Voyage n-1

by Stephen Baxter

  It was the first time Conlig had met Josephson in the flesh. The assistant administrator gave off the aura of sleek, bureaucratic competence, which came over on TV. Every inch the organization man. In his early forties, and with that small face perched on a long neck, that prematurely high forehead, the thick spectacles, and those rapid, decisive movements, Josephson was like some tall, flightless bird.

  But his dry words connected with Conlig; suddenly it was an intense, electric moment for him. My God. He’s serious. We’re in real trouble here, it’s genuinely possible that these bastards could close us down. And you can bet your life that if they do, none of us working on NERVA would be allowed within a thousand miles of whatever new program they turn to. Conlig’s whole career — everything, all his self-belief — funneled through that one moment in time, that decision point. If I say the wrong thing now, my professional life will be over. Because there will never be another NERVA project; not for me.

  “Now.” Josephson had finished his preamble. He swiveled his head and stared at each of them. “Sum up. I want you to tell me where you are, and what your prospects for success are. I want the truth as you see it; this isn’t the moment for false pride. The whole program depends on us making the right decision.” He glared at Udet. “How about you first, Hans?”

  The old German sat up straight in his chair. “The truth, Tim? The truth, as you can tell from the reports, is that NERVA, at this stage of its development, is in trouble. We haven’t been able to sustain a single worthwhile burn yet…” In his clipped, accented, slightly imprecise English, with its bizarre overlay of Alabama drawl, Udet began to go through NERVA’s myriad problems — pump stresses, nozzle hot spots — and the steps the teams were taking to resolve them.

  “So you see,” Udet finished up, “the NERVA is indeed not worth a snap, today. But” — and he leaned forward, fixing Josephson with a glare — “neither was the F-1, the Saturn’s great first-stage engine, at a similar stage in its development, back in ’62 or ’63. If anything, the prospects were worse. There we had combustion instability problems; there the damn things kept exploding on us. But we were allowed to stay on the case, Tim. We got on with our work. And we solved the problems, so much so that the Saturn V has never suffered a single significant engine failure.

  “It is the same now. We do not need an alternative program. With NERVA we face problems: yes, of course we do. But they are only engineering issues. We have never let such issues intimidate us before, and we will not now.” As he spoke, Conlig thought, a kind of subliminal message was radiating out of him at Josephson. When you look at me you are looking at von Braun himself. My engines are heroes. We got you to the Moon, we can get you to Mars. Trust my judgment, and allow me to proceed with my work….

  Conlig longed to be in Santa Susana — or better still, back in Nevada, at Jackass Flats, in the still emptiness of the desert. He longed to get away from all the politicking, and back to the engineering.

  He thought of Natalie.

  His relationship with Natalie was a kind of nagging ache on the fringe of his awareness. He knew she wasn’t happy. Damn it, neither was he. But just then there just wasn’t room in his head to think about it. Maybe in a couple of years, when NERVA had dug itself out of the hole, he -

  Josephson was looking at him. His cue to perform.

  Slowly, haltingly, with none of Udet’s Prussian-aristocrat fluency, Conlig began to speak.

  He described the steps being taken to reduce the latest cavitation and hydrogen-graphite corrosion problems, and the difficulties they were having with the way the intense radiation was making capacitance gauges produce erroneous hydrogen tank measurements. And so forth. But, he told Josephson, the team was hopeful nevertheless of getting to the first extended burn and full system test soon, and the rigs were demonstrating that the design would hold up under the vibration and shock to be expected during a flight…

  As he spoke, he couldn’t tell how well he was doing.

  Josephson listened without comment. Then he turned to Bert Seger.

  The program director had been sitting in with the NERVA people over the last week, poking around Santa Susana and the other sites, evidently figuring out for himself what the prospects were. He sat facing Josephson, whiplash-thin, with his trademark carnation glowing on his buttonhole, just above the crucifix pin there.

  Briskly, Seger summarized his own view of the various problems. “Tim, I don’t know what the hell shape our schedule for NERVA is going to be in when we get through the current replan. What’s hamstringing us is the safety precautions; we have to drown and dismantle each damn rig after every bitty problem. I’m not saying we should skip the safety stuff; of course not. But we’re going to have to plan realistically for every milestone in the program from now on. More realistically than we have up to now. But—” A pause.

  “Yes, Bert?”

  “You’ve got some good people out there, Tim. Both ours and the contractor’s; some of our best. And they’re doing their damnedest to make this thing fly. I recommend we stay with this horse, Tim; don’t think about backing another.”

  Josephson listened in glassy silence. “All right. Thank you, Bert, gentlemen. You’ve said pretty much what I expected you to say. I think I have to back your judgment, your faith in this balky machine of yours, this NERVA. I’ll keep on going in to bat for you. But I hope you’ve heard what I’ve told you today. Bert, I want you to pull together a coherent status summary I can pass up the line. And I want to see a new schedule out of your people, Hans: a credible schedule. And I want to see you adhering to it, from now on.”

  Those tough words, delivered in a flat monotone, seemed at odds with Josephson’s dry, file-clerk appearance. Conlig felt restless, eager to get out of here.

  As they were walking out of the door, Josephson called Bert Seger back. Conlig could hear Josephson distinctly. “I want you to ride herd on these assholes, Bert. Don’t take any more bullshit. Ride herd, and make them fix this nuclear skyrocket of theirs…”

  We don’t need to be told, Conlig thought, as he followed the others through the carpeted corridors.

  When he got out of the building, despite the humid heat outside, Conlig felt a surge of relief; prickles of sweat broke out over his forehead. It was like being let out of school. Fucking bureaucrats.

  Now, at any rate, he could get back to work: start expending energy once more, and relieve the huge anxiety that was knotted up inside him. January 1977-January 1978

  Her application to NASA took a full year to resolve itself. And yet, once started, the process had a kind of inevitability about it, a grinding logic.

  A couple of weeks after her first application, she got a telegram from the National Academy of Sciences. They wanted more information: a fuller rйsumй, reprints of published papers, a five-hundred-word essay on experiments she would like to conduct on the surface of Mars.

  She complied. She wrote about her ideas on outflow channels, and on searching for water under the Martian regolith, and what that would mean for the future colonization of the planet.

  She shaved her essay to exactly five hundred words; she’d had previous dealings with government agencies, and she knew that breaking the smallest rule might cost her her chance.

  She wasn’t taking the application too seriously, in the privacy of her own mind. But she wanted to get as far as she could: maybe put herself in a position where she could give herself a choice of pursuing that crazy option — a career in the space program — or not.

  York read in Science that fewer than a thousand scientists sent their names in response to the National Academy of Sciences flyer: far fewer — according to the press — than NASA had been hoping for.

  York could understand that. A scientist’s career was brief, in terms of productive years: the peak time was late twenties to early thirties. Right where York was. Losing that time could be very damaging, in terms of a long-term career.

  And scientist recruits had been given a rough eno
ugh ride by NASA in the past. Not one of the first batch of scientist-astronauts, who’d signed up in 1965, had made it to the Moon with Apollo.

  You’d have to be crazy to risk your career, your reputation, on the slim chance of a flight into space someday, with an organization of engineers and pilot jocks like NASA.

  Of course you would.

  A few weeks after submitting her essay she received a letter from the Academy.

  She wasn’t rejected yet.

  She had passed their preliminary screening, as regards age, height, and health, and she was scientifically qualified for the program, with proven expertise in a relevant field. She was sent more forms to complete: an application for federal employment, an aeromedical survey form designed for Air Force pilots, several others.

  And she was invited to go for medical examinations at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas.

  To the lair of the hero test pilots! Jesus. I’m getting close.

  Texas, as she descended toward it, struck her as a pancake-flat plain. It was a hot June day; stepping out of the plane to walk the few yards to the terminal building was like walking through a furnace.

  She met the other candidates at the Best Western where they’d been lodged. They intimidated the hell out of her. There was a chemistry department chair from Caltech; a Princeton M.D. who was also a Ph.D. candidate in physiology; a physics professor from Cornell; a Ph.D. physiologist who was also a jet pilot; an M.D. who was also a jet pilot. And so on. It was obvious that the “scientists” whom NASA was considering largely had “operational” bents, too; they were mostly pilot-scientist hybrids.

  York was the only woman.

  Jesus. White male pilots with professorships. What chance do I have?

  The candidates congregated at lunch and over dinner. The men organized trips to the Alamo, in downtown San Antonio. York kept away from those macho gatherings and tried not to let herself get depressed.

  On the first morning of the tests, she had to start at six o’clock Texas time, which was 4 A.M. Berkeley time. So that was the first of her handicaps. She couldn’t even get a coffee; she was supposed to fast until lunch for the purposes of the tests.

  The tests were going to last all week.

  The first test was for glucose tolerance. Blood was drained from her arms while she forced down incredibly sweet glucose liquid.

  Then she was subjected to eye tests: there was an Ishihara color-blindness test, and a photograph of her retina taken by a flash blazing into her eye. She had to drink a liter of lukewarm water, after which a weight was placed on her eyeball, to measure the fluid excreted.

  There were internal medicine tests. She had to lie for an hour inside a Faraday cage, a metal box that excluded electric fields, while a cardiogram was taken. York felt like a chimpanzee in a zoo. Then she was strapped into a device fitted with a parachute harness, designed to hang her while the blood pooled to her feet. She had to hyperventilate until blackout symptoms began to show, little dots darting around her vision.

  Then — brutally quickly — she was given a Master heart test, where she climbed and descended stairs while holding electrodes to her chest. At the end of the test she had to fit her lips around a mouthpiece so her exhaled carbon dioxide could be collected for volume measurements.

  There were tests of her vestibular system, the balance apparatus of her middle ear. Hot and cold water was poured into her ears to confuse her vestibular canals, making her dizzy. Doctors peered into her eyes, watching how long it took her eyelids to stop flickering.

  Later, she was told to walk in a straight line through a darkened room. The idea was to test for vestibular imbalances. When the lights came up she found she’d drifted maybe a yard to the left of the room’s center line.

  The tilt chair was another vestibular test. It looked a little like an electric chair, mounted on a rotating platform in the middle of a pitch-dark room. She was strapped into the chair, and electrodes were fixed to track her eye motion. The chair was spun around, once every three seconds, and tipped back and forth. Every so often they would reverse the direction of tilt and rotation. It was like a carousel ride, run by lunatics; every tilt made York feel as if she wanted to upchuck, but she was determined she wasn’t going to give those assholes that satisfaction.

  She had to give urine samples at half-hour intervals, for three hours; she had to drink quarts of water to generate the raw material. She had to give blood six times. In the end the veins in both her arms collapsed from repeated pricking.

  In the midst of the physicals, she went through psychological tests: playing with blocks, drawing self-portraits, completing a five-hundred-question multiple-choice personality test. There were IQ tests, Rorschach inkblot tests, memory tests, vocabulary tests, tests of math and reading.

  She went through a written paper on her “personal values,” which sought to examine the motives she had for going into space. She labored over the fifty questions, covering possible motives like money and fame, the good of mankind, and the thrill of it all, as well as the possibility of scientific discovery.

  On her first pass through, York tried to answer honestly. Of course, it’s the scientific discovery They’re selecting mission specialists here! What the hell else do they expect? But then she wondered if she ought to try to be smarter. It would be a bad thing to seem unbalanced, obsessed about the science to all else. Any astronaut, even a specialist, was going to have to help out with the chores. And besides, the Mars crew was going to have to be presentable to the press, projecting the right all-American, NASA-tradition, John Glenn — wholesome image.

  She went through her scores again, trying to anticipate what the selectors might be looking for.

  Then she figured that all the other candidates would have worked this out as well and would similarly be doctoring their answers.

  She went through a third time, trying to take that into account…

  An earnest young man took her through a scatter chart rendered by a computer. He sounded puzzled by the results: here she showed herself to be dedicated to a single goal, there flexible and capable of balancing multiple objectives; over here the results said she was strongly self-motivated, but there she was coming up as happiest working with a team… and so forth. It was a complex, meaningless dance.

  She gritted her teeth and tried not to say anything to make it worse. She wondered how much all this was costing.

  One morning she was given barium sulfate for breakfast, to provide contrast in X-rays of her gall bladder. Another time she was provided with a tritium solution, so her percentage of body fat could be measured. She took pills which gave her diarrhea, and which caused her piss to come out green. In the EEG test, eleven needles were poked half an inch into her scalp.

  Even her teeth were checked over. A cheerful, inane dentist tut-tutted over her mouth’s state of disrepair, and he seemed to take a lot of comfort in telling her in great detail how much preventative dental work she’d have to endure. You don’t want toothache or an abscess halfway across the Solar System, ho ho!

  In the course of a healthy life, York had had hardly any experience of hospitals. The doctors here were Air Force, specialists in aerospace medicine. In her ignorance, she had expected the tests to be tough. In fact what they hit her with was so far beyond her experience that it scared the hell out of her. The tests struck her as ordeals: barbaric, brutal, often ridiculous, barely scientific.

  The final test, on the Friday, was a sigmoidoscopy. She had to give herself an enema. Then she lay on a bench while a woman doctor shoved a rod up her rear, straightening out the intestines, probing farther and farther.

  York was exhausted, angry, humiliated, frightened. It took a powerful effort of will to submit herself to this last invasion.

  Before San Antonio, she’d treated the whole thing casually. An indulgence for Ben, maybe. An adventure. An amusing battle of wits between herself and NASA, in which she would see how far she could get before they found her out.

  Now, all that
had changed. She didn’t want the investment in pain and humiliation to be wasted.

  Withdrawing her application became unthinkable.

  Her test results, when they came, showed her medical history to be “unremarkable.” She was “in no apparent medical or psychological distress.”

  Comforting, she thought. Well worth a week in medical hell.

  Then she was called to Houston itself for an interview.

  The plane landed at Houston Intercontinental. York made her way into the terminal, and, as she’d been instructed, found the Continental Airline Presidents’ Club. She faced a plain glass door with a one-way mirror. When she knocked, the door was opened by a NASA protocol officer, a short, dapper man in a blazer. She identified herself, and he hurried her inside — out of sight of the press? — and offered her a diet soda.

  When all the candidates had arrived — it was the San Antonio group — they were to be taken in a limousine to the Nassau Bay Hilton.

  When she stepped out of the air-conditioned airport building the August heat hit her in the face, moist and enclosing, as if the ground was steaming. Although the afternoon was well advanced, the sun seemed to be directly overhead.

  The limousine worked its way south, toward downtown, on I-59, and then east and south around 610, the Loop. The Nassau Bay Hilton was close to JSC, more than twenty miles from the city center, out on I-45.

  Houston was hot and flat, sprawling, evidently very new. The roads were well maintained and modern. Huge, colorful billboards battered at her eyes, lining the interstate. Many of the signs and ads were in Spanish; after all, Texas had nearly been part of Mexico.

  There were few indications of the presence of the space program here: inflatable rockets in the used-car lots, a “Tranquillity Plaza” shopping mall, the basketball team called the Rockets.