Rude Astronauts by Allen Steele

Author:Allen Steele [Steele, Allen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Anthologies
ISBN: 9781480439962
Publisher: Old Earth Books
Published: 1987-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

John Harper Wilson

JOHN HARPER WILSON, THE first American to set foot on the Moon, lives today in peaceful obscurity in a log cabin in Rindge, New Hampshire. There’s no mailbox on the narrow dirt road leading to his house, and the clerks at the post office in town are among the small handful of townspeople who are aware of the famous resident. Wilson visits the post office two or three times a week to check his rented box, which is seldom full. Although John Harper Wilson’s name is in the history books, the man himself has almost been forgotten.

Inside the cabin, surrounded by birch and pine trees near the shore of Lake Monomonac, there is little to show that its occupant was once an astronaut. Wilson’s wife, Leanne, who was photographed nearly twenty years ago tearfully watching her husband on TV as he descended the ladder of Eagle One, has decorated the log walls with Tibetan carpets. Wilson himself—his brown hair now turned grey, his once athletic build now slightly paunchy—has become an amateur expert on Buddhist culture and Tibetan history. It is only in Wilson’s small office, in a guest room adjacent to the living room, that one finds memorabilia from the Luna One expedition: a model of a moonship, a bit of grey rock suspended in an acrylic cube, a framed photo of the twenty members of Luna One, posed in their heavy space armor on the surface of the Moon, surrounding the American flag that was planted there.

Wilson, the mission commander, is the astronaut in the center of the group. Next to him is his second-in command, Captain Neil Holliday. Their helmets almost entirely cover their faces, except for a narrow eye slit, so it is impossible to read their expressions. Wilson says that he was smiling when the picture was taken.

“Bloody wonder, right?” he asks. “Neil wasn’t smiling. I couldn’t see his face, but I know that he wasn’t smiling. I think he wanted to murder me right then.”

Wilson pauses, gazing at the group photo. “Pretty remarkable that they let a traitor stand in the middle of the picture, isn’t it?” he wonders aloud.

It has taken nineteen years for the true events concerning Luna One to become public. For almost two decades the US Air Force, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the White House had successfully prevented historians and the press, along with the greater public at large, from finding out what occurred on the Sea of Tranquility on July 20, 1969.

For all those years, the four-and-a-half-minute communications blackout from Tranquility Base has officially been described as a “technical failure.” And since the mission’s return to Earth six weeks after the landing, John Harper Wilson has virtually disappeared from the public eye. When Congress awarded Medals of Honor to the members of Luna One, all but Major Wilson attended the ceremony on Capitol Hill. Wilson was said to be too sick to attend, and Neil Holliday accepted the medal for his friend. Wilson says he never received the medal from Holliday.

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