She heard a noise; she turned.
Ralph Gershon was in the wardroom, wearing a T-shirt and shorts. He was just floating, with a plastic can of Coke in one hand and a silver-gray lithium hydroxide canister in the other. The lith canisters were used to scrub carbon dioxide out of the recycled air, and they had to be checked and changed regularly. The familiar red-and-white Coke can was pretty much the normal size and shape, except for a baby-style microgravity dispenser at the top.
Gershon held a finger up to his lips — evidently Stone was still asleep — and he held the can out toward her.
She shook her head. “Too gassy.”
“Yeah,” he whispered back. “Coke paid a million bucks to get these cans on the Mission Module, but they just can’t get the damn mix right.” He started to juggle with the lith and Coke cans, sending them spinning and oscillating from hand to hand. York had already observed that microgravity was like a three-dimensional playground for the guys; as soon as they’d gotten into the Mission Module’s big workshop area Stone and Gershon had started doing cartwheels and loops and spins, throwing bits of gear to each other like Frisbees.
Gershon’s eyes kept straying to her chest.
She resisted the temptation to fold her arms across her T-shirt. Well, that’s it. She had a stock of sports bras, and in future she’d be wearing one every time she left her sleep cubicle. No significant relating on this damn mission.
Gershon looked away and sipped at his Coke.
“What’s with the lith cylinders?”
He shrugged. “You know me. I catnap. I’m not sleepy now; I figured I might as well get ahead of myself.” He cackled. “You know, I even got a little shut-eye during the docking.”
That was true. And, with York still unable to rest, there he was, drinking Coke and ogling her chest and getting ahead of his chores.
“You’re an asshole, Ralph,” she said with passion.
He grinned at her. “I know how you’re feeling, by the way.”
“You do?”
“Sure. Stuffy head, right?”
“I know what it is. Zero G. Blood gathering in my chest and my head—”
“Look, if it’s really bad, you should take a scop/Dex.”
“I’ll be okay.”
“Suit yourself. What else? You got a sore back, right?”
“Yeah.” She rubbed at her lower spine. “How did you know?”
“You want to know where that comes from? I’ll tell you. In your bag, you’re never perfectly stable. There’s always a little bit of movement. You drift this way and that. And you know what your body does in response?”
“Tell me.”
“Your toes clench. Right up, into tiny little balls.”
“Why?”
“Because here we are flying to Mars, but we’re still goddamn apes who think we’re going to fall out of a tree any minute. Anyhow, that’s where the back pains come from.”
“So what do I do?”
“Just unclench.” He grinned. “Chill out and unclench. And, Natalie. Use eye masks and earplugs if you have to. What the hell. I won’t tell.”
She went back to her closet. Maybe I’ll give up on trying to sleep and follow Gershon’s example. Get ahead of the day. But she climbed back into her sleeping bag, and it felt warm, and she turned off her overhead light and stretched out again.
She made a deliberate effort to uncurl her toes. Immediately, her back felt easier. Hey, what do you know? The asshole was right.
She closed her eyes.
Wednesday, May 24, 1972
MOSCOW
The United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics:
Considering the role which the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. play in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space for Peaceful Purposes;
Striving for a further expansion of cooperation between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space for Peaceful Purposes;
Noting the positive cooperation which the parties have already agreed to in this area;
Desiring to make the results of scientific research gained from the Exploration and Use of Outer Space for Peaceful Purposes available for the benefit of the peoples of the two countries and of all the peoples of the world;
Taking into consideration the provisions of the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and other Celestial Bodies, as well as the Agreement on the Rescue of Astronauts, the Return of Astronauts, and the Return of Objects Launched into Outer Space;
In accordance with the agreement between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on Exchanges and Cooperation in Scientific, Technical, Educational, Cultural and other fields, signed 11 April 1972, and in order to develop further the principles of mutually beneficial cooperation between the two countries; Have agreed as follows…
ARTICLE 3 (of 6)
The parties have agreed to carry out projects for developing compatible rendezvous and docking systems of United States and Soviet manned spacecraft and stations in order to enhance the safety of manned flights in space and to provide the opportunity for conducting joint scientific experiments in the future. It is planned that the first experimental flight to test these systems be conducted during the second half of the decade, envisaging the docking of a United States Apollo-type spacecraft with a Soviet Salyut-type space station, and/or a Soviet Soyuz-type spacecraft with a United States Skylab-type space station, with visits of astronauts in each other’s spacecraft and stations. The implementation of these projects will be carried out on the basis of principles and procedures which will be developed in accordance with the summary of results of the meeting between representatives of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences on the question of developing compatible systems for rendezvous and docking of manned spacecraft and space stations of the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R., dated 6 April 1972…
Source: Extract from Understanding Signed by President Richard M. Nixon and Chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers A. N. Kosygin. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard M. Nixon, 1972 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1972)
Saturday, October 28, 1972
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY
Ben Priest called her after midnight.
“It’s over, Natalie. I thought you’d like to know. We lost Mariner.”
She sat up in bed. “Oh? How come?”
“They’d just taken more images of Tharsis and Syrtis Major, and the pictures were on the tape; but then Mariner had to position itself to point its high-gain antenna at Earth to play back the pictures, and — zippo. Nothing. Out of attitude gas. So we lost fifteen pictures.
“But what really pisses me,” he growled into the phone, “is that Mariner still has fuel on board; it’s just in the wrong place — in the retrorocket tanks, not the attitude control tanks. We could have run tubes to carry the retro stuff to the attitude control jets. If we’d done that, we might have another year of useful life out of Mariner.”
“But…”
“But it would have cost another thirty thousand bucks. Out of a hundred-rnillion-dollar mission. So we didn’t do it.”
“Oh, well, Ben. I guess nobody figured that Mariner would last so long anyhow. The basic mission plan was only ninety days.”
“Maybe. But if I’d known, I’d have paid up the thirty grand myself. And then the fuckers axed Viking!”
She had to laugh. “Come on, Ben. This isn’t like you. You’re the great Man-In-Space hero. That thirty thousand bucks has probably gone to pay your salary anyhow.” That was basically true; the unmanned scientific exploration of Mars had been scaled right back, with the savings being pulled into the manned effort.
“Well, I sometimes get my sense of priority back, Natalie. It’s not the lost year that bugs me, you know; it’s, just those fifteen pictures. There they are, sitting on that tape, even now�
�
“We had to send up a last command. To make Mariner turn off its radio transmitter.”
Oh, God. The poor, brave little probe. She pushed her pillow against her face until she was sure she wouldn’t guffaw. After all, it was only a couple of days since she’d called Ben in a similar mood herself, after an evening spent poring over the latest polls showing Nixon heading for a landslide over McGovern. “How long before Mariner’s orbit decays?”
“Oh, fifty years.”
“Well, maybe we’ll have a manned mission by then. You’ll get there yourself, Ben. Maybe you’ll be able to retrieve your pictures. And maybe pick up the old spacecraft itself; who knows?”
She heard him laugh. “Sure. Why, we’ll bring it back and hang it up in the Smithsonian where it belongs.”
“What next for you, Ben?”
She heard him sigh. “Apollo-N. The test flights for the NERVA. Some time in Tomorrowland.”
“At least you and Mike might get to see more of each other. Maybe I’ll see more of the two of you, in fact.”
“Perhaps. But the flights are looking a long way off, Natalie.”
“Now I think I ought to get some sleep, Ben.”
“Okay. Good night, Natalie.”
“Yeah. You, too, Ben.”
She lay in the darkness, wide-awake.
Mike wasn’t there, of course, or anywhere within five hundred miles of her. He was losing himself in the NERVA developments. As Ben had hinted, that damned project was slipping again.
Anyway, she realized, things hadn’t been quite the same between the two of them since that day in 1969 when she’d gone out to Jackass Flats with Mike and Ben.
She’d tried to talk it through with Mike. It had gone beyond a simple argument for her, beyond the kind of sparky debating exercise they’d enjoyed so many times in the past. NERVA seemed to symbolize, to her, a lot of her unease about the way the country was being run. And eventually that seemed to get through to Mike. Impatiently, he’d shown her schemes to trap the venting hydrogen, to bury the expended cores more deeply…
Somehow that didn’t help. Obviously Mike was smart enough to understand the issues that concerned her, but it was pretty clear he didn’t care; not as much as he cared about a successful project, anyhow.
She loved Mike, she believed. And he loved her. But, she thought, their disparate lives, their different perspectives over the value of projects like NERVA, all of it was steadily pulling them apart.
They’d gone out to Jackass Flats, she recalled, just six months after they’d met. And that was all of three years ago. Maybe she should start regarding those first happy six months as the anomaly, not the norm.
Meanwhile, in March — four months into Mariner’s orbital survey — the first detailed maps of Mars had begun to appear from the U.S. Geological Survey people at Flagstaff. York had gotten hold of copies of those and pored over them.
Mars was very different from what anyone had expected.
Mars was asymmetrical. The whole of the southern hemisphere was swollen, the land lifted well above the datum level and heavily cratered. The northern hemisphere was mostly below the datum, and was a lot smoother than the south… but the north had Tharsis.
Tharsis was a bulge in the planet the size of southern Africa. It was as if a quarter of the whole surface of Mars had been lifted up by some colossal event. The bulge was surrounded by an array of cracks and grooves: to the east of Tharsis, in the Coprates region, a huge canyon system stretched nearly a quarter of the way around the circumference of the planet.
The ancient cratered terrain in the south was cut by gullies and channels which seemed to have been incised by running water. York was entranced by images of Moonlike craters, eroded by flash floods. But there was no sign of water on the surface, in the quantities needed to cut the gullies; maybe the water had escaped from the atmosphere, or was trapped under the surface.
It was what intrigued her about Mars, she’d decided, the mix of exposed, lunar terrain and Earthlike weathering, a combination that made up an extraordinary world: neither Earthlike nor lunar, but uniquely Martian.
But it had nothing to do with her.
The work she was doing, she’d long realized, was building up into a solid, if unspectacular career. She was becoming just another rock hound: her future was probably in commercial geology, and would be spent in messy oil fields, or mines. She could expect a life of heat, cold, rattlesnakes, cow pies, poison oak…
The prospect left her poleaxed with boredom.
She never got to see Mike. She wasn’t interested in her work. And, meanwhile, she spent her spare time imagining geologic traverses across the ancient, battered surface of Mars.
What it amounted to, she told herself with brutal frankness, was that her personal life had been on hold for, hell, years. Just like her professional life.
She felt a germ of a new resolution somewhere inside her, like a dust mote around which a new future might crystallize.
I have to get closer to this Mars stuff. And not for Mike, not even for Ben Priest. For me.
There might be a way. Maybe she could transfer into the Space Sciences Laboratory, right there at Berkeley, that big white building on top of Grizzly Peak.
She got out of bed, dug out her loose-leaf folder of Mars photos, and began to study the eroded craters again.
Thursday, June 7, 1973
LYNDON B. JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, HOUSTON (FORMERLY MANNED SPACECRAFT CENTER)
Phil Stone was the first to understand Seger’s suggestion.
“My God,” he said. “You’re going to send us to the Moon. Aren’t you?”
“Yes. Yes, that’s right. That’s what I’m considering. I want to reassign your mission a Saturn V and send you to lunar orbit.”
Chuck Jones stared at Seger, astonishment crinkling up his squat face. “Like hell you will.”
For long seconds, the three of them sat in silence.
Stone felt stunned; there in that sterile, mundane office, on an ordinary Thursday morning, it was impossible to absorb such news.
Skylab B, the second Earth-orbital Saturn Wet Workshop, was to have been Stone’s first flight into space. He’d already been training on the science and operational aspects of the mission for months. And Seger was thinking of changing it all around and sending him to the Moon? Jesus.
Seger played with the carnation in his lapel. “You got to look at the bigger picture. The NERVA is slipping again, so its program of test flights is being cut. And that’s freed up a Saturn V. And we need to use it, or we’ll lose it. And I want to use it to send you boys to lunar orbit.”
Stone frowned. “It’s a man-rated Saturn V, for God’s sake. It’s already built. How can we lose it?”
Seger shrugged. “We may have built the thing, but we haven’t yet spent the money to make it fly.”
“We can’t go to the fucking Moon,” Chuck Jones said. “We’re still waiting on the J-2S.” Lunar-orbital workshops were planned, but a few years down the road, following extensive modifications to the S-IVB: the upgraded J-2S main engine, additional payload capacity, a self-ullaging system, electrical heating blankets and Mylar insulation, additional batteries, upgraded electronics… “The fucking S-IVB doesn’t have the power to inject itself into lunar orbit.”
“No, it doesn’t. But it doesn’t need to. Look at this.” Seger had a glossy presentation on his desk; he handed them copies.
Stone looked quickly. It was a summary of an old McDonnell Douglas study called LASSO — Lunar Applications of a Spent S-IVB Stage (Orbital). It showed how Saturn components could be used to establish lunar orbit workshops of varying complexity and weight. It was full of cutaway isometric diagrams and color pictures and big bold bullet-point blocks of text, and — naturally, as it came from the manufacturers of the S-IVB — it was relentlessly optimistic: some of the projected dates were already in the past.
“Look at Baseline 1.” Seger pointed to sections of the presentation. “That shows how we
can take a workshop to lunar orbit without the J-2S upgrade, or any of the rest of it…”
A Saturn V would be launched looking superficially like those for the Apollo landing flights. But instead of a Lunar Module, the booster would carry an airlock module, fixed to the front of the third stage.
The S-IVB would send the spacecraft toward the Moon. Just like the landing missions. But, once exhausted, the third stage wouldn’t be discarded. The Apollo would decouple and dock with the empty stage via the airlock adapter. The stack would follow a long, lower-energy trajectory to the Moon: a day and a half more than the three-day landing flights. Then the Apollo Service Module’s main engine would be used to brake the whole stack into lunar orbit.
The empty stage would have the same weight and dynamic characteristics, roughly, as a loaded LM. So an Apollo would indeed be able to deliver it to lunar orbit. The only modifications needed for the S-IVB would be the usual passivation and neutralization kit — equipment to turn the stage from a dry fuel can into a working station — and equipment brackets and pallets. Enough supplies could be carried for a four-week stay in lunar orbit, and the station would be refurbished for later crews.
As he read, Stone began to see the feasibility of it. It could, he realized, be done. But…
“Why?”
Jones looked up from his own reading; Seger fixed Stone with a glare.
“Why what?”
“Why are we doing this, Bert? It’s just a stunt. We’ll have to cut out so much to save weight, we’ll be compromising a lot of our science objectives for Skylab B.”
“I know about the science, Phil. But we can send all that stuff up on the second crew flight, can’t we? And your flight will simply turn into a more limited engineering trip, with less emphasis on the science.” Seger was a thin, intense man, with black, slicked-back hair and an Irish darkness; Stone found him unnerving. “If you’re in my chair, Phil, you have to look at the benefits for the program as a whole. Beyond your one mission alone. Yes, it will be a stunt. But a hell of a stunt. It will put us right back on top of everything…”
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