Voyage

by Stephen Baxter

It wouldn’t have been like this with LBJ.

  But Johnson was gone. Now there was this new breed of shifty Republicans in the White House. And suddenly Michaels, at sixty-one, found the political levers he was used to pulling weren’t connected to anything any more. Even his links with the Kennedys didn’t seem as useful as they once had.

  Sitting here, he felt old, tired, used up.

  Maybe I should retire back to Dallas, he thought. Go work on my golf swing.

  He noticed Agronski glancing around at the walls at the moonwalk maps. ‘Poignant, isn’t it?’ Michaels said sharply.

  Agronski didn’t react.

  ‘Leon, why did the President withdraw this draft?’

  ‘Because, frankly, nobody in the White House is sure about the impact Kennedy’s remarks about the Mars option are having on public opinion. And now –’ Agronski waved a hand at the curling photographs of Fra Mauro ‘– now you people have served us up with all this. The public mood is a fragile thing, Fred; after Apollo 13 America may want to go to Mars as fast as it can – or it may want to close down the space program altogether.’

  Muldoon’s nostrils went white. ‘You’re talking about the lives of three men, damn it.’

  Agronski studied him, analytically. ‘You know, you people at NASA have been the same whenever I’ve dealt with you. So emotive, so unrealistic. Even you, Fred. Every time we ask for proposals, back you come wanting everything: look at this Space Task Group report with its “balanced programs,” its “wide range of technologies.” You ask for Mars, but that brings everything else in its wake, it seems: nuclear boosters, a Space Shuttle, huge space stations. The same old vision von Braun has peddled since the 1950s – even though you didn’t need a space station to get to the Moon. Your hidden agendas are not, frankly, very well hidden. Why can’t you learn to prioritize?’

  Muldoon said angrily, ‘The Task Group is asking for a mandate to begin the colonization of the Solar System. And to secure the future of the human race, just as Kennedy is saying. What could be higher priority than that?’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Agronski snapped. ‘We’re a country at war, Colonel Muldoon. And the war is a hemorrhage of money, resources, national morale.’

  ‘Sure,’ Muldoon said. ‘And Apollo is going to end up having cost as much as it takes to keep the war going for another twelve months. What a price to pay.’

  Agronski ignored that. ‘The budget just isn’t big enough to do everything you want. You don’t have to be a White House insider to see that. And the public mood is against you too. I don’t suppose you fly boys have heard of a thing called Earth Day, planned by the environmentalists in a couple of weeks’ time –’

  ‘Yes, I’ve heard of it, damn it.’

  ‘Clean-ups. Marches. Teach-ins. That’s where the public is going to focus in the coming decade, Colonel Muldoon: on our problems here on Earth, not more of your stunts in space.’

  ‘Maybe so. But Agnew chaired the Space Task Group, not NASA,’ Michaels growled.

  Agronski ploughed on. ‘it’s time you people dropped the idea that you’re some kind of heroic super-agency. During Apollo you thought you were the Manhattan Project. Well, now you’re a service agency with a limited budget. And that’s what you have to learn to live with …’

  Michaels knew Agronski had a point.

  In Michaels’s humble opinion, the current NASA Administrator, Thomas O. Paine, was an idiot: a naive dreamer who was pumping Agnew full of grandiose visions, without a thought about how acceptable they would be to the decision makers inside the White House. Paine was a real contrast to his predecessor, Jim Webb, whom Michaels had greatly admired. Webb was a real political operator – he had known where the bodies were buried, up on the Hill – and he had actively avoided long-term planning. NASA was bad at it anyhow – long-range plans always got bogged down in infighting between the centers – and Webb believed that long-term plans were just hostages to fortune, a distraction for budget authorizers and NASA managers.

  Paine couldn’t seem to see that the real problem right now lay in holding NASA together, in the tough times to come, not starting up new programs.

  It just wasn’t the way Michaels would run things.

  Agronski said, ‘Fred, forget your huge space stations, your fifty men on the Moon in 1980. The President wants what he’s calling, in private, a “Kennedy option.”’ He tapped the document again.

  ‘In this statement he was going to pick out one element from the Task Group’s report, the Space Shuttle, on which to focus. But what if he were to choose something else – a more visible, major goal – to achieve as quickly and as cheaply as possible?’

  Muldoon was staring at Agronski, evidently baffled.

  But Michaels understood. He’s speaking obliquely. In code. He has to. But Kennedy is evidently making his point. Nixon wants to save money. But he doesn’t want to be the President who killed the space program, not with Kennedy bleating in the background.

  ‘You’re thinking about Mars,’ he said to Agronski. ‘After all that bullshit about the Manhattan Project and Earth Day, you’re here to talk about going to Mars. Aren’t you?’

  Muldoon looked startled.

  ‘What does Paine say about this?’

  Agronski looked at him carefully. ‘Let’s think about Doctor Paine later,’ he said.

  I knew it. They’re forcing Paine out. He’d heard the rumors from within the White House. Not only was Paine not cooperating, he was being seen as undermining the President. We need an new Administrator who will work with us and not against us, and will reflect credit on the President, not embarrass him … Paine was a dead duck. And now – from the way Agronski was studying him – Michaels understood that he, Fred Michaels, was being offered the chance to succeed, in preference to George Low, Jim Fletcher.

  Mars, and the post of Administrator, all in one day. Games within games. But I’ll have to give Agronski something to take home with him, the bones of a cheap Mars option. And there is sure as hell going to be a price to pay, and I need to find out what it is.

  The talk was affecting the astronaut differently. There was a look of hope on Muldoon’s face, Michaels recognized; a delicate, fragile hope, as if Muldoon thought this magical possibility – we might go to Mars – might melt away if he longed for it too warmly.

  He wondered how much, if anything, Muldoon was aware of what was really going on here, under the surface. Looking at Muldoon’s angry, open face, Michaels felt vaguely ashamed of his calculation. In fact, Muldoon’s presence seemed to be working on him the way he’d hoped it would work on Agronski.

  Joe Muldoon felt scared to say anything, to disturb this difficult, mysterious process of negotiation. In case he made it all somehow go away.

  Mars. They’re still talking about Mars. If Fred Michaels says and does the right things now, the road to Mars might actually be opening up, for us.

  For me.

  And Joe Muldoon would have something to do with his life again.

  The months since his return from the Moon had been as bad as Muldoon had expected.

  His most recent PR jaunt had been to some place called Morang, in Nepal. He’d given his standard-issue schoolkids’ talk. When I was on the Moon …

  ‘When I was on the Moon, I couldn’t see Earth so well. Tranquillity Base was close to the Moon’s equator, and right at the center of the face of the Moon as you look at it. So Earth was directly above my head, and it was difficult to tip back in my spacesuit to see it.

  ‘The sunlight was very bright, and, under a black sky, the ground was a kind of gentle brown. It looked like a beach, actually. I remember looking at Neil bounding around up there, and I thought he looked like a beach ball, human-shaped, bouncing across the sand. But the colors of the Moon aren’t strong, and the most colorful thing there was the Eagle, which looked like a small, fragile house, done out in brilliant black, silver, orange and yellow …’

  His attention had kept drifting from his words, to the hiss
of warm rain on the school’s wooden roof, the coin-like faces of the children sitting cross-legged on the floor before him, the teacher’s odd, suspicious frown.

  Once, his brief couple of hours’ walking on the Moon were the most vivid thing in his mind, colorful as an Eagle on the flat, tan expanse of his memory. But in the endless goodwill tours which had followed the splashdown, he’d given all his little speeches so often, already, that he felt the phrases, the underlying memories, had gotten polished smooth, like pebbles. Eventually the tale would be rendered trivial by the retelling.

  Hell, but I’m a long way from the Moon now. And with all these damn cuts I’m never going back. All I can do is talk about it. Damn, damn.

  When he’d done, the Nepalese schoolkids had started to ask questions. The questions seemed strange to Muldoon.

  ‘Who did you see?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘On the Moon. Who did you see?’

  ‘Nobody. There’s no one there.’

  ‘But what did you see?’

  Muldoon started to understand, he thought. Maybe his American-flavored images of beach balls and sand were too foreign for these kids, their level of education not what he’d been prepared for. He needed to be more basic. ‘There’s nothing there. No people, no plants or trees, no animals. Not even air, no wind. Nothing.’

  The children looked at each other, apparently confused.

  The rest of the talk, the questions, rambled into nothing.

  At the prompting of the teacher – a slim girl – there was some polite applause for him, and he gave out little American flags and copies of the mission patch.

  As he left the little school house, he heard the teacher say, ‘Now, you mustn’t listen to him. He’s wrong …’

  Back in his hotel room, he’d started working his way through the mini bar.

  It turned out that the Nepalese believed that when you died, you went to the Moon. Those kids had thought the spirits of their ancestors, their grandparents, lived up on the Moon, and Muldoon should have seen them when he was there. He’d been telling them there was no heaven. No wonder they had been confused.

  He’d walked on the Moon. And now, in that corner of his own Earth, he’d been confronted by rows of kids in a wooden shack who were still being taught – despite his actual presence, despite his eye-witness account from the Moon itself – superstitious fairy tales.

  It made the whole damn enterprise seem futile.

  Just before coming over to JSC to do his capcom shift today, he’d gotten a package in the post. It was a script for a credit card commercial. Do you know me? Last year I walked on the Moon. That doesn’t help me though when I want to reserve an airline seat … Goddamn garbage.

  It was for more money than he’d make in five years. He could only do it if he retired from the Agency.

  Jill would surely welcome it. Jill wasn’t like some of the other wives. She didn’t have a military background; Jill had never gotten used to the flights, the dangers, the dilute bullshit that NASA doled out during a mission …

  And the fact was, NASA was never going to let him go back to the Moon.

  What if he did retire?

  Maybe the moonwalker tag wouldn’t endure; maybe he wouldn’t be seen as a hero for much longer. The mood seemed to have turned even more against the program. There had even been criticism, in the press, about his and Armstrong’s conduct on the Moon. They’d spent too long on the ceremonials. They’d collected fewer rocks than hoped for. Most of the samples weren’t properly documented. They’d used the wrong camera to photograph their footprints, so they’d lost time and come home with less interesting photographs. They’d had to cut short the 3-D photography. Even the shots they’d taken in orbit were criticized, as being tourist shots of Earthrise, while the unexplored Moon whipped by beneath them.

  Hell, it was hardly our fault. Nixon called us, not the other way around. And what the hell can you do with all that science stuff? It was hardly idiot-proof: too damn easy to make mistakes, when you only have a couple of hours, out of your entire life, to walk on the Moon …

  He was already drinking too much, fighting off the depression, the deflation, with alcohol. He’d been just the same after his Gemini flight. A few years of this and he’d turn into some sad, paunchy slob telling war stories to anyone who’d listen, to increasingly blank faces.

  He remembered, that day in Nepal, that he’d taken a nap. When he woke up, he needed the bathroom. He tried to float out of bed, and his torso went crashing to the floor, his legs wrapped up in a sheet. And then, when he’d shaved, he tried to leave the after-shave bottle floating in the air. It fell into the sink, smashing into big sharp chunks.

  That evening in Nepal, he was to be guest of honor at a dinner at a swank, Western-standard restaurant a mile off. He elected to walk, to clear his head of beer fumes. The road was rocky, badly made, and steep; he was, after all, in the foothills of the Himalayas here. He soon tired.

  All along the side of the road as he walked, there were children, kneeling down. They all held candles and looked up at him, their round faces shining in the dusk light like images of the Moon.

  It was an act of veneration.

  They think I’m a god. A god, come to visit them.

  They shouldn’t do this to people, damn it. They’d made him into a stranded moonwalker. He just wanted to walk on another glowing beach.

  He tried to focus on what Michaels and Agronski were saying.

  Michaels hauled his bulk out of his chair, and let his impressive, waist-coated gut hang over the polished table for a minute. ‘Gentlemen, let’s see if we can’t cut to the chase.’

  He pulled a flip-chart away from the wall. The first few sheets were covered with barely comprehensible notes relating to the Apollo 13 astronauts’ abandoned moonwalk checklists: ‘DOCUMENTED SAMPLE: select sample/place gnomon upsun of sample/sample & gnomon [8,5,2] x sun/retrieve sample …’ There was a peculiar poetry in the way these technical people communicated with each other, he reflected.

  On a clean page, he began to scribble. ‘Let’s see what we got here. How would we do this? What’s the minimum we have to do to get to Mars? I can see three strands of work for the short term. First, we’ll need flight tests of the nuclear rocketry. Second, we’ll have to man-rate the modules of the Mars ship itself, such as a lander. Finally, we’re going to have to get some experience of long-duration missions in space.’ He listed the items quickly. ‘But, whether we go for the Space Shuttle, or for an uprated Saturn program, or both, you’re looking at maybe five years before a new launch system comes on stream. So for the time being we’re going to need to use the Saturn V to get by.’ He eyed Agronski. ‘You know we’ve already announced the suspension of the Saturn V production line.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Now, in addition to the moonshots, we have our Skylab program, which might have needed a couple of Vs. But a couple of months back we redirected the program; we’re going to revert to the Wet Workshop concept, which can be launched by a Saturn IB. So as of now our remaining Saturn Vs – seven of them built or in production, SA-509 through SA-515 – are dedicated to Apollo Moon missions.’

  ‘How many launches will you need for a Mars program?’ Agronski asked.

  Michaels blew out his cheeks. ‘Let’s say, in the next half-decade, six Saturn V flights, and perhaps ten Saturn IBs. That should get Skylab well underway, and perhaps take us as far as the first Earth-orbit manned flights of the NERVA, before we get the new launcher. Joe, does that sound reasonable?’

  Muldoon grunted. ‘Yeah. I guess. If you want to cut it to the bone; if you want to run the risk of another Apollo 1 fire.’

  ‘Now, Joe…’

  ‘Six Saturn Vs,’ Agronski said. ‘And there are seven Moon flights left, Apollos 14 through 20.’ His lips pulled tight into a thin grin.

  So that’s it. Now I know the price, for Mars, for Paine’s job. It was as if Agronski was taking a much-delayed revenge. Agronski had always desp
ised the manned Moon program, opposed it whenever he could. Agronski knows that this is the end of Apollo. Right here and now; right in this room.

  Agronski said smugly, ‘Well. Of course I’m aware that there’s a lot of opposition to further Moon flights, even within NASA. The whole system’s too complex. “One of these days Apollo will kill somebody, if it hasn’t already killed Lovell and his crew” – that’s what is being said, isn’t it? I imagine a curtailment wouldn’t be impossibly difficult to sell, even within NASA, now that the first landings have been achieved. And –’

  Muldoon kicked back his chair and stood up. ‘So we’re cutting the Moon flights,’ he said. He was tall, intimidating, his disgust majestic. ‘Just when we’ve got there. Jesus Christ, Fred. The later flights would have been the crown of the program,’ Muldoon said. ‘J-class missions, with advanced LMs, three-day stays on the surface, long-duration backpacks that would extend each moonwalk to up to seven hours, and electric cars. We’d have gone to sites of terrific wonder, and beauty, and scientific interest. We’ve even got a tentative plan to go to the far side of the Moon.’

  Michaels stared at Muldoon. He prided himself on being a great off-the-ballot politician, but he found words deserting him, at this moment of all moments.

  ‘I know, Joe. I know.’

  Michaels could imagine the attacks he’d suffer from the scientists. It was even possible he wouldn’t be able to sell a deal like this to Paine, and to others in the Agency, such as George Mueller, the great space station proponent. And, looking further ahead, he supposed there was a danger that a Mars program would keep NASA a single-issue Agency, everything subordinated to one goal, just like in the days of Apollo.

  He tried to focus on Muldoon, to handle the situation in front of him.

  ‘It may not be a case of canceling the flights, Joe. Maybe we could stretch out the schedule. Defer some of the flights until later –’

  Muldoon faced Michaels; the knotty muscles bunched around his shoulders, under his shirt. ‘Don’t do this, Fred. Don’t kill the missions.’

  From the corner of his eye Michaels could see Agronski’s face, his revulsion at this outburst of monomania.