Voyage n-1

by Stephen Baxter

  The day after the meeting in Washington, Fred Michaels called up Seger in Houston.

  He leaned on Seger to take some leave.

  Seger was reluctant; he felt fit and energetic, and he was getting on top of the issues coming out of the accident.

  They finished the call without resolving the issue.

  Later that day, Tim Josephson, who’d been working out of Houston since the disaster, went to see Seger in his office.

  “Look, Bert, we want you to take an extended leave.”

  “But I’ve discussed this with Fred.”

  “So have I. And I’ve already drafted an announcement, to go out tomorrow.”

  Seger was furious. “In that case, you can announce my resignation instead.”

  Josephson met his stare, steadily, analytical. “Bert, you’re overstressed. You’re not thinking straight.”

  “Oh, is that so? How the hell do you know that? What are you, a doctor that you can diagnose me?” He stared into Josephson’s thin, intelligent face. “What’s going on here, Tim? Overstressed, what the hell is that? I think you’re acting on rumors, and half-truths, and things you don’t understand.”

  “Really?” Josephson asked drily.

  “Really. Listen, me and my guys down here are doing fine. We’re working through the issues with the guys in Huntsville. With the grace of God, we’re going to get through this. In spite of whatever you’re hearing, I’m not going into shock.”

  “It’s not like that, Bert. Nobody wants—”

  “Listen, Tim. If you want to fix up some kind of psychiatric hearing, then you do it; I’ll abide by the decision of any competent psychiatrist. If he thinks I need R R, then I’ll discuss it with you. But I’m not having you, or Fred Michaels, or any other amateur, diagnosing my psyche. Now, you got that?”

  Josephson seemed to think it over. Then he nodded, his face expressionless, and left the office.

  Seger got on with his work; he hoped he’d heard the end of that.

  But a little later Josephson called back and said that he’d arranged a hearing with two psychiatrists in the Houston Medical Center for that very evening.

  Seger spent three hours with the psychiatrists, talking things over. They fed back their conclusions to him quickly.

  He was obviously under a strain, they said, but he didn’t have a psychosis. There was no danger that Seger was going to fall apart under further pressure.

  Seger went back to his office, elated. He called Tim Josephson and told him he should cancel his press release. Then he got to his knees, in his darkened office, and prayed his thanks.

  He felt like laughing; if he was truthful, he felt as if he had fooled the psychiatrists.

  The next day Fred Michaels phoned. Michaels began to describe a new job to him, a more senior position in the Office of Manned Spaceflight.

  “You’ve spent long enough at the detail level, Bert, and you’ve done a damned fine job. But now we’re going to need help steering NASA through the next few years, which will be as hard as any we’ve faced before. I want you to move up to the policy level. I want you to get to know the Cabinet people; I can arrange the introductions for you. It’s a job on the mountaintop, Bert.”

  Yeah. The mountaintop, in Washington.

  Seger hesitated. “You’re making it sound good, Fred.” But I know what this is all about. “Fred, I’ll say what I believe, one more time: whether you push me out of your way or not, it’s going to be a mistake to go back into our systems now and make sweeping changes. We have to make fixes, obviously, but they should be straightforward and limited; if we go beyond that, we risk coming out with a less mature system, with new problems hiding from us…”

  “Look, Seger, I’m tired of hearing that. I can’t agree with you. I just don’t see it that way, and I don’t think that’s the prevailing view inside NASA. And I know for sure that’s not how they see it up on the Hill.”

  “What are you saying, Fred? I’ve seen your tame shrinks, and—”

  “I know.”

  “I’m no psychotic, Fred.”

  “I know that,” Michaels said gruffly. “And I’m glad for you. But that isn’t really the question.”

  “Then what is?”

  “Whether you’re the right man to continue leading the program, right now.”

  Seger picked up a paper clip from his desk and began to fold and unfold it with his free hand.

  Friday, January 30, 1981

  ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY

  Michaels found himself shivering, despite his topcoat. The sky was overcast, the clouds impossibly low. Thank Christ this is the last.

  The mourners stood in rows: there was Jim Dana’s grieving family, with poor, beat-up old Gregory Dana, the dreamer from Langley, standing in the front row with his arms around his wife and his widowed daughter-in-law; there were the usual ranks of NASA managers and engineers, of congressmen and senators; and there was the Vice President of the United States himself. And right at the front there was a row of astronauts, standing straight and tall, saluting their fallen comrade: Muldoon, York, Gershon, Stone, Bleeker, others — men who had flown the first Mercurys, men who had once walked on the Moon, men — and women — who might walk on Mars. And there was Vladimir Viktorenko, who had flown with Joe Muldoon to lunar orbit, and who Muldoon had insisted should be there — the Afghanistan situation or not — to represent that other astronaut corps, from the other side of the world.

  There was a volley of rifle shots, a slow litany from a bugler. The ceremony dragged on, poignant and exquisitely painful.

  There was a roar that seemed to shake the ground. Michaels looked up into the sky, startled.

  Four Air Force T-38s were coming in from the southwest, in a close diamond formation, no more than five hundred feet from the ground. The planes gleamed white against the lead gray sky. As the formation roared overhead, their jets screaming, the wingman veered out of the diamond and climbed vertically, disappearing into the clouds in a couple of seconds.

  The other three T-38s carried on toward the north, their afterburners glowing.

  Michaels recognized the formation. The missing man. He could see the astronauts at the graveside, the row of them, rookies and veterans alike, all with their heads turned up to the jets.

  As the ceremony broke up, Michaels worked his way through the milling, black-coated throng, toward Joe Muldoon.

  “Joe, I need to speak to you. I have an assignment for you.”

  Muldoon just glared back at him. He towered over Michaels, rigid, intimidating. His muscles were visible under his uniform, his face a scowling mask. Michaels could see a righteous, terrible anger burning in there.

  Michaels drew a deep breath. It was that anger he wanted to tap into. “I want you to keep this to yourself for now. I’m transferring Bert Seger. I’m bumping him further up in the Program Office. I’ve found him a job here in Washington.”

  “He won’t accept it.”

  “Well, he’s going to have to accept it. Hell, man, you saw how he was, in that meeting with Udet. I’ve had to take him out of the line.”

  Muldoon shook his head. “Bert worked damned hard. And none of it was his fault—”

  “I’m not interested in allocating blame,” Michaels said firmly. “Let them do that up on the Hill. All I’m concerned about is taking the program forward, from here on in to the end zone. And I don’t think Bert Seger is the right man to do that anymore.”

  “So who is?”

  “You.”

  Muldoon looked at him with his mouth open and his eyes round blue disks, a caricature of amazement. “Me? You’re kidding. I’m no manager. I’m the asshole with the big mouth you nearly grounded, remember.”

  “Yes, you are an asshole sometimes,” Michaels said testily. “But I trust your judgment, over the things that matter. You’re a moonwalker, for God’s sake. And you handled the Moonlab mission well. That broadcast—”

  “That was a stunt.”

  “Don’t d
ecry yourself. Down here, that broadcast was like a catharsis. I think it helped a lot of people, in NASA and beyond, come to terms with what happened. And you’ve done a good job with the post-accident review.” He sighed. “Look, Joe, I need you because we’re in a damned hole. I still don’t know which way Reagan is going to swing. But I know the accident looks bad, very bad, up on the Hill. I think it’s highly likely we won’t be allowed to proceed with the nuclear rocket program. And the MEM isn’t even a bucket of bolts yet; it was months behind schedule even before this mess… What I need is someone impatient, tough, charismatic — you, Joe — to get hold of the program and pull the damned thing out of Marshall, and the contractors, and all the rest, and make it happen.”

  Muldoon looked across the cemetery. “Let me get something clear,” he said quietly. “If I take this job, I won’t be able to remain on the active roster.”

  Michaels took a breath. “No. There’s no way you could maintain both schedules.”

  “So if I take this job, to get your ass out of a sling, I pass up on my chance of going to Mars.”

  “I’m not going to pretend that’s not true, Joe. But if you don’t take the job, I think the chances are nobody will be going to Mars, not in my lifetime or yours.”

  Muldoon’s mouth worked. “It’s one hell of a price you’re asking me to pay.”

  “I know it.”

  “And it’s not exactly orderly, Fred,” Muldoon said. “How are all those engineers and managers and space cadets going to feel when you put a dumb jock like me at the top of the structure chart?”

  Michaels smiled. “Well, back in the Apollo days managers used to bounce around the organigram without paying too much attention to that kind of thing. Maybe we need that spirit back again. I don’t think you ought to worry about the color of the carpet on the floor, Joe. And if anyone does start bothering you about ranks and status — well, you just come to me.”

  “Hell, no,” Muldoon said. “If any paper-pusher with his thumbs up his ass tries to fuck me over—”

  “Does that mean you’re taking the job?”

  “It means I’ll think about it. You’re a bastard, Michaels.”

  They began to walk toward their waiting cars.

  Tuesday, February 3, 1981

  OZERO TENGIZ, KAZAKHSTAN

  The wind across the steppe pierced the layers of York’s pressure suit. She tried walking around, to keep warm. But the Soviet-design suit, wired for internal strength, resisted her motion, and she soon felt herself tiring; and the “appendix,” the bunched-up opening at the front of the suit, irritated her chest.

  Beside her Ralph Gershon was huddled over on himself. His head was tucked into the collar of his suit, his helmet was under his arm. Gershon’s eyes were glazed. He had a knack, York had observed, of retreating into some private cosmos when the outside world got sufficiently shitty. Well, just now that was a knack she envied.

  The mock-up of the Soyuz Command Module sat squat on the Kazakh plain. A handful of trucks — battered, unpainted — stood around the capsule. Beside the Soyuz was the flatbed truck which had carried the capsule dummy out there. Fifty yards beyond that stood a Soviet Army helicopter, its rotors turning slowly. Cables trailed from the Command Module, coiling across the dust of the steppe, leading to winches attached to the chopper.

  There was a smell of wormwood grass: thin, almost lost on the cold air. The ground was baked to a yellowish, brick-hard glaze, with just a few tufts of grass. In some places patches of snow lingered. Vladimir Viktorenko had told her that in the early spring, the steppe would be covered in flowers. York found it hard to believe.

  She didn’t know what had caused the latest delay. Technicians stood around, showing no apparent concern for timetables or schedules. That seemed to be the way in the Soviet Union, even around the space program.

  York tried to be tolerant, but she found it hard. She didn’t feel she had the time to hang around on a steppe with a bunch of ragged-assed Soviets. Let’s get on with this. Get it over.

  Vladimir Viktorenko came stalking up to her, compact and purposeful, his flight helmet fixed over his head. “So,” he said, and he clapped her on the shoulder. She was braced for the blow, and managed not to stumble. “You are ready for your ride? And you, Ralph?”

  Gershon lifted his head out of his suit neck, like a turtle poking out of its shell.

  York stared up at the wall of the Command Module, her apprehension growing. “We’ve had no preparation for this. Where’s the hatch? At the top of the Soyuz?”

  “Yes, it is at the top. I will climb in first.” He tapped her shoulder, then Gershon’s. “Then you, then you. You will see. It will be easy.”

  The technicians were snickering. York felt her resentment build.

  “So, Vladimir, why are these guys of yours laughing at me?”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Vlad-im-ir,” he said, accenting the second syllable. “Oh, it is nothing.”

  “Like hell it is.” She felt anger surge in her. She’d been burning up with it since Apollo-N, lashing out at anything that came in her way. She suspected it was one reason she’d been sent over there, despite her involvement in the post-accident investigations. To keep her out of the way. To cool her off, on the steppe.

  Well, it wasn’t working.

  She stalked over to one of the techs, a burly guy in a shirt, grease-stained, that strained at his ample belly. “What’s so funny? Huh?”

  Viktorenko came to her side and took her elbow. “You must be calm, my dear.”

  She shook his hand off. “Oh, sure. Just as soon as these ill-mannered assholes—”

  “No,” he said, and there was some steel in his voice.

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Soy-uz.” He pronounced the word the way she had, as an American-eared best guess, with the syllables rhyming with “boy” and “fuzz.” Even to York’s ears it sounded clumsy. “That is what is so amusing. I suspect your English transliterations are at fault,” he said smoothly. “That ‘y’ is perhaps deceptive. You see, in the standard orthography, ‘yu’ stands for a specific Cyrillic letter, and so the ‘y’ and ‘u’ should not be split. The syllables are So-yuz, you see. Now. Since the stress is on the second syllable, we would allow the unstressed ‘o’ of ‘So’ to soften into a weaker ‘ah.’ And then ‘yuz’ has a long ‘u,’ like ‘shoe.’ Sah-yooz. But, of course, in speaking, final consonants tend to drift to the unvoiced. One must soften the ‘z’ to ‘s.’ So: Sah-yooss Sah-yooss.”

  She tried it a couple of times, and drew an ironic hand-clap from the big, burly tech.

  “Better,” Viktorenko said. “Now, you see, you have taken the trouble, here in my country, to pronounce correctly one of the three or four words of Russian with which one could reasonably expect an American astronaut to be familiar.”

  She was aware of the tech watching her, a leer in his eyes. She glared back. These Russians were even more full of macho bull than their American counterparts.

  But then, some of that might be to do with the lousy international situation. She tried to imagine what these men must feel about their countrymen fighting and dying in Afghanistan — and what went through their heads when they looked at her, a vulnerable, isolated American, and remembered the aggressive anti-Soviet rhetoric that had been emanating from the White House from the day Reagan had walked in. They’d be entitled to despise her, she supposed.

  Her anger dissipated. Hell. Maybe I deserve it.

  She shivered, and tried not to think about it.

  A rope ladder came snaking down out of the Soyuz toward the ground.

  She knelt at the summit of the Command Module, with the heavy hand of a tech on her shoulder to steady her. The Command Module was like the headlight of some huge car, upended on this plain, its green paint a striking contrast with the washed-out brown of the soil. From up there the steppe looked immense, intimidating, deserted save for the small group around the capsule; the sky was iron-gray, a lid clamped tight over the la
nd.

  In the remote distance she spotted a silvery glint that might have been water. Some godforsaken landlocked salt lake.

  Viktorenko clambered into the capsule first. He told York to give him a couple of minutes before following; he said he had to check the bolts holding the seats in place. As far as she could tell he was serious.

  At last Viktorenko poked his head out of the hatch and waved her in. The technician pulled off her outer boots, and the antiscratch cover she had worn over her helmet.

  The cabin was laid out superficially like an Apollo Command Module — which, after all, was of the same vintage as this Soyuz technology — with three lumpy-looking molded couches set out in a fan formation, their lower halves touching. Gingerly, feetfirst, she lowered herself.

  Vladimir Viktorenko was already in the commander’s seat, over at the left of the cabin. He waved her toward the other side. “Be my guest!”

  She slid herself down, wriggling until she could feel the contours of the right-hand seat under her. The couch was too short for her, and compressed her at her shoulders and calves. The couches in a Soyuz were supposed to be molded to the body of the cosmonaut; in this training rig the couches came in one size, to fit all, and were scuffed and battered from overuse.

  The capsule was cramped even compared to the Apollo trainers she’d used, and was jammed full of bales of equipment for postlanding: parachutes, emergency rations, flotation gear, survival clothing. The main controls were set out in a panel in front of Viktorenko: a CRT screen, orientation controls on Viktorenko’s right, and maneuvering controls to his left. There was an optical orientation viewfinder set up on a small porthole to one side of the panel. York recognized few of the instruments, actually. But it didn’t matter; she wouldn’t be doing any flying. And besides, in this landing-drill mock-up, most of the controls were obviously dummies.

  The capsule layout struck her as truly clunky. It was all sharp corners; and some of the controls were so far from the cosmonauts’ hands that they were provided with sticks to poke at the panels. It was low-tech, utilitarian.