Voyage n-1

by Stephen Baxter

  Joe Muldoon, at his moderator’s desk, said, “Will you let me take that, Gregory?”

  Dana shrugged his compliance.

  Muldoon turned to the audience, his lean face underlit by the lamp on his desk. “Now, Hans, I don’t think we’re in a position where we’re going to be able to hide on this. We have to discuss the implications for the manned program. And we have to face the fact that there was evidence of potential problems on earlier VB tests, with solid fuel burns inducing destabilizing oscillations…”

  Udet found himself shouting. “But the AS-5B04 loss was not caused by a Solid Rocket Booster failure!”

  “But Solid Rocket Booster problems contributed,” Muldoon said. “We’ve seen that. And it seems to me that the whole design is inherently more risky than the old liquid-fuel configurations. Remember we survived Saturn V launches in which we lost whole engines. But if you’re sitting on top of those damn unstoppable Solid Rocket Boosters, it’s not a question of if you go, just which direction. None of us is arguing that we should stop flying the upgraded Saturns; it’s just that we have to be honest about the consequences of the compromises we’ve made in its design. Because if we don’t come clean now, the folks on the Hill are going to hang our hides out to dry.”

  Muldoon looked around the room, taking in all of the delegates. “You know the situation we’re in, folks; the budget deficit is running so high this year that every discretionary program — including Ares — is under pressure, all the time, every budget round. Now, you may say that isn’t fair — that our mistakes get magnified out of proportion, while the much bigger foul-ups of other agencies are hidden — but we’re a high-profile agency; you have to accept it as a fact of our lives. So, we have to be squeaky clean. We’ll take questions at the close, folks; I want to move this along now…”

  Udet, still standing, did not trust himself to speak. Compromises. You talk of compromises. We were compromised from the beginning. Our Saturn VB fuding from the start has been half the projections we requested. Half! Without compromises you would not be flying into space now. And yet you bleat about the consequences, about the loss of a single launcher!

  He felt he could bear no more of this. He clambered past the people beside him, apologizing, and reached the aisle. He stalked toward the back of the room.

  Dear God. Are we really reduced to such finger-pointing inanity? All I ask — all I have ever asked — is that you give me adequate tools, and I will finish the job. Achieve the dream. Even with half the resources, I will find you solutions! But what I will not — cannot — achieve is a miracle, I cannot guarantee you perfect safety and reliability. When will you people understand that?

  It seemed a long way to the door Nobody was prepared to meet his eyes.

  Dana’s patient presence at the podium, unseen, was like a wound in Udet’s side.

  Saturday, June 5, 1982

  NEWPORT BEACH

  It all came to a head.

  It was their wedding anniversary, for God’s sake. And although JK had flowers for her, and a card, and a kiss on the cheek in the morning, Jennine knew from long experience that it was his secretary, Bella, who scheduled such events in his diary and would buy the card and whatever. There was no thought from JK at all.

  This evening they were supposed to be going out for dinner. They did that together maybe twice a year. But JK didn’t come home. That wasn’t so unusual. When Jennine phoned his office, she got Bella, who politely told her he wasn’t at the Columbia site. That was code for: he’s out with the guys.

  And so it proved. JK came rolling in, after eleven, as oiled as you like, parking his T-bird at a crazy angle in the driveway.

  “You shouldn’t drive like that,” Jennine said. She hated the querulous tone that came into her voice at such moments.

  “Oh, God, the dinner. Honey, I’m sorry,” JK said. “I clean forgot. We’ll do it tomorrow. Okay?”

  No, you idiot. It’s not okay. And right now, I have the feeling that it never was.

  She went to bed.

  After an hour or so he joined her. He touched her face, tenderly, and ran his hand down her nightgown, until he had cupped her breast.

  She turned away. She was much too tense, too upset. And anyhow she could smell the stale rum on his breath, oozing out of his pores.

  But at least he was home. At that thought she softened, as she drifted toward sleep. At least he’s come home. Maybe in the morning, I might be able to persuade him not to go in quite so early for once.

  Before she fell asleep, the phone rang. JK picked it up immediately. “Lee.”

  She had followed the development of Columbia’s MEM program. Actually, since JK brought work home most nights, and since he routinely held business meetings at their home — and always without any warning — she could hardly help but follow the program.

  Once, JK took her out to Boston, where the Avco company were manufacturing the MEM’s ablative heat shield. It was a fascinating place. The ablative stuff was an epoxy resin, something the Avco engineers called “Avcoat 5026-39.” To hold this in place, the engineers constructed a titanium honeycomb, which would be bonded to the capsule’s lower surface, and they pumped the epoxy into each individual cell with a caulking gun. It had to be done by hand; the engineers worked their way across the surface until they had filled in all two hundred thousand cavities. If an X-ray inspection revealed a bubble, that cell would be cleaned out with a dentist’s drill and refilled.

  Jennine watched this through a glass picture window. It was a startlingly medieval scene, this slow and painstaking handcrafting. And she wondered how it must feel to work on something — to touch and shape it with your fingertips — knowing that it might, one day, enter the air of Mars.

  Avco’s testing process would start with handheld blowtorches, and finish up with rocket-propelled power dives into the Earth’s atmosphere…

  But such occasions, when JK took the trouble to share his work with her, were the exception, not the rule. Mostly she had to endure his absences, silently hostess his business meetings.

  Jennine had married JK back in 1955.

  At the time he had been working for a master’s in aeronautical engineering at Caltech, the California Institute of Technology, out in Pasadena.

  They got married in a Catholic church close to Jennine’s parents’ home in New Orleans. She had been starting to make her way as a secretary in a large law practice in the city. But she gave it all up to go with JK, to support him and his career a thousand miles away. That was what you did in 1955.

  Jennine’s parents gave them money to rent a car for a couple of weeks, and so they drove back east, through Vermont, to watch the fall coloring the leaves. Whenever the fall came she thought of that honeymoon.

  After the honeymoon they flew west, and JK drove her out to Pasadena, to the little house he’d rented.

  When they arrived, there was a group of JK’s pals waiting there. She thought it must be some kind of welcome home party. But no; it turned out there was a problem in the Caltech wind tunnel.

  So JK had kissed her and gone off to the lab, leaving her standing in the driveway with all her luggage. JK didn’t get home until dawn.

  As it turned out, that honeymoon in Vermont, twenty-seven years ago, had been the last holiday Jennine and JK had taken together.

  And this damn Mars program was the toughest project JK had ever worked on. JK was at heart a technician, and a hands-on manager, at his best — so Jennine thought — when working with comparatively small teams, at one site. But now he was running a national effort, one of the most complex engineering projects ever undertaken.

  Even beyond the complexity of what was going on at Columbia itself there were all the subcontractors Columbia had to deal with: Honeywell working on stabilization and control (not Hughes, JK would point out with relish), Garrett Corporation on the cabin environment, Rocketdyne, a subsidiary of Rockwell, providing the main propulsion systems, Pratt and Whitney developing the fuel cells, and so o
n.

  JK wanted to avoid the thousands of uncoordinated changes that had pretty much paralyzed Rockwell’s development of Apollo for a while in the 1960s. So he had instigated a change control mechanism. And that had brought him endless conflict with the astronauts — including Joe Muldoon — who, in the Apollo days, had gotten used to ruling the roost.

  And on it went.

  Once, JK showed her a PERT chart for the MEM development, a project plan with all the tasks linked together in their logical order. It was just a mass of computer printouts, little boxes, and spidery connecting arrows.

  “What do you do with all this?”

  JK laughed and tipped the plan toward a waste bin. “Nothing! Haven’t got time to read it!”

  The project was a monster, and JK was trying to wrestle it to the ground.

  She could see that the whole damn thing was bending Lee in half. But to relax, he generally wouldn’t think of coming home to her. Instead he would go out with Bob Rowen or Jack Morgan or some such, out to some Newport Beach hot spot like the Balboa Bay Club, and he’d come home in the small hours roaring drunk and sleep it off. He wasn’t an alcoholic, she believed; the drinking was just one more example of the way JK’s life was never stable, never routine, but swung constantly between crazy extremes.

  And the next morning he would be back at his desk, hungover or not, with his two cups of sugary coffee inside him.

  The night was so quiet that she could hear both halves of the phone conversation.

  “JK, you’d better get down here,” Julie Lye’s insect voice whispered. “I’m at the pressure test of the oxidizer tank. We’ve had a failure. Catastrophic. I’m looking into the test pit right now. We had seven tons of nitrogen tet down there. Now, all we’ve got is a few fragments of titanium stuck in the walls.”

  “All right. I’ll be straight over.” JK began to rattle out instructions while he hunted for his pants. Lye was to begin with a scrutiny of the evidence of the explosion. Just by looking at the distribution of the pieces it was possible to figure out the order in which the tank had come apart. Then there would have to be more structural tests. They should pressure up other test tanks with plain water instead of the nitrogen tet. That way, they could tell if the failure was due to something mechanical — like a faulty weld — or some kind of chemical reaction to do with the propellant. And Lye should get onto the tanks’ manufacturer, a division of General Motors out in Indianapolis. The manufacturers should run identical tests. That way, they could see if the failure had been caused by damage in shipment, or some kind of local phenomenon…

  He was still barking out instructions as he left the bedroom. He threw the phone back on the receiver cradle, and left the house at a run.

  He didn’t say good-bye to Jennine.

  Jennine lay there, trying to summon up sleep. It didn’t work.

  She felt as if something was cracking inside her, as if she was one of JK’s goddamn oxidant tanks, pumped full of pressure.

  She got out of bed and walked barefoot to the bathroom. She had a couple of bottles of tranquilizers there.

  She looked at herself in the mirror. She saw a slack, sagging woman, with worry lines etched into her face and tired, graying, mousy hair.

  She took the pills, popping them into her mouth like jelly beans. Viewing the image in the mirror, the little pills pushing into the small sour-looking mouth, was like watching somebody else, someone on TV maybe. She couldn’t feel anything.

  When she’d done, she threw the empty bottles into the trash and went back to bed.

  Even then, sleep wouldn’t come.

  After a time, she reached out for the phone and dialed Jack Morgan’s home number. By a miracle he was there, and not throwing rum down his throat in some bar. She told him what she’d done.

  At around 6 A.M., JK came running in, with his hair mussed and no tie and his shirt sticking out of his pants.

  Jack Morgan was sitting on the bed, with an overcoat thrown over his pajamas, rubbing Jennine’s limbs. “Where the hell have you been? I called you an hour ago.”

  JK started talking about the oxygen tank, and batches of contaminated nitrogen tet, and all the rest of it; but Jack just glared at him.

  So JK broke off, and then he started trying to take command. “Have you called a hospital? What about a stomach pump?” It was typical JK. Arrive too late, then order everyone else around.

  “She doesn’t need a pump,” Jack snapped back at him. “But she’s going to sleep for a hell of a long time. She should be asleep now. And then I want her to go into the hospital, for observation.” He nodded at the bedside table. “I’ve left a number there.”

  JK, looking restless and bewildered, sat on the bed. Then he took Jennine’s hand and began to rub, as Jack had been doing, along the length of her forearm. His hands were warm, but they were trembling, and his touch was uncertain, wavering between too hard and too soft. She managed to smile at him, and he seemed to get a little confidence, and the strokes evened out.

  “This is a hell of a thing,” he said, his voice thin. “A hell of a thing.”

  “Listen to me,” Jack Morgan said. “You’ve got to get your head out of your ass, JK. You’ve got to start paying some attention to your family. And yourself, come to that. Or Jennine is going to walk out on you, and nobody’s going to blame her. In fact, I’ll be here to drive her away.

  “I’ll come back in a couple of hours. You take care, Jennine.” And he went to get his coat, and she heard the door bang behind him.

  JK looked devastated. He really hadn’t seen this coming, she realized.

  “So,” he said stiffly. “I guess it was a cry for help, huh.”

  Oh, JK. Pop psychology slogans. She closed her eyes and thought of the face in the mirror, the steady stream of pills passing her lips. Have I really become such a clichй?

  JK sat silently for a while, rubbing her arm. And then he began jabbering about the tank failure. “It was amazing,” he said. “The tanks only blew when they were filled with nitrogen tet. So we knew there had to be some kind of chemical thing going on. But the tanks would only blow here, at Newport. We ran identical tests over at the manufacturers’, in Indianapolis, and zippo.

  “So we started doing a trace on the nitrogen tet. It comes from a big refinery run by the Air Force. And guess what we found? The stuff we had at Newport was from a later batch than the stuff at Indianapolis. Our stuff was purer. The Indianapolis batch had impurities, a tiny amount of water in it. So we set up another lab test back at Newport. And we found that when the nitrogen tet is too pure — better than 99 percent — it becomes corrosive! It attacks titanium! But add a dash of water, like in the Indianapolis batch, and the problem goes away. Anyhow, to hell with it. I think we’re going to switch to oxygen-methane for our propellant. The performance is okay, and it’s nontoxic, and we can store it easily for months in space, even if it isn’t hypergolic…”

  Jennine lay there listening to this, with her arm in JK’s hands. He was full of his story by now, with the technological sleuthing and all the rest of it, and she could feel his hand jerk around, animated by the storytelling, quite oblivious of her flesh lying passively inside his.

  She thought of the immense project, the pieces of the Mars ship flowing into the Newport assembly bays from every state in the Union: fuel and oxygen tanks from Buffalo and Boulder, instruments from Newark and Cedar Rapids, valves from San Fernando, electronics from Kalamazoo and Lima. And probably every one of those pieces left an invisible trail behind it, of drunkenness, and heart attacks, and smashed-up marriages.

  She thought, oddly, that JK really ought to understand what had happened to her.

  It’s destructive testing, JK. That’s all. Destructive testing.

  Tuesday, August 10, 1982

  LYNDON B. JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, HOUSTON

  “You’re not going to let me fly.”

  Joe Muldoon sat back in his office chair, which creaked under his weight. There was an empty Dr. Pepp
er can on his desk, out of place among the executive stationery and leather blotters; he grabbed the can and crushed it with a quick movement. “It isn’t like that, Natalie. I told you; I wanted to explain all this to you in person, myself, rather than let you hear it another way…”

  “I appreciate that. But you’re not going to let me fly.”

  “You’re not going to be the only disappointed dude in JSC. Look, I told you: because we lost that damn Saturn VB, and because we’ve had our budget pared even more — goddamn it, Natalie, the whole country’s been in recession for a year; that’s hardly my fault — because of all that we’re having to compress the schedule. And we’ve still got a deadline to meet. The crew of the first E-class mission will now fly a mission we’re calling D-prime, which will combine the objectives of the old D and E-classes. And—”

  “So the D mission, my space soak mission, is gone. Joe, I know as much about Mars as anyone in the Astronaut Office. And you’re not going to let me fly.”

  Muldoon made a visible effort to control himself. “Natalie, you have to believe this. It isn’t personal. Except that I don’t think this is such a loss. It’s precisely because you know so much that you’re a lot more use to me here, on the ground, than hanging around in some tin can in LEO watching the paintwork yellow. I need you here, Natalie. To teach us about Mars. To remind us why we’re going there in the first place.”

  She thought it over, trying to contain her anger. “All right. What choice have I got? But I’m going to continue with my training, and my time in the sims, and I’m going to grab every bit of flight experience I can. And if you’re telling me now you’re going to stop me doing that, I’ll be walking out of that door, and I won’t be back. Mars expert or not.”