Voyage (12 page)

This tone – hectoring, impatient – was all too familiar to Dana. He held his hands up, irritated. ‘I’m not suggesting anything, Dad. I’m just chewing the fat. The hell with it.’

But Gregory continued to stare at the board, his eyes invisible behind the layer of chalk dust on his glasses. Some remark of Dana’s had sent him off, like a Jules Verne impulse, on some new speculative trajectory of his own; Jim Dana might as well not have been there.

The hell with it
, he thought.
I have my own life now, my own concerns. I don’t have time for this any more
.

Maybe I never did
.

Dana withdrew from the workshop, brushing the dust off his jacket, leaving his father to his thoughts.

He spent the rest of the afternoon with his mother. They sat on the swing seat back of the house, drinking home-made lemonade and talking in the warmth of the sun. In the distance, seagulls cried.

Gregory Dana carefully sketched interplanetary trajectories.

… At age fifteen, in the year 1944, Gregory Dana was no rocket engineer. In fact he was no more than garbage, just one of the thirty thousand French, Russians, Czechs and Poles who toiled inside a carved-out mountain in Thuringia.

Everything was slow – even dressing was slow – and Dana was already hungry by the start of his work at five a.m. And yet he would receive nothing until his soup, at two in the afternoon.

And then would come the rush into the smoking mouth of the tunnel into the mountain, with the SS guards lashing out with their sticks and fists at the heads and shoulders of the worker herd which passed them. The tunnel was like Hell itself, with prisoners made white with dust and laden with rubble, cement bags, girders and boxes, and the corpses of the night being dragged by their feet from the sleep galleries.

Gregory Dana was prized by the supervisors for the capacity of his small hands for skilled work. So he was assigned to lighter, more
complex tasks. Gradually he picked up something of the nature of the great machines on which he toiled, and learned of the visions of the Reich’s military planners.

It was well known among the workers within the
Mittelwerk
that Hitler had ordered the production of no less than twelve thousand of von Braun’s A-2 rockets – or rather, what the Germans now called their V-2: V for
Vergeltungswaffe,
revenge weapon.

There was a plan to construct an immense dome at the Pas de Calais – sixty thousand tons of concrete – from which rockets would be fired off at England in batches of fourteen at once. And then there were the further schemes: of hurling rockets from submarine craft, of greater rockets which might bombard targets thousands of miles distant, and – the greatest dream of all! – of a huge station orbiting five thousand miles above the Earth and bearing a huge mirror capable of reflecting sunlight, so that cities would flash to smoke and oceans might boil.

Such visions!

… But the V-2 was the daily, extraordinary reality. That great, finned bullet-shape – no less than forty-seven feet long – was capable of carrying a warhead of more than two thousand pounds across two hundred miles! Its four tons of metal contained no less than twenty-two thousand components!

Dana came to love the V-2. It was magnificent, a machine from another world, from a bright future – and the true dream inherent in its lines, the dream of its designers, was obvious to Dana.

Even as it slowly killed him.

One morning, so early that the stars still shone and frost coated the ground, he saw the engineers from the research facility at Peenemunde – Wernher von Braun, Hans Udet, Walter Riedel and the rest, smartly uniformed young men, some not much older than Dana – looking up at the stars, and pointing, and talking softly.

Dana had glanced up, to see where they were looking. There was a star, bright, glowing steadily, with the faintest glimmer of red, like a ruby.

The ‘star’ was, of course, the planet Mars, burning brightly.

Of course:
that
was the dream which motivated and sustained these young, clever Germans: that one day the disc of Mars would be lit up with cities built by men – men carried there by some unimaginable descendant of the V-2.

At fifteen, Gregory Dana had been able to understand how these young men from Peenemunde were blinded by the dazzling beauty of their V-2 and what it represented. It was not simple callousness:
yes, he could understand the duality of it, and he would comfort himself with plans for after the war. Perhaps, he would dream, he himself would pursue a career in building still greater rocket machines, and even father a son who would be the first to travel beyond the air to Mars or Venus.

How he envied the young engineers from Peenemunde, who walked about the
Mittelwerk
in their smart uniforms;
they
seemed to find it an easy thing to brush past the stacks of corpses piled up for daily collection, the people gaunt as skeletons toiling around the great metal spaceships! The duality of it crushed Dana. Was such squalor and agony the inevitable price to be paid for the dream of spaceflight?

He tried to imagine how it would have been had
he
been born to become one of these smart young Germans in their SS uniforms.

When he immersed himself in such dreams, something of his own, daily pain would fall from him.

But then the morning would come again.

In his workshop, in the sunny June of 1970, Gregory Dana labored at his blackboard, immersed in memories, and the resolving dream of spaceflight.

As Dana’s car was pulling away, his father came running from the house. He rested his hands on the Corvette’s window frame. There was chalk smeared across his forehead.

‘Where are you going?’

‘I’ve got to get away, Dad,’ Dana said apologetically. ‘I have to be at –’

‘I think it works,’ Gregory said breathlessly. ‘Of course it’s too early to be sure yet, but –’

‘What works?’

‘Venus. Not Jupiter –
Venus
. Kiss good-bye to Verne – we don’t need those immense nuclear rockets after all!’

‘Dad, I –’

Sylvia linked Gregory’s arm. ‘Good-bye, dear. Drive safely.’

‘I’ll call when I’m home, Mom.’

Dana looked back once, at the end of the block. Sylvia was waving, but his father had already gone back to his shop.

It was nearly noon; from a burned-blue sky the sunlight bore down on York’s bare head and shoulders.

Jorge Romero had led them all into a little valley that afforded a good view of the hills. Now he went bounding up to a twisted old ironwood tree. ‘This tree is your LM. You’ve just landed on the Moon. Now I want each of you to come stand over here and describe what you see.’

The three astronauts – Jones, Priest, Bleeker – stared back, all but anonymous in their baseball caps, T-shirts and chromed sunglasses.

Romero’s question wasn’t hard, York knew. This was an interesting area: non-lunar, but with easily visible geologic relations among colorful rock units. But the stances and expressions of the astronauts betrayed a mixture of bafflement, embarrassment and resentment.

Christ
, York thought.
This trip is going to be a disaster
.

But Romero was windmilling his arms at them. ‘Come on! The one thing you’re always short of on the Moon is time. You – Charles. Come over here, and start us off.’

With a kind of lazy grin at Bleeker, Chuck Jones went strolling over to Romero. He leaned against the tree, beside Romero, and began to summarize what he could see.

Romero was maybe fifty now, York supposed, but he was vigorous and supple, apparently still full of energy; his sunburned nose stuck out from under his sunglasses, and a few strands of graying hair licked out from under his floppy hat. York had taken in a graduate lecture of Romero’s some years back. Working out of Flagstaff, Romero was a great field geologist as well as a geochemical analyst. He had immediately struck her as someone who could not fail to inspire the most reluctant of students – such as your average beer-swilling, wise-cracking pilot-astronaut hero, for instance.

So when Ben Priest had told her that Romero had agreed to give the Apollo 14 crews, prime and backup, some geologic training, and Ben had invited her along to help out, she’d been pleased.

‘… No, no, no! What about the layers in that mountainside over there?’

‘Look, Professor –’

‘And you have missed the most important feature of the landscape altogether!’

Jones looked baffled; he was squat, solid, dark, and the thick primate hair on his hands and arms seemed to bristle with anger. ‘What “important feature,” for Christ’s sake?’

‘Look here.’ Romero knelt and picked up a handful of fragments, of a white rock, from the floor of the valley. ‘Can you see? Such rocks are everywhere – are they not? – now that you
observe.’

Jones had had enough. ‘This is a goddamn boot camp.’ He kicked at one of Romero’s white rocks. ‘Ben, this is a
fucking
waste of time. Our program is compressed enough without this crap.’

‘Come on, Chuck,’ Adam Bleeker said easily. ‘You haven’t given it much of a chance.’

‘Fuck it, and fuck you,’ Jones said. ‘Listen up: we’re only the goddamn backup crew for Apollo 14. That’s the first thing; we probably won’t even make it to the Moon. Two. The target is the lunar Apennines, not goddamn California. So why am I here tripping myself up on a pile of Californian rocks? Three. I’m an aviator. I don’t see why I need to know a fucking thing about the geology of the goddamn Moon to do my job.’

‘Look, Chuck –’ York stepped forward.

The look he gave her then – of sheer, undiluted contempt – made her hesitate, just long enough for Romero to raise his hand.

‘Now, now. Of course Mr Jones here is absolutely right.’

Jones looked startled.

‘It doesn’t matter how much you know about the San Gabriel mountains. Of course not. It doesn’t really matter what you know about the Moon. What does matter to me, though, is that for you to make your mission into a full-up success, you’re going to have to learn how to
observe.’

A full-up success
. Ben Priest was suppressing a grin; York wondered if he had coached Romero to throw dumb-fighter-jock slang at Jones.

It caught Jones off balance, anyhow. He bent and picked up a piece of the white rock. ‘Just tell me what the hell the relevance of this is.’

‘It is called anorthosite,’ Romero said evenly. ‘And it is our best guess that this was the primary component of the Moon’s primordial crust.’

‘Really?’ Adam Bleeker stepped forward now, and took the piece of rock from Jones – as if it was the only sample of anorthosite in the valley, York reflected wryly. ‘How so?’

Jones still glowered, but for now he was sidelined from the conversation, and Romero was back in control.

‘When it first formed, the Moon was probably entirely molten. Then the outer hundred miles or so cooled to form a crust of anorthositic rocks – bright rocks, just like these. The main components of anorthosites, you see, like plagioclase, are light; heavier minerals, including those rich in iron and magnesium, sank into the body of the Moon. Now, the anorthosite – we think – dominates the brighter, older areas we see on the Moon’s face, while the dark maria are cooled seas of lava.’

Bleeker was grinning at the idea. ‘So the maria really were seas, once.’

York nodded. ‘It must have been a hell of a sight, back then: oceans the size of the Mediterranean brimming with red-hot, molten lava …’

She tailed off. Jones, his eyes hidden by his sunglasses, was watching her as she spoke, and cracking some joke to Ben Priest. Something crass, about the way she moved her eyebrows up and down when she was talking.

Ben looked uncomfortable, caught between a grin with his crew commander and embarrassment for his friend.

And York was silenced, just like that. She felt as if she was sixteen again, gawky, clumsy, infuriated.

With a fling of the arms, a grand actor’s gesture, Jorge Romero walked a few yards away. ‘Listen to me. I want you to leave this place as better observers, after today. But I also want you to leave with something else: a sense of the great
drama
of geology.’ He glanced around. ‘When you look at a valley like this, you see a few dusty old rocks, perhaps. But
I
see immense processes which churn the surfaces of worlds, frozen in time as if by a flashbulb. I am sure Natalie has the same perception. It is only our mayfly life spans which restrict us all from seeing this.

‘And now you may be going to the Moon! You must grasp this opportunity, and go there with open hearts and minds. Believe me when I say that I would give anything to exchange places with you.’

Chuck Jones stepped forward and spat a piece of gum onto the dusty ground. ‘Yeah, well, we won’t be going either unless Dave Scott and Jim Irwin drive their Lunar Roving Vehicle over a goddamn cliff on one of these dumb jaunts. They’ll be taking the last Apollo to the Moon, and not us. So I think you should cut the speeches, Prof, and let’s get on with the checklist, and get this over.’

He kicked a piece of ancient anorthosite out of his way, and stalked out of the valley.

There should have been at least four astronauts on this field trip.
But the good old guys seemed to have lost heart in what they saw as pointless training exercises, after the program cancelations Fred Michaels had announced earlier in the month. At least these three had turned up, but Jones’s attitude was turning the whole thing into a walk through Purgatory.

York was pretty uniformly appalled by the astronauts she’d met so far. Ben was clearly atypical. And she couldn’t believe guys like Jones; they were like relics from some grisly Flintstones version of the 1950s. The whole bunch of them seemed utterly self-obsessed, to her.

Well, screw them.

She and her friends at Berkeley had done little, over the last couple of months, but follow the fall-out from the events at Kent State, in May. Some of them were preparing their own demonstrations in support and sympathy. She was prepared to bet Chuck Jones – probably Bleeker too, even Ben – hadn’t even heard of the Kent State trouble, the way it was tearing the country apart. They were so cocooned inside their precious programs.