Voyage (66 page)

JK started talking about the oxygen tank, and batches of contaminated nitrogen tet, and all the rest of it; but Jack just glared at him.

So JK broke off, and then he started trying to take command. ‘Have you called a hospital? What about a stomach pump?’ It was typical JK. Arrive too late, then order everyone else around.

‘She doesn’t need a pump,’ Jack snapped back at him. ‘But she’s going to sleep for a hell of a long time. She should be asleep now. And then I want her to go into hospital, for observation.’ He nodded at the bedside table. ‘I’ve left a number there.’

JK, looking restless and bewildered, sat on the bed. Then he took Jennine’s hand and began to rub, as Jack had been doing, along the length of her forearm. His hands were warm, but they were trembling, and his touch was uncertain, wavering between too hard and too soft. She managed to smile at him, and he seemed to get a little confidence, and the strokes evened out.

‘This is a hell of a thing,’ he said, his voice thin. ‘A hell of a thing.’

‘Listen to me,’ Jack Morgan said. ‘You’ve got to get your head out of your ass, JK. You’ve got to start paying some attention to your family. And yourself, come to that. Or Jennine is going to walk out on you, and nobody’s going to blame her. In fact, I’ll be here to drive her away.

‘I’ll come back in a couple of hours. You take care, Jennine.’ And he went to get his coat, and she heard the door bang behind him.

JK looked devastated. He really hadn’t seen this coming, she realized.

‘So,’ he said stiffly. ‘I guess it was a cry for help, huh.’

Oh, JK
. Pop psychology slogans. She closed her eyes and thought of the face in the mirror, the steady stream of pills passing her lips.
Have I really become such a cliche?

JK sat silently for a while, rubbing her arm. And then he began jabbering about the tank failure, ‘It was amazing,’ he said. ‘The tanks only blew when they were filled with nitrogen tet. So we knew there had to be some kind of chemical thing going on. But the tanks would only blow here, at Newport. We ran identical tests over at the manufacturers’, in Indianapolis, and zippo.

‘So we started doing a trace on the nitrogen tet. It comes from a big refinery run by the Air Force. And guess what we found? The stuff we had at Newport was from a later batch than the stuff at Indianapolis. Our stuff was purer. The Indianapolis batch had impurities, a tiny amount of water in it. So we set up another lab test back at Newport. And we found that when the nitrogen tet is
too
pure – better than ninety-nine per cent – it becomes corrosive! It attacks titanium! But add a dash of water, like in the Indianapolis batch, and the problem goes away. Anyhow, to hell with it. I think we’re going to switch to oxygen-methane for our propellant. The performance is okay, and it’s non-toxic, and we can store it easily for months in space, even if it isn’t hypergolic …’

Jennine lay there listening to this, with her arm in JK’s hands. He was full of his story by now, with the technological sleuthing and all the rest of it, and she could feel his hand jerk around, animated by the story-telling, quite oblivious of her flesh lying passively inside his.

She thought of the immense project, the pieces of the Mars ship flowing into the Newport assembly bays from every state in the Union: fuel and oxygen tanks from Buffalo and Boulder, instruments from Newark and Cedar Rapids, valves from San Fernando, electronics from Kalamazoo and Lima. And probably every one of those pieces left an invisible trail behind it, of drunkenness, and heart attacks, and smashed-up marriages.

She thought, oddly, that JK really ought to understand what had happened to her.

It’s destructive testing, JK. That’s all. Destructive testing
.

‘You’re not going to let me fly.’

Joe Muldoon sat back in his office chair, which creaked under his weight. There was an empty Dr Pepper can on his desk, out of place among the executive stationery and leather blotters; he grabbed the can now and crushed it with a quick movement. ‘It isn’t like that, Natalie. I told you; I wanted to explain all this to you in person, myself, rather than let you hear it another way …’

‘I appreciate that. But you’re not going to let me fly.’

‘You’re not going to be the only disappointed dude in JSC. Look, I told you: because we lost that damn Saturn VB, and because we’ve
had our budget pared even more – goddamn it, Natalie, the whole country’s been in recession for a year; that’s hardly my fault – because of all that we’re having to compress the schedule. And we’ve still got a deadline to meet, an appointment with Mars. The crew of the first E-class mission will now fly a mission we’re calling D-prime, which will combine the objectives of the old D and E classes. And –’

‘So the D mission, my space soak mission, is gone. Joe, I know as much about Mars as anyone in the Astronaut Office. And you’re not going to let me fly.’

Muldoon made a visible effort to control himself. ‘Natalie, you have to believe this. It isn’t personal. Except that I don’t think this is such a loss. It’s precisely
because
you know so much that you’re a lot more use to me here, on the ground, than hanging around in some tin can in LEO watching the paintwork yellow. I need you here, Natalie. To teach us about Mars. To remind us why we’re going there in the first place.’

She thought it over, trying to contain her anger. ‘All right. What choice have I got? But I’m going to continue with my training, and my time in the sims, and I’m going to grab every bit of flight experience I can. And if you’re telling me now you’re going to stop me doing that, I’ll be walking out of that door and I won’t be back. Mars expert or not.’

He held his hands up. ‘Enough! You’ve got yourself a deal, Natalie.’

She narrowed her eyes as a new suspicion entered her head. ‘ERA,’ she said.

He looked baffled. ‘Huh?’

‘The Equal Rights Amendment. It was thrown out in June.’ She felt her anger blossom inside her, an unreasonable rage. ‘The political climate’s changing. Is
that
why you feel able to pick on me now?’

‘Fuck it, Natalie, that’s got nothing to do with it!’ He leaned forward, visibly angry, unhappy. ‘You know, you, and the other women, would get on a lot better around here if you didn’t walk around with such goddamn immense chips on your shoulders.’

She glared at him. Muldoon sat tall in his chair, trim, sharp, irritated, studying her frankly, his blue eyes empty of calculation. He really believed that he was benefiting her with such advice, she saw; he couldn’t see anything wrong with what he’d said.

She didn’t trust herself to speak.

Later, in the dingy apartment she was renting in Timber Cove, she tried to get drunk, and failed.

Her life was going steadily down the toilet. At thirty-four she was getting old as a practicing scientist, and her academic career was probably beyond repair, now; her commitment to the space program – all those hours in sims and survival training – meant the time and energy she’d had to devote to her research just wasn’t enough, and she knew that her papers, briefer and sparser every year, just weren’t enough to enable her to prosper, if she returned to university.

And what had it all been for? She’d just lost her one chance – limited as it was – to get some genuine space experience.

She was further from Mars than ever.

It looked as if she’d blown it, as if she’d made one damn foul-up in her life after another.

Mike Conlig was ancient history. But she was still on her own. Generally that suited her.

But, God, she missed Ben.

The MEM simulator here at Newport was an ungainly assemblage, without much resemblance to the sleek lines of the final spacecraft shape. It looked like a car smash, surrounded by the blocky forms of mainframe computers, all laid out in this corner of the echoing, refurbished manufacturing shop.

Ralph Gershon clambered out of the simulator, pissed as all hell. ‘That fucking thing is a lemon,’ Gershon said. ‘A big fat lemon, JK.’

JK Lee was waiting for him at the hatch, his round face creased with anxiety. ‘Christ. Talk to me, Ralph.’

‘Look,’ Gershon said, ‘the simulator’s supposed to match the real thing – that’s the whole point – it’s no good looking for your left-hand joystick
here
when on the real thing it would be placed over
there
. JK, you got to keep these things up to date with the changes you’re making to the design.’

‘Hell, I know that, Ralph. But what can I do? The MEM design is still so fluid that there are always a couple of hundred changes outstanding, and so the sim never catches up with the real thing …’

‘Oh, it’s worse than that,’ Gershon said. He pulled off his gloves
and jammed them in his helmet. ‘This thing doesn’t even make sense in itself. The changes you
have
made aren’t consistent.’ He looked into Lee’s anguished, stressed-out face; his sympathy for the man struggled with his anger. ‘Look, JK, I’m going to raise Cain about this. That’s my job, damn it. It’s impossible to gain genuine experience with such a flawed sim – in fact, in my view the simulator itself is a severe danger to the overall progress of the project.’

Lee led him away from the sim and lit up a cigarette. ‘Oh, Christ, tell me about it. Change is my bugbear, Ralph. Change is killing me.’ He painted a picture of a whole industry ploughing its way toward Mars, a vast national network of craftsmanship and expertise slowly coming to focus on a single problem, and all of it flowing through this one site. ‘We’re working in places no one has touched before,’ Lee said. ‘It’s not surprising nothing is right first time. So we get a
thousand
change requests a week, from all across the country. And every time we change something, every piece that component touches has to be modified as well. And I’ll tell you who are the worst offenders.’ He eyed Gershon. ‘Your good buddies in the Astronaut Office.’

Gershon laughed. He wasn’t surprised to hear it.

The astronauts still exerted a lot of power, official and unofficial. It was their asses on the line, after all. Lee was trying to get them all to submit to his change request process, just like everybody else, to keep everything orderly. But he was also aware of the need to keep this key group sweet. So he’d set up a private lounge for the astronauts, just down from his office, with a shower and a couple of fold-out beds, a place where they could sack out and hide from the press. And he’d take them home with him and have Jennine throw swank dinner parties for them, and make a hell of a fuss of them, and laud them to the skies. And the astronauts would come away thinking JK Lee was the greatest thing to have happened to the space program since the invention of Velcro.

At least, Gershon reflected, until he bounced their next request for a change.

Now Lee spotted something else, in another part of the shop floor. He stalked over to an operator of a six-ton turret lathe, who was shaving thin slices off an intricate aluminum sculpture. The thing looked beautiful, like a work of art; Gershon, who was supposed to be an expert on MEM systems, couldn’t place it or identify its function. Lee picked up the engineering drawing the guy was working from. Then he called Gershon over; Lee was agitated,
and the operator avoided Gershon’s eyes, obviously embarrassed. Gershon felt sorry for him.

‘Look at this,’ Lee said, waving the drawing in front of Gershon.

‘What about it?’

‘We’ve got a policy that any drawing with more than a dozen changes has to be redrawn. This one must have over a hundred, for Christ’s sake. And that’s not the worst of it.’ He picked up the component the operator had been modifying. ‘This fucking thing is obsolete! I know it is! Even before it’s been manufactured!’ He threw the thing to the floor, where it landed with a clatter.

The operator, baffled, wiped his hands on a rag and looked around for his supervisor.

Lee stalked away, a tight little knot of tension; Gershon walked with him, his flight helmet under his arm.

Lee looked quite gaunt, his skin stretched tight as if by wires under the flesh, and his posture was stooped over. Lee was a man just eaten up by nervous energy and adrenaline.

Gershon had come to spend a lot of time here at Newport as the MEM had moved through its development. He’d served as a guinea pig for the life sciences boys, and he’d crawled in and out of hatches and down ladders to sand-pits stained red like Mars dust.

He’d spent hours in plywood-and-paint mockups of the spacecraft interior, trying to imagine that this was
real,
that he was all but alone on the far side of the Solar System, trying to bring a spacecraft down to Mars. Just like Pete Conrad.

He wanted nobody to know the MEM better than he did. Right now, he was achieving his goal.

He’d become aware that the whole place, the whole of Columbia Aviation, was kind of high-octane, driven forward by the relentless, destructive energy of JK Lee. And under the high pressure, and the enormous complexity of the project, the place always seemed on the point of being overwhelmed.

But Gershon still believed, as he had at the time of the RFP, that the Columbia vision of the MEM – inspired and led by JK Lee – was the best shot they had of building something that might actually work, sufficiently well to fly people down to Mars in a few years from now.

Gershon had been tough on Columbia himself. But basically he wanted the project to succeed. He wanted to fly to Mars, damn it, not hang JK Lee’s scalp on his wall.

But, even as he framed that thought, he tripped over a wire, stretched across the floor. And when he looked down he saw more
wires and loose components and discarded equipment: bits of spacecraft, scattered over the floor like detritus, washed up by the overwhelming tide of specification changes.

Gershon, flight helmet under his arm, walked around the training vehicle. Natalie York walked with him, her hair lifted by the breeze, her sunglasses hiding her eyes.