Free Lights in the Deep by Brad R. Torgersen Page A

ever-presently painful, such that I quickly grew to hate it. We’d trained together—relentlessly—in preparation for this historic flight. In spite of watching the Soviet Union roll ahead with its mighty super-booster. In spite of Dr. Von Braun’s forced retirement, on account of the absentee trial at the Hague. In spite of seeing the posted names of friends who had been killed or gone missing over the skies of Havana and Hanoi. Nothing had distracted us, and together we had made the circumlunar flight our co-religion.
    By the time I slid into lunar orbit, the entire thing had begun to seem profoundly, stupidly empty. Vic was dead. They’d make him a hero no matter what happened now. Without him here to share the sweetness of victory, I took little comfort in the realization of our dream. Whether I, myself, got back to Earth or not, the headlines in the papers would continue to be crowded with news from the Long War against Communism, of which The Battle for the Moon was just that—a single battle. Symbolic, yes. Grand. But ultimately of little importance to the men scraping and fighting in the mud-filled ditches.
    My orders called for me to take pictures, so I took them.
    My orders also called for telemetry, so I took it, and sent it.
    I was on my sixth circuit around the day side, and getting ready for the breakout burn that would put me on course back to Earth, when the feeds to the Chiron died. At first puzzled, I reset the breakers, only to watch them barber-pole again. Then a third time. By the fourth try I was flipping the switches back and forth with such panic that I almost broke them clean out of the panel.
    Without the bell-bottomed rockets on the Chiron, there was no way I’d be breaking lunar orbit now.
    Hollowly, I reported my situation back to Houston, who had no doubt already become appraised of the situation via the Gemini’s computer.
    It took almost a quarter of an orbit before anyone on the ground had the nerve to respond. By which time I was screaming incoherent obscenities within the claustrophobic confines of the cabin.
    “You’ll have to go check it outside,” was their only suggestion.
    As if I didn’t already have the cabin depressurized.
    • • •
    Vic’s malfunctioning thruster pack had done more damage than I’d first noticed. There were pieces of it embedded in the Chiron down near the collar where the nose of the Gemini committed adultery with the business-end of the booster. I couldn’t see it, but I guessed that under the cowling some of those pieces had chewed part-way into the wiring. Why the connection hadn’t failed before now, I could not be sure. Suffice to say that there was absolutely no way of effecting a repair.
    While the mission controllers on Earth went politely apeshit, I allowed myself to drift away from the joined space vehicles and examine the limb of the moon as I flew once again towards the night side. How long had that gray, cratered landscape been waiting for the first person from Earth to see it up close? Mountains and valleys, great heaping plains of what looked like soft putty…Vic would have given a gonad to see this view, especially from outside the spacecraft. I hoped—somewhat vainly—that where Vic was, he was vicariously enjoying the show.
    The night side was black like no other blackness I’ve ever experienced. The stars away from the moon were bright, fixed, and perfect; silent suns all raging mightily in the far-off depths of the Milky Way. When I was a teenager, I used to sit out in the country at my uncle’s place, just he and I and the humid Mississippi air. Not a city light for fifty miles. And never had we ever gotten a night sky as perfect or as magnificent as this.
    I felt my throat close up as dawn on the far limb greeted me, and I orbited back into radio contact.
    The monkey house in Houston could offer me little, save for additional promises that they were “Working the problem.”
    Bullshit. More likely they were working how