Voyage n-1

by Stephen Baxter

  Mike had already pulled on his shirt; he was muttering to himself, as his mind started to whirl around the problems of the engine.

  He’s probably already forgotten what we were talking about.

  They set off for me test facility a little after 3 A.M. It was going to take half an hour to drive out to Santa Susana from downtown L.A.

  Mike drove out of the San Fernando Valley, and York could see streetlights glowing down there, neat rectangular blocks of light plastered over the valley floor and walls.

  Mike drove anxiously, too quickly, without speaking to her.

  The test facility was nestled in a rough, boulder-strewn depression in the Santa Susana Mountains. When Mike stopped the car, she was struck by the chill of the air.

  She walked with Mike to the center of the facility.

  The stars were out overhead, though the young Moon had long set.

  Santa Susana was operated on behalf of NASA by Rockwell International. It had been built as part of the development program for the old S-II, the Saturn V second stage. There was still some S-II development work going on there, in fact. The whole site was a swarm of activity, with technicians — some of them in flameproof or radiationproof gear — crawling all over the rig. To York, they looked like ungainly insects.

  The NERVA 2 engine stood upended at the heart of the facility, surrounded by a wire-mesh safety fence. Glowing in powerful floodlights, the broad engine bell flared toward the sky.

  When they got close to the rig, technicians came up to Conlig. Mike managed one last, apologetic glance back at York, and then he was lost.

  Alone, she began to walk slowly around the rig.

  “Hi. You look like you need this.”

  She turned. A man was at her elbow, grinning; he was tall, pale, with blond hair; he wore grimy coveralls. He looked as if he had been up all night. He bore two plastic cups of a brownish liquid. “It’s from a dispenser. It’s supposed to be coffee,” he said, “but I wouldn’t bank on it without a full chemical analysis.”

  “I know you. Don’t I?”

  “Yup. Adam Bleeker. We took a field trip together a few years back, in the San Gabriel Mountains.”

  “Oh.” The Cold Warrior astronaut. “With Ben and Charles Jones. What a disaster that was.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that. You did your job well. And everyone calls him Chuck, by the way.”

  “Whatever.”

  She took the coffee gratefully and sipped it. It was warm, but almost flavorless.

  Bleeker told her he was the Astronaut Office representative on the project there. Ben Priest had covered the same assignment some years before.

  “It’s kind of an odd time of day to run an engine test,” York observed.

  “Well, we’re so far behind schedule. Every hour counts.”

  “Tell me about it. I came out with Mike. Do you know him? — Mike Conlig—”

  “Sure.”

  “Nothing was going to keep him away from here, once the call came.”

  They started to walk around the test rig, slowly. Technicians were everywhere, arguing desultorily. There was an almost tangible air of tension, of depression; it was Mike’s mood writ large.

  The contrast to Jackass Flats — to the raw enthusiasm Mike had represented to her there — was marked.

  In the middle of it all, the huge NERVA 2 engine stood erect and silent, aloof, remote behind its safety cordon. That motor, Mike had told her, was the “Integrated Subsystems Test Bed Engine”; it was a complete, more or less operational machine, but it was trapped in that ungainly test rig, and, when it fired, it could only drive itself into the solid Earth.

  Just looking at the rig, York could tell that NERVA was still years away from flight status, from delivering its promised two hundred thousand pounds of interplanetary thrust.

  The upturned nozzle sat atop a short, fat cylinder, and two smaller bells protruded from the cylinder’s sides. The cylinder was the pressure shell which contained the radioactive core, and the smaller nozzles, gimbaled, were attitude control rockets. She saw the ring of cone-shaped actuators at the base of the engine; the actuators operated the control drum, which moderated the reactor. A huge spherical hydrogen tank sat close to the engine, and pipes snaked from it to swaddle the pressure shell and nozzle. Plumes of vapor vented from the tank, and sheets of ice encrusted its sleek metal walls.

  Adam Bleeker helped her trace out the engine’s operation.

  “Liquid hydrogen works as both propellant and coolant — it’s called regenerative cooling. A pump pushes the hydrogen through that cooling jacket surrounding the pressure shell and the bell. Then the hydrogen is forced through the radioactive core, where it flashes to vapor, and drives its way out through the bell…”

  There was still no trap for the vented hydrogen, York noted absently.

  Bleeker showed her how an efflux pipe from the reactor carried a proportion of the hot hydrogen gas to a turbine, to power the engine’s pumps in flight. The turbopump exhaust was used as attitude control gas, vented off through the small supplementary nozzles.

  “What’s the problem tonight?”

  “Cavitation. Gas bubbles in the liquid hydrogen flow. We raised the core temperature to its working regime, and we’d started the hydrogen flow. We reached nominal thrust, for about half a second. But then the core temperature started to climb. We were cavitating, somewhere below the pump: hydrogen bubbles, stopping the circulation of coolant. And that was why the core temperature was climbing. We had to shut down.” He sounded tired. “You can imagine the safety restrictions we’re under here. If the pressure shell had been breached, we’d have had radioactive products reaching the atmosphere, and there would have been hell to pay. So as soon as we saw the problem, we had to obey the rule book, which said to shut off the hydrogen, and flood the whole damn core with water to ensure the temperature comes down. Now we’re going to have to siphon off all that radioactive water, and take the core apart by remotes, and make sure the propellant flow cylinders haven’t been damaged in the heat… It will be days before we’re set for the next test.”

  “Christ. What a mess.”

  York studied his profile; picked out by the powerful floods, Bleeker’s skin looked thin, almost translucent. She found it hard to read Bleeker’s own reaction to all this. Was he impatient at the restrictive rules, the need for safety? Did he have any qualms about handling lethal substances in such an unstable, unproven rig? She couldn’t tell. Just as when she’d first met him, Bleeker struck her as utterly calm, cool. Or, perhaps, completely without a soul.

  “You’re all under a lot of pressure,” she said. “I know a lot of questions are being asked about the ability of NASA to deliver NERVA 2.”

  “By who?”

  She shrugged. “The press. Congress.”

  “Yeah,” he said evenly, showing no resentment. “Well, hell, maybe there are questions to ask. You know, the program’s led by the Germans, from Huntsville. And they didn’t pick the design goal — which is two hundred thousand pounds of thrust for thirty minutes — because they knew they could build it; they chose the goal because that’s what we need for the Mars mission profile. They didn’t go through a lot of analysis to try to figure it out; they just started building toward it. It’s the way they’ve always worked. And it’s kind of hard to argue against their kind of record. But…”

  “But you’re not so sure.”

  He hesitated. “The truth is, the development schedule we’re working to was modeled on experience of chemical technology. Nuke stuff is different. I think they’re only just figuring out how different. And that’s even after we’ve eliminated a lot of nice-to-haves, like a deep throttling capability… I think maybe we’ve underestimated the schedule, here. We’re pushing too hard.”

  Now a crew, in white protective gear, was moving into the cordoned-off zone, converging on the NERVA. York wondered vaguely if one of them was Mike. There was no way of knowing.

  She stared at the inert NERVA
2, resentful. Thanks to that broken-down thing, I’m not going to see a trace of Mike for weeks now.

  Bleeker had to leave her, to get on with his own work.

  She watched the slow, painstaking demolition job for a few minutes, then she went back to the car and managed to fall asleep in the passenger seat.

  When she awoke, the sun was well above the horizon, and the car was stuffy and hot. There was no sign of Mike. She found a bathroom, and left a note for Mike.

  She drove herself back to L.A. Mission Elapsed Time [Day/Hr:Min:Sec] Plus 004/21:38:11

  Daily execute packages were uploaded from Mission Control overnight as twenty feet of teleprinter output. The packages contained suggested time lines, and a few personal messages. York split up her portion of the list and put it into her ring binder, throwing away yesterday’s draft, and began to figure out how to follow the day through.

  She looked down the list, searching first for time-critical items. Then she looked for stuff that would need advance setup and preparation, and items that weren’t solo, where she’d have to work with the others.

  The execute package wasn’t so much a detailed time line, as the first generations of astronauts had had to follow, but a “shopping list” of objectives. Mission planning was a lot more laid-back, compared to the days when moonwalks had been choreographed down to the minute. The shopping list approach had evolved during the long-duration Skylab flights of the 1970s. York was relieved; she was a senior professional, after all — they all were — and she didn’t need her activities handheld by some remote roomful of experts down in Houston.

  In her pocket, to help her with the timing, she carried a small personal alarm clock, a cute clockwork thing she’d picked up from a five-and-dime in a mall in Nassau Bay. Its crudity and lack of accuracy appealed to her, in the midst of all that high technology.

  Her main objective for the day was going to be powering up the Ares Transfer-Orbit Science Platform. She drifted upward, along the cylindrical length of the Mission Module.

  The Mission Module was based on the design of the Skylabs, which had been in use for more than a decade. Such was the lifting capacity of the Saturn VB that the Mission Module had been delivered to Earth orbit “dry” — carrying no fuel — and with interior partitions and equipment already fitted. The crew occupied what had been the hydrogen tank, all forty-eight feet of it, with its domed ceiling and floor. Hidden under the floor was the lox tank, much smaller, a cramped, squashed sphere. The lox tank was used to hold stores, and with its thicker walls it would serve as the crew’s storm shelter — shielding them from solar flares, if any blew up in the course of the mission.

  The hydrogen tank was split into three levels by partitions of triangular metal mesh. York was wearing Dutch shoes, with V-flanges in the sole, to enable her to cling to either side of the floors. There was a fireman’s pole running down the middle of the workshop, and there were straps and guide ropes and harnesses everywhere.

  The tank’s bottom level was “home” — the wardroom, sleep and waste compartments. The middle belt doubled as a command and control area, covering all of the spacecraft’s subsystems, environmental processes, and flight operations, and as an experiment and exercise area, with a running strip around the tank’s circular wall. The exercise machines, still in their launch configuration, were strapped against the pressure hull. And the top level, closest to the prow of the Ares cluster, was the Science Platform.

  The whole module was something like a big engine room, York thought, with clunky tanks and storage boxes stuck to the curved walls, and cables and pipes running everywhere, under smooth covers of yellow plastic.

  When she floated up into the science platform, it was like entering an octagonal cave. Bulky equipment racks and storage bays were fixed all around the curved hull. One side of the octagon served as a ceiling, broken by a couple of high-quality viewing ports — disks of darkness — and by small science-experiment airlocks, sturdy wheeled hatches like the doors of little safes. Everything was still in its place, stowed neatly away, still in the wrapper.

  She pulled herself to the right-hand wall and locked her feet into a couple of stirrups. It was the display and control console: a long rack of switches, cathode-ray displays, and numeric and qwerty keypads. She closed switches and began booting up the science platform’s computers, then started to power up and check out the rest of the equipment.

  As it started to come to life, the cramped little science station reminded her of some bespectacled kid’s bedroom laboratory; it was compact, miniature, kind of sweet.

  Some of the experiments carried by Ares were part of long-term microgravity research programs. There were experiments in protein crystal growth, and the diffusion of bacteria in microgravity conditions, and a chunky arrangement called the heat pipe performance experiment, a dry engineering test of the diffusion of heat from hot spots on pipes and ducts in microgravity.

  But Ares offered some special opportunities. There was a scheme to observe major solar events like spots and flares from the two widely separate vantage points of Ares and Earth, and so there was a whole bunch of instruments which would be directed at the sun: a coronagraph, a spectroheliograph, a spectrographic telescope. Since in flight the Ares cluster would keep itself aligned to point at the sun, to save boiloff, all the equipment was mounted in a pallet, which would be unfolded and held out from the body of the Mission Module, like a rearview mirror.

  The setting up took longer than she expected. The computers, Hewlett-Packard minis, were slow. The models Ares was carrying were out-of-date: the design of the platform, already nearly a decade old, had become frozen around those customized, low-weight, low-power machines years before. Hewlett-Packard and the other computer suppliers had made a commitment to keep supporting NASA’s in-flight equipment as long as was necessary. But it was ironic that York was — in deep space, en route to Mars — having to make do and mend with technology which no self-respecting middle-sized savings and loan in Gary, Indiana, would put up with anymore.

  And besides, microgravity was turning out to be a pain in the butt to work in. Anything that wasn’t tied down just floated away. It was easy enough to remember that for major pieces of equipment, but it also applied to her notebook, pens, pencils, handkerchief, and she wasted a lot of time chasing down elusive items of equipment. And she had to make a conscious effort to anchor herself — with foot stirrups, or by holding on to a rack surface, or by wrapping her legs around a strut — before she tried to move anything. Otherwise, every time she turned a switch on the control panel, the switch would just turn her back.

  It was like working on an ice rink: a huge, invisible, three-dimensional ice rink, across whose surface items kept escaping from her, slithering away along perfectly straight lines, and on which she felt she was constantly losing her balance.

  When York came floating back down into the wardroom, Phil Stone was already in the little galley area, working on the lunch. Food packages and trays floated in the air beside him.

  A TV camera, fixed to the wall of the wardroom, was fixed on him; York vaguely remembered that they were scheduled for another public broadcast. She wondered how many people were still watching.

  Stone glanced up at York. “You’re starting to look like an astronaut, Natalie.”

  “How so?”

  “Take a look in the mirror.”

  The nearest mirror was fixed over the washbasin. York floated over and inspected herself. Stray wisps of hair floated up around her head in a kind of halo, and the skin under her eyes looked puffy, as if she had been crying. That was another effect of microgravity: the accumulation of fluids under the skin of the face. She prodded at the fleshy pads under her eyes; the skin was tender, as if stretched.

  Gershon came soaring down the fireman’s pole, upside down. “Hello, Japan-ee lady,” he said, pulling his eyes slantways.

  There was a hiss of static from the comms panel fixed to the wall. “Ares, Houston. We see a box of goodies there, Ph
il.” Capcom today was Bob Crippen.

  York sensed the others stiffening, subtly. Crippen’s forced banter signaled they were going out to the public. We’re onstage again, guys.

  Stone held up an anonymous brown bag. “Good day, Bob. Would you believe you’re looking at chicken stew? All I have to do is push the pack inside this little sliding drawer here, like so, and that injects the bag with three ounces of hot water, and I pull it out and mush it up a little. And there you go; beautiful chicken stew.” He stuck the stew onto a tray floating beside him; the tray held four bags, a can of nuts, and a sachet of tropical punch, all fixed with Velcro. Stone floated the tray to Gershon. “Come and get it.”

  “Yum.” Gershon snipped the top off his chicken stew bag and began to spoon it into his mouth. He waved at the camera and grinned; he was eating his meal upside down relative to Stone.

  Stone said smoothly, “We’ve been flying in space now for more than twenty years, and I guess we’ve figured out how to provide decent food. We’re basically having much the same kind of food that the workshop crews, in lunar and Earth orbits, are eating right now. We have a menu that repeats, every six days or so. Most of our food is rehydratable. Like my noodles and chicken here.” He pointed at his tray. “That’s because rehydratable gives the best food value per pound of weight. But we do have some foods which are thermostabilized — cooked before launch, and then stored in a cold box. I’ve got here stewed tomatoes, and ground beef with pickle sauce, for instance. And some foods we can carry in their natural form, like my almonds here. And then I have these freeze-dried pears, and this strawberry drink… We don’t have a refrigerator or a food freezer, as the Skylabs have, but we do have something new: an oven. It’s fan-forced, of course, not convection. Because hot air doesn’t rise anywhere in zero G. And we’ve even got hot and cold running water, here in this little galley of ours.”

  Gershon said sotto voce, “Tell him about the farts, Phil.”

  Oh, sure. Hot mike, asshole.

  Actually the farts were a real problem. There was a device in the spigots that was supposed to scrape excess hydrogen, which was a by-product of the Mission Module’s power cells, out of their water supply. But the gizmo didn’t work too well, and a lot of gas got into their stomachs. And out again almost as quickly.