Voyage (27 page)

Then she figured that all the other candidates would have worked this out as well and would similarly be doctoring their answers.

She went through a third time, trying to take that into account …

An earnest young man took her through a scatter chart rendered by a computer. He sounded puzzled by the results:
here
she showed herself to be dedicated to a single goal,
there
flexible and capable of balancing multiple objectives; over
here
the results said she was strongly self-motivated, but
there
she was coming up as happiest working with a team … and so forth. It was a complex, meaningless dance.

She gritted her teeth and tried not to say anything to make it worse. She wondered how much all this was costing.

One morning she was given barium sulphate for breakfast, to provide contrast in x-rays of her gall bladder. Another time she was provided with a tritium solution, so her percentage of body fat could be measured. She took pills which gave her diarrhoea, and which caused her piss to come out green. In the EEG test, eleven needles were poked half an inch into her scalp.

Even her teeth were checked over. A cheerful, inane dentist tutted over her mouth’s state of disrepair, and he seemed to take a lot of comfort in telling her in great detail how much preventative dental work she’d have to endure.
You don’t want toothache or an abscess half way across the Solar System, ho ho!

York had had hardly any experience of hospital, in the course of a healthy life. The doctors here were Air Force, specialists in aerospace medicine. In her ignorance, she had expected the tests to be tough. In fact what they hit her with here was so far beyond her experience that it scared the hell out of her. The tests struck her as ordeals: barbaric, brutal, often ridiculous, barely scientific.

The final test, on the Friday, was a sigmoidoscopy. She had to give herself an enema. Then she lay on a bench while a woman doctor shoved a rod up her rear, straightening out the intestines, probing further and further.

York, by now, was exhausted, angry, humiliated, frightened. It took a powerful effort of will to submit herself to this last invasion.

Before San Antonio, she’d treated the whole thing casually. An indulgence for Ben, maybe. An adventure. An amusing battle of wits between herself and NASA, in which she would see how far she could get before they found her out.

Now, all that had changed. She didn’t want this investment in pain and humiliation to be wasted.

Withdrawing her application became unthinkable.

Her test results, when they came, showed her medical history to be ‘unremarkable.’ She was ‘in no apparent medical or psychological distress.’

Comforting, she thought. Well worth a week in medical hell.

Then she was called for interview to Houston itself.

The plane landed at Houston Intercontinental. York made her way into the terminal, and as she’d been instructed found the Continental Airline Presidents’ Club. She faced a plain glass door with a
one-way mirror. When she knocked, the door was opened by a NASA protocol officer, a short, dapper man in a blazer. She identified herself, and he hurried her inside –
out of sight of the press?
– and offered her a diet soda.

When all the candidates had arrived – it was the San Antonio group – they were to be taken in a limousine to the Nassau Bay Hilton.

When she stepped out of the air-conditioned airport building the August heat hit her in the face, moist and enclosing, as if the ground was steaming. Although the afternoon was well advanced, the sun seemed to be directly overhead.

The limousine worked its way south, toward downtown, on the I-59, and then east and south around the 610, the Loop. The Nassau Bay Hilton was close to JSC, more than twenty miles from the city center, out on the 1–45.

Houston was hot and flat, sprawling, evidently very new. The roads were well-maintained and modern. Huge, colorful billboards battered at her eyes, lining the Interstate. Many of the signs and ads were in Spanish; after all, Texas had nearly been part of Mexico.

There were few signals of the presence of the space program here: inflatable rockets in the used car lots, a ‘Tranquillity Plaza’ shopping mall, the basketball team called the Rockets.

Beyond the heat haze of the freeway, the downtown skyscrapers thrust out of the plain like a collection of launch gantries, isolated, crowded. There were water towers, big oval tanks, like the Martian fighting machines from
The War of the Worlds
. They passed roadside neon thermometers, which read high nineties or low hundreds, even this late in the day.

Houston was going to be very different from the older cities she’d grown used to.
Do I really want to live here?

All the other candidates were talking about the death of Elvis, a few days earlier. She had nothing to say on that – in fact the endless, obsessive coverage bored her – and she was glad when they got to the hotel.

The Nassau Bay Hilton was a tower block by the shore of Clear Lake, a few minutes from JSC. The receptionist’s voice contained a strong Texan twang, and there was a gift store in the lobby, with ten-gallon hats and cowboy boots. Her room, a single, was plush. It had a view of a marina, and a bright blue swimming pool, which she wouldn’t have time to use.

In the morning she was up at five thirty.
Three thirty, Berkeley time
. The sun was already high.

Her interview was directly after breakfast. And so there she was, with the time not yet seven thirty, being driven in a limousine west along NASA Road One.

The cow pasture to her right, along the north side of the Interstate, had been fenced off. Blocky black and white buildings were scattered across the plain, each numbered with big black round figures, like toys from some giant nursery.

The driver – a beefy, sweating man called Dave – took a right into a broad entrance. On the right was a granite sign saying ‘Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center.’ And on the left a Saturn V lay on its side, its stages separated and mounted on wheeled trailers.

Dave grinned when he caught her gawping at the Saturn. ‘That’s just a test article,’ he said. ‘The first one built. The story is that when it looked as if we might be canning Apollo altogether, there was talk of taking one of the flight articles and putting it on display here, or maybe at the Cape. A man-rated moon rocket as a lawn ornament.’ He chuckled and shook his head. ‘Can you believe it?’

It seemed to take forever for the limousine to drive past the grounded Saturn. The booster was aging. York could see corrosion around its big rivets, cobwebs on the big A-frames which supported it, and some of the fabric parts around the engine bells were stained with lichen. The Stars and Stripes painted on the flank of the fat second stage was washed out, the red of the stripes running down toward the ground.

Beyond the Saturn there was a small rocket garden. York recognized a Redstone, the slim black and white pencil which had thrown the first Mercury capsules on their sub-orbital hops. The Redstone was upright, but held to the ground by wires, like Gulliver. And she saw a Space Shuttle, a wind-tunnel test article, a scale model of a ship which had never been built; it was an airplane shape, upright against the gleaming white of a big external fuel tank.

The Shuttle’s body looked chunky, clumsy. But York was entranced by the curve of the wings, set against the crude cylinders of the throwaway rockets around it; the spaceplane looked elegant, a stranded relic of a lost future.

She was checked into security, in Building 110, and given a photocopied map and directed toward Building 4. She set off on foot.

The buildings were black and white blocks. Many of them were clustered around a kind of courtyard, where thick-bladed grass shone in the sunlight, bright green. There were cherry trees, and a
duck pond with an attractive stone margin. But no ducks: Ben Priest had told her how they left too much mess, and had been chased away.
We’re not here for ducks
. There was a flat tropical heat, the air still, suffused by the chirp of crickets. It was hard to move around; she could feel the heat drain energy out of her.

She tried to imagine working here.

Bicycles leaned up against every building, and there were big sand-filled ashtrays by the doorways, with stubs sticking out of them.

There was an air of calm here. The blocky buildings didn’t have the feel of most Government establishments. It was more like a university, she thought. In fact, Dave, her driver, had called this the ‘campus.’

JSC had its own Martian water towers. There was an ‘antenna farm,’ a fenced-off field of big white dishes, turned up like flowers. And, here and there, huge tanks of liquid nitrogen gleamed.

Inside Building 4, the air-conditioning was ferocious; it must have been thirty degrees cooler than outside. The building was actually quite gloomy, even cramped; it had small ceiling and floor tiles, and the walls were painted a 1960s corporate yellow-brown. She felt her spirits dip a little. It was like an aging welfare office.

She took the elevator. The interview was in the ‘astronaut library.’

When she knocked, the door opened, and a man greeted her: tall, wire-slim, with gray-blond hair and blue eyes, he wore jeans and a Ban-Lon shirt. He smiled at her, easily, and shook her hand.

She recognized him. He was Joe Muldoon. A moonwalker was shaking her hand.

It hit her suddenly, a change of perspective, in a surge. This really was the Space Center. There were
astronauts
here, for Christ’s sake.
Veterans
.

She tried to look at Muldoon, but found it impossible to face him directly; her vision seemed to moisten up, and it was as if he was glistening, shining.

But now I’m applying to become one of these people. My God. Will people look at me the same way? How the hell will I cope with that?

Joe Muldoon guided her to her seat, a chair stuck in the middle of the room.

There were hardly any books here, in this ‘library.’ On the wall behind her chair was a row of photographs: portraits of dead
astronauts, Russian and American.
Jesus. Put me at my ease, why don’t you
. There was a big TV running in the corner, the sound turned down low. It ran a continuous feed from the crew up in orbit in Skylab A, right now; the split screen showed a shot of the Earth, taken from Skylab, and Mission Control ground track displays. Occasionally she heard the controlled murmur of the air-to-ground loop.

The panel was seven people: seven white males, behind a long oaken desk. Many of the faces were familiar to her, from TV and newspaper coverage of the space program: astronauts, senior NASA science managers, administrators.

And there at the center of the table – she recognized with a sinking heart – was Chuck Jones. He nodded at her, dark and squat, his graying black hair a fine bristle.

Christ. Chuck Jones
. She hadn’t seen him since Jorge Romero’s ghastly field trip in the San Gabriel Mountains, all those years ago. She wondered if Jones remembered her.

Jones rapped on the table and called the group to order. ‘Thanks for coming in, Natalie. We’ve all seen your application and it’s very impressive.’

‘Thank you.’

‘So we can skip all of the stuff you’ve covered before. Now we want you to tell us about your scientific studies, and how they are going to help us get to Mars. In your own time.’

Suddenly, her mouth was dry as the sands of Jackass Flats.
What a question
. It was so loaded.

Slowly, she began her answer.

She summarized the main thrust of her work, the geological surveys based on Mariner data, and how she’d helped formulate a hypothesis that maybe Mars had once had surface water, in liquid form, and maybe that water was still there, under the oxidized soil. And how, if the first crew could find incontrovertible evidence of that water, it would all but assure the continuation of the exploration of Mars.
Find water, and there will be lots more flights, guys. Seats for you all. But you need me to find the water
.

Chuck Jones was staring at her. She was sure he remembered her from that field trip.

She tried to seem relaxed, to smile, to meet their eyes. All she got back was cold stares. But as she spoke about her work, she grew in confidence; some of her awe rubbed away. These men were just that: men. Even Joe Muldoon. And, now she looked at them that way, she became aware that three of them, at least, were
discreetly checking her out, glancing at her chest, and following the line of her legs.

She was asked follow-up questions. Then Jones asked what criteria she would use to select a Mars landing site. Another loaded question, but she was getting more confident now. She smiled at the panel, from one end of the long table to the other.

‘My goal, obviously, will be a successful science program on the first mission,’ she said. ‘And the scientific worth of a site will be a key criterion. But it’s also obvious that the first landing is going to be extremely difficult. So we must primarily choose a site which will enable the crew to land in safety.’ She rattled through a brief checklist: the site ought to be on a smooth, unbroken plain, with no highlands nearby to interfere with the final landing approach, and the winds should be low, and the season should be chosen to minimize the prospect of dust storms, and so forth.

‘We need to get a scientist on Mars. But a dead scientist on Mars wouldn’t do anybody any good.’

That actually got a smile. As well it might; it was a deliberate echo of Deke Slayton’s famous justification of his policy of keeping scientists off the early Apollo missions. It was all part of the message she was accumulating for them, in word, gesture and subtext.
I’m a scientist, and a good one, with very relevant experience. But I’m prepared to help you guys achieve your own dreams. More than that – you need me, in order to achieve those dreams
.

Now, tougher questions started to hit her.

‘Doctor York, would you submit to a two-year journey to Mars?’

‘I … Sure. I’d want a reasonable chance of success. But I would love to go, for scientific reasons. And I feel I could maybe articulate the experience better than –’