“So I’m an artifact bloodhound?” Hair stood on my neck.

Howard shrugged. “That’s my hunch. Besides…”

“Besides, what?”

Howard looked at his hands. “The scientist who trained for the slot you’re taking was tracking fragments in Nigeria when she came down with dysentery.”

“Oh.” I had been chosen by the runs. “What do you expect me to find?”

“Nothing. We already found it. A Projectile crashed, largely intact, four days ago. You’ve already signed the requisite secrecy paperwork—”

My heart skipped. “You want me to go with you to the wreck!” I was going to make history. This was almost better than going to Jupiter. My head spun. I saw myself hacking through jungle with a machete, leading Howard to his prize, vine-smothered like a ruined temple. But something was wrong with my picture.

The conference-room door opened again and a corporal wearing well-cut utilities with Quartermaster Branch collar brass came in. Hibble nodded at me again.

A yellow tape measure hung around the corporal’s neck. He made me stand and wrapped the tape around my chest while I talked.

“Okay. I’m the second-string artifact bloodhound.” I jerked my thumb at Metzger. “But why’s he here?”

Hibble paused while the Quartermaster corporal held out my arm and taped it, then my inseam, speaking measurements into a wrist ‘puter. He left.

Howard answered. “Captain Metzger is one of two pilots checked out to fly the Apollo Mark II The other guy’s on alert at Lop Nor in China.”

“Pilot?” A knot grew in my stomach. “To where?”

“The Projectile crash-landed at ten degrees, two minutes south latitude and fifty-five degrees, forty minutes east longitude—”

“That’s in—” I wrinkled my forehead, visualizing a globe.

“The middle of Mare Fecunditatis.” Howard looked at his watch. “At ten tomorrow morning, we three leave for the moon.”

A day later, they walked us three out on the gantry in baggy, white space suits. The one I’d been measured for actually fit. We carried little air-conditioner suitcases, just like old movies. Real old. They hadn’t used Canaveral’s launchpads since satellites went private. I shouldn’t have been surprised at the rusty girders. I shook. I hate heights. The narrow bridge to the capsule was latticed steel, so when I looked down between my feet the ground was 350 feet away.

In three days the ground would be 250,000 miles away. I stared ahead at the open capsule hatch, squeezed the bridge rail harder with shaking hands, and shuffled toward the capsule.

The Apollo capsule itself had just been built so it smelled like a new car inside. But it looked as old-fashioned as a laptop computer. I lay there flat on my back while technicians snapped fishbowl helmets over our heads, Howard on my right and Metzger on my left.

A tech patted my head, shot me a thumbs-up, then ducked back outside and sealed the hatch. Gray sky shone through the little capsule window. I scrunched my shoulders, hands at my sides, and tried to remember all the things I’d been taught over the last twenty-four hours, mostly what not to touch. The trip to the moon would last three days, but they had crammed me with three months’ training since yesterday. I had been nervous about learning my flight duties until they explained that I had none.

My trainer assured me, “The first American astronaut was just a monkey. He did fine.” Then my trainer eye-balled the Infantry tab on my file. “A really dumb monkey.”

My trainer taught me that the monkey wore a little space vest and diapers. My trainer never taught me how to pee in space.

Metzger’s voice and the ground controller’s rang inside my helmet. We had more room in the capsule than the old pioneers had because the old-fashioned instruments that had filled much of the capsule had been replaced by a wireless ‘puter Metzger held. It was not much bigger than a Playstation Model-40.

I sat atop history’s biggest conventional bomb. This spaceship was strictly forties, according to the briefings I’d sat through yesterday. But its ancestors had a few problems. Out of less than twenty Apollos, one incinerated its crew on the ground and another blew apart on its way to the moon and limped home. The space-shuttle airframes that had been revived to make Interceptors like Metzger flew exploded one trip every fifty. No wonder we started years ago to send robots to space instead of people.

My heart rattled like a stick dragged along a picket fence.

Metzger glanced over and raised his white-gloved thumb at me.

Pumps rumbled hundreds of feet below me and jostled my couch.

In my helmet, somebody said, “Ignition!”

I figured it would be loud. And I expected the G-forces, like a piano on my chest. But the vibration nearly had me screaming in my helmet. I’d read that these tubs shook like crazy.

I gripped the seat so hard I was afraid my fingers would puncture my pressure suit. I tried to relax my hands but couldn’t. I saw blue sky, really dark blue, for the first time in months. Then the palsied view ahead was blackness and stars.

When the engines cut off, the silence was as deafening as the roller coaster had been.

Metzger was saying something about attitude and roll, then he looked over and winked behind his visor. The view changed as he rolled the ship onto its back. It didn’t feel like that, of course. There’s no up or down you can feel. I just mean we were upside down, relative to Earth. Once he rolled us, Earth was over my head, not at my feet.

The planet a hundred miles below filled the little windshield. Or whatever you called the front window up here where there was no wind.

Until that moment all the pictures from space I had ever seen were the burnished, blue planet with the wispy white cloud streaks.

The dirty gray ball we’ve gotten used to since the Projectiles and their dust made me cry.

I tried to wipe my nose and bumped my hand against my helmet faceplate while Metzger and Ground Control rattled back and forth. He didn’t sound excited, exactly. Just a notch higher voice pitch, like he always sounded before an exam.

He held a Voiceboard in a gloved hand and studied its readouts, then let go of it. It hung there, weightless just like the holos show it.

“Metzger, can I undo my helmet?”

“No.”

“Just to wipe my nose—”

“This thing’s brand-new. If it develops even a pinhole leak, we could be dead.”

We were drifting a quarter million miles through vacuum. I’d seen all those holos where the guy in the space suit has a bad heater and he freezes solid. Or his head explodes when his suit rips. Or he just floats off into space sobbing into his radio. I always thought that last would be the worst. I licked my lip and tried to forget the snot.

There was no sound except the three of us breathing into our helmet mikes.

The Apollo looked like a big rifle cartridge. The three of us sat in the cone-shaped capsule that formed the “bullet” on Apollo’s front. The cylindrical “cartridge” behind us stored the spider-legged Lunar Excursion Module. It was the part of Apollo that would drop to the lunar surface, slowed by retro-rockets, then land on its unfolded legs. Later the LEM would rocket us back to dock with the “bullet” capsule orbiting the moon. Then we would crawl back into the bullet and ride it back to Earth.

Over the next day, Metzger and Canaveral decided the capsule wasn’t going to spring a leak, so we got to take off our helmets and pressure suits. Metzger jettisoned the skin that encircled the LEM, then detached the “bullet” capsule we were riding in and reversed it so it traveled fat end forward. That let him dock the hatch on the capsule’s pointy end with the LEM’s hatch.