Voyage (13 page)

She felt blind, unreasoning anger, almost a hatred of these astronauts, and the system that had produced them.

As he stumped over the landscape, Chuck Jones could barely see the rocks around him. He just kept on going over and over the events of the last few days.

Fred Michaels, Associate Administrator, had come to the Astronaut Office in Building 4 personally, to wield the axe. He’d stood there in his waistcoat, plump as a seal, in front of a room full of sports shirts and crew cuts.

Michaels’s personal presence wasn’t much consolation, for Chuck Jones.

Michaels was here to announce, tersely, that the bean counters were cutting
all
the remaining Moon flights – save only for one more, Apollo 14, which was due to fly early in 1971.

Jones couldn’t believe it; in a few words, Michaels was shredding his, Jones’s, one-and-only chance of a Moon flight.

There was some argument from the floor, but Michaels slapped down their questions. ‘It’s for the good of the program, damn it, the longer-term good of the Agency. We’ve done what we’ve had to do. And Tom Paine –’ the NASA Administrator – ‘doesn’t like this any more than I do. Less, even. But we’ve had to accept this, to give us all a future. I’m sure most of you men understand that.’

Sure, Jones thought, you might understand it in your head. But,
when you’ve just had the flight you’ve trained for over years taken away, you can’t take it in your fucking
gut
.

And the anguish in the Office had gotten all the greater when Deke Slayton stood up, his face like granite, to announce that it had been decided that this last mission, 14, should be upgraded to a J-class, a sophisticated scientific expedition. So 14 would get the advanced LM with the Lunar Rover, and the Service Module with orbital instrument pallet, which had been assigned to Apollo 15. And with 15’s equipment had come its landing site: a place called Hadley, in the foothills of the lunar Apennines.

But 15’s original crew – Dave Scott, Jim Irwin and Al Worden – were already in intensive training for the Hadley site.

So, Deke said, he was standing down Alan Shepard and his crew, who had been the prime assignment for Apollo 14. Scott and his crew had been promoted to 14 instead, and they’d take their backup crew of Jones, Bleeker and Priest with them. The date of the flight would be put back a few months, to give Boeing a chance to get the Rover ready, and let Grumman finish their LM upgrades. Deke said he’d expect Shepard’s crew to pitch in and support Scott’s training from here on in.

Jones saw Al Shepard walk out of that meeting, his face like a tombstone. You didn’t want to cross Al at the best of times, and it was obvious that despite his seniority he hadn’t been taken into confidence about the rearranged schedules before the meeting. Slayton was a good old buddy of Al’s, too, all the way back to the Mercury days.
A hell of a way to handle things, Deke
. Well, Jones expected Slayton would be getting a few choice words of advice from Shepard after this.

Jones had his own points to make, though.

He left it a couple of hours, then he went storming into Slayton’s office.

‘Damn it, Deke, I shouldn’t be backup. You ought to be making me commander of the prime crew for 14, in place of Scott.’ After all he – Jones – had been one of the original batch of Mercury astronauts,
and
the fourth American in space. And he’d already started his training for his own later J-class mission besides.

He’d waited a hell of a long time for this, the crown of his career, and he wasn’t giving up his mission – to be busted down to hole-in-the-sky trash-can Skylab flights – without a fight.

But Deke had just waved him away. ‘You don’t have a case, Chuck. Listen: A1 Shepard is also one of the original batch, in case you forgot that,
and
he’s been waiting for a lot of years for a second
flight after that damn ear illness. And he was the
first
American in space; Al outranks you, Chuck. But I’m still standing him down in favor of Dave Scott. You’ve got to face it, Chuck. I don’t like this any more than you do, but Scott’s is the best prepared crew I have, for the one mission we’ve got left.’

‘Yeah.’ Of course Jones understood that. The mission was the thing; nobody within NASA wanted to do anything that carried the slightest risk of a foul-up.

Nobody, that is, save the astronauts who weren’t aboard the last Apollo Moon ship.

Understanding it didn’t stop him trying, though; and he had stayed in Slayton’s office for a long time, arguing hard …

There was another piece of the old rock, anorthosite or whatever shit it was, in his way. Jones kicked it aside and stalked on.

The afternoon was to be a simulated three-hour moonwalk. York had to make up the numbers, in the absence of enough astronauts. Jones teamed with Priest, and Bleeker paired off with York. Jorge Romero would stay behind in the truck, and act as a capcom. The astronauts wore backpacks, radios and cameras, and they followed traverses laid out on coarse maps designed to match the quality of low-resolution orbital photographs.

York and Bleeker stopped at the first sample point. There was a large, fractured boulder here, shot through with anorthosite. Bleeker set up a gnomon and took a photograph of the rock face. The gnomon was a device for calibration, a little tripod with a color scale for the photography, and a free-hanging central rod to give local vertical. Bleeker hit the rock with his hammer, and broke off a piece the size of his fist. He placed the sample in a small Teflon bag and dropped it into the pack on York’s back. He’d donned lunar gloves to do the work; York could see how stiff and clumsy the gloves were.

‘How was that?’

She grinned back at him. ‘Standard operating procedures, Adam; Jorge will be proud of you.’

They walked on.

Bleeker raised his face to the sun, a vague half-smile on his face. Bleeker was pale, freckled – a northern boy – and he wore plenty of sun-block on his exposed skin, here in the Californian heat. York hadn’t spent any time alone with him before today. He seemed bland, unimaginative, rather empty.
Ideal profile for a moonwalker,
she thought wryly.

‘I guess this training is very different from what you’ve been used to,’ she said.

‘Oh, you bet. Especially compared to my assignment before joining the Astronaut Office.’

‘What was that?’

‘510 Squadron. That’s a fighter-bomber squadron, based in Virginia. Beautiful part of the country. Do you know it?’

‘No … What kind of bombs?’

He glanced at her, professional reserve coming down behind his eyes. ‘Special weapons.’

Oh. Nuclear
.

‘We were trained to deploy out of West Germany. We’d have flown low, a hundred feet, under the enemy’s radar.’ He mimed the maneuver with a dusty hand. Now he pulled his hand so it soared straight upwards. ‘The idea was to let go of the payload at just the right moment. The package would follow a two-mile arc to the target.’ He grinned again, almost shyly. ‘While it was falling I’d be high-tailing it out of there, as fast as I could go, before the detonation.’

‘I’ll bet. It sounds risky.’

‘All flying is risky,’ he said levelly. ‘But the F100s we flew were beautiful ships …’

He waxed lyrical about the F100 for a while: the ‘Super Saber,’ the world’s first fighter capable of sustained supersonic speed.

York tuned out.

The F100 had been produced by Rockwell: the company who had built Apollo, and who were now bidding to go to Mars. Given where the bulk of the money went, it was as if the space work of companies like Rockwell was a thin, glamorous patina on the surface of their real mother lode, military development.

‘The part I didn’t enjoy so much was ejecting.’

‘Ejecting?’

‘It was a one-shot mission. The planes didn’t carry enough fuel to make it to their targets and back. We had to eject hundreds of miles short of home, let the planes crash, and then survive as best we could.’

‘Christ,’ York said. ‘Walking home, through a nuclear battlefield?’

‘I was trained for it,’ he said. ‘I was part of a global strategy. The weapons are new, so you need new strategies to use them. It’s all about mutual deterrence. “Safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation …”’

She was startled by the quote. ‘That’s well expressed.’

‘Winston Churchill.’ His eyes were like blue windows.

He wasn’t unintelligent, she realized. Just – different from her, and the people she mixed with. A Cold Warrior. She shivered.

He glanced at his checklist. ‘Hey, look; we’ve missed our last stop.’

They turned and retraced their footsteps, reaching for fresh sample bags.

At the end of the afternoon, they met up back at the truck. Romero, was still grinning, even joking with Jones, but York thought she could see a strain around Romero’s eyes, under the dust and sun-block.

On the truck radio, a commentator was quoting a speech by Walter Mondale in Congress, where NASA’s budget submission was being debated …
I believe it would be unconscionable to embark on a project of such staggering cost as this Mars proposal when many of our citizens are malnourished, when our rivers and lakes are polluted, and when our cities and rural areas are dying. What are our values? What do we think is more important?
…

York and Ben Priest got cups of coffee from a communal flask, and walked off a little way. The sun was low, now, and blasted directly into their eyes; it had lost little of its heat.

‘I guess Romero is soaking up a lot of Chuck’s frustration at losing his flight,’ York said.

‘Naw. Chuck is always like this, when it comes to the “science,”’ Priest said. He took a pull of his coffee. ‘It’s damaging.’

‘Damaging is right. Can’t you exert some influence on him?’

He grinned at her. ‘I’m afraid you don’t know astronaut psychology, Natalie. Where these guys are concerned, the commander’s word is
everything
. He sets the tone for the crew, the whole mission. If the commander is somber and quiet, like Armstrong, then that’s the way the crew must be; if he wants to wear a beanie hat with a Teflon propeller on it, and sing all the way to the Moon, like Pete Conrad, then we all have to wear our beanie hats and like it. That’s the way it is. Thank God Dave Scott is taking the science seriously. I think if Chuck was the prime commander, 14 might be the nadir of Apollo’s science program, not the zenith.’

Now, she heard, voices were raised again. Romero was telling Jones how important it was to take samples from large boulders, if they could, because large rocks wouldn’t have moved far from
where they were formed. And the
context
of a sample was just as important, to the good geologist, as the
content
of the rock –

Jones was telling Romero where he could stick his geological hammer.

This isn’t good enough,
York fumed.
We can’t keep sending these clowns to the Moon. Beanie hats, and kids’ jokes –

We can’t go on like this. If we’re really going to Mars we need a new class of astronaut. A better breed
.

Ben had continued to encourage her to apply, to join the program.
Maybe I should. I know I could do a better job than a moron like Chuck Jones
.

She went back to the truck, and got more coffee.

‘You are go for TOI,’ capcom Bob Crippen said. ‘One minute thirty.’

‘Thank you,’ Gershon replied.

York pulled on her helmet and locked it to the neck of her pressure suit. She fumbled slightly, her fingers clumsy inside her stiff gloves. She buckled her canvas restraints around her.

Once more she felt cool, stale air wash over her face.

Ares, assembled, was a slim, fragile pencil of metal. It was a big, bright object, and it would be easily visible from Earth, as a naked-eye star passing over Cape Canaveral.

Stone said, ‘Go for ET H-two pressurization.’

‘Confirm.’

York began closing switches that would raise the temperature inside the booster’s two great External Tanks. Liquid hydrogen would boil and evaporate, and the resulting gas would force liquid propellant through the feed pipes and into the combustion chambers of the MS-II.

York was a geologist, and that was why she was going to Mars. But a crew was only three people. So, if you expected to fly in space, you had to expect to study up on a lot of mundane crap that was necessary just to keep the spacecraft and booster working.

And Natalie York’s specialty was the External Tanks.

She knew enough to give expert papers on External Tanks to the industry. In fact, she
had
given a paper on them, God help her.

‘One minute,’ Gershon said.

York glanced at the window to her right. She was over the west
Atlantic, and it was early morning down there; she could see boats on the Gulf, ribbons of land laid out like a cartoon map.

TOI was Transfer Orbit Injection: it meant departure from Earth orbit, the start of the long transit to Mars. This was a key moment in the mission – in her life, in fact.

But a day and a half here, orbiting Earth, wasn’t enough.

She had tried to fix some of the more memorable scenes of Earth in her head.
Night over Africa
: the fires of nomad encampments, spread across the desert.
Thunderstorms over New Zealand
: lightning like flashbulbs, exploding under cottony layers of cloud, discharges sparking each other in great chain reactions covering the country.

November 6, 1986
. That was the day when Ares was due to return to Earth orbit. Mission day five hundred and ninety-five.
Then I’ll be back; I’ll be seeing you again. A bright Sunday morning, with my crates full of bits of Mars
.

‘Ares, you are go for the burn,’ Crippen said.

Stone set the ‘master arm’ switch to ON, and York could see him checking over the rest of the instrument panel. Guidance control was set to primary; thrust control was on automatic; the craft was in the correct attitude; the engine gimbals were enabled, so that the nozzles could swivel, like eyeballs in their sockets, to direct the craft.