He held his hands up. “Enough! You’ve got yourself a deal, Natalie.”
She narrowed her eyes as a new suspicion entered her head. “ERA,” she said.
He looked baffled. “Huh?”
“The Equal Rights Amendment. It was thrown out in June.” She felt her anger blossom inside her, an unreasonable rage. “The political climate’s changing. Is that why you feel able to pick on me now?”
“Fuck it, Natalie, that’s got nothing to do with it!” He leaned forward, visibly angry, unhappy. “You know, you, and the other women, would get on a lot better around here if you didn’t walk around with such goddamn immense chips on your shoulders.”
She glared at him. Muldoon sat tall in his chair, trim, sharp, irritated, studying her frankly, his blue eyes empty of calculation. He really believed that he was benefiting her with such advice, she saw; he couldn’t see anything wrong with what he’d said.
She didn’t trust herself to speak.
Later, in the dingy apartment she was renting in Timber Cove, she tried to get drunk, and failed.
Her life was going steadily down the toilet. At thirty-four she was getting old as a practicing scientist, and her academic career was probably beyond repair; her commitment to the space program — all those hours in sims and survival training — meant the time and energy she’d had to devote to her research just wasn’t enough, and she knew that her papers, briefer and sparser every year, just weren’t enough to enable her to prosper if she returned to a university.
And what had it all been for? She’d just lost her one chance — limited as it was — to get some genuine space experience.
She was farther from Mars than ever.
It looked as if she’d blown it, as if she’d made one damn foul-up in her life after another.
Mike Conlig was ancient history. But she was still on her own. Generally that suited her.
But, God, she missed Ben.
Monday, December 6, 1982
HEADQUARTERS, COLUMBIA AVIATION, NEWPORT BEACH
The MEM simulator at Newport was an ungainly assemblage, without much resemblance to the sleek lines of the final spacecraft shape. It looked like a car smash, surrounded by the blocky forms of mainframe computers, all laid out in this corner of the echoing, refurbished manufacturing shop.
Ralph Gershon clambered out of the simulator, pissed as all hell. “That fucking thing is a lemon,” Gershon said. “A big fat lemon, JK.”
JK Lee was waiting for him at the hatch, his round face creased with anxiety. “Christ. Talk to me, Ralph.”
“Look,” Gershon said, “the simulator’s supposed to match the real thing — that’s the whole point — it’s no good looking for your left-hand joystick here when on the real thing it would be placed over there. JK, you have to keep these things up-to-date with the changes you’re making to the design.”
“Hell, I know that, Ralph. But what can I do? The MEM design is still so fluid that there are always a couple of hundred changes outstanding, and so the sim never catches up with the real thing…”
“Oh, it’s worse than that,” Gershon said. He pulled off his gloves and jammed them in his helmet. “This thing doesn’t even make sense in itself. The changes you have made aren’t consistent.” He looked into Lee’s anguished, stressed-out face; his sympathy for the man struggled with his anger. “Look, Lee, I’m going to raise Cain about this. That’s my job, damn it. It’s impossible to gain genuine experience with such a flawed sim — in fact, in my view the simulator itself is a severe danger to the overall progress of the project.”
Lee led him away from the sim and lit up a cigarette. “Oh, Christ, tell me about it. Change is my bugbear, Ralph. Change is killing me.” He painted a picture of a whole industry plowing its way toward Mars, a vast national network of craftsmanship and expertise slowly coming to focus on a single problem, and all of it flowing through this one site. “We’re working in places no one has touched before,” Lee said. “It’s not surprising nothing is right the first time. So we get a thousand change requests a week, from all across the country. And every time we change something, every piece that component touches has to be modified as well. And I’ll tell you who the worst offenders are.” He eyed Gershon. “Your good buddies in the Astronaut Office.”
Gershon laughed. He wasn’t surprised to hear it.
The astronauts still exerted a lot of power, official and unofficial. It was their asses on the line, after all. Lee was trying to get them all to submit to his change request process, just like everybody else, to keep everything orderly. But he was also aware of the need to keep this key group sweet. So he’d set up a private lounge for the astronauts, just down from his office, with a shower and a couple of fold-out beds, a place where they could sack out and hide from the press. And he’d take them home with him and have Jennine throw swank dinner parties for them, and make a hell of a fuss over them, and laud them to the skies. And the astronauts would come away thinking IK Lee was the greatest thing to have happened to the space program since the invention of Velcro.
At least, Gershon reflected, until he bounced their next request for a change.
Then Lee spotted something else, in another part of the shop floor. He stalked over to an operator of a six-ton turret lathe, who was shaving thin slices off an intricate aluminum sculpture. The thing looked beautiful, like a work of art in itself; Gershon, who was supposed to be an expert on MEM systems, couldn’t place it or identify its function. Lee picked up the engineering drawing the guy was working from. Then he called Gershon over; Lee was agitated, and the operator avoided Gershon’s eyes, obviously embarrassed. Gershon felt sorry for him.
“Look at this,” Lee said, waving the drawing in front of Gershon.
“What about it?”
“We’ve got a policy that any drawing with more than a dozen changes has to be redrawn. This one must have over a hundred, for Christ’s sake. And that’s not the worst of it.” He picked up the component the operator had been modifying. “This fucking thing is obsolete! I know it is! Even before it’s been manufactured!” He threw the thing to the floor, where it landed with a clatter.
The operator, baffled, wiped his hands on a rag and looked around for his supervisor.
Lee stalked away, a tight little knot of tension; Gershon walked with him, his flight helmet under his arm.
Lee looked quite gaunt, his skin stretched tight as if by wires under the flesh, and his posture was stooped over. Lee was a man just eaten up by nervous energy and adrenaline.
Gershon had come to spend a lot of time at Newport as the MEM had moved through its development. He’d served as a guinea pig for the life sciences boys, and he’d crawled in and out of hatches and down ladders to sandpits stained red like Mars dust.
He’d spent hours in plywood-and-paint mock-ups of the spacecraft interior, trying to imagine that this was real, that he was all but alone on the far side of the Solar System, trying to bring a spacecraft down to Mars. Just like Pete Conrad.
He wanted nobody to know the MEM better than he did. And he was achieving his goal.
He’d become aware that the whole place, the whole of Columbia Aviation, was kind of high-octane, driven forward by the relentless, destructive energy of JK Lee. And under the high pressure and the enormous complexity of the project, the place always seemed on the point of being overwhelmed.
But Gershon still believed, as he had at the time of the RFP, that the Columbia vision of the MEM — inspired and led by JK Lee — was the best shot they had of building something that might actually work sufficiently well to fly people down to Mars a few years from, now.
Gershon had been tough on Columbia himself. But basically he wanted the project to succeed. He wanted to fly to Mars, damn it, not hang JK Lee’s scalp on his wall.
But, even as he framed that thought, he tripped over a wire, stretched across the floor. And when he looked down he saw more wires and loose components and discarded equipment: bits of spacecraft, scattered ov
er the floor like detritus, washed up by the overwhelming tide of specification changes
Monday, February 21, 1983
ELLINGTON AIR FORCE BASE, HOUSTON
Gershon, flight helmet under his arm, walked around the training vehicle. Natalie York walked with him, her hair lifted by the breeze, her sunglasses hiding her eyes.
Ralph Gershon couldn’t help himself. “That’s the MLTV? Holy shit,” he said.
Ted Curval, from Phil Stone’s prime crew, was the senior astronaut assigned to oversee them for the day. He just grinned. “Your regulation Mars Landing Training Vehicle, Number Three. Brutal, ain’t she?”
The Mars Landing Training Vehicle was an open framework, set on six landing legs. Gershon could see a down-pointing jet at the center, surrounded by a cluster of fuel tanks. Reaction control nozzles were clustered at the four corners of the frame, like bunches of metallic berries, and there were two big auxiliary rockets, also downward-pointing. The pilot’s cockpit was an ejector seat partially enclosed by aluminum walls, with a big, bold NASA logo painted on the side, under a black-stenciled “three.” The whole thing stood maybe ten feet high, with the legs around twelve feet apart. There was no skin, so you could see into the guts of the thing, jet and rockets and fuel tanks and plumbing and cabling and all; it was somehow obscene, as if splayed.
In the low morning sunlight the bird’s complicated shadow stretched off across the tarmac of the wide runway.
“Shit,” Gershon said again, coming back to Curval. “It’s like something out of a fucking circus.”
“Tell me about it,” said Curval. “But it’s the nearest thing we have to a MEM trainer. You want to fly a MEM, you have to learn to handle one of these things, guy.” Curval was grinning, laughing at him.
Ted Curval was one of the Old Heads. A classic astronaut profile: a Navy test pilot, he’d even been an instructor at Pax River, and he’d logged a lot of time in space already. In the endless battle to climb up the Ares selection ladder, Curval had the great advantage of being from an earlier recruitment class than Gershon, and had already accrued plenty of live, free-flying MLTV experience. While the best Gershon had managed, for all his angling and hours spent at Columbia, had been some time on the tethered facility at Langley, where a MEM-type mock-up dangled from cables.
So Curval was in Phil Stone’s crew and was on his way to Mars. And Ralph Gershon was still on the outside looking in.
But what the hell. As of today, Ralph Gershon would be able to add MLTV experience to his list of accomplishments. So screw Ted Curval, and all the other complacent assholes.
As far as Gershon was concerned the contest wasn’t over until the bird left the pad, on April 21, 1985.
Gershon jammed his helmet on his head. He jumped up into the MLTV’s open frame. With a single twist he was able to lower himself into the single seat. “How about that. Just my size.”
Curval stepped forward. “Hey, Gershon—”
Gershon was strapping himself in. “The seat’s a Weber zero-zero, right?”
“Come on down from there, man, you’re not prepared. You’re not supposed to—”
“And the jet back there is a General Electric CF-700-2V turbofan. Come on, Ted, I know the equipment. I’ve come out here to fly the thing, not listen to you yack about it.” He glanced down at the control panel: a few instruments, a CRT, a couple of handsets. Just like the sims.
He found himself blinking; the sun was strong, almost directly in his face, and his eyes hurt. On the Plexiglas windshield in front of him he could see reticles — fine lines — etched in there, labeled with numbers -
But suddenly the pain in his eyes amplified. “Yow.” He threw his arm across his face. His eyes itched unbearably, and started to flood.
“For a start,” Curval called up drily, “you can close up your visor. You’re being hit by hydrogen peroxide leaking from the attitude controls. You sure you know what you’re doing, guy?”
Gershon snapped shut his visor and squeezed his eyes closed. “Let me bust my neck, Ted. It’s my neck. What do you care?”
“Okay,” Curval said at length. “Okay, you win.”
Curval, with York, went over to the control truck and clambered in the back. In a moment, Gershon heard Curval’s crisp voice sounding in his flight headset. “Okay, Ralph. What we’re going to do is take the MLTV up fifty feet, twice around the block, and back home again, just as nice as pie. Just to let you get the feel of her. And then you’re coming out for an eye bath. You got that?”
“Sure.”
Gershon kicked in the jet, and there was a roar at his back. Dust billowed up off the ground, into his face. Vapor puffed out of the attitude nozzles, as if this was some unlikely steam engine, a Victorian engineer’s fantasy of flight.
The runway tarmac fell away. The lift was a brief, comforting surge. The MLTV was like a noisy elevator.
Gershon whooped. “Whee-hoo! Now we is hangin’ loose!”
Of MLTV Number Three’s four cousins, two had crashed during the last half year. The pilots had ejected and walked away. Nobody was sure about the cause. Well, vertical takeoff and land vehicles were notoriously unstable; maybe you had to expect a percentage of failures. The hope was that these crashes weren’t showing up fundamental flaws in the design of the MEM itself.
Anyhow, the MLTV itself still needed test flights. Nobody was too keen to risk it, so far away from the Mars landing itself.
Nobody except somebody so desperate to get on the selection roster he’d do almost anything.
Gershon took the MLTV up to maybe sixty feet and slowed the ascent.
The principles of the strange craft were obvious enough. You stood on your jet’s tail. You kept yourself stable with the four peroxide reaction clusters, the little vernier rockets spaced around the frame, squirting them here and there. In fact, he found, he didn’t even need to work the RCS control when he was trying to hold the craft level; the little rockets would fire by themselves, in little solenoid bangs and gas hisses.
He experimented with his controls. He had a full 360-degree yaw capability, he found; he could make the MLTV rotate around its vertical axis, back and forth. He whooped as the world wheeled around him. And he had some pitch and roll control: he could make the vehicle tip this way and that. But when he tried it, of course, the thrust of his single big downward jet was at an angle to the vertical, and he’d find himself shooting forward, or sideways, or backward across the painted tarmac -
Curval shouted in his ear. “Hey, take it easy!”
— and that was evidently the way you had to fly a MEM. But he had to take care not to tip too far in any direction, or he could feel the stability start to go.
The low sunlight got in his eyes, which were still watering, and made it hard to read his instruments.
He came to rest perhaps a hundred feet above the ground, facing the control truck.
“Maybe you should get back down here for that eye bath, Ralph,” Curval said.
“So how much fuel does this thing carry?”
“Enough for maybe seven minutes.”
“And how long would a landing sequence take?”
“Ralph—”
“Tell me.”
“Three, four minutes.”
He checked his watch; he’d been up no more than two minutes. Time to spare.
He took the MLTV straight up in the air.
“Ralph, get your ass down here!”
“There’s only one way I’m coming down, bubba, and that’s by a Powered Descent.”
“You’re not trained for this.”
“I’ve done over fifty sims. Come on, man. I know what I’m doing. This bird is working as sweet as a clock. Let me bring her in.”
Curval sounded as if he was choking. “Goddamn it, you asshole, you smash up that trainer, and I’ll sue you myself.”
Gershon grinned. “Sure.” What, after all, could Curval do? Nothing, as long as Gershon was in the trainer, and Curval was stuck on the ground.
<
br /> Gershon took her to three hundred feet. “This high enough to initiate?”
He could hear Curval take a few breaths. “Find the button for the automatic control sequence.”
Gershon found it and pushed. The jet throttled back, and the MLTV dipped briefly. Then a new, throaty rocket roar opened up, and the trainer stabilized.
“All right,” Curval said. “Now, the secret of the MLTV is that it has two independent propulsion systems. Right now, your turbofan jet is throttling back to absorb two-thirds of your weight. So if everything else cut out, you’d fall under one-third of a G — just like on Mars. You got that? The jet is knocking out gravity, just enough to make it feel like Mars.”
“Sure.”
“But you don’t fall, because of the two hydrogen peroxide lift rockets under your ass which have just cut in to hold you up. And it’s the lift rockets which are emulating the landing system of the MEM, and that’s what you have to control to bring her in to land. You throttle down the rockets until you land. Like an ICBM trying to land on its tail.”
“Okay.”
“You have two more controls there, Ralph. Your attitude control on the right, and your thrust control on the left. You want to try those babies out?”
“Sure.”
The controls were familiar to Gershon from his sim runs. The attitude control moved in clicks; every time he turned the control the reaction rockets would bang and the MLTV would tip over, by a degree at a time. The thrust control was a toggle switch; every time Gershon closed it the lift rockets roared, to give it a delta-vee of a foot per second.
After the free-flight mode it was surprisingly difficult to handle the trainer; it was like being immersed in some viscous, sticky liquid. Because of the one-third effective gravity, he had to tip the bird three times as far as before to get the same push in any direction. And once he started moving, he just kept on going, until he changed the attitude again, and the craft took some time to respond because of the sluggishness. He found that he had to think out the simplest maneuver well in advance.
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