Space: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  ‘Why don’t you report it?’

  ‘Because no one would believe me. I haven’t a single solid fact to go on, only theories.’

  ‘Ask Eddy what he thinks.’

  ‘He’s in Arizona, dammit. I’ve called twice but he’s on a field trip.’

  ‘Your problem will wait till he gets back.’

  ‘Wait? Do you know what a real major event can be? A region on the face of the Sun fifty times bigger than the entire surface of the Earth. It explodes. In thirty minutes it can throw masses of material a hundred and fifty thousand miles out into space. In less than an hour it sends forth enough energy to supply every electricity need in the United States for a hundred million years. That’s titanic.’

  ‘And dangerous?’ the girl asked.

  ‘Our atmosphere protects us. But if you were in an airplane very high, real danger.’

  ‘And astronauts, like Apollo 18 maybe?’

  ‘Deadly.’

  So during the last weeks of March, Sam Cottage watched with extra care his Sun’s behavior, but when nothing exceptional occurred he put that month to bed with a reassuring summary:

  All solar activity low during past 24 hours. Only small subflares. Magnetic field has been only mildly disturbed. General activity should remain low. Potential for major events low. However, it could increase if new Region 396 should amalgamate with neighboring regions.

  Two committees had been convened, the first composed of scientists to determine what instruments Apollo 18 should carry to the Moon in order to acquire data that would help explain the genesis of that satellite and perhaps the universe. They began their discussions on a sober note:

  ‘On earlier explorations, the astronauts could place the instruments, point their antenna toward the Earth, and expect that radio signals would carry the data direct to our stations in Australia, Spain or the United States. And they were correct. As of last week our Moon stations were sending us nine million separate bits of data every day, throughout the year. We are getting to know the Moon as well as we know Rhode Island.

  ‘But from the other side we can have no direct contact. Everything will depend upon the two or three satellites we place in orbit about the Moon. If they fail, we fail. To state it another way, if they fail, the whole Apollo 18 flight fails.’

  NASA brought in communications experts, who promised that the three proposed satellites would be at least as reliable as the other devices they were gambling on, and with this assurance they reached a most sensible decision:

  ‘Since experiments initiated by previous Apollo missions have succeeded much better than we had a right to expect, with every instrument functioning four times longer than predicted, it is essential that we receive the same kind of data from the other side of the Moon. We recommend these duplications:

  ‘A suprathermal ion detector to measure the mass and energy of any gases on or near the lunar surface.

  ‘A solar-wind spectrometer to measure the flux and energy of atomic particles from the Sun, an experiment of greatest significance.

  ‘A lunar-surface magnetometer to measure fluctuations in the magnetic field at the Moon.

  ‘A passive seismic experiment to measure lunar vibrations from whatever source.’

  They then turned to a series of experiments specifically designed for the new side of the Moon: using a device that sent radio impulses into the body of the Moon to see whether any ice or water existed below the surface, and conducting a fascinating experiment which might help to decide a furious lunar debate: Are mascons merely impacted meteors, suggesting that the Moon had a cold origin, or are they submerged lava flows, indicating a hot origin? Ten years earlier the word mascon did not exist; it meant mass concentration and referred to mysterious but ordinary-looking locations on the Moon where the force of gravity noticeably increased. Obviously, something unusually heavy lay hidden below the surface, and it was given the name mascon. The scientists wanted to know about the mascons on the other side.

  Dr. Mott was a member of the second committee, which had perhaps the more exciting assignment: to select the spot on which Claggett and Linley would try to land, for it was imperative that a location be chosen which would yield a rich variety of rocks and afford good terrain observations. The two astronauts attended every meeting because they must become familiar with the area they were to explore, and as they studied the new maps, constructed from data supplied by the Russians after their successful photographic flight to the far side in 1959 and by the American flights of the 1960s, they realized that almost every site they might want to explore carried a Russian name—so awarded because the Russians had got there first. Claggett asked, ‘You mean, whenever anyone goes to the back of the Moon, he’ll be using Russian street signs?’ And when the committee members nodded, he said, ‘Now I understand why Senator Grant was in such a sweat to catch up.’

  Landing a spacecraft on the Moon presented unusual problems, as the astrophysicists explained:

  ‘You will be faced by the same constraints as the earlier Apollos. You must bring your module down a very narrow corridor. If the Sun is below 7°, your landing area will be in shadows so deep you won’t be able to distinguish dangers like big boulders. If the Sun is higher than 25°, landing is quite impossible, for you lose shadows, and without them you cannot ascertain what lies ahead.

  ‘The ideal is a space only 4° wide—12° to 16°—because then the Sun behind you acts like a helpful flashlight, pointing out the dangers.

  ‘Of course, if you reach your desired landing spot too late, so that the Sun is high and blazing, quite simple. You just speed farther ahead to your alternate landing site, and as you approach the terminator line, you find yourself once more just where you want to be, 12° to 16°.’

  When Paul Linley heard these very exact limitations, comparable to those restricting the capsule when it tried to return to Earth, he said, ‘From our takeoff spot that day we fly 238,848.7 miles and have to land at precisely 70 hours, 37 minutes, 45 seconds after takeoff, and right in relation to the crater Gagarin.’

  ‘And don’t be a minute late,’ Claggett said, ‘or the damned Sun will be too high in the heavens.’

  It was only then that Linley appreciated how that requirement of sunlight and shadow on a remote valley on the other side of the Moon determined when, four days earlier, Apollo 18 must ascend into the air at Cape Canaveral. ‘We climb into this machine weighing 6,300,000 pounds,’ he wrote to his wife, ‘and we fire engines producing 7,500,000 pounds of thrust, and we’re restricted by minutes and seconds. Space flight is an exact science.’

  When the two committees submitted their reports, NASA was highly pleased, because everyone now saw that Apollo 18 promised exciting rewards, a worthy capstone in every respect. But when it dawned on people that this would probably be the last Apollo that would ever fly, engineers from all over America came to the Cape to see it standing in majesty beside the ocean at Complex 39.

  Two carloads of engineers from Langley Field drove down non-stop—nineteen hours—to see the splendid thing they had visualized years before, without having had a reasonable clue as to how it would ultimately be effected. Dieter Kolff had government orders to fly to Canaveral, but he preferred to ride, so he organized an expedition from Huntsville of old Peenemünde hands, nine of them driving straight through in thirteen hours, to see the glorious rocket they had built, and when they stood looking at it, Kolff said, ‘When this goes, we’ve launched fourteen of our Saturn-Apollos, and not one has failed. We’ve gone to the Moon and we could have gone to Saturn. Look at it!’

  He stayed at the Cape to supervise the final touches to his masterpiece, the last in a proud series, and sometimes when he wiped dust off the giant, as engineers will do, he grieved that of all the men who had pioneered this great machine, not one had ever ridden on its high nose: A group of American boys who weren’t born when we started work. They get to go and we don’t. He prayed that the culminating flight would be a good one and that it would bring f
urther honors to Von Braun.

  One evening as he ate alone at the Bali Hai a handsome Oriental woman in a gray linen jumpsuit asked if she could sit with him, and although he expressed his astonishment at her daring, she drew up a chair and introduced herself as Rhee Soon-Ka from Asahi Shimbun of Tokyo: ‘Could I ask a distinguished German scientist a few questions?’

  Dieter was flattered, and they talked for many hours, for she had a knack of guessing what a man like him would want to speak about in these days of beautiful tension.

  ‘What kind of man was Von Braun?’ she asked.

  ‘He never betrayed anyone who worked for him.’

  ‘Or anyone he worked for?’

  ‘All of us who reached Huntsville alive, we owe it to Von Braun.’

  ‘When the rocket lifts off, in April, what will you think as it soars into the air?’ She spent almost an hour on this question: the things that could go wrong, that had indeed gone wrong with the many failures of the A-4 at Peenemünde; the emotions that overcome a man when a long-sought goal is attained; his feelings toward his fellows who joined the Russians in 1945; the relative costs of an A-4 and a Saturn V.

  She took few notes, for she suspected that she would use very little of what Kolff was telling her, but she needed his insights to provide a solid underpainting for what she would write, and it was almost dawn when she asked, as good reporters often did, ‘What would you like to tell me that I haven’t asked?’ and he said, ‘You know it’s all wrong? Pointed in the wrong direction?’ and she said, ‘I’ve known that all along. It’s exhibitionism. Little boys showing off.’

  They discussed this for some time, and finally Kolff asked, ‘What do you see in them? The way they live and die?’

  And now she wanted to talk, for this had been a night of enrichment. ‘They are so small. Herr Kolff, have you noticed how small these wonderful young men are?’

  ‘They have to be, to fit into our capsules.’

  ‘But the rest of America’s heroes are so tall, so huge.’ She stopped speaking and drummed on the table for some moments. ‘I’ve been developing a theory that whenever a nation elects great giants as its heroes, it’s doomed. Tall Prussian cavalrymen. Those pathetic Swiss guards at the Vatican. The huge gladiators of Rome. And the ridiculous sumo wrestlers of Japan.’

  ‘I have little regard for giants,’ Kolff said.

  ‘In America it’s all monstrous football players and hyperthyroid basketball players.’ She became quite excited. ‘I was in the Atlanta airport when a basketball team, the Boston Celtics, I think—they came through as a team, and I had to look up like this to see them. Those gods, those great muscular gods.’ She laughed nervously. ‘It was quite revolting, really. America and Japan both electing their heroes by weight. Both societies doomed.’

  She spoke more on this subject, analyzing it from various angles, and concluding, ‘I think Europe may be saved because they make heroes of little, ordinary men like soccer stars and bicycle racers. They have sense enough to look at Goliath and his Philistines with suspicion. They see the merit in normality, and I think that’s why I’m so infatuated with the astronauts. They’re so little and so ordinary and so very brave.’

  Kolff had not thought of this before, having accepted the government’s decision to select small men for the capsules, but he found that he liked the idea, for he had never been able to see merit in a man simply because he was seven feet tall or weighed two hundred and seventy pounds.

  They sat quietly for a while, both weary from the long night’s talk, then Kolff said, sighing, ‘When you’re a young man, you imagine that when you grow old and fill a position of responsibility, all discussions will be like this one tonight. Instead, we waste our time in trivialities. I am indebted to you.’

  ‘On the contrary.’

  On 3 April 1973, Sam Cottage, working at his telescope in Boulder, spotted on the receding western limb of the Sun at a point 10° above the solar equator, a new collection of sunspots and he duly noted them: ‘Region 419, horseshoe shaped. Below average in luminosity.’ And that evaluation was forwarded to numerous stations around the world.

  As always these days he asked himself as he filed his report, ‘Could this be the big one?’ but the modest appearance of 419 forced him to answer no.

  On 4 April the collection of spots had moved closer to the extremity from where it would move around to the invisible side of the Sun, and Sam needed to be sure how many days would pass before it reappeared at the eastern limb. His calculations would have surprised some who thought they knew the Sun well.

  Because the Sun, like all other visible stars, is gaseous and not a solid, it rotates on its axis at sharply different speeds, depending on how far from the solar equator a spot is. It is as if Ecuador had a day of 22 hours, the United States 24 hours, and Greenland 27 hours.

  At its equator the Sun requires only 26.7 days to complete a revolution, but at any point approaching a pole, it takes 32.1 days. Region 419, which stood just north of the equator, would make its circuit in 27.6 days, which meant that it would be out of sight for at least 14.

  On 5 April, Cottage caught his last glimpse of 419 as it disappeared, and although the amount visible was minimal, he thought he detected in it substantial variations from what he had seen previously, so after filing his routine reports, he went to headquarters and said, ‘I caught just a glimpse of 419 as it went around the bend, and I thought it had become more active.’

  ‘Damn,’ the manager growled. ‘Fifteen days and we’ll see nothing. It could come back at us on the east limb a full-fledged terror.’

  ‘All we can do is guess.’

  The manager sat clasping and unclasping his hands. ‘Twenty years from now we won’t be so powerless. We’ll have monitors up there checking all sides at all times.’ He left his desk in some agitation, looked at various photographs, then shook his head. ‘Cottage, the Sun is the single most vital item in our universe … to us. And we know so little about it. The only star among the trillions that we can study close up, and we practically ignore it.’

  He stomped about the room for additional minutes, then stopped abruptly and snapped, ‘You want me to issue an advisory, don’t you?’

  ‘I’m very nervous, sir.’

  ‘But have you any hard evidence?’ He answered himself: ‘None.’ Then he asked, ‘What was this eighty-eight-year cycle you mentioned the other day?’

  Cottage outlined his nebulous theories, but even as he voiced them he had to acknowledge how tentative they must sound. The manager, apprehensive himself about the dying gasp of Cycle 20, wanted to find substance in the young man’s ideas, but could not.

  ‘Sam, do you agree that we have no justification for issuing an advisory?’

  ‘I do.’

  So none was issued.

  Nine days before the flight was scheduled, the three astronauts were placed in quarantine to protect them against germs, especially colds and measles, which might be brought to them by others, and in this time they went through daily drill in the simulators. Pope, as the most methodical, shuffled his three-by-five single pages made of a very high quality fireproof French paper, summarizing and indexing ninety-six different contingency sequences covering every emergency for which he would have any responsibility, and although he knew these procedures by heart, he kept cutting the pages arbitrarily, as if they formed a deck of cards, and rattling off the steps he would have to take if that accident occurred. For example, the first paper reminded him of exactly how high and how far down range the rocket ought to be at crucial stages during the first two hours:

  At this point Altair will still have 236,245 miles to go before ignition for lunar orbit. That’ll take us 60 hours, 36 minutes, 7 seconds, or 60.61 hours. We’ll start out at a speed of 24,247 mph and constantly diminish to 1,398. That’ll give us—and he worked the small circular slide rule he had bought in Japan during his Korean duty—an average made-good speed of 3,898 mph.

  When Claggett saw what Pope was up to
, he asked, ‘You proposin’ to replace the computer?’ and Pope said, ‘If I have to,’ and Randy said, ‘Don’t lose them slips of paper.’

  On 20 April, three days before lift-off, Region 419 reappeared almost coyly on the extreme eastern limb of the Sun, as if it were a high-school-freshman girl peering around a corner in her first modish dress. Cottage, staring with the keenest interest, could detect nothing, but when he alerted the manager that the region was again visible, three experts crowded into the telescope area to compare judgments.

  ‘Lots of regions on the Sun more active than that,’ one old-timer said.

  ‘Granted,’ the manager said, ‘but is there any evidence of significant change?’

  ‘None,’ Cottage said. ‘If you’ll compare photographs of fifteen days ago, you’ll see it’s less active now.’

  ‘Thank God. Anything could have happened on that other side.’

  The astronauts went to bed on the night of 22 April with such a wealth of information that only young men in the finest physical condition could have hoped to keep it in order and available. Claggett, for whom this would be his fourth trip, told the NASA people who dined with them, ‘In raw data to be handled, if Gemini was indexed at 1.0, my Apollo flight was 2.3, but this one, to the other side of the Moon, it’s got to be 3.3. This is really complex.’

  They were wakened for breakfast at 0400, and Deke Slayton with five other NASA officials was surprised when Claggett lifted his glass of orange juice and toasted: ‘To William Shakespeare, whose birthday we celebrate with a mighty bang.’ Slayton helped them dress and accompanied them to Complex 39, where a score of searchlights played on the waiting rocket and nearly a million spectators gathered in the pre-dawn to watch the last flight of this majestic prototype as it headed for regions doubly mysterious.