Free Lunar Descent by Allen Steele Page A

never to get undressed for sleep, since it could hinder a person in the event of an in-flight emergency. He glanced at the luminous face of his wristwatch and saw that he had been asleep for only four and a half hours, yet he felt as if he’d caught a full eight hours of sleep. Another effect of spaceflight; in microgravity, the body requires less time to recharge. The dream of American industry realized: less rest, more work …
    As Lester shoved aside the curtain of his compartment and floated out into the mid-deck, the recessed overhead lights brightened. Someone on the flight deck had thoughtfully decided to provide him with a semblance of morning. He passed storage bins decorated with taped-up postcards of sunny beach scenes and mountain trails, and noticed that the curtain had been pulled open in the compartment which had been occupied by the only other passenger on this trip; apparently she had also been invited to the flight deck for the landing. Across the narrow aisle, the curtain hiding the toilet was also open. He had the urge to make a visit, but he dismissed it. He could hold his bladder for another twenty or thirty minutes until they landed, and he had never enjoyed whizzing into a suction hose.
    Riddell grasped the ladder with his hands and hauled himself up through the hatch onto the flight deck. The low, cramped compartment was dimly lit; most of the illumination came from tiny red and green status lights on the wraparound dashboards and from the silver-blue glow of the computer screens. The flight deck was a netherworld of thin, stark shadows; the pilot and copilot were two vague lumps sitting in high-backed seats in front of the angular, multipaned windows. He felt his way to an unoccupied seat behind the commander’s seat on the left, lowered himself into it, and searched for the harness straps which dangled like dead tapeworms on either side.
    Alli James looked around and favored him with a wide, bucktoothed grin: a homely Texarkana farm girl who had managed to get herself out of the soybean fields and onto the high frontier. “Get enough sleep?” she asked politely. Lester nodded. “Good. Three minutes to AOMV separation, better strap in tight.” She turned back to her station. “How’s it looking there, Ray?”
    â€œSystems copacetic. Internal electrical is powered up, batteries on standby.” The pilot’s head was encased in a bulbous VR helmet; a fiber-optic cable led from the back of the helmet to the dashboard before him, and only his mouth could be seen below his opaque black visor. Inside the helmet, he was seeing the hallucinatory panorama of virtual-reality: a 3-D computer-simulated horizon, a gridwork of XYZ line coordinates, navigational beacons, guidance parameters, and artificial imagery. Like a mime artist imitating a pilot at work, Ray Carroll lifted a gloved hand, pointed his finger to an invisible console in midair, and made a couple of jabbing motions. Lester felt the moonship jar slightly as the RCR’s on the outer hull fired to correct their trajectory.
    â€œLTV tank pressurization complete on all four,” Ray drawled. “Guidance primary is on, abort sequence is off. Status is go. Ready to decouple AOMV.”
    â€œGood deal,” Alli replied. “Okay, we’re on full internal. Ready to come off autopilot.” As commander, Alli flew without wearing a VR helmet, to verify that Ray’s electronic vision wasn’t deceiving him. She reached up and snapped toggles which disengaged the autopilot, tapped a couple of digits into the flight computer, then pulled back the candy-striped safety cover from the booster-release bar above her head and watched as the digital timer on her main board counted down. “Autopilot off, manual descent system engaged. Y’all ready there?” Carroll nodded. “All right. AOMV separation minus five … four … three … two … one …”
    Holding the