The rock that hit the rocket had been hiding behind the moon. It was only the size of a fist. Inside it, down deep in the core, surrounded by weird heavy metals and crystalline rock, was a drop of a substance so primitive it was unrecognizable. It would never be recognized. It was a bit of matter, a grain of dust from the beginning of the solar system itself. Presolar. A presolar particle, trapped in a rock in crazy orbit around the sun. It was one in a million, one in a hundred million, like a raging genius in the human race, or a crazed savant skipping outside the bell curve. The rocket, approaching lunar orbit, cut through the emptiness like a gleaming, nanomatronic sliver in an artery, so tiny, such a fragment of metal on its path. The meteor was even smaller, a rogue molecule, loose in extraterrestrial solution. A subliminal particle on the atom of the solar system. A bit of thought loose in the brain. The size of the meteor was judged, later, to be nine centimeters in diameter. They did not see it at all; nobody saw it on any electronic screen. The astronauts and Maxon had put on their space suits. They had strapped themselves down, in the control module, just like takeoff. Just like the moment when the tower of fuel under them had exploded, shooting them straight up, face-first, into the ozone. The babble of Mission Control in their ears had directed the astronauts through the checks, the tests, prior to their arrival. The storage pod was already orbiting the moon, so they would sync with it, if all the numbers were aligned properly. The voice of Mission Control, calm and calming, droned on down the procedure for initiating lunar-orbit insertion. When the procedure was finished, when they had fired the rocket again, they would be orbiting, too.
The meteoroid was close, getting closer, but still secret, undetected by the astronauts in space or the humans on Earth, who were operating the astronauts remotely. It was such a little one, though. It was a meteor that no one would notice or care about, if it were wrapped in a cozy blanket of Earth’s air. The atmosphere can burn up most things before they bother Earth. Yet in space, the smallest little thing moving at the correct velocity in the most dangerous direction can penetrate like a bullet. A grain of sand can leave a two-inch crater in the hull of a spaceship. What could a baseball do? It’s one thing when you walk outside, turn your face up, and say, “Wow, just look at all those stars.” It’s another when a hunk of metal from before time drives itself into your intestines.
The pilot of the rocket was named Tom Conrad and he was a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Air Force. He was an automated person, his moves dictated by a roomful of scientists in Texas, by a protocol, by a list of procedures. Favorite of Gompers, the commander, and vocal critic of Phillips, the engineer, Conrad was as effective a pilot as there was in the world. Maxon was the only civilian on board. Conrad, Phillips, Gompers, they were good guys, stand-up characters. Everyone is friends in space; a few little blobs of life in a vastness of cold death will always pal around together.
Maxon clicked on his face mask, clicked into his restraints, buckled down into the chair. He became one with the rocket, connected to it, part of the hardware, indistinguishable. He was no longer floating, no longer human. He was a smudge on the rocket, a little bit of flesh inside it. He heard his breathing, inside that shatterproof helmet, that flesh bucket. Outside the ringing in his ears, outside the noise of Mission Control, relaying instructions to the pilot, to the engineer, to the real astronauts, while Maxon had been told, so lovingly, so kindly, to sit tight. The men on the ground always talked to the astronauts as if they were children, performing dogs. They were an extension of humanity, a little finger of biology in the vast mechanical space. Overdirected. Overthought. Ultimately, so insignificant.
When the meteor struck, the voice in the radio had just said, “Okay, check.” Then there was a bump; it was felt by the astronauts as a ripple in the core of the rocket. There was nothing they could have done, on the fly, to override the program and violate the list of available alternatives. The thing had to impact. There was no such thing as an evasive maneuver. They felt it hit, they heard the metal groan, and they felt a lift, a sickening moment of lurch, like a car going fast over the top of a country hill. Then the rocket began to tilt, but they didn’t feel it. They were in it, part of it, connected to it, laced into it with nylon straps and boots.
They saw themselves go off course, humanity jiggered to the left, hard, and there was a hissing sound, and some of the lights on the control panel began to blink, and the pilot’s arms were moving quickly over buttons and dials, responding to the blinking, the information, like a spinning wheel on a sinking ship, going faster and faster. Maxon thought of dying in the same way that he thought of the spaceship imploding: ruining itself on itself, crushing like a can. The meteor was heavy metal. The skin of the rocket would not deflect it. There would be damage, but how much? Mission Control began to shriek. Like a parent whose child has run into the road. “Gompers? Status! George?” Then went silent.
The meteor had hit the rocket. There was no turning back. The people were inside the rocket and were strapped to the rocket. It’s very hard to survive a meteor strike, in space. Everyone had always known this. Playing the numbers, they bet that a meteor would not hit, because space is so big, and meteors are so small, and rockets take up very little of space. Like a boat on the ocean, trying to stay away from one other boat, except times a thousand, times a million. It was so safe.
Of course, nothing kills you right away, and the same can be said for meteors. They don’t have to kill you right away. This was the case in the rocket Maxon was sitting in, headed for the moon. It did not kill them right away. Yet they all four knew, and all the other humans back on Earth who were paying attention knew, that in that moment, the mission changed, and there was very little hope of a happy reunion. In the mad spinning mechanism, the cruel randomness of space, with its dire temperature shifts, its spinning infernos, its ferocious pellets, the chance of a human surviving was very small. The fact that most astronauts came back and were fine was a testament to just how tiny the steps taken by humans into space had been.
So the little room got littler. The astronauts began to sweat. The air became tainted, as if they could taste the chemicals. Their feet longed for the bumpy heaviness of Earth. Their lungs yearned for the sweet, pure air of Manhattan, or even a coal mine, air that was made the real way, by plants and other people and cars and breezes and animals, not manufactured and tanked. Now they were not only cramped inside a spaceship, they were cramped inside a damaged spaceship. The panic was there at the back of their throats, with the desire to claw their way out, escape, restart, make different life choices.
Gompers took control, barking orders and asking for status reports. Fred Phillips, so obnoxious on his downtime, became a mechanism of assessment, snapping out clipped answers and clicking away on a board of buttons and levers. Maxon could do nothing. His limbs went still. His worry was distant. He thought of Sunny sitting in a room at NASA in Langley, looking at an uplink to the rocket’s control room. She would see their four shining heads, round and hairless, closed to the elements. Would she think he looked bald? Would she think he looked familiar? Would the boy be there, in his helmet? Would Sunny be aware they were all encased in their own skulls? Maxon closed his eyes. Robots were more suited for this. Robots were more equipped. There was nothing a robot would regret, faced with its destruction in the aftermath of a meteor strike.
This is the story of an astronaut who was lost in space, and the wife he left behind. Or this is the story of a brave man who survived the wreck of the first rocket sent into space with the intent to colonize the moon. This is the story of the human race, who pushed one crazy little splinter of metal and a few pulsing cells up into the vast dark reaches of the universe, in the hope that the splinter would hit something and stick, and that the little pulsing cells could somehow survive. This is the story of a bulge, a bud, the way the human race tried to subdivide, the bud it formed out into the universe, and what happened to that bud, and what happened to the Earth, too, the mother Earth, after the bud was burst.
If Sunny were here, he would say, “Don’t be afraid. Think of the meteor as a giant meatball. One I will eat and gain twenty pounds.” She was always saying he was too skinny.