Voyage

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘I am.’

  He sat back and sighed. ‘But you want to go to Mars. And you can figure out the implications of the crew rotations as well as anyone else.’

  ‘Damn it, Joe, I’m far and away the best mission specialist for Mars surface operations. You know that; I should be in line for the F mission, so I can get out there and do what I’m having to teach everyone else!’

  He steepled his fingers. ‘All I can tell you is, we’re going to follow the rotation system. If it works out that Phil Stone takes his crew to Mars, then so be it; and if things get messed up or delayed for some reason, and your crew gets back in line – through the normal rotation system – then you’ll have your chance. And maybe, if there’s a second or third landing –’

  ‘You know damn well there will be no second landing. We’re putting everything we’ve got into this one shot. Square with me, Joe. I should be on the damn flight. And if I was a man, another Harrison Schmitt, I’d be inked in already as a no-brain choice. But I’m a woman, and that’s why I’m not going.’

  ‘Natalie, it’s not like that.’

  ‘Come on, Joe. Don’t bullshit me, for once.’

  He folded his fingers together. ‘No bullshit?’

  ‘No bullshit.’

  ‘I’m not going to pretend that the gender thing doesn’t cause us problems, Natalie.’

  The gender thing. ‘What problems, for Christ’s sake? That I won’t be able to fit my flight helmet over my bouffant hairstyle? Joe, it’s 1981–’

  ‘Give me a break, Natalie. Look, it might have been different if we’d ever built the Shuttle, if we had big roomy ships to carry seven or eight to orbit, if access to space had ever become routine. Then we would be flying women every month. But we don’t. So you work it out. If you have a mixed crew, you need extra facilities. Personal hygiene. Privacy. It’s all avoidable payload weight. And that’s not a good thing when you’re planning an eighteen-month deep-space mission.’

  ‘So take an all-female crew. No need for separate showers then; right? …’

  Muldoon was starting to look exasperated. ‘Look, Natalie, you know you’re not going to win this argument. And I’m not even the right guy to be arguing with.’

  ‘Then who is?’

  He shrugged. ‘American culture. The world. Hell, I don’t know; I’m just the poor schmoe who recommended you for the D mission.’ He studied her with, she thought, a little more sympathy. ‘Natalie, take my advice. The main thing is to be in the rotation. That’s all that matters; that, and doing your damnedest at the job. And I know you’ll do that. We need you in the program, Natalie. You’re an element we’ve missed before. We think a lot of you. You’d be surprised. And I noticed the work you did at capcom during Apollo-N.’

  She shrugged. It wasn’t an assignment from which she wanted to gain any credit. ‘You need me in the program, but not necessarily on a ship to Mars.’

  He shuffled the papers on his desk, the typed-out lists of crew assignments. ‘Maybe that’s true. Maybe you’d actually be more use to the program, overall – to the science goals – right here, in Houston, than stumbling around on Mars itself. Have you thought about that? Natalie, you’re complaining about flying the space soak mission. Hell, I understand that; in your shoes, I’d be up here beefing too. But all I get to fly these days is this damn desk.’ He looked wistful. Almost desperate. ‘Two hours on the Moon just wasn’t enough, for one lifetime.’

  She couldn’t help saying it. ‘Two hours too many for your wife, maybe.’

  He threw the papers down on the desk. ‘Goddamn you, York, why do you have to be so abrasive?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Joe.’ She shook her head. ‘I guess I’m just –’

  ‘Listen to me,’ he said bluntly. ‘Who the hell knows what’s going to happen? You just keep on doing what you’re doing. Do whatever that bunch of assholes out there do, but do it twice as often, and twice as good. And offer me things they can’t; like your geology training. Keep yourself in the frame. Make yourself indispensable. Who knows where we’ll all be, by 1986?’

  For that brief moment she felt oddly cheered – almost confident. He’s right. I’ve got this far; maybe I can get through the final barriers. I can do this.

  But Muldoon’s eyes started straying to the heaps of papers on his desk.

  York was shut out again: she was out in the dark, with her mission prospects – her career, her life – reduced once more to being a matter of little more than guesswork and hope. Her brief warm stab of self-confidence faded as quickly as it had come.

  She got out of Muldoon’s office.

  June, 1981 Headquarters, Columbia Aviation, Newport Beach

  When he got up in the morning Lee liked to hit the ground rolling. Jennine fixed him two cups of coffee, both heavily sugared, so the second one had time to cool and he could down it in a gulp, on the run to the black T-bird in the yard.

  His first task was to find somewhere to work on the proposal. He spent a day roaming around the plant.

  Columbia’s plant was a bunch of decrepit old factory buildings, with the big wind tunnel snaking through the complex. The site worked pretty well for the small-run experimental work that was the norm for CA’s workload. But it was already bursting at the seams.

  What Lee needed was office space.

  Finally his eye settled on the canteen; it was the only open space big enough to take a hundred people or more.

  ‘This is it. Bella, I want you to get rid of the serving hatches and the goddamn trestle tables. I’ve got drafting tables and desks coming in here.’ He squinted upwards. ‘Not enough light. Get some skylights knocked through. And check the power; we’ll need a secured supply for the computers.’

  ‘Yes, sir, JK. But –’

  ‘What is it with you and these “buts”?’

  ‘Where will we eat?’

  Lee waved a hand. ‘The whole of the goddamn US is full of McDonald’s. Nobody will starve.’

  ‘Yes, sir, JK.’

  He looked around the canteen, with its battered serving bays and scuffed floor and stink of tomato sauce. It was the pits. And it was going to be a tough regime in here. He’d already issued a notice that for the duration of the proposal development he’d expect everybody to be at their desks by seven a.m. and to work through until at least nine p.m. And the work here would just be the center of a huge effort right across the company, with teams of engineers in laboratories and wind tunnels generating data to support the thesis that Columbia was going to be able to do this, to build this unprecedented machine …

  But this was the focus: it was in this big, dirty room, he felt now with a growing excitement, that the final proposal for the Mars Excursion Module would be drawn up.

  He started scouring the organization, taking out whoever he thought was going to be of use to him in constructing the bid. When anybody howled, he just waved Cane’s name at them, and that was usually enough. That was Art Cane’s culture, Lee reflected. He might have doubts about the wisdom of this bid, but now they had gotten into it, it was a corporate effort, all or nothing, and Cane would expect the whole organization to support Lee as best it could.

  During that first week Art Cane spent some time trying to assemble corporate partners: potential subcontractors who would support Columbia’s bid. A coalition of subcontractors was, by traditional wisdom, a major feature of any serious bid for a contract like this.

  At Cane’s recommendation, Lee and Bob Rowen flew out to Culver City, the headquarters of Hughes Aircraft. This was where Cane had cut his teeth, and he still had some contacts out there. Cane arranged an appointment for them with a vice president called Gene Tyson. As it happened Hughes hadn’t been signed up by anybody else in the MEM bidding process yet. And Hughes were skilled in control and stabilization, so they would be good to have on Columbia’s side.

  But when Lee and Rowen got to Culver, Tyson kept them waiting for three hours, and when they’d given their pitch, Tyson and his aides laughed them out of the
office.

  Gene Tyson was a fat, soft-looking man who reeked of cologne and tobacco, and he irritated the hell out of Lee. He put a fatherly arm around Lee’s shoulders as he walked him to the door. ‘Take my advice,’ Tyson said. ‘Art Cane is a great old guy. But, JK, you’re wasting your time. Not to mention mine. You have no chance of winning this contract, absolutely none. You’re just a bunch of lab boys.’

  Lee went back to Newport steaming – and worried. If Hughes wouldn’t take their bid seriously, who the hell would? And not having a partner could leave a big hole right in the middle of the bid.

  But the more he thought about it, the more he began to see that he might be able to turn this too from a weakness to a strength.

  ‘Look at it this way,’ he said to Art Cane. ‘Fuck ‘em. Fuck Hughes. And the rest. We’ll go it alone. We’ll go to NASA as a coach, not a team. That’s what they need. Once you have Columbia as the coach, you can put anybody you like on the goddamn team. Let the customer make the choice when they’re ready; we don’t need to lock them in now.’

  Art Cane shook his head. ‘You’re a crazy man, JK. Get out of my office.’

  When the canteen had been converted, Lee set himself up at a desk on a stage. He appointed team leaders, his senior and smarter people like Bob Rowen and Julie Lye. But all the time he himself was going to hover over the whole thing like a hawk, looking out for trouble.

  Rapidly, the concept of the Columbia MEM began to emerge.

  Lee wanted something that would look, to the NASA evaluation panel, easy to build. So the MEM started out pretty much as Lee had outlined it, that night he’d driven out to the Mojave with Ralph Gershon. You had your basic Apollo Command Module shape, a squat cone thirty feet tall, with a heatshield all of thirty feet across at the base. And now his teams of engineers focused on that concept. Inside the conical, heat-resistant shell, the MEM would have two stages, like Apollo’s Lunar Module: a descent stage for landing on Mars, which would later serve as a platform for an upper ascent stage, which would return to orbit.

  Lee laid down rules about how he wanted as little innovation as possible. ‘You can start being creative when we’ve won the goddamn bid, not before.’ For instance, he didn’t want to see any changes to the overall Command Module shape. The angle of that cone had been determined years back by wind-tunnel tests at NASA’s own Ames Laboratory, and all the experience of Apollo had proven out that analysis since then, and he wasn’t about to let anyone in his organization challenge it now.

  In Lee’s first sketch, the MEM would land on five fold-down landing legs. Five was chosen in case one of the legs broke off on landing; the MEM could stay stable even if that happened. The descent stage engine, the rocket which would carry the MEM down the last few miles to the surface of Mars, stuck out of the base of the MEM, with its fuel tanks clustered close by.

  Inside the fat base of the descent stage there was a doughnut-shaped compartment. Some of this was taken up with fuel tanks, but the rest was given over to payload. Half of the doughnut was a surface shelter, a tightly curving chamber that would serve as crew quarters and laboratory for the crew while they were on the Martian surface. Then there were surface operations bays, with room for airlocks and equipment, and space for a small Martian rover.

  Sitting on top of the descent stage was a smaller cone: the cabin of the ascent stage. This was a bubble of glass, to give all-round visibility. The crew would ride down to the surface and back to orbit again inside this cabin. It held room enough, just, for four guys, lying side by side in acceleration couches. But you could fold the couches out of the way, so the pilots could stand up to control the final descent.

  The rest of the ascent stage was a cylinder, impaled down the spine of the MEM’s descent stage. The ascent stage, rising from Mars, would look like a Kojak lollipop, Lee thought whimsically, a glass lollipop on a stick of propellant tanks and rocket engine, leaving behind a truncated half-cone: the descent stage, scorched and decapitated.

  That was the skeleton of the thing, anyhow, and the teams soon began to put on some flesh, mapping out the subsystems.

  ECLSS, the environment control and life support system: Jack Morgan’s baby, with molecular sieves to scrub out carbon dioxide, and filtration for water recycling. Electrical supply: fuel cells for the descent stage, separate, smaller cells for the ascent. Guidance and control: there would be inertial guidance, and rendezvous and landing radar systems, and attitude rocket clusters, and gimballed main engines to allow thrust vector control. Communications: the engineering models of the ascent stage started to sprout antennae, S-band for TV links to the orbiter and voice to Earth, and VHF for voice links to the orbiter and EVA to MEM links …

  Lee had his people borrow where they could. Details in the subsystems, for example: they put in power cells that had already served in the Apollo Lunar Module, an L-band rendezvous radar from Gemini. As for a propellant, should they use the nitrogen tetroxide/Aerojet 50 Grumman had used on the LM? That was hypergolic – meaning it would ignite on contact with its oxidizer, with no need for an ignition system – but it was low-performance, corrosive, not to mention toxic. Not the stuff you’d want to have to store for a year or more as you hauled your MEM out to Mars. There had been some studies of fluorine-based compounds, but they hadn’t been taken too far because fluorine was such difficult stuff to work with. What, then? …

  As the teams worked, the design quickly evolved away from the first baseline sketched out by Lee.

  That bubble of glass on top of the ascent stage, for instance. It would have given the crewmen an uninterrupted horizontal field of view, and a hundred and thirty-five degrees vertically: it would have been like riding some superb helicopter down to the surface of Mars. But if the bubble was made of laminated glass, it would be too heavy; and lighter alternatives like Plexiglas would discolor and weaken under the intense, ultraviolet-laden Martian sunlight. And, as Jack Morgan was quick to point out, all that glass would overload the environment control system. So the beautiful bubble was discarded, in favor of small, LM-like, downward-slanting pilot’s windows.

  And the five-landing-leg geometry was soon upped to six, to provide the broad-based craft with better landing dynamics. To guard against excessive forces on landing, the legs incorporated a crushable aluminum honeycomb, so they would compress, absorbing the force of impact …

  It was an exciting, invigorating time.

  Lee didn’t spare himself; he charged through the organization, checking, cross-fertilizing, collating, cutting through a lot of what he judged to be sterile crap.

  Sometimes he’d realize he couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept, or eaten. Sometimes, in fact, it was only a pressure in his bladder or bowels that made him attend to the human side of his needs at all.

  Every day he went home in the dark and left in the dark.

  It was incredible. He never even saw the apple blossom in his yard. He hardly saw his kids – two boys, Bert and Gerry, both high school age – for more than minutes at a time.

  He had a little more time with Jennine, but most of that he spent eating, or – if he was lucky and could relax – sleeping lightly.

  He worried a little about Jennine, when he thought about it. She’d grown used to the stupid hours he worked, over the years. Although she knew and cared nothing about airplanes, Jennine seemed to understand that these bursts of activity were like brush fires; they wouldn’t last forever, and then she would have him back. For a while, anyhow.

  But she seemed a little more strained, this time, although he couldn’t quite figure out why.

  They were both older, he supposed. That was one thing. And the boys were sure a handful.

  But the MEM pressure would go away. She would get him back.

  … But what if we win?

  Then it isn’t going to go away. Is it, JK? Not until 1986, and that ascent stage lifts off Mars, and it’s all over.

  But always, the work came crowding back in on him again, shutting out hi
s consideration of anything else.

  He kept two supreme goals in mind. One was meeting the proposal submission deadline, and the other was keeping the MEM’s overall weight within the design limits specified in the RFP.

  For the first, he had Bella print up a kind of calendar, which he pinned up around the plant and had checked off every day. FORTY-SIX DAYS TO SUBMISSION DAY! AND ROCKWELL ARE STILL AHEAD OF US! Lee was proud of this, ‘It’s kind of like the calendar they had in When Worlds Collide. Do you remember that, Bella? When they were building a rocket ship to get off the Earth? …’

  ‘Yes, sir, JK.’

  The weight problem was more difficult to crack.

  Every design definition Lee had ever worked on was the same; each subsystem inevitably grew in scope and complexity as the engineers got into the detail. So Lee started to keep a list of best-guess weights for all the various components and subsystems.

  Every morning Lee would call his senior people into his own office, into a progress meeting he called a hot griddle. It was something he knew they used at the Strategic Air Command. Seven forty-five smart and then the doors were locked; the chairs were pushed against the wall, and there was no coffee, so you couldn’t sit down and take it easy. Then, everybody would talk through their top problem for the day and how they would resolve it.

  At the griddle sessions Lee handed out weight summaries, showing how far the current aggregate design was over the limit. He was reluctant to start setting weight limits for subsystems – he wanted to find the best trade-off across the whole spacecraft – but he pushed his people every day to figure out what they could do to bring down their net weight, to give the rest a little slack.

  Still, the daily totals weren’t coming down fast enough, and the weight issue soon emerged as his major worry.

  It wouldn’t matter if, at submission time, they were a little heavy, a little above the target. If they won, there would be plenty of detailed design work to follow. But right now it seemed as if the Columbia MEM wouldn’t even be in the right ball park.