Phases of Gravity (33 page)

They passed through security checkpoints, and Tucker drove up the long ramp to the base of the Service and Access Tower. Another guard approached them, saw Tucker, saluted, and stepped back into the shadows. Baedecker and Scott got out of the car and stood looking up at the machine poised above them.

To Baedecker's eye the shuttle—or the SSTS, Space Shuttle Transportation System as the engineers liked to call the entire package of orbiter, external tank, and solid rocket boosters—looked jerry-rigged and awkward, an unlikely coupling of species neither aircraft nor rocket, creating a sort of interim evolutionary form. Baedecker realized, not for the first time, that he was looking at a space-faring platypus. Now it struck him with full force how much the space shuttle—that much-vaunted symbol of America's technology—already had become an assemblage of aging, almost obsolete equipment. Like the older command pilots who flew them, the surviving shuttles carried the dreams of the 1960s and the technology of the 1970s into the unknowns of the 1990s, substituting wisdom from painfully learned lessons for the unlimited energy of youth.

Baedecker liked the look of the rust-colored external fuel tank. It made sense not to burn precious fuel lifting tons of paint into the fringes of space only to have the expendable, thin-skinned tank burn up seconds later, but the effect of such common sense was to make the shuttle look more workaday, almost battered, a good, used pickup truck rather than the classy showroom models flown in earlier space programs. Despite—or perhaps because of—this new-paint-over-the-old-rust feel to the entire ungainly machine, Baedecker realized that if he were still a flying member of the team, he would love the shuttle with the kind of pure and unreasonable passion men usually reserved for wives or lovers.

As if reading Baedecker's mind, Tucker said, "She's beautiful, isn't she?"

"She is that," agreed Baedecker. Without thinking about it, he let his gaze wander to the aft field joint of the right-hand solid rocket booster. But if there were O-ring demons lurking there, waiting to destroy ship and crew by raking sudden tongues of flame across the hydrogen-primed bomb of the external tank, there was no sign of them today. But then, Baedecker realized, there had been no sign of them to the Challenger crew either.

Around them, men in white went about their business with the insect-intensity of technicians everywhere. Tucker pulled three yellow hard hats from the back seat of the Plymouth and tossed

one to Baedecker and another to Scott. They moved closer and craned their necks to look up again.

"She's something, isn't she," said Tucker.

"Quite a sight," murmured Baedecker.

"Frozen energy," Scott said to himself.

"What's that?" asked Tucker.

"When I was in India," Scott said, speaking so softly that his voice was barely audible above background work noises and the soft chug of a nearby compressor, "I guess, for some reason, I started to think of things . . . to really see things sometimes . . . in terms of energy. People, plants, everything. Used to be, I'd look at a tree and see branches and leaves. Now I tend to see sunlight molded into matter." Scott hesitated, self-conscious. "Anyway, that's what this is . . . just a huge fountain of frozen kinetic energy, waiting to thaw into motion."

"Yeah," said Tucker. "There's energy waiting there, all right. Or at least there will be when the tanks are topped off in the morning. About seven million pounds of thrust when those two strap-on roman candles get lit." He looked at the two of them. "Want to go up? I promised you a look-see, Dick."

"I'll wait here," said Scott. "See you later, Dad."

Baedecker and Tucker rode up in the pad elevator and stepped out into the white room. Half a dozen Rockwell International technicians in white coveralls, white overboots, and white caps were working in the brilliantly illuminated space.

"This access is a little easier than mounting the Saturn V," said Baedecker.

"Had that little boom arm, didn't it?" said Tucker.

"Three hundred and twenty feet up," said Baedecker, "I used to lurch across that damn number nine swing arm in full pressure suit, carrying that little portable ventilator that weighed about half a ton, and hold my breath until I got into the white room. I was sure I was the only Apollo hero who was fast developing a fear of heights."

"We're a little closer to the ground here," said Tucker. "Evening, Wendell." Tucker greeted a technician with earphones connected to a cable jacked into the hull of the shuttle.

"Evening, Colonel. Going inside?"

"For a few minutes," said Tucker. "I want to show this old Apollo fossil what a real spacecraft looks like."

"All right, but wait just a second, please," said the technician. "Bolton's on the flight deck running the communications check. He'll be coming down in just a second." Baedecker ran his hand across the skin of the shuttle. The white tiles were cool to the touch. Close up, the spacecraft showed signs of wear—subtle discolorations between the tiles, flakes of black paint missing, a well-used polish to the fittings on the open entry hatch. The used pickup had been washed and waxed, but it was still a used pickup.

A technician emerged from the round hatch and Wendell said, "Okay, it's all yours."

Baedecker followed Tucker in, wondering as he did so what had become of Gunter Wendt. The old-hand Mercury and Gemini crews had held Wendt, the first white-room "pad führer," in such esteem that they had coerced North American Rockwell into hiring him away from McDonnell when the Apollo program came in.

"Watch your head, Dick," said Tucker.

They crossed the middeck and climbed to the forward seats on the flight deck. To someone trained in Apollo, the shuttle interior seemed huge. There were two additional couches set behind the pilot's and copilot's seats, and a ladder had led to a single seat on the lower deck.

"Who gets the lonesome spot down there?" asked Baedecker.

"That's Holmquist and he's sick about it," said Tucker as he slid into the horizontal command pilot's couch. "He's done everything but bribe one of the other two for a window seat."

Baedecker edged carefully into the right seat. In his center seat in the Apollo Command Module, clumsiness would just have gotten him stuck. A slip now would drop him five or six feet to the windows and instrument bay below him at the rear of the flight deck. He pulled the shoulder harnesses on out of habit, secured the lap belt, but ignored the wide crotch strap.

Several trouble lights hung from hooks, throwing a bright light on the instruments and shadows into the corners. Tucker clicked one of these lamps off and activated several cockpit switches, bathing them both in a red-and-green glow. A cathode ray display directly in front of Baedecker lit up and began running through a litany of meaningless data. The quickly changing lines of data reminded Baedecker of the PanAm passenger shuttle with its flashing cockpit graphics in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Dave had insisted they see that movie a dozen times during the winter of 1968. They had been putting in fourteen-hour shifts supporting Apollo 8, and then in the evenings they would drive pell-mell across Houston to watch Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, HAL, and the austro-lopithecines perform to the sounds of Bach and Strauss and Ligeti. Dave Muldorff had been quite irritated one night when Baedecker had fallen asleep at the beginning of the fourth reel.

"Like it?" asked Tucker.

Baedecker ran his gaze over the console. He set his hand lightly on the rotational hand controller. "Very elegant," he said and meant it.

Tucker tapped at the computer keys on the low console that separated them. New information filled all three of the cathode displays. "He's right, you know," Tucker said.

"Who's right?"

"Your boy." Tucker ran a hand over his face as if he were very tired. "It is sad."

Baedecker looked at him. Tucker Wilson had flown forty missions over Vietnam and shot down three enemy MiGs in a war almost devoid of aces. Wilson was a career Air Force man, only transferred to duty with NASA.

"I don't mean it's sad that the services are finally flying missions," Tucker said. "Shit, the Russians have had a pure military presence up there in the second Salyut station for . . . what? Ten years at least. But it's still sad what's happening here."

"How so?"

"It's just different, Dick," said Tucker. "Back when you were flying and I was on backup, things were simpler. We knew where we were going."

"To the moon," said Baedecker.

"Yeah. Maybe the race wasn't all that friendly, but somehow it was more . . . shit, I don't know . . . more pure. Now even the size of the damn bay doors back there was dictated by the DoD."

"You're just carrying an intelligence-gathering satellite back there," said Baedecker. "Not a bomb." He remembered his father standing on a darkened dock in Arkansas thirty-one years earlier, searching the skies for Sputnik and saying, "If they can send up something that size, they can put up a bigger one with bombs aboard, can't they?"

"No, it's not a bomb," agreed Tucker, "and now that Reagan is history, chances are we won't be spending the next twenty years ferrying up SDI parts either."

Baedecker nodded and glanced toward the windows, hoping to catch a glimpse of the stars, but the special glass was shielded for the launch. "You didn't think it would work?" he asked,

referring to the Strategic Defense Initiative—what the press still called, with some derision, Star Wars.

"No, I think it would," said Tucker. "But even if the country could afford it—which we can't—a lot of us feel it's too risky. I know that if the Russians started orbiting X-ray lasers and a bunch of other hardware that our technology couldn't match in twenty years . . . or defend against . . . most of the brass I know would be calling for a preemptive attack on whatever they put up."

"F-16-launched antisatellite stuff?" asked Baedecker.

"Yeah," said Tucker. "But say we didn't get everything. Or they replaced it faster than we could shoot it down. What would you advise the president to do, Dick?"

Baedecker glanced at his friend. He knew that Tucker was a personal friend of the man who had just won the election to replace Ronald Reagan. "Threaten surgical strikes of their launch sites," said Baedecker. The entire shuttle stack seemed to sway slightly in the evening breeze, making Baedecker feel a hint of nausea.

"Threaten?" said Tucker with a grim smile.

Baedecker, knowing from his childhood in Chicago as well as from his years in the Marines just how useless threats can be, said, "All right, launch surgical strikes against Baikonur and their other launch facilities."

"Yeah," said Tucker and there was a long silence broken only by the creaks and groans of the 150-foot external tank lashed to the orbiter's belly. Tucker flicked off the cathode displays. "I love the Cape, Dick," he said softly. "I don't want it blown to shit in a game of tit for tat."

In the sudden darkness, Baedecker breathed in the smell of ozone, lubricant, and plastic polymers; the cockpit smell that had replaced ozone, leather, and sweat. "Well," he said, "the arms deals the last couple of years are a beginning. The satellite you're carrying back there will allow a degree of verification that would've been impossible even ten years ago. And killing ICBMs with good treaties—before the weapons are built—seems more efficient than putting a trillion dollars worth of X-ray lasers in space and hoping for the best."

Tucker laid his hands on the console as if he were sensing with his palms the data and energy that lay dormant there. "You know," he said, "I think the president-elect missed a bet during the campaign."

"How so?"

"He should've made a deal with the American people and the Soviets," said Tucker. "For every ten dollars and ten rubles saved by negotiating away missiles or cutting back SDI, the Russians and us should put ten rubles or ten bucks toward joint space projects. We'd be talking tens of billions of dollars, Dick."

"Mars?" said Baedecker. When he and Tucker had been training for Apollo, Vice President Agnew had announced that NASA's goal was to land men on Mars by the 1990s. Nixon had not been interested, NASA soon came down from its drunken euphoria, and the dream had receded to the point of invisibility.

"Eventually," said Tucker, "but first get the space station going and then put a permanent base on the moon."

Baedecker was amazed to find that his breathing seemed to catch at the thought of men returning to the moon in his lifetime. Men and women, he amended silently. Aloud, he said, "And you'd be willing to share it with the Russians?"

Tucker snorted. "As long as we don't have to sleep with the bastards," he said. "Or fly in their ships. Remember Apollo-Soyuz?"

Baedecker remembered. He and Dave had been part of the first team to sightsee the Soviet space program prior to the Apollo-Soyuz mission. He still remembered Dave's subtle commentary on the flight back. "State of the art. Jesus, Richard, they call this state of the art! To think we've spent all that energy scaring ourselves and Congress into believing all that stuff about the Soviet space juggernaut, the supertechnologies they're always on the verge of building, and then what do we see? Exposed rivets, electronic packages the size of my grandmother's old Philco radio, and a spacecraft that couldn't perform a docking maneuver if it had a hard-on."

Their written report had been a bit less pointed, but during the Apollo-Soyuz mission the American spacecraft had done all of the chasing and docking and—contrary to original plans—the crews had not switched ships for the landing.

"I don't want to fly in their tubs," repeated Tucker, "but if cooperating with them would get NASA back in the space-exploring business, I could put up with the smell." He unstrapped himself and began climbing down, taking care to use the proper handholds.

"A camel pissing out, eh?" said Baedecker, following carefully.

"What's that?" said Tucker as he crouched in front of the low, round hatch.

"Old Arab proverb," said Baedecker. "It's better to have the camel inside your tent pissing out than outside pissing in."