Voyage

by Stephen Baxter

  Such visions!

  … But the V-2 was the daily, extraordinary reality. That great, finned bullet-shape – no less than forty-seven feet long – was capable of carrying a warhead of more than two thousand pounds across two hundred miles! Its four tons of metal contained no less than twenty-two thousand components!

  Dana came to love the V-2. It was magnificent, a machine from another world, from a bright future – and the true dream inherent in its lines, the dream of its designers, was obvious to Dana.

  Even as it slowly killed him.

  One morning, so early that the stars still shone and frost coated the ground, he saw the engineers from the research facility at Peenemunde – Wernher von Braun, Hans Udet, Walter Riedel and the rest, smartly uniformed young men, some not much older than Dana – looking up at the stars, and pointing, and talking softly.

  Dana had glanced up, to see where they were looking. There was a star, bright, glowing steadily, with the faintest glimmer of red, like a ruby.

  The ‘star’ was, of course, the planet Mars, burning brightly.

  Of course: that was the dream which motivated and sustained these young, clever Germans: that one day the disc of Mars would be lit up with cities built by men – men carried there by some unimaginable descendant of the V-2.

  At fifteen, Gregory Dana had been able to understand how these young men from Peenemunde were blinded by the dazzling beauty of their V-2 and what it represented. It was not simple callousness: yes, he could understand the duality of it, and he would comfort himself with plans for after the war. Perhaps, he would dream, he himself would pursue a career in building still greater rocket machines, and even father a son who would be the first to travel beyond the air to Mars or Venus.

  How he envied the young engineers from Peenemunde, who walked about the Mittelwerk in their smart uniforms; they seemed to find it an easy thing to brush past the stacks of corpses piled up for daily collection, the people gaunt as skeletons toiling around the great metal spaceships! The duality of it crushed Dana. Was such squalor and agony the inevitable price to be paid for the dream of spaceflight?

  He tried to imagine how it would have been had he been born to become one of these smart young Germans in their SS uniforms.

  When he immersed himself in such dreams, something of his own, daily pain would fall from him.

  But then the morning would come again.

  In his workshop, in the sunny June of 1970, Gregory Dana labored at his blackboard, immersed in memories, and the resolving dream of spaceflight.

  As Dana’s car was pulling away, his father came running from the house. He rested his hands on the Corvette’s window frame. There was chalk smeared across his forehead.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I’ve got to get away, Dad,’ Dana said apologetically. ‘I have to be at –’

  ‘I think it works,’ Gregory said breathlessly. ‘Of course it’s too early to be sure yet, but –’

  ‘What works?’

  ‘Venus. Not Jupiter – Venus. Kiss good-bye to Verne – we don’t need those immense nuclear rockets after all!’

  ‘Dad, I –’

  Sylvia linked Gregory’s arm. ‘Good-bye, dear. Drive safely.’

  ‘I’ll call when I’m home, Mom.’

  Dana looked back once, at the end of the block. Sylvia was waving, but his father had already gone back to his shop.

  Thursday, July 9, 1970

  San Gabriel Mountains, California

  It was nearly noon; from a burned-blue sky the sunlight bore down on York’s bare head and shoulders.

  Jorge Romero had led them all into a little valley that afforded a good view of the hills. Now he went bounding up to a twisted old ironwood tree. ‘This tree is your LM. You’ve just landed on the Moon. Now I want each of you to come stand over here and describe what you see.’

  The three astronauts – Jones, Priest, Bleeker – stared back, all but anonymous in their baseball caps, T-shirts and chromed sunglasses.

  Romero’s question wasn’t hard, York knew. This was an interesting area: non-lunar, but with easily visible geologic relations among colorful rock units. But the stances and expressions of the astronauts betrayed a mixture of bafflement, embarrassment and resentment.

  Christ, York thought. This trip is going to be a disaster.

  But Romero was windmilling his arms at them. ‘Come on! The one thing you’re always short of on the Moon is time. You – Charles. Come over here, and start us off.’

  With a kind of lazy grin at Bleeker, Chuck Jones went strolling over to Romero. He leaned against the tree, beside Romero, and began to summarize what he could see.

  Romero was maybe fifty now, York supposed, but he was vigorous and supple, apparently still full of energy; his sunburned nose stuck out from under his sunglasses, and a few strands of graying hair licked out from under his floppy hat. York had taken in a graduate lecture of Romero’s some years back. Working out of Flagstaff, Romero was a great field geologist as well as a geochemical analyst. He had immediately struck her as someone who could not fail to inspire the most reluctant of students – such as your average beer-swilling, wise-cracking pilot-astronaut hero, for instance.

  So when Ben Priest had told her that Romero had agreed to give the Apollo 14 crews, prime and backup, some geologic training, and Ben had invited her along to help out, she’d been pleased.

  ‘… No, no, no! What about the layers in that mountainside over there?’

  ‘Look, Professor –’

  ‘And you have missed the most important feature of the landscape altogether!’

  Jones looked baffled; he was squat, solid, dark, and the thick primate hair on his hands and arms seemed to bristle with anger. ‘What “important feature,” for Christ’s sake?’

  ‘Look here.’ Romero knelt and picked up a handful of fragments, of a white rock, from the floor of the valley. ‘Can you see? Such rocks are everywhere – are they not? – now that you observe.’

  Jones had had enough. ‘This is a goddamn boot camp.’ He kicked at one of Romero’s white rocks. ‘Ben, this is a fucking waste of time. Our program is compressed enough without this crap.’

  ‘Come on, Chuck,’ Adam Bleeker said easily. ‘You haven’t given it much of a chance.’

  ‘Fuck it, and fuck you,’ Jones said. ‘Listen up: we’re only the goddamn backup crew for Apollo 14. That’s the first thing; we probably won’t even make it to the Moon. Two. The target is the lunar Apennines, not goddamn California. So why am I here tripping myself up on a pile of Californian rocks? Three. I’m an aviator. I don’t see why I need to know a fucking thing about the geology of the goddamn Moon to do my job.’

  ‘Look, Chuck –’ York stepped forward.

  The look he gave her then – of sheer, undiluted contempt – made her hesitate, just long enough for Romero to raise his hand.

  ‘Now, now. Of course Mr Jones here is absolutely right.’

  Jones looked startled.

  ‘It doesn’t matter how much you know about the San Gabriel mountains. Of course not. It doesn’t really matter what you know about the Moon. What does matter to me, though, is that for you to make your mission into a full-up success, you’re going to have to learn how to observe.’

  A full-up success. Ben Priest was suppressing a grin; York wondered if he had coached Romero to throw dumb-fighter-jock slang at Jones.

  It caught Jones off balance, anyhow. He bent and picked up a piece of the white rock. ‘Just tell me what the hell the relevance of this is.’

  ‘It is called anorthosite,’ Romero said evenly. ‘And it is our best guess that this was the primary component of the Moon’s primordial crust.’

  ‘Really?’ Adam Bleeker stepped forward now, and took the piece of rock from Jones – as if it was the only sample of anorthosite in the valley, York reflected wryly. ‘How so?’

  Jones still glowered, but for now he was sidelined from the conversation, and Romero was back in control.

&nb
sp; ‘When it first formed, the Moon was probably entirely molten. Then the outer hundred miles or so cooled to form a crust of anorthositic rocks – bright rocks, just like these. The main components of anorthosites, you see, like plagioclase, are light; heavier minerals, including those rich in iron and magnesium, sank into the body of the Moon. Now, the anorthosite – we think – dominates the brighter, older areas we see on the Moon’s face, while the dark maria are cooled seas of lava.’

  Bleeker was grinning at the idea. ‘So the maria really were seas, once.’

  York nodded. ‘It must have been a hell of a sight, back then: oceans the size of the Mediterranean brimming with red-hot, molten lava …’

  She tailed off. Jones, his eyes hidden by his sunglasses, was watching her as she spoke, and cracking some joke to Ben Priest. Something crass, about the way she moved her eyebrows up and down when she was talking.

  Ben looked uncomfortable, caught between a grin with his crew commander and embarrassment for his friend.

  And York was silenced, just like that. She felt as if she was sixteen again, gawky, clumsy, infuriated.

  With a fling of the arms, a grand actor’s gesture, Jorge Romero walked a few yards away. ‘Listen to me. I want you to leave this place as better observers, after today. But I also want you to leave with something else: a sense of the great drama of geology.’ He glanced around. ‘When you look at a valley like this, you see a few dusty old rocks, perhaps. But I see immense processes which churn the surfaces of worlds, frozen in time as if by a flashbulb. I am sure Natalie has the same perception. It is only our mayfly life spans which restrict us all from seeing this.

  ‘And now you may be going to the Moon! You must grasp this opportunity, and go there with open hearts and minds. Believe me when I say that I would give anything to exchange places with you.’

  Chuck Jones stepped forward and spat a piece of gum onto the dusty ground. ‘Yeah, well, we won’t be going either unless Dave Scott and Jim Irwin drive their Lunar Roving Vehicle over a goddamn cliff on one of these dumb jaunts. They’ll be taking the last Apollo to the Moon, and not us. So I think you should cut the speeches, Prof, and let’s get on with the checklist, and get this over.’

  He kicked a piece of ancient anorthosite out of his way, and stalked out of the valley.

  There should have been at least four astronauts on this field trip. But the good old guys seemed to have lost heart in what they saw as pointless training exercises, after the program cancelations Fred Michaels had announced earlier in the month. At least these three had turned up, but Jones’s attitude was turning the whole thing into a walk through Purgatory.

  York was pretty uniformly appalled by the astronauts she’d met so far. Ben was clearly atypical. And she couldn’t believe guys like Jones; they were like relics from some grisly Flintstones version of the 1950s. The whole bunch of them seemed utterly self-obsessed, to her.

  Well, screw them.

  She and her friends at Berkeley had done little, over the last couple of months, but follow the fall-out from the events at Kent State, in May. Some of them were preparing their own demonstrations in support and sympathy. She was prepared to bet Chuck Jones – probably Bleeker too, even Ben – hadn’t even heard of the Kent State trouble, the way it was tearing the country apart. They were so cocooned inside their precious programs.

  She felt blind, unreasoning anger, almost a hatred of these astronauts, and the system that had produced them.

  As he stumped over the landscape, Chuck Jones could barely see the rocks around him. He just kept on going over and over the events of the last few days.

  Fred Michaels, Associate Administrator, had come to the Astronaut Office in Building 4 personally, to wield the axe. He’d stood there in his waistcoat, plump as a seal, in front of a room full of sports shirts and crew cuts.

  Michaels’s personal presence wasn’t much consolation, for Chuck Jones.

  Michaels was here to announce, tersely, that the bean counters were cutting all the remaining Moon flights – save only for one more, Apollo 14, which was due to fly early in 1971.

  Jones couldn’t believe it; in a few words, Michaels was shredding his, Jones’s, one-and-only chance of a Moon flight.

  There was some argument from the floor, but Michaels slapped down their questions. ‘It’s for the good of the program, damn it, the longer-term good of the Agency. We’ve done what we’ve had to do. And Tom Paine –’ the NASA Administrator – ‘doesn’t like this any more than I do. Less, even. But we’ve had to accept this, to give us all a future. I’m sure most of you men understand that.’

  Sure, Jones thought, you might understand it in your head. But, when you’ve just had the flight you’ve trained for over years taken away, you can’t take it in your fucking gut.

  And the anguish in the Office had gotten all the greater when Deke Slayton stood up, his face like granite, to announce that it had been decided that this last mission, 14, should be upgraded to a J-class, a sophisticated scientific expedition. So 14 would get the advanced LM with the Lunar Rover, and the Service Module with orbital instrument pallet, which had been assigned to Apollo 15. And with 15’s equipment had come its landing site: a place called Hadley, in the foothills of the lunar Apennines.

  But 15’s original crew – Dave Scott, Jim Irwin and Al Worden – were already in intensive training for the Hadley site.

  So, Deke said, he was standing down Alan Shepard and his crew, who had been the prime assignment for Apollo 14. Scott and his crew had been promoted to 14 instead, and they’d take their backup crew of Jones, Bleeker and Priest with them. The date of the flight would be put back a few months, to give Boeing a chance to get the Rover ready, and let Grumman finish their LM upgrades. Deke said he’d expect Shepard’s crew to pitch in and support Scott’s training from here on in.

  Jones saw Al Shepard walk out of that meeting, his face like a tombstone. You didn’t want to cross Al at the best of times, and it was obvious that despite his seniority he hadn’t been taken into confidence about the rearranged schedules before the meeting. Slayton was a good old buddy of Al’s, too, all the way back to the Mercury days. A hell of a way to handle things, Deke. Well, Jones expected Slayton would be getting a few choice words of advice from Shepard after this.

  Jones had his own points to make, though.

  He left it a couple of hours, then he went storming into Slayton’s office.

  ‘Damn it, Deke, I shouldn’t be backup. You ought to be making me commander of the prime crew for 14, in place of Scott.’ After all he – Jones – had been one of the original batch of Mercury astronauts, and the fourth American in space. And he’d already started his training for his own later J-class mission besides.

  He’d waited a hell of a long time for this, the crown of his career, and he wasn’t giving up his mission – to be busted down to hole-in-the-sky trash-can Skylab flights – without a fight.

  But Deke had just waved him away. ‘You don’t have a case, Chuck. Listen: A1 Shepard is also one of the original batch, in case you forgot that, and he’s been waiting for a lot of years for a second flight after that damn ear illness. And he was the first American in space; Al outranks you, Chuck. But I’m still standing him down in favor of Dave Scott. You’ve got to face it, Chuck. I don’t like this any more than you do, but Scott’s is the best prepared crew I have, for the one mission we’ve got left.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Of course Jones understood that. The mission was the thing; nobody within NASA wanted to do anything that carried the slightest risk of a foul-up.

  Nobody, that is, save the astronauts who weren’t aboard the last Apollo Moon ship.

  Understanding it didn’t stop him trying, though; and he had stayed in Slayton’s office for a long time, arguing hard …

  There was another piece of the old rock, anorthosite or whatever shit it was, in his way. Jones kicked it aside and stalked on.

  The afternoon was to be a simulated three-hour moonwalk. York had to make up the num
bers, in the absence of enough astronauts. Jones teamed with Priest, and Bleeker paired off with York. Jorge Romero would stay behind in the truck, and act as a capcom. The astronauts wore backpacks, radios and cameras, and they followed traverses laid out on coarse maps designed to match the quality of low-resolution orbital photographs.

  York and Bleeker stopped at the first sample point. There was a large, fractured boulder here, shot through with anorthosite. Bleeker set up a gnomon and took a photograph of the rock face. The gnomon was a device for calibration, a little tripod with a color scale for the photography, and a free-hanging central rod to give local vertical. Bleeker hit the rock with his hammer, and broke off a piece the size of his fist. He placed the sample in a small Teflon bag and dropped it into the pack on York’s back. He’d donned lunar gloves to do the work; York could see how stiff and clumsy the gloves were.

  ‘How was that?’

  She grinned back at him. ‘Standard operating procedures, Adam; Jorge will be proud of you.’

  They walked on.

  Bleeker raised his face to the sun, a vague half-smile on his face. Bleeker was pale, freckled – a northern boy – and he wore plenty of sun-block on his exposed skin, here in the Californian heat. York hadn’t spent any time alone with him before today. He seemed bland, unimaginative, rather empty. Ideal profile for a moonwalker, she thought wryly.

  ‘I guess this training is very different from what you’ve been used to,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, you bet. Especially compared to my assignment before joining the Astronaut Office.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘510 Squadron. That’s a fighter-bomber squadron, based in Virginia. Beautiful part of the country. Do you know it?’

  ‘No … What kind of bombs?’

  He glanced at her, professional reserve coming down behind his eyes. ‘Special weapons.’

  Oh. Nuclear.

  ‘We were trained to deploy out of West Germany. We’d have flown low, a hundred feet, under the enemy’s radar.’ He mimed the maneuver with a dusty hand. Now he pulled his hand so it soared straight upwards. ‘The idea was to let go of the payload at just the right moment. The package would follow a two-mile arc to the target.’ He grinned again, almost shyly. ‘While it was falling I’d be high-tailing it out of there, as fast as I could go, before the detonation.’