Voyage

by Stephen Baxter

  That did it. York was incensed. She leaned forward so her voice boomed from the speakers. ‘Look, I’ve really no time for crap like this. We’re training for a deep space mission, for Christ’s sake. Why should we give up our time, put more pressure on ourselves, just to respond to dumb-ass remarks like –’

  Phil Stone put his hand over her microphone.

  ‘I understand how Natalie feels,’ he said smoothly. ‘Believe me. The suggestion’s just implausible. I think the best proof I can offer you that our mission is genuine is this: it’s probably easier to fly to Mars for real than to fake it up.’

  That got a laugh, and the moment passed.

  York tried to steady her breathing. She knew she was in for a lecture from Rick Llewellyn later.

  ‘What about sex?’

  Stone asked, ‘What do you mean?’

  A male reporter got up now, in a seedy Lieutenant Columbo raincoat, a grin on his face. ‘What about sex? You’re all normal, healthy adults – America’s first mixed space crew – and you’ll be cooped up in that dinky Mission Module for eighteen months. And Ralph and Natalie aren’t married … Come on. Two guys and one gal? What a situation.’

  York felt her cheeks burn. I could just walk out of this. Yeah. And out of the mission.

  Gershon was grinning, enjoying it all hugely.

  Stone pursed his lips. ‘I take it you know the official NASA line. It’s in our induction handbooks. Close coupling of crew members is to be avoided.’ He smiled, self-deprecating, completely in control. ‘Some help.’ Another laugh. ‘But I’d say that advice is basically right. Hell, we’re all adults. But a sexual relationship between crew members – or, more importantly, a special emotional relationship – would be harmful to the stability of the crew as a whole, and might compromise our ability to support the whole crew through the entire duration of the mission. And if you fully understand the potential for negative impact – you’ve got jealousy, special treatment, circumvention of the chain of command, recrimination and regret when you fall out, and so on – I bet this avoidance will be adopted as a group norm on future mixed flights.’

  Gershon cocked his head. ‘Adopted as a what?’

  ‘Pay more attention to your psych training, Gershon.’

  Another laugh. Another defused moment.

  York hoped the color was fading from her cheeks. It was remarkable the way Stone could turn out the party line, though. The same bland crap, the half-lie which NASA had fed to the world since the days of Mercury.

  And I’m just part of the machine now, she thought. An accomplice in the traditional lie. I’m an astronaut, now; my human needs don’t exist any more, officially.

  The reporter’s question, if facetious, was actually perceptive. NASA was terrific at the technology, she thought, but stunningly bad at dealing with the needs of the soft, pink bodies they loaded inside their gleaming von Braun dream machines – unable even to recognize that those needs existed.

  The questions continued to come, sliding from topic to topic. And all of them, York thought, looking for ways into the central, banal question everyone wanted to ask of an astronaut:

  What does it feel like, in space? On the Moon? On Mars?

  At first it seemed just dumb to her: naive, too open, without a possible answer. And the way it cropped up, in one form or another, at every conference irritated her.

  Today, Joe Muldoon tried to answer it.

  ‘I’m just an ordinary guy. But I guess you could say I’ve done something extraordinary.

  ‘Let me tell you what it was like. When you look down on the Earth from orbit, you forget about your hassles: the bills you got to pay, the trouble you’re having with your car. Instead, all you think about is the people: the people you know and care about, down there in that blue bowl of air. And you realize, somewhat, how much indeed you do care about them …’

  Save for Muldoon’s voice, the room was silent.

  She watched the questioners, tough, cynical pressmen all, as they fixed on the face of the astronaut. Even the woman who’d asked about the fake-up was listening, intent, trying to understand.

  Muldoon was saying, ‘To see the Earth fall away behind your receding capsule … To stand on the Moon, and see that little world curve away under your feet: to be cognizant that you are one of just two humans on this whole world, and to be able to hold your hand up and cover the Earth …’

  Here you had a handful of men who had done something extraordinary: flown beyond the air, even walked on the airless surface of the Moon – unimaginable things, things which nothing in their human evolutionary heritage had prepared them for. And York began to see that something in the press people – masked by all the banter and joshing and bluster – was responding to that. Something primeval.

  You’ve been up there. I could never go. Don’t say you’re just an ordinary guy. What is it like? Tell me.

  As the astronauts spoke to the public – even though, for God knew what reason, even a skilled operator like Muldoon always seemed to fall into a stilted jargon littered with ‘somewhat’ and ‘cognizant’ – a very basic and primal communication was struggling to happen, a layer under the spoken. The words of Muldoon and the rest weren’t enough; they could never be. York often had the feeling that people wanted to close in and touch the astronauts. As if they were gods. Or as if information, sensations, memories could be transmitted through the skin.

  But she could not contribute to this. How could she? She’d never flown higher than in a T-38.

  She felt like a fake, sitting there bathed in TV lights, alongside a man who had bent down and run his fingers through lunar dirt.

  October, 1984

  … How frequently we perceive our national debates about the future of SPACE TRAVEL veering between hysterical extremes! And all of it is played out against the background of the most cynically AMORAL times in living memory.

  While the ‘yuppies’ parade their Rolex watches and their BMW sports cars, and while our illusory economic ‘upturn’ is fuelled only by the President’s massive rise in MILITARY EXPENDITURE – which is itself inherently inflationary, and to which the Mars mission has become explicitly linked, by NASA’s supporters in politics – all of which is leading to an immense DEFICIT which we will bequeath to our children – the income gap between richest and poorest is at its widest in two decades.

  And that very DEFICIT is itself a cynical manipulation of the economy by an Administration which is determined that there shall be no opportunity, because of the DEFICIT burden, for an expansion in welfare spending or other programs in the years beyond President Reagan’s retirement in 1988.

  At its grandest, the dehumanizing experience of SPACE can lead us, paradoxically, to a fuller understanding of the HUMANITY the astronauts must cast aside. Indeed it can teach us a truer perspective:

  —CONTEMPT for our works

  —VALUE of ourselves.

  It is a new perspective which can lead us closer to GOD. But all too often the experience of SPACE, certainly as portrayed to the general public by the Government information organizations and public bodies supporting and opposing the space initiative, veers between twin mirror-image idols, both of them false:

  —MELLONOLATRY, that is the baseless worship of technology for its own sake

  —MISONEISM, an equally baseless fear and hatred of technology.

  What better argument for casting aside our rocket vessels now, with their deadly NUCLEAR hearts! …

  Excerpt from ‘Mellonolatry and Misoneism: The Twin Idols of Space,’ Rev. B. Seger, Church of St Joseph of Cupertino. All rights reserved.

  Monday, December 3, 1984 Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, Houston

  Ralph Gershon was standing in the hatchway of the MEM mockup, his face visible behind his clear visor. ‘Okay, Natalie. You want to come in now?’

  ‘Rog, Ralph.’

  York, on the faked-up Martian surface, took a deliberate step toward the MEM.

  As she moved, the harness around he
r chest hauled at her brutally, and she was dragged upwards through a couple of feet. She tripped. The suit, pressurized at three and a half pounds per square inch, was like a balloon around her, and it kept her body stiff, like a mannequin, and she couldn’t save herself.

  She toppled like a felled tree.

  She fell on her knees, with her gloved hands in the dirt. The soil in front of her face was dried-out Houston gumbo, sprinkled with pink gravel: she was on what the astronauts called, inaccurately, a rock pile, a simulated Martian surface. This surface was more or less flat, because flat areas were where the more conservative mission planners wanted to put the MEM down.

  ‘Goddamn this harness.’

  ‘You tell it, Natalie. You want any help?’

  ‘No. No, I’ll manage, damn it.’

  York was lashed up to a tethered Martian gravity simulator. The harness around her chest was attached by cables to a pole above her; the cables led to pulleys which offset two-thirds of her weight. Just like on Mars. Except on Mars, there wouldn’t be some ludicrous, clumsy rope hauling unpredictably at her back every time she took a step.

  To get upright now, for example, she had to push at the ground, and let the harness haul her upright, and scrabble with her ankles at the soil, hoping not to tip over backwards again.

  She stood there teetering on her feet, her hands outstretched for balance. Through her helmet she could hear ironic applause from the technicians.

  ‘Ignore the assholes,’ Gershon advised.

  ‘Rog.’ She took a breath. ‘Here I come again, Ralph.’

  ‘Just take it steadily, Natalie. That’s my girl …’

  She took a slow and measured step. It was actually a lot easier to take her feet off the surface than to put them back down again. She seemed to drift in a shallow parabola through the air before each step completed, and she grounded with a crunch in the dried gumbo. It was like swimming through some viscous liquid, all her motions rendered slow, dreamlike, unstable.

  At last, though, she seemed to be getting up a little momentum. The mass of her backpack tugged at her, its inertia constantly dragging her off her line; whenever she wanted to change direction she had to think four or five steps ahead.

  The MEM drifted before her, remote and all but unattainable, bathed in movie-set floodlights. The mockup’s hatch gaped open, the fluorescent light within revealing the hardwood-and-ply nature of its construction.

  Not far from the MEM was a mocked-up Mars Rover, the TV camera mounted on its prow swiveling to stare at her with its dark lens. The camera was live. York, under its gaze, felt like some gorilla loping around its cage.

  Ralph, of course, had taken to Mars-walking as if he’d been born to it.

  This was actually a simulation of their second walk on Mars, the first time they would get to do any serious work. The first walk would be an hour-long solo by Phil Stone, as commander. The purpose of the first walk – according to the mission plan – was for him to test out the systems of his suit and his general mobility, to check out the status of the MEM after landing, and to resolve any glitches with the comms systems. Stone would do little science, that first time out, except to pick up a small contingency surface sample.

  Of course there was a hidden agenda.

  The attention of the Earth – and all of NASA’s sponsors in the White House and on the Hill – would be on that first walk, the first small steps by a man on Mars. So all the ceremony – putting up the Stars and Stripes, the footprints-and-flags stuff, the speech by President Reagan (who was, right now, basking in his new landslide win against Teddy Kennedy) – could be got out of the way in that first hour. And on Joe Muldoon’s advice, learning from his Apollo experiences, everything in that first walk was being check-listed and timelined, including Reagan’s call.

  After that, hopefully, the rest of the program would be free for some serious work.

  It made some sense to York. She knew how such things had to be accommodated. But it still seemed odd to her, sometimes, that NASA should be planning the exploration of Mars around TV ratings.

  Now she reached the MEM. She skidded a little as she came to a halt, at the foot of the ladder down from the hatch.

  The simulation supervisor spoke to her over her headset. ‘Natalie, this time we’d like you to try extracting a SNAP from its cask.’

  ‘Rog.’ She tried to keep the weary irritation out of her voice. That meant she had to trudge further, across to the plywood Mars Rover. She swiveled on her heel like a puppet, until her body was pointing at the Rover, and then lumbered across the crunching surface.

  The dummy Surface Exploration Package was already set up, its silver and gold boxes sprawling across the surface in a spider-web of power cables and data feeds. Some of the cables still needed connecting, as did the antenna for transmitting signals back to Earth. The SNAP generator – System of Nuclear Auxiliary Power – was a box to one side of the little complex. York was supposed to activate it by inserting a little pod of plutonium into it. The pod – a dummy, one of several – was mounted in a little rack at the back of the Rover. It was a narrow cylinder, maybe a foot long, held inside a graphite storage cask.

  She got hold of a handling rod. By pulling a trigger handle, she opened little jaws at the end of the handle and tried to engage them around the pod. Her pressurized, elasticated gloves resisted every movement of her hands; it was like trying to close a fist around a rubber ball.

  When she had got the handling jaws open, she had to use two hands to guide the open mouth around the end of the pod.

  Finally she tried to pull the pod free of its flask. But the damn thing wouldn’t come.

  The jaws slipped off the pod, and she staggered backwards. She could hear her breathing rasp, the rattle of the cable on her harness.

  ‘You got any suggestions, Ralph?’

  ‘Hold it there. Let me try that mother.’

  She rested surreptitiously against her cables, while Gershon clambered backwards out of the MEM. He wasn’t hooked up to a Peter Pan, so he labored under the full weight of his suit, and his movements were heavy and awkward.

  He climbed down the ladder and took the handling rod. With York’s help he got the jaws fitted to the fuel pod. He started to pull; he even leaned back, digging his heels into the dried-out gumbo. But the pod wouldn’t come loose.

  The SimSup called, ‘Ah, you guys want to take a break? That thing sure is jammed.’

  ‘Nope,’ said Gershon. ‘Natalie, let’s try the direct approach. You get hold of the rod, here.’

  ‘Okay.’ She took it from him, moving slowly, being careful not to release the grip on the trigger handle.

  ‘Now.’ He reached over and took a geological hammer from the loop at her waist. ‘Start pulling, babe.’

  With both hands on the handling rod, she leaned back and dragged.

  Gershon started hitting the cask with the hammer, with high, sweeping blows; his whole body had to swivel to deliver the blows.

  Every time a blow landed York could feel the fuel pod shudder.

  ‘It’s not working, Ralph.’

  ‘The hell it isn’t.’

  He spun like a hammer-thrower, and with two hands he delivered one final almighty blow to the cask.

  The graphite split right in two.

  The fuel pod came free. York stumbled backwards, her boots scuffing at the gumbo in an effort to keep upright. The cables helped her this time, giving her just enough leverage to keep from falling.

  The fuel pod went tumbling to the surface, like a dropped relay baton.

  Gershon lumbered across to her, his face framed by his visor. ‘Hey. You okay?’

  ‘Sure. How’s the pod?’

  They bent over the little metal cylinder, where it lay in the pink gravel. There was a hairline crack down one seam.

  ‘How about that,’ Gershon said. ‘We busted it. We nuked Mars.’

  ‘Well, it was only a mockup. Probably the real thing will be tougher.’

  ‘Christ, I
hope so.’

  ‘Okay, guys,’ the supervisor said. ‘Both your heart rates are showing a little high. That is definitely it for now. Take five. We’ll resume in an hour.’

  Jorge Romero came barging into the simulation chamber. ‘Goddamn it,’ he stormed. ‘You did it again, Natalie! You broke my damn SEP! And you were a half-hour behind schedule!’

  York, free of her cabling, was sitting on the Rover with her helmet on her lap, cradling a mug of coffee. She smiled at him. ‘Oh, take it easy, Jorge. It’s only a sim.’

  Romero, small, purposeful, pink with anger, marched back and forth across the fake Martian surface, sending up little sprays of gravel. ‘But that’s three times out of the last three that my SEP implementation has been screwed up …’

  Her training had been intense, the compressed schedule committing her and the others to eighteen hours a day in complex exercises like this, for long weeks at a stretch. She felt her patience drawing thin, as Romero paced about. I don’t have time for these debates, Jorge. But she owed him an answer.

  ‘Look,’ she said to Romero, ‘I know how you feel. But you have to make allowances, Jorge. Out on a field trip, you can take as long as you want, days or weeks thinking over a sample if you need to. It’s not like that here. The Mars-walks can last only a few hours each. They’ll be even more curtailed than the old Apollo moonwalks. So we have to plan out every step. These simulations are’ – she waved a hand – ‘choreography. It’s a different way of working, for you and me. Real time, they call it.’

  Romero was still pissed. ‘Goddamn it. I’m going to write a memo to Joe Muldoon. All these screwups. Those Flight Operations people just can’t be running the mission properly.’

  ‘But that’s the point of the sim, Jorge. We’re supposed to break things.’ She found a grin spreading across her face, but she suppressed it. ‘I’m sorry, Jorge. I do know how you feel. I sympathize.’

  He glared at her. ‘Oh, you do? So you haven’t gone over to the operational camp altogether?’