Titan

by Stephen Baxter

  He really didn’t want to descend into some hole in the ground, not on a day like this.

  But he had his duty.

  He was pretty sure the reason he’d been summoned here today was to do with the new NASA announcement, the incredible news that they were planning to send astronauts to Saturn.

  Deeke, like many within the USAF, was no fan of NASA.

  He was of the same vintage as the early astronauts, but his own career had run orthogonally to the Moonwalkers’. He was an old lifting-body man: after Patuxent, he’d flown the X-15, the youngest pilot to do so. When Shuttle came along, his X-15 experience paid off. The X-15 was an unpowered glider, when it landed. Just like Shuttle.

  A still-young Air Force officer, Deeke had taken the first test orbiter, Enterprise, on captive flights—where it had been strapped to the back of a 747—and later on its first free landing tests. Then he’d flown on the third orbital flight, one of the system’s shakedown cruises.

  Later, when STS had become operational, Deeke had flown exclusively Department of Defense missions on Shuttle.

  Deeke and his buddies had launched reconnaissance satellites, and tried out some techniques for orbital manned reconnaissance, they’d even tried out core technology for some of the more exotic anti-satellite weaponry system proposals, like lasers and particle beams, which had come out of SDI.

  Nobody outside the military knew exactly what he’d got up to on those missions. But Shuttle was, after all, a military vehicle.

  But after Challenger, the military missions had dried up, and it looked as if Deeke wasn’t going to get to fly again.

  Since then he’d assumed responsibility for advanced projects, in the USAF and outside. For instance he was an observer on NASA’s RLV program. It was interesting, varied, senior work.

  But it wasn’t like flying. And as the years wore on, even as he got older and slowed up, he got steadily more frustrated.

  But now NASA was launching this ludicrous jaunt to the outer Solar System, and he’d had the call to come here to Cheyenne from his old commander, Al Hartle, and his instincts were telling him something pretty exciting was coming down.

  So here he was.

  A neat little electric vehicle like a golf buggy took Deeke along the glowing length of the central tunnel, deep into the heart of the mountain. Then there was a left turn, through big blast doors—each of them steel plates three feet thick, like battleship hull—and into the heart of the command post itself.

  He worked through the elaborate security clearances. He even had to pass through a series of chambers, like airlocks; at the heart of the mountain the incoming air was stringently filtered against chemical, biological and radioactive agents.

  He’d been prepared for the delays; he sat patiently in the echoing, blue-painted, boxy rooms.

  This complex, dug out of the granite core of the mountain, covered more than four acres. The rooms were all steel shells, supported on big metal springs which would act as shock absorbers, in the event of the nuclear attack which had never come. From this base, any aerospace battle over the U.S. would have been coordinated, and there were hot line links to the Pentagon and the White House. The place was designed to survive. It was hardened against EMP Blast and heat from any explosion would have been channeled through that big entrance tunnel and vented on the other side of the mountain…

  There was no reading matter in the waiting rooms, but there was public net access. He logged onto Time, and found himself staring at an image of the thin, serious face of Jake Hadamard, the NASA Administrator. The accompanying article lauded Hadamard and his team; the proposed Titan project was striking a chord, right now, with the public—although there was opposition, from the Luddites and various religious groups—and the project was turning out to be a “fitting capstone” to the u.s. manned space program. Far better to remember a final great triumph to conclude forty years of endeavor, than the sour memory of the Columbia fiasco. And so on.

  Hadamard was clearly using the Titan proposal to propel himself from the relative obscurity of his previous accounting background to the front rank of national figures. Once the Titan mission was launched, and NASA’s final affairs wound up and devolved, Hadamard would have his pick of jobs, in industry or politics. Hadamard, the article said, had every chance of becoming man of the year.

  Deeke had to grin at that. Hadamard was one shrewd guy if he could turn a Shuttle crash into a good career move.

  Somehow it was typical NASA. All bullshit.

  At last an aide—a young MP—collected him, and walked him to the office of Brigadier General Albert Hartle.

  Hartle came out from behind his desk, and shook Deeke’s hand vigorously. “Gareth. It’s good of you to come out here.”

  The MP brought Deeke a coffee. It was good quality, potent and rich. Then the MP left, closing the door behind him.

  Hartle smiled thinly. “I’d offer you a drink. Baltics, that’s what you Edwards boys used to drink, right?”

  “I understand, sir. Not here.”

  “No. Not here.”

  Deeke sized up his surroundings. The office was just a box, like all the chambers in the complex. Hartle had left the walls unpainted; the bare steel shone in the harsh fluorescent strips. The biggest item of furniture was Hartle’s desk, a severe battleship-gray affair that looked like it had been welded together out of gun metal. Its surface bore a blotter, a fountain pen, and a small old-fashioned computer terminal.

  The only item of adornment on the walls was a North American Air Defense Command crest, behind Hartle; the NORAD badge was a shield, with a sword and eagle wings upraised before the North American continent, sheltering it from the lightning strikes above.

  Hartle was approaching sixty. The Brigadier General was small, trim and upright in his decorated uniform, his strong hands folded up before him.

  He looked, Deeke thought, like part of the room, an extension of its severity.

  This was Hartle’s habitat. As far as Deeke knew Hartle had no family: nothing in his life but the Air Force, and what he saw as his mission. It was hard to imagine the old Cold Warrior anywhere else but here.

  They’ll probably have to bury him here, Deeke thought.

  Hartle was studying him, his blue eyes predatory.

  “I think you’d better tell me why I’m here, sir.”

  “Gareth, I want you to indulge me. I want to go over a little history with you. Because if we don’t learn from the past, we’re condemned to repeat it. Right? And by the end of the story, I think you’ll agree with me that we need to take action now. A single, affirmative, decisive action. There are others who will support us…”

  “Action, sir?”

  “Bear with me.”

  Hartle started to tell Deeke how he had gotten involved in America’s space activities as far back as the 1970s, after Apollo.

  “Of course you know the truth about Apollo. McNamara—the Defense Secretary—supported the lunar thing to President Kennedy. Why the hell should the DoD support a big civilian man-in-space boondoggle? But in retrospect it’s clear. McNamara had wider goals. With a big new program like Apollo, outside the reach of the USAF, McNamara could please the aerospace lobby and Congress, taking the pressure off himself, so that he could get on with budget-paring defense programs. Our programs.

  “You must understand this point clearly, Gareth. The civilian space program, and its Agency, were actually used as bureaucratic weapons against the USAF. And hence, of course, against the national interest.”

  So, Deeke thought, our interpretation of history is that the U.S. went to the Moon in order to beat up on the USAF. Deeke suspected it wasn’t as simple as that; he knew the USAF’s space programs had been riven by infighting within the Air Force from the beginning. But it wasn’t a bad theory.

  Maybe old Al Hartle has been down this damn hole in the ground too long.

  … But Deeke found he wanted to hear more. It all fit in, he realized, with his own instincts.

&nbs
p; It had been years since Deeke’s last visit to the complex.

  Deeke was surprised by the subdued atmosphere, He remembered a buzz about the place, a sense of purpose and vigor. It the Big One had ever come, this might have been one of the last outposts of civilization, as the bright young people here monitored the launching of nuclear-tipped missiles across the planet. They could have survived down here for weeks, months even; there were big steel reservoirs, for instance, storing six million gallons of cool, uncontaminated Colorado Springs water.

  The sense of mission, of power, had been palpable. Deeke missed it all, damn it.

  But now it was different, right across the country, even the world; now, in hardened Minuteman silos that had cost millions to develop, farmers were being allowed to store grain.

  Sometimes, Deeke thought, he just couldn’t recognize the world, this odd, fragmented future into which he was slowly sliding, helplessly. None of the old certainties seemed to hold any more.

  He could understand how Hartle felt, with his recitation of forty-year-old history, of historic crimes for which retribution’ was coming.

  “Go on, sir.”

  “We had to accept the Moon, hut at least we were able to stop those assholes flying to fucking Mars…

  “I worked on the study group that came up with the Shuttle recommendation. We forced NASA to accept a delta-winged orbiter, to give the bird a low angle of attack atmosphere entry—more heating, but greater cross-range abilities. And that big cargo bay was built for anti-sat work. The Shuttle was a military vehicle, no doubt about it. Then we started work on the Vandenberg launch site. We even essayed an orbital bombing run, over Moscow. But we were faced with nothing but delays and overruns. And then came fucking Challenger.

  “Think how far back we’ve slipped, since the X-15 you flew. A fucking museum piece, but still the fastest aircraft in the world. Do you remember what we planned? The X-20, the B-70—a Mach 3 bomber—and the F-108—a Mach 3 fighter—all canceled by 1968. My God, they even canceled the Supersonic Transport because of the fucking environmentalists who said the human race would become extinct if it ever took to the air. Right now the USAF does not have a plane to catch the Russians’ Foxbat…

  “Gareth, NASA has been a thorn in our flesh ever since it was founded, by Eisenhower. Even when it hasn’t been used as a positive weapon against us, it’s acted to disrupt our programs and limit our capabilities. My God, if I had my way there would be NASA managers hauled into the courts to answer charges of treason, such is the damage they’ve inflicted.

  “But it’s been a long game. NASA has been weakening since 1969. It’s been a slow decline but it’s been steady. And now, at last, we’re in a position to kill it.”

  “Kill it, sir?”

  “Listen to me now. This damn Titan stunt is one last throw of the dice by those NASA assholes. If it succeeds, they’re figuring, maybe they’ll get back in the public eye, start clawing back some of the power and prestige and funding they’ve blown. We can’t let that happen, Gareth.

  “Look, we’re working at many levels to stop this. We’re pulling strings in the Pentagon and up on Capitol Hill. I’m calling in every favor I can. And, frankly, we can count on Xavier Maclachlan’s support. If we can just delay the damn thing until Maclachlan gets into the White House in ‘08 we’ll have won…

  “But anyhow, this is an historic moment, and we must have the courage to act, to shape the future. Otherwise, we might have no future to shape. The Red Chinese, Gareth. Asia is stirring from its thousand-year sleep. Red China will soon be on the march. Think about that.”

  “You talked about action, sir.”

  Hartle came forward, and rested his thin hand on Deeke’s uniformed shoulder. His face was a mask, the wrinkles in his cheeks pulled straight by his severe frown, and his shock of crewcut white hair was like a metal helmet. “I think we can stop this before they get to a launch. But we have to plan for the worst. You’re going to be my linebacker. My last line of defense. I want you there in that hole, if that runner tries to break through…”

  Deeke thought, Hartle has gone rogue. But he has backers. And a vision.

  He felt adrenaline spurt in his system, as it he were once more in the cockpit of a rocket plane, readying for ignition.

  Holy God, he thought. I’m going to get to fly again.

  Hartle looked into Deeke’s face, and nodded, as if satisfied.

  Marcus White wanted to fly himself straight into Edwards for the F-1 test fire. But he couldn’t get hold of a T-38. Like a lot of other NASA resources, the little needle-nosed supersonic trainers, used by the astronauts like sports cars and taxis, were being quietly withdrawn from service.

  It was deeply shitty, White thought; there was a stench of decay about the whole enterprise. The sooner we get this damn Titan mission assembled and away the better.

  Anyhow he had to get a commercial flight into LAX; from there he hired a car and drove north out of the city. The car was a late-model Chevy with a lot of smartass electronic features he couldn’t switch off; it just seemed to go where it wanted to go, like a dumb old mule.

  The F-1 was the big main engine that powered the S-IC, the Saturn V first stage. White knew the F-1 refurbishment program was going badly, and—as Benacerraf had told him when he’d gone along to bitch at her about the T-38s—his presence up there at Edwards would be a morale boost for the guys.

  Not that he could do anything constructive, of course. He was an aviator, not a rocket scientist. He was just a kind of symbol, a presence, who still meant something to the guys working on this unlikely project. Maybe. But this was the last of it. After Titan was gone, his usefulness would be done.

  He figured he’d have himself stuffed and mounted and stuck in the Smithsonian. Hang me up there with the Wright Flyer, boys.

  The evening was coming on. The sky was cloudless, but the horizon was ringed with the sulphur-orange glow of Los Angeles, masking the stars.

  At last he reached the desert. He could see it all around him as a flat, pale white crust in the starlight: the salt flats, like an immense runway, where they used to test the X-15.

  He spent the night in the bar with Don Baylor, the old-time Rocketdyne engineer who had invited him to Edwards.

  He woke up with a banging head. You ain’t got the tanker capacity you used to have, boy.

  But he pulled on his shorts and went for a run around the base.

  The sun was barely above the horizon, and the cold of the desert night was lingering, making the air sharp as a blade as it cut into his lungs. He used to run until his heart was pumping, burning all the alcohol and toxins out of his system. But today he tired quickly.

  He had to walk back to his room, the world graying around him, limping and wheezing like the old geezer he had become.

  The test stand viewing bunker was just a couple of rows of seats behind a big picture window, with telemetry on the engine fed into little softscreens. When he arrived the bunker was already half-full, of managers and senior technicians; White knew that this was just a viewing point for the senior staff—managers and VIP types like White himself—and the real work would be done by technicians controlling the test from elsewhere.

  It was mostly men in the bunker, mostly in rumpled suits. They were uniformly fat and aged. Many of these guys had been pulled out of retirement, to work on Saturn technology once more. White hair and bald scalps glowed in the low desert sunlight.

  We all let ourselves get so damn old, White thought gloomily.

  A countdown was proceeding, delivered by a smooth woman’s voice. It sounded like the announcements in an airport departure lounge.

  Donny Baylor was sitting in the front row of the stand, pale as a ghost, with his face half-covered by the biggest, thickest pair of sunshades White had ever seen.

  White laughed and clapped Baylor on the back; Baylor blanched further.

  “Asshole,” Bavlor said.

  “Not as young as you used to be, Donny.”

&n
bsp; “Neither are you.”

  White settled into a seat beside Bavlor. “I’ll tell you the best damn hangover cure I ever knew. You’d take up your bird after a night of throwing them back, with all that alcohol still sloshing around your system. All you’d have to do was pull a few Gs and suck in oxygen to flush all that crap away…”

  Baylor was a short, stocky man, and his face was a round, wizened button. He rubbed his forehead and scratched at the grizzled frosting that was all the years had left of his hair. “Things have changed, Marcus. When you think about it, it was pretty much you and me on our own last night.”

  “Too damn true,” White said. In fact, he had a theory you could correlate the nation’s decline with the growing adversity of these younger generations to a few cold ones.

  Baylor checked his watch. “Ten minutes to the firing.”

  White looked out of the picture window. The sun was low and in his eyes, but the glass was polarized somehow. There was a small pair of binoculars in front of his seat, not much bigger than opera glasses. But when he lifted them to his eyes some kind of electronics in the optics started to work, and the test stand leapt into his view, as detailed as if he was standing next to it, the image as steady as a rock, the glasses somehow compensating for the shake of his hands.

  The test stand itself was just a big square block of scaffolding, sitting on concrete trestles over a flame pit, anchored deep in the desert. The stand was maybe forty feet tall, and it was topped off by the two big silvery spheres which held oxidizer and propellant, RP-1 kerosene, for the test fires. There was frost, sparkling over the shell of the liquid oxygen tank.

  The single F-1 engine under test today—a complex tangle of feed lines, electronics and gimbal bearings—was pretty much hidden by the test stand structure. But he could see the nozzle, protruding out beneath the scaffolding, and he could see the fat kerosene pipes wrapped around the bell; the fuel passed around the combustion chamber and engine bell, to cool them, before it was fed into the combustion chamber.