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In Saturn TimeWilliam BartonOn the Ides of October, 1974, LM pilot Nick Jensen rode across the Lunar regolith under a featureless black sky not far from the north pole of the Moon. Almighty strange here, he thought, nothing like what we saw at the other six landing sites. Maybe a little bit like Taurus-Limow, but...Long, long shadows cast across the surface, black lanes running off to infinity behind crater walls, every rock the origin of a dark finger that pointed away from the Sun, the Sun itself a glare right on the southern horizon. Post a big sign: Penumbra Starts Here. Scary when you looked around the sky, too. The Earth was nowhere in sight, had disappeared below the horizon as they'd descended the long hill away from the lander's touchdown site.Orbiter pilot Ben Santori's voice crackled in his earphones, lightly fuzzed by static. "Inertial nav puts you at seven klicks."Nick said, "Rog. Coming up on Black Hills terminator." Somewhere up in that flat black sky, Apollo 21's orbiting CSM Nightwing would be a silvery fleck. And somewhere behind them, back up the twin tracks the rover was leaving in the dust, in the direction of Peary's north rim mountain structure, Lunar Module Flamebird was a barely visible golden freckle on the gray landscape. Seven kilometers. A long walk back if this thing breaks down.Goddamned lucky to be here. Eight long years in training since acceptance into the 1966 astronaut candidate pool. Watching men from the earlier intakes get their second and third flights, Alan Shepard on the Moon, Walter Cronkite jolly on TV... As Nixon canceled the Air Force's Manned Orbiting Laboratory, then the advanced Apollo Lunar program, then what little remained of Apollo Applications other than Skylab...Nick glanced over at mission commander Stan Freeman in the rover's left-hand seat, craning his neck a little to see around the EVA helmet's visor rim. These outer hard-hat helmets with their gold visor structure were a nuisance. We should just go with the red cloth cover they rigged for the orbital EVAs. "Time.""On time, on target." Freeman's voice came over the earphones clear and crisp, marked by his familiar Chicago accent. Freeman's luck was even greater, contaminating everything he touched. First black man in space. First black man on the Moon. Mission commander. Ph.D. in mechanical engineering. Darling of the press, interviewed by all and sundry only hours before liftoff.Lucky for us. Young black moderate Jesse Jackson giving a speech in which he praised NASA, saying King would've been proud, telling them all how much King had liked Star Trek, giving the mission SCLC's blessing and, by extension, its approval of the whole revived space program.They pulled up on the edge of shadow, near a low, hummocky ridge, the solar wind- and ejecta-eroded wall of a very old highland-type crater, unclipped their restraints and got out of the rover. Nick staggered slightly, bouncing inside his suit."Watch it.""I'm all right. A little disoriented from the ride." Wouldn't matter if I fell down anyway. Just get the suit dirty. And, though stiff and clumsy and uncomfortable as hell, these Apollo EVA suits are nothing if not sturdy."All set?""Lead on, MacDuff." The newsmen interpreting for the home viewing audience would like that. Hardy, bluff, brave, uncomplicated men, our representatives in the Great Void. Nick smiled to himself. Then why do we keep having post-mission nervous breakdowns? It was getting to be a NASA injoke. Go to the Moon. Then the nuthouse.They walked into night."Dark here."Nick said, "Yeah. Let's hold here for cooldown." Stepping into shadow, they'd just taken a 100K+ temperature drop, and another few steps might double that. Orbital sensing said the minimum temperature down inside the crater's permanent shadow was no more than 100K, theory said it might be as low as 40K. The suits were sturdy, but not invulnerable.Lovely luminous night, night that... Nick flipped up the gold visor. "Jesus!""What..." Freeman flipped up his own visor and looked. "Oh..." Soft whisper of delight. Above them, the sky was flooded by the gentle radiance of a hundred million suns, distant, steady needles of light, white, pale blue, tawny red-orange here and there, the Milky Way like a river of golden dust.Lucky to be here. All because Morris Udall and a determined band of party conservatives took the Democratic nomination away from the McGovernites' Children's Crusade, all because Nixon got a little paranoid and pulled that Watergate crap, crap that lost him the election.President Udall standing up there on Inauguration Day, decreeing that U.S. military forces would turn their equipment aver to the ARVN in situ and, evacuate Vietnam forthwith, "...because, right or wrong, it's time we were done with this sorry business..."President Udall sitting in the Oval Office signing an executive order that canceled Nixon's space transportation system, reinstating Apollo and AAP, "...because we spent forty billion dollars acquiring this technology. Let's get the benefit of it before we go out and buy another one."And, three weeks after that, astronaut trainee Nick Jensen had been assigned to the Apollo 21 prime crew. Apollo 17, to the Moon, numbers 18 through 20 up to Skylab 1, then back to the Moon again. Ten more flights to the Moon were decreed, and another Skylab, and anywhere between three and seven freestanding AAP missions. After that? Who cares? This will keep us busy through 1981....They walked on into the deeper darkness, picking over rocks, skirting small, shallow craters, taking samples, talking to Santori in orbit, back through the LM link to Mission Control."Okay, let's get the lights on." This was the other limiting factor. It was still seventy Kelvins here, not enough to redline the suits, not even close, but the power necessary to run this new lighting system would drain the backpack batteries in less than forty-five minutes. Ten minutes in here was what the profile called for.Flame on. The crater bottom lit up around them, rock and dirt and dust and nothing else. Disappointing. "Over there." Nick pointed at what looked like a low ridge of black talus near the steeper southern wall of the depression.He kneeled by it and prodded with his rock hammer. "Sintered solid, I guess, whatever it is.""Crack off a sample and let's get out of here. This place is a bust." The commentators would be talking about than one, all right....Nick hit the rock a sharp blow with the hammer's pointed end, breaking a chunk loose. Flash of bright white. "Uh." He picked up the sample and turned it over. Opaque white rock, colored like chalk but hard like granite, no crystalline structure, covered by a thin black rind.Freeman was suddenly kneeling beside him, reaching out, taking the piece, looking at it himself, watching light glint off the flat, exposed ice surface. "Well, well. Happy birthday, Nick."Summer 1977. It was the best of times.... Period. No Dickensian dichotomies at all.Nick Jensen floated cradled in the arms of his gas-powered astronaut maneuvering unit sixty meters from Apollo 29's CSM, silver and white cone-cylindercone hanging above Earth's bright limb. Beautiful day for an EVA. You could look straight down eight hundred kilometers on the brilliant blue Pacific, through thin stratus above the green hills of Hawaii. Not as good a view as the one from higher up. You couldn't really tell it was all one giant shield volcano, just like the bigger one on Mars, but still...Viking 1. Still laughing about that badly tuned color camera. "Jeez, it looks just like Utah! Wait a minute, let's have a look at the color wheel...." Red sky at night, sailors' delight.A red-helmeted head poked out of the command module's open hatch, and Amy Jordan's voice was sharp and distinct in his earphones. "Nick? We should be able to eyeball the Agena any time now.""Copy that." She was a superb engineer, had had a decisive hand in designing the radio-telescope mission, but the media had ignored all that, going on and on and on about having this sweet young thing fly in the cramped confines of an Apollo capsule with two men, about how she'd have to do all her private business right in front of them....Worth an exasperated sigh, an attempt at explanation: This is business. Important business, and we're all professionals, polite to each other... Order of the Dolphin, my ass...Smirk, smirk; wink, wink. All business. Right. Sure it is, buddy...Nick hit the hand controllers, compressed air stuttering behind his back, and did a slow turn. About ten meters away the completed radio telescope floated, a twenty-meter dish they'd brought up disassembled in the CSM's science bay, where a lunar mission would've carried camera packs and one of those little subsatellites. When they'd begun, just a week ago, it had been no more than a collection of wire mesh and cabling and electronic boxes. Now...A lovely, shining flower of silver and black, floating in low Earth orbit, waiting for its life in space to begin. There. The Agena booster was just a scintilla of light on the edge of vision, out in black night. "I've got it. How far?"Amy said, "Radar says ten klicks.""Okay. Bring her in." Once they had this thing coupled to the telescope and got it on its way to GEO, they could go home.... Christ, I love being in space, but... two weeks packed into a cabin the size of a compact station wagon interior with two offer people, people who smelled a little worse with each passing day.... That sort of thing could wear thing fast.Another voice in his ears, faintly tinged with a hiss of static, a little echoey from its trip through two ground links and one comsat: "Apollo 29, Mission Control.""That you, Jake?""Roger." Jake Burnett was the ... 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