The recovery convoy was racing off across the desert surface, towards the orbiter’s projected touchdown position, miles from the runway. They raised a dust cloud a thousand feet tall.
The orbiter was huge as it came in, impossibly ungainly. It was gliding down a steep entry path, as smooth as if it were mounted on invisible rails.
You could tell the bird was sick. Even Hadamard could see that, at a glance. There was some kind of black smoke billowing out of the fat engine pods at the orbiter’s tail. The pods themselves were badly charred and buckled. And there were yellow flames, actual flames, licking along the leading edge of that big tail fin. The public affairs officer said that was hydrazine, leaking out of ruptured power units over the orbiter’s hot surfaces.
But it wasn’t a disaster yet. In the distance Hadamard could see five billowing white parachutes, like thistledown, drifting down through the air.
Hadamard tried to think ahead. He was going to have trouble with that arrogant old asshole Tom Lamb, when he emerged from this, covered in fresh glory. He’d have to be kicked upstairs to somewhere he and his old Apollo-era buddies could be kept quiet, once the first PR burst was over…
Arrogant old asshole. Suddenly he pictured Tom Lamb sitting on the flight deck of that battered old orbiter, alone, struggling to bring his spacecraft home.
His calculation receded. Hadamard found he was holding his breath.
To increase his rate of descent, he pushed forward on his stick. The back end of the bird came up a little, and the attitude change increased his sink rate.
It was a steep descent: at seventeen degrees, five times as steep as the normal airliner approach, dropping three feet in every fifteen flown. He was pretty much hanging in the straps now, falling fast. He tried to keep his speed constant, by opening and closing the speed-brake with the throttle lever. He could feel the brake take hold, dragging at the air.
Way to his right, he could see where the runway had been painted on the bare desert surface, remote, useless. Beyond it was a group of drab, dun buildings: it was the Wherry housing area, where he’d once lived, when he’d flown F-104 chasers for the X-15s. But that had been in the middle of a different century, a hundred lifetimes ago.
Two thousand feet.
“Beginning preflare.” Using his hand controller and his speed-brake, he started to shallow his glideslope to two degrees.
Columbia responded, sluggishly, to the maneuver. But his speed was about right.
It was still possible. Even if the landing gear collapsed, even if the orbiter slid across half the Mojave on its belly. As long as he held her steady, through this final couple of thousand feet.
The baked desert surface fled beneath the prow of the orbiter, already shimmering with heat haze.
At a hundred and thirty-five feet, the orbiter bottomed out of its dip. He lifted the cover of the landing gear arming switch, and pressed it. At ninety feet, he pushed the switch.
He heard a clump beneath him, as the heavy gear dropped and locked into place.
“Columbia, Houston. Gear down. We can see it, Tom.”
“Gear down, rog. I’m going to take this damn thing right into the hangar, Marcus.”
“Maybe we’ll dust it off a little first.”
Just a few more feet. Damn it, he could jump down from here and walk into Eddy.
“Coming in a little steep, Tom.”
“Yeah. Could do with a little prop wash right here.”
“Hell,” said White, “stop complaining. You never had to nurse a sick jet home to a carrier, in pitch darkness, in the middle of forty-foot Atlantic swells. Even a black-shoe surface Navyguy like you can handle this…”
Now for the final maneuver, a nose-up flare, to shed a little more velocity.
But now the master alarm sounded again. He didn’t have time to kill it.
According to the warning array, the last power unit had failed.
He jammed on the speed-brake, and shoved at his stick. If he could pitch her forward, get her nose flat—maybe there would be just a little hydraulic pressure left—
But the stick was loose in his hand, the throttle lever unresponsive.
The orbiter tipped back.
He heard an immense bang from the rear of the craft, as the tail section struck Earth.
Columbia was still traveling at more than two hundred knots.
The orbiter bounced forward, tipping down as its aerosurfaces fluttered. He could feel the bounce, the longitudinal shudder of the airframe. And then came the stall The orbiter had lost too much of its airspeed in that tail-end scrape to sustain lift.
The nose pointed to the ground.
Now—with the master alarm still crying in his ear, and the caution/warning array a constellation of red lights—the Mojave came up to meet him, exploding in unwelcome detail, more hostile than the surface of the Moon.
Barbara Fahy watched every freeze-framed step in the destruction of STS-143.
The second impact broke the orbiter’s spine. The big delta wings crumpled, sending thermal protection tiles spinning into the air. The crew compartment, the nose of the craft, emerged from the impact apparently undamaged, trailing umbilical wires torn from the payload bay. Then it toppled over and drove itself nose-first into the desert. It broke apart, into shapeless, unrecognizable fragments. The tail section cracked open—perhaps that was the rupture of the helium pressurization tanks—and Fahy could see the hulks of the three big main engines come bouncing out of the expanding cloud of debris, still attached to their load-bearing structures and trailing feed pipes and cables.
The black smoke billowing from the tail section was suddenly brightened by reddish-orange flames, as the residual RCS fuel there burned.
The orbiter’s drag chute billowed out of its container in the tail. Briefly it flared to its full expanse, a half-globe of red, white and blue; then it crumpled, and fell to the dust, irrelevant.
White thought of Tom Lamb. It was like a vision, blinding him.
… Tom came loping out of a shallow crater, towards White. Tom looked like a human-shaped beach ball, his suit brilliant white against the black sky, bouncing happily over the sandy surface of the Moon. Tom had one glove up over his chest, obscuring the tubes which connected his backpack to his oxygen and water inlets. His white oversuit was covered in dust splashes. His gold sun visor was up, and inside his white helmet White could see Tom’s face, with its four-day growth of beard…
Damn, damn. It was as if it was yesterday. That was how he was going to remember his friend, he knew; as he was during those three sun-drenched days they’d had together on the Moon, both of them feeling light as feathers: the most vivid moments of his life, three days that had shaped his whole damn existence.
He turned away from the FCR screens.
The morning California sunlight was bright. It illuminated the expanding cloud of dust and smoke, turning it into a kind of three-dimensional, kinetic sculpture of light, set against the remote hills surrounding the dry lake beds.
Hadamard, beyond calculation, knew he would spend the rest of his life with this brief sequence of images, watching them over and again.
Jiang gazed at the glistening curvature of Earth: the wrinkled oceans, the shadow-casting clouds stacked tall over the equator. Outside the cabin, all the way to infinity, there was no air; just silence. She felt small, fragile, barely protected by the thin skin of the xiaohao.
Where she passed, she relayed revolutionary messages, reading from a book she had carried in a pocket of her pressure suit. “Warm greetings from space,” she said. “Everything that is good in me I owe to our Communist Party and the Helmsman of the Country. This date is one on which mankind’s most cherished dreams come true, and also marks the triumph of Chinese science and technology…”
The words were so familiar to her, homilies from classes in politics, as to be almost meaningless. And yet, here, alone in the blackness of space, with the blue light of Earth illuminating the pages of the book, she felt filled with a deep, u
nfocused nostalgia. She felt growing within her an abiding attachment for her huge country, for the billion-strong horde of her countrymen: the brash entrepreneurial class in the bustling coastal cities, the peasants still scratching at their fields as they had done for five millennia. She was of them, and so of the Party which, after seven decades, still ruled; she would, she knew, never be anything more or less than that.
But now the ground controllers were telling her, in clipped sentences, of some disaster involving the American Space Shuttle. They sounded jubilant, she thought. They had her intone words of sympathy, of fellowship, broadcast from orbit.
The truth was she felt little concern, for whatever might have befallen the American astronauts. This was her moment; nothing could diminish that.
Though she knew she would be under pressure to become an ambassador for the space program, for the Party, and for China, Jiang intended to battle to stay within the unfolding program itself. The Helmsman had stated that a Chinese astronaut would walk on the surface of the Moon before 2019: the seventieth anniversary of Mao’s proclamation of the People’s Republic. Jiang felt her grin tighten as she thought about that. It would be a remarkable achievement, an affirmation that China would, after all, awake from her centuries-long slumber and become the dominant world power in the new millennium.
And it was only fifteen years away.
Jiang would still be less than fifty. Americans and Russians had flown at much greater ages than that…
And so she read the simple words of soldier and Party leaders, as she sailed over the skin of Earth.
Paula Benacerraf, suspended, could hear sounds, drifting up to her from the huge, empty ground below. Her own breathing was loud in her ears.
This was the end of the U.S. space program, and the end of her own career.
Earth was claiming her. For the rest of her life.
She could see her future, mapped out. Her destiny was no more than to be a survivor of Columbia, and somebody’s mother, somebody’s grandmother, for the rest of her life.
She’d never get back to space again. She’d never again drift in all that light, never see the lights of her spacecraft as it drifted in its own orbit beneath her.
Like hell, she thought. There has to be an option.
She tucked up her legs, keeping away from the Earth as long as she could. But the impact in the dirt, when it came, was hard.
Book Two
LOW EARTH
ORBIT
A.D. 2004–A.D. 2008
What did you think you were doing, Rosenberg?”
Marcia Delbruck, Rosenberg’s project boss, was pacing around her office, formidable in her Berkeley sweatshirt and frizzed-up hair; she had a copy of Jackie Benacerraf’s life-on-Titan article loaded on her big wall-mounted softscreen. “You’ve made a joke of us all, of the whole project.”
“That’s ridiculous, Marcia.”
“You let this woman Jackie Benacerraf get to you. You just can’t handle women, can you, Rosenberg?”
Actually, he thought, no. But he wasn’t going to sit here and take this. “All I did was speculate a little.”
“About life on Titan? Jesus Christ. Do you know how much damage that kind of crap can do?”
“No. No, I don’t really see what damage that kind of crap can do. I know it’s bad science to go shooting my mouth off about tentative hypotheses before—”
“It’s not the science. It’s the PR. Don’t you understand any of this?” She sat down behind her desk. “Isaac, you have to look at the situation we’re in. Think back to the past. Look at 1964, when the first Mariner reached Mars. It was run out of JPL, right here—”
“What has some forty-year-old probe got to do with anything?”
“Lessons of history, Rosenberg. Back then, NASA was already thinking about how to follow on from Apollo. Mars would have been the next logical step, right? Move onward and outward, human expansion into the Solar System.
“But Mariner found craters, like the Moon’s. They’d directed the craft over an area where they were expecting canals, for God’s sake.
“All of a sudden, there was no point going to Mars after all, because there was nothing there except another sterile, irradiated ball of rock. You could say that handful of pictures, from that first Mariner, turned the history of space exploration. It Mars had been worth going to, we’d be there by now. Instead, NASA was just wound down.”
“I know about the disappointment,” he said icily. “I read Bradbury, and Clarke, and Heinlein. I can imagine how it was.”
“NASA learned its corporate lesson, slowly and painfully.” She thumped the desk with her closed fist to emphasize her words. “Look how carefully they handled the story of the organic materials they found in the Martian meteorite…”
“Careful, yeah. But so what? They still haven’t flown a Mars sample-return mission to confirm—”
“It’s not the point, Rosenberg,” she snapped. “You don’t promise what you don’t deliver. You don’t yap to the media about finding life on Titan.”
“All I talked about was the preliminary results, and what they might mean. You can hear the same stuff in the canteen here any day of the week.”
She tapped the clipping on her screen. “This isn’t the JPL canteen, Rosenberg.”
“Anyway, what does NASA have to do with it? JPL’s an arm of Caltech; it’s organizationally independent—”
“Don’t be smart, Rosenberg. Who the hell do you think you are? Maybe it’s escaped your notice, but you’re just one of a team here.”
The team lecture, he thought with dread. “I know.” Rosenberg pushed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. “I know about the line, and the matrix management structure, and my office, division, section, group and subgroup, I know about the organization charts and documentation trees.” It was true. He did know all about that; he’d had to learn. An education in JPL’s peculiar politics was like a return to grade school biology, learning about kingdoms and phyla and classes.
“Then,” she snapped, “you know that you occupy one space in that organization, one little bitty square, and that’s where you should damn well stay. Leave the press to the PR people; they know how to handle it right… Look, Rosenberg, you have to come to some kind of accommodation with me. I’m telling you there’s no other way to run a major project like a deep space mission except with a tight, lean organization like ours. And it works. As long as we all work within it.”
“Come on, Marcia. We shouldn’t be talking about organizational forms, for God’s sake. At the very least we’ve got evidence of a new kind of biochemistry, something completely new, out on the surface of that moon. We should be talking about the data, the results. About going back, a sample-return mission—”
“Going back?” She laughed. “Don’t you follow the news, Rosenberg? The Space Shuttle just crashed. Nobody knows what the hell the future is for NASA. If it has one at all.”
“But we have to go back to Titan.”
“Why?”
He couldn’t see why she would even pose the question. “Because there’s so much more to learn.”
“Let me give you some advice, Rosenberg,” she said. “We aren’t going back to Titan. Not in my lifetime, or yours. No matter what Huygens has found. Just as we aren’t going back to Venus, or Mercury, or Neptune. We’ll be lucky to shoot off a few more probes to Mars. Get used to the fact. And the way to do that is to get a life. I understand you, Rosenberg. Better than you think I do. Probably better than you understand yourself. Titan is always going to be out there. What’s the rush? What you’re talking about is yourself. What you mean is that you want to discover it all, before you die. That’s what motivates you. You can’t bear the thought of the universe going on without you, its events unfolding without your invaluable brain still being around to process them. Right?”
This sudden descent into personal analysis startled him; he had no idea what to say.
She sat back. “Look. I know you’re a g
ood worker; I know we need people like you, who can think out of the box. But I don’t need you shooting your mouth off to the press. It’s not three months since Columbia came down. We’re trying to preserve Cassini, the last of the great JPL probes; you must know we haven’t secured funding for the extended mission yet. If you attract enough hostility, you could get us shut down, future projects killed…”
Slowly, he realized that she meant it. She was expressing a genuine fear: that if space scientists attracted too much attention—if they sounded as it they weren’t being “responsible,” as if they were shooting for the Moon again—then they’d be closed down.
In the first decade of a new millennium, a sense of wonder was dangerous.
Discreetly he checked his watch. He was meeting Paula Benacerraf later today. Maybe he could find some new way forward, with her. And…
But Delbruck was still talking at him. “Have you got it, Rosenberg? Have you?”
Rosenberg came to pick Benacerraf up, in person, from LAX. She shook Rosenberg’s offered hand, and climbed into the car.
Rosenberg swung through Glendale and then turned north on Linda Vista to go past the Rose Bowl. For a few miles they drove in silence, except for the rattling of the car, which was a clunker.
Rosenberg, half Benacerraf’s age, seemed almost shy.
Rosenberg’s driving was erratic—he took it at speed, with not much room for error—and he was a little wild-eyed, as if he’d been missing out on sleep. Probably he had; he seemed the type.
JPL wasn’t NASA, strictly speaking. She’d never been out here before, but she’d heard from insiders that JPL’s spirit of independence and its campus-like atmosphere were important to it, and notorious in the rest of the Agency.
So maybe she shouldn’t have been surprised to have been summoned out here like this, by Isaac Rosenberg, a skinny guy in his mid-twenties with glasses, bad skin, and thinning hair tied back in a fashion that had died out, to her knowledge, thirty years ago.
“This seems a way to go,” she remarked after a while. “We’re a long way out of Pasadena.”
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