Voyage

by Stephen Baxter

  He’d found he couldn’t hold the optical equipment steady in the microgravity. But the way round that was to set the gadgets floating in the air, as well aligned as possible; then he could bring his eye up to the eyepiece and make an accurate reading.

  The first TCM – Trajectory Correction Maneuver – had taken place ten days after leaving Earth. At that time the flight path had been pretty badly misaligned. The trajectory planners back in Houston had sent corrective burn parameters chattering up the line to Ares, and the MS-II stage’s maneuvering propulsion system – two modified Lunar Module engines – had applied a hefty velocity change of twenty-five feet per second. But, according to the latest data, the craft was still on a slightly divergent trajectory. Today Stone would check the craft’s position and velocity, and the track would be recomputed; and tomorrow, if they could get it right, the second TCM burn would fix the trajectory’s small remaining anomaly.

  There was a whole slew of ways for the ground to keep track of a spacecraft. The faster the craft was receding from Earth, the more its radio carrier frequency was shifted, like a whistle on a speeding train. Or, to fix distance, an uplink modulation pattern – a brief digital code – could be transmitted to the spacecraft, and sent straight back. The delay in receiving the copied signal would tell the specialists how far away the craft was from Earth. And on Ares another radio method was being run, an experiment involving the change in angle between Ares and a quasar, a radio source in the background sky.

  But even all these techniques in combination weren’t accurate enough to position Ares; the combined accuracy was only maybe half that required.

  The answer was to use equipment on board the spacecraft itself.

  In fact Ares had its own automated optical sensors. There were two sun sensors – little cadmium sulphide photoresistors – placed on the solar cell array. And there was a star tracker, a lens with an image dissector tube. But the automatic system just wasn’t too smart. Every few days, the star tracker got fooled by bright particles, bits of junk floating along with the spacecraft in its orbit around the sun.

  So – just as had sailors on Earth’s oceans for millennia – Phil Stone had to navigate his ship by the stars.

  He found himself humming as he worked. He knew he was good at this. He’d practiced the techniques in planetariums on the ground, and in Moonlab; he could get a measurement true within a few thousandths of a degree, and he took a lot of satisfaction from the basic craft of it.

  When he’d finished he packed away the instruments, and drifted back up to his control station. He ran the numbers through the computer, to figure out the position for himself. He would feed the raw data down to Houston, of course, but it kind of satisfied him to know that he could do this independently.

  Stone liked to visualize the mission trajectory, to figure out where he was.

  The energy expended by the injection booster – although monumental in human terms, the result of five years’ fuel haulage to orbit – was so low on the cosmic scale that the craft’s trajectory barely diverged from Earth’s. The Ares stack, having pushed itself away from Earth, was now scooting alongside the home planet in its orbit like a dog beside its master.

  The first results looked good; the spacecraft was pretty much where it was supposed to be, and he figured that the TCM-2 burn would only have to be a few feet per second.

  When he was done he indulged himself. He doused the wardroom’s lights, and sat in the warm darkness close to the picture window, surrounded by the hum of fans.

  Ares was alone in space now: Earth and Moon were reduced to star-like points of light, side by side. In all the universe, only the sun showed a disk.

  The sense of isolation was extraordinary: far deeper than he’d known in space before, even during his time in Moonlab. Unless you were around the back of the Moon, Earth was always in view. And in Skylab A, the Earth itself dominated every waking moment, and you took your reference from that huge quilt of light, from the continents and oceans sliding under you.

  Out here, it was different. There was no ‘up’ or ‘down’: there were just little islands of rock, floating around in the sky. For interplanetary flight humans would need to develop a new kind of perception, he thought, a three-dimensional awareness.

  As his eyes dark-adapted, the stars came out: millions of them, far more than were visible through Earth’s murky atmosphere. He could see the galaxy, a great speckled river of stars; he made out the edge of the disk in the direction of the galactic core, in Sagittarius, with its ragged edge caused by black swirls of obscuring dust clouds, and the nearby stars sparkling in the dark scars. And he could see the moons of Jupiter, four of them, in a line alongside the planet’s bright spark.

  Ralph came floating out of the brightness of the wardroom area to bring him a meal, a couple of packets of warmed-up rehydrated stew. With a pencil light in his mouth Stone mashed in the water, until the food was moist through.

  [Hr:Min:Sec] 19:37:20

  After thirteen hours awake, the crew had finished up their duties for the day. York was feeling queasy again, so she took a scopolamine and went to bed. Stone wanted to spend some time alone, maybe writing letters.

  But Gershon, still full of nervous energy, wanted to play darts.

  The dartboard was the Mission Module’s great recreation, along with magnetic cards. The darts were tipped with Velcro, and they flew straight and level.

  It was quite different from playing under gravity. To get accuracy, the best technique was rather to push the dart comparatively slowly through the air, maybe with a little spin for stability. But if the dart was too slow, currents in the air would knock it off track.

  Gershon set up the dartboard in the Science Platform, and he and Stone threw the darts so that they arced easily the length of the workshop.

  [Hr:Min:Sec] 21:01:32

  Gershon called him out of his sleep locker, and over to the Space Ark.

  Arabella’s cage hadn’t been closed properly, and the spider had got out. Gershon pointed our a huge, sweeping web, which spanned yards of space, crossing from side to side of the Mission Module.

  Stone just hoped enough insects of some sort had survived the various sterilization checks to make it into the Module to sustain Arabella. Gershon was all for shaking out the fruit fly pupae for her.

  Flying to Mars, bound up in spider-web. It was a beautiful image, Stone thought.

  [Hr:Min:Sec] 23:32:37

  When he slept, Stone had his usual space dream.

  Oddly, he was vaguely aware of the causes of the dream, even while he slept: the breeze from the wall fan, the falling sensations of microgravity, maybe a subconscious realization of the speed with which he was traveling.

  All of it merged into a dream of flying.

  He was surrounded by woods and rivers and blue skies, and he was flying, low like a bird of prey.

  June, 1978

  University of California at Berkeley

  Sometimes the prospect of starting at Houston seemed attractive to York, compared to the clique-ridden, insulated world of the universities. She was moving to a place where people were doing great things: working on stuff of more substance than the next grant application, a place where achievement was measured by more than just the number of journal citations per year.

  At other times, though, she couldn’t believe she was doing this.

  She was offered plenty of advice against NASA, from senior staff on down. For example, she was told, the center of gravity of space science was not at Houston, but at the universities: like Cornell, where Sagan was based. Would her own work on Martian outflow channels have been improved if she’d upped sticks and moved to Texas?

  In fact NASA seemed to be actively anti-science. In the wake of the Apollo 11 landing a shoal of scientists had abruptly quit: Bill Hess, Houston chief scientist, Elbert King, lunar samples curator, Eugene Shoemaker, Apollo field geology principal investigator. Shoemaker talked about his concern for the direction of the space program
, and what a poor system Apollo was for exploring the Moon: nothing but a rope and pulley, for instance, to haul surface samples into the LM’s cabin! And what evidence was there that things had gotten any better? Was the Mars program going to be any different?

  It was depressing. If these eminent men couldn’t cut it inside NASA, what chance did she have?

  Earnest friends shoved newspaper stories under her nose. The Tennessee Valley vs Hill case had just concluded, with the Supreme Court ruling that the new Tellico Dam couldn’t be built, because it would drown the only known habitat of a three-inch fish called a snail darter … People nowadays were dead against big, mindless technological stunts – hell, she was herself – and what could be bigger, more mindless, than NASA?

  Then, it was said, she’d end up serving as a non-scientific grunt on training trips. Making sandwiches for astronauts. And if she came back into the mainstream of academic science later, she’d have a hell of a gap in her bibliography. She could be blowing a promising career.

  Besides, you only have to watch Dallas to see what kind of a cultural desert you’re walking into. And the climate down there in Texas, my dear. Oh, my!

  She got stubborn. She even started defending the space program. As an application of government technology, space was somewhere between true science and the opposite. At least it didn’t actively kill people. By contrast she cited Ben Priest as an example of an intelligent, thoughtful adult who was able to survive, precariously maybe, in the dumb-fighter-jock snakepit of NASA.

  Anyway, the only way she was going to get to Mars was via Houston. So that settled the argument, as far as she was concerned.

  She didn’t see Mike Conlig.

  When she’d finally got up the nerve to tell him about her application, he didn’t seem surprised. He didn’t even seem to take it seriously, she thought.

  He called a few times, from Marshall or Santa Susana. But he wouldn’t come to Berkeley, to talk, or help her close out her life.

  Maybe he was being patronizing – maybe he thought she was following a whim, that she wasn’t serious, she wouldn’t see this through. If that was true, he didn’t know her too well after all.

  Or – she wondered – perhaps he suspected something about her and Ben Priest. She’d fallen into bed with Ben only once more, since that time at Pasadena, all of two years ago. But she was no actress; she knew she couldn’t help showing what had happened, in her voice, her eyes, her body language … that is, if Mike was perceptive enough to see, caring enough to devote the attention.

  Which, she figured sadly, he wasn’t.

  But their conversation was too stiff, too many things left unspoken, for her to tell for sure.

  There were a lot of details.

  She got another letter. It said she was to report to Houston to start her ground training in just six weeks, which was a ludicrously short period of time for any working scientist to disengage herself from her commitments. She entered into a regime of eighteen-hour days. She tried to close out her research work with final papers and draft contributions to joint work, and she reassigned the graduate students who were working with her, and she disengaged herself from her teaching commitments.

  Her salary offer was on a Government grade equivalent to what she would have got as a civil service scientist. She hadn’t expected riches as an astronaut, but the pay seemed lousy, actually, considering the dislocation to her life, the hours she would have to put in, the risks, for Christ’s sake.

  She was concerned enough to call Ben Priest about it.

  ‘Am I being picked on?’

  ‘It’s nothing personal. You got to remember you’re at the bottom of an immense pecking order, Natalie. You can’t make more money than the senior military astronauts. I guess you can see that. And their salaries are rigid, because they are locked into a military pay scale.’

  ‘Yeah, but civil service salary scales are rigid, too, once you’re inside. Promotion is slow, and –’

  He cut her off. ‘You have to ask yourself, Natalie. Is this really an issue for you? Is the salary a genuine factor in your decision to join NASA? If it isn’t, quit beefing and move on.’

  She thought about that.

  She signed the forms.

  She had to sort out her pension contributions. She sold her car, and gave up her rented apartment. She made out a new will: her mother was the main beneficiary, and, after some thought, she made Ben Priest her executor. She bought herself a new wardrobe: slacks and light shirts, suitable for Houston. She spoke to her Savings and Loan and her bank, and made arrangements for her mail to be forwarded.

  She even got chased by the press, local paper and radio crews looking to run comic pieces on the new lady astronaut. After the first embarrassing result appeared – Space Beauty Is Over the Moon – she chased the reporters away, and they soon seemed to forget about her.

  There was a round of farewells, which she hated.

  She took a final drive around Berkeley. She headed up Dwight Way and across Telegraph Street, passing the little shingle houses there, and then into and above Strawberry Canyon. The hills were a lush summer green. Further off, beyond the flats of Berkeley, she could see the misty blur of San Francisco and Marin County, linked together by the rust-colored Golden Gate Bridge. The air was fine, laced with eucalyptus.

  How the hell could she give up all this for the humid smog of Houston?

  She hadn’t anticipated how difficult this aspect of her odyssey would be. Her workplace, the apartment she’d rented for years, Berkeley itself: all of it, she realized, maybe belatedly, made up the fabric of her life. Pursuing Martian geology, flying into space, was one thing – but she hadn’t bargained for how hard it would be to clean out her apartment, and to accept the cards and small presents and exchanged addresses, and continually, constantly, say goodbye.

  Wednesday, July 5, 1978

  Headquarters, Rockwell International, Los Angeles

  Gershon walked around the car park, working the stiffness out of his legs after his drive out from the city. It was colder than he’d come to expect for California.

  The LA division of Rockwell was strung out around the southern border of Los Angeles International Airport. Beyond the fence, the airport was a plain of concrete, with aircraft rolling between distant buildings like little painted toys. There was a distant rumble of jets ramping up, and a remote, evocative whiff of kerosene. If he squinted, he could see a line of big airliners stacked up in the sky.

  The Rockwell headquarters building was an uncompromising cube of brick, four stories high, without a single window. Ralph Gershon had never seen anything like it; it was like the kind of dumb, baffling modern sculptures that earned their creators thousands of dollars. No natural daylight at all. Christ. He was here for a regular meeting of the MEM Technical Liaison Group, and Liaison Group meetings were meetings from hell anyway. The thought of spending all day inside this goddamn box of bricks was depressing.

  Beyond the clutter of Rockwell buildings, he could see all the way down Imperial Boulevard to Santa Monica Bay. He liked the way the morning light was coming off the water, steely gray and flat.

  ‘Here.’

  There was a small, wiry man at his side, with a balding head and rimless glasses and big, ugly freckles; he was holding up a cigarette packet.

  ‘Thanks,’ Gershon said. ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Uh huh.’ The guy took a cigarette himself, tamped it against the box, and lit up. His arms were disproportionately long and bony, and they stuck out of his sleeves. Just behind him in the parking lot, there was a T-bird, gleaming black. ‘You looked like it was a good moment for a smoke.’ He had a broad, bold New York accent. He was maybe fifty, and he looked familiar to Gershon.

  ‘You here for the MEM thing?’ Gershon asked.

  ‘Yeah. And you? You from NASA? A pilot, maybe?’

  ‘How do you know?’

  The guy tapped his own small paunch. ‘Because you look fit.’

  ‘I’m the Astronaut Off
ice rep.’ Gershon hesitated when he used the word ‘astronaut.’ As he always did. Look at me, the great astronaut. When I haven’t flown anything for NASA except a T-38 trainer. But then this little guy had used the word ‘pilot.’ Maybe he understood.

  The stranger stuck out his hand. ‘My name’s Lee. John K. My friends call me JK.’

  The handshake was firm, the palms callused. It wasn’t the grip of a pen-pusher.

  ‘You from one of the MEM bidders?’

  ‘Nope,’ Lee said. ‘I’m from CA. Columbia Aviation. Tell me you’ve heard of us.’

  Gershon grinned.

  Lee shrugged. ‘We do a lot of subcontracting work for Rockwell, and others, and we’re doing some experimental stuff for NASA. Lifting body shapes and such. We’re small, but we’re growing, and we’re smarter than the rest. When it comes to Request For Proposals rime, we’ll throw in our lot with one of the big guys and hustle for a piece of the pie.’ He stared up at the HQ building, the big brick cube. ‘You know, I worked here, for a while. Under Dutch Kindelberger.’

  Gershon looked at Lee with new interest. He knew that name, of course. Any kid like Gershon, who had grown up steeped in planes and the men who built them, would know about Dutch Kindelberger. Dutch had built up Rockwell – then called North American Aviation – in the war years by delivering perhaps the finest American flying machine of that conflict, the P-51 Mustang.

  ‘Dutch designed this building himself,’ Lee said. ‘We used to call it the Brickyard.’

  ‘I didn’t know Kindelberger was an architect.’

  ‘He wasn’t.’ Lee grinned. ‘You don’t think it shows?’ He looked around, at the airport, the Boulevard, the sprawl of Rockwell buildings. ‘There used to be a sign, on top of the main building over there –’ He pointed. ‘You could see it from miles away. “Home of the X-15.”’

  Something clicked in Gershon’s mind. ‘I thought I knew your face.’ He had a vague memory of an old photograph, from the scrapbooks and cutting files he’d kept as a kid: an experimental airplane, up at Edwards, with a line of grinning young engineers, all spectacles and buck teeth and uncontrolled hair. ‘You worked on the X-15?’