Returning from the Land, per the will of the voters, we’re going to be headed to c4, the full moon in a blue sky.
>press c4
The piece at c4 presses in smoothly, like a button, then releases. You are sucked up once again into the time vortex. As you slow down, you briefly make out Stravinsky’s ballet “The Rite of Spring” being broken up by riots in Paris and then everything begins to change…
[Press SPACE to continue.]
Chapter Nine - The High Point
Lunar Module
An early space capsule like the cockpit of a plane, bolted with banks of dials and analogue readouts like car milometers. A computer displays crude green digits; not far away is a sextant. Mass is so critical that there’s no panelling over the maze of wires and pipes, and the hull is eggshell-thin.
Two astronauts can just about comfortably stand by the control panel, either side of which is a triangular window. In the white ceiling, at the rear, is a hatch, shut tight; and down at knee-level, the entrance to an airlock.
A modern-looking book, Rukl’s “Atlas of the Moon”, sits incongruously beside a kind of hammock.
You are not altogether surprised to find out who the other astronaut is.
Black snatches the sparkler away and you lose sight of it. “That was a close one! We’re breathing pure oxygen here. It could have been the Apollo 1 fire all over again.”
Oh damn, we’re actually in the lunar module—without any of the proper training! Good thing Black extinguished the sparkler, that is exactly the sort of thing you don’t want to have in a spacecraft. (Though, didn’t they switch away from pure oxygen specifically because of the Apollo 1 fire?)
If this were Trinity, or even Curses, we would have just made the game unwinnable by losing our only light source. But this game has been relatively merciful about the order of vignettes, and there haven’t really been any darkness puzzles yet, so hopefully we’ll be okay.
Black is poised over the controls, wearing not a space-suit but casual clothes: black jeans and a T-shirt from the height of the Vietnam war protests, with a picture of men on the moon and the slogan “So What?” written underneath.
“Haven’t you ever wondered what would have happened if the last Apollo astronauts hadn’t been killed?”
Jeans and a T-shirt seem entirely inappropriate for a moon landing.
Also, wait a moment—the last Apollo astronauts weren’t killed. As far as I know, nobody’s ever died on the moon. Apollo 1 caught fire during testing, but I don’t think there were any other deaths in the entire Apollo program: they all made it back safely, including the famously disastrous Apollo 13.
I’m reminded of a Tumblr post that went viral a while ago:
“If I had time travel I’d kill Hitler” “If I had time travel I’d stop my favourite politician getting assassinated” you’re all thinking way too small. If I had time travel I’d stop Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin from dying on the moon due to Soviet sabotage, kicking off the Great Nuclear War and devastating half of the planet.
There have been a few places where Black doesn’t seem to quite understand the history they’re interfering with. But this casts those moments in a different light. What if they understand perfectly well—but they’re not from the same history as us?
It sounds like this time we’re going to be working together to save our history, the one where Apollo 17 made it back safe and sound. Or maybe it’s actually Apollo 16, and in Black’s timeline, NASA never tried again after the disaster. Given that Black has someone gotten hold of a lunar module (or the lunar module?), I think we’re firmly in alternate-history territory now.
According to the status line, it’s currently 11:17 am “Lunar Time”, but I admit I have no idea what that means. We’ll have to trust Black to have the scheduling figured out for us.
“So here goes!”
This has, to say the least, been a confusing evening. Killed? You don’t remember that, but then nobody at your school ever talked about Apollo.
Okay, so we seem to be from the real timeline. (Also, is this the first time the story specifies anything about the protagonist’s past? I don’t remember it happening before, except in the Proust reminiscence.)
>read atlas
There are entries on every named feature of the moon, and well-drawn maps. It’s really intended for astronomers rather than tourists, though it includes quite detailed features of the Apollo landing sites.
The view is extraordinary, flying over a bright white-grey cratered world from 70 miles up.
“And… burn!” says Black coolly. The capsule turns and thrusts briefly into a new elliptical orbit, arcing downward.
“Traditionally the astronauts get to name the Lunar Module, so, I hereby christen her… ‘Othello’.”
So what happened to the astronauts who were supposed to be in this module? I’m very curious how Black arranged this.
Also, the status line updates here to say Lunar Module “Othello”. Nice touch.
>x sextant
Used for navigational fixes, sighting against the stars, the way travellers have for four thousand years. Through it you can see only lunar surface.
Time passes.
“Let me see… the Littrow valley, that’s 20 degrees 48 minutes north, 30 degrees 10 minutes east…”
There doesn’t seem to be anything for us to do except wait and trust our pilot.
The “Othello” drops to a perilune of just 10 miles up, and Black kicks in the engines again to tumble it out of orbit.
The craft is on automatic pilot descent now, gliding down over the lunar surface.
At 2000m up, Black takes over the controls, chiefly a buttoned joystick. The “Othello” is braking steadily.
Only 100m over the lunar soil now, and Black is concentrating to avoid craters and boulders.
Sheets of lunar soil are blown radially away from the base of the craft by rocket exhaust.
Wires hanging from the four legs brush against the surface, and the “contact” light comes on. For an instant Black hesitates, then kills the engines, and the “Othello” settles without a bump, leaning just fractionally (one of its legs must be slightly inside a minor crater).
“I don’t recognise this! We’re in the wrong place! And there’s no fuel to take off and land elsewhere.”
Uh-oh! At this point the game seems to be over. I haven’t found anything we can do here. Leaving early doesn’t wreck history, but I think we’re in a walking-dead state.
So let’s restore back to the start of this segment, and double-check Black’s calculations this time.
“Let me see… the Littrow valley, that’s 20 degrees 48 minutes north, 30 degrees 10 minutes east…”
>look up littrow valley in atlas
South of the Littrow crater, a valley with a broken south wall named after Johann J. von Littrow (1781-1840), the Austrian astronomer. The Taurus-Littrow valley, landing site of Apollo 17, is located at 20 degrees 10 minutes north, 30 degrees 48 minutes east.
Aha. They switched their minutes around.
>show atlas to black
Black looks aghast at the entry you found on the Taurus-Littrow valley. “10 minutes north, 48 east!” Frantic manoeuvering of the capsule ensues.
History saved! Black can probably take it from here, right?
But there’s no way we’re leaving without taking the chance to walk on the moon. Who would give up that opportunity?
We can sit back and appreciate the view as we descend, until…
“Houston, Taurus base here,” says Black superbly to nobody in particular. "The Othello has landed.
– Welcome to the Moon, population 4."
The “Othello” shakes a little as its remaining fuel sloshes back and forth in the tanks.
[Your score has just gone up by one point.]
Population four, so that would be us, Eugene Cernan, and Harrison Schmitt, from the actual Apollo 17. Meaning Black somehow got a second lunar module into orbit without anyone noticing for the sake of this intervention. How in the world did they manage that?
I’m not sure where to go from here, though. The airlock and hatch aren’t implemented, and OUT doesn’t work. Brute force eventually reveals that the answer is DOWN, which does make some sense.
You change into the space suit, and wriggle out on your stomach through a hatch only 32 inches square. (Getting out of a lunar module has been compared to being born.) Clambering out onto the nine-rung ladder, you stretch with relief. The last step is actually quite a large one…
A Magnificent Desolation
As Buzz Aldrin put it. A ridged, furrowed plain of unraked powdery soil, dotted with pebbles and boulders of subdued grey and brown which gleam here and there with splashes of glass. Mountains rise like sand dunes from the overcurved horizon.
You have landed in the southeast corner of the Taurus-Littrow Valley, an embayment between two-kilometer high Massifs to north and south, which runs eight kilometers wide to the west until it climbs foothills bordering the Mare Serenitas. The valley floor ends suddenly with Bear Mountain to the southeast.
A ladder rises through the shade into the airlock of the squat and beautiful Lunar Module “Othello”.
The Lunar Rover, a stripped-down jeep, rests neatly here.
It seems Black won’t be joining us for this one. Disappointing, but the complexities of another character moving around would probably push the game past the Z-machine’s limits.
And that seems like a good place to end this update. What next? Exploration?
Continuing the same transcript file from last time, because I forgot to switch it out:
14.txt (28.7 KB)
