Voyage (80 page)

The burn knocked
Challenger
into a new, low orbit around Mars.

York, strapped into her acceleration couch, tried to relax.
Challenger
would stay in its new orbit for a couple of revolutions, while the two pilots and the controllers back in Mission Control checked out its systems.

The MEM’s ascent stage cabin, buried within the conical upper heatshield, was more or less a vertical cylinder, rising up above her. The three acceleration couches were crammed into its base, side by side. She could see, at an angle, the navigation and guidance panels with their big false horizon displays, and the alignment optical telescope thrusting down from the ceiling above her.

The cabin’s main windows were big triangles, angled to face downwards, so the pilots, when they stood up, would be able to see their landing site. And there was a small rectangular sighting window directly above her, with a matching panel cut in the upper heatshield. York stared up at that little window; trapped between the two pilots, she felt like a prisoner, staring up at a small window in the roof of her cell.

Where the interior of the Apollo Command Module had a warm feel to it – all browns and grays and greens – this cabin was mostly unpainted aluminum, thin and delicate and somehow unfinished. She could see lines of rivets, stitching the thing together. To York, the raw look spoke of a hurried development, a less mature technology than Apollo.

Through the window York watched Ares recede from the MEM. It was the first time she’d seen the craft from the outside since the rendezvous in Earth orbit. The fat, faithful MS-II injection engine was still evidently the stack’s center of gravity – though the two External Tanks were long discarded – and ahead of it was fixed the slim MS-IVB stage which would brake them back into Earth orbit. The whole of
Endeavour,
their cylindrical Mission Module with its solar array wings, had been separated from the MS-IVB, turned around and redocked nose-first; the idea was to free up the MEM from its shroud at the Mission Module’s base. Meanwhile
Discovery,
their Apollo, was now docked to a lateral port, so it
dangled sideways from the Mission Module, like a berry from the line of fuel-tank cylinders.

When
Challenger
returned to Martian orbit, the MEM would be discarded, and the remaining modules – booster stages, Mission Module and Apollo – would be reassembled, once more, in a straight line, for the burn home.

The cluster was a collection of cylinders and boxes and panels, crudely assembled – and clumsily repositioned since their entry into Martian orbit. All this orbital construction work – sliding modules through space like kids’ construction blocks – was unnerving, to York. When they separated the Mission Module from the boosters, they were cutting themselves loose from their only ride home, for God’s sake! But she understood that there were backup strategies at every stage, ways they could reassemble some kind of configuration that could tolerate a ride home, even if they lost the landing.

It’s all a symptom of the clumsy way we’re constrained to do this, the lousy technology. One day, maybe we’ll have the power and energy to do this journey in something resembling comfort, without having to take the damn spacecraft apart all the time
.

The assembled craft had none of the detailed, toy-like brilliance she had observed about ships in Earth orbit. After a year in space, the brilliant white paint of pre-launch had faded to a pale yellow; and the shadowed areas of the hull were picking up brown shading from the battered skin of Mars. The cluster looked aged, soaked in space.

When Ares had receded from view she could see nothing through the little window but darkness.

Darkness, and, occasionally, a sliver of ochre landscape.

Challenger
flew over the shadowed limb of Mars.

‘Thirty seconds to DOI,’ Stone said. ‘Everything’s go.’

‘I confirm a go,’ Gershon said.

DOI
: insertion into descent orbit – a new, low, elliptical orbit, an orbit that would intercept the surface of the planet.

York could see Gershon’s hand, hovering over the manual fire button.
Challenger
was Gershon’s baby, of course; this landing – the next few minutes – were the culmination of a decade of work for him. He looked keyed up to York, tense, expectant.

Sims were spring-loaded to fail. That was the point, really: to familiarize crew and controllers with all the myriad ways the mission could go wrong, and train them to cope. Now, however, York had the feeling that Ralph Gershon was spring-loaded the other
way.
It is going to take a lot to keep him from landing this bucket of bolts
.

And that, as far as York was concerned, was good.

‘Fifteen seconds,’ Stone said. ‘Ten seconds to DOI. Here we go, guys. Eight. Six, five, four.’

Gershon’s gloved hand closed over the firing button.

‘Two, one.’

The rockets fired in sequence. It was a muffled, rattly noise.

And then came the jolt, deep in her back.

‘Retro light on.’ Gershon flashed a grin. ‘Beautiful! Pure gold!’

It felt as if
Challenger
had been knocked backwards. Solid rockets, she’d been told, always burned a lot more crisply than liquid.

The burn went on, with Stone counting up the time. The rockets’ thrust of forty thousand pounds force was too small to shove seriously at the mass of the MEM, and so there was no rattle, no vibration, no real sense of deceleration. Just a steady push at her back, a smooth hiss as the retropack burned.

The push died sharply. Right on cue, the retropack had cut out.

Nothing felt different.
Challenger
was still in orbit around Mars, for the time being, and York was still weightless, floating within the restraints which held her to her couch.

But now the MEM was following a path that would bring it arcing down until it sliced into the Martian atmosphere, at maybe thirty miles above the surface. And the drag of the atmosphere would not allow the craft to climb out again.

Challenger
was committed to Mars.

Suddenly she got an unwelcome sense of perspective, a feeling of how small and fragile this little capsule was. This was
different
from landing on Earth. On Earth you were descending toward an inhabited planet, toward oceans full of ships waiting to pick you up.

Out here there was only the three of them, jammed up against each other in this little pod, descending toward a dead world. So far from Earth they couldn’t even see it. Out here, they weren’t closing off their journey, coming home; out here, they were pushing out still further, into extremes of technological capability and risk, so far from Earth that Mission Control couldn’t even speak to them in real time. It was like climbing the ladder one more rung.

But what York felt right now was not fear, but mostly relief.
Another abort threshold crossed
. The further the mission went, the fewer things were left to go wrong.

‘Coming up on jettison retro,’ Gershon said.

Stone counted him down. ‘Three, two, one.’

York heard a muffled bang as pyrotechnic charges broke the metal belt holding the small retropack against the base of
Challenger
. Then there was a clatter against the wall, oddly like the footsteps of a huge bird: that must be the belt of the discarded pack, scraping along the hull.

Now, with the retropack gone,
Challenger
was falling ballistically, like a projectile shot out of a gun. Its heatshield gave it the form of a blunt cone, the classic Command Module shape, though the MEM was nearly three times as big as an Apollo CM.

Gershon tipped up the spacecraft, so that the blunt prow of its base, where the titanium honeycomb heatshield was thickest, led the way into the gathering air. When he fired the attitude thrusters York saw brief bursts of gray mist, beyond the small window above her.

Then the mist got more persistent, in short bursts of translucent paleness, that lingered even after Gershon had stopped firing.

Soon the mist started to turn pink. There was a thin whistle beyond the hull.

The glow was the air of Mars, its atoms smashed to fragments by impact with
Challenger’s
heatshield.

Gershon whooped. ‘We’re getting close! Old papa Mars has us!’

‘Goddamn,’ Stone said, his voice tight.

The first feather touches of deceleration settled over York: a gentle pressure inside her stomach, a faint heaviness about her legs.

A light went on at Gershon’s station.

‘Gotcha!’ he shouted. ‘That’s point zero five G. This is going to be a real ride. Hang on.’

Point zero five G
: the traditional threshold of atmospheric drag. And now here they were, reaching point zero five G in the air of Mars.

Now the deceleration piled up on her in sudden, brutal steps.
It’s bumpier than the sims. This air is supposed to be thin, damn it
. There must be a more complex structure of layers in the atmosphere than had been realized, a sharper differentiation.

The pain at her chest was already exquisite.

She kept her eyes wide open, trying to remember every detail of this.
Every ounce of pain will tell someone, some atmospheric scientist, more about Mars
. After all she might be one of just three people in history to endure this.

Somehow, though, right now it wasn’t worth it.

She heard the crisp rattle of the attitude control thrusters’ solenoids.

Gershon watched his guidance display. ‘Right on track. One forty-seven degrees …’

Challenger
had to hit a precise reentry corridor. The allowable guidance error either way was only half a degree: less than fifty miles wide.

‘Coming up on one G … now.’

Just one G?
Already York felt as if her suit was made of lead tubes, as if some fat man was sitting on her chest.
Can this really be Earth-normal gravity
? After a year in microgravity, this burden seemed intolerable, like carrying a huge pack around on your back, for your whole life.

‘One point five,’ Stone said.

York groaned. She was pushed deep into her couch, her arms pressed into her body; the small components of the weights of Gershon and Stone which rested on her now became immense loads.

‘Hang on, guys,’ Stone said. ‘One point eight. You’ve been through a lot worse in the Wheel. Two point one.’

Gershon worked at his guidance panel, his hand hovering over his RCS control.

‘Two point five,’ Stone said. ‘Point six! … Point five. Point three. Hey, what did I tell you.’

The light in the small window above York had become a gray-white glow, cold and brilliant, as bright as Earth daylight. Gershon and Stone were bathed in the diffuse, unearthly light, the orange of their suits washed out, their faces invisible behind the reflections from their faceplates. It was like being inside some huge, complex fluorescent light tube.

The weight on her chest and legs began to slacken off now. She could feel her chest expand, her breath flowing more easily into her lungs.

Something went flying past the little window overhead, small and brilliant, glowing yellow. Flaming. It was a piece of the heatshield, melting off the base of the craft, carrying the lethal heat energy away from the capsule. Now more pieces came flying past, fist-sized or bigger, some of them rattling on the hull of the cabin.

York felt panic build up inside her. Jesus.
We can’t take much more of that
.

This is the first chance Mars has to kill us, she thought. I wonder if it will take it
.

From the ground,
Challenger
would look like a huge meteor, she
supposed, glowing and burning and sputtering, leaving a complex, multiple trail across the dark Martian sky.

The thrusters squirted again, tipping up the nose of
Challenger
.

‘Here we go,’ Gershon said. ‘Coming into pull-up.’

The MEM had some maneuvering capability. The center of gravity was offset, and so by rotating and pitching up,
Challenger
could be made to skip like a flat stone off the thicker layers of air, closer to the surface.

‘Three, two, one,’ Gershon said.

Now York felt a deep lurch, a shove which quickly bottomed out; it was like reaching the base of a loop on some huge roller coaster.

‘How about that,’ Gershon said. ‘What a ride. Into the zoom maneuver.’

Challenger
was ascending briefly, shedding its heat, before dipping once more into the lower air.

Stone tapped a glass panel. ‘Hey. I got me a working altimeter. Sixty thousand feet.’

York felt a prickle at the base of her scalp.
Sixty thousand feet
. Suddenly the altitude reading had turned from miles – a spacecraft’s measure – to feet, read from an air-pressure altimeter. Just like an aircraft.
We’re nearly there
. There was another bang of attitude jets. The capsule tipped up again.

The glow beyond the small window faded, to gray, then to a pale pink, the color of flesh.

‘Lift vector up glide,’ Gershon called.

The MEM was falling again, dipping into the thickening air at the better part of five hundred feet a second. But now the rise was smooth, comparatively gentle, the worst of the heat and the Gs over. Now it really was like the sims.

Gershon unclipped his harness and threw it back over his shoulder. ‘All change,’ he said. He pushed himself up and climbed out of his couch. To York’s left, Stone began to do the same. The crew had to stand for the last powered-descent phase of the landing.

Apprehensive, she unclipped her own harness. She stood, cautiously, on her couch, holding onto straps on the walls.

She could barely feel her legs. After her year in space York seemed to have forgotten how to stand up. Her inner ears were rotating like crazy, and the aluminum walls of the cabin tipped up around her. She felt enormously heavy.

She felt a hand on her arm. Stone’s.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘It passes.’

That was true. But after most long-duration space missions there were ground crews to lift you out of your cabin and carry you to a wheelchair, en route to the hospital …