“Very good bomb, Pilgrim.”
“Okay, Topdog.”
“Hey, Pilgrim. You got radio?”
Gershon couldn’t figure what the FAG was talking about; the raid was over. “Say again, Topdog. Say again.”
“Topdog listen to radio. Voice of America. You brave boys in trouble.”
“What?”
“Apollo. Brave boys. Spaceship in terrible danger, say Voice of America. You understand?”
Jesus. He felt electrified. I wonder what the hell has happened, if they can get home…
But what a way to find out, from some poor little guy, lost in a shit-hole in the mountains of Cambodia.
“Rager, Topdog. I copy. Thank you.”
“And to you, Pilgrim, a good night.”
Yeah. A good night faking my records.
Somewhere in the sky above him — for all the peril those guys were in — Americans were undertaking vast, wonderful adventures. And there he was, flying this bucket of bolts, splashing liquid fire over peasants. Doing something so shitty that even his own government wouldn’t admit it was happening.
I’ve got to get out of this. Of course, despite a lot of pressure from the White House, NASA had yet to fly a black man into space. It would be a long haul for Ralph Gershon…
But it can’t be worse than this.
Gershon and his wingman climbed back to altitude, and Gershon turned his nose for home. Mission Elapsed Time [Day/Hr:Min:Sec] Plus 000/00:12:22
Earth was a wall of blue light, as bright as a slice of tropical sky; it dazzled her, dilating her eyes, making the sky pitch-black when she looked away. The Command Module’s windows were tiny, already scuffed, but even so they let in shafts of startling blue, and the cabin was bright, cheerful, light-filled.
“Houston, we have a hot cabin.” Stone tapped a gloved forefinger against a temperature gauge. “Running at seventy-seven.”
“Copy, Ares” Young said. “We recommend you put coolant fluid through the secondary coolant loop.”
“Roger,” said Gershon. “Ah, okay, Houston, now I’m seeing a fluctuation of my water quantity gauge. It’s oscillating between, I’d say, 60 and 80 percent.”
“Copy, Ralph, working on that one…”
And Stone said he suspected there was a helium bubble in an attitude thruster propellant tank. Young recommended that he perform a couple of purge burns of the attitude thrusters to burn out the bubble. So Stone began to work that out. Meanwhile, Young came back with an answer to the water gauge problem; it looked as if it was traced to a faulty transducer…
And on, and on, a hail of small checks and detailed, trivial problems.
York had her own checklist to follow. She worked her way through the pale pages quickly, opening and closing circuit breakers, throwing switches, calling out instructions for Stone and Gershon. She was immersed in the hiss of the air in her closed helmet, the humming of the Command Module’s instruments and pumps, the rustle of paper, the crackle of Young’s voice calling up from the ground, the soft voices of Gershon and Stone as they worked through their post-orbit checklists.
It was a mundane procedure they’d followed together dozens of times in the sims.
But, she realized, it was a profound shock to go through this routine — not in some stuffy ground-based trainer — but here.
If she looked ahead of the craft, she could see the planet’s curve. It was a blue-and-white arc with black space above it. But when she looked straight down, the skin of the Earth filled her window, scrolling steadily past as if she were viewing some colorful map on a computer screen.
She was amazed by the transparency of the air. There was a sense of depth to the atmosphere, a three-dimensional appearance that surprised her. There were shadows under the clouds as they slid across the face of the seas. The clouds thickened toward the equator, and when she looked ahead, tangential to the Earth’s surface, she could see them climbing up into the atmosphere, as if Ares was heading for a wall of vapor. On the land she could easily make out cities — a gray, angular patchwork — and the lines of major roads. The orange-brown of deserts was vivid, but the jungles and temperate zones were harder to spot; their color did not penetrate the atmosphere so well, and they showed up as a gray-blue, with the barest hint of green.
She found the lack of green disappointing.
She saw the wake of a ship, feathering out like a brushstroke on the sea’s calm surface.
Gershon, in his center seat, leaned toward her. “Quite a view, huh.”
She turned her head — and quickly regretted it; her head felt like a tank of fluid, sloshing when she moved. She held her head steady for a few seconds and let the sloshing settle down again. Resolutely, she tried not to think about her stomach.
Space adaptation syndrome. She understood what was happening to her. Without gravity, little particles of calcium on sensitive hairs in the inner ear took up random positions, and the body couldn’t work out which way was up. It generally went away after a few days.
But just now it was a huge embarrassment to York.
More carefully, she turned back to the window. They were passing over storm clouds, thunderheads which piled up on top of each other as if solid, cliffs and ravines of cloud miles deep. She could see lightning, sparking in the clouds like living things, propagating across storm systems thousands of miles across. The clouds, illuminated from within, glowed purple-pink, like neon sculptures. “Look at that. It looks as if the thunderheads are reaching up toward us.”
“Only about a tenth of the way,” Gershon said mildly.
“Pressure’s okay,” Stone said. He began to take off his gloves and helmet.
York unlatched her gloves and pulled them off, then shoved them into a pocket on her couch. She grasped the sides of her helmet, which came loose with a click; she pushed it up over her head.
She moved too quickly. Suddenly her head was full of sloshing fluid again, and saliva flooded her mouth.
Her helmet, rolling loose, clattered against a bank of switches. Gershon grabbed it easily, laughing. “Interception!” In his pressure suit he looked small, compact, comfortable. He threw the helmet up in the air again with a twist; the helmet revolved, oscillating about two spin axes.
York felt embarrassed, clumsy. And, watching the helmet, suddenly she was retching.
“Oh, man,” Stone said in disgust. He handed her a plastic bag, and York fumbled it open, and pushed her face into it.
As she heaved, a greenish sphere, about the size of a tennis ball, came floating up out of the bag. It was shimmering, and complex pulsations crossed its surface.
York watched in awe. Maybe I ought to film this. It was a demonstration of fluid mechanics, in the absence of gravity; she wondered if the wave patterns, dominated by surface tension, could be predicted by computer.
The glob of vomit split in two. One half headed toward the wall, and the other made straight for Gershon.
“Ah, shit,” Gershon said, and he tried to squirm out of the way.
The glob hit him in the chest, with a soft impact; it immediately collapsed and spread out over his suit, as flat as a fried egg. Surface tension again, York thought absently.
“Oh, Jesus,” Gershon said. “Oh, shit.”
Stone reached for wet wipes, and passed some to Gershon. “Come on, man. It might have been any of us. We’ve got to get this place cleaned up.”
So they began chasing around the cabin, hunting down bits of vomit with paper towels and plastic bags.
Once her stomach awareness had receded a little, York found, oddly, that it wasn’t actually so unpleasant. It was a little like chasing butterflies.
“NC One phasing burn,” Stone said. He held down the thrust control, watching his instruments.
The burn felt tight and rattly to York. She was shoved into her couch again; the acceleration was low, but crisp.
Through her window she could see vapor venting from attitude control thruster nozzles; the vents looked like fountains of
ice crystals, the particles receding from the walls of the craft in precise straight lines.
The burn was taking place over the nightside of Earth. The planet pulled away; it was as if she were rising above a floor of dark, frosted glass. The continents were outlined by chains of brilliant dots, like streetlights seen from the air. But those dots weren’t streetlights; they were towns.
She twisted in her seat and looked ahead, toward the limb of the planet.
She could see the airglow layer, the bright layer of ionized oxygen at the top of the atmosphere, a fine line that was like a false sunrise. And then, as she watched, a sliver of sky turned blue and spread along the horizon. More colors came up, coalescing around a bright patch that was the rising sun, a spectrum that washed around the curve of Earth. The light of the dawn reached her through the layer of atmosphere; for a brief moment she saw the shadows of the clouds streaming across the orange surface of the sea.
Then the sun rose high enough to illuminate the tops of the clouds. The sea turned to crimson, and a wash of pale blue and white spread from the horizon toward her.
On a whim, she dug into a pocket of her pressure garment and pulled out the handful of grass which Vladimir Viktorenko had given her. She held it in her palm and rubbed it gently; it gave off a sweet aroma, like a herb. It was polin, a kind of wormwood, common all over the Kazakhstan steppe.
Stone finished the burn. His push-button control, released, popped back out of the panel on its spring. “Two hundred seven feet per second,” he said.
“Right on the wire,” Gershon murmured. “One hundred ninety-five times two hundred zero one.”
Young called up, “Copy your burn, Ares. You are two hundred fifty miles from the stack, and closing.”
“Copy, John. Preparing for NC Two…”
The crew had arrived in orbit with half the Ares cluster: their Apollo Command and Service Modules, the Mars Excursion Module — the MEM — and the Mission Module, their habitat for the journey. The rest of the cluster — the main injection booster and its huge fuel tanks — had already been placed in orbit and assembled, ready for them to dock with it.
The Mission Module was a squat cylinder, with the Apollo a slim, silvery cylinder-cone attached to its front, and the MEM — a fatter, truncated cone — stuck on the back. Fixed to the base of the MEM’s shroud was an Orbital Maneuvering Module, a fat doughnut fitted with a modified Apollo Service Module propulsion system. The OMM would be discarded before they docked with the booster cluster. But first Stone had to use the OMM in a series of four burns, to chase the booster cluster around the sky.
Stone announced: “Ready for NCC.”
“Copy,” Young said. “Ninety miles and closing.”
The corrective burn was crisp and short, a brief hiss.
Stone murmured, “Natalie, you ought to be able to see the booster by now. Right out front.”
York pressed her face to the window. The brief burns were placing Ares on segments of successively wider orbits; following the new orbits, Ares would eventually overtake the booster stack.
The craft was noticeably higher than when they had first been injected into orbit; the curvature of the Earth was much more pronounced, and she was able to see complete landmasses, speckled with cloud.
Suddenly it was there: a pencil, gleaming silver, hanging over the dipping horizon.
“I have it.”
“That’s a relief,” said Stone drily. “Okay, Houston, I’m going for the twenty-eight feet per second coelliptic combination burn.”
“Copy, Phil.”
Another sharp rattle.
Young said, “Slight underburn that time, Ares. One point six feet per second.”
“Copy that,” said Gershon, and he clucked at Stone in mock disapproval.
Young said, “Your orbit is now ten miles under the booster’s. Range sixty-three miles and closing.”
“Rog,” Stone said. “Going for terminal phase initiation.” York could hear solenoids clatter as Stone worked the push-button controls of the reaction control clusters. “How about that. Right down Route One.”
“Good burn, Ares,” Young said. “You’re closing at one hundred thirty-one feet per second.”
Stone went through two more corrections, and five sharp braking maneuvers. Then, maybe half a mile from the booster, he took the Apollo on a short, angular inspection sweep. The reaction control systems bit sharply, rattling York against her restraint.
York watched the cluster roll with silent grace past her window.
The booster cluster was squat, pregnant with fuel. Its heart was a fat MS-II booster, a Saturn second stage, modified to serve as an orbital injector. Fixed to the front of the MS-II was an MS-IVB, a modified Saturn third stage, a narrower cylinder. To either side of the MS-II were fixed the two External Tanks, fat, silvery cylinders as long and as wide as the MS-II stage itself. The supplementary tanks carried more than two million pounds of liquid oxygen and hydrogen, propellant Ares would need to break clear of Earth orbit.
The MS-II and its tanks looked like three fat sausages, side by side, with the slimmer pencil shape of the MS-IVB protruding from the center. The rest of the Ares stack — the Mission Module, MEM, and Apollo — would be docked onto the front of the MS-IVB to complete the assembly of the first Mars ship, a needle well over three hundred feet long.
The cluster was oriented so that it was pointing toward the sun; that way, boiloff of the cryogenic propellants inside the tanks was reduced. Shadows of struts and attitude thrusters lay long against the sunlit white-and-silver bellies of the fuel tanks. The booster’s underside was illuminated only by the soft blue and green of Earthlight. She could see the great flaps of the cluster’s solar panels, folded up against the sides of the MS-IVB stage like wings; the panels would be unfurled when Ares was safely launched on its trajectory to Mars. There was the bold red UNITED STATES stenciled against the side of the MS-II, and the finer lettering along the long thin protective flaps masking the solar panels, and the NASA logo; and she could make out the support struts and attachment pins which held the External Tanks in place against the flanks of the MS-II, and the gold-gleaming mouths of the MS-II’s four J-2S engines, upgrades of the engines which had pushed Apollo to the Moon.
To assemble this much mass in Earth orbit had taken all of nine Saturn VB flights over the last five years — half of them manned. The booster stages and their tanks had been flown up and assembled more or less empty, and then pumped full of gas from tanker modules. The cluster was an exercise in enhanced Apollo-Saturn technology, of course, and the essence of its design went all the way back to the 1960s. But NASA had had to develop a raft of new techniques to achieve it: the assembly in orbit of heavy components, the long-term storage of supercold fuels, in-orbit fueling.
Sailing over the Earth, brilliantly lit by the unimpeded sunlight, the booster stack was complex, massive, new-looking, perfect, like a huge, jeweled model. Once they’d docked, she wouldn’t see the cluster from outside again like this for a year. Not until, she realized with a jolt, she receded from it in the MEM, in orbit around Mars.
Stone stretched, raising his arms above his head and reverse-arching his back, so that he floated up out of his frame couch. His long limbs unfolded with evident relief; he really did look too tall to be an astronaut, York thought.
He said, “It’s been a long day already. What say we have ourselves some lunch before we proceed with the docking? If you can take it, Natalie.”
Food? Now? “Sure,” she said. “I’m fine.”
“Rager,” said Gershon. He climbed out of his couch. He moved in microgravity as if he’d been born to it; he just floated up out of his couch, pushed at the instrument panel in front of him, and went swimming around like an eel.
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 standa
rd of cuisine would improve, York knew. But while they were stuck inside the 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 translunar 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.
Monday, April 13, 1970
MANNED SPACECRAFT CENTER, HOUSTON
Chuck Jones snapped his visor closed 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, Tones 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?”
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