Michael Esdale, in his pilot seat in the Command Module, greeted them with a broad smile. He was the one who would be orbiting the Moon while Tom and Luke went down to the surface. “I’d about given up on you two,” he said. “I made snacks, figuring you might be hungry after all that heavy switch throwing.”
Tom squeezed past Michael into his seat on the left, while Luke settled in on Michael’s right.
“How’s Pursuit doing?” Tom asked.
“Ticking like a Timex,” Michael answered. A US Navy test pilot, Michael had been the one to name the Command Module. As the world’s first Black astronaut, he had decided to honor the WW2 Black fighter pilots, the Tuskegee Airmen, and their unit, the 99th Pursuit Squadron.
“These snacks are . . . simple,” Luke said, popping a Ritz cracker with a square of cheese on top into his mouth.
“NASA’s version of shit on a shingle,” Michael said. “Maybe some Tang to wash it down?” Despite the TV ads, astronauts hadn’t drunk Tang in space since Gemini in the mid-1960s. One of the early astronauts had vomited Tang during space motion sickness, and reported that it tasted even worse coming back up.
Tom pushed the transmit button. “What next, Houston?”
“Take a fifteen-minute bathroom break while we reset the sim. We’ll pick up again in the Prep for Lunar Orbit Insertion.”
“Sounds good,” Tom replied. He pushed a small knob on his wristwatch and the Apollo 18 crew clambered out of the Command Module simulator.
Kaz, who was watching them on the multiple consoles in the instructor station in the adjoining room, had allowed himself only a moment to think that it might have been him in that sim, prepping for Apollo 18. He’d flown with Luke and Michael, all test pilots together, out of Patuxent River; until the accident, he’d seen them nearly every day, and gone for a beer with them most nights. As he watched the experts create one malfunction after another for the crew to deal with—before the launch, it was crucial that Tom, Luke and Michael see all the possible things that could go wrong and learn how to deal with them—he felt a little rueful that he was about to throw them the biggest mission curve ball ever.
After the bathroom break he saw Michael and Luke head directly back to the sim, but Tom stopped for a quick check-in with the instructors. When he spotted Kaz, he came directly to him, a big smile on his face. “Well look who the cat dragged in! Kazimieras Zemeckis! You’re even uglier than I remember.”
Kaz shook his hand, smiling back. He didn’t know Tom as well as the other two, but they’d been classmates in the same Test Pilot School group at Edwards Air Force Base in California’s Mojave Desert. “Good to see you, Tom,” he said. “You three are doing good work together.”
“Yeah, we’re getting there. These torturers here are making sure of that.”
Kaz said, “I need to talk with you all after the sim.” He paused. “Update from Washington.”
Tom’s forehead furrowed. He didn’t like surprises, especially as the crew commander. He looked at his watch, and then nodded, curtly. “Okay. But time to head back in now. See you at the debrief.”
As Kaz left the sim and walked out of Building 5, he had to stop for a moment to get his bearings. He looked at the parking lot ahead and the nine-story rectangular building on his right, and matched it with what he’d seen while flying over in the Cessna. He turned right across the open central quadrangle and headed towards the Mission Control Center.
From the outside, MCC looked like just another three-story block of stuccoed cement, with windows tinted dark against the Texas sun. He followed the path around to the entrance, where the architect had made a perfunctory effort to give the nation what they expected of their space program—angular concrete forms stuck onto the postmodern Brutalist cubes. Government ugly.
He reached into his sport jacket pocket to retrieve the new NASA ID badge he’d been issued that morning. A guard sitting in front of three heavy silver doors took it from him, checked the building access code and handed it back.
“Welcome to MCC,” he said pleasantly, pushing a button. The clunk was loud as the nearest door unlocked. Like a bank vault, Kaz thought. Let’s see what valuables they’re keeping inside.
The immediate interior was as underwhelming as the exterior. Gray, fluorescent-lit corridors, functional linoleum and fading prints of the Earth and Moon in cheap black frames on the walls. Kaz followed the arrows on the small signs saying MCC. One of the two elevators had an Out of Order sign on it, so he looked around and took the stairs.