Voyage n-1

by Stephen Baxter

  Book Five

  ARES

  Mission Elapsed Time [Day/Hr:Min:Sec] Plus 369/09:27:26

  Ocher light, oddly mottled, shone down through the little Command Module window beside her: Mars, grown so huge it no longer fitted into the window; Mars, sliding like oil past the glass.

  “Three minutes to loss of signal,” capcom John Young called up.

  “Roger,” Stone replied.

  The crew sat side by side in Apollo. York’s pressure suit felt hot, bulky, the angular acceleration couch uncomfortably restricting after so long in the Mission Module’s shirtsleeved environment.

  “Ares, Houston, we read you as go for Mars Orbit Insertion. Everything is go for MOI. Two minutes to loss of signal. Be assured you’re riding the best bird we can find.”

  “Thank you, John. We appreciate that.”

  Sure. But Young’s assurances weren’t all that comforting, York thought.

  Just now, Ares was free-falling past Mars. Even if the big MS-II engines failed altogether, they still had enough speed to escape from Mars’s gravity well and emerge on a free return trajectory back to Earth.

  But if Stone, and Mission Control, decided to commit to MOI, the Mars Orbit Insertion burn, then their final abort option would be gone. They would be committed to Mars orbit.

  MOI really was the moment of truth, the moment when Ares finally cut the long, fragile ties of gravity and celestial mechanics that could draw it home to Earth again.

  But Ares was about to fall around the back of Mars, into its shadow, and out of radio line of sight of Earth; and it was at that point, with Stone able to rely on nothing but the instruments in Ares, that the burn would be initiated. The crew would be on their own — isolated by time lag and the rocky bulk of Mars — when it most mattered.

  According to the ground’s best predictions, they were going to hit the MOI window within plus or minus ten miles of the required height above Mars.

  However, who the hell believed predictions?

  The MS-II was going to impose a tough acceleration. So all the stack’s remaining modules — the MS-II and MS-IVB booster stages, then the MEM, the Mission Module, and Apollo — were still strung out along the center line of the stack, along the line of the burn. Then, after the burn was completed, and they were safely in Mars orbit — if they got there — the crew would have to go through a complex repositioning exercise to prepare for the landing. It was one hell of a way to run a mission, York thought: to reassemble your spacecraft in Mars orbit…

  “One minute to loss of signal,” said Stone.

  “One minute,” John Young said, almost simultaneously. He must be timing his transmissions so they arrived to match their local events. “Ares, this is Houston. All your systems are looking good going around the corner.”

  “Copy that, John.”

  York could hear the tension in Stone’s voice. Gershon sat in the center couch, uncharacteristically silent, pensive.

  The ocher light shifted. She looked up.

  Ares was dipping low across Mars.

  Less than three hundred miles beneath York, a mottled, battered landscape slid by. She could see Arabia, a bright yellow circular area, and to its right an irregular, blue-black patch, the volcanic plateau called the Syrtis Major Planum. Syrtis had been the first Martian feature observed by telescope from Earth. And now I am falling ass-backwards over Syrtis itself; I can see it before me, a lurid patch the size of my hand.

  She felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up, prickling. She was so close that Syrtis slid across her field of view, falling toward her as Ares slid deeper into Mars’s gravity well, moving past her fast enough for it to change the lighting conditions in her cabin.

  The belly of Mars seemed to bulge out at her. Mars was a small world; in contrast to Earth, she could see its curvature prominently, even at such a low altitude.

  She tried to be analytical, to separate the panorama into geological units…

  But it was a battered, tired landscape. The land was the color of bruises, inflicted by the ancient meteorite impacts: like accumulated porphyrin, which the little world was unable to break down. Bruises on the face of a corpse, left there for all time. It was a surprisingly depressing panorama, obviously lifeless.

  “Thirty seconds,” Stone said.

  York turned briefly to her own workstation. On the first pass around the planet, the science platform was working at full capacity, taking observations of the surface and atmosphere. Even the tail-off of the radio carrier during loss of signal, as Earth was eclipsed by the atmosphere of Mars, would give a lot of information about the structure of the Martian air.

  These first observations were important. If the burn went wrong, and the mission turned into nothing more than a flyby, it could be that these contingency observations would be the most significant data that Ares would return.

  Ares dipped lower, and swept over the line between night and day. She was granted a brief glimpse of a line of craters picked out by the last of the sun, their wind-eroded rims casting long shadows across the ancient, resilient surface.

  “Ares, Houston, coming up to loss of signal,” Young said from distant Mission Control. “You’re go all the way, guys.”

  “Thanks a lot,” Stone said. “See you on the other side, John. Ten. Nine.”

  …Then the cratered contrast was gone, and Ares flew into shadow, over a land immersed in unbroken darkness. The Solar System is full of empty, unlit worlds, she thought. Earth is the exception. She felt isolated, vulnerable. A long way from home.

  “Three. Two. One.”

  Static burst from the grilles on the science-station racks, from the little speakers in her headset.

  LOS had come right on time. That meant their trajectory was true.

  Gershon laughed, explosively. “How about that. Right on the button. Hey, Phil. I wonder if they just turned it off. Wouldn’t that be terrific? I can imagine John saying, ‘They’re just a bunch of uptight assholes. Whatever happens, just turn the damn thing off…’ ”

  York could see Stone in profile, beyond the cupped headrest of his couch. He was grinning, but it was a tight grin that showed a lot of teeth. “Let’s go to the MOI checklist, Ralph. Ah, coming up on ten minutes fifteen to MOI.”

  York craned her head upward, staring at the circular patch of darkness that was Mars. She summoned up a map of the surface in her mind. Ares was traveling over the Hesperia Planum, another volcanic plain to the east of Syrtis, close to the equator.

  She could see traces, outlines, glimmers of white against the darkness. Has to be starlight, picking out the CO2 ice.

  She had seen nomads’ campfires burn, pinpricks in the night of the huge deserts of Earth. But there were no fires in the Martian desert. In fact, of all the worlds of the Solar System, only Earth — with its oxygen-rich atmosphere — knew fire.

  “Five minutes to the burn.”

  She was sealed into her suit, shut in with the hiss of oxygen, the whir of fans, the scratch of her own breathing. She felt isolated, cut off. Lousy design. I need to hold somebody’s hand.

  “Okay, Ralph,” Stone said. “Translation control power, on.”

  “On.”

  “Rotational hand controller number two, armed.”

  “Armed.”

  “Okay. Stand by for the primary TVC check.”

  “Pressures coming up nicely,” Gershon said. “Everything is great…”

  A hundred feet behind them, the big MS-II injection stage was rousing from its long, interplanetary hibernation. Heaters in the big cryogenic tanks were boiling off vapor, bringing up a pressure sufficient to force propellant and oxidizer out of the tanks, and Stone and Gershon were running tests of the sequence which would bring the hydrogen and oxygen into explosive combination inside the combustion chambers of the four J-2S engines.

  In the window above her, she could see a segment of a circle: bone white in the starlight, quite precise, immense.

  “…Oh, my God.”

>   Stone twisted, awkward in his suit, and peered over his shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

  “Look at that. I think it’s Hellas.” The deepest impact crater on Mars. And white, with its frozen lake of carbon dioxide. Somewhere in there, the Soviets had set down Mars 9.

  Stone grunted. “You’re going to be looking at that for a long time.” He turned his back, his disapproval evident, and resumed the preburn checklist with Gershon.

  “Thirty seconds,” Stone said. “Everything is looking nominal. Still go for MOI.”

  He placed his gloved hand over the big plastic firing button.

  The whole burn was automated, York knew, controlled by computers in the cluster’s Instrumentation Unit, the big doughnut of electronics behind the Mission Module. Multiple computers, endlessly checking everything and backing each other up and taking polls among themselves. It was hard to see what could go wrong. Nevertheless, Stone sat there with his hand on the button, ready to take over if he had to. To York, it looked comical — and yet, somehow heroic as well. Touching.

  “Twenty seconds,” Stone said. “Brace, guys.”

  “All systems are go for MOI,” Gershon said.

  York checked her own racks. “Roger, go.”

  She checked the restraints across her chest, rapidly, and settled her head against her canvas headrest. She tried to make sure there were no creases or folds in the thick layers of the pressure suit under her legs or back.

  She felt her heart pound, and chill sweat broke out across her cheeks and under her chin.

  “T minus ten seconds,” Gershon said.

  Stone’s hands hovered over his controls.

  “Eight seconds.”

  “I got a 99,” Stone said. He pushed a button. “Press to proceed.”

  York felt air rush out of her in a sigh.

  “Six seconds,” Gershon said. “Five, four. Ullage.”

  There was a brief rattle, a sharp kick in the small of her back. Eight small solid-fuel rockets, clustered around the base of the MS-II, had given the booster a small shove, helping the propellants settle in their tanks.

  Gershon said, “Two. One. Ignition.”

  The crisp ullage shove died, to be replaced by a smooth, steady push that she felt in her back, her neck, her thighs.

  The force built up rapidly. The silence was eerie. She had her back to the direction of thrust, and she felt as if she was sitting up and being hurled forward, into some unknown future.

  “Fifteen seconds in,” Stone said. “Point five G. Climbing.”

  After a year of zero G, the pressure already felt enormous. So much for all those hours of exercises; didn’t do a damn bit of good.

  There was a shudder, a vibration that set into the walls and equipment racks around her. Loose gear rattled. She heard a clatter somewhere behind her: some bit of equipment, inadequately stowed, falling the length of the Command Module.

  “One G,” Stone called. “Two.”

  The pressure built up further, compressing her chest.

  “Jesus,” Gershon said. He had to shout over the rattling of the walls and equipment. “Eight minutes of this.”

  “Can it,” Stone snapped. “Two point five Gs. We’re doing fine. Right down Route One. Three point six. Hang on, guys.”

  She felt unable to breathe. It was as if the pressure suit was tightening around her, constricting her. It was a bizarre, terrifying, claustrophobic experience.

  A fringe of bubbly darkness gathered at the edge of her vision.

  They were utterly alone, inside a tiny artifact arcing above the surface of an empty planet, reliant on the smooth working of their machines to survive.

  “Four point three Gs,” Stone called. She could hear the rattle of the thrust in his voice. “That’s it. That’s the peak. Coming up on pericenter.”

  Stone and Gershon began to run through a readout of the status of the maneuver so far.

  “Burn time four four five.” Four minutes, forty-five seconds. Halfway through. “Ten values on the angles: BGX minus point one, BGY minus point one, BGZ plus point one…” Velocity errors on the burn were amounting to only a foot per second, along each of the three axes of space. “No trim. Minus six point eight delta-vee-cee. Fuel thirty-eight point eight. Lox thirty-nine zip, plus fifty on balance. We ran an increase on the PUGS. Projected for a two nineteen point nine times twelve six eleven point three…”

  York translated the numbers in her head. The burn was working. The cluster was heading for an elliptical orbit, two hundred by twelve thousand miles: almost perfect.

  “Hey, Natalie.” It was Gershon.

  “What?”

  “Look up.”

  With an effort, she tilted back her head. The helmet restricted her, and under the acceleration her skull felt as if it had been replaced by a ball of concrete, tearing at her neck muscles.

  Through her small window she saw the battered southern plain of Mars.

  And the bulging landscape above her was lit up, right at the center, by a soft, pink glow; it was like a highlight on a huge, ocher bowling ball.

  It was the glow of the burn, the light of the MS-II.

  For the first time in the planet’s four-billion-year history, artificial light had come to the Martian night.

  Friday, August 17, 1984

  LYNDON B. JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, HOUSTON

  The questions came drifting out of a sea of lights so intense that they seemed to bake York’s face dry.

  “How does it feel to be on the crew?” “What about the guys you beat out?” “Who will be first on the surface?” “What’s it like in space?…”

  The three of them — chaperoned by Joe Muldoon and Rick Llewellyn, head of NASA’s Public Affairs Office — sat on a rickety podium, with the NASA logo emblazoned behind them, and a Revell model of a Columbia MEM on the table before them. The briefing room in the Public Affairs Office was packed, and in front of their table there was what the Old Heads called a goat fuck, an unseemly scramble of microphones and camera lenses, pushed into the faces of the astronauts.

  Rarely in York’s life had people been interested enough to ask her to explain herself, her background, her motives, her hopes and fears. And now everything about her was significant: everything that had happened in her life, every aspect of her personality.

  It was probably going to last forever. And she found she hated it.

  She envied Phil Stone, with his neat, crew-cut good looks and his hint of a Midwestern twang — the stereotypical astronaut hero — for the grace with which he fielded the dumbest, most repetitive questions. And the press had already taken Ralph Gershon to their hearts for his infectious grins — the glamorous, hell-raising bachelor spaceman — and for his wisecracking, and the hint of danger, of ambiguity about him. Even if he did make Rick Llewellyn visibly nervous every time he opened his mouth. And even if there was, as far as York was concerned, an undertow of racism about the patronizing affection with which Gershon was treated.

  And that left York: in her own view, the least equipped to handle the media pressure, but the one on whom most interest was focused. And all for the wrong reasons.

  It had started the day after her place in the crew was announced. All the outlets used the same ancient stock NASA photo of her, holding up an outdated biconic MEM model. “This quiet, intent and dedicated scientist…” “Redhead Natalie York is, at 37, unmarried and without children…” “We asked beautician Marcia Forbes what advice she would give America’s premier spacewoman. Well, to begin, with those eyebrows, you know…” “This mop-haired 35-year-old native of L.A….” “…A crop-haired brunette of medium height, Natalie York is said to be disconcerted by the prospect of publicity…” “Her dark, close-cropped hair and her Latin good looks make Natalie a woman of glamour and mystery, but a natural for the role of America’s first woman on Mars…”

  Hair, eyebrows, and teeth. It drove her crazy.

  Already they’d tracked down her mother, who was loving the attention, and Mike Conlig and
his new family, who weren’t.

  It would help if NASA had given her any preparation for handling the feeding frenzy. Even basic communications training. Instead, the only guideline was: Don’t embarrass the Agency.

  Some of the questions were tougher, more pointed, than others.

  “Doesn’t the case of Adam Bleeker indicate that we’re not yet ready to send humans on these immense long-duration missions? That we don’t yet know enough about the effects of microgravity on the body? That, in fact, the Ares mission is an irresponsible jaunt?”

  “You’re surely right we don’t know enough,” Muldoon said smoothly. “But the only way we’re going to find out is by getting out there and working in microgravity and studying the effects. Sure there are dangers, but we accept them as part of the job. It’s a price of being first. You ought to know that Adam was broken up to be taken off the flight, medical risks or not; and I know everyone in the Astronaut Office would volunteer to take his place…”

  “Ralph, you want to talk about your Cambodia runs?”

  “Ah, that’s all in the public record now, and I have nothing more to add. It’s all a long time ago.”

  “But how do you feel about having to distort records and maintain a cover-up that lasted for years before—”

  “You can read about it in my memoirs, Will.”

  Laughter.

  “What about Apollo-N?”

  Muldoon leaned into his microphone. “Ah, what about it, sir?”

  “I took the JSC visitors’ tour earlier on. Big heroic machines. Lots of plaques about Apollo 11. Mission Control as a national monument, sure. But Apollo-N might never have happened, still less the Apollo 1 fire, for all the evidence I saw at JSC. What is it with you people? How can you pretend that everything’s upbeat, that nothing bad ever happens?”

  “We don’t pretend that at all,” Muldoon said. “I think the crash is uppermost in our minds, every day.”

  “That’s what you call it? The crash? The damn thing didn’t crash; it exploded in orbit.”

  “We have to learn from what went wrong, move forward, make sure that the losses we suffered aren’t wasted. We can’t afford to brood, or be deterred from our intentions.”