Voyage (85 page)

Jennine called him into the house.

She handed him the phone. Jack Morgan was calling. He asked if Lee and Jennine wanted to come over to his house to watch the launch over a couple of beers. Lee thought about it, but said no, he wanted to work on his lawn today.

Actually, Lee had been hoping for an invitation from NASA to go down to the Cape, to watch the launch. It would have been a nice touch. It hadn’t come.

He and Morgan gassed on the phone for a while about the old days.

Morgan had quit Columbia now, and had set up as an independent consultant in aerospace medicine, and was making a hell of a lot more money selling himself back to Columbia as a freelance. At that he’d lasted longer at Columbia than Lee, though.

The frustration of his do-nothing sinecure had slowly driven Lee crazy, and he’d taken an early retirement.

Art Cane had died a while back, less than eighteen months before MEM 014, his company’s finest product, was due to touch down on Mars. And now Gene Tyson – the smug jackass who had once taken over JK’s own job – was head of the company.

Anyhow, Lee went back to his mower, and eventually he rolled the thing out into the sunshine, and when he started it up the rattling roar of the petrol engine drowned out the thin Canaveral voices from the neighborhood.

After a while, Jennine came out again. The sunlight caught the gray in her hair, making it silvery, shining. She brought him a glass of lemonade, and then she took him by the hand and led him into the house.

The TV was on, of course.

And there it was, the already familiar image of the Saturn VB stack, a bundle of white needles. The ripple of early-morning Florida heat haze betrayed the distance of the camera from the launch pad. JK picked out the pregnant bulge of the MEM shroud at the middle of the stack, above the fat first stage and its boosters, beneath the slimmer lines of the Mission Module and the Apollo spacecraft.

‘Go over there,’ Jennine said suddenly. She had her Polaroid in her hand.

‘Huh?’

She waved her free hand. ‘By the TV. Go ahead.’

He thought of the lawn, half-cut.

Then he went to stand by the TV.

Slowly, JK Lee raised his hand in salute, standing there beside the TV image of the Mars ship, while his wife took his picture with her Polaroid.

The bulk of the eight-mile journey from the MSOB to the pad was via the regular highway, US One, the main coastal road. This section of the road had been cleared by the local cops, but even so the van, with its convoy of backup vehicles, proceeded incredibly slowly along the wide, empty freeway.

Stone glared stoically out of the windows, and Gershon’s gloved fingers drummed on his thigh.

KSC was big and empty, a rectilinear complex of dusty, straight roads and alligator-infested drainage ditches. The buildings were four-story blocks, square, low and weathered – uglier than anything at Houston – with the feel of a government research establishment. In the low morning sunlight, everything was flat and dusty, beach-like.

Occasionally, beyond the cordon, York would see a little knot of people, regular citizens, waving at her and clapping. She felt numbed, isolated.

On the eastern horizon she could see the misty forms of launch complexes, the blocky gantries protruding above the grassy beach. Many of the gantries were disused and half demolished, now; they looked like relics, washed up on this scrubby, rubbish land, here at the corroding, entropy-laden margin between sea and land.

The transfer van turned off the highway, and started down the access road to the pad.

And suddenly – for the first time that day – York could see the Saturn: the central, gleaming white needle, slim and powerful, with its cluster of four squat solid rocket boosters, the whole enclosed by the massive, blocky gantry, sitting atop the pad’s octagonal base. The assembly was picked out by powerful searchlights, augmenting
the morning light. She could see ice coating the sides of the cryogenic fuel tanks, and there were puffs and plumes of vapors emerging from the central column, little clouds drifting across the launch complex.

The rising sun came out from behind a thin cloud, and splashed the sky with orange and gold. Light washed over the launch pad, and, beside its access tower, the Saturn shone like a pearl.

The van pulled up at the foot of the pad’s concrete base. The van doors swung open, and York was helped to the tarmac by suit techs.

Up close, the Saturn, looming before her, had a gritty reality that made it stand out in the washed-out dawn light. It had almost a home-workshop quality: the huge bolts holding it together, the white gloss paint on its flanks. Its complexity, its
man-made-ness,
was tangible.

There was a sign fixed to the concrete base of the launch pad: GO, ARES!

She looked back down the crawlerway to the Vehicle Assembly Building. The VAB was a black and white block, squat on the horizon; it was impossible to judge its size. The crawlerway was a path of big yellow river-gravel blocks running straight as an arrow to the VAB, at infinity; it ran alongside the canal built for the barges which hauled huge Saturn stages up to the VAB. She could see the tracks ground into the road surface where the crawler-transporter had hauled the Saturn to the launch complex; they looked like dinosaur footprints.

Suddenly it struck her. The event they’d practised and talked about for months was about to happen. She really would be sealed into the little cabin at the top of this stack and thrown into space.
My God,
she thought.
They’re serious
.

In recent weeks York had been out to the pad many times. She’d come to think of the pad as a noisy, busy place, like an industrial site: machines running, elevators going up and down the gantries, people clanging and banging and talking.

Today was different. Today, save for the crew and their attendants, there was no living soul within three miles.

After the press of people at the MSOB – the glimpses she’d had of the million-strong throng around the Cape – to be at the epicenter of this concrete desolation, with the overwhelming bulk of the Saturn VB before her, was crushing, terrifying. Like a glimpse of death.

Still carrying her air unit, accompanied by only the whisper of
oxygen, York followed Stone toward the steel mesh elevator at the base of the launch tower scaffolding.

Perhaps these are my last moments on Earth. Right here and now, on this blasted concrete apron. Maybe this is indeed a kind of death, time-delayed by hardware
.

The breeze off the Atlantic ruffled the flags behind the wooden bleachers at the viewing site, close to the VAB. The grandstand crowd was more than twenty thousand, Muldoon was told, including five thousand special guests and four thousand press. There were celebrities, politicians, families and friends of the crew.

There were one million people within seventy-five miles of this spot.

JFK was there, in his wheelchair, behind big sunglasses, looking a lot older than his sixty-eight years. The rest of Muldoon’s old Apollo crew showed up, and the NASA PAO people had the three of them line up – Armstrong, Muldoon, Collins – behind the frail old former President, with the Saturn gleaming on the horizon behind them.

The PR done, Muldoon sat down.

He was looking east, into the low morning sun. It was a clear, still morning, with a few scattered clouds; the PAO said the probability of meeting launch weather rules was good, more than eighty per cent.

The VAB was a huge block to Muldoon’s left, the windows of the cars clustered around it glistening like the carapaces of beetles. There was a stretch of grass before him, with its clustered cameramen, the flagpole, and the big digital countdown clock, and on the other side of that the barge canal stretched across his vision. Beyond the canal was a line of trees. And beyond that – there on the horizon, made faint by morning mist – he could see the blocky, blue-gray forms of the two LC-39 gantries. 39A, the pad for Ares, was on the right.

If he turned to look further to the right he could make out more launch complexes, gaunt, well-separated skeletons: ICBM Row, stretching off down the Atlantic coast.

KSC had changed a hell of a lot since he’d first flown, in Gemini. Even from here you could see how the space program had receded. Employment here was less than half what it had been then. The
launch complex he’d flown Gemini from, LC-19, was still there – used for unmanned Titan launches now – but only ten complexes out of twenty-six at KSC remained operational. The launch pads rotted, the gantries had rusted and were pulled down, and NASA executives let local scrap merchants bid to take away the junk.

But Complex 39A was still there. Once, he’d flown out of there on Apollo. And now the Ares stack was there, assembled and ready to fly.

Behind Muldoon’s seat, two old ladies chatted about the launch parties they’d held over the years in their Florida gardens, as brilliant manned spacecraft had drifted through the night sky, directly overhead.

NASA had set up a series of press portakabins, and reporters in short-sleeved shirts trooped in and out carrying photocopied mission timelines, and glossy goodies from the contractors. To Muldoon’s left, toward the VAB, the big network TV cabins were full of activity; their huge picture windows shimmered in the morning light.

Loudspeakers boomed with the voices of the astronauts on the air-to-ground loop, and with updates from Mission Control at Houston and the Firing Room here at the Cape. The Public Affairs Officer intoned countdown highlights. A way down from Muldoon, a girl reporter was fanning herself with a crumpled-up press release.

Muldoon, stiff and hot in his dark business suit, felt aged, restless, thirsty.

The mist was burning off the horizon. Now, at 39A, he could see the slim white needle of the Saturn, emerging from the blue haze.

When he’d first come to work here at the Cape, Rolf Donnelly had found the LCC very different from the MOCR, back at Houston.

The Firing Room was full of the same computer consoles and wall-sized tracking screens; but there were also sixty TV screens showing the Saturn stack from different angles. And in the viewing room behind the Trench, there was a huge picture window with a panoramic view of Merritt Island, with its launch gantries poking up out of the sand, three miles away. Unlike the MOCR, the Firing Room wasn’t closed to the outside world.

And at the moment of launch, the Firing Room flooded with real, honest-to-God rocket light.

The atmosphere was different here, too. The controllers here were independent of the Mission Control guys, by job description and inclination. They were more like blue-collar technicians. The LCC controllers were in charge for the first few seconds of the flight; they were the guys who had to get the mission off the ground by doing the dirty work of the launch.

It was an atmosphere Donnelly liked. He’d come out here to Florida, bringing his family, soon after the Apollo-N fiasco, hoping to rebuild his career.

As he’d feared, some of the shit flying around then had stuck to him. Well, he wasn’t a Flight Director any more; Indigo Team was just embarrassing history, and Donnelly’s brilliant career probably wouldn’t look so brilliant ever again. But he was still here, still involved, still with NASA.

They reached T minus five minutes, and the controllers moved into the final pre-automatic check.

‘Guido?’

‘Go.’

‘EECOM?’

‘Go.’

‘Booster?’

‘Go.’

‘Retro?’

That was Donnelly.

He glanced at his console. His vision was misty. ‘Go,’ he said.

Go, by God. Go!

Helicopters flapped over the pads: that was Bob Crippen and Fred Haise, Muldoon knew, checking out the launch weather conditions.

At T minus ten minutes, the countdown went through the last of its planned holds. After that, there were no more holds; and for Muldoon, events unfolded with the inevitability of falling off a cliff.

At thirty seconds, Muldoon stood with the rest, and faced the Saturn. Save for occasional flags of vapor from the cryogenic tanks, the pad was still static, like a piece of a factory.

There was a moment of stillness.

Plumes of steam – from the sound-suppression water system –
squirted out to either side of the slim booster. Muldoon could see the last umbilical arms swinging aside.
Main engine start
.

Then a bright white light erupted from the base of the Saturn.

The Saturn lifted from the ground, startlingly quickly, trailing a column of white smoke which glowed orange within, as if it were burning. The booster was a splinter of bone white riding on a lozenge of liquid, yellow-white light – the fire of the Solid Rocket Boosters – light that was stunningly bright.
This,
the brilliance of rocket light, was what the pictures never captured, he thought; right now the TV images would be stopped down so much they would tame the rocket light, turn the sky dark blue, make the smoke a dull gray.

The stack arched over, following a steep curve away from the tower: the pitchover maneuver, violent, visible. Already the gantry was dwarfed by the smoke column; it looked denuded.

The Saturn punched through an isolated thin cloud, threading it like thread through a needle. The surface of the barge canal rippled, glaring with the reflected rocket light.

Now, after maybe ten seconds of the flight, the sound reached him. There was a deep reverberation that he sensed in his gut and chest, and then a clattering thunder which rained down from the sky above him, in sharp multiple slaps: that was shock waves from the booster engines, huge nonlinear waveforms collapsing and battering at each other. Through that bass pounding he could hear the people around him whooping and clapping.

Before him, silhouetted in rocket light, JFK raised up a wizened fist.

Muldoon could feel that he was in the presence of a huge release of energy: it was like being close to a huge waterfall, maybe. But this energy was made and controlled by humans. He felt a surge of triumph, a deep exhilaration … a huge outpouring of relief.