Voyage (31 page)

Gershon walked around the car park, working the stiffness out of his legs after his drive out from the city. It was colder than he’d come to expect for California.

The LA division of Rockwell was strung out around the southern border of Los Angeles International Airport. Beyond the fence, the airport was a plain of concrete, with aircraft rolling between distant buildings like little painted toys. There was a distant rumble of jets ramping up, and a remote, evocative whiff of kerosene. If he squinted, he could see a line of big airliners stacked up in the sky.

The Rockwell headquarters building was an uncompromising
cube of brick, four stories high, without a single window. Ralph Gershon had never seen anything like it; it was like the kind of dumb, baffling modern sculptures that earned their creators thousands of dollars.
No natural daylight at all. Christ
. He was here for a regular meeting of the MEM Technical Liaison Group, and Liaison Group meetings were meetings from hell anyway. The thought of spending all day inside this goddamn box of bricks was depressing.

Beyond the clutter of Rockwell buildings, he could see all the way down Imperial Boulevard to Santa Monica Bay. He liked the way the morning light was coming off the water, steely gray and flat.

‘Here.’

There was a small, wiry man at his side, with a balding head and rimless glasses and big, ugly freckles; he was holding up a cigarette packet.

‘Thanks,’ Gershon said. ‘I don’t.’

‘Uh huh.’ The guy took a cigarette himself, tamped it against the box, and lit up. His arms were disproportionately long and bony, and they stuck out of his sleeves. Just behind him in the parking lot, there was a T-bird, gleaming black. ‘You looked like it was a good moment for a smoke.’ He had a broad, bold New York accent. He was maybe fifty, and he looked familiar to Gershon.

‘You here for the MEM thing?’ Gershon asked.

‘Yeah. And you? You from NASA? A pilot, maybe?’

‘How do you know?’

The guy tapped his own small paunch. ‘Because you look fit.’

‘I’m the Astronaut Office rep.’ Gershon hesitated when he used the word ‘astronaut.’ As he always did.
Look at me, the great astronaut. When I haven’t flown anything for NASA except a T-38 trainer
. But then this little guy had used the word ‘pilot.’ Maybe he understood.

The stranger stuck out his hand. ‘My name’s Lee. John K. My friends call me JK.’

The handshake was firm, the palms callused. It wasn’t the grip of a pen-pusher.

‘You from one of the MEM bidders?’

‘Nope,’ Lee said. ‘I’m from CA. Columbia Aviation. Tell me you’ve heard of us.’

Gershon grinned.

Lee shrugged. ‘We do a lot of subcontracting work for Rockwell, and others, and we’re doing some experimental stuff for NASA.
Lifting body shapes and such. We’re small, but we’re growing, and we’re smarter than the rest. When it comes to Request For Proposals rime, we’ll throw in our lot with one of the big guys and hustle for a piece of the pie.’ He stared up at the HQ building, the big brick cube. ‘You know, I worked here, for a while. Under Dutch Kindelberger.’

Gershon looked at Lee with new interest. He knew that name, of course. Any kid like Gershon, who had grown up steeped in planes and the men who built them, would know about Dutch Kindelberger. Dutch had built up Rockwell – then called North American Aviation – in the war years by delivering perhaps the finest American flying machine of that conflict, the P-51 Mustang.

‘Dutch designed this building himself,’ Lee said. ‘We used to call it the Brickyard.’

‘I didn’t know Kindelberger was an architect.’

‘He wasn’t.’ Lee grinned. ‘You don’t think it shows?’ He looked around, at the airport, the Boulevard, the sprawl of Rockwell buildings. ‘There used to be a sign, on top of the main building over there –’ He pointed. ‘You could see it from miles away. “Home of the X-15.”’

Something clicked in Gershon’s mind. ‘I thought I knew your face.’ He had a vague memory of an old photograph, from the scrapbooks and cutting files he’d kept as a kid: an experimental airplane, up at Edwards, with a line of grinning young engineers, all spectacles and buck teeth and uncontrolled hair. ‘You worked on the X-15?’

Lee said, ‘No. But I bet I know what you’re thinking of.’

‘The B-70. You worked on the B-70, didn’t you? With Harrison Storms.’

‘Yeah. With Stormy.’

Harrison Storms was the man who had built the Apollo spacecraft for Rockwell. And before that, there had been the B-70, a supersonic bomber. Gershon remembered old photographs: that stainless steel surface painted white to reflect Mach 3 heat, the huge delta wing two stories off the ground …

‘Congress canceled the project on us,’ Lee said. ‘We only ever made two of the damn things. And I know one of them crashed with an F-104. I guess the other was scrapped.’

‘No. It survived. It’s in a museum.’

Lee eyed Gershon and smiled. ‘How about that? I never knew.’

Gershon glanced at his watch. ‘Come on. It’s gone nine. We have to go in.’

‘Sure. We don’t want to miss the read-through of the minutes, do we?’

Side by side, they walked into the Brickyard.

Two portly, shirt-sleeved aerospace executives were struggling with a balky Vu-graph machine. One said, ‘You sure you know how to fly this thing, Al?’

Al laughed.

Gershon tried to settle himself in the small, hard-framed chair, with his briefcase tucked under the table. It was already hot, airless, and his collar chafed at his throat.

That word, ‘fly,’ tugged at him. Flying a projector. Flying a desk. Jesus. Words misused by people who knew no more about
flying
than how to order a drink from a stewardess.

The chairman called them to order. He was Tim Josephson, a NASA Assistant Administrator, a tall, thin, bookish man. He sat on a swivel chair behind a desk at the head of the table, and rattled through the minutes and agenda.

Lee leaned over to Gershon. ‘How do you like that? This is Dutch’s old office. That’s Dutch’s chair, for God’s sake. Rockwell must really, really, want this contract.’

Behind Josephson the whole wall was covered with a mural. It showed a P-51 Mustang coming right out at you.

Gershon wanted to be out of here,
doing
something.

But life in the Astronaut Office wasn’t like that. You had to pay your dues.

‘Listen to me,’ Chuck Jones had said, in his role as chief astronaut. ‘We gotta have someone from the Office assigned to the Mars Excursion Module.’

Gershon had thought he was being dumped on. ‘But there is no MEM.’

‘Even better.’ And Jones had spun Gershon a story about how Pete Conrad had helped to design the controls and instrument displays for the Lunar Module. ‘Conrad spent fucking
months
in plywood mockups of that lander, surrounded by painted switches and dials, trying to imagine himself coming down onto the Moon.’ Jones held his thumb and forefinger up, a hair’s breadth apart. ‘And he came
that
close to being the first man to land there. Now. You want to tell me you know more about how things work around here than old Pete Conrad?’

So maybe this wasn’t such a bad assignment after all, Gershon had concluded.

The trouble was, though, it still didn’t look as if the MEM was ever going to fly, except in the glossy promotional brochures of the aerospace companies.

Landing a spacecraft on Mars wasn’t an easy thing to do. And that was just about the only thing everybody was agreed on. Even after you’d hauled ass all the way out there, you found yourself facing a planet that was an awkward combination of Earth and Moon: the worst features of each, Gershon supposed. That smear of air was thick enough that you couldn’t fly a tin-foil buggy on rockets right down to the surface, like the Lunar Module landing on the Moon; you were going to have to take a heatshield along. On the other hand, the air was too thin to allow you simply to fly your way down to the surface in a glider with wings, the way the Space Shuttle would have flown to Earth. You had to have some compromise, a bastard cross between a flying machine and a rocket ship.

So disagreement was inevitable. After all nobody had done this before, tried to build a machine to land people on Mars.

But there was a lot of money and politics involved, so, of course, the arguments went far beyond the technical.

This Liaison Group was a relatively new initiative, and it came from Fred Michaels himself, as an attempt to cut through the mess of arguments holding up the MEM design. The Group got all the warring factions together – the aerospace people from Rockwell and McDonnell and Grumman and Boeing, and the NASA groups from Marshall and Ames and Langley and Houston – to thrash out the issues.

The formal presentations started.

First up was a delegation from Grumman, to present their current thinking.

The Grumman MEM would come in from Martian orbit as a half-cone, like an Apollo Command Module split down the center. With the aid of a lot of electronics, the crew could actually steer the thing. Then, inside the atmosphere, the MEM would tip downwards, so that it was falling to the ground nose first. The heatshield shell would fall away, revealing something that looked like a fat Lunar Module, with landing legs that would spring out. The whole thing would come down on rockets mounted in the nose. On the ground, the MEM would unfold, with crew quarters swiveling out from the sides toward the ground.

Grumman had built the Apollo Lunar Module. Gershon
happened to know that Grumman had the tacit backing of Marshall, with Hans Udet and all the other old Germans. And so what you got was a kind of beefed-up Lunar Module, coupled with some typical brute-force heavy engineering from the Germans.

The Grumman people had a model, a little Revell-kit version of the thing, which was all unfolding legs and rotating compartments and bits of plastic heatshield. Parts of it kept falling off in the hands of the nervous presenter. The thing looked ludicrously overcomplicated. When that upside down cone came apart, revealing all the plumbing inside, Gershon was reminded of an ice cream cornet.

JK Lee leaned over and laughed quietly. ‘Christ, that thing is ugly. And you’d waste a lot of development effort.’

‘How so?’

‘The thing’s a bastard. Too many smart-ass ideas. You’d have to develop a new heatshield material, to cover that huge flat surface.
And
you’d have to figure out how to build a lifting body to fly in the Martian atmosphere.
And
you’ve got a whole new Lunar Module to build as well. And for what?’

‘So what would you do?’

‘Me? If I was Grumman? I’d tell my designers to cut out the ice cream and focus on the meat and potatoes. Pick one approach and stick to it. If you’re building a lifting body, fine. Don’t give me damn Moon-bug legs as well.’

The delegation led by Boeing weren’t too specific about the details of their landing craft itself; instead they concentrated on how it would get down through the atmosphere. Their MEM would descend from orbit and go through reentry, and then, about six miles up and still traveling faster than sound, it would sprout a ballute – a cross between a balloon and a parachute, a huge, inflatable sail that would grab at the thin air. Then, a complex sequence of parachutes would bring the craft close enough to the surface for hover rockets to take over for the landing.

The problem was that nobody had yet made a ballute, or even tested one in a wind tunnel. And it would be all but impossible to test in the thicker atmosphere of Earth.

A lot of the Boeing presentation was to do with the technicalities of packing parachutes. It was deadly dull. Gershon made himself take notes on his jotting pad; but sometimes, when he glanced down at the pad, he didn’t recognize what he’d written.

The third presentation was from Rockwell themselves, backed by a combination of Langley and JPL. And this was the most advanced option of all. It was another lifting-body shape, but more
advanced than Grumman’s crude half-cone: it was a biconic, a segment of a fat cone topped by a thin nose. This MEM would be able to enter the Martian atmosphere direct from Earth, without the need to stop over in a parking orbit around Mars first. The biconic would be controlled one hundred per cent by the pilot, with a joystick and rudder pedals. The ship would follow a complicated entry path, dipping and swooping and swirling, losing heat gradually and bleeding off speed. And then, approaching the surface, the biconic would tip up and land on its tail, ready for an ascent back to orbit.

But there were drawbacks. The electronics would be so complex there was no way an astronaut could land the thing in the case of computer failure. And all those curved surfaces would take a lot of buffeting from the air; the biconic would need heavy heatshielding over most of its surface.

The biconic looked to Gershon like a hybrid of Langley’s traditional love of aircraft, and JPL’s expertise in robotics and computer control, all mixed up together with Rockwell’s immense appetite for fat and ambitious development budgets.

Looking at the presentation, Gershon felt an odd itch in the palm of his hands and his feet.

Lee was grinning at him. ‘I can see that look in your eye. You’d like to fly that thing down through the Martian air, maybe do a couple of banks over Olympus Mons.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’

Lee waved his hand. ‘I’m not mocking you. But you need to understand that you’re looking at a twenty-year development effort there, minimum, in my judgment. Christ, nobody’s flown a biconic
ever
. Not even a fucking wooden mockup. Unless the Russians are up to something, which I doubt.

‘And then you’re talking about building a biconic to land on
Mars
. What do we know about the atmosphere of Mars? Boy, if you want to see your grandson flying down onto all that red dust, then you put your money on a biconic. But you and I sure ain’t going to see it …’

The three presentations took them right through the day and on into the evening. Then, in a long final session, the meeting argued out the merits of the comparative designs: possible crew sizes, surface stay capabilities, gross weight in Earth orbit, required delta-vee, aerodynamic characteristics like lift-to-drag ratio. It all got bogged down in picky detail, and it became clear to Gershon after a while that all sides were more intent on filibustering than reaching any kind of decision.