The last items in the suitcase were his faded orange US Navy flight suit and leather boots. He touched the black-and-white shoulder patch—the grinning skull and crossbones of the VF-84 Jolly Rogers, from his time flying F-4s off the USS Independence aircraft carrier. Just below it was sewn the much more formal crest of the USN Test Pilot School, where he had graduated top of his class. He rubbed a thumb across the gold of his naval aviator wings—a hard-earned, permanent measure of himself—then lifted the flight suit out, threaded the hanger into the arms, hung it in the closet and tucked his brown lace-up flight boots underneath.
The rattling bedside alarm woke him, his glass eye feeling gritty as he blinked at the sunrise. His first morning on the Texas Gulf Coast.
Kaz rolled out of bed and padded to the bathroom on the stone floor, cold under his bare feet. He relieved himself and then looked in the mirror, assessing what he saw. Six foot, 173 pounds （need to buy a scale）， dark chest hair, pale skin. His parents were Lithuanian Jews who had fled the rising threat of Nazi Germany, emigrating to New York when Kaz was an infant. His face was like his dad’s: broad forehead, big ears, a wide jaw leading to a slightly cleft chin. Thick dark eyebrows above pale-blue eyes, one real, one fake. The ocularist had done a nice job of matching the color. He turned his head to the right and leaned closer, pulling down slightly on the skin of his cheek. The scars were there, but mostly faded. After several surgeries （five? six?）， the plastic surgeon had rebuilt the eye socket and cheekbone to a near-perfect match.
Good enough for government work.
He methodically went through his morning ritual, five minutes of stretching, sit-ups, back extensions and push-ups, straining his body until his muscles squawked. You get out of it what you put into it.
Feeling looser, he showered and shaved, and brushed his teeth. He rummaged in his eye bag, pulled out a small squeeze bottle and leaned back to put a few artificial tears into his fake eye. He blinked at himself rapidly, his good eye staring back with 20/12 vision.
That impressed them a long time ago during aircrew selection. Eye like a hawk.
2
Manned Spacecraft Center
“Houston, we have an electrical problem in the LM.” Apollo Lunar Module Pilot Luke Hemming’s voice was measured, calmly reporting the crisis he was observing.
“Roger, Luke, we’re looking at it.” The Capsule Communicator’s voice, coming from Mission Control in Building 30 at the Manned Spacecraft Center, was equally calm, matching Luke’s dispassionate urgency.
On the instrument panel in front of Luke, the Master Alarm light glowed bright red next to the window, where he couldn’t miss it during their upcoming landing on the Moon. He pushed the red light in to extinguish it, resetting it for subsequent failures. Several multicolored lights were still illuminated on the Caution and Warning panel.
“What are you seeing, Luke?” Mission Commander Tom Hoffman leaned across to have a look, their shoulders touching in the confined cockpit.
“I think it’s a bad voltage sensor,” Luke said. “Volts show zero/off scale low, but amps look good.” Tom peered around him at the gauges, and nodded.
The crew was hot mic, so the CAPCOM heard them. “Roger, Luke, we concur. Continue with Trans-Lunar Coast Activation.”
Tom and Luke carried on bringing the lunar lander to life, taking advantage of what would be the relatively quiet three days after launch, during which they’d travel across the 240,000 miles of space between the Earth and the Moon.
Luke slid his pencil out of his shoulder pocket and made a quick note on the small notepad he’d clipped to the panel. He was tracking the failures as they accumulated; maintaining a running tally was the only way to keep it all straight in his head, especially as multiple systems failed. The Apollo 13 explosion had reinforced just how complicated the spaceship was, and how quickly things could go seriously wrong.
Tom checked his own handwritten list. “So, I see a sticky cabin dump valve, a misconfigured circuit breaker, failed biomed telemetry, and now a bad voltage sensor. I think we’re still GO to continue with the full flight plan. Houston, you concur?”
“Roger, Bulldog, we’ll watch that voltage and likely have some steps for you to take later, but you’re still on track for lunar insertion and landing.” Luke, a Marine Corps captain, had been the one to nickname the tough little spaceship “Bulldog” after the Marine Corps longtime mascot.
Tom and Luke finished the TLC checklist, deactivated the LM, and exited through the tunnel, closing the hatch behind them.