The lines inscribed on the command module wall meandered, drifted up and down, broke off abruptly and resumed as if halting for breath.
From some angles they appeared meaningless scribbles but looked at correctly they resolved into long strings of transcribed speech.
"I saw boiling water spilled on an ants nest, insects by the hundred scattering in chaos …"
"It was the last day of November, dead leaves caught in a localized whirlwind, a storm of leaves under a lead gray sky …"
"Sometimes I would focus on tiny aspects of larger systems -- loading the dishwasher would become a huge task, surrounded by a maze of options that had to be traversed …"
Wilson flicked two switches, part of the Lunar Insertion Burn checklist. Short aluminum stems capped with plastic they clicked satisfyingly under his fingers. Green lights under dull covers came on.
Wilson returned to the dark grey on grey streams of writing. There was something comforting about the uninterrupted flow of images, demands, prayers.
He remembered the launch pads; the huge blocks of the vehicle assembly buildings; the trackways between them. All covered with words. Some stamped into the concrete when it was wet; some carved with high pressure jets of water; most painted onto any flat surface.
Endless strings of words, neurotically self-regarding in a vast number of styles. A child's scribble executed in letters a meter high in spray paint; multi-colored extravaganzas of standard street graffiti; lettering that wouldn't look out of place on a solemn war memorial.
A skein of prayer layered onto the hard engineering of the Cape. The central mystery of twenty first century humanity turned outwards and inscribed onto indifferent technology that itself existed solely as a function of that over-riding obsession.
"Come lovely fire rain, make us pure again," read a scribble by a fuel tank gauge, its horizontal needle shivering lightly at the two-thirds full mark.
***
The spaceship was on the far-side of the Moon from the Earth, on a trajectory that, unaltered, would take it around and back home. There was no communication with Mission Control here, no constant back and forth of dry technical minutiae to dull the ache of distance and impose structure on what still seemed an almost improvised response to what had been found on the Moon.
At the pre-determined time Wilson held down the main thruster switch for the required six minutes. Jackson to his left and Kaminski to his right lay strapped down -- tense, watchful and eager. The noise of the rocket was familiar and almost reassuring after the random creaks and pings of free-flying.
The burn ended and Apollo 37 was in Lunar orbit.
In the sudden emotional vacuum (going to the Moon had been replaced by being at the Moon) Wilson saw his life, everyone's lives, leading up to this moment. Motions repeated until drained of meaning; actions stereotyped and etched in time; all done over and over until life crashed into a wall of rough metal leaving only a smear of bubbling red misery.
As happened frequently to almost everyone these days he found himself weeping for no reason he could put a finger on.
"Steve? Steve, we'll be back in Earth comms in a minute. You going to be OK?" asked Kaminski gently.
"Yeah, I'll be fine, it's just … you know."
"I know."
***
After a few minutes, and re-orienting the spacecraft, Wilson again triggered the main rocket -- this time for fifteen seconds to circularize their highly elliptical orbit.
"Well, we're here. Ready to go to work Tim?" said Wilson to his second-in-command, Kaminski.
There was little sense of relief or joy in the cabin. Just a sour sense that the crew were on the verge of completing their mission.
Jackson was looking out of the small thick window and called to the other two men, "look, there it is!"
Wilson and Kaminski crowded around the window, eager to see the target with their own eyes.
Passing below was the ancient circle of Korolev crater, four hundred and thirty seven kilometers across, straddling the equator on the far-side of the moon. In the north-eastern quadrant was a smaller crater, Korolev D, and in that could be seen the target.
Ten kilometers across, glittering prismatically in the lunar daylight, the bottle green star-shape of the artifact gazed up at them.
***
Discovered originally by a Russian probe in 1963 news of the existence of a possible extra-terrestrial object on the lunar far-side had been suppressed by the communist authorities. Yet, somehow, everyone had known that something had happened on the day of discovery. It was as if the sky had quietly changed color or a second sun had risen in the morning. The whole human race, as one, looked up at a universe they suddenly found strange and painfully fragile. For many people it was as though reality itself had been contaminated.
In sleep, everyone found themselves dreaming the same dream. A low hill of green glass rose over a plain of ivory sand and pulsed with light under a sable sky. All was blurred, but in the distance impossibly steep and jagged mountains clawed upwards.
Word of the Soviet discovery leaked out and, quietly and without any fuss, the human race directed its energies towards this eruption of the alien in their backyard.
By 1970 it was estimated that fifteen percent of global industrial capacity was being used in one space program or another.
***
The crew busied themselves with the preparations for landing, Wilson and Kaminski crawling forward into the Lunar Module, Jackson fiddling with the camera he would use to photograph the LM after it separated from the Command and Service Module.
All the while there was a flow of un-needed advice and instruction from Mission Control, mercifully interrupted whenever the spacecraft moved behind the Moon.
Every square inch of the CSM and LM interiors was covered with writing, messages formed almost without thought by those who built the equipment. It was one of the behaviors that had followed in the train of the discovery, as though people were dealing with the psychic irritation by exuding words uncontrollably, trying to seal off the reality corroding effects under a carapace of verbiage.
Hatches were closed with dull thuds and the LM (Wilson and Kaminski aboard) separated from the CSM. To Wilson it felt like an abandonment, as had the whole journey. Gradually they had whittled away at the great stack of the Saturn 5, stages falling away as they completed their purposes, until the crew was left in this irregular polyhedron of foil.
The LM and the CSM pulled apart far enough that Jackson could see clearly that the LM was in good shape.
"You look fine Steve. The LM legs are fully extended."
***
Wilson remembered waking as a child from dreams filled with urgent importance, carrying messages that melted at the touch, like snowflakes.
That sense of having been entrusted, night after night, with tasks on which great yet incomprehensible events depended had returned. Dread filled him, but overlaying it was a feeling of ferocious glee that he finally was doing something, even if it was only acting as delivery boy for the large black box covered in yellow trefoils.
He thought for a moment and decided that that child with a head full of subliming memories would be proud of what he was doing. That was perhaps the best that could be expected in a world dominated by the cancerous ontology of the artifact.
***
Upright in the LM, held in place with straps, Wilson and Kaminski ran through their checklists. Once they were satisfied all was well, and that the CSM was far enough away, Wilson activated the thirty second Descent Injection Burn. The roar of the rocket was louder and somehow looser than that of the CSM -- less controlled and with more of the wildness of the original Saturn 5 launch about it.
They were now fifteen kilometers high and four hundred and eighty kilometers from the landing site. The ship went into Powered Descent Initiation, the computer controlled attitude jets activating frequently enough to sound like great fingers drumming on the thin walls.
Wilson and Kaminski lost themselves in the monitoring process, murmuring to each other long strings of numbers in a tone that came close to reverence. Their training had been intense enough that this, the most hazardous phase of the trip, passed in a trance, the two men becoming parts of the LM control system.
The LM was now in its braking phase, three kilometers high and tilting to near vertical to let the crew see the lunar surface. The small window was surrounded by lacy calligraphy but, for the first time on the mission, the men felt no desire to read.
At two hundred meters high and half a kilometer uprange of the landing site Wilson got manual control and, using the clumsy instruments that had scarcely changed over the length of the Apollo program, he began to maneuver the LM.
***
An unwanted thought came to Wilson as he made slight course corrections, a flaw in his perfect meshing with the landing process.
What was wrong with them that the best technology they could achieve was identical to that devised for the very earliest lunar missions? Had the effects of the artifact so blunted humanity that they were only capable of a dull repetition of earlier triumphs? Was the slow grind of Apollo, soon to reach some kind of pinnacle, just a slow winding down of human genius?
He dismissed the worries and returned to concentrating on the landing, resuming the blissful non-thought of routine.
The landing site looked level and clear of debris and as a result Wilson had little to do, although he made several small nudges to the ship's trajectory out of sheer nervousness.
The LM gently descended to the bone dust plain inside Korolev D until the meter long probes projecting from the footpads touched the surface and that thruster cut out.
The ship fell that last meter in the light lunar gravity and then there was silence broken only by the hiss of the life-support systems.
"Houston. The Medusa has landed. Greetings from Korolev base."
"Thank you Medusa. That was a text-book landing. Everyone here is cheering."
***
Kaminski was scowling.
"That landing could have been automated. We aren't needed here," he said.
"We knew that was a possibility when we volunteered. It's too late to have regrets."
Kaminski was still unhappy.
"I expected to contribute more to the mission than this."
He returned to his post landing check-list.
Once they were sure the ship was sound they began to suit up, checking each other as they maneuvered themselves into the bulky equipment in a clumsily claustrophobic ballet.
More check-lists, more ritualized exchanges with Mission Control, now in constant communication through a handful of micro-satellites deployed by the CSM.
At times the stress the program placed on this elaborate routine struck Wilson as being more akin to sympathetic magic than anything to do with engineering. Soothing incantations designed to infect a hazardous reality with safety, not so different from the intersecting meshes of words all over the walls.
Finally they were suited up. The process had locked them both into the mission script; both were operating at a rarefied level where their skills, knowledge and native abilities melded to produce an imaginative expertise the exercise of which was its own reward.
"Ready?" said Wilson and, on seeing Kaminski nod inside his silvery helmet, he opened the hatch. Air rushed out in a tumultuous diminuendo leaving Wilson with only the sounds of his life support pack and his breathing. Another whittling away of the un-needed.
Without any further discussion Wilson clambered over the lip of the hatch and slowly worked his way down the ladder fixed to one of the landing struts. He paused on the bottom rung, aware that his elevated heart rate and deep breathing would be obvious to everyone in Mission Control. He felt annoyed that this moment was so lacking in the privacy that something so solemn demanded.
Once he'd collected his thoughts he lowered his right foot to the surface, followed swiftly by the left.
He blanked briefly, there was a stutter in time as he absorbed the fact that he was standing on the Moon. For a timeless period he simply took in his surroundings: the white, white dust underfoot; the crater edge, too close and too topographically extreme to be anywhere on Earth; the black sky, studded with stars, hard bright points of light.
It was monochrome and bright; edges were sharp; shadows were delineated as cleanly as if they had been painted with a calligraphy brush. It was beautiful in a way very different to any beauty Wilson had ever experienced before. It was a landscape ancient enough to stun the mind and yet it looked as though it had been cut out of paper an hour before.
***
"Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent," he said, imagining the frowns and groans in Mission Control when they heard his first words
"OK, let's get to work."
Kaminski climbed out on the ladder and released the rover which tilted out from its cargo bay, elements unfolding and snapping into place as it descended. Wilson had always loved watching this, the complexities of the assembly self-organizing in a way that seemed a metaphor for the whole program.
Once the rover was down and deployed Kaminski climbed down the rest of the way and began helping Wilson get out the primary cargo -- the large box that took up most of the space occupied by the Ascent Propulsion System on previous missions.
Even in the dream-like lunar gravity the bomb was heavy and maneuvering it onto the reinforced rover was difficult and time-consuming. Eventually though the two men had the bulky object onto the rover and got on themselves, sitting on the bomb which was where the seats would usually have been.
The LM had landed three kilometers from the edge of the artifact, well within range of the rover. Wilson, driving, pointed the machine at the pulsing green segment of horizon and drove away.
The rover bounced over the smooth surface at a steady seven kilometers an hour, Wilson skillfully avoiding boulders and steep topography with slight shifts of the T-shaped controller. Mission Control remained surprisingly quiet, perhaps overwhelmed by the view from the forward pointing TV camera.
The artifact was getting closer. A slowly rising lump of green glass, one hundred meters high at its tallest, falling in shallow terraces to an irregular edge scalloped with conchoidal fractures. Every few seconds it was lit, briefly, from within, filling the sky above it with an eerie green glow. It looked strangely organic in this the most inorganic of places.
***
Neither of the men spoke as they moved closer to their target, lost in thoughts of contingencies, alternate plans to be activated if the unexpected were to happen. Everything went well, however, and the distance to the artifact steadily reduced.
As he drove Wilson thought about how the human perception of time was smeared out, the present moment a patchwork of instants generated by different parts of the brain at fractionally different times. He wondered whether the moment of death would be smeared even more, become a subjectively endless cascade of impressions underlain by a pure white light. As the end spread out, perhaps the all-pervading sense of wrongness he and everyone else felt would stretch and dilute to nothingness. At least it would remove the tyranny of words written all around him, each one a nail fixing a concept in time.
***
They approached the edge of the artifact, an assemblage of flat micro-terraces, none thicker than five centimeters, some projecting above those below. There were hollows in the lunar surface that showed the artifact continued underground for at least several meters, stacked pancakes of green glass abutting ragged piles of white lunar dust.
Here the pulses of light were amazingly bright and left behind after-images that made it difficult to see.
Wilson stopped the rover a few meters short of a large curving projection and both men got off.
Kaminski wandered a short distance away and kicked at the dust which rose in loose, slowly falling clouds. Light pulses from the artifact illuminated fragments of quartz in the clouds, sharp, bright viridian flickers.
Wilson ignored Kaminski. He'd had enough of the man's childishness and his help was no longer needed. There was no room for second thoughts here. It was far too late.
He opened the access panel on top of the bomb and gazed down on the simple controls. Three toggle switches sealed under tight rubber sheaths for protection against vacuum. A single red button, rectangular, surrounded by an ivory plastic bezel.
"Houston, I'm going to arm the device."
"Acknowledged Steve."
With great deliberation Wilson flicked the three switches. As he did so he realized that he had no checklist for this task. No reassuring list of options branching off from each other in a cloud of possibility. He was now at the extreme limit of the mission but felt nothing but weariness. Even the mystery of the artifact seemed a cheap thing now, something alien brutally imposed on a natural landscape.
As he flicked the last switch the red button lit up, just as the artifact flashed green. For a second the button was the color of mud, then the flash passed.
Wilson knew he was prevaricating but took a moment to focus on the scrawling writing all over the control panel anyway. It was an incomprehensible mess.
Without thinking he reached out and punched the button.
There was an endless moment of liquid light and the threnody of consciousness collapsed to a single pure thought which, so slowly, fell into tatters and faded away.
***
In the CSM Jackson saw the bloom of the explosion, the pure white sphere that expanded out to cover the artifact then shrank away revealing an unchanged plain of vitreous green.
***
Around the curve of the moon, on the side that always faces the Earth, the indifferently monochrome landscape contrasted sharply with the blue orb in the sky. There was a pin-prick of light somewhere in Central Asia. Another rocket-borne crew thrown against the mystery. Another assemblage of words hurled at the sky.
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