The Lovecraft Squad: Dreaming by Stephen Jones

Author:Stephen Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2018-10-08T16:00:00+00:00

Muldoon grunted. “Welcome to Lunarville 1. That’s what we need you to go fix.”

It had all come out of the panicky days of the late 1950s, Muldoon explained.

There had been covert spaceflights pretty much from World War II, from both sides of the Iron Curtain. But from 1957 the Soviets had gone public, and space had started to look like an arena for conflict between the powers.

“I was around then. In the USAF,” said Muldoon. “We feared the Russians would grab the high ground by reaching the Moon first. The Air Force started talking up plans for a nuclear weapons base on the Moon as early as 1958. Von Braun got involved, and it got bogged down in the usual inter-service infighting.”

“But then,” Dyer said, “Hoover’s Human Protection League people looked at the transient lunar phenomena at Aristarchus, and joined the dots with the Verne incursion at Florida, and we decided we needed to get people up there quickly. Armed with a few weapons.”

“And luckily,” Muldoon said dryly, “America had a plan.”

The engineers from Bell Aerosystems who dreamed it up, as an emergency Moon-race measure in 1962, had called it the “One-Way Space Man.” The astronauts called it “Project Poor Slob.”

Muldoon ticked off the stages. “You send up a Surveyor lander probe. Use it as a radar beacon to attract the landing of shelters—‘chuckwagons,’ we called them—on uncrewed boosters. Finally you send up an astronaut . . .”

A poor slob who rode a Mercury capsule on top of a Saturn booster, all the way to the Moon.

Dyer eyed me. “You may be reminded of the recent space movie Countdown. Or the book it was based on. More hiding in the open.”

“In the event, we sent up two guys. Two Mercury shots.”

“What about the radiation? The solar flares?”

Muldoon shrugged. “We hardened the Mercury capsule. Heaped-up lunar dust keeps the crew protected on the surface. More robust than Apollo, actually. It just couldn’t bring you home again. The chuckwagons had to be docked together, covered with lunar soil, then a silo dug out for the nuclear missiles . . .”

“Not ICBMs,” Dyer said. “Lunar gravity is gentle, remember. Small rockets would suffice to deliver a lethal payload anywhere on the lunar surface.”

“Of course the nukes could have been turned on the Soviets, if they ever got there,” Muldoon added. “As opposed to the eldritch threat. That was the deal that got the USAF to cooperate.”

“I’ve been in space. I can’t believe two guys could do all that work.”

“They had—help,” Muldoon said. “Need to know, Jones.”

“And then what? They just wait? For months, years?”

“They do their duty,” Muldoon said sternly. Then he hesitated. “Inconveniently, the lunar base itself is situated in Aristarchus.”

I gaped. “At ground zero?”

Dyer shrugged. “J. Edgar Hoover had to—negotiate—with the air force. Who could not be told the whole truth, of course. It was the best we could do.”

“And if the missiles are launched—”

“There’s a time delay of an hour,” Muldoon said. “That’s enough time to get to safety. You can run a few miles in an hour.

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