Voyage (37 page)

Staring into Josephson’s narrow, calculating eyes, Muldoon saw everything – his whole life, all his aspirations – narrow into this one moment.
The road to Mars lies through this bottleneck, this piece of paper, the seventy thousand high school kids and their seven thousand fucking names, in this shitty room on the wrong side of the planet. I really have to do this
.

And the lightness of the Moon was, after all, a long time ago.

He took the list from Josephson. He looked at the names on it.
Adventure. Blake. Eagle. Endurance …

Josephson said, ‘Do you want me to go find Phil and –’

‘No. I’m the commander. Here.’ He stabbed at a name. ‘This one.’

Josephson looked at the paper.
‘Grissom.’

‘The commander of Apollo 1.’

Josephson studied Muldoon’s face for a moment; then he nodded. He turned, and left the room.

Muldoon splashed water in his face. Then he went back to the bar, and started working on getting seriously drunk.

It took her an hour to get suited up, in the personal gear room.

The safety instructions alone were intimidating enough. Hundreds of facts were thrown at her, about D-rings and lanyards and oxygen bottles and hypoxia and survival procedures …
My God. And I’m only going to be a passenger in the damn thing
.

But now here she was, trussed up in a flight suit, with an oxygen mask, straps everywhere, a parachute, emergency oxygen, intercoms, survival kits for several unlikely environments tucked into her pockets. There was a sick bag in a pouch on her leg. She even had her own flight helmet, a World War One-style Snoopy hat.
Look at me, the newest fighter jock hero
.

She walked out to the field. There was Phil Stone, the senior astronaut who was going to take her up today. Stone was tall, proudly bald, the best part of fifty. He grinned and shook her hand with a big gloved mitt. ‘Welcome to the carnie ride,’ he said.

She smiled back uncertainly.

Beyond him, a gleaming toy on the tarmac, was the T-38 itself. The trainer was an intimidating white dart. The wings were just little stubs, incredibly short, and the sleek white shape had more of the feel of a rocket about it. It seemed incredible, against intuition, that such a small, compact machine could support itself in the air and fly.

You’re getting down to the wire, Natalie. You say you want to be an astronaut. You mock the hero pilot tendency. That’s fine
.

But it means you have to cope with experiences like this
.

Two techs helped her climb up and lower herself into the cockpit. The T-38’s white-painted walls were only just wide enough for her to squeeze in. She would actually be in a separate cockpit behind Stone’s, under her own little bubble of glass.

Stone clambered aboard, in front of her, and spoke over the intercom. ‘Natalie, can you hear me?’

‘Sure, Phil. Loud and clear. And I –’

He cut her off. ‘Final safety instructions,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you when to close your canopy bubble. Do it slowly, Natalie. Now, your parachute is set to open as soon as you eject. That’s appropriate for low altitude. Later I’ll tell you when to change the setting to high altitude, when you need to have a delay between ejection and the chute opening; you do that by fastening the hook to that ring on your ‘chute, and …’

And the noise of the jets rose to a roar, drowning out his words.

The plane started to taxi.

Stone, sitting in his bubble ahead of her, looked out calmly, his motions deft and precise. The controls before her moved in sympathy with Stone’s, working themselves like a high-tech pianola.

She felt her pulse rate rising, her breathing deepening, and the rubber stink of her oxygen mask grew sharper; she felt sweat pool under her goggles, on her squeezed-up cheeks.

She consoled herself that she was going on a ride which few people would experience: high, fast, probably extraordinarily beautiful. Even if she left the corps tomorrow, she would have this to take away from here.

Yes, but I’m pretty sure I could get by without it …

Without warning, the plane threw itself down the runway, pressing her back into her seat. Within a few seconds she could feel the wheels leaving the ground.

The plane pitched upwards steeply, and she lost sight of the ground.

There was a layer of cloud above, lumpy cumulus. The clouds seemed to explode at her, and she shot into white mist. She was through it in a second, emerging into bright, clear sunshine.

She glanced down: the land was already lost, remote, a patchwork of faded brown with the gray shadows of clouds scattered over it.

The T-38 rose almost vertically, like a rocket. In a few seconds, the sky faded down to a deep purple.

The surface of Earth was remote, small, the works of humanity already reduced to two-dimensional splashes of color. It astonished her to think, given the facility with which she had leapt from the ground, that just a century ago no human on the planet had undergone such an experience.

Scientist-astronauts no longer had to slog through the hell of flight school. But they still needed to go through dynamic situations:
to gain experience of microgravity and acceleration, to recognize the symptoms of airsickness and hypoxia. So, the price the scientist-astronauts had to pay was regular hours of flying backseat in a Northrup T-38, the most advanced jet trainer.

Experienced astronauts were encouraged to take up the rookie scientists. And once you were up there, they could do whatever the hell they liked with you.

But she trusted Stone. She appreciated the fact that he was taking time out of his own Moonlab-Soyuz training for this piece of nursemaiding.

‘How about that,’ Stone said now. ‘Forty-eight thousand feet. Higher than you’ve ever flown before, Natalie.’

So high she was already in the stratosphere, higher than the tallest mountain, so high she couldn’t breathe unaided.
The edge of space, right? Welcome to your new home, space girl
.

‘Okay,’ Stone said now. ‘Let’s start gently. We’ll slow her down. Can you read the airspeed?’

‘Sure.’

‘Follow what I do.’

When the jet got to under two hundred miles an hour, it bucked and juddered, as if the air had become a medium of invisible lumps.

‘She doesn’t like being reined in,’ Stone said. ‘So –’

He opened up the throttle and the plane surged forward. Sunlight gleamed from the carapace around York, and the Earth curved away beneath her, brilliantly lit.

‘Slow roll,’ Stone said now.

The Earth started to tilt, sideways. It wasn’t as if she was rolling at all; York felt only a slight increase in the acceleration pushing her into her seat.

The horizon arced around her, tipping up, and the bruised purple of the stratosphere slid beneath the belly of the plane.

Then the plane righted itself, sharply. The roll had taken maybe fifteen seconds.

‘Snap roll,’ Stone said.

This time the plane twisted over in a second, land and sky and sun rolling around, the light strobing across her lap and hands. Her stomach resisted the roll as if she was suddenly filled with mercury.

After one and a half turns the plane finished upside down. When she looked up, she could see the Gulf of Mexico, set out like a huge map painted across a misty ceiling. Gravity plucked at her –
one negative G –
and her shoulders strained against the seat harnesses,
and her helmeted head bumped against the canopy. The blood pooled in her head, making her feel stuffy, as if she were developing a cold.

‘Just like the tilt table, huh, Natalie,’ Stone said dryly.

He snapped the plane through a fast half-roll, righting it; the plane settled onto the level, rocking slightly in the air.

For a second they were still. Stone’s precision and control were remarkable, York thought –

And then Stone threw the plane down on a dipping curve, diving down toward the remote ground; the noise of the jets increased.

‘Parabolic curve,’ Stone called over the jet noise.

So I should be weightless
. She relaxed her arm, and watched her hand drift upwards. ‘My God.’ She felt the weightlessness in her gut; it was as if her organs were climbing upwards, inside her chest cavity.

‘You feeling queasy?’

‘A little.’ She reached down, checking she could reach the bag in the pocket on her flight suit leg.

Stone made no signs of taking the plane out of its dive. ‘Ah, you’ll be fine. If it gets too bad, just watch the instrument panel; don’t look out of the window.’

‘Okay, but –’

Her sentence fell apart as Stone threw the plane into a ferocious S-shaped curve. She was turned every which way, and the glowing landscape wheeled around the canopy.

And then he took the plane into a straight dive, accelerating at the Gulf of Mexico. The ocean shone like a steel plate, far in front of her face.

At twenty thousand feet Stone hauled the nose of the plane upwards. The jets howled, and the Gs shoved her hard into her seat; her head was pushed into her shoulders, and her vision tunneled, walled by darkness.

The T-38 leapt back up to the sky, and the light reverted to its deep purple.

She tasted saliva at the back of her throat, sharp, like rusty iron. ‘Phil, I don’t feel so good.’

‘If you have to barf, take off your oxygen mask.’

I would if I knew how
.

‘And turn the mix in your mask to a hundred per cent oh-two,’ he said. ‘Turn on your cold air blower.’

When she tried that, taking deep breaths of the oxygen, the pressure on her throat lessened.

‘Anyhow,’ he said, ‘you wouldn’t want to miss this next part.’

‘Huh?’

At forty-five thousand feet, Stone lit the afterburner. Over her shoulder York could see white condensate blossoming behind the T-38. She watched the airspeed climb up toward six hundred miles an hour, higher, higher.

And through Mach 1.
Jesus
.

There was the mildest of vibrations, and then the ride got a lot smoother. The noise of the jets died to a whisper; the plane was now traveling so fast, York realized, it was outrunning its own sound.

The cockpit was a little bubble of serenity, of cool, easy flying; meanwhile, she knew, sonic thunder was washing down on the ground below. A few feet ahead of her there was Stone inside his own canopy, the only living thing within miles of her, and around them the plane was a little isolated island of reality, gleaming paint and warm air and hard surfaces, up here in the mouth of the sky. She felt somehow closer to Stone, as if bonded to him.

‘How you doing now?’ Stone asked, his intercom voice loud in the stillness.

‘Oh, good, Phil,’ she said. ‘I’m good. This is –’

‘I know.’ He glanced over his shoulder at her, his eyes concealed by his sunglasses. ‘And in orbit, you’ll fly twenty times as fast, many times higher. Maybe now you’ll understand better why some of us get so hooked on this stuff.’

She grimaced. ‘Is my disapproval that obvious?’

‘To me it is. I don’t blame you. But you got to learn to understand the other guy’s point of view.’

Suddenly she felt defensive. ‘What do you care?’

He laughed, evidently not taking offence. ‘More than you think, maybe. Natalie, I’ve seen you work around the Office. I think you got potential. I think we need people like you in the program. But you have to learn to work in a team.’

He threw the plane suddenly into a new series of dives and barrel rolls.

York pulled out her bag and sat in misery, staring at her knees, while the world wheeled around her.

The T-38 approached the runway like a falling rock. The landing, when it came, was soft and quick.

The techs helped York out of the cockpit. Her queasiness had gone already, but she felt disoriented, as if she had grown smaller,
lighter; she felt oppressed by the heavy sky above her, the hot, moisture-laden air.

Stone slapped her on the shoulder. ‘You did good,’ he said.

‘I nearly threw up.’

‘But you didn’t. I told you you got potential, York.’

‘Yeah. Maybe.’

Standing there on the mundane tarmac of Ellington, she looked up at the lidded clouds, remembered how it had been, in those few seconds, to be weightless. She let her hands drift up from her sides.

Stone was watching her, observing, evaluating.

Embarrassed, she tucked her helmet under her arm, nodded curtly to Stone, and headed for the personal gear room.

The sky was empty, a harsh blue. Beyond the launch facilities, the wind whipped sand across the nude, flat steppe. Bert Seger was glad he was safely tucked away behind the glass of this observation room, three miles from the pad.

Behind him there was a murmur of conversation from the other guests – program managers, minor politicians, academicians, celebrities – who seemed more intent on the food and drink, which was lavish enough, and on pursuing whatever low-level political and diplomatic gains were still to be wrung out of this joint mission.

Seger had binoculars around his neck; now he raised them and fixed them on the launch complex itself.

The N-1 booster stood tall on its pad. N for
Nosityel
– the Carrier. It sat on a porch-like structure at the lip of a flame pit. The mobile service structure had already been lowered; at three-quarters of an hour before lift-off the towers had been swung down through ninety degrees to the ground, leaving the booster exposed. Now the booster was a vertical line, out of place in this huge, horizontal landscape.

Seger saw propellants vent from the N-1’s multiple stages, and flags of vapor smeared across the still, layered air. The lower three stages made up a slim, truncated cone, flaring at the base, and the upper stages and the spacecraft itself were an upright cylinder stacked on top of that. The upper stages alone were about the size and shape of a Saturn IB. And somewhere inside that complex, Seger knew, the Soyuz T-3 spacecraft was buried; and somewhere
within
that
were two cosmonauts, sitting out the final minutes of their countdown.