Transformers Dark of the Moon Read Online Free Page B

who, lapsing in his duties, was responsible for anything going wrong in the mission designated Apollo 11.
    “I’m going to step off the LM now.”
    Another pause, one that the fanciful would have said stretched from the very first moment humanity’s most distant ancestors stared up in wonder at the pale globe in the sky through to all the descendants to come who would look back upon this moment as one of the seminal achievements of the race.
    A framed picture of John F. Kennedy, hanging on the wall, looked on in silence.
    Thirty-five seconds ticked past. It was the longest thirty-five seconds anyone in the room could possibly have imagined.
    And then Neil Armstrong’s voice came through, announcing that he had set foot upon the moon, and the place went berserk.
    It was thoroughly unprofessional, but it was a brief indulgence that Bruce McCandless could understand. He did not, however, join in the burst of excitement and the cheers that were going on around him. In his position of being in charge of Capsule Communications—otherwise known as CAPCOM—he couldn’t afford to allow his focus to waver for so much as a second. His was the voice of Mission Control, and he had to stay on top of every single word Armstrong was saying.
    Someone was tapping him on the shoulder. McCandless glanced to his left and saw a PR flack from NASA consulting a sheaf of papers. He looked confused. “Did Armstrong just say, ‘One small step for man’ or ‘One small step for
a
man’?”
    “ ‘For man.’ Why?”
    “He was supposed to say ‘a man.’ ” The flack double-checked the papers. “That’s the line that was vetted.”
    “What difference does it make?” McCandless was getting impatient.
    “It makes a huge difference grammatically. Talking about an individual man makes sense, but just saying ‘man’ as in the whole of humanity makes the line self-contradicting.”
    McCandless was incredulous. “Oh, for God’s sake. We just put an astronaut on the moon. You seriously think years from now anyone’s going to care about whether or not he said a participle?”
    “It’s an article, actually. And reporters are already asking. Could you tell Armstrong to say it again, correctly?”
    “Get away from me,” said McCandless, because Armstrong’s voice was coming through again.
    “Yes, the surface is fine and powdery. I can kick it up
loosely with my toe. It does adhere in fine layers, like powdered charcoal, to the sole and sides of my boots. I only go in a small fraction of an inch, maybe an eighth of an inch, but I can see the footprints of my boots and the treads in the fine, sandy particles.”
    McCandless nodded and said, “Neil, this is Houston; we’re copying.” He noticed that the flack was now standing between reporters from Reuters and
The New York Times
. Everyone looked confused. The flack was saying something about static obscuring the word “a.” McCandless rolled his eyes. Some people had no sense of priorities.
    He waited for Armstrong to reply, to keep him and, by extension, everyone in Mission Control apprised. But instead of the mission commander’s voice coming back to him, he began to hear increasing amounts of static. “Neil, we’re getting signal interference. Do you copy? Come in.”
    Nothing. The static only grew louder and more annoying.
    McCandless kept his voice level, but there was quiet intensity in it as he called out, “What the hell just happened?”
    Everyone was hearing—or not hearing—the same thing McCandless was. One of the technicians called out, “Seems to be a transmitter malfunction.”
    “Well, get it back up. Get our men back in contact!”

ii
    Need to know
.
    That had been the golden rule of the operation ever since JFK had first said the words in the Oval Office.
    Among everyone in the building that housed Mission Control at that moment, only three men needed to know what was about to happen on the moon.
    None of them was actually
in
Mission Control.
    Instead,