At first, nothing. Then, gradually, like an air mattress deflating, the tension eased on the fabric, and the seams looked less distended. Michael was relieved to see the needle dropping in the pressure gauge on the suit’s right wrist.
“Looks like it’s working, Houston.” He tapped the gauge to make sure it wasn’t sticking. “As soon as the pressure gauge shows zero differential, I’ll close the valves.” He poked at the suit’s cloth; it was no longer quite as stiff.
“Copy, Michael,” he heard Kaz say. “Reminder to close the helmet valve first, then the hatch valve.” That would suck any extra odors out of the vent hose and keep them from getting into the cabin.
Michael didn’t want to take it too far or the suit’s negative pressure relief valve would suck open and start pulling in cabin air. He increased the speed of his tapping on the pressure gauge, watching the needle slowly bounce towards zero.
“Looks like we’re there.” He closed the helmet valve, and then quickly reached and spun the hatch valve tightly closed.
Svetlana squeezed the suit lightly, near the elbow, where there was no internal bracing. “Prekrasna,” she nodded. Excellent.
Chad spoke to Houston. “Kaz, that’s complete, suit looks good now, but we’re going to leave Luke connected to the hose, just in case we need to vent him again. It’s Michael’s turn to get some shut-eye. The cosmonaut and I are heading back into Pursuit.”
“Copy, Chad, sounds good. Nice work, and sweet dreams, Michael.”
In Moscow, Chelomei turned to his flight director.
“Listen to them for any word of Michael Esdale waking up.”
The Moscow Electronics Research Institute engineers had initially told Chelomei that his request was impossible; there were too many unknowns, there wasn’t time, and there was no way to test that it would work properly. But he had been unrelenting. “Just build the equipment!” he had yelled. He hated the inbuilt Soviet caution about running afoul of interdepartmental politics; it had allowed the Americans to beat them to the Moon.
The engineers in the end had hastily installed their thrown-together 13-cm S-band modulating uplink hardware alongside the huge TNA-400 antenna’s listening gear. The modification would interweave TsUP’s voice transmissions with the strong carrier frequency that it blasted skyward in a beam of electromagnetic energy, tightly focused towards the Moon by the towering dish antenna. It was like an invisible searchlight in the night, looking for the four small, circular receiving antennas sticking out of the aft section of Pursuit.
With luck, the processors inside the American ship would treat it as just another arriving signal to deal with. If the frequency and modulation matched closely enough to the American transmissions, it would pass through the filters, and the radio wave would be transformed into an electric signal that passed to a speaker—in this case the small one built into the commander’s headset, over his left ear.
When the flight director reported that he was certain that the other astronaut was asleep, Chelomei pushed his mic button and spoke. Hoping it was only Commander Miller, but uncertain of who else might be listening, he chose his words carefully.
“Transmission test, transmission test, how do you hear me?” he said in a deliberately flat and bored tone, like an uninterested radio operator. He wasn’t sure if the signal would be retransmitted by the spaceship back to Houston somehow, and didn’t want to alert anyone.
Chad, who had been thumbing through the checklist for tomorrow’s entry into lunar orbit, bolted upright, startled to hear the Russian language in his ear. It didn’t repeat, and he snuck a glance at Svetlana, who was looking out the window at the growing Moon. Had he imagined it?
Chelomei repeated himself. “Transmission test, transmission test, how do you hear me?” He wondered whether Cosmonaut Gromova would also hear him, or only Miller. He checked the clock at the front of the room. Still 30 minutes of comms remaining until the Earth turned too far for his satellite dish to see the spacecraft.
Be patient, he counseled himself. Miller needs time to decide what to do.
Chad pictured the ship’s comm system in his head, and rechecked the switch config. What the fuck? This wasn’t just stray VHF radio delivering typical, unregulated noise from Earth; this was coming to him on their designated S-band frequency. To get through to his headset, it had to be a specifically modulated signal. The realization hit him. Someone in Russia is calling us on purpose!
But who? He kept his face calm, in case Svetlana looked at him.