He pitched Challenger back again to keep it from picking up too much forward speed. Then he flew over another field of boulders; he banked to the left to avoid them.
There wasn’t a runway, he thought, on the whole fucking planet.
Sweat trickled down from his brow and into his eyes; he had to blink to clear them.
New terrain advanced over the close horizon at him, rushing up toward him, exploding in sharp, unwelcome detail. Still, he couldn’t see anywhere to set down.
“Three hundred feet, down three and a half, fifty-four forward.”
“How’s the fuel?”
“Seven percent.”
Shit. He was doing worse than in any of the sims. Except the ones he’d crashed.
There. A flat area, like a little plateau, off to his right: just a field of dust. On one side there was a field of big old boulders, on the other an eroded area. The flat place was no bigger than a parking lot, a couple of hundred square feet, but it ought to be enough.
He had his landing site.
He pushed his joystick. The MEM turned to the right. He lined up his marked window, and locked in the computer. He imagined those invisible curves, York’s magical polynomials, snaking out to join him up to his landing site.
“Two hundred twenty feet. Thirteen forward, down four. Eleven forward. Coming down nicely. Altitude velocity lights.”
The shadow of Challenger came swooping across the uneven surface of Mars toward him. The shadow was a fat irregular cone; he could see antennae bristling, and at the base the shapes of the landing pads, with their long contact probes sticking out from beneath.
There really wasn’t much of a gap left between him and that shadow.
And then dust, red and brown and yellow, came billowing up in big clouds from the surface, suspending itself in the thin air. Dust and shadows. They didn’t have those in the sims.
Guess this is for real, Ralph.
A light marked “DESCENT QTY” came on in front of him. Low fuel. If he was too low when the descent fuel ran out, he would be in a dead man’s zone: too low to abort, too high to land safely. The MEM would just fall to the surface, smashing open like a big aluminum egg.
He tried to ignore the warning light. Overdesigned crap. Let a man fly his aircraft.
PGNS released the craft from the landing program, and Challenger began its final descent.
He picked a little gully, just beyond the landing point, to use as a reference for the craft’s height and motion, and he stared at the gully as he worked toward killing his horizontal velocity. The MEM had to land straight down, with no sideways motion. Otherwise, the touchdown might break off a landing leg.
There was a haze of dust all around the craft, billowing up, obscuring his view, adhering to the window in great ocher streaks.
“Thirty seconds.”
“Any forward drift?”
“You’re okay. Hundred up. Down at three and a half.”
The haze was all around him. And now he could see dust flying away from him in all directions, scouring over the surface. The streaks confused his perception of his motion, the way fog blowing across a runway could sometimes. But he could see a big rock, sticking up through the haze, and he focused on that.
“Sixty feet. Down two. Two forward. Two forward. Good.”
He clicked the descent toggle, killing the speed, until Challenger was floating toward Mars as slow as a feather.
“Fifty feet. Thirty. Down two and a half. We’re kicking up a lot of dust.”
I can see that, damn it. The MEM was drifting backwards, and Gershon couldn’t tell why. And going backwards was bad, because he couldn’t see where he was going. He pulsed the hand controls.
“Twenty.”
Well, he’d killed the backward motion, but a sideways drift had crept in. Fuck. He was pissed with himself. He wasn’t flying his bird smoothly at all.
“Four degrees forward. Three forward. Drifting left a little. Faint shadow.”
The shadow closed up, and dust billowed, so he couldn’t see the ground anymore. He struggled to get the MEM vertical.
He kept falling, blind.
“Four forward. Three forward. Down a half. Drifting left.”
Gershon felt a soft bump.
“Contact light,” Stone said. “Contact light, by God!”
For one second, Gershon stared at Stone.
Then he killed the descent engine, fast.
The vibration that had accompanied the engine firing, all the way down through the powered descent, faded at last. He should have cut it as soon as the contact light came up; if the engine kept firing too close to the surface the back pressure from its own exhaust could blow it up…
Challenger fell the last five feet, and impacted on Mars with a firm thud. Gershon felt the landing in his knees, and every piece of gear in the cabin rattled.
“Shit,” he said.
Stone started to rattle through the post-touchdown checklist. “Engine stop. ACA out of detent.”
“Out of detent.”
“Mode control both auto. Descent engine command override off. Engine arm off…”
They got through the T plus one checkpoint, their first stay/no-stay decision.
And then they had the ship buttoned up tight, and it looked like they could stay for a while.
Out of Gershon’s window there was a flat, close horizon. He could see dunes, and dust, and little rocks littering the surface. Nothing was moving, anywhere. Without buildings, or people or trees, it was hard to tell the scale of things. The sky was yellow-brown, the sun small and yellow and low. The light coming in the window was a mix of pink and brown, and he could see how it reflected off his visor, and off the flesh of his own cheeks.
Martian light, on his face.
He saw Stone grin, behind his faceplate. “Houston, this is Mangala Valles. Challenger has landed on Mars.” Gershon could hear the confident elation in his voice.
Gershon and Stone and York shook hands, and slapped each other on the back, and threw mock punches at each other’s helmets.
Gershon said, “Houston, can you pass on my regards to Columbia Aviation. This old Edsel has brought us down. JK, you are one steely-eyed missile man.”
He checked his station. He had fourteen seconds of landing fuel left. Well, the hell with it. Fourteen seconds is a long time. Armstrong himself only had about twenty seconds left, and nobody beefed about that.
Anyhow, it’s going to be a long time before anyone comes back, to better what I did today.
Thursday, March 21, 1985
PATRICK AIR FORCE BASE
Joe Muldoon squinted down as the plane from Houston came in on its approach to Patrick.
Although it was still hours to sunup, there was a steady stream of corporate planes descending on Patrick Air Force Base and Orlando Airport. And every road on the peninsula looked like a ribbon of light, locked up. He felt a knot of anxiety gather in his gut. Maybe he’d left it too late to get to the launch.
But he couldn’t have gotten away any earlier. He hadn’t had any sleep that night, and not much the night before. The logistics of the launch — the press stuff, and ensuring the NASA control centers were talking to each other, and handling a lot of last-minute crap to do with VIP passes and TV sites and such — all of it just went on and on, ballooning in complexity and detail.
Hell, was he going to have to listen to the launch on the radio of some hired car in bumper-to-bumper traffic?
The stewardess offered him a drink before landing. He refused, as he had before. Time enough for that later.
When the plane got into Patrick he hurried off. A young guy in a suit was waiting for him, holding up a hand-lettered card with his name on it.
“Mr. Muldoon?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m from KSC. We have a chopper waiting for you. This way, sir.”
“Thank Christ for that.”
Muldoon had a bag to collect from the plane. He hesitated for less than one second.
To hell with it; he’d buy a clean shirt when he needed it.
He walked briskly across the tarmac with the aide. The young guy said, “We’re laying on copters to bring in key people who might get stuck in traffic.” He seemed rushed, almost awe-struck, just about in control. Muldoon guessed the poor guy had been doing this ferrying all night.
“That bad, huh?”
“Hell, yes, sir. All the roads into Merritt Island are jammed. It’s like a parking lot out there. I’ve never seen anything like it, sir.”
Muldoon eyed him in the gathering dawn light. The kid was not more than twenty-two. So, aged about six in 1969. He doesn’t remember. He really hadn’t seen anything like it before.
Muldoon felt old, trapped, gravity-bound. Just as he’d felt after the splashdown in ’69. His work on Ares was nearly done, and the depression he’d been fighting off for all these years, using that huge goal to distract himself, was seeping back.
His one landing was long ago, and he’d never walk across that snowlike surface again.
They walked more quickly, toward the waiting chopper.
MANNED SPACECRAFT OPERATIONS BUILDING, COCOA BEACH
There was a smart military knock on her door.
She rolled on her side and switched on her bedside light — 4:15 A.M.
“Wake-up call. The night’s been clear, and the weather’s expected to be good…”
“Thanks, Fred.”
Fred Haise was right on schedule. The first time recorded on the Ares checklist was 0415.
The clock starts ticking here. And it won’t stop for eighteen months.
She pushed back the covers and climbed out. She rearranged the sheets, smoothing them out. She wasn’t going to be back there for a while, and she didn’t want to leave behind a mess.
She switched on the TV. She found herself staring at a still of her own face, while a commentator talked about the launch-day crowds gathering around the Cape. She clicked the thing off.
She took her time over showering. She relished the sting of water against her skin, the way the lather ran away down her body to the drain. She turned the shower on cold and stood there shivering for long seconds, feeling the blood rise in her capillaries. Showering in microgravity wasn’t going to be so easy; she had the feeling that she wouldn’t feel so clean as this again until she got back to Earth.
She toweled herself dry, quickly. Her hair was cropped short and dried easily. She pulled on a sport shirt, slacks, and sneakers.
The sport shirt was plain blue except for a patch with the Ares mission logo. The logo was a disk circled by the name “Ares” and their three surnames. The circle contained a stylized, pencil-shaped Ares cluster blasting toward a red star; the ship’s exhaust billowed out to become the stars-and-striped wing of an American eagle, peering sternly at the departing spacecraft.
It was a clumsy, cluttered design, she’d thought from the beginning. But the NASA PAO people had thought it appropriately patriotic in tone, and Stone and Gershon hadn’t cared enough one way or the other, and that had been that. So the badge sat high over her right breast, glaring out, gaudy and embarrassing.
When she left her room, she found Gershon and Stone waiting in the corridor. They were leaning against the wall, arms folded in almost identical poses, talking quietly. They grinned at her.
She walked up to them. Then, spontaneously, she reached out her hands to the two of them. Stone and Gershon each took a hand, and then, to her surprise, they clasped hands as well. For a few seconds the three of them stood there, joined in a circle, in the middle of the carpeted corridor, grinning at each other.
MERRITT ISLAND
Bert Seger had thought that his two mule-drawn wagons would clog up the traffic. But all four lanes of U.S. 1 had been at a dead standstill anyhow. Even off the freeways the traffic was moving slower than the pace of the mules, and the problem was going to be that the animals might grow impatient at the slow pace of the cars.
Already he had seen people giving up on getting closer to the launch, climbing on top of their cars and setting up tripods.
A row of black faces peered out of each of his wagons, at the staggering stream of traffic. Seger had brought a dozen of the poorest families from Washington to the launch, all members of the congregation of the little church he’d founded in Washington.
Now, though, he wasn’t so sure how effective his gesture was going to be.
Every gas station and coffee shop along the road — all of them open all night — was full of humanity, teenagers and Marines and factory workers and middle-aged couples and kids running around. It was a real cross section of America. The Mars shot, he’d calculated, had cost every man, woman, and child in the country around fifty dollars apiece, and it looked as if a good sample of them had gone out there today to check on that investment, dumping themselves onto this flat, primitive landscape.
In all this flood of people, Seger realized with a sinking heart, his little protesting band wasn’t going to make much of a splash. Anyway, there was maybe enough evidence around here that it was wrong to be sending off three Americans to Mars, while so many of their fellow citizens suffered, without the need for stunts by Seger. He’d learned that there were still cases of malnutrition being discovered among the poorest of the poor: there at the Cape, here at the foot of the Mars ship itself! If such things didn’t turn a few heads, maybe his little gesture really wasn’t going to make much difference.
But he wasn’t going to give up. The effectiveness of the PR wasn’t really the point. Anyway, maybe he could trade on his old NASA contacts to get closer to the pad than most of the rest. Just a little TV coverage would make his mission worthwhile.
Someone in the wagons began to sing, and the rest took it up, as the mules made their mournful way along the packed road. After a couple of words Seger recognized the song. It was the hymn the astronauts had read out from lunar orbit, to mark the deaths of their colleagues. Abide with Me…
He wondered where Fay was. Maybe she was watching on TV out in Houston. He hadn’t seen her since he’d told her, by phone, he was setting up his church. Maybe she’d forgive him, for leaving her behind like that.
On the horizon the Saturn VB was visible as a finger of white, bathed in light from every angle.
Seger was moved, unaccountably. He grabbed at the crucifix pinned to his lapel, so hard the metal dug into his fingers.
MANNED SPACECRAFT OPERATIONS BUILDING, COCOA BEACH
York reported to the exercise room, where a nurse weighed her, took her temperature, and checked her heart rate and breathing and blood pressure. It was all brisk, thorough, but somehow perfunctory. As if the nurse — a cheerful woman in her forties — wasn’t really interested in the results. After all, NASA knew all about York’s health by then; fragments of her body, scrapings and fluid samples, already lay around a dozen NASA facilities, as prized as bits of moonrock.
But it made sense on another level. It was all just part of the ritual. Like a priest robing up, she thought. Today, I am different from the run of mankind, and must be treated as such.
She made for the mess hall. There she had to sit in line with her two crewmen, at a table which crossed the head of another, longer table. There was a curtain behind her, and on the table was a gaudy flower bowl with a ribbon which read “Ares,” and a little display of silk and bows in the shape of the mission badge. Two rows of people sat down the longer table, looking at her, with a mundane ridge of sauce bottles and pepper shakers between them.
It was like a wedding breakfast, she thought.
The meal was another prelaunch ritual: nothing on the menu but steak, eggs, juice, toast, and coffee. Every astronaut, back to Al Shepard himself, had sat down to the same fare before The Flight.
York tried to eat, but the steak was thick and massive, and tasted like rubber in her mouth.
She’d fought to get this part of the ritual changed. A little muesli and canned milk would do her fine just now. But the doctors had lectured her abo
ut the importance of sticking to a “low-residue” diet before the launch. That was to reduce the volume of her solid wastes. Fine in theory, but it turned out to mean, in practice, steak with every meal, big bleeding slabs of the stuff.
She watched the other people in the room. There was Administrator Josephson, and several senior managers from NASA centers, and from the contractors. She recognized Gene Tyson from Columbia, the firm which had built the MEM, fat and corporate and beaming complacently. There were senior astronauts in here too, Bob Crippen and Fred Haise and others. And there were Ted Curval and Adam Bleeker, grinning and wisecracking as if nothing untoward had happened; but York thought she could see the tightness of their grins, a kind of hardness behind their eyes.
Stone and Gershon, sitting alongside her, were in good form, she thought. They were just two Air Force guys joshing with the other pilots, self-deprecating, almost witty. Humble, brave, relaxed. Almost bored with it. Just another day at the office. It was a good performance.
But, under the surface — the studied casualness, the soft clink of cutlery against china, the occasional sharp ripples of laughter — the atmosphere in the mess hall was extraordinary. Strained to the point of breaking.
York couldn’t think of a damn thing to say that wouldn’t sound lame. And as the hideous meal went on she began to develop a fear that if she spoke at all her voice would crack.
She stabbed a fork into her egg, but the yolk had hardened, and only a little yellow liquid oozed out onto her plate.
Fred Haise kept checking his watch. Like every other item today, breakfast was time-lined.
The members of the crew were released to return to their dorm rooms.
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