Voyage (8 page)

He rooted in the equipment bay beneath the couches. He got to the food locker and lifted the lid; it was full to bursting with little cellophane packets of food, all Velcroed in place.

Once they got into the Mission Module, the standard of cuisine would improve, York knew. But while they were stuck inside this Apollo they had to make do with squirting water into color-coded plastic bags of dehydrated food. Still, she wasn’t about to complain. The Command Module was like a cute little mobile home, with its warm water for food and coffee, and toothpaste, even a system for the guys to shave.

Gershon came floating up with a handful of gold-painted bags. ‘Hey. I found these at the front. None of us is coded gold, are we?’

Stone smiled. ‘Nope. I had those put there for you to find.’

York studied the bags. ‘Beef and potatoes. Butterscotch pudding. Brownies. Grape punch.’ She looked at Stone. ‘What’s this? None of this was in my personal preference. In fact, I hate butterscotch pudding.’

‘I thought it was kind of appropriate. This was the first meal the Apollo 11 crew ate in space. Straight after trans-lunar injection, after they left Earth orbit for the Moon.’

‘All
right,’
Ralph Gershon said, and he pulled a hose out of
the potable water tank and squirted the spigot into his bags with enthusiasm.

York looked at the bags again.
Butterscotch pudding, in memoriam
. Bizarre.

But maybe, after all, it was appropriate.

Chuck Jones snapped closed his visor and tugged at the umbilicals on his pressure suit, testing their fittings.

He stepped to the edge of the tank. It was a big blue rectangle, like a swimming pool. T-shirted divers were already moving through the water, playing around the sim like dolphins; cables trailed through the water, around the blocky white shape of the sim itself.

It’s like a fucking kid’s game
, Jones thought.
Sims. How I hate sims
.

He turned to see his partner, Adam Bleeker. Because his suit was so stiff, Jones had to hop around like a rabbit. ‘You okay, kid?’

Bleeker seemed to start. ‘Sure. Yeah, sure, Chuck.’

Jones snickered to himself. He knew he could put a bug up the ass of a raw kid like Bleeker, just by smiling at him. ‘Good boy. Welcome to the Weightless Environment Training Facility, here in sunny Texas. Beautiful sight, isn’t it?’

Bleeker turned to the water. ‘I think I’ve got a kind of Monday morning feeling about this, Chuck.’

‘So do I, Adam; so do I. I hate this fucking fish tank. But we gotta go through with crap like this, or they won’t let us fly their beautiful birds. You all set?’

‘Let’s do it.’

His breath loud in his ears, Jones stepped onto the white platform before him. Now he was suspended over the pool. With a whine of hydraulics, the platform lowered his clumsy, umbilicalled bulk into the water.

The divers loaded him up with weights that would neutralize his buoyancy, and so simulate weightlessness. Then they got hold of Jones’s suited arms, and began to drag him through the water toward the sim. The water was hot, for the benefit of the divers.

The WET-F, pronounced ‘wet-eff,’ was one of the largest simulator facilities here at MSC. The pool was set at the center of
Building 29, a big circular building that had once served as a centrifuge. Now, a sleek ambulance stood beside the pool, and there was a decompression chamber nearby. Big clunky white pieces of kit, simulators for other exercises, stood beside the water; cranes running along the roof would lower them in when required.

Jones hated the WET-F. He could never forget the presence of the water around him: the resistance to every movement, the clammy light, the glopping of bubbles, the shadowy forms of the divers.

Conditions more different from the ice-cold stillness of space it was hard to dream up.

Looming ahead in the water he could see the sixty-feet-long hulk of a mocked-up S-IVB, a Saturn third stage, with the mouth of its single engine bell gaping at him. The Multiple Docking Adapter was a squat cylinder fixed to the front of the S-IVB, and a crude, open-ended mockup of a docked Apollo Command Module was fixed to the front of
that
.

The idea was that the empty S-IVB would be used as a space station shell, a Skylab, once it had reached orbit. The S-IVB and the Apollo carrying its crew would be launched separately, by Saturn IB boosters, the smaller, cheaper cousins of Saturn Vs. The astronauts would dock with the booster by nuzzling the nose of their Apollo against the Docking Adapter, and then enter through specially fitted airlocks. The crew would clean out the shell, and settle down to live inside the big liquid hydrogen tank.

This sim wasn’t painted, or finished in any way. It all looked ungainly, ugly, evidently lashed up in haste.

The simulation supervisor’s voice sounded in his headset. ‘Good morning, Chuck, Adam.’

Good morning to you, asshole
.

Bleeker turned and waved at one of the ubiquitous TV cameras.

The SimSup said, ‘I just want to review the basic parameters of the sim with you, before you start. Now, you know this isn’t an integrated sim.’ Meaning they weren’t hooked up to Mission Control. ‘This is just a preliminary trial of the checklist we’re going to have to use, when we fit out the workshop in orbit. Okay, let’s proceed.’

The divers nodded to Jones, and they guided him closer to the Apollo mockup. It was just an open cone, fitted to the Docking Adapter. The simulation was supposed to start at the moment at which the crew were moving into the workshop to configure it for habitation.

Their first job was to dismantle the docking assembly in Apollo’s
nose and open up the tunnel to the workshop. This part, at least, should go smoothly, because this sort of docking was standard operating practice on the Moon missions.

Jones heard Bleeker’s breath scratching as he hauled at the heavy docking probe assembly. ‘Take it easy, kid. We’re being paid by the hour.’

Bleeker laughed, and his posture relaxed a little.

When they had the probe assembly loose, Bleeker passed it to a diver.

Bleeker moved ahead of Jones into the Multiple Docking Adapter. The Adapter was a tight tunnel, lined with lockers. All the equipment for living quarters, clothes, food, experiments and the rest was stored in these lockers during the launch; when they’d fitted out the hydrogen tank for habitation, Jones and Bleeker would have to come back here, unpack the lockers, and move this equipment into the tank.

Bleeker passed on, into the hydrogen tank itself.

The metal walls of the tank opened out around him. It was pitch dark, and Jones had the feeling that he was following Bleeker into a huge, forbidding metal cave. ‘Hold up, Adam; let’s throw a little light on the situation here.’ Jones unclipped a portable light from his belt and fixed it to the fireman’s pole that passed along the axis of the tank.

The lamp sent glimmering light through the water along the length of the tank, to a wall at the far end that bulged inward toward him. This was the bulkhead between the hydrogen tank and the booster’s lox tank beyond. Helium pressurization spheres clung to the walls like big silver warts. Handrails and poles looped across the metal cave, and folded-up partitions and other bits of kit were stowed neatly against the walls of the tank.
Too neatly. I wonder what those poor schmuckos will find when they meet this bird in real life, in orbit
.

The Skylabs were just lash-ups, really, improvisation. But they would give NASA experience it needed of orbital operations and long-duration flights, before the real space station cans started flying later.

‘Okay, guys,’ the SimSup said. ‘As you know, in orbit the first job would be to check that the propellant lines are properly blocked. Today, we want you to skip over that and proceed straight to the assembly of the floor.’

‘We’ve read the checklist,’ Jones growled. ‘Come on, pal.’ He shimmied along the fireman’s pole, deeper into the tank.

Bleeker and Jones manhandled packs of floor panels away from their stowage against the tank walls. Their job was to fit a floor of aluminum grid across the width of the tank, maybe two-thirds of the way along its length. Putting the panels together would be like assembling a jigsaw puzzle, working their way in to the tank’s axis.

The two men worked their way around the perimeter of the tank. It was simple work, but slow, clumsy and tiring; Jones found it hard to grip tools with his suited hands, and the water resisted every motion.

Divers had followed them into the tank. One of them had brought in an underwater TV camera, and was filming them.

The SimSup tried to cheer them up. ‘We appreciate your help here, guys. We’re well aware that you two are slated for other missions, and probably won’t even be the ones to carry this out for real anyway …’

I sure as hell hope not, Jones thought
.

Chuck Jones was supposed to be going to the Moon. He was backup commander on Apollo 15, which, according to the basic framework of crew rotation, would give him his own mission three shots later, on Apollo 18.

But Congress had cut NASA’s budget for Fiscal 1971, making it the leanest budget for nine years. And Nixon still hadn’t responded to the Space Task Group’s proposals for the future shape of the space program, although the word was he was now leaning toward a Mars program of some kind, under Kennedy’s relentless public pressure.

Anyhow, NASA was going to need Saturn Vs to launch its Skylabs and space station modules and NERVA test flights. So, NASA was going to have to conserve Saturn V launches. The remaining lunar expeditions, Apollos 14 through to 20, were going to be stretched out to six-monthly intervals …

There were rumors in the Office that the later flights might be cut altogether.

Jones had flown in space. Once.

He’d finished three orbits of Earth on the second orbital Mercury flight, following John Glenn. It had been a picnic. He’d enjoyed the feeling of microgravity, being able to yaw the little capsule about so that the glowing Earth sailed every which way past his tiny window.

But he used up too much of his hydrogen peroxide maneuvering fuel, playing around in orbit.

By the time he got to the retro-sequence, nobody was sure if he had enough fuel to set the capsule at the right angle to reenter. He might have burned up, having wasted all his fuel playing around in orbit. Well, he hadn’t; he’d overshot his splashdown point by two hundred fifty miles, but he was picked up within a couple of hours by choppers from the carrier.

Jones had been content with his adventure. But the NASA hierarchy were less than pleased with him. He might have augured in: killed himself by playing around.

Officially Jones stayed on the roster, for assignment to a later flight. But there was a certain distance, now, between Jones and the rest of the Astronaut Office. Deke Slayton, the chief astronaut, had dropped heavy hints that he might want to drop out of the program altogether.

But Jones, mad as hell, had flatly refused. He’d wanted to prove the astronauts really were aviators.
He
knew he’d done well; he knew he’d done better than Glenn, even, as far as he was concerned.

So he was going to stay on as an astronaut, and he was going to go to the goddamn Moon. In the meantime, to keep in the program, he accepted a job with Slayton and Alan Shepard – another of the original astronauts, also grounded, in his case for an ear condition – in the Astronaut Office.

Jones had served in there for eight whole years: scheduling and training, working on sims and mission profiles.
Eight years
.

Now enough bigwigs had moved out of NASA, it seemed, for his indiscretion to be forgotten, and he was back on flight status.

But if the Moon flights got cut, so did he. He’d probably be too damn old for Mars.

Jones didn’t want to go to the Moon for the thrill of exploration. For him it wasn’t the destination that counted but the journey: a mission that offered the most challenging flying test anyone could devise.

The Skylabs just weren’t going to offer that. He had no wish for his career to climax in a low-Earth-orbiting trash can, where the job would be to endure, just logging days, boring a hole in the sky.

He really would hate to miss out on the Moon.

Jones hauled at floor bolts with a vigor that alarmed the surgeons who were monitoring his vital signs.

When the floor was completed, the SimSup congratulated them. ‘Okay, boys; we’ll take a break and refurbish before the next session. Come out through the Docking Adapter.’

Preceded by the divers, Bleeker made his way through the cramped Adapter and toward the brightly lit water beyond.

‘Now you, Chuck,’ the SimSup said.

Jones made his way into the shadowy Adapter; the lockers clustered about, restricting his movement. He was illuminated by the tank lights behind him, and the free blue water of the facility ahead of him.

When he was well inside the Adapter, the exit to the Apollo mockup slammed shut.

Jones pulled up short. He wrapped his gloved palms around the hatch lever. It wouldn’t give.

‘What’s going on?’

‘Jones.’ The SimSup voice was terse now. ‘You’ve suffered a multiple failure. Your Command Module is disabled; you can’t return to it; you can’t get it loose of the docking port. The power in the workshop cluster is about to fail. What do you do? Go.’

Now the lights failed. He was left floating in pitch darkness. Even the tank lights had gone out.

‘What kind of asshole game is this? …’

He took a breath, and calmed himself down. SimSups were famous for throwing crap like this at you. He had to find an answer to this, and fast; he could yell at them later.

He knew the theory. If Skylab astronauts couldn’t get home, a new Apollo would be sent up from the Cape. But if the disabled Apollo was jammed to the docking port, what use would that be?

In the pitch darkness, he was starting to forget which way up he was.

These fucking sims
.

He tried to concentrate; he pictured the Adapter as he’d seen it just before the ‘failure’: the useless docking port before him; the access tunnel back to the workshop behind him.