Voyage (54 page)

Muldoon was forced to watch, helpless, as in the rooms of the White House his careful test and development program was cut to the bone, all talk of Venus-orbit missions and Mars bases was dropped, and the three Mars flights were reduced – incredibly – to just a single shot.

And as the meeting developed, Muldoon became aware of another undercurrent. NASA had screwed up royally over the Apollo-N thing; well, here was Reagan offering to endorse a new, huge program. But there was going to be a price to pay. And the head of Bert Seger, and some internal reorganization at NASA, wasn’t going to be enough.

Muldoon came to see, quite clearly, the act of repentance that would be expected, if NASA was to be cleansed.

Michaels compiled a final report for Reagan, setting the agenda for the new mission and laying out a program to obtain House and Senate approval.

When it was done, he refused to leave the document with aides. Instead, he walked the document himself into the Oval Office, and, shaking with fatigue, handed it to Reagan in person.

There was a note of resignation stapled to the cover.

… Our great goal is to build on America’s pioneer spirit, and to develop new frontiers. A sparkling economy spurs initiatives, sunrise industries, and makes older ones more competitive.

Nowhere is this more important than our next frontier, space. Nowhere do we so effectively demonstrate our technological leadership and ability to make life better on Earth. The Space Age is barely a quarter of a century old. But we’ve already pushed civilization forward with our advances in science and technology. Opportunities and jobs will multiply as we cross new thresholds of knowledge and reach deeper into the unknown.

Our progress in space – taking giant steps for all mankind – is a tribute to American teamwork and excellence. Our finest minds in government, industry and academia have all pulled together. And we can be proud to say: we are first, we are the best, and we are so because we’re free.

America has always been greatest when we dared to be great. We can reach for greatness again. We can follow our dreams to distant stars, living and working in space for peaceful, economic, and scientific gain.

My advisers are developing an overall National Space Policy which I will outline in full later in the year. This policy will establish basic goals for the US space program, which will include: to strengthen the security of the United States, maintain United States space leadership, expand United States private sector investment and involvement in civil space and space-related activities, and to promote international cooperative activities in the national interest. As we look to the future, we must begin to secure leadership in space through the end of the century and beyond. The way to do that is to set a fruitful new direction for the space program, one which will make the best use of our present capabilities, in chemical rocket technology and our ability to live and work for long periods in space. And the time to do it is now.

Tonight, against the background of the forthcoming Space Policy, I am directing NASA to proceed with the preparation of a manned mission to Mars, and to do it within five years. Such a mission will permit quantum leaps in our research in science and communications, and our understanding of the nature of our universe.

Just as the oceans opened up a new world for clipper ships and Yankee traders, space holds enormous potential for commerce today …

Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Ronald Reagan, 1981 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1981), p. 362
.

Michaels called Tim Josephson into his office. He had loosened his tie, and broke open a fresh bottle of his favored Kentucky bourbon. But there was little mood of celebration, as the two of them sat there sipping their drinks in the half-light; Michaels seemed more exhausted than Josephson had ever seen him.

Josephson raised his glass. ‘Here’s to you, Fred. You’ve done one hell of a job, these last few weeks.’

Michaels drank. ‘Yeah. Yeah, so I have. Well, we got our announcement out of Reagan. And when I go, I’ll take most of the blame for Apollo-N with me, away from NASA.’

‘Fred –’

‘That’s my job now, Tim,’ Michaels said, his voice harder. ‘My last assignment. It’s the way these things work. But the biggest job lies ahead, still. Delivering this thing.’ He eyed Josephson. ‘And that’s going to be a job you’ll have to handle yourself, Tim. I’ve already made my recommendation to the White House.’

Josephson had been expecting this, but still, panic spurted briefly in him. ‘I’m – delighted by your faith in me, Fred. But, am I the right guy? Hell, I’m a back-room boy. A functionary; a natural follower.’

‘Jesus Christ, don’t you think I know that?’ Michaels snapped. ‘But I also know there’s no better candidate available. You’re just going to have to overcome your weaknesses, Tim. You’ll get there if you work at it.’

Josephson hid a smile behind his glass. ‘Thanks, Fred. I’m going to miss you.’

‘And I want you to lean on Muldoon. Use him. The two of you should make a hell of a team.’

‘I’ll remember that.’

Michaels stared into his drink. ‘You know, sometimes I think we’ve lost something on the way in all this. I mean, the people furthest from the decision-making have been the guys whose idea it was in the first place – the engineers of Langley and Goddard and Marshall – people who have given their whole lives to dreams of spaceflight. People like Gregory Dana. We take their studies and reports and use them as ammunition for our games of politics. But all that visionary stuff about exploration and destiny, all their efforts to stretch our hearts and minds – it’s gotten lost somewhere.’

Josephson sipped his drink. ‘But could it be any other way, Fred? It was the same with Apollo. Once spaceflight becomes the religion of the empire, it becomes immensely powerful; but it can’t stir us to dream in the same old way. And all of us involved – NASA, the White House, the DoD – just figure out ways in which the space program can serve our own interests. It’s the way things are.’

‘Maybe. And I
know
those guys at Langley are going to hate this one-shot business. Who the hell knows when we’ll be back again? I remember LBJ saying to me once that Americans are a lot better at breaking new ground than caring for the ground already broken. He was sure right. Anyway, the hell with it. We can forget all the political crap now, Tim, and start dreaming about Mars.’ He studied Josephson again. ‘Tell you what I’ve been thinking,’ he said. ‘Now that we’ve got this nice tight goal, our new Apollo, this one-shot trip to Mars, we’re going to need a new name. Something to sum the whole thing up.’

‘I guess you’re right,’ Josephson said. ‘In fact, maybe we should have done that before issuing the press briefings.’

‘Well, you’re in the hot seat now,’ Michaels said. ‘What are you going to choose, Tim?’

Josephson pulled his lip. ‘Humm. How did the name “Apollo” come about? That was before my time –’

Michaels said, ‘It was picked out by Abe Silverstein in 1960. Now Abe was the head of the Office of Manned Spaceflight at the time – or rather, its predecessor. Silverstein kind of dabbled in the classical myths. He’d picked the name “Mercury” a year earlier, because he liked the idea of a messenger in the sky. And then von Braun’s people called their new launch vehicle “Saturn,” and so another classical god seemed a natural choice to Silverstein.’

‘Maybe so,’ Josephson said with half-smile, ‘but that’s rather muddled. Isn’t it true that von Braun was actually naming his rockets after planets? There was the “Jupiter,” and then the “Saturn”–’

‘Give me a break,’ Michaels said good-humoredly. ‘Silverstein was a research engineer; what did he know? Anyhow Silverstein remembered from his schooldays the story of the god who rode the chariot of the sun drawn by four winged horses:
Apollo,
the son of Zeus. So Silverstein did a bit of checking to make sure Apollo hadn’t done anything that would be too inappropriate for the American public, such as screwing his mother, and found he hadn’t – and so Apollo it was.’

Josephson studied his drink and thought about it. ‘Well, maybe
we ought to follow the same tradition. I know a little mythology too. Apollo had a half-brother. Another great Olympian god. He had his own mythology; it was only later that he was identified with the Romans’ war-god … Only battle and bloodshed gave him any pleasure; his twin children Phobos and Deimos –
Panic
and
Fear
– accompanied him onto the battlefield …’

Michaels grunted.
‘Panic
and
Fear
. Sounds like the kind of guy who’d prosper up on the Hill.’

Josephson smiled. No other name was possible.

And the press would love it.

‘Sixty minutes to pericenter,’ Stone said.

All three of the crew were in the Mission Module’s Science Platform. At the heart of this little octagonal chamber, lined with its banks of switches and displays, they were strapped into harnesses and had their feet hooked into stirrups.

Above York’s head there was a small science viewport. A brilliant, shifting white light beat down over her face, flooding the fluorescents.

She could see the upper half of a fat, pale, gibbous disk.

My God. That’s Venus
.

To her naked eye, the day side of the planet was glaring white – much brighter than Earth, from a similar distance – and it washed out the stars. Of the thin slice of night side she could see nothing at all.

The trajectory of Ares had taken it arcing inside the orbit of Venus. So now, Ares was barreling out of the sun toward Venus, tumbling along a hyperbola into Venus’s gravity well. Ares was already moving toward the planet at more than five miles a second, and as York watched, that gibbous disk was narrowing, and the reflected sunlight cast shifting shadows across her lap.

There was a Hasselblad Velcroed to the work surface near her; she ripped this loose now, jammed her face up against the port and began taking pictures.

Venus was about the size of the Earth, but this was nothing like her experience of Earth orbit. There was no detail: the surface of Venus was permanently hidden, baked under its huge layers of carbon dioxide cloud. From this close, the cloud tops looked utterly smooth, featureless, as if the planet was a huge pearl: perfect, entire …

Although, now she looked more closely, she thought she
could
see a little structure in the clouds, right at the limb: a fine shell, surrounding the main cloud decks, outlined against the darkness of the sky.

She snapped the camera furiously.

‘You got a problem, Natalie?’ Stone asked dryly.

‘I think I see the haze layer,’ she said. A shell of sulphuric acid clouds, swathing Venus, outlined against the darkness of the sky.

‘Yeah. And that picture’s not on the schedule,’ Stone said.

Christ
. ‘Okay, damn it.’ She slammed the Hasselblad back on its surface. ‘I just saw something no other human being had even seen
before, that’s all. I thought it was worth investing in a snapshot.’

‘If we don’t get through this encounter on the right trajectory,’ Stone murmured, his eyes on the flickering CRT displays before him, ‘you won’t be going home to get that roll of film developed. Let’s concentrate, guys.’

Yeah, yeah. We’re in operational mode here. Stick to the goddamn mission plan
.

York returned her attention to her displays.

Gershon was grinning over his shoulder at her.

The plan was for Ares to skim around behind the dark side of the planet. The slingshot would twist the ship’s trajectory through thirty degrees, and Ares would be hugely accelerated. As Ares had crawled, unpowered, around the sun, it had drawn only a little way ahead of Earth; so now, Ares was passing between Venus and Earth. The cluster would pass into the shadow of Venus, but it would never be out of Earth’s line of sight.

The crew all had their assignments for the Venus encounter phase: Stone was monitoring the cluster’s trajectory, Gershon was to follow the atmospheric-entry subprobe Ares had released, and York was operating the Mission Module’s sensor pallet.

In one of the video monitors she had an image of the cloud tops in ultraviolet light. It showed a wealth of blue-gray detail invisible to the naked eye: cloud structures that swept around the planet, complex bows and cells that distorted and stretched out along the planet’s lines of latitude. The whole thing, in its computer-generated false colors, looked almost Earth-like.

The sensor pallet on its rear-view-mirror extensor arm was a collection of fat, awkward-looking tubes and antennae and lenses, all wrapped in foil. There was a TV camera to study the clouds, an airglow experiment to look for ultraviolet echoes of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen, an infrared radiometer studying cloud temperatures, a magnetometer, charged particle telescopes. Four horn-shaped radar antennae would be able to penetrate the cloud layer and map the strip of Venus over which Ares passed. The sensors were already working, peering forward from the rear-view mirror, the pallet which angled out from the Mission Module’s pressure hull.

‘Hey,’ Gershon said. ‘Here goes the probe. I’m passing through the ionosphere. Two hundred fifty miles above the ground. Progressing toward the main cloud layers, at hyperbolic speed … How about that.’

York unhooked herself from her stirrups and drifted over to
Gershon. There was a TV monitor at the center of Gershon’s station; right now, the screen showed nothing but a snowstorm of static.

The subprobe had been ejected twenty-three days ago, from a compartment at the base of the Mission Module, and had been pushed onto a slowly diverging orbit. Ares was missing Venus by a few thousand miles; the probe, pushed ahead of Ares, was supposed to impact the planet directly, a few minutes before the closest approach of the main craft. The probe would hit in the middle of the day side, in an upland region called Ishtar Terra.

Right now, the probe was contained within its aeroshell deceleration module, a deep, streamlined pie dish. Its TV cameras couldn’t see out of the aeroshell, but there was a radio-transparent window at the top, so the probe could talk to Ares.

Gershon said, ‘I’m in the atmosphere now, but still above the main cloud banks. Fifty miles up. The temperature’s low here; under a hundred below, in fact. But this is the minimum; it should soon start to rise as I enter the main cloud banks. Here we come to breakout … Three, two, one. Mark. Watch the screen, Natalie.’

Right now, somewhere in those clouds, York knew, that fat pie dish was falling apart. A pilot chute would pull away the lid, and the main chute should open above the probe.

There was a break in the monitor’s snowstorm, a yellow, flickering blur.

Gershon whooped. ‘How about that. We can see out, at last.’

On the TV the pale, jaundiced wash brightened and darkened periodically: the probe was rotating, slowly, under its chute, and that cyclical brightening must be the sun, a glare behind the diffuse haze of sulphuric acid particles.

‘Visibility’s dropping. Down to maybe four miles,’ Gershon said. ‘I’ve got a pressure of three-quarters of Earth’s sea-level pressure, and the temperature is around fifty degrees. Yum. Balmy. And I’m still all of thirty-eight miles high.’

Thirty-eight miles. Two hundred thousand feet
. On Earth, that would be the top of the stratosphere: pressure less than a hundredth of sea level.

The haze on the TV screen thinned out. ‘Whoa,’ Gershon said. ‘Look at that. All of a sudden I can see for miles and miles.’

York found herself looking down on a layer of cloud, thick and unbroken, a pale, washed-out yellow. The clouds were fluffy, Earthlike. Almost friendly. Up above there was a featureless yellow sky; she could know longer tell where the sun was.

The probe dropped into the thick clouds.

‘Coming up on twenty-eight miles. I’m through all that sulphuric acid shit. But temperature outside is all of four hundred degrees already. And pressure’s higher than an atmosphere already. Three, two, one. Mark. Chute sep.’

The picture seemed to shudder, then it stabilized again.

The pressure vessel – the heart of the probe – had hatched out of its aeroshell, and cut itself loose from its parachute. The probe was still more than twenty-five miles high, but it had already cut away its last chute. The air of Venus was so thick that from here the probe could free-fall all the way to the surface.

The pressure vessel was a sphere of thick metal. There were vanes on the sphere to make it spin, so that it was stabilized during its fall, and there were tough little windows cut into the surface so that the probe’s instruments could see out.

‘… Hey,’ Gershon said. ‘Look at these numbers from the mass spectrometer.’ He tapped a screen. ‘I got me some heavy isotopes of hydrogen in the air.’

‘So what?’

He narrowed his eyes.
‘Water,
my dear. Oceans, maybe: once upon a time, anyhow. Long since boiled off by the greenhouse effect, caused by all this fucking cee-oh-two. But where there were oceans …’

Life, perhaps
.

The probe was spinning slowly in the sluggish air. The light was dark, reddish, but the illumination was no worse than a cloudy day on Earth. She couldn’t see the sun at all; there was only an ill-defined glare, almost baleful, spread across half of the cloud bank that covered the sky.

And now, suddenly, she could see the surface: the probe’s fish-eye camera returned panoramic views of a landscape, dimly visible through the murky air. York made out what looked like a cleft in the land, running from side to side of the picture – no, not a cleft, she realized; it was a ridge, hundreds of miles long, leading up to a plateau.

‘Wind speed down to zip,’ Gershon said. ‘Pressure and temperature still rising. Venus doesn’t have air; that stuff is more like my momma’s chicken soup.’ He tapped the screen. ‘That’s Ishtar Terra,’ he said. ‘Or the edge of it; right where we’re drifting. We’re slap on course. Look at it, Natalie. Seven miles above the mean surface, and –’

‘– and as big as the United States. I know.’ Ishtar Terra was a
high, exposed plateau, already mapped by radar from Earth: Ishtar was how a continent might look if someone drained away Earth’s oceans.

York felt excitement mount. At last, a chance to do some geology on this mission.

Venus and Earth were twins. So presumably Venus had a hot, radioactive core, just like Earth’s, whose heat must escape to space. On Earth, that happened in two ways: plate tectonics and vulcanism. But, in the radar mapping and the crude Russian probes’ results, nobody had observed any sign of plate tectonics on Venus: no rings of vulcanism, no rift valleys.

So York, along with every other geologist, believed that the dominant geological process for losing core heat had to be vulcanism: ongoing and continuing. There just had to be a whole bunch of live volcanic hot-spots, all round the planet, feeding the heat to the atmosphere, and thence to the ultimate heat-sink of space. Therefore, at Ishtar, she expected to see a young surface, heavily distorted by the upwelling of magma – liquid rock under the solid crust – and resurfaced by repeated lava flows. If there were any impact craters, they would be heavily distorted, maybe even buried, invisible under the fresh surface.

She pointed off to the right of the screen, to shadowy cones that loomed out of the murk. ‘Look at that. That must be the Maxwell Montes.’ The tallest mountain range on Venus. The probe was drifting toward the Montes, she saw, floating like a fat metal balloon in some sluggish current. The Montes were steeper, in places, than anything on Earth. The mountains were folds in the surface, illuminated by the diffuse, ruddy light and wreathed by thick air; it was like swimming over some undersea ridge.

Something showed up on the edge of the screen: a circular feature, on the flank of the mountain range.

‘Hey. What’s that?’ The probe’s slow rotation took the feature out of shot, almost immediately. ‘Hot damn.’

Gershon grinned up at her. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘No panning or zooming. This isn’t
Wide World of Sports.’

A circle? Could it be a crater? What the hell was that doing there?

Something was wrong; York could smell it. She waited, excited, impatient, as the camera panned around, agonizingly slowly, the image wobbling as the probe hit turbulence pockets in-the soupy air.

The circular feature came back again, drifting in from the right.

York shoved her face right up to the screen. Almost a perfect circle, surrounded by a dark blanket of material: it had to be an impact crater, surrounded by a layer of ejecta. Like a bullet-hole centered in dried blood. And it was so large it was almost certainly several hundred million years old.

And it was pristine
: no coverage by lava flows, no distortion by shifts in the landscape.

Which meant that Ishtar Terra had to have been geologically dead, too, for at least as long.

That’s impossible. Her mind raced. If that’s characteristic of the whole surface, everything is turned on its head
. No plate tectonics, and no vulcanism either?

The enigmatic crater passed out of view as the probe descended.

‘Ten minutes from pericenter,’ Stone said. The mission commander was watching his instruments, York saw, not the images from the probe, the first pictures of the surface of Venus.

The probe was heading for a rough plain, broken up with large, jagged rocks. She saw some evidence of winds: dust streaks, scouring, a couple of flattened dunes.
The air isn’t always so sluggish, then
.

‘Coming on in,’ Gershon said. ‘Approach speed twenty-one feet per. Thirty seconds.’

Around fifteen miles per hour. Like a slow car crash: hard, but survivable.

‘Nine. Eight …’

The ground rocked upwards, spinning toward the camera; York, trying to pick out features, felt oddly dizzy.

‘Two. One.’

The picture fuzzed over briefly, then cleared.

She saw a steady image, a rocky plain, no longer rotating. The plain tipped a little, as the probe settled on its side.

Gershon whooped. ‘Touchdown!’ He pumped his arms, football-style. ‘Welcome to a pleasant spring day on Venus. Air pressure is a soothing ninety-one atmospheres. Temperatures today will peak at a frisky eight hundred and eighty degrees Fahrenheit …’

Hot enough to melt lead
.

York bent to stare into the screen. The image was distorted into a kind of bow by the fish-eye lens. She couldn’t see the horizon; the visibility couldn’t have been more than a few hundred yards. The sun was invisible, but the sky was bright. Like a smoggy day in LA.

Live, from the surface of Venus
. York felt a surge of affection for the tough little superprobe.