Voyage

by Stephen Baxter

  He said now, ‘Haven’t you been listening, Natalie? Agnew’s presented a great vision. We could be on Mars by 1982. And by 1990 we’ll have a hundred men in Earth orbit, forty-eight on the Moon, and forty-eight in a base on Mars –’

  ‘Oh, sure,’ she said, bristling. ‘Yes, actually, I have been listening. And I hear that Agnew gets booed when he talks in public about going to Mars. People don’t want this, Mike; the war is fucking up the economy too comprehensively.’

  Ben, gratifyingly, looked startled to hear her swear.

  “Well, I doubt Nixon’s going to buy it all anyhow,’ Ben said. ‘The word is he’s leaning a little toward the Space Shuttle, as the one element in the STG proposals to preserve over all the rest. Because it promises low-cost access to space. On the other hand, Nixon likes heroes …’

  ‘But he’s backed into a corner, by what Kennedy said to Armstrong and Muldoon in July,’ Mike said. ‘And by the pro-Mars statements he’s been issuing ever since.’

  York grunted. ‘Nixon hates Kennedy. Besides, Kennedy’s just another opportunist. Do you really think he would have continued pumping funds into Apollo the way Johnson did, if he’d not been invalided out of the White House back in ’63? If he’d actually had to pay for any of the things he was able to call for, from his wheelchair?’

  ‘Johnson was a genuine space enthusiast,’ Mike said. ‘You’re too cynical, Natalie.’

  ‘Johnson was interested in his own advantage. Why else have you got so many NASA centers in the south?’

  ‘Does make you think, though,’ Ben said. ‘What if Kennedy hadn’t taken those bullets in Dallas? Or – what if they’d killed him, instead of his wife? Without him as a cheerleader on the sidelines, maybe the whole program would have got itself canceled.’

  ‘Anyway,’ York said, ‘I just hope that whatever happens this time around they make room for a few scientists among all you av-i-at-ors.’

  ‘Don’t listen to her, Ben,’ Conlig said. ‘She’s playing it cool. Guess what she keeps on the wall of her bedroom in her mom’s house.’

  ‘Shut up, Mike –’

  ‘Pictures of Mars.’

  Priest looked at her, evidently intrigued.

  ‘Hell, I was just sixteen. For a while I got caught up in all that showbiz about Mariner 4 …’

  Mariner 4 was a NASA space probe which reached Mars in July, 1964. Mariner hadn’t carried the fuel to put itself into orbit around Mars; it made one sweep past the planet, firing off pictures as it went. Mariner sent back twenty-one pictures, in all. They covered maybe one per cent of Mars’s surface.

  Natalie York had never even thought about Mars, other worlds, before Mariner. She wasn’t even interested in astronomy, or space travel, or other worlds, or any of that. Astronomy was a subject for the handful of old men who controlled access to the big telescopes, and used them to pursue their obscure, decade-spanning projects. Even back in 1964, geology – the study of the Earth – was what captured her imagination. Stuff you could walk around in, and pick up, and examine with your eyes and hands.

  Mariner made everything different. For a while, anyhow.

  She remembered a teacher at school, trying to put over the basics of astronomy.

  In July 1964, when Mariner reached Mars, the planet had been in opposition. Mars was a planet that circled the sun, like Earth; but its orbit was outside the Earth’s, and its year was twice as long. That meant its distance from Earth was constantly changing, as Earth scooted by on the inside track. But when sun, Earth and Mars were lined up, in that order, Mars would come closest to Earth. Opposition. That’s what it means. So at opposition, Mars is almost opposite the sun, seen from Earth. At its closest point.

  She remembered, as she’d learned of this, a sudden sense of herself as a passenger on the Earth – as if it was a giant spinning spaceship, steaming past this great red liner called Mars.

  To do their jobs, astronomers have to be able to figure out where they are, in relation to the rest of the universe. They have to be able to imagine, really and truly, that they aren’t living on a flat Earth.

  She’d gotten copies of the pictures radioed back by Mariner 4, and had indeed taped them to her bedroom wall.

  The first photo showed the limb of the planet, seen from close to; the horizon curved, and surface markings were vaguely, frustratingly visible. Still, the image was a hell of a contrast to the misty, unreal disk you could see through a telescope.

  Mariner’s photos showed how Mars would look to an orbiting astronaut.

  The next few pictures showed views of the surface, as if looking down from directly overhead. The monochrome images looked like aerial pictures of a desert, Arizona maybe …

  Ben Priest said now, ‘You know, Mariner was a big shock to us all. Before Mariner, we thought we understood Mars pretty well. You could walk around on the surface with nothing more than a facemask. We thought we saw seasonal changes in dark patches on the surface, that were maybe down to some kind of spreading vegetation.

  ‘But now, everything looks different. We had it wrong – all of it. Earth-like Mars certainly isn’t.’

  It was Mariner’s seventh picture that was the real surprise.

  The seventh picture showed craters. Nobody was expecting to find those.

  Not Arizona, then. Mars looked more like the Moon.

  Priest said, ‘We know now the atmosphere is impossibly thin. It’s mostly carbon dioxide, and there’s no oxygen, and hardly any water vapor. Not even nitrogen … Mariner didn’t find any canals, incidentally. Even though it flew over an area where a lot of the most prominent canals were expected.

  ‘All our ideas were turned upside down by this. With such a thin atmosphere, any life must be very hardy. Nothing like terrestrial life at all. But, of course, the question of life won’t be settled until humans land there. It was one hell of a disappointment, the NASA guys tell me. Suddenly, Mars became a place it wasn’t worth traveling to. If we don’t make it to Mars, if the funding and resources aren’t assembled, then for me, that shock of Mariner 4 will have been the turning point.’

  York shrugged. ‘But NASA oversold Mars for years. It was a kind of holiday resort in the sky, teeming with life, justifying all the billions they wanted to pour into rockets and spaceships …’

  Priest laughed. ‘A holiday resort. I like that.’

  To York, Mars was much more than that. After Mariner she’d become interested in Mars, and its history in the human imagination. She got books from the library. Mars as the Abode of Life by Percival Lowell, New York, 1909; Mars and its Canals by Lowell, New York, 1906 … She remembered fantastic, gaudy pictures of huge irrigation canals dug across the face of a dying, drying Mars, long descriptions of the waves of vegetation and the herds of animals which must sweep across the red Martian plains. The Mars Project: Wernher von Braun, University of Illinois, 1953. It had a big rocket ship on the cover, like a kid’s book. Von Braun wanted to build ten spaceships in Earth orbit, each weighing three and a half thousand tons, and carrying seven men. It would take nine hundred flights to orbit to assemble the fleet. There would be two-hundred-ton landing boats, to take fifty people down to the surface for a year-long stay … These visions, she’d thought, were a boy’s dreams of power, dressed up as serious engineering plans.

  York had put this stuff aside. Even at the age of sixteen, York was hot on science, on the strictness and logic of it; she found herself getting unreasonably impatient at illogic, and wishful thinking, and the emotional coloration of rational processes of all sorts.

  (Actually she was much too severe for most of the boys her mother tried to match her with. You’d think that someone who’d suffered as messy a divorce as Maisie York would learn not to meddle in other people’s relationships …)

  The fact was, to her, the real Mars was a hell of a lot more interesting than Lowell’s anthropocentric dreams.

  Because of Mariner, Mars had turned into a place you could do some geology.

  How would the geology
of Mars differ from Earth’s? What would that tell you about Earth, that you couldn’t have learned from staying at home? A hell of a lot, probably.

  Mariner’s thirteenth frame had electrified her.

  The thirteenth picture showed craters with frost inside them.

  My God. Not the Moon, not Arizona. Mars is something else. Something unique.

  Ben eyed York, interested, speculative. ‘So you’re a closet Mars nut. I ought to take you out to JPL sometime. That’s where they run the planetary probes from … Hey, Natalie. Maybe you ought to apply.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘The astronaut corps.’

  ‘Me? Are you joking?’

  ‘Why not? You’re qualified. And we need people like you. Even Spiro says so; he thinks people were turned off by Apollo because it was too engineering-oriented.’

  ‘Well, so it was.’

  Priest eyed her. ‘I’m serious, actually, Natalie. It’s a genuine opportunity for you. You could go work for Jorge Romero’s geology boys in Flagstaff, and train the moonwalkers. That’s how Jack Schmitt got into the program, and they say he’ll make it to the Moon.’

  ‘You worry me, Ben. How can a crazy man like you be allowed to drive a car at night?’

  ‘Here.’ Driving with one hand, he reached up, turned back his lapel, and unclipped a silver pin, in the shape of a shooting star trailing a comet’s tail.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘My rookie’s pin. Some day soon I’m going to get a flight. So you need this more than I do. Take it. And when you’re the first human on Mars, when the Spiro Agnew lands in 1982, drop it into the deepest damn crater you see, and think of me.’

  ‘You’re crazy,’ she said again. ‘You should give it to Petey.’

  They fell silent.

  Her thoughts turned back to Jackass Flats.

  They don’t even contain the vented hydrogen. And Mike never thought to tell me about any of this. Why? Because he thought I couldn’t stand to hear it? Or because he can’t even see what’s wrong, here?

  What does that say about us? And – do we really have to do this shit, to get to Mars?

  She closed her fingers around the little pin Ben had given her.

  Ahead of them, the Interstate was a band shining in the starlight and stretching toward the glow of Vegas.

  Monday, October 27, 1969

  Edwards Air Force Base, California

  Major Philip Stone joined the USAF in 1953, at the age of twenty.

  He arrived in Korea in time to make a series of hazardous sorties. Well, Korea had been a turkey shoot. But Stone hadn’t enjoyed combat. His buddies called him too serious – a straight arrow. But for Stone, the important thing was what he could learn in each flight, either about his machines, or about himself.

  After the war, his disciplined curiosity found a new focus.

  In the early 1960s the most promising route to space, if you were inside the USAF, had looked like the experimental high-altitude rocket aircraft program. The X-15s could even give their pilots astronaut wings, by flying through the officially recognized lower limit of ‘space,’ at fifty miles high. The X-15s were to lead on to the advanced X-20 – the Dyna-Soar – in which a guy would have been boosted into orbit, and then he would have flown back down, landing like an airplane.

  But with men routinely being hurled into space in ballistic capsules like Mercury and Gemini, the X-20 looked too advanced for its time, and it soon ran up a bill as large as that for the entire Mercury program without delivering a single flight article. And it was canned.

  Now, the only way for a pilot to reach space was to transfer to NASA. Neil Armstrong was another X-15 pilot who had gone that way before. And so that was what Stone had determined to do.

  But first he had some unfinished business.

  In 1969, Stone was thirty-seven years old.

  ‘Drop minus one minute.’

  ‘One minute,’ Stone said. ‘Rog. Data on. Emergency battery on. I’m ready when you are, buddy. Master arm is on, system arm light is on …’

  The B-52 reached its launch station over Delamar Dry Lake in Nevada. The rocket plane was suspended from the bomber’s wing pylon like a slim, black, stub-winged missile, crammed full of liquid oxygen and anhydrous ammonia, ready for its mid-air launch.

  Stone was sealed up inside the X-15. The B-52’s engine was just feet away from his head, but Stone, cocooned inside the pressurized cockpit, could barely hear its noise. From the corner of his eye he could see the chase planes clustered close to the B-52. At last, this damn flight is going to be over and done with.

  After fifteen years, the X-15 program was winding up. There was only one serviceable X-15 left: this one, X-15–1, the first to fly back in 1960, a veteran of seventy-nine previous missions. The Edwards people wanted to finish up the program with one last flight, the two hundredth overall; and they had asked Phil Stone to stay around long enough for that. But then there was a series of delays and technical hitches, and the winter weather had closed in; until by now the flight was all but a year later than it had originally been planned for.

  For Stone that was a year wasted out of his life. But he’d spent the time preparing for his move to NASA, trying to be sure he started off his new career as well placed as he could be.

  ‘Fifteen second mark to separation. Chase planes on target. Ten seconds.’

  He felt his heart, somewhere under the silver surface of his pressure suit, pumping a little harder. As it was supposed to at such moments.

  ‘Three. Two. One. Sep.’

  With a solid crack the B-52’s shackle released the X-15, and the plane dropped away from its mother, and Stone was jolted up out of his seat.

  Stone emerged from the shadow of the bomber’s wing, at forty-five thousand feet, into a shock of brilliant sunshine. He was already so high that the morning light was electric blue, more like dusk. The chase planes were little points of silver light around him, with their contrails looping through the air.

  The land curved below the plane’s nose, as if the Mojave was some huge, smooth dome. He could see the worn hump of Soledad, the Lonely Mountain, brooding over Rogers Dry Lake, half a mile above sea level. Everywhere the dried-up salt lakes glistened like glass, speckled with gray-green sagebrush and the twisted forms of Joshua trees. It was a flat, desolate, forbidding place. But every summer the desert sun baked the damp lake beds to a flat and smooth surface. The whole place was like one huge runway, and you could land anywhere in reasonable safety.

  It was a little after ten thirty in the morning.

  Stone pushed the button to ignite the X-15’s rocket engine.

  He was kicked in the back, hard. The plane’s nose was tipped up into the sky as ammonia and oxygen burned behind him, and he rode higher into the deepening blue. He could hear his own breathing inside his helmet; otherwise, there was barely a sound – he was outpacing the noise and exhaust plumes behind him.

  Far ahead he saw a speck of light, like a low star. It was a high chase plane. It grew out of nowhere in a flash, and plummeted backwards past Stone, as if it was standing still.

  At forty thousand feet he reached point nine Mach, and he could feel a bumping, like a light airplane flying in turbulence. He was moving so quickly now that the air molecules couldn’t get out of the way of his craft in time.

  The turbulence smoothed out as he went supersonic.

  Eighty thousand feet.

  He moved the rocket’s throttle to maximum thrust, and he was pushed back into his seat by four and a half G. X-15–1 climbed almost vertically. The sky turned from pearl blue to a rich navy. He was already so high he could see stars ahead of him, in the middle of the day; so high there were only a few wisps of atmosphere, barely sufficient for his plane’s aerodynamic control surfaces to grip.

  The sensations of power, of speed, of control, were exhilarating.

  Ninety thousand feet; thirty two hundred feet per second. The Mojave spread out beneath him, over two thousand feet above s
ea level, was like the dried-out roof of the world.

  Less than a minute into the flight, the problems started.

  He got a message from the ground. It sounded like they were losing telemetry from the bird. The trouble was, the voice link had suddenly got so bad that he couldn’t tell for sure what they were saying.

  A warning light showed up on his panel. Another glitch. For some reason his automatic reaction control rockets had deactivated. It wasn’t too serious for now; he was still deep enough in the atmosphere that he was able to maintain control with the aerodynamics.

  The X-15 flew like an airplane in the lower atmosphere. It had conventional aerodynamic surfaces – a rudder and tail planes – which Stone could work electronically, or with his pitch control stick and rudder pedals. But above the atmosphere X-15 was a spacecraft. The automatic RCS (reaction control system) – little rocket nozzles, like a spaceship’s – was controlled by an electronic system called the MH96. And there was a separate manual RCS system Stone could control with a left-hand stick.

  Quickly he was able to trace through the fault The automatic RCS had shut itself off because the gains of his MH96, his control system, had fallen to less than fifty per cent. The gains were supposed to drop when the plane was in dense air; then the MH96 was designed to shut itself off, to conserve hydrogen peroxide rocket fuel. But this time the gains had dropped because the hydraulics which controlled his aerodynamic surfaces were stuttering. So the automatic control system couldn’t rely on the data it was getting, and it had shut down the automatic RCS.

  It looked as if the electrical disturbance that had started with the radio was spreading. Looks as if we might be snake-bit, old buddy.

  Well, he was close to the exhaustion of his rocket fuel anyhow. He pressed a switch, and the engine shut down with a bang.

  He was thrust forward against his straps, and then floated back.

  He had gone ballistic, like a hurled stone; now X-15–1 would coast to the roof of its trajectory, unpowered. He lost all sensation of speed, of motion. He was weightless inside the cabin, and he felt as if his gut was climbing up out of his neck.