Voyage n-1

by Stephen Baxter

  Her sentence fell apart as Stone threw the plane into a ferocious S-shaped curve. She was turned every which way, and the glowing landscape wheeled around the canopy.

  And then he took the plane into a straight dive, accelerating at the Gulf of Mexico. The ocean shone like a steel plate, far in front of her face.

  At twenty thousand feet Stone hauled the nose of the plane upward. The jets howled, and the Gs shoved her hard into her seat; her head was pushed into her shoulders, and her vision tunneled, walled by darkness.

  The T-38 leapt back up to the sky, and the light reverted to its deep purple.

  She tasted saliva at the back of her throat, sharp, like rusty iron. “Phil, I don’t feel so good.”

  “If you have to barf, take off your oxygen mask.”

  I would if I knew how.

  “And turn the mix in your mask to a hundred percent 02,” he said. “Turn on your cold air blower.”

  When she tried that, taking deep breaths of the oxygen, the pressure on her throat lessened.

  “Anyhow,” he said, “you wouldn’t want to miss this next part.”

  “Huh?”

  At forty-five thousand feet, Stone lit the afterburner. Over her shoulder York could see white condensate blossoming behind the T-38. She watched the airspeed climb up toward six hundred miles an hour, higher, higher.

  And through Mach 1. Jesus.

  There was the mildest of vibrations, and then the ride got a lot smoother. The noise of the jets died to a whisper; the plane was traveling so fast, York realized, it was outrunning its own sound.

  The cockpit was a little bubble of serenity, of cool, easy flying; meanwhile, she knew, sonic thunder was washing down on the ground below. A few feet ahead of her there was Stone inside his own canopy, the only living thing within miles of her, and around them the plane was a little isolated island of reality, gleaming paint and warm air and hard surfaces, up here in the mouth of the sky. She felt somehow closer to Stone, as if bonded to him.

  “How you doing now?” Stone asked, his intercom voice loud in the stillness.

  “Oh, good, Phil,” she said. “I’m good. This is—”

  “I know.” He glanced over his shoulder at her, his eyes concealed by his sunglasses. “And in orbit, you’ll fly twenty times as fast, many times higher. Maybe now you’ll understand better why some of us get so hooked on this stuff.”

  She grimaced. “Is my disapproval that obvious?”

  “To me it is. I don’t blame you. But you’ve got to learn to understand the other guy’s point of view.”

  Suddenly she felt defensive. “What do you care?”

  He laughed, evidently not taking offense. “More than you think, maybe. Natalie, I’ve seen you work around the Office. I think you have potential. I think we need people like you in the program. But you have to learn to work in a team.”

  He threw the plane suddenly into a new series of dives and barrel rolls.

  York pulled out her bag and sat in misery, staring at her knees, while the world wheeled around her.

  The T-38 approached the runway like a falling rock. The landing, when it came, was soft and quick.

  The techs helped York out of the cockpit. Her queasiness had gone already, but she felt disoriented, as if she had grown smaller, lighter; she felt oppressed by the heavy sky above her, the hot, moisture-laden air.

  Stone slapped her on the shoulder. “You did good,” he said.

  “I nearly threw up.”

  “But you didn’t. I told you you got potential, York.”

  “Yeah. Maybe.”

  Standing there on the mundane tarmac of Ellington, she looked up at the lidded clouds, remembered how it had been, in those few seconds, to be weightless. She let her hands drift up from her sides.

  Stone was watching her, observing, evaluating.

  Embarrassed, she tucked her helmet under her arm, nodded curtly to Stone, and headed for the personal gear room.

  Thursday, November 27, 1980

  TYURATAM COSMODROME, KAZAKHSTAN

  The sky was empty, a harsh blue. Beyond the launch facilities, the wind whipped sand across the nude, flat steppe. Bert Seger was glad he was safely tucked away behind the glass of that observation room, three miles from the pad.

  Behind him there was a murmur of conversation from the other guests — program managers, minor politicians, academicians, celebrities — who seemed more intent on the food and drink, which was lavish enough, and on pursuing whatever low-level political and diplomatic gains were still to be wrung out of this joint mission.

  Seger had binoculars around his neck; he raised them and fixed them on the launch complex itself.

  The N-1 booster stood tall on its pad. N for Nosityel — the Carrier. It sat on a porchlike structure at the lip of a flame pit. The mobile service structure had already been lowered; at three-quarters of an hour before liftoff the towers had been swung down through ninety degrees to the ground, leaving the booster exposed. The booster was a vertical line, out of place in the huge, horizontal landscape.

  Seger saw propellants vent from the N-1’s multiple stages, and flags of vapor smeared across the still, layered air. The lower three stages made up a slim, truncated cone, flaring at the base, and the upper stages and the spacecraft itself were an upright cylinder stacked on top of that. The upper stages alone were about the size and shape of a Saturn IB. And somewhere inside that complex, Seger knew, the Soyuz T-3 spacecraft was buried; and somewhere within that were two cosmonauts, sitting out the final minutes of their countdown.

  The whole thing looked like a piece of the Kremlin. Nobody could mistake an N-1 for an American design. But the N-1 was nevertheless the stepbrother of the Saturn, fathered by a group of postwar German exiles who’d built on the same Nazi technology taken to White Sands by von Braun and his people. Another child of the V-2.

  “Here.” Fred Michaels stood at his elbow; he held out a glass of vodka. “You look like you could use this.”

  Seger eyed the drink doubtfully. “Thanks, but I don’t encourage drinking on launch days, Fred.”

  “Drink. That’s an order. Bert, it’s their launch, not ours.”

  Seger forced himself to laugh and took the drink. “You’re right. I suppose I’m a control nut.”

  “I know the feeling. But you have to learn to relax, when there really isn’t a damn thing you can do to change the course of events.”

  Michaels was right, of course. The Soviets and Americans had exchanged mission control staff for this flight, with some American controllers being stationed at Kaliningrad. And there at Tyuratam the Americans had been let into the cosmodrome as far as this observation bunker. But that was the extent of it. There was no way Seger, or any of the American staff, could exert any influence over the way this launch developed.

  “I’m just glad they aren’t two of our boys up there,” he said. “I wouldn’t let this damn thing fly. Fred, we wouldn’t even man-rate the N-1.”

  Michaels, sleek, in control, dug his antique watch out of his vest pocket and checked the time. “So the Soviet space program is all hat and no horse, eh, Bert?”

  Seger sipped his drink. It was sour vodka, but the alcohol seemed to have no effect on him. “It’s not so funny when you know as much as we do, now, about the Soviets’ preparations for launch. They do a lot of checkout in their assembly building. But then there’s very little checkout once the thing gets to the pad. Hell, there’s hardly even any electronic monitoring gear there, and only a limited computer interface. It lets them get to a launch point faster, but at the cost of a hell of a lot of reliability. No wonder they suffered so many failures with this booster.

  “And did you know they’ve got a roll axis with pitch and yaw control only? That damn thing can’t control its own flight azimuth, and they have to swivel the whole support structure to align—”

  “Give me that in English, Bert.”

  “The Saturn V can steer itself into orbit, with its onboard computer. The N-1 can’
t. Depending on where they want to head, they have to point the thing…”

  This was the Soviets’ main cosmodrome, their nearest equivalent to Kennedy. It was lost in Soviet central Asia, a couple of hundred miles east of the Aral Sea;, where the Americans used the Atlantic as their firing range, the Soviets used the huge, empty heart of their country. The nearest town was Tyuratam, a small railway junction fifteen miles away, which had remained poor, shabby, and backward, despite the spectacular cosmonaut hotel planted in the middle of it.

  The launch facility in use today was isolated even from the rest of the cosmodrome, situated maybe twenty miles farther to the east. They’re taking no chances. And I don’t blame them.

  Seger felt cut off there, isolated, impotent. I’m nearer to the Chinese border than I am to Moscow, even.

  Well, he’d done what he could to make the joint mission work. He’d pushed through a lot of steps to try to make sure his American charges and their Soviet counterparts could work together effectively, and safely. For instance he’d soon realized that the language barrier went far beyond just the Russian-English gap, and he’d assigned “Russian Interface Officers,” to translate NASA jargon into plain English, which could then be translated by the Russian interpreters. And then there was the daily schedule. His mission-planning guy had come along to Russia last year loaded down with documents. His Soviet counterpart had shown up with a pencil. There just wasn’t any paper in these offices, for instance, there was only one copy of the Soyuz mission plan for the joint project, handwritten on long rolls of paper and taped up on the walls of the Soviet Mission Control in Kaliningrad. Seger couldn’t figure if it was some sinister Soviet thing about controlling information, or just a dearth of photocopiers.

  Now, showing on a TV monitor, there was a film of the two cosmonauts — Vladimir Viktorenko and Aleksandr Solovyov — taken earlier in the day. In their pressure suits, they were leaving their quarters and climbing aboard a bus. The bus looked like a tourist coach.

  Seger felt a pull inside him, a protective urge. He offered up a brief prayer for the safety of the cosmonauts, and he touched his crucifix lapel pin.

  Michaels observed that and raised an eyebrow.

  “You do need to take it easy, Bert. I figure you’re just going through — what do they call it? — culture shock. Hell, Bert, these aren’t our boys. We’re just going to have to accept the Soviets know what they’re doing, in their own sweet way. After all the N-1 seems to be getting there as a launch system. They’ve fired off two unmanned circumlunar Soyuz shots and brought them back to Earth. And we’ve got Muldoon, Bleeker, and Stone up there in lunar orbit waiting for their bird; the Soviets really, really don’t want to screw up with this shot.”

  “Maybe. I just wish they’d let some of our guys redesign their launch facilities a little bit.”

  Michaels guffawed. “That would have gone down very well. Anyway, we need some success, too, Bert. As you know well enough.”

  That was true, Seger realized.

  The TV played a snatch of music; it was bland, slow stuff, and a PR announcer said in clipped English that this was being played simultaneously to the Soyuz, as a relaxant for the cosmonauts. Good grief, Seger thought. It would be like being stuck in an elevator.

  And then, Seger saw from the timers, there was just a minute to go. He raised his binoculars.

  The electrical and propellant umbilicals fell away from the walls of the ship, and the N-1 stood alone: huge, clumsy, fragile. My God. It looks like boilerplate.

  Ignition came at four seconds.

  Smoke and light flooded from the broad base of the N-1, across the steppe, and fire billowed into the trenches beneath the ship.

  Seger watched as the glare built up. That broad first stage contained no less than thirty rocket engines, compared to five on a Saturn.

  The first few moments of launch were critical. Unlike Saturn, the N-1 was not held back for a controlled release while its thrust built up. Rather, it simply lifted from the pad once its thrust exceeded its weight. And there was no provision for engine shutdown.

  The huge stack lifted, impossibly, on its pillar of fire. It was like watching a cathedral raise itself off the ground.

  Once the stack was more than its own length from the ground, the N-1 accelerated quickly. Following its flight path it tipped over, its base an explosion of light.

  Then the sound reached the observation bunker, and the window before Seger rattled; the light blazed into the room, as if a small sun had arisen from the steppe. He felt the throb of the rockets deep in his gut.

  Michaels leaned over to Seger. “It seems to be going okay.”

  “Max-Q,” Seger shouted back over the noise. “It has to get through max-Q.” The point of maximum aerodynamic pressure was the point at which problems had occurred on previous flights. It was the early failure of the N-1 which had, essentially, lost the race to the Moon for the Soviets. For example the last N-1 trial before Apollo 11, in 1969, had suffered such violent vibration that an internal line had come loose. Liquid oxygen had sprayed through the body of the rocket. Engines exploded; turbopumps tore themselves apart… The explosion was equivalent to a tactical atomic bomb, so powerful it had been detected by American reconnaissance satellites.

  The timers on the wall said sixty-six seconds.

  “I think that’s it,” Seger breathed. “The engines will be throttling back up to full power.”

  “So they’re through the worst of it?”

  “Oh, no. No, with this bird it isn’t over until the fat lady sings, Fred.”

  Michaels clapped him on the shoulder and went to talk to the other guests.

  Seger stayed at the window long after the others had moved away, and the rattling of the launch had dispersed. He watched the dwindling light in the sky, and counted through the launch events in his head. Mission Elapsed Time [Day/Hr:Min:Sec] Plus 121/12:23:34

  Gershon floated out of the docking adapter and into the Command Module’s forward access tunnel. He emerged headfirst at the top of Apollo’s conical cabin. He did a neat somersault in the air, translating from the “up” of the Mission Module to the “down” of the Apollo.

  To Gershon, this inversion was one of the strangest aspects of the whole trip.

  He closed the hatch behind him, dogging it loosely.

  He settled into Stone’s seat, at the left-hand side of the cabin, and stuck his checklist to a Velcro square on the control panel in front of him. He had a little foil tube of orange juice in the top pocket of his Beta-cloth coveralls, and he dug that out, pulled out the straw, and took a sip. He adjusted his headset and made sure he had a working comms link to the rest of the Ares cluster — both York and Stone responded from intercoms in the Mission Module — and he fired off a call to Fred Haise, who was the capcom on the ground. He didn’t wait for his signal to crawl across the Solar System to bring him a reply before beginning work, however.

  He began to power up Apollo’s systems.

  During the transfer to Mars and back, all but essential systems were quiescent on Apollo. There were umbilical connections through the docking system which hooked up Apollo to the main solar panel arrays, so Apollo didn’t have to run on its own power. Every fifty days or so, Gershon was supposed to go through this routine of checking Apollo’s systems. He was making sure they would be working when it came time for the crew to ride Apollo home, back down through the air of Earth.

  The chore took maybe 40 percent of his attention.

  He dug a cassette tape out of his pocket and slid it into the deck forward of Stone’s flight station. The sound of violins — a light, delicate phrase — came drifting out into the cabin’s thin air. Gershon closed his eyes, and let the music wash over him. Mozart: Symphony Number 40. Exquisite. He felt himself relax, and even the cabin around him started to feel bigger.

  Nam vets were supposed to live up to the image of spaced-out Jimi Hendrix fans. And in Houston, image was an important thing: when you had ten guys, with equall
y good qualifications, competing for one seat, intangibles like image could win you a flight, or lose you one.

  So Gershon kept his Mozart to himself.

  He was alone in the cabin as he worked through his checklist. Closing the hatch was strictly against regs, and he had to clear it with Stone every time he went in there. But Apollo was one of the few places in the whole cluster where you could get a little genuine privacy. Stone understood. You had to have a little space, a little time to yourself.

  It was strange to think that there were only three human beings within tens of millions of miles of this point, and yet here they were cooped up together, for months on end, in this collection of tin cans. The only solid interior partitions in the Mission Module were those around the crapper.

  And the truth was, the three of them didn’t really get along. York never said much to anyone, Stone was too much the USAF goddamn straight-arrow commander to get involved, and Gershon himself said far too much, all the time.

  But it didn’t bother Gershon. Or his crewmates, he suspected. All the psychiatric team-building stuff was so much horseshit, to Gershon. They weren’t on this mission to make friends with each other; they were there to fly to Mars. And to achieve that they would overcome a little interpersonal friction.

  As long as a man got a little time to himself, it was no big deal.

  He worked steadily through the gauges and dials and computer screens in front of him, and compared them with the expected readings printed out on his teletyped checklist. His headset was voice-activated; he’d fixed it so that the Mozart stopped playing when he spoke.

  Gershon liked working with Apollo hardware.

  The basic design was antiquated, but it was fifteen years since its last major failure, on Apollo 13. Anyway, there wasn’t necessarily anything wrong with “antiquated.” To a pilot, it was the difference between a development vehicle and an operational bird; for “antiquated” read “proven.” In Gershon’s view it would have been a crying shame to have abandoned the Apollo line back in the early 1970s and try to build a newfangled spaceplane. Nice as the shuttle would have been to fly.