Voyage n-1

by Stephen Baxter

  Gershon could have drawn this layout blindfolded. After so many years with Columbia, so many hours in simulators here and at the Cape and Houston, he knew the position of every damn switch. He could even lay claim to have designed half the panels he saw.

  There was a scent of wiring, of lubricant, of ozone, of fresh-milled metal. The MEM was unfinished, but it had a live feel to it, much more so than any simulator. It was like the cockpit of a new, gleaming aircraft.

  And it was homely. It was the kind of den Gershon would have loved to have owned as a kid, a mixture of workshop, radio station, and clubhouse.

  He would have no trouble living in here for a month, on Mars, he realized; no trouble at all.

  If he got himself the chance.

  There was some kind of commotion going on, and Gershon straightened up to see.

  Jack Morgan stalked down toward Lee and Gershon with a document in his hand. “JK! Have you seen this?”

  Gershon recognized the document as a draft summary of Phil Stone’s tiger team review of the MEM program. It was a photocopy marked “Confidential”; Gershon guessed that some sympathizer inside NASA had leaked it to the Columbia people.

  Lee started flicking through it, speed-reading. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “Jesus Christ.”

  Jack Morgan stood there, clenching and unclenching his fists.

  Lee looked to Gershon like he was trembling, and he kept twitching that left arm, as if it was giving him severe pain. “Listen to this. ‘I am definitely not satisfied with the progress and outlook of the program… I could not find a substantive basis for confidence in future performance’… Paper-pushing cocksucker! ‘My people and I have completely lost confidence in the ability of Columbia Aviation as an organization… I seriously question whether there is any sincere intent and determination by Columbia to do this job properly…’ ”

  Jack Morgan’s own anger seemed to have dissipated as he studied Lee. “JK, what is it with you and that arm?”

  Lee waved both arms in the air. “Screw my arms! Listen to this: ‘I think NASA has to resort to very drastic measures, including the possibility of shifting to a new contractor…’ ”

  Morgan, frowning, grabbed Lee’s right elbow. “Listen to me, asshole. You’re coming to my office right now.”

  Lee tried to shake loose, but Morgan wouldn’t let go, and with a nod he instructed Gershon to get a hold of the other arm.

  Gershon, hesitantly, got hold of Lee’s bony elbow.

  So Morgan and Gershon frog-marched JK Lee out of the Clean Room, past goggling technicians, all three of them still in their soft shoes and their hats and white coats.

  Lee waved the report around, shouting like some Old Testament prophet. ” ‘For me, it is just unbearable to deal further with a nonperforming contractor who has the government over a barrel when it comes to a multibillion-dollar venture of such national importance’… And screw you, too, Mr. Phil Fucking Stone!”

  They reached Morgan’s office, and Morgan pulled up a portable EKG machine.

  Lee eyed the machine. “What’s this?”

  “Roll up your sleeves, JK.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with my heart.” Lee dropped to the floor and, to Gershon’s astonishment, started doing push-ups. “Look at this!” Lee shouted up at Morgan, twisting his head. “If I was having a heart attack, this would kill me.”

  Jack Morgan ignored Lee’s antics. He bent down and grabbed Lee by the collar and simply hauled him to his feet. He shoved Lee into a chair and began to strap in the EKG leads.

  Lee still had the Stone report. “Look at this! He’s even put on a list of the people who should be fired! Including you and me, Jack! Cocksucker!”

  Morgan read the EKG trace. He looked at Lee. “You’re going to the hospital.”

  “Bullshit,” Lee snapped. “I’m in the middle of a fucking CARR.” He got up and headed for the door.

  Morgan simply blocked the door with his body. He nodded to Gershon. “Get on the phone to Mr. Cane,” he ordered. “Tell him he has to speak to Lee.” And he turned and shouted to an assistant to send for the paramedics.

  Uncertain of what he was getting himself into, Gershon picked up the phone.

  Lee kept reading the report. “Look at this shit. Missed deadlines. Late drawing releases. Cost overruns. Yeah, yeah. But don’t they understand how complex this thing is? Or what chaos their own people create down here every time they push through another change? Look, you can comb through the paper trail all you want, but you have to look at the fucking hardware. Sure, we’re behind schedule. But this is a joke.” He appealed to Morgan. “It’s a fucking witchhunt, Jack. That’s what it is. A witch-hunt.”

  Gershon held the phone out to Lee. “Art Cane wants to talk to you.”

  Lee took the phone.

  Art Cane ordered him to leave the plant.

  A couple of paramedics came running up the corridor. They had a wheelchair with them.

  IK Lee looked around, bewildered, still wearing his Clean Room overshoes and plastic hat.

  The paramedics got him into the chair, ignoring his vague protests, and rushed him out.

  Morgan lit up a cigarette, his hands trembling.

  Gershon found he was shaking, too. “Christ,” he said to Morgan. “I didn’t know.”

  Morgan pulled off his plastic hat. “Really? Hell, JK’s not the only one who’s nearly killed himself on this fucking program. Haven’t you heard about it? They call it the Ares Syndrome.”

  It had been a coronary, all right; it hit Lee soon after the medics got him to the hospital.

  When Lee came to himself — a few days later, flat on his back in the hospital — the first thing he did was get a secure phone installed in his room, and he started calling the plant.

  He found the place in an uproar.

  The final draft of Phil Stone’s tiger team report was, if anything, even more damning than that leaked early summary. And there was a lot of wild talk in the press of NASA going to another contractor for the MEM.

  After a point the speculation seemed to feed on itself — Lee had even seen articles about the number of articles that had appeared on the MEM problems. It seemed to Lee that his people were spending more time on rooting through all the press garbage and the gossip from NASA and in-house than they were on building a spacecraft.

  Well, as far as Lee was concerned, it was all a lot of bull; there was no way NASA could pull out of Columbia if it wanted to preserve anything like its 1986 Mars landing target. It was just bullying, industrial blackmail.

  But Columbia had to respond.

  Art Cane, in Lee’s absence, ordered yet another internal audit.

  In the days that followed, a high-powered team went right through the whole program, interviewing hundreds of people. They had kept everything confidential; they’d even used rooms which they’d checked were clear of bugs in advance. That was supposed to reassure the employees, but Lee knew that sure as hell it would scare the life out of them.

  And the early results of that audit looked like being as hard-hitting as Stone’s.

  Lee, lying there helpless, seethed. There’s nothing wrong with the goddamn program. They’re pulling my organization apart for nothing. This is a witch-hunt.

  And all of it while Lee was conveniently out of the office. All his people were worried about their own positions, and about the future of Lee himself.

  So Lee called up Jack Morgan and told him he wanted out.

  Morgan protested, of course. Lee had been in the hospital little more than two weeks.

  Morgan came to the hospital, and he brought Jennine, to try to persuade him to stay.

  “JK, you’re stuck here for another two weeks at least, maybe a month.”

  Lee was furious. His anger at the betrayal by his own body seemed to course through him like nitrogen tetroxide, a volatile substance that was burning him up. He got out of bed and started doing push-ups again. “See?” he gasped. “For Christ’s sake, what is wrong with y
ou people? Can’t you see—”

  But Jennine was screaming. She had her hands clasped to her cheeks, so that her face was a thin, moist ribbon, compressed between the palms of her hands.

  “Stop it. Stop it, JK.”

  They came to a compromise. He was out of there three weeks after the attack.

  The deal was that he was supposed to stay at home, working if he really had to, for another couple of weeks at least.

  He tried to watch TV. There was some god-awful depressing thing called The Day After, about a nuclear attack on Lawrence, Kansas; everyone said he should watch it.

  After the first hour he threw the remote across the room. He’d always hated Jason Robards, anyhow.

  After two days he couldn’t stand the isolation anymore, and he got the T-bird out of the garage.

  Jennine didn’t try to stop him. She just watched him preparing to go. It made him uncomfortable to look her in the eye, to meet that bruised look there.

  When he got to work the plant was in chaos. It was worse than he had expected, with NASA people still crawling all over the goddamn place, and Art Cane bouncing off the walls of his office, convinced he was going to lose the MEM contract.

  So Lee tried to get a hold of his program again.

  First he kicked out all the outsiders, the NASA people and the rest, whom he regarded as not strictly necessary for the progress of the MEM. It took him a day just to do that, and he had a lot of opposition from the NASA bigwigs, of course, but he did it anyhow.

  Still, it worried him a little that Art Cane’s backing in this was muted.

  Then he spent a couple of days working through the two audit reports, and blue-penciling the politics and the waffle and the ill-informed and the downright goddamn stupid. And there was a hell of a lot of that.

  The auditors, both internal and external, had gone for what he considered to be easy meat: schedule delays and paperwork snarl-ups and procedural problems. To Lee, schedules on paper were all very well — you had to produce them for senior management, and they were always the best guess you could make, and you had to keep a weather eye on them — but the fact was, half the time Columbia didn’t know what they were trying to build here, or what the latest batch of test results would throw at them, or what the latest flood of changes from the design teams at Marshall, Houston, and elsewhere would bring. In a program like the MEM you couldn’t expect actually to stick to a schedule. The delays certainly weren’t a question of his people’s competence, as far as Lee was concerned; they were more a measure of the inherent complexity of what they were trying to do.

  Columbia was building a spacecraft, for God’s sake; and you only had to walk through the Clean Room, to see the four beautiful test articles emerging, to understand that basically, at the heart of all the paper storms, JK Lee was succeeding.

  He tried to distill the reports down to what he considered to be the elements of common sense, of valid criticism, and then act on them. For instance the auditors had found poor demarcation of work areas, and sloppy handling of materials, and so forth. Well, he wasn’t going to argue about that kind of thing. Lee fired off memos, and called in people to chew ass, and demanded some fixing.

  After a few days of this he went to see Art Cane, and he was able to throw the two fat audit reports across the desk at Art. Every paragraph of each report had been blue-penciled by Lee, either as completed, with a fat tick, or as irrelevant bullshit, in which case he’d just scribbled it out.

  Cane leafed through the stuff, looking a little dubious; but he accepted what Lee had given him, and told him to write up his responses to the reports formally.

  Next, Lee got everyone at the plant involved in the MEM program — there was almost a thousand of them — to come squeezing into the big, roomy old canteen. The room was still used as the main conference room, and its walls were lined with multicolored schedule boards and progress charts. Lee got a photograph of their prime MEM, Spacecraft 009, blown up so it covered the wall behind him — the great complex silver pyramid made a beautiful image — and he stood on a table in front of his people. He put his hands on his hips, and glared out at the sea of pinched-up, worried faces around him.

  “Now, I know times have been tough for you guys. I know you’ve got a lot of people crawling all over you saying you don’t know your butts from third base. And we did get some things wrong. But now we’re fixing them, and that’s healthy. And I know, deep down — and you know — that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the way we’re working here. And I know there’s nothing wrong with the spacecraft, either. If NASA wants to fly in April” — the target date for the D-prime mission, the first manned flight — “then we’ll be ready for them.

  “I want you to forget about everything else, now, except that first flight. We’re going to focus on this one spacecraft here, and make it work; because if we can complete that flight well, believe me, all the rest of the program is going to slot into place, bang bang bang, just like that.

  “And I know one thing more.” He looked around at their faces, all somehow smoothed out by the way they were tilted up at him, made to look younger; he felt a surge of protectiveness. “One thing more. I know I couldn’t ask for a better group of people to work with. Now, let’s get back to work, and let’s make history.”

  Well, this was a standard spiel for Lee, a version of a talk he’d used at tough times on many projects. A standard-issue motivator. On the B-70, it had even gotten him a cheer.

  But this time, although there were a lot of nodding heads, nobody cheered; and when he was done, they just turned away, and drifted back to their workstations.

  He got down off the rickety table with a hand from Jack Morgan. He had a sick feeling, deep in the pit of his stomach. He felt isolated, somehow vulnerable.

  Maybe it was his heart, letting him down again.

  The hell with it. Leaning a little on Jack Morgan, he started prowling around the plant, trying to pinpoint problems, bawling out technicians, riding herd on his program managers as hard as he could.

  Tuesday, November 8, 1983

  LYNDON B. JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, HOUSTON

  Joe Muldoon wasn’t a happy man.

  He had a decision to make, and today was the day he had to make it.

  He had the three names of his prime Ares crew — the Commander, the Mission Specialist, and the Mars Excursion Module Pilot — written out on a piece of paper on his desk.

  CDR: Stone. MSP: Bleeker. MMP: Curval.

  Less than eighteen months before Ares was supposed to leave the ground, the heat was on NASA over its crew selection — which still hadn’t been announced to the public — and NASA, in turn, was turning up the heat on Joe Muldoon, who was responsible for that selection.

  The scientific community was going ape-shit about the fact that all three astronauts on the prime Mars crew were from the military. Adam Bleeker — while he was doing fine in the freshman-standard geology classes York was mounting, and while everyone acknowledged he was an intelligent, competent, experienced astronaut — was, according to the eggheads, a completely crazy choice for the Mission Specialist slot. The National Academy of Sciences and the U.S. Geological Survey were throwing around a lot of crap about the fact that NASA even had a fully qualified Mars surface scientist, in Natalie York, but wasn’t planning to give her a seat on the mission. And all the other scientists in the corps, the geochemists and geophysicists and life scientists, had been overlooked as well.

  It was Apollo all over again, they said.

  Well, York had shown she could do a good job under pressure, on her assignment as Apollo-N capcom for instance, and she’d been putting in an impressive amount of time in the sims. She could probably handle the flight.

  Muldoon knew that putting York on the mission as the MSP would shut up the science lobby for sure. And, he reflected, assigning York would have the side benefit of closing down another couple of lobbies — the minority interest ones — which complained long and hard about the way NASA
still supposedly discriminated in favor of sending up white males.

  He wrote out that list of names, now, to see how it would look:

  CDR: Stone. MSP: York. MMP: Curval.

  But York was a rookie.

  He remembered what York herself had said, back at the time of her selection interviews. We need to get a scientist on Mars. But a dead scientist on Mars wouldn’t do anybody any good. The fact was, you weren’t talking about a trolley-car ride but an extended deep-space mission using complex, edge-of-the-envelope technology.

  Sometimes, when he reflected on what they were doing, it grabbed at his imagination. They were planning to send three people in a fragile collection of tin cans across forty million miles — and then hope that the engineering being cooked up in Lee’s ramshackle operation in Newport Beach, and whatever discipline could be adapted from a lifetime of aviation in Earth’s atmosphere, were capable of bringing them safely down to the surface of an alien world. Plumbing, TV cameras, and all.

  The scale — the audacity of it all — stunned him, when he let himself think about it. And Muldoon, he reminded himself, had walked on the Moon.

  Maybe, as many people argued, they were going too far, too fast…

  He shrugged that off. Be that as it may, they were going.

  As far as Muldoon was concerned it was better to get somebody down to that surface to do at least some science, no matter how dumb. And, the way he saw it, the way to maximize the chances of achieving that was to send up his three best aviators: people who had cut their teeth in the most extraordinary physical situations the home planet had to offer. And hope that was enough for Mars…

  Also, while he was impressed by York, there was something about her which unsettled him a little. All that intensity. She’d come into NASA with a great big grudge against the world, and it was still there, and getting bigger all the time, as far as he could see. Those goddamn twitching eyebrows of hers. She would drive her crewmates crazy in a month.

  York wasn’t ready. It was a shame.