I’d order an abort. But with that Russian mission on the way, and how things are going with the two wars, and Congress chopping at our budget—”
    “I get the picture,” I said.
    And it was true. In more ways than one.
    So, three hours after the accident, I uncoupled Vic from the spacecraft and sent his body drifting slowly towards the Earth, and eventual reentry—a fiery end, like the Norse of old. I sent my co-pilot a mental farewell, closed his door, then mine, and set about trying to figure out how to get to the moon and back with just one man to watch all the instruments and flip all the switches.
    • • •
    By spacecraft standards, Gemini was an old horse. And if Kennedy’s first Vice President had had his way, Gemini would have been just a pit stop en route to Apollo. But with the U.S. military heavily committed to Cuba and Vietnam, neither Congress nor the Senate was in any mood to green-light yet another expensive NASA development project. Johnson was forced to be satisfied with ops remaining in Houston, while McDonnell kept its coveted contract. They flew the first Gemini-Chiron flights not long after dispensing with the Agena series, so that by 1967 things were ramping up for the first manned American reconnaissance of lunar space.
    Technically, Chiron was the wedding of Agena hardware to the more robust Centaur booster stage. Launched separately on Titan II rockets, the Gemini docked in low Earth orbit with the Chiron and used the Chiron’s engines to break out of and insert into both Earth and lunar trajectories. And once McDonnell and Grumman ironed out their dispute over the proposed lunar lander design, Chiron would essentially be four separate spacecraft in one.
    In the last 18 months, I’d done nothing but eat, drink, and sleep Gemini-Chiron. If the President had been determined to keep his promise to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade, I’d been determined to be that man. Or at least one of the men. All other considerations aside.
    The seat next to me was painfully empty, such that I found myself actually shying away from it, as much as the too-cramped confines of the capsule would allow. If this had been one of the actual landing flights planned for later in the year, I’d have had no choice but to abort, because without one man to stay in orbit while the other took the lander down to the surface, there would be no point.
    But for this first circumlunar trip, one man would have to do, and there was plenty to keep me occupied in spite of how much Kraft and Co. sliced out of the schedule.
    Still, Vic’s absence was