Voyage (86 page)

It was done. And after this last effort, he thought morbidly, he could get to work on pickling his liver seriously. It was a kind of release.
No more goals
.

The Saturn arced upwards, its vapor trail leading right into the sun; Muldoon, dazzled, couldn’t see the first staging.

His vision was blurred. He was crying, damn it. ‘Go, baby!’ he shouted.

Seger had been leading his group in hymns, and handing out leaflets about how Ares was carrying plutonium casks, for its SNAP generators, into space. ST JOSEPH OF CUPERTINO IS THE PATRON SAINT OF ASTRONAUTS. JOIN WITH US IN PRAYER …

But they were mainly ignored by the crowds around them on the road, with their cameras and binoculars, their eyes shaded by hands against the sun.

When the Saturn light burst over the road, the hymn dissolved, as the members of the group turned to look.

The white needle, clearly visible, had lifted off the ground on a stick of fire. There was no sound yet.

Seger fell to his knees, dazzled. It was the first launch he’d viewed since Apollo-N. He let his leaflets fall to the dust, and tears stung his eyes. He could see some of his congregation staring at him, amazed; but it was as if he was back in the MOCR again.

He knew now he’d never left it, really; in fact, he never would.

‘This is holy ground,’ he said. ‘Holy, holy ground.’

Gulls wheeled overhead, crying, oblivious to the lethal noise cascading toward them.

Muldoon stayed in the stand until the news came that Ares had reached orbit successfully. When he got to the limousine that had brought him here – in the VAB car park, maybe thirty minutes after liftoff – the vapor stack still loomed in the sky above, a man-made column of cloud, miles wide and slowly dispersing.

Through the airlock’s small window, Natalie York could see stars, embedded in a black sky.

There was Jupiter, high in the sky, a good third brighter than as seen from Earth, bright enough to cast a shadow. And in the east there was a morning star: steady, brilliant, its delicate blue-white quite distinct against the violet wash of the embryonic Martian dawn. That was Earth, of course. The twin planet was close to conjunction – lying in the same direction as the sun – and was about as close as it ever got to Mars; right now it was actually a crescent in the Martian sky, with its shadowed hemisphere turned to Mars.

The constellations themselves were unchanged from the familiar patterns of her childhood. It was a sobering reminder of what a short distance they’d come: the stars were so remote that they reduced this immense interplanetary journey – achieved at the very limit of human technology, far enough to turn Earth itself into a starlike point – to a child’s first step.

Today, though, they would reach the climax of this journey, when Phil Stone became the first human to walk on Mars. The MEM had already been on the surface for three days. The crew had had to spend that precious chunk of their stay time adapting from zero G.

As she’d been warned, York had found herself a few inches taller and a stone lighter than when she’d left Earth. At first, she’d had trouble walking around the MEM’s tight compartments; she’d kept walking into walls and forgetting which way was down. And she had the scrawniest pair of ‘chicken legs.’
Rapid aging, huh, Adam,
she thought.
You were right. We’re three old people, stuck here on the surface of Mars
. But anyhow, chicken legs were all she needed in Mars’s one-third gravity.

But after three days on the Martian surface, she still felt disoriented, as if the Jupiter-lit landscape beyond the window was just another plaster-of-paris sim mockup.

When she walked out there, though, it would become real.

Stone joined her at the port. Stone, like York, was wearing thermal underwear, with his Cooling and Ventilation Garment over the top. The cooling garment was a corrugated layering of water coolant pipes. York had her catheter fitted, and Stone wore his own urine collection device, a huge, unlikely condom. The two of them looked bizarre, sexless, faintly ridiculous.

‘Pretty view, huh,’ Stone murmured. ‘You know, Ralph claims he can see the Moon with his naked eye.’

‘Maybe he can. It’s possible.’ The Moon ought to look like a faint silver-gray star, circling close to its master.

Stone had brought over York’s Lower Torso Assembly; this was the bottom half of her EVA suit, trousers with boots built on. ‘Come on, York; enough rubbernecking.’

She stared at the suit with a feeling of unreality. ‘That time already, huh.’

‘That time already.’

She hooked the sleeves of the cooling garment over her thumbs; the hook would stop the sleeves riding up later. She looked at her hands, her own familiar flesh, with the plastic webbing over the balls of her thumbs; it was the first step in the elaborate ceremonial of donning the suit, and the simple act had made her heart pump.

She stepped into the Lower Torso Assembly. The unit was heavy, the layered material awkward and stiff, and it seemed to wriggle away from her legs as Stone tried to pull it up for her. She found she was tiring rapidly, already.

Now she fitted a tube over her catheter attachment. It would connect with a bag large enough to store a couple of pints of urine. There was nothing to collect shit, though; she was wearing a kind of diaper – an absorbent undergarment – that would soak up ‘any bowel movement that cannot be deferred during EVA,’ in the language of the training manuals.

York planned to defer.

Now it was time for the Hard Upper Torso. Her HUT was suspended from the wall of the airlock, like the top half of a suit of armor, with a built-in life support backpack.

She crouched down underneath the HUT and lifted up her arms. She wriggled upwards, squirming into the HUT. In the darkness of the shell there was a smell of plastic and metal and lint, of newness.

She got her arms into the sleeves, and pushed her hands through; the cooling garment’s loops tugged at the soft flesh around her thumbs. Her shoulders bent backwards, painfully. Nothing about this process was easy. Still, these suits were a hell of a lot simpler than the old Moon suits; the Apollo crew had had to
assemble
their suits on the lunar surface, connecting up the tubes which would carry water and oxygen from their backpacks.

Her head emerged through the helmet ring. Stone was grinning at her. ‘Welcome back.’ He pulled her HUT down, jamming it so that it rubbed against her shoulders, and guided the metal waist
rings of the two halves of the suit to mate and click together.

Now she helped Stone don his suit.

York and Stone had already been inside the cramped airlock for two hours.
Challenger’s
atmosphere was pressurized to seventy per cent of Earth’s sea level, with a mix of nitrogen and oxygen, but to stay flexible their suits would contain oxygen only, at just a quarter of sea level pressure. So York and Stone had had to pre-breathe pure oxygen to purge the nitrogen from their blood.

It was a tedious ritual. And EVAs on Mars could last only three or four hours, at most. Apollo backpacks had been capable of supporting seven hours of surface working. But Mars’s gravity was twice as strong as the Moon’s, and Mars suits had to be proportionately lighter, and could therefore only sustain much briefer EVAs. There would also have to be a long tidy-up period after each EVA: the suits would have to be vacuumed clean of Mars dust, which was highly oxidizing and would play hell with their lungs if they let it into
Challenger
.

The brief EVAs, with the surrounding preparation and cleanups and anti-contamination swabbing, were going to occupy most of each exhausting, frustrating day on Mars.

York fixed on her Snoopy flight helmet, and over the top of that Stone lifted her hard helmet with its visor, and twisted it into place against the seal at her neck.

The last pieces were her gloves; these were close-fitting, and snapped onto rings at her wrists.

Stone flicked a switch on her chest panel, and she heard the soft, familiar hum of pumps and fans in the backpack, the whoosh of oxygen across her face. He rapped sharply on the top of the helmet, and held up a gloved thumb before her clear faceplate. She nodded out at him and smiled.

She held up her arm; there was a reflector plate stitched into her cuff, allowing her to see the panel on the front of her chest which gave her a readout of oxygen, carbon dioxide and pressure levels, and various malfunction warnings. She could see her oxygen pressure level stabilizing.

Stone tested out the radio link. ‘Hi, Natalie. Able Baker Charlie …’ His voice sounded soft and tinny, echoed by muffled sound carried through the thick glass of her faceplate.

She checked the small plastic tubes protruding from her helmet’s inner surface; she sipped out little slugs of water and orange juice. The OJ was okay, but the water was too warm. It didn’t matter. She pushed her suit’s internal pressure up to maximum, briefly, to
test for leaks. She fixed her little spiral-bound EVA checklist to her cuff.

When they were through with the suit checkout they studied each other. Stone’s suit was gleaming white, with bright blue Mars overboots, and the Stars and Stripes proudly emblazoned on his sleeves.

Stone asked: ‘Are we done?’

She was sealed off from
Challenger,
now: locked inside her own, self-contained, miniature spacecraft. She took a deep breath, of cool, blue oxygen. ‘Yes. Let’s get on with it.’

‘Roger.’ He looked away from her to talk to Gershon, who was up in the ascent stage. ‘Ralph, we’re waiting for a Go for depress on time.’

‘Rager, Phil; you have a go for depress.’ Gershon would monitor this first EVA from the ascent stage cabin.

Stone closed a switch on the wall; York heard sound leak out of the air, and the internal noise of her own breathing seemed to grow louder, more ragged, to compensate.

‘Roger,’ Stone said. ‘Everything is go here. We’re just waiting for the cabin to bleed enough pressure to open the hatch.’

The gauge, York saw, showed the pressure already down to two-tenths of a pound.

Gershon said, ‘I’m reading a real low static pressure on your lock. Do you think you can open the hatch yet?’

Stone said, ‘I’ll try.’

The exit from the airlock was a small hatch, close to the floor. The handle was a simple lever. Stone bent down, twisted the handle, tugged. York could see the thin metal of the hatch bow inward. The hatch stayed shut.

‘Damn it.’

‘Let me try.’ She crouched down, and picked at the corner of the hatch, where it protruded from the wall. Her gloves, of metal mesh and rubber, were clumsy; her hands felt huge and insensitive. But she managed to get a little flap of the hatch peeled back.

Through the sliver she’d opened up between the hatch and its frame, she could see ochre light.

‘I think I broke the seal.’

Stone pulled at the handle, and this time the hatch opened easily.

York saw a little flurry of snow as the last of their air escaped into the Martian atmosphere.

They both had to back away to let the hatch swing back.

Now York could see the porch, the platform fixed to the top of
Challenger’s
squat landing leg, onto which Stone would back out in a moment. The porch was coated in brown grit, thrown up by the landing. And beyond the porch, she could see the surface of Mars: it looked like sand, and it was streaked with radial lines pointing away from
Challenger
, showing the effects of their descent engine’s final blast.

It was just a scrap of landscape; on Earth it would look so commonplace she wouldn’t even perceive it.
But it was Mangala Vallis
: now, there was only a few feet of thin Martian air separating her from the surface she’d been studying all her adult life.

‘Natalie,’ Stone said.

She turned; in contrast to the brown of Mars, in the mundane kitchen-light of the airlock, his suit seemed to glow white.

‘There’s something we forgot,’ Stone said. ‘From the checklist. We didn’t fix these.’ Stone had taken his red EV1 bands from a suit pocket. Stone, as the leader of the first EVA, was in charge of the operation; York was, officially, his backup, and Stone would wear the red bands around his arms and legs for identification by the TV cameras.

But he was holding the bands out to her.

‘I don’t understand.’

He was smiling again. ‘I think you do. Put on the bands.’

She held out her hand, and he dropped the bands into her palm. Through her clumsy gloves she couldn’t feel the bands’ weight.

‘You’ve got to be kidding.’

He said testily, ‘Look, I’m not asking you to land the goddamn MEM. You’ve done this in the contingency sims. All you have to do, on this first EVA, is to walk around and scratch a few rocks, and talk to the folks at home about it.’

She didn’t feel any pleasure, or pride, in his startling offer. All she felt was irritation.
That damn roller-coaster again
. ‘This doesn’t make sense, Phil. You’re passing up the chance to become the first human to walk on Mars, for God’s sake. What kind of asshole does that?’

‘This kind,’ he said, annoyed. ‘This is important, Natalie. I discussed it with Joe Muldoon before the launch. We have to get this right – this first EVA most of all – for the sake of the future. The next few minutes are maybe the point of the whole damn mission. Even more than the science – though I don’t expect you to agree with that. Natalie, it’s going to be a long time before anyone comes this way again. But we’re changing history here; even if we fall back, now, people will be able to look up at Mars and say, yes,
it’s possible, we can get there, live up there. We know, because somebody did it.

‘Look, I know I’m no Neil Armstrong. You’re more – articulate. And this is your place; your valley. Your planet, damn it. You know your way around here better than anyone alive. I think you’d do a better job of communicating this than me. And besides …’

‘What?’

He smiled. ‘I have this feeling. I might be remembered longer for being the man who passed up the chance to be first.’

‘I hope she’s obeying orders,’ Gershon called.

‘About as much as she ever does.’

They’ve plotted this. I’ve been set up
.

‘And take this,’ Stone said.

She held out her hand; Stone dropped into her palm a small disk, like a coin, less than an inch across. It was the diamond marker. ‘I think it’s more appropriate for you to place it. For Ben. And the others.’

He reached out with two hands, and closed her fist over the marker. He was looking into her eyes.

He knows, she realized suddenly. About Ben and me. He knows. They all knew, all the time
.

She dropped the marker into a sample pocket on her suit. Then, numbed, she pushed the red bands over her arms and legs, and dropped her gold visor down over her face.

Stone held the hatch aside. York got down, clumsily, to her knees, and backed up ass-first to the hatch. She started to crawl backwards, out onto the porch.

‘Here we go. You’re lined up nicely, Natalie. Come toward me a little bit. Okay, down. Roll to the left. Put your left foot to the right – no, the other way. You’re doing fine.’

She could feel where her sides scraped against the hatchway. Coolant tubes dug into her knees.

Blood hammered in her ears.

‘Okay, Ralph, I’m on the porch.’ She reached out and grabbed the handrails, to either side of the porch.

She looked up. The white paint of the outer hull was stained with landing dust, and tinged yellow by the quickening Martian morning. She had got so far out that could see the whole of the hatchway before her; it was a rectangle of brilliant fluorescent light, set within the skin of
Challenger
. Inside the rectangle Phil Stone had crouched down, peering out at her, nodding inside his helmet.