TCR

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At 5:26 PM EST on December 13, 1972, six days after leaving Earth and during their third day on the surface of the Moon, Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt made the final moonwalk of Apollo 17. Gene Cernan had flown to the Moon before, on Apollo 10. That flight was with his commander from the Gemini 9 mission, Tom Stafford. On Apollo 10 Gene flew a lunar module to within a tantalizing nine miles of the Moon’s surface, then returned to altitude, leaving the honor of the first lunar landing to Neil and Buzz on Apollo 11. Robyn had been following live television broadcasts of the mission from only a few miles away at Taurus Base. Now she followed the mission with the television in her truck as she drove down the flanks of North Massif to reach the floor of the Taurus-Littrow valley. The landing site of Apollo 17 was on the southeastern edge of Mare Serenitatis where an asteroid hit the Moon back in the Day. The unimaginable violence of the collision created a basin four hundred miles across. The rim of Serenitatis is a ring of mountains which have collapsed in some places, making a corona of long valleys like Taurus-Littrow aligned toward the center of the mare. The pyroclastic flows that filled the “Sea of Serenity” had been accompanied by lava fountains which covered the area with tiny glass beads bearing bright colors such as orange and yellow. The outer, southeastern end of the valley butts up against a large mountain. In the run-up to Apollo 17 NASA reviewed aerial photos and took to calling this mountain the East Massif. In the south a narrow canyon leads to yet another valley. The west side of this canyon is the sheer wall of South Massif. Crossing north to the other side of East Massif is another canyon leading to still another valley. Beyond this canyon is the so-called Sculptured Hills, and to the west of those hills is North Massif. Between North and South Massif is a valley is about four miles wide, partially blocked by Family Mountain and a sharp fault ridge three hundred feet high. The eastern foot of that sharp ridge forms a gentle ramp leading up and around the western slope of North Massif to some rugged back country. In that area, where it would be too difficult for landing craft to safely touch down, Michael had chosen to build Taurus City in a deep “cut-and-cover” tunnel. A layer of lunar soil was carefully groomed to cover and disguise the ceiling.

There was a large, dark, shattered boulder wedged in the foot of North Massif where geologist Harrison Schmitt was gathering samples. Robyn was careful not to run over their electric Rover parked nearby. The Boeing-made Lunar Rover contained a built-in navigation system that kept track of every turn of the wheels and calculated the distance back to the Lunar Module. This was a safety feature. If the Rover became inoperative, the astronauts would have to walk to the LM. This system used Intel’s new four-bit microprocessor, the 4004, which was essentially a computer on a single silicon chip. As the 1970s progressed, this innovation would undergo further advances and become the heart of the Micro, sparking the Information Revolution.

The boulder being examined by Schmitt was in five separate pieces and lay beneath a long furrow of dents showing it’s recent plunge down the face of the mountain. Apollo 15 Command Module pilot Alfred Worden had photographed the area in 1971 from orbit. Worden’s photos captured what resembled tracks of wheeled vehicles and bright debris that did not resemble stones at all. But analysts, making inquiries of the Russians, concluded the anomalies were from natural processes. They said the tracks and other debris were probably from boulders that had rolled down the face of North Massif in a “recent” (less than 20 million years) moonquake.

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The truth was, Worden had found evidence of Taurus City construction, but the valley floor was pristine. Not even Robyn, with her gift, could sense a significant divergence of the present timeline. She pulled her truck to a stop, pumped the atmosphere down to a near vacuum, then popped the door open to wait for the boys. Cernan and Schmitt hadn’t heard Robyn roll in, of course. And they were so busy it was sixteen minutes before they looked up from their tasks and noticed Robyn’s truck parked next to them. Both of the astronauts uttered sharp expletives and the live feed was hurriedly cut. CBS cut to Walter Cronkite for commentary. The blackout would last for nearly an hour as NASA claimed technical difficulties. Robyn used her talent to probe her own future. Time was “lazy” as she well knew. You had to kick it in the pants to change it. Michael tried to explain how it was tied to something he called the ‘holographic principle’. The number of possible events in a spherical region went up with the area of that sphere rather than the volume. There was a constraint. Without this inertia, this reluctance built into time, Robyn’s vision would be a boiling nexus of change with no way to see what was going on.

Robyn noted, to her dismay, that NASA would swear the astronauts and flight control crew to silence, and cover up what Robyn had just done. But she kept trying. Robyn waved for them to come inside. There was plenty of room for at least one astronaut to be seated next to her, even fully garbed as he was. The sun illuminated her face and they could see they were dealing with a young woman. Cernan described the situation to Houston. A phone call was made to a contact in the Soviet Union asking if they were operating in the same area and didn’t bother to tell anybody. The Russian thought the American joke was in particularly bad taste. “Is not enough you win Luna race?” he said. “Now you rub it on?”

Cernan and Schmitt, who were watching their oxygen steadily spend down, gently prodded Houston they were still waiting for instructions. At length C. Gordon Fullerton, the CAPCOM for that phase of the mission, said Cernan could approach the truck, and perhaps, if he chose, even to enter it. But he ordered Schmitt to wait outside and be prepared to abandon Cernan and hustle back in the Rover to the Lunar Module, which was then about four miles away. So Cernan walked over to the truck and performed a complete circuit around it. There was only the one woman seated inside. This woman was wearing a vacuum suit, and she was waving at him, motioning for him to come inside. So Gene, now free to oblige, did so. She gestured for him to close the door and when he did, she began to re-pressurize the cab of the truck with pure oxygen, to just 3 psi. When the dial read the appropriate pressure Robyn removed her helmet. The sharp spent-gunpowder smell of the lunar regolith assaulted her nose. She wrinkled it and said, “Do people ever imagine what the moon smells like? Oh, no.”

But Robyn was used to it, and after two lunar EVAs so was Cernan. When he removed his own helmet his first words to her were, “You sound like an American.”

Robyn looked him over and saw Gene was rather gaunt, and thought it was a shame a man in his thirties was going gray. She said, “I was born on the high plains, Commander Cernan. Smack dab in the middle of the country, or close enough as never mind. My name is Robyn, with a ‘Y’. Just Robyn, no last name.”

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Cernan’s ice seemed to melt a little. He said, ‘Forget ‘Commander’. Just call me Gene.”

“It’s an honor to meet you, Gene,” she said. “I represent a privately held corporation named Astrodynamics. Sometimes we just call it Astrodyne. We’re based out of Seattle, but we have a few offices around the world, and, believe it or not, even up here. We’ve been watching you fellows drop by over last the few years, but this is the first time you’ve come within driving distance. We’re very busy, but I couldn’t resist dashing over for a chit-chat, as brief as it must be.”

“Well, Robyn, I guess I wonder what Astrodynamics Corporation is so busy doing.”

“Thirty years ago we were a church. We see human history as a work of art, and we are making an endeavor to perfect it. Humanity leaving the Earth and spreading out into the universe is much closer to perfection than staying home with all our eggs in one basket, to use the cliche, especially with the powerful weapons we now have, and the sheer insanity behind making them.”

Robyn showed him a binder containing many documents and photographs. ‘The names in this dossier will probably mean nothing to you, but they will mean a great deal to certain people in the government. Please accept this package and run it up your chain of command. Think of this as a long list of serious grievances we have with the United States going back for more than a hundred years.”

“I feel like I’ve stepped into the middle of an old argument,” Cernan said as he flipped through the binder to briefly sample the information. Old argument indeed. Some of the documents, just as Robyn said, were on age-yellowed paper dating back to the Reconstruction period.

Robyn said, “If you have the time during your flight home, Gene, please take a deeper look at that material. I think you’ll see why we didn’t find it a good idea to get permission from the government of the United States before coming up here and doing what we have done.”

Within the binder were also five sets of color photographs that drew Cernan’s interest, with the negatives clipped to them. He pulled them out and asked what they were.

“Images of each one of the previous Apollo landing sites, taken very soon after departure. Note the missing ascent stage in each photo. We thought NASA might want a photographic record. And the binder contains one more thing, Gene. We included the one-line charlie elements for an object NORAD has classified as a spent Soviet booster. You should tell your people to look at it again, maybe with radar. It’s twelve days before Christmas, Gene. I’ve got a hundred and fifty of your Earth pounds of presents for Dr. Harrison Schmitt out there. Rocks from the North Massif, taken at depths up to six hundred feet below the surface. There’s also sulfur from a channel we call Yellow Rille. Documentation is provided with the samples have original location and depth. We’re not trained geologists but my boss has a Masters in archaeology, the same principles apply. I hope it will compensate for the precious minutes you are losing talking to me.”

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“Why are you talking to me, Robyn? Is this just a sales pitch? Am I to be your go-between?”

She smiled and shook her head. She thought he deserved an honest answer. “You may be impressed that Astrodyne got to the moon before Apollo 11, but the way we get here takes a strange shortcut. We specialize in some things but not in others. Your lunar lander out there, even your CSM orbiting overhead, we don’t have anything like those. We could have built something together. But in the end the whole Apollo program was just so you could stick it in the eye of the USSR. The interest of the American people waned right after Apollo 11. You know it’s true. The space race was just a big Cold War stunt and after you won it started to look like spending a lot of money for nothing. Now to be fair, the Soviet Union lost interest as well, after they lost.”

Robyn noticed a feeling of well-being that bordered on giddiness and looked at the cabin pressure. It had crept past 4 psi of pure oxygen. Cernan’s spacesuit was still running, and pushing fresh air through his collar ring into the interior of the truck. She bled it down, then continued. “Nixon canceled Apollo 20 and designated that Saturn 5 to haul up a modified Saturn 1B upper state as Skylab,” Robyn said, resuming where she had paused. “After that Nixon even canceled Apollo 19 to shift funding to the Shuttle. It seemed to us that America wasn’t looking outward anymore. Then we visited the Soviets and told them there was hard currency waiting for what they potentially had to offer. So the moon race is the story of the tortoise and the hare, with the hare putting one toe over the finish line and turning back. But the tortoise is closing in now, and he’s bringing a nuclear third stage. What did you do with your third stage, Gene? You let it crash onto the moon. One more reason we’re glad things are winding up with NASA. We live and work up here, you know.”

“We didn’t know that at the time, Robyn. It was just for seismic research.’”

“Okay, Gene, but dig this: The Soviet third stage is fired three times, once for Earth orbit, once for trans-lunar injection, and once more for the return. Their vehicle is just that third stage and a lander. They’re coming up with a crew of four and the whole crew gets to land. So they’re doing it after you, but they’re doing it better. Now if the only reason you’re going to the moon these days is for rocks, I’m sure the Soviets can sell them directly to you for much cheaper. The bottom line is that NASA does not need to follow up with Apollo 18.”

At that Robyn drew a sudden breath of air and paused briefly. What she had just said to Gene Cernan were the magic words. It took another Sputnik moment to get America to react, but react America did, or rather, shortly would. The purpose of Robyn’s visit was fulfilled. Nothing, absolutely nothing drove technological innovation faster than war, even the faux war-by proxy of the Cold One. Robyn had rekindled it. Reality had diverged and the Moon Race was back on.

“Then, Robyn, I would say you are in luck. Apollo 18 has indeed been canceled. Dr. Schmitt out there was supposed to be on that flight, but he bumped one of my buddies to be the Lunar Module pilot on this one, to my great displeasure. This mission truly is the last one.”

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“I’m sorry about your friend, Gene. I didn’t know that. We’ve been disconnected from things earthside, just a bit. So busy, as I already said.”

“How did you get up here anyway?”

“Okay, suppose you’re Captain Kirk at Starfleet Command, and you need to go to the moon. Do you ride the starship Enterprise to get up here, or what?”

“No, you just beam up.”

“Bingo, Gene. That’s about as close as I can get to telling you what’s going on.”

“Okay, but what I don’t understand is how you are willing to work with the Soviets. You told me you were born in America. They’re the enemy. They’re…communists!”

Robyn corrected him. “They really just socialists. Communism was the goal. People can espouse utopianism, and claim to be utopians, all while still living in a crapsack country. We’re negotiating with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The enemy? Frankly, competing theories of economics bores the hell out of me. Besides, who owns your moon buggy?”

“The American people do.”

“You see? Socialism. That dog-eat-dog, every-man-for-himself stuff does not really work all that well up here, any more than it works on the aircraft carriers you served on. But, time marches on, Gene, and your backpack won’t run forever. That was pretty much all I wanted to say. Thanks for taking this time out of your tait schedule to meet with me.”

He blew out a puff of air with a sigh. “Now I would ask a small favor from you, Robyn.”

“Any thing, Gene. Anything at all. Just name it.”

“My beautiful ten year old little girl’s name is Tracy,” Cernan told her. “I wrote her initials with my finger in the ground near the Challenger. I did it far enough away that our ascent won’t erase it, but now that I know you’re here I’m worried that new footprints might erase her initials.”

“I can tell you love your daughter very much,” she said. “I promise no one will ever come near the Challenger. We’ll make it off-limits to the Russians too. Little Tracy’s initials won’t last forever, of course, due to micrometeorites, but close enough. A million years? That’s much better than anything you could do for her Earthside. Take care, Gene, and have a safe journey home.”

When the men returned to the LM Harrison Schmitt snapped a photo of Cernan. He looked haggard, exhausted, and perhaps just a little bit haunted. To his mind the young lady he met out there with her sheaf of papers and bundle of rocks and all the things she said spelled certain

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doom for NASA’s entire manned space program, not just the moon shots. But it was not the last time they would meet.

Early in 1973 Robyn suggested they try to get in on the ground floor of a opportunity that promised to transform society like nothing since the harnessing of steam power. But bad hiring decisions required Judith to intervene personally. That was never good. A man likely to be a much more suitable candidate for Robyn’s project was identified and agreed to be interviewed. At roughly the same time Captain Eugene Cernan sent a message through FBI Associate Director Mark Felt requesting to contact the leadership of the Astrodynamics Corporation. Judith knew it would make for a busy day but she decided to attend to both of these visitors at the company’s workshop. And she would allow Robyn to be present as well, hopefully so she could say, ‘See, I told you so!’ when things played out the way she promised they would.

The place in Washington State where the Enumclaw and Black Diamond Highway crossed the Kent-Kangley Road was called Four Corners, but there wasn’t much there aside from a lumber yard, a grocery store, a gas station, and one modest strip mall with a dentist and a cafe. Astrodyne leased the vacant office between Dr. Tsugawa’s practice and Nancy’s Noodle Nook. Sometimes locals wandered in by accident, thinking it was one or the other. So vinyl lettering went up on the glass that formed the front wall denoting the place as ‘Epoch Electronics’ but people still wandered in thinking the place sold hi-fi stereo equipment.

When Gary Kildall visited the place he was expected. The receptionist, a giant woman named Dory going by her name placard, looked to be of Indian descent. Certainly she was wearing what appeared to be native garb to keep warm whenever the door opened. Gary thought if she stood up she might easily prove to be the tallest woman he had ever seen. Dory verified who he was, somehow, before he even gave his name. There was a solid sound of steel moving within steel. “Thank you for coming here today, Mr. Kildall,” she said. The door to the left of her cubicle slowly began to pivot open without human intervention. It seemed deceptively massive in the way it gradually slowed to a nearly imperceptible stop before it could crash through the adjacent wall. “Please go ahead and enter the shop. Everyone is really looking forward to meeting you.”

A Teletype was clacking along in the middle of a print job. To Gary’s delight he saw it was a model 33 ASR. That model, as Gary well knew, was ubiquitous in the United States Navy. It was turning a stack of blank perforated-edge paper into another stack of finished printout. A large spool of paper tape with holes punched in six-bit binary code was providing the data to be printed. A woman in a blue shop smock was manually reeling up the spent tape after it fed through the reader. Her smock wasn’t buttoned up. Gary could see that she wore a black concert tee and blue jeans. One of the guitarists silk screened on the shirt was Dory.

The stocky woman spooling up the data said, “I’m Hunky, also known as Sabotage,” she said with a broad smile. “They let me handle the tape because if I touch anything else I’ll probably just break it.” Gary saw where the data had originated. There was a blue green cabinet six feet high, six feet deep, and two feet wide. His prospective employers had a minicomputer, a PDP-1, one of only about fifty ever made. Another woman wearing a buttoned up smock stood over

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there. He couldn’t tell what she was wearing under the light-blue cotton lab coat but he guessed from her bare calves that it was a dress. Her hair was a much darker brown than that of the first woman, with hints of red. Like any ginger or border line ginger her skin was quite pale. For her part Robyn thought the well-dressed bearded visitor very much resembled her father when he was roughly the same age. She imagined if there was a Collier’s encyclopedia entry for ‘Dad’ then his photo would be featured as the very quintessence of all dads.

Gary saw there was one other woman in the shop. She looked like a female biker who was wearing what had to be the most expensive leather boots he had ever seen. They were black, went up over her knees, and were articulated at every joint. Her thighs weren’t bare, but her thigh muscles were evident, and he could tell she was a runner. In fact, it was entirely possible she ran miles in those boots. They looked that functional. The skin on her face was darker than her two friends, but not darker than Dory. Everything that wasn’t tucked into the boots except her hands and face was covered in deep red leather with zippers everywhere for pockets and for basic access to the garment. It was was glossy and richly red, like fresh blood. Her forearms were covered with more black leather.

“It’s her outfit, I know,” said Robyn. “People always stare. But she’s homesick and that getup makes her feel like she’s home. I’m Robyn, incidentally. This is Judith Margolies, who in fact owns our company.”

“I have no choice, really,” Judith said. “I’m the only person around here who can actually obtain a bank account without being arrested or thrown into bedlam, and before you ask, I include Michael in that assessment.”

Gary smiled at that, and nodded at the computer next to Robyn. “So Green Acres does have a PDP-1 after all. I thought my friends were kidding. I’m Gary Kildall, Miss Margolies.”

“I want to personally thank you for accepting our invitation, Mr. Kildall. Your reputation is such that we wouldn’t dare make a useless waste of your time.”

“My friends told me you had a DEC minicomputer squirreled away in here but I wasn’t sure I believed them. You should know them. They said they were on your payroll for a time. And I think I can take an educated guess why they aren’t working for you anymore.”

“I fired four of them for good cause. But I’m surprised your friends did not try to scare you off.”

“I think they might have been a little embarrassed about screwing up a really good thing.”

“The name of my company is Astrodynamics. Sometimes we shorten that up to Astrodyne. You may be thinking you came here for a job interview, Mr. Kildall, but it’s really the other way around. We’ve already decided you’re the man for the job and we just need to convince you. But I am curious, sir, why you’re in the job market. Just curious, you understand.”

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He said, “I crapped out in the draft lottery but I’ve been working it off by teaching at a Navy college down in Monterey, California. They cut me loose to finish my doctorate at U-Dub. To my great misfortune I find myself with a slight cash-flow problem lately. I flew back up in my own plane and that’s a pretty expensive hobby. My four buddy pals said you had deep pockets and they said the work you have in mind was right up my alley.”

Judith said, “We have the best logistics in the business, and that is no idle boast. When you watch it in operation you are simply not going to believe it. Anything you tell Dory to order, no matter how expensive or rare it is, absolutely will be here overnight, beg steal or borrow. It is only necessary that your item actually exists. You could tell Dory to get you the Hope Diamond, and the next morning you would have it. We want you to use our supply chain to turn that big box there, our so-called minicomputer that’s really as big as three coffins stacked on top of each other, into a box the size of a piece of luggage. Then we will have the world’s first microcomputer. Will you do it, Mr. Kildall?”

“So take something that costs as much as a lakefront home on the East Side and turn it into something that costs as much as a used car, so anybody can have one? Yes, I can do it, and I will do it, Miss Gervasi, but remember, when I do, there goes the whole neighborhood.”

“We asked your friends to help us, but they used our parts and some local girls we hired as assemblers to build these stupid boxes that make free calls and cheat the phone company.”

Kildall said, “Let me guess. That was Wozniak and Jobs.”

Judith nodded. “I heard they sold a hundred of their boxes for one hundred fifty dollars apiece. I do hope they managed to save most of it. They might just be able to pay their lawyers enough to avoid conviction for embezzlement. After I fired them there was another fellow working here who actually did earn his keep. He wrote a program to simulate an 8008 micro processor on our mini. Dig up that tape for me, Hunky.” Kildall watched her dig around in a wheeled Vidmar, find it, and hand it off to Judith. “Unfortunately this isn’t a one-size-fits-all simulation, it’s set up to compile statistics on vehicular flow so cities can adjust the timing on their traffic lights. Then your friend used our supply system to order everything he needed to build a portable version. We built that traffic analyzer for him and thought it was our microcomputer. Meanwhile another bloke used our PDP-1 to host BASIC on an 8008, but we don’t have that tape. I don’t much fancy playing the victim, Mr. Kildall. I fired both of them.”

Gary said, “Now you must be talking about the Gates and Allen show.”

Judith nodded again. “They went into business for themselves, something called Traf-O-Data, but it’s not going anywhere. I sent their tape to the state capital. It’s going to be be tough selling their new box when every city from here to Spokane sends their data to Olympia to crunch. Robyn already told them what I’ll tell you: essentially, we have infinite money. But we don’t have a deep knowledge of technology. That puts you in a very good negotiating position, Mr. Kildall. Your friends clearly did not believe we were sincere in our attitude about money and

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about what we are trying to do here. Now, I’ll retain the patents for the hardware, just to keep my skin in the game, you understand? But software patents are still a gray area legally. So you will be a full partner when it comes to the licenses. You and I will be equal co-owners of anything you write on my time. If you sublet to a third party I will not block the transaction or try to undermine you in price. You can have all this in writing, but really, Mr. Kildall, it will not be necessary.” She paused to catch her breath, then said, “What do you think, Hunky?”

“I think playtime is over, Judith. No more Romper Room. The grownup is in the building.”

“And you, Robyn? Do you get the feeling this day is shaping up to be a good one?”

“This was a big deal, Judith. This was the last major alteration before Elyon wins.”

Gary seemed puzzled by Robyn’s words, but then again the entire interview had been conducted with an air of unreality.

Judith said. “Dory just told me Captain Cernan arrived a little early. He’s next door at Nancy’s.”

That last bit puzzled Gary even more. He didn’t remember hearing Dory say anything since he stepped into the shop. “So are you in, Mr. Kildall?” But Judith already knew he was in from what Robyn just said about the new timeline.

“Just call me Gary, please. And yes, I’m in. How did I get so lucky?”

“Good fortune all the way around, Gary. I’ll leave it to Hunky and Dory to negotiate your salary and other such details, and to step you through the paperwork. Robyn, let’s go eat and see your famous astronaut. Dory told Nancy to cook our usual.”

Captain Gene Cernan, so recently the commander of the Apollo 17 moon shot, sat in a booth devouring a Chicago-style Italian beef sandwich, cut up with a knife and fork to avoid staining his dress blue uniform, but the wetter the better, he said, and it was so good it made him homesick. Judith Margolies sat across him over a plate of fried cod, chips, and string beans, which was what she called her "usual". Robyn sat next to her having already eaten her own usual, cheese frenchees and fries, and she was just starting in on her raisin pie. She said, “I'm glad we could meet again without the time constraints we had last time, up there."

Gene said, "I want to retire from NASA.  Where could I go from here? There's no way I'll ever get another flight.  But I agreed to do this last job and meet with you.  Do any of you know FBI associate director Mark Felt?"

Robyn said, "Judith does not, but I remember him fondly.  He's not exactly an ally, but he's a voice of reason in the government."

Gene said, "You gave me a set of numbers that corresponded with an object in orbit around the

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Earth. We illuminated it with radar and found the return to be much brighter than it looks optically. What my people want to know is whether it is artificial?"

"It is a...combination of artificial and natural.  Did anyone find it interesting?"

Gene nodded his head. "They found it interesting enough that my flight will no longer be the last one.  We have a certain amount of hardware that is already built. My friend Joe Engle, who was bumped off my own flight, will be on the next flight. What I came to ask you was, will Joe and the rest of the crew be safe when they arrive at this...interesting object?"

Judith said, "I can't give my assurances if they do something stupid, but we ourselves will not put them in any danger whatsoever.  They will even find, when they arrive, that they are welcome."

"But it's in the Van Allen radiation belt.  They can't stay long."

"Actually, Captain, this interesting object orbits in the so-called Safe Gap between the inner and outer belt.  The crew need spend no more time crossing the inner belt than you did when you went on your flight to Taurus-Littrow, and they need not cross the outer belt at all."

"We propose to link the ascent stages of two Lunar Modules together." He pulled a document out of his briefcase. "Here is a print with the dimensions."

Judith looked at it and saw how the main engine of each LM had been replaced by a tunnel to connect the two and permit access. It would maneuver entirely by external thrusters. She said, "It will be snug but we can easily accommodate them."

"What about docking?  Will they need a compatible interconnection?"

"There will be no need for that.  They will see why, when they get there.  But your design team will need to modify the thrusters to use compressed air only.  I don't want my people breathing what the notes on this drawing says you're using for propellant."

He said, "They want to keep the flight under wraps.  It’s all Dee Oh Dee funding now. It won't have the publicity that mine did.  The communications will be...ah...secure."

She raised an eyebrow, took out a pen and marked '283 MHZ' on the drawing Gene had provided. "That's VHF, ship-to-ship, in the clear.  Whatever arrangements you made between the flight crew and ground control in terms of comms, that is how you'll talk to us.  And here's the call sign." She wrote Midway Control on the sheet and passed it back to him.

“Why must Astrodyne be so mysterious?”

“Meet us halfway, Captain, and we'll go on to the next thing. If not, there are other sturgeon in the Black Sea, if you catch my meaning.”