Voyage (77 page)

‘Goddamn this harness.’

‘You tell it, Natalie. You want any help?’

‘No. No, I’ll manage, damn it.’

York was lashed up to a tethered Martian gravity simulator. The harness around her chest was attached by cables to a pole above her; the cables led to pulleys which offset two-thirds of her weight. Just like on Mars. Except on Mars, there wouldn’t be some ludicrous, clumsy rope hauling unpredictably at her back every time she took a step.

To get upright now, for example, she had to push at the ground, and let the harness haul her upright, and scrabble with her ankles at the soil, hoping not to tip over backwards again.

She stood there teetering on her feet, her hands outstretched for balance. Through her helmet she could hear ironic applause from the technicians.

‘Ignore the assholes,’ Gershon advised.

‘Rog.’ She took a breath. ‘Here I come again, Ralph.’

‘Just take it steadily, Natalie. That’s my girl …’

She took a slow and measured step. It was actually a lot easier to take her feet off the surface than to put them back down again.
She seemed to drift in a shallow parabola through the air before each step completed, and she grounded with a crunch in the dried gumbo. It was like swimming through some viscous liquid, all her motions rendered slow, dreamlike, unstable.

At last, though, she seemed to be getting up a little momentum. The mass of her backpack tugged at her, its inertia constantly dragging her off her line; whenever she wanted to change direction she had to think four or five steps ahead.

The MEM drifted before her, remote and all but unattainable, bathed in movie-set floodlights. The mockup’s hatch gaped open, the fluorescent light within revealing the hardwood-and-ply nature of its construction.

Not far from the MEM was a mocked-up Mars Rover, the TV camera mounted on its prow swiveling to stare at her with its dark lens. The camera was live. York, under its gaze, felt like some gorilla loping around its cage.

Ralph, of course, had taken to Mars-walking as if he’d been born to it.

This was actually a simulation of their second walk on Mars, the first time they would get to do any serious work. The first walk would be an hour-long solo by Phil Stone, as commander. The purpose of the first walk – according to the mission plan – was for him to test out the systems of his suit and his general mobility, to check out the status of the MEM after landing, and to resolve any glitches with the comms systems. Stone would do little science, that first time out, except to pick up a small contingency surface sample.

Of course there was a hidden agenda.

The attention of the Earth – and all of NASA’s sponsors in the White House and on the Hill – would be on that first walk, the first small steps by a man on Mars. So all the ceremony – putting up the Stars and Stripes, the footprints-and-flags stuff, the speech by President Reagan (who was, right now, basking in his new landslide win against Teddy Kennedy) – could be got out of the way in that first hour. And on Joe Muldoon’s advice, learning from his Apollo experiences,
everything
in that first walk was being check-listed and timelined, including Reagan’s call.

After that, hopefully, the rest of the program would be free for some serious work.

It made some sense to York. She knew how such things had to be accommodated. But it still seemed odd to her, sometimes, that NASA should be planning the exploration of Mars around TV ratings.

Now she reached the MEM. She skidded a little as she came to a halt, at the foot of the ladder down from the hatch.

The simulation supervisor spoke to her over her headset. ‘Natalie, this time we’d like you to try extracting a SNAP from its cask.’

‘Rog.’ She tried to keep the weary irritation out of her voice. That meant she had to trudge further, across to the plywood Mars Rover. She swiveled on her heel like a puppet, until her body was pointing at the Rover, and then lumbered across the crunching surface.

The dummy Surface Exploration Package was already set up, its silver and gold boxes sprawling across the surface in a spider-web of power cables and data feeds. Some of the cables still needed connecting, as did the antenna for transmitting signals back to Earth. The SNAP generator – System of Nuclear Auxiliary Power – was a box to one side of the little complex. York was supposed to activate it by inserting a little pod of plutonium into it. The pod – a dummy, one of several – was mounted in a little rack at the back of the Rover. It was a narrow cylinder, maybe a foot long, held inside a graphite storage cask.

She got hold of a handling rod. By pulling a trigger handle, she opened little jaws at the end of the handle and tried to engage them around the pod. Her pressurized, elasticated gloves resisted every movement of her hands; it was like trying to close a fist around a rubber ball.

When she had got the handling jaws open, she had to use two hands to guide the open mouth around the end of the pod.

Finally she tried to pull the pod free of its flask. But the damn thing wouldn’t come.

The jaws slipped off the pod, and she staggered backwards. She could hear her breathing rasp, the rattle of the cable on her harness.

‘You got any suggestions, Ralph?’

‘Hold it there. Let me try that mother.’

She rested surreptitiously against her cables, while Gershon clambered backwards out of the MEM. He wasn’t hooked up to a Peter Pan, so he labored under the full weight of his suit, and his movements were heavy and awkward.

He climbed down the ladder and took the handling rod. With York’s help he got the jaws fitted to the fuel pod. He started to pull; he even leaned back, digging his heels into the dried-out gumbo. But the pod wouldn’t come loose.

The SimSup called, ‘Ah, you guys want to take a break? That thing sure is jammed.’

‘Nope,’ said Gershon. ‘Natalie, let’s try the direct approach. You get hold of the rod, here.’

‘Okay.’ She took it from him, moving slowly, being careful not to release the grip on the trigger handle.

‘Now.’ He reached over and took a geological hammer from the loop at her waist. ‘Start pulling, babe.’

With both hands on the handling rod, she leaned back and dragged.

Gershon started hitting the cask with the hammer, with high, sweeping blows; his whole body had to swivel to deliver the blows.

Every time a blow landed York could feel the fuel pod shudder.

‘It’s not working, Ralph.’

‘The hell it isn’t.’

He spun like a hammer-thrower, and with two hands he delivered one final almighty blow to the cask.

The graphite split right in two.

The fuel pod came free. York stumbled backwards, her boots scuffing at the gumbo in an effort to keep upright. The cables helped her this time, giving her just enough leverage to keep from falling.

The fuel pod went tumbling to the surface, like a dropped relay baton.

Gershon lumbered across to her, his face framed by his visor. ‘Hey. You okay?’

‘Sure. How’s the pod?’

They bent over the little metal cylinder, where it lay in the pink gravel. There was a hairline crack down one seam.

‘How about that,’ Gershon said. ‘We busted it. We nuked Mars.’

‘Well, it was only a mockup. Probably the real thing will be tougher.’

‘Christ, I hope so.’

‘Okay, guys,’ the supervisor said. ‘Both your heart rates are showing a little high. That is definitely it for now. Take five. We’ll resume in an hour.’

Jorge Romero came barging into the simulation chamber. ‘Goddamn it,’ he stormed. ‘You did it again, Natalie! You broke my damn SEP!
And
you were a half-hour behind schedule!’

York, free of her cabling, was sitting on the Rover with her helmet on her lap, cradling a mug of coffee. She smiled at him. ‘Oh, take it easy, Jorge. It’s only a sim.’

Romero, small, purposeful, pink with anger, marched back and forth across the fake Martian surface, sending up little sprays of
gravel. ‘But that’s three times out of the last three that my SEP implementation has been screwed up …’

Her training had been intense, the compressed schedule committing her and the others to eighteen hours a day in complex exercises like this, for long weeks at a stretch. She felt her patience drawing thin, as Romero paced about.
I don’t have time for these debates, Jorge
. But she owed him an answer.

‘Look,’ she said to Romero, ‘I know how you feel. But you have to make allowances, Jorge. Out on a field trip, you can take as long as you want, days or weeks thinking over a sample if you need to. It’s not like that here. The Mars-walks can last only a few hours each. They’ll be even more curtailed than the old Apollo moonwalks. So we have to plan out every step. These simulations are’ – she waved a hand – ‘choreography. It’s a different way of working, for you and me.
Real time,
they call it.’

Romero was still pissed. ‘Goddamn it. I’m going to write a memo to Joe Muldoon. All these screwups. Those Flight Operations people just can’t be running the mission properly.’

‘But that’s the point of the sim, Jorge. We’re supposed to break things.’ She found a grin spreading across her face, but she suppressed it. ‘I’m sorry, Jorge. I do know how you feel. I sympathize.’

He glared at her. ‘Oh, you do? So you haven’t gone over to the
operational
camp altogether?’

She winced. ‘That’s not fair, damn it.’

His anger seemed to recede. He sat on the Rover, small beside her ballooning white suit. ‘Natalie. I guess you should know. I’m resigning from the program.’

She was startled. ‘You can’t.’ Romero was a principal investigator for Martian geology. If he was lost to the program now, its scientific validity would be greatly diminished. ‘Come on, Jorge.’

‘Oh, I mean it. I’m almost sure I’m going to do it.’ He looked around at the sandpit sourly. ‘In fact, I think today has made up my mind for me. And if you had any integrity left, Natalie York, you’d quit too.’

‘Jorge, are you crazy? You’ll have a geologist on Mars. What more do you want, for Christ’s sake?’

‘No. You’ll be a technician, at best. Natalie, Ares is a marvelous system,
operationally
. Scientifically, it’s Apollo all over again. Look at this.’ He waved a hand around the sim site. ‘All the stuff you’ll actually use to explore Mars. Pulleys and ropes. The MET. That damn beach buggy, the Rover, with its carrying capacity of, what, a few hundred pounds? And the way you fumble with those gloves
and that ludicrous handling rod.’ His voice was tight, his color rising; he was genuinely angry, she saw. ‘Natalie, all you have to do is look around you to see where the balance of the investment has gone. Did you know they’ve spent more on developing a long-lasting fabric for a Martian Stars and Stripes than on the whole of my SEP?’

Operational
. Romero had used the word as if it was an obscenity. Once, York thought, she would have too. But maybe she saw a better balance now. A space program, especially something right out on the edge like this Ares shot to Mars, had to be a mix of the operational and the scientific. Without the operational, there wouldn’t be any scientific anyhow.

She tried to explain some of this to Romero.

‘Save it, Natalie. I’ve gone over all this a hundred times. I’ll not be convinced. And as for you –’ He hesitated.

‘Yes? Say it, Jorge.’

‘I think you’ve sold out, Natalie. I supported your application to NASA. Damn it, I got you in here. I hoped you could make a difference. But you’ve gone native. Now we have Apollo all over again, the same damn mistakes. But this time – in part, anyhow – it’s your fault. And mine. And I’m sorry.’

He climbed off the Rover, stiffly, and walked away.

York found herself shaking, inside her pressure suit, from the ferocity of his attack.

In addition to their rising workload as launch day approached, the crew were still expected to attend PR functions. The astronauts called it ‘time in the barrel.’ Usually a head of a chamber of commerce would need a showpiece astronaut to attend a reception and shake hands and pose for pictures and spread goodwill.

York was lousy at it, and she tended to be kept behind the scenes, mostly doing goodwill tours to various NASA and contractor facilities. Gershon spent a lot of his time at Newport, where even now, the Columbia engineers were struggling to comb out the MEM problems highlighted by the D-prime mission and other tests, and complete their flight article, the MEM that would land on Mars.

York was sent up to Marshall.

They put her up overnight at the Sheraton Wooden Nickel in
Huntsville, a town which the tourist information called ‘Rocket City.’ The next day she was taken on a tour of Marshall by a couple of eager young engineers. Marshall had been hived off into NASA from the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, but its military origins were obvious; in fact it occupied a couple of thousand acres within the Redstone arsenal. She was shown a spectacular rocket garden at the Space Orientation Center, and shown around a huge test stand used in the development of Saturn F-1 engines. Saturn stages were assembled here, and then, bizarrely, traveled by water routes to the Cape; they were shipped on barges down the Tennessee River, then moved via the Ohio and Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico, and then around the coast to Florida where they were brought into the Kennedy waterways.

She spent most of the day in von Braun’s old conference room, with around twenty engineers. Most of them were young Americans, thus confounding her prejudice about Marshall’s domination by Germans. Each of the engineers got up for a half-hour, to talk about his or her specialty, while the rest of them remained in the room, half looking at the speaker, and half at her. It seemed odd. Didn’t these guys have anything better to do than look at
her
looking at Vu-graphs of rockets?

She was taken to a party at the Marshall people’s country club, called the Mars Club.

There, she started to understand these people a little better.

This was an isolated group, stuck out here in Alabama, and they ate and drank spaceflight. To them, an astronaut was worthy of much greater homage than you were liable to receive in, say, Houston: and the Ares crew especially, as embodiments of von Braun’s thirty-year-old dream of flying to Mars. Having an astronaut come out here to Alabama made it all real – and reassuring, in the midst of the usual crisis about the overall NASA budget and the future of the centers.