World Engine

by Stephen Baxter

  Emma, where I come from, the shuttle system was a dual spacecraft system, both elements piloted, both fully recoverable. Malenfant became a booster pilot.

  Where you come from.

  I don’t know how else to put it. Not yet. But for sure, you have a lot to talk over with Malenfant. Ask him about the flight of STS-719.

  719? We never flew anything like that number of missions . . . Never mind. I’ll talk to him.

  Sorry. We should continue with the debriefing.

  In which we had reached my eleventh birthday.

  So I guess it was Phobos that finally crystallised my own determination to get into space. Because it was the year after the shuttle flew, you see, that President Reagan adopted a crewed NASA mission to Phobos as a national goal in space. Suddenly, after the Moon, we had somewhere to go.

  And then, two years later, he set out the funding for Space Station Freedom, which would serve as a construction shack for the Phobos mission as well as delivering science goals of its own.

  I was thirteen, fourteen years old, and even then I was following the debates, or trying to. But suddenly all I could see was a future full of missions into space, to Earth orbit and beyond. And I was fascinated by the Phobos mystery too. I wanted a part of it.

  Well, Malenfant was ahead of me, of course – he had gone through college with an Air Force scholarship, had amassed a lot of flying experience, and by the late 80s he had his eye on the test-pilot schools. A classic Right Stuff career trajectory. And he encouraged me, by the time I was aged eighteen or so, to follow his footsteps, advised me to get some flying experience.

  But, you know what? I applied to the Air Force Academy, but washed out immediately. Asthma. Didn’t even know I had asthma. No way was I ever going to be a pilot for the Air Force, let alone a spaceship pilot.

  But it wasn’t only pilots who flew into space.

  Once I’d finished cursing my luck, I figured that out, yeah. I had other strengths. I was a kind of all-rounder, academically. Maths was my first love. In fact my mother always hoped I would go into accountancy. So now I focused on science subjects at college. And languages.

  Languages?

  Russian, specifically. Well, I guess I was foresighted, for a kid. I followed the wrangles that developed as NASA and the space industry tried to turn Reagan’s visions into reality. And I was starting to get inside tracks on the gossip, even then, partly thanks to Malenfant.

  You see, it quickly emerged that to mount a mission to Phobos, you were going to need to send up to orbit a lot of heavy components, not least a significant fuel load. Even the early estimates came in at a thousand tonnes or more, in low Earth orbit. Whereas a shuttle launch could carry only thirty tonnes of cargo to orbit, and even that had to be in chunks small enough to fit inside the payload bay. We needed heavy-lift capacity, and America had had none since the Saturn V lunar-rocket production line was shut down after Apollo.

  They shut down the Saturn V? . . . Sorry. You have a lot to talk to Malenfant about. Go on.

  So I knew that the Russians were developing a new heavy-lift launcher of their own. The Energia, it was called in the end. A derivative of their own failed lunar-launch booster. It finally flew in 1987, with a cargo capacity to LEO – low Earth orbit – of two hundred and twenty tonnes.

  Oh. So as little as five, six launches could have sent up a thousand tonnes.

  It took more than that, in the end. But yes, a feasible number. Certainly more so than thirty or forty shuttle launches . . . And I was aware too that the Russians were planning their own probes to Phobos. The whole thing was developing into another Moon race. I foresaw, you see, that someday the Americans and Russians might decide that the best way to get to Phobos was to team up, American smart technology, Russian heavy-lift capability.

  So it came to pass. The fall of the Berlin Wall came at just the right time for me. The way it turned out, 1992, Presidents Bush and Yeltsin agreed to cooperate in space, with the Russian launchers helping build America’s space station – which would eventually merge with the Russian Mir to become the Bilateral Space Station – and then the two nations would work together on the Phobos mission itself, the ultimate goal. The politics was obvious. American money kept the post-Soviet space programme afloat, so Russian space specialists wouldn’t be lured away to work on missile development for antagonistic nations. A win-win all round – and for me especially.

  Because you had seen this coming.

  Sure. After college I had the sciences I needed, especially astrophysics, geology, planetology – everything I could think of that might be essential for a crew at Phobos, or even just useful. And, crucially, I had Russian. I even went over there on summer schools. And it worked out.

  In 1994 the first US astronauts started going over to Russia, for joint training.

  And in 1995 I tried the NASA application process.

  I remember that period so well. If you talk to the astronauts, everyone goes through the same experience. Everybody stays at the Kings Inn hotel next to JSC. In the evenings everybody drinks at the Outpost, just outside the Center gates – trying not to stare at the astronauts, but I soon learned they go there to be stared at. We were in a group of twenty of us ASHOs – that’s astronaut hopefuls – and we were all as competitive as hell. But we knew that we had to come over as team players, and we were all competitive about that as well. I remember this barrage of a panel interview, and it was led by Joe Muldoon himself, and it wrung me out.

  How about your asthma? Wasn’t that a barrier?

  That’s a medic’s question. The doctors told me I would have passed at NASA even as a pilot candidate in that regard. NASA has different medical standards from the Air Force. Ironic, huh?

  So then I had to wait a couple of months as their ponderous decision-making went through its process. And then, I’ll always remember, I got a call from Joe Muldoon. ‘Would you like to come fly with us?’

  It must have been a thrill.

  Oh, yes. So I joined their latest astronaut class, and even as an ascan—

  Ascan?

  Candidate astronaut. What you are until you fly in space. Even from the start, I was always in line for the Phobos mission. I was better equipped in Russian and the relevant sciences than most of the veterans. I actually trained some of them on the geology. Of course I needed a champion or two among the bubbas.

  The bubbas?

  The senior astronauts. The top dogs, who have an in with the chief of the astronaut office, and the JSC director. That’s the way you get into the crew rotation. But I always got along with Tom Lamb, who had boned up on the science of the Moon in order to get a ride on Apollo, which was not dissimilar to my strategy. And it worked. I don’t mean to sound smug. Here I am – I came all the way to Phobos, with Tom Lamb alongside me.

  You have a right to be smug. How did Malenfant feel?

  What do you mean?

  Well, there he was in the astronaut office, and I guess you were kind of leapfrogging him to get to the most glamorous mission since Apollo . . .

  Oh. No, there’s another piece of the puzzle that doesn’t fit here. Malenfant and me. He wasn’t at NASA at all.

  Look – in my memories, Malenfant and I became an item around 1990. When I was twenty, and I hadn’t made it into the Air Force Academy, and Malenfant was on his own track, still test-flying. Building up that portfolio, on his way to NASA. You can imagine we spent a lot of time apart, in those years. Why, I hadn’t anticipated how much my geology field trips would take me far from home, let alone my language-practice trips to Russia. And Malenfant had his own commitments, of course. And then—

  Yes?

  So Malenfant had a couple more tries at the astronaut draft, in the early nineties. Washed out each time. And the second time he thought the stumbling block was about contacts he had made in the private space-development industry. He said he was trying to look beyond the station, beyond Phobos even. Where would we go after that? He thought the industrial development of sp
ace was the way to go. Which was not the kind of message the NASA interview panels wanted to hear, since it sounded like a direct threat to the future of NASA itself, and a lot of careers and aspirations – and you would not want a NASA insider, equipped with inside knowledge, supporting such ventures.

  His application failed.

  It failed. He failed.

  So he kind of regrouped, went back to the Air Force, and started thinking about how he might reposition to become more acceptable to NASA while nurturing his own long-term goals. But before he got to that point—

  Ah. Before he applied again, you were accepted.

  It just put us under too much of a strain. I wouldn’t say he thought it was a betrayal by me, who used to be the little kid following him around, to have got in before he did. In fact I sometimes felt it was a betrayal of me that he didn’t try again. It wasn’t that he didn’t support me. It just pulled us apart in ways we hadn’t expected.

  So you never married. No kids.

  No, no. We were engaged, broke it off. We did have vague plans for the future. Even after Phobos I would only have been mid-thirties, Malenfant mid-forties. Plenty of time, even for kids. But it wasn’t to be.

  I think we still loved each other, that’s the crazy thing. Even as he went off to California to found Bootstrap, Inc., and I left for Phobos. I always knew he’d be there for me in a real crisis, you know? As I would for him. There was never another Malenfant.

  Which is why you called his name, all the way from Phobos. Tell me how you got there.

  Sure. The ride of my life!

  Well, we flew up to the station on the shuttle. We were novices on STS, Arkady and I, even though Arkady had flown Soyuz before. Tom Lamb guided us through it all.

  My family came to the launch. They stayed at the Days Inn on Cocoa Beach, and came over to peer at me through the glass of the quarantine quarters. My mother brought the local priest! He blessed me, and I was given rosary beads to carry into space. I have them in my pressure-suit pocket.

  And Malenfant—

  Oh, he came. Still just Malenfant, with that bald pate burned to mahogany by the California sun – by then Bootstrap were flying experimental rockets out of a strip in the Mojave. He looked great, actually. Look, he was thrilled to see me fly; whatever the tension between us, we were always happy for each other when we achieved success. Does that make any sense?

  Engaging human psychology module.

  Don’t joke about it. So, the morning of the launch came. We had a ten-minute ride to pad 39-B, where they had launched the Apollos from. I remember how the shuttle itself was wreathed in steam, as we rode up the gantry . . . Gee, I’ll have to talk to Malenfant about this piloted-booster variant he claims to have flown.

  And then aboard the orbiter, and the launch.

  So, look. I kind of assume you know nothing of our Phobos mission strategy.

  It was called a split-sprint design. We were taken aboard the BSS, where we were loaded into the assembled crew modules, and then, on 21 November, 2004, we were kicked out of Earth orbit by our transfer vehicle and sent on our way to Mars. We would get to Mars on 3 June, 2005, where we would aerobrake into orbit – that is, we would dip into the Martian atmosphere to slow down. The plan was that we would set off back to Earth on 1 September, and get back to Earth in January – so we would have had little more than a year in deep space, with all its attendant hazards, known and unknown. That’s the ‘sprint’ part.

  And when we got to Mars, we would find our cargo spacecraft, which contained such essentials as our Phobos explorer-lander and our fuel to get home, already waiting for us. Before we launched, it had taken years to assemble the components of our mission in orbit – all those Energia and shuttle launches – and then it was sent to Mars in two separate bundles. The cargo spacecraft was sent first, launched 9 June 2003, and got to Mars on 29 December the same year. So we weren’t committed to fly in the second bundle until we were sure that first bundle was safely in place. That’s the ‘split’ part of the strategy, you see . . .

  So, sprint or not, you still spent seven months in deep space before Mars.

  We lived in derivatives of space-station modules, with some robust Russian tech integrated – those Salyuts and Mirs of theirs. Four modules, joined end to end in a square; we called it a ‘race track’ design. At the centre of the square was our Earth return vehicle, a tough little craft that would also have served as a storm shelter in case of solar flares. Add to that an aerobrake shield for our arrival at Mars, and a booster pack with enough fuel left to have swung us around Mars and take us straight back home, if anything had gone wrong.

  We were comfortable enough – in fact, compared to the station, we three had masses of room.

  I remember the first days. My own first days in space, of course. There’s nothing like the smell of a new ship.

  I was the only true rookie, and the guys showed me the ropes. Working in space is about a bunch of tricks that you learn, and adapt. For instance, you don’t just open a bag of gear, as I did in my first half-hour as we unpacked, because stuff just floats out everywhere. Holding the bag, you turn around, just slowly, so a bit of centrifugal force keeps everything in the bag until you are ready for it. And when you do take stuff out you make damn sure it has a Velcro spot, or else you stick it to a loop of duct tape on the wall, gummy side out, and lodge it somewhere. Everything floats away and is lost otherwise. But even after a few days, when you have everything stuck to the walls, you can make one false move and knock it all off, and it’s like a blizzard of bits of paper, pens, drink holders, tools . . .

  I hated the cleaning – you get all sorts of garbage: dust, lint, hair clippings, food scraps, old Band-Aids, all gathering in the air grilles and you have to clean them out. And swab down the walls to get rid of mould. Human bodies are pretty disgusting when they are confined. Ironically, I quite enjoyed working on our urine-processing plant. It was basically a still, designed to retrieve potable water from the waste. Like something out of the nineteenth century, a real gadget . . . And there was stuff I loved. Such as tending our little row of pea plants, under their LED lights. I guess you know some of this. It must have taken even you – what, weeks? To get to Mars.

  More like days.

  Days. As you said, we have a lot to discuss. But anyway, as that big old peach of a planet swam out of the dark, well, everything else just melted away.

  All right. And now you are stranded here, on Phobos. Tell me how that happened.

  I . . . feel like I need a full debrief. The technical side—

  Just give me a summary. I think that will help – help you, I mean. Trust me, I’m a doctor.

  Ha! No, you’re not.

  OK.

  Look, it was always a complex operation.

  So we reached Mars, docked with our cargo ship, checked our Earth-return systems were functional – and then we thought about approaching Phobos.

  I think our strategy was similar to yours, from what I observed from the ground as you came in. It took a few orbits around Mars to put the Timor stack into a close co-orbit of Phobos, a couple of kilometres off for safety. And then Arkady and I powered up the lander, and closed up our suits. Funny – donning the suit is another thing I remember very vividly – the hum of the fans, a faint chemical smell from the anti-fog treatments on the visor, the guys’ voices in my earpieces, my own voice amplified and distorted in that glass bowl of a helmet . . . Well.

  We separated from Tom, in the main stack.

  I didn’t know then I was never going to see the man again.

  Arkady was a great pilot, and he took that lander straight in, it was just like the sims in Houston and Star City. The two of us, standing there side by side, peering out of those downward-pointing windows. Big spotlights casting a glow on the ground. Heading straight for the heart of Stickney.

  Oh. Where you found the shaft. As we did.

  Yeah. The shaft that’s way too deep? Malenfant told me. More stuff we need to talk a
bout. None of this had shown up on the visuals taken by automatic probes that had gone before us, or even in our own preliminary scans. It was just there. Suddenly the ground was just disappearing from under us, visually and in the landing radar. I guess you pulled out in time? We had no time to react, it felt like.

  We’re in a smarter ship. Centuries of development, remember. The automatics saved us, spotted the anomaly in town.

  Well, all we had was our mark-one eyeballs, as Tom Lamb used to say, and not much else. We reacted too slowly, in retrospect. We actually dipped down, into the shaft itself. Not far. Just a few metres, I guess. I could see a wall before my face, like crudely packed rubble, very dark in our lights – which were pointing downwards anyhow, not sideways, which didn’t help, but falling down a hole was not in our mission design – and Arkady was improvising, blipping the thrusters to get us out of there. And then—

  Yes?

  There was a blue flash. It was like a glow, all around us. I couldn’t see well, but I got the impression there was a brilliant ring, somewhere beneath us, that had lit up, all at once . . .

  Just report, Emma. Don’t be self-conscious.

  Yeah. Not like I need to fear flunking out of the next crew rotation, right? Well, at the moment of that flash from below we lost Tom.

  Tom Lamb? In the main ship?

  His signal cut, just like that. Then we got various alarms, as uploads of our telemetry back to the ship failed in turn.

  A blue ring, inside Phobos.

  If that is the Phobos anomaly we had come to study – well, it nearly killed us.

  Because all the while we were panicking over the loss of signal, we were still in this hole. We were drifting sideways, our residual velocity taking us towards the wall. Arkady did his best. A great best. He saved the ship. But—

  But you clipped the shaft wall?

  Clipped the rim, yes, on the way up and out. We came so close to making it . . .