All That Outer Space Allows by Ian Sales

Author:Ian Sales [Sales, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Goodreads: 25452304
Publisher: Whippleshield Books
Published: 2015-04-26T12:00:00+00:00

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Another building, another gym-sized room. This, explains Walden, is the Apollo Lunar Mission Simulator. There are banks and banks of computers, with flashing lights and reels of tape that abruptly zip clockwise then anticlockwise. There is a great cubical frame of steel girders off to one side, and just visible within it is a grey and cratered diorama. And there are the three simulators, which look like someone opened a giant closet and all the boxes inside just fell out into piles. Walden points over at a large U-shaped console which looks up at one of the simulators.

That’s where the pencil-necks set up the mission parameters, he tells her. It’s all computerised.

There’s a lot of computers, Ginny says.

Yeah, 4.2 million bucks’ worth.

It’s a sum beyond imagining for Ginny, though not, she suspects, inconceivable to those closely involved with Apollo—after all, putting a man into space, putting a man on the Moon, is a hugely expensive endeavour.

This way, says Walden. This is the LM simulator.

He takes Ginny’s arm and leads her up a short flight of red-carpeted stairs to a platform at the back of the piles of boxes, and he steps through an entranceway into the simulator itself. Ginny halts at the jamb and peers in, and she can feel her pulse quicken as she takes in the grey panels of switches and dials and readouts, the two tiny triangular windows, the hand controllers—and it all looks so very real, an actual spacecraft, something that’s designed to operate in space, to land on the surface of another world. Cold fingers run up her spine and she thinks about magazine and book covers and descriptions in prose in short stories and novellas and novels, about spaceship bridges and control rooms, and here she is gazing at a tiny cabin which will carry two men to the Moon, and in no way does it resemble anything her imagination might have created from the science fiction she has read over the years. She looks down at her feet and wonders if she should take off her heels, they might damage the lunar module, she’s heard it is fragile, walls as thin as a beercan’s—but this, of course, is just a simulator, and the floor is good and solid. So she steps inside beside her husband and he tells her she’s at the commander’s position. She grabs a hand controller with each gloved hand and she stares through the window, which is really some kind of screen, at the surface of the Moon, which is really the diorama she saw earlier inside the giant steel framework. Now she’s starting to feel a little faint, she might even swoon, the sheer physicality of this tiny spacecraft cabin, of the grey instrument panels on every available surface, the dials, the switches, the digital readouts, the little blue and black ball bobbing this way and that beneath a glass etched with reticulations, and everything carefully labelled, so meticulously labelled. Her husband could be going to the Moon, she thinks.

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