Voyage (76 page)

It was probably going to last forever. And she found she hated it.

She envied Phil Stone, with his neat, crew-cut good looks and his hint of a Midwest twang – the stereotypical astronaut hero – for the grace with which he fielded the dumbest, most repetitive questions. And the press had already taken Ralph Gershon to their hearts for his infectious grins –
the glamorous, hellraising bachelor spaceman
– and for his wisecracking, and the hint of danger, of ambiguity about him. Even if he did make Rick Llewellyn visibly nervous every time he opened his mouth. And even if there was, as far as York was concerned, an undertow of racism about the patronizing affection with which Gershon was treated.

And that left York: in her own view, the least equipped to handle the media pressure, but the one in whom most interest was placed. And all for the wrong reasons.

It started the day after her place in the crew was announced. All the outlets used the same ancient stock NASA photo of her, holding up an outdated biconic MEM model. ‘This quiet, intent and dedicated scientist …’ ‘Redhead Natalie York is, at 37, unmarried and without children …’ ‘We asked beautician Marcia Forbes what advice she would give America’s premier space woman.
Well, to begin, with those eyebrows, you know … ‘
‘This mop-haired 35-year-old native of LA …’ ‘… A crop-haired brunette of medium height, Natalie York is said to be disconcerted by the prospect of publicity …’ ‘Her dark, close-cropped hair and her Latin good looks make Natalie a woman of glamor and mystery, but a natural for the role of America’s first woman on Mars …’

Hair, eyebrows and teeth. It drove her crazy.

Already they’d tracked down her mother, who was loving the attention, and Mike Conlig and his new family, who weren’t.

It would help if NASA had given her any preparation for handling
this. Even basic communications training. Instead, the only guideline was:
Don’t embarrass the Agency
.

Some of the questions were tougher, more pointed, than others.

‘Doesn’t the case of Adam Bleeker indicate that we’re not yet ready to send humans on these immense long-duration missions? That we don’t yet know enough about the effects of microgravity on the body? That, in fact, the Ares mission is an irresponsible jaunt?’

‘You’re surely right we don’t know enough,’ Muldoon said smoothly. ‘But the only way we’re going to find out is by getting out there and working in microgravity and studying the effects. Sure there are dangers, but we accept them as part of the job. It’s a price of being first. You ought to know that Adam was broken up to be taken off the flight, medical risks or not; and I know everyone in the Astronaut Office would volunteer to take his place …’

‘Ralph, you want to talk about your Cambodia runs?’

‘Ah, that’s all in the public record now, and I got nothing more to add. It’s all a long time ago.’

‘But how do you feel about having to distort records and maintain a cover-up that lasted for years before –’

‘You can read about it in my memoirs, Will.’

Laughter
.

‘What about Apollo-N?’

Muldoon leaned into his microphone. ‘Ah, what about it, sir?’

‘I took the JSC visitors’ tour earlier on. Big heroic machines. Lots of plaques about Apollo 11. Mission Control as a national monument, sure. But Apollo-N might never have happened, still less the Apollo 1 fire, for all the evidence I saw at JSC. What is it with you people? How can you pretend that everything’s upbeat, that nothing bad ever happens?’

‘We don’t pretend that at all,’ Muldoon said. ‘I think the crash is uppermost in our minds, every day.’

‘That’s what you call it?
The crash
? The damn thing didn’t crash, it exploded in orbit.’

‘We have to learn from what went wrong, move forward, make sure that the losses we suffered aren’t wasted. We can’t afford to brood, or be deterred from our intentions.’

‘Look, I’m from out of town. All around JSC I saw Apollo-N car lots and shopping plazas. There’s even an Apollo-N memorial
park, for God’s sake. Don’t you think a public reaction like that, spontaneous and visible, deserves something more from you people than “learning from what went wrong?” …’

Hell, yes,
York thought. Some around JSC thought the malls and so forth were tacky, somehow undignified. York didn’t; as the reporter was implying, such things were symbols erected by the people out there as they responded to the human tragedy. Sure, it was car lots and malls: what the hell else were they supposed to do?

But she’d also got to know the pilots’ viewpoint well enough to understand it. They’d accepted the deaths, put Apollo-N behind them and moved on. Ben would have done just the same. It was difficult for an outsider to accept, but that was the culture.

York wasn’t a pilot, though. She’d spent long enough agonizing over her own role here, in the wake of Ben’s death. As if there wasn’t already enough doubt, enough ambiguity in her mind.

She’d resolved it by determining, in the privacy of her own mind, that everything she did from this point in was for Ben. It was as simple as that.

A strident woman stood up. ‘Natalie, as a scientist, how do you respond to those people who claim that the whole of the Mars expedition is a stunt, a fake? – that instead of traveling to Mars you’ll just be closeted away in some studio in Nevada for a year, bounding around a mockup of the MEM?’

That did it. York was incensed. She leaned forward so her voice boomed from the speakers. ‘Look, I’ve really no time for crap like this. We’re training for a deep space mission, for Christ’s sake. Why should we give up our time, put more pressure on ourselves, just to respond to dumb-ass remarks like –’

Phil Stone put his hand over her microphone.

‘I understand how Natalie feels,’ he said smoothly. ‘Believe me. The suggestion’s just implausible. I think the best proof I can offer you that our mission is genuine is this: it’s probably easier to fly to Mars for real than to fake it up.’

That got a laugh, and the moment passed.

York tried to steady her breathing. She knew she was in for a lecture from Rick Llewellyn later.

‘What about sex?’

Stone asked, ‘What do you mean?’

A male reporter got up now, in a seedy Lieutenant Columbo raincoat, a grin on his face. ‘What about sex? You’re all normal, healthy adults – America’s first mixed space crew – and you’ll be
cooped up in that dinky Mission Module for eighteen months. And Ralph and Natalie aren’t married … Come on. Two guys and one gal? What a situation.’

York felt her cheeks burn.
I could just walk out of this
. Yeah. And out of the mission.

Gershon was grinning, enjoying it all hugely.

Stone pursed his lips. ‘I take it you know the official NASA line. It’s in our induction handbooks.
Close coupling of crew members is to be avoided.’
He smiled, self-deprecating, completely in control. ‘Some help.’ Another laugh. ‘But I’d say that advice is basically right. Hell, we’re all adults. But a sexual relationship between crew members – or, more importantly, a special emotional relationship – would be harmful to the stability of the crew as a whole, and might compromise our ability to support the whole crew through the entire duration of the mission. And if you fully understand the potential for negative impact – you’ve got jealousy, special treatment, circumvention of the chain of command, recrimination and regret when you fall out, and so on – I bet this avoidance will be adopted as a group norm on future mixed flights.’

Gershon cocked his head. ‘Adopted as a what?’

‘Pay more attention to your psych training, Gershon.’

Another laugh. Another defused moment.

York hoped the color was fading from her cheeks. It was remarkable the way Stone could turn out the party line, though. The same bland crap, the half-lie which NASA had fed to the world since the days of Mercury.

And I’m just part of the machine now, she thought. An accomplice in the traditional lie. I’m an astronaut, now; my human needs don’t exist any more, officially
.

The reporter’s question, if facetious, was actually perceptive. NASA was terrific at the technology, she thought, but stunningly bad at dealing with the needs of the soft, pink bodies they loaded inside their gleaming von Braun dream machines – unable even to recognize that those needs existed.

The questions continued to come, sliding from topic to topic. And all of them, York thought, looking for ways into the central, banal question everyone wanted to ask of an astronaut:

What does it feel like, in space? On the Moon? On Mars?

At first it seemed just dumb to her: naive, too open, without a possible answer. And the way it cropped up, in one form or another, at every conference irritated her.

Today, Joe Muldoon tried to answer it.

‘I’m just an ordinary guy. But I guess you could say I’ve done something extraordinary.

‘Let me tell you what it was like. When you look down on the Earth from orbit, you forget about your hassles: the bills you got to pay, the trouble you’re having with your car. Instead, all you think about is the people: the people you know and care about, down there in that blue bowl of air. And you realize, somewhat, how much indeed you do care about them …’

Save for Muldoon’s voice, the room was silent.

She watched the questioners, tough, cynical pressmen all, as they fixed on the face of the astronaut. Even the woman who’d asked about the fake-up was listening, intent, trying to understand.

Muldoon was saying, ‘To see the Earth fall away behind your receding capsule … To stand on the Moon, and see that little world curve away under your feet: to be cognizant that you are one of just two humans on this whole world, and to be able to hold your hand up and cover the Earth …’

Here you had a handful of men who had done something extraordinary: flown beyond the air, even walked on the airless surface of the Moon – unimaginable things, things which nothing in their human evolutionary heritage had prepared them for. And York began to see that something in the press people – masked by all the banter and joshing and bluster – was responding to that. Something primeval.

You’ve been up there. I could never go. Don’t say you’re just an ordinary guy. What is it like? Tell me
.

As the astronauts spoke to the public – even though, for God knew what reason, even a skilled operator like Muldoon always seemed to fall into a stilted jargon littered with ‘somewhat’ and ‘cognizant’ – a very basic and primal communication was struggling to happen, a layer under the spoken. The words of Muldoon and the rest weren’t enough; they could never be. York often had the feeling that people wanted to close in and
touch
the astronauts. As if they were gods. Or as if information, sensations, memories could be transmitted through the skin.

But
she
could not contribute to this. How could she? She’d never flown higher than in a T-38.

She felt like a fake, sitting there bathed in TV lights, alongside a man who had bent down and run his fingers through lunar dirt.

… How frequently we perceive our national debates about the future of SPACE TRAVEL veering between hysterical extremes! And all of it is played out against the background of the most cynically AMORAL times in living memory.

While the ‘yuppies’ parade their Rolex watches and their BMW sports cars, and while our illusory economic ‘upturn’ is fuelled only by the President’s massive rise in MILITARY EXPENDITURE – which is itself inherently inflationary, and to which the Mars mission has become explicitly linked, by NASA’s supporters in politics – all of which is leading to an immense DEFICIT which we will bequeath to our children – the income gap between richest and poorest is at its widest in two decades.

And that very DEFICIT is itself a cynical manipulation of the economy by an Administration which is determined that there shall be no opportunity, because of the DEFICIT burden, for an expansion in welfare spending or other programs in the years beyond President Reagan’s retirement in 1988.

At its grandest, the dehumanizing experience of SPACE can lead us, paradoxically, to a fuller understanding of the HUMANITY the astronauts must cast aside. Indeed it can teach us a truer perspective:

—CONTEMPT for our works

—VALUE of ourselves.

It is a new perspective which can lead us closer to GOD. But all too often the experience of SPACE, certainly as portrayed to the general public by the Government information organizations and public bodies supporting and opposing the space initiative, veers between twin mirror-image idols, both of them false:

—MELLONOLATRY, that is the baseless worship of technology for its own sake

—MISONEISM, an equally baseless fear and hatred of technology.

What better argument for casting aside our rocket vessels now, with their deadly NUCLEAR hearts! …

Excerpt from ‘Mellonolatry and Misoneism: The Twin Idols of Space,’ Rev. B. Seger, Church of St Joseph of Cupertino. All rights reserved
.

Ralph Gershon was standing in the hatchway of the MEM mockup, his face visible behind his clear visor. ‘Okay, Natalie. You want to come in now?’

‘Rog, Ralph.’

York, on the faked-up Martian surface, took a deliberate step toward the MEM.

As she moved, the harness around her chest hauled at her brutally, and she was dragged upwards through a couple of feet. She tripped. The suit, pressurized at three and a half pounds per square inch, was like a balloon around her, and it kept her body stiff, like a mannequin, and she couldn’t save herself.

She toppled like a felled tree.

She fell on her knees, with her gloved hands in the dirt. The soil in front of her face was dried-out Houston gumbo, sprinkled with pink gravel: she was on what the astronauts called, inaccurately, a rock pile, a simulated Martian surface. This surface was more or less flat, because flat areas were where the more conservative mission planners wanted to put the MEM down.