Adrift on the Sea of Rains (Apollo Quartet) Read Online Free PDF

acknowledgement, frowns darkly in thought, and then a slow smile evolves on his face.
    We’re saved, he says in wonder.
    It soon transpires that the men of Falcon Base can listen, but they cannot be heard. They try to contact someone using the S-band, but no one responds. They have no idea why—perhaps their equipment is faulty, although the self-tests say not. Perhaps the Earth no longer listens on those frequencies, perhaps the Earth has no dish directed at the Moon. It doesn’t matter. Now the men of Falcon Base have a home to return to. All it requires is for someone to go there and tell them about the castaways on the Sea of Rains.
    Do they even have a space programme? asks Kendall. We don’t know how far we’ve evolved from our Earth.
    So we show them how to do it, replies Alden with a grin; big Alden, always the most serious of them all. The corn-fed Mid-Westerner who says little, and then only after great deliberation. The dedicated engineer test pilot who is always worth listening to. The man Peterson is sure he has not heard say a word for nearly a year.
    Neubeck at the telescope lets out a whoop. They crowd round him like kids, demanding to know what he’s found.
    Cain’t be sure, he says with glee, but I reckon we got there a space station in orbit.
    Peterson pushes his way through the unruly astronauts. He tugs at Neubeck’s shoulder. Let me see, he orders. Is it Freedom?
    No, no. Too small. Neubeck glances down at Peterson’s expectant face and adds with a cheerful insolence, Sir . Too small, but it’s an orbital platform for sure.
    They can make out little detail. The space station is indeed smaller than Freedom, a collection of perhaps seven or eight modules, with only three or four pairs of solar cell wings. This Earth’s space programme, it seems, is less advanced than theirs.
    They gaze at each other in wonder. The same thought is written on their faces in the different languages of their features: it can be done . There’s an ALM with an ascent stage out there on the Sea of Rains, an ALM for the trip from the Moon to the Earth. The ALM can’t land, but there’s no need.
    Because there’s a space station in LEO.
    Imagine their faces, Peterson thinks, imagine the expressions on the faces of those guys in the space station when they hear a knock on the hatch and there’s some guy in a spacesuit outside. Imagine what they’ll say when they hear there’s a whole bunch more on the Moon.
    He looks across at Kendall and the resentment, the simmering anger, is gone. It’s clear space now, like that abrupt luminous moment he used to feel as his North American F-108D Rapier pierced the clouds and he found himself flying above a landscape of pillowy white. Sound has fallen away; vision, of preternaturally sharpness, is all. Then hearing would return: the muted roar of the YJ93 turbojets, the hiss of his headphones, the vibration of the airframe.
    Peterson is not ready to feel gratitude. Kendall and the Bell may have brought them all home, but Peterson will not thank the man yet. Later, perhaps. Once they stand on the soil of the good green Earth.
    Perhaps by then he will have come to terms with the debt he owes the scientist and his Nazi weird science.

    Higher, further, faster—Peterson’s career had taken him one step beyond the last with each move, which was neither an unusual nor an unexpected career-path for an officer of his calibre. After flying hypersonic reconnaissance missions thirty-five miles above the earth, close enough to space the sky about him was black and the only blue lay beneath his aircraft, as though he were skimming across the surface of a vast curved lake—after flying so near to space he could almost touch it, the only step up was orbit, and USAF plainly thought he had the right stuff because they asked him to try out for their astronaut corps. They’d been launching Saturn IBs out of Slick Six at Vandenberg for over a decade, they even had their own line of Apollo