Voyage (59 page)

His mind was starting to race.

Three guys instead of four
. If it could be done, he started to figure now, there would be knock-on savings throughout the rest of the program, beyond the MEM definition itself. For example, one quarter less life support would have to be hauled all the way out to Mars and back. And all at no, or minimal, cost to the value of the surface activities.

That’s what he would have to demonstrate, anyhow.

If he could achieve this, he realized with growing excitement, it would be a hell of a strong plank in the bid.

All Lee’s brief feelings of panic were gone now; he felt strong, fit, eager, pumping with adrenaline again. He grabbed Morgan’s arm. ‘So all we have to do is figure out some way of getting three guys to maintain a twenty-four-hour EVA shift pattern. Listen, Jack. This is what I want you to do.’

It was hardly a simulator: just a room within a room, fenced off from one of the Columbia site’s larger lab areas. They fitted it out
with a rudimentary life support system – food and water – but the room was left open to the outside air.

Morgan paid three students, from a paramedic class he taught at Caltech, to come and live in there for a month.

Every day the students went through a mocked-up EVA: they put on dummy spacesuits and backpacks loaded with lead weights, and they moved about simulating Mars surface experiments. And then the students would climb up a little ladder to simulate returning to the MEM, and vacuum each other clean of talcum-powder Mars dust.

The students experimented with work and sleep patterns, trying to find ways to optimize their surface shifts.

The whole set-up was crude, but effective; at the end of the month the students were a little bored, and definitely exhausted; but they were alert, functional, and actually fitter than when they had gone into the mockup. Exhaustion was fine, anyhow; the real crew were going to have the whole return leg of the trip, seven months of it, to sleep it off.

Morgan wrote this up for Lee, and Lee was delighted with the results. Not only was his three-man idea going to hit that Evaluation Board between the eyes, he was going to be able to throw at them detailed proposals about managing the Mars surface time: suggestions for shift rotas, the need to establish work and sleep patterns before arrival at Mars, how to schedule suitable rest periods, and all the rest.

Problems and opportunities
. He had a mood of gathering momentum, of approaching triumph.

As the clock wound down to the deadline day, Lee started sitting in on the rehearsals as each group put together its own piece of the pitch.

He began to figure out how the final thing would come together. There would be him – and Xu, Rowen, Lye, Morgan, and a few others – on a stage in some kind of hotel or convention center, in front of a mass of NASA engineers, and they would have sixty minutes to make their case.

But the more he listened to the draft pieces of the pitch, the more he understood that it wasn’t going to make sense to have five or six or seven presenters in that time. One man was going to have to do the whole show, from beginning to end, on every aspect of the proposal, every damned subsystem, with the others sitting there in support to help field questions.

So after that, he started taking material home – draft scripts, documents, notes – and set himself to memorize every piece of the system he was proposing. He even took the stuff to bed, and sat there propped up against his pillows, with his reading light and his glasses.

Jennine would wake up, and mumble something, and he’d be shocked to find it was four in the morning, or some such godforsaken time. An hour until he had to get out and start all over again.

But he was full of energy. He couldn’t believe it. Day after day. He felt like he could fly.

Eventually he had a cot brought into his office. It seemed to him he saved a lot of time that way.

Lee got a call from Art Cane.

‘I’m getting kind of worried about what you guys are costing me. If we don’t win the bid I’m looking at one hell of a write-off. How’s my two-million budget looking, by the way?’

‘Fine, Art.’

Actually, that was a bare-faced lie. Lee was well aware that he had long since bust out of that two-million limit, and he was headed for three or four times as much.

One of Art’s more endearing characteristics, from Lee’s point of view, was his distrust of computerized accounting systems. He insisted on inspecting the figures every month, analyzed, summarized and interpreted more or less by hand. Just like when he’d started the company.

So Cane was always at least a month behind the action. And by a little manipulation, Lee could juggle his billings and payments to pick up another thirty days. So he had two months’ grace in all.

That was all Lee needed. In two months, the bid would be in. He figured that if he won the bid, nobody would care how much it cost. And if he lost, Art would have his hide anyway. Either way the important thing was to have the resources he needed, at hand, now.

Cane said now, ‘I just got a call from McDonnell Douglas.’

‘Oh, yeah? And?’

‘They want to throw in with us on a joint effort to bid on the MEM. How about that, JK? Now, I want you to think about this

Cane went on about the details.

Lee thought hard.

If you were objective about it, a call like this from McDonnell
was second only in value to a similar call from Rockwell themselves. McDonnell had built Mercury and Gemini, the first two generations of manned American spacecraft, and the third stage of the Saturn V. So they would be good, credible partners. And Lee knew that there were plenty of muttering voices within NASA who had never been happy about Rockwell’s work on Apollo, and had grumbled ever since. That community inside NASA, and Lee was sure there would be some of them on the evaluation board, would welcome a return to the good old days of partnership with McDonnell.

Every which way you looked at this, it made sense.

Lee cut through Cane. ‘Not interested,’ he said.

Art Cane was silent, for a long minute.

‘Now, look here,’ Cane said at last. ‘You know I’m not going to jam this deal down your throat. That’s not my style, JK.’

‘I know that, sir. But this is our bid. Fuck McDonnell. Maybe we’ll hire them as a subcontractor later. Who needs them?’

‘JK –’

‘I need you to back me, Art.’

There was a bass rumble on the phone line. ‘Hell, Lee, you know I’ll do that. Just don’t let me down.’

‘You know I won’t, Art. Now get off the line, I got work to do.’

Natalie York and Ralph Gershon sat side by side in the Mars Excursion Module Biconic Simulator Number Three. York was hot and cramped in her closed pressure suit. Inside, the MEM cabin was realistically mocked up; from the outside, this motion-based simulator was a big, ungainly piece of engineering, with heavy white-painted hydraulics completely enclosing the cabin.

‘Okay, Ralph, we’ll give it to you at OMS burn plus one,’ the SimSup said.

‘Rog,’ Gershon said tersely.

Around York, electroluminescent readouts and gauges and dials came to life, the needles flickering and the CRT tubes blinking awake, to register engine temperature and chamber pressure and fuel and oxidizer levels.

Gershon sat to the left, in the pilot’s seat, and York to the right. The cabin’s windows, at eye level around them, were big and square,
so that it was like sitting in a small, cramped airliner cockpit. The instruments’ soft green glow suffused the cabin; it was, York thought, like being immersed in water.

Now there was a smear of crimson beyond York’s window. She saw a simulated Martian landscape, salmon-pink and softly curving, come rearing up beyond the glass. The landscape was a slice of painted plaster of paris over which, somewhere, a light television camera was panning under computer control. The sky was black, starless, probably just a backdrop. But there were splashes of orange light: representations of the tenuous upper atmosphere of Mars, reflecting the glow of the biconic’s RCS thrusters.

‘Take it that the burn was good,’ the SimSup said now. ‘Your residuals are three-tenths, and your pitch maneuver was successful.’

‘Okay,’ Gershon said.

Gauges flickered and acronyms scrolled across the CRTs before York.

‘We’ve dumped our forward RCS propellants,’ she told Gershon. ‘OMS and RCS post-ignition reconfiguration complete. Auxiliary power unit start. We got two out of three APUs running, and that’s nominal.’

Gershon flicked at a gauge. ‘SimSup, I got a poor correlation with the attitude reading on the inertial ball. I’m going to center the readings manually. You got a problem with that?’

‘No problem, Ralph. We agree with that.’

‘Entry interface,’ York said. ‘We’re in the atmosphere, Ralph. A hundred and fifty-eight thousand feet. Nose up at forty degrees.’

Gershon said, ‘Let’s see what they got to throw at us this time.’

‘You’re getting paranoid, Ralph.’

‘Tell me about it.’

Now the plaster of paris was scrolling past the window more rapidly.

‘Frictional heating,’ York said. She watched sensors telling her how the temperature was climbing over the lower surface of the craft.

The biconic, based on Rockwell’s current draft design, was the most advanced MEM configuration being studied by the various contractors. It would fall into the atmosphere belly-first, and then fly down like an airplane, so the whole of the underside was tiled with heat-resistant panels, forming a heat sink which absorbed the energy of the sparse Martian air molecules.

‘Get ready for your comms blackout,’ the SimSup said dryly. ‘See you on the other side, guys.’

‘I hope so,’ Gershon said.

Beyond York’s window a pinkish plasma glow built up.

Gershon grunted. ‘What a fake.’

‘I kind of like it,’ York murmured.

York and Gershon began to monitor the systems displays before them, checking them against checklist cards taped to the consoles. Now the work of the sim became routine, almost dull …

Except that now, York knew, if this was for real, she would be feeling the first tug of deceleration in earnest, as the craft dug deeper into the Martian atmosphere. She could feel her pulse rising, beating at her throat. This simulation, designed more for engineers than astronauts, was crude: not even motion-based, it was a shadow play, mimicking life. But there was just enough in the sim, inside this static cabin, for it to catch at her imagination, to give her a taste of how it would be, really, to fly down from orbit to the surface of Mars.

She wished – suddenly, childishly – that this was for real. That she could somehow fast-forward through the years of training and uncertainty that lay ahead.

Oh, I want this. So badly
.

Even if I have to get there with Ralph Gershon,
she thought.

‘A hundred and thirty thousand feet. Coming up to aerosurface control initiation.’

‘Yo,’ Gershon said. He began to work his stick and pedals.

The biconic was deep enough into the atmosphere, on this computer-generated dive, for the pressure to have rendered the forward attitude rockets useless. And the atmosphere would be almost thick enough for the biconic’s control surfaces to start biting into the air.

Right now, York realized, the biconic was a peculiar, unprecedented mix of spacecraft and aircraft.

‘Dynamic pressure twenty pounds per square foot,’ York said. ‘One hundred twenty thousand feet.’

‘I got it,’ Gershon said.

Now the last thrusters were switched off. The craft had become a glider, with only its aerodynamic control surfaces to maintain its attitude and trajectory.

The glow outside her window reached its peak now, racking up through pink and yellow and blue-white. Actually the colors changed in visible clunks, as the computer changed over its filters.

Gershon worked at his stick and pedals, the biconic’s oddly
old-fashioned aerodynamic control system. ‘The response seems sluggish to me.’ He pushed the stick forward. ‘I’m trying to descend. The elevons have gone down, the rear has come up. I don’t feel a damn thing. Fucker. There we go. I overshot. Okay, bringing her up. Arresting my sink rate. Back on the stick. Elevons up, lift dumped, back end dropping down. Shit. Where’s the response … Oh. Here it is. I’m wallowing like a hog in mud.’

The biconic would be slow, clumsy, heavy to handle by comparison with most Earth-bound aircraft, York knew. Flying the biconic was more like guiding a boat; you just had to rearrange your control surfaces and wait while the new configuration bit at the stream of thin air, and slowly changed your momentum.

‘One hundred and three thousand feet,’ she called now. ‘Here we go,’ Gershon said. ‘First roll reversal coming up.’

In the electronic imagination of the computer, the biconic banked through eighty degrees to the right. York watched the tilting landscape; the plaster of paris appeared to quiver as some fault in the TV camera’s control mechanism made the tracking shudder.

The biconic was designed to go through a series of S-shaped turns in the upper atmosphere of Mars. The flight path was a question of budgeting: the craft had to shed all of its orbital energy by the time it reached its landing site, but on the other hand, at any point in its trajectory, the craft needed to maintain enough energy to reach that landing point. So the craft had to manage the lift generated by its biconic shape, together with the kinetic energy of its descent, to shed heat and reach its target …

‘Overshot,’ Gershon muttered. ‘Eighty-five degrees. Eighty-six. Banking left to compensate. Come on, SimSup. Is this where you hit us? Banking left. Okay. Here we go. Okay. First roll complete. Here we go. Second roll reversal.’ Gershon’s voice was tense, his movements fast, mechanical.

He takes these games too seriously, York thought
.

At this point the biconic would be traveling at many times the local speed of sound. Still glowing, it would streak across the Martian sky, scrawling a wake of vapor across unmarked skies, shedding great crashing waves of acoustical energy across the dead, empty landscape, a land that had lain undisturbed for half a billion years.