Voyage (21 page)

And, meanwhile, US intelligence had learned that Soviet cosmonauts in Salyuts had overseen military exercises in Eastern Siberia, sending down real-time tactical information to battlefield commanders.

A lot of people thought this militarization of space was a deeply shitty development, a fall away from the dream of Apollo. And Jack Kennedy had attacked it, publicly.

So maybe Seger was right that a morale-raising stunt was a good idea at this point. But it
would
be a stunt.

Stone had a military background himself. But he hadn’t come into the space program to play spies in space, or to fly stunts. For him, this proposal was a sour compromise. Screw the science, for the sake of the politics.
Just like the old days
.

And, to him, it didn’t say a lot for Seger’s sound judgment.

Now Seger cut the discussion short. ‘Chuck, Phil, every so often you’ve got to take a chance like this. To go back to the Moon so soon would be a hell of a thing for us. A hell of a thing. The nation needs a boost right now: why, you’ve got two White House aides testifying in the Senate against the President right this minute. And as for the risks, remember, they flew Apollo 8 to the Moon and back on only the
second
manned Apollo, the
first
manned Saturn V, and the
first
V to fly after the unmanned Apollo 6, which was a shambles …’

Stone understood now. Seger had been reading his history.
This is Bert’s Apollo 8. Back to the Moon! A grandiose stunt: a way to make his mark. And Skylab B is to be sacrificed for it
.

Seger was saying, ‘Just think what a hell of a lift it will give us when you’re successful …’

‘If, Bert,’ Jones said. ‘
If
.’

When he’d thought it over, Stone still wasn’t happy.

But he wanted to fly in space. If he was going to have to swallow this ill-thought-out, gung ho crap to do it, then that was the price he would pay.

And anyhow – Stone reflected, in the midst of the revised, hectic training schedule – he kind of liked the idea of going to the Moon …

The piece was splashed over the front page of yesterday’s
Washington Post
. Ralph Gershon sat in the public library of his home town, reading it over and over.

… American B-52 bombers dropped about 104,000 tons of explosives on Communist sanctuaries in neutralist Cambodia during a series of raids in 1969 and 1970 … The secret bombing was acknowledged by the Pentagon the Monday after a former Air Force major described how he falsified reports on Cambodia air operations and destroyed records on the bombing missions actually flown …

Ralph Gershon felt a deep satisfaction. At last it was coming out.

He was convinced all that covert crap had worked against his career progression in the years since. Maybe it had also killed off the tentative feelers he’d put out about getting into the space program. That and the color of his goddamn skin. Maybe there were people afraid of what he might say, if he got to be a public figure, right? Well, now at last it was all going to be out in the open, and there was nothing anybody could do about it.

He made his decision, sitting there in the musty heat of the library’s reference section, with some old guy opposite him drooling in his sleep. As soon as he got back to his squadron he’d start progressing a new application to NASA.

Before he got up he read some more about how Ehrlichman and Haldeman were going to have to testify in front of the Senate. At last, he thought: at last that asshole Nixon was getting his.

ABSTRACT:

The large Martian channels, especially Kasei, Ares, Tiu, Simud and Mangala Valles, show morphological features strikingly similar to those of ‘Channeled Scabland.’ Features in the overall pattern include the great size, regional anastomosis, and low sinuosity of the channels. Erosional features are streamlined hills, longitudinal grooves, inner channel cataracts, scour upstream of flow obstacles, and perhaps marginal cataracts and butte and basin topography. Depositional features are bar complexes in expanding reaches and perhaps pendant bars and alcove bars
.

Scabland erosion takes place in exceedingly deep, swift floodwater acting on closely jointed bedrock as a hydrodynamic consequence of secondary flow phenomena, including various forms of macro-turbulent vortices and flow separations. If the analogy to the Channeled Scablands is correct, floods involving water discharges of millions of cubic meters per second and peak flow velocities of tens of meters per second, but lasting perhaps no more than a few days, have occurred on Mars …

From
The Bulletin of Geophysical Research,
vol. 23, pp. 27–41 (1974). Copyright 1974 by Academia Press, Inc.; all rights reserved
.

Later, York would pinpoint the divergence in the trajectory of her life to a couple of days in the middle of 1976.

After that point, things just seemed to unravel, for her, as she fell toward a new destiny.

York wished she had something to drink. Even with all the windows open, the sun beating down on the roof made the car as hot as hell. Her sunglasses kept slipping down her nose, and every time she rested her arm on the sill of the window frame she burned her skin.

She rattled her nails on the steering wheel, waiting for Ben Priest.

In the middle of the aimless mess of her life, she seemed to be regressing, to some kind of childhood.

She’d had a huge image of Mars taped to her bedroom wall, a black and white photomosaic compiled from fifteen hundred Mariner 9 photographs, with the scar of Olympus Mons square at the center. At least, she’d had it there until Mike had made her take it down. He said Olympus Mons looked like a huge nipple.

And now here she was hanging around at the gates of JPL – without a security pass – like a goddamn groupie, hoping to get an
early look at the Soviets’ new pictures from the Martian surface.

At last, here came Ben Priest. With his graying crew cut he looked every inch the military man. He was carrying a fat cardboard folder with a blue NASA logo stenciled on the front. He was moving at a half-trot, despite the heat, but he showed no signs of sweat; his crisp short-sleeved shirt glowed white in the brilliant noon light.

This time he hadn’t been able to get her into the lab itself. Nobody was supposed to see the stuff the Soviets were sending back from Mars.

Ben clambered into the car beside her. ‘Got it.’

She reached over. ‘Give.’

‘Hell, no. Is that any way to greet an old friend? Let’s get out of this heat first. Mars can wait a few more minutes.’

She suppressed her eagerness.
Be polite, Natalie
. And, after all, this was Ben. She started the car. ‘Let’s find a bar. Do you know anywhere?’

‘Only the waterholes where the JPL hairies hang out, and I’d rather take a break from them.’

‘I’m staying at the Holiday Inn. It’s only a few minutes from here.’

‘Go for it.’

She pulled out.

‘I was expecting to see Mike too,’ Ben said.

‘Oh, in the end he couldn’t get away. He has his head shoved much too firmly up a NERVA 2 exhaust pipe.’
Or up his own ass, maybe,
she thought sourly.

‘You know the NERVA thing still isn’t going too well. My flight on Apollo-N has been delayed again, and –’

‘Mike doesn’t tell me anything. Half of it’s classified, anyhow.’

‘Well, that’s the word in the Astronaut Office. So how’s life for my favorite girl-geologist?’

She grunted, and pushed her slippery sunglasses back up her nose. ‘Shitty, if you want the truth. My professor at Berkeley – Cattermole – is a jackass.’

Priest laughed out loud. ‘I wish you’d say what you mean.’

‘Cattermole’s smart at departmental infighting, and putting together grant applications. But that’s it. The rest of his head shut down long ago. His projects are lousy, as are his methods. He sees Berkeley’s Space Sciences Lab as just a way to chisel money out of NASA. If I was smart enough to have seen that before I signed up, I wouldn’t have gone within ten miles of the man.’

‘But your contract is only short-term.’

‘Yeah, and then I have to find another.’

‘Which you will. If you want it. You’re a bright girl, Natalie.’

‘Don’t patronize me, asshole.’

He laughed again.

‘Yes, I’ll find another job. Maybe I’ll even get an assistant professorship somewhere. But …’

‘But you don’t think life as a rock hound is going to work out for you.’

‘I don’t know, Ben. Maybe not.’ Not even working on Mars data was satisfying her.

‘So what’s your alternative?’

‘Well, there are plenty of jobs for geologists with the oil companies. Good pay; lots of travel.’

Ben said nothing. When she glanced sideways, he was pulling a face.

She felt infuriated. ‘So what else do I do, smartypants?’

He grinned, and patted the folder on his lap. ‘It’s obvious. Your trouble is, thousands of geologists have been to Alaska before.’

‘So?’

‘So, I know a place where there are no geologists at all. Your problem is you’re working on the wrong planet.’

The bar at the Holiday Inn was pretty full. It was July 5, the day after the Bicentennial. Bunting drooped around the walls, and there was other Bicentennial debris: a couple of newspaper pictures of Operation Sail, the big regatta in New York Harbor, and yellowing, handwritten, out-of-date signs for local pie-eating, baton-twirling and greased-pole-climbing contests.

York found them a table in the corner. When Ben went to get drinks, she grabbed the folder out of his hands and spread the Soviet material over the veneer table top.

The first couple of images were Soviet publicity shots, of a Mars 9 lander mockup on a simulated Martian surface. The craft landed hard, closed up into a ball, and then four petals unfolded to reveal instrumentation and antennae; in place, the lander was a splayed-open sphere, four feet across.

Ben returned with drinks: Buds, in bottles that glistened with dew.

She pushed the publicity shots across the table. ‘Look at these damn things. Red sand, and blue sky.’

He laughed. ‘Well, you can’t blame the Soviets. That’s what we
expected to find down there too. The trouble is, we want Mars to be just like Earth.’ He took one of the pictures. ‘Still, isn’t their Mars lander pretty?’

‘Oh, sure,’ York growled. ‘But Viking would have been a hell of a lot prettier. Viking would have had stereoscopic cameras and a full meteorology station and
four
biology experiments. And Voyager would have had a
surface rover.’
Voyager, a heavy Mars probe to be launched by Saturn V, had been killed by budget cuts in 1967, and the Viking landers in 1972. ‘Think of it. After traveling hundreds of millions of miles, if we want this Soviet probe to see behind some rock twelve feet away, we can’t do it. Pathetic.’

He held his hands up. ‘Don’t ask me to argue. Anyhow, the Soviets haven’t done so badly.’

‘We’d have done better, Ben. You know it.’

All NASA had to show for this Mars opportunity was another Mariner orbiter, taking high-resolution photos of equatorial landing sites, plus one hard-impact probe which had sampled the atmosphere before crashing into the surface. It was just like the lunar program of the 1960s; the unmanned science program had been completely subordinated to the operational needs of the manned mission to come. The new Mariner, laden with imaging equipment, wasn’t a scientific probe but an advance scout for the manned missions.
And we could at least have sent a couple of Vikings
.

Meanwhile the Soviets were sending up their own clumsy probes, evidently intent on genuine science. In fact the Soviets had sent probes to Mars in every launch opportunity since 1960. And of this year’s pair of probes, Mars 8 had failed, but Mars 9 had started transmitting surface images the day before – on America’s Independence Day. Humanity’s first Martian lander had probably provided all the propaganda benefit the Soviets could have wished for.

Priest dug more pictures out of the folder. ‘Here. This is what you want to see …’

She grabbed the photographs and started leafing through them eagerly. The pictures were grainy, and the resolution wasn’t great. But they were in color. Soon the bar table was covered with images of crusty, rust-brown Martian regolith, a rocky horizon, a pink sky.

Ben said, ‘These are strictly for JPL consumption only. The Soviets passed them over because we gave them Mariner images of their landing site, in Hellas. So you’re not seeing them now. Okay?’

‘Sure.’ Her heart pumped harder. ‘Oh, God, Ben, I can’t tell you
how much I appreciate this. It would have taken me months to get my hands on this stuff otherwise.’

He touched her hand, briefly; his palm was cool and dry, the feel of his skin somehow startling. ‘You know, it means a lot to me to see you like this.’

She looked at her hand inside his. She felt confused, conflicting emotions surging. So her dubious relationship with Ben Priest was still dubious.

She pulled back her hand, unwilling to think about this right now. Not when she had
Mars
on the table top.

The Soviet lander was sitting in the middle of a flat, undulating landscape of ochre-colored material, with boulders scattered between small dunes. It was, she thought, like the stony deserts of North Africa, North America or Asia. Some shots showed pieces of the lander itself: an unfolded petal here, resting on the regolith, there a jumble of clunky Soviet equipment on the upper surface, a series of white-painted boxes contrasted with the pink sky. Another photo showed a sampling arm upraised, as if in triumph, over the surface; she could clearly see trenches, scooped out of the sandy regolith by the arm.