Voyage

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘We look forward to hearing about it, Bob.’

  ‘… Maybe one of you could tell us what you can see out of your picture window right now.’

  York turned. The ‘picture window’ was a two-feet-wide viewport set in the wall of the wardroom, big enough to have to curve to follow the concavity of the pressure hull; it was triple-paned, with the thick, tough feel about it of an airplane window.

  ‘I see Earth and Moon,’ she reported. ‘They’re both pretty much full, although I can see a thin slice of shadow down the right-hand limb of each of them.’ Earth was now so distant its sphericity wasn’t obvious; it was reduced to a flat blue bowl of light, with its pale, shrunken companion close by its limb. ‘The Earthlight is still bright,’ she said. ‘Strong enough to read a book by, I’d say. But …’

  ‘Go ahead, Natalie.’

  ‘Something is different.’ She peered into the window to see better. ‘The sky is just like a clear night on Earth. And – my God – it’s full of stars. Earlier in the flight the glare of Earth was so bright it blacked out everything else. Now, I can see the stars. I can recognize the constellations again, for the first time on the trip.’

  ‘Ares, I guess you’ve really gone up into night.’

  ‘Yes, we have. A huge, empty, cold night at that.’

  ‘Ares, Houston. Thank you, Natalie. Ares, here’s the significance. You’re now almost exactly five hundred and sixty-two thousand statute miles from the Earth. That’s twice as far as any human has traveled before. And you’re now passing out of the Earth’s sphere of influence.’

  Sphere of influence – an imaginary bubble in space centered on Earth, an almost perfect sphere where the gravitational potential of Earth and sun were in balance. Inside the sphere of influence, Ares had essentially been in an orbit dominated by Earth; beyond this point, however, the craft had escaped from Earth, and was in solar orbit, a new planet.

  Stone said, ‘Thank you, Bob. We understand, and we’re impressed, almost humbled, with the thought …’ Stone seemed dissatisfied with his own trite words. He was looking at York thoughtfully. ‘Natalie, you want to add anything to that?’

  She stared back, frozen, her mind suddenly empty. Well, you’ve griped often enough about the inarticulate grunts they send into space. Now’s your chance to do better.

  For some reason she thought of Ben Priest. What would he advise her?

  Just say what you feel, Natalie. Don’t hide behind technicalities. And don’t let it embarrass you.

  ‘Houston, Ares. I guess what strikes me now is that we humans have spawned at the bottom of a hole. A deep gravitational hole dug into space-time by Earth’s mass. And of all the humans who have ever lived, all the billions of them, only the three of us – Phil, Ralph and myself – have ever climbed to the lip of that hole …’

  She was aware of Gershon and Stone exchanging doubtful glances; Stone waved Gershon to be still.

  York stared back at the receding Earth. She held up her hand, and covered the Earth-Moon system with her palm. ‘I’m holding up my hand now, and the whole of human history – including even the voyages to the Moon – is hidden from my view by my palm. We’ll spend another year in space before we see Mars loom close, just as Earth is falling away now. A year in this collection of tin cans, with nothing but the stars and the sun beyond the windows. We know it’s going to be difficult, despite all the training and the preparation. But what’s important is that we’ve come out, over the edge of the gravity hole, and now we’re going to see what lies beyond. We have indeed gone up into night, Houston.’

  Stone nodded. He was still looking at her, thinking.

  York shivered. Suddenly the Mission Module – drifting through space with its ticks and whirs and smells of food and stale farts – seemed like a little home to her, impossibly fragile, the only island of warmth and light in all that dark night.

  Sunday, August 15, 1976 Between Earth and Moon

  After a couple of days of floating around inside the Command Module in their longjohns and jump suits, Jones, Dana and Stone started to help each other back into their pressure suits. To go through the Lunar Orbit Insertion burn they were going to have to return to their couches and strap on their canvas harnesses.

  They finished up a meal: soup and cheese and spreads on crackers, with a grapefruit-orange mixture to drink. Dana had a plastic bag of pea soup. He would take a spoonful of the soup, tap the handle, and the glob of soup would float off, still holding the shape of the spoon. But when he poked the liquid with a finger-tip, surface tension hauled it quickly into a perfect, oscillating sphere. Dana leaned over to suck it into his mouth, a little green marble of pea soup.

  Jim Dana found life in microgravity startling, the endless unexpected details enchanting.

  Most of it, anyhow.

  Before suiting up, Chuck Jones decided to take a dump.

  This involved stripping stark naked, and climbing into the storage bay under the three metal-frame couches. Apollo’s Waste Management system consisted of a collection of plastic bags, with adhesive coatings on the brim, and finger-shaped tubes built into the side. Jones had to dig into the bag with his finger – nothing would fall, after all – and hook his turds down into the bag. And afterwards he had to break open a capsule of germicide, drop it into the bag, and knead it all together.

  In a moment the sounds and smells of it were filling the cabin.

  Dana just sat and endured it. The lousy design of the system was hardly Jones’s fault.

  The irony was, the Apollo system had been heavily upgraded in the last few years. Rockwell had stretched the original lunar flight design, making it more robust and reliable, and increasing its capacity; Apollo was mostly used as an orbital ferry craft for taking crews to and from the Skylabs, but even flying solo it was capable of supporting as many as four men for eight days in orbit. Rockwell were even trying to make the Command Module reusable, by providing salt water protection and modularizing its components – so a Command Module could be cannibalized after splashdown, even if the whole thing couldn’t be flown again.

  But some things they hadn’t got around to fixing, like the plumbing arrangements.

  Dana was finding his first flight in space, with its long string of hassles and discomforts, a surprisingly depressing experience. The contrast between the Zen-like emptiness of cislunar space, and these scrambled human attempts to survive in it, struck him powerfully. And the immaturity of the technology compared to his aviation background was striking.

  But we really are at the edge of our capabilities out here. Dad’s right. We’re not really up to this. Not yet. We just aren’t smart enough. Clever monkeys, improvising, making it up as we go along, riding our luck, hauling along our plumbing …

  Still, it was one hell of an adventure to tell his son Jake about.

  Dana took his turn on trash detail. He collected up the food bags, spiked them with pills to dissolve the residue, and rolled them up tightly and stuffed them into a plastic garbage bag. He stashed the garbage in a storage compartment. The compartments had been almost full within a few hours of leaving Earth orbit, and the garbage was dumped regularly into space; Enterprise was heading for the Moon surrounded by a little orbiting cloud of food bags and other trash.

  The crew settled down to their pre-LOI checklists. It was all done in an uncharacteristic silence, Dana observed. It wasn’t hard to figure out why. Arguably Lunar Orbit Insertion was the key moment of the mission; on it depended the success of their flight – and, of lesser importance to the career astronaut, the success of Moonlab itself.

  And they’d have to perform the burn during the loss-of-signal period, while the craft was round the back of the Moon and shielded from the Earth. So there would be no way the men in Mission Control could help them out.

  Since his decision to initiate it, Bert Seger had built up this mission, orchestrating the media coverage carefully. Apollo/Moonlab was going to be a feel-good extravaganza, a return to the Moon, a demonstration
of competence: a distraction from the collapse of Saigon, the rocketing cost of fuel, the stagnant economy, inflation … He’d even given way to a write-in campaign by Star Trek fans who wanted Enterprise as the call-sign for the ship, the first Apollo to the Moon in four years. It didn’t do any good for the Astronaut Office to protest that they didn’t need a call-sign for this mission.

  It was all fine PR. But the high profile meant that a failure – and a failure due to some dumb programming fault – would be very embarrassing.

  Apollo shuddered slightly, and solenoids rattled. That was the firing of the reaction control clusters, halting the spacecraft’s slow roll. The stack had been rotating since leaving Earth orbit, to even out the sun’s heat; the crew called it ‘barbecue mode.’

  Stone, in the center of the three frame couches, said suddenly, ‘Hey. I got the Moon. Right below us.’

  Dana looked up from his checklist.

  It looked as if streams of oil were descending across the glass of the window to Dana’s right. Dana felt a stab of fear; he couldn’t figure what malfunction could have caused this. Then his eyes refocused, and he realized he was looking at mountains. They slid slowly past the window, lit by the slanting rays of the sun, trailing long black shadows.

  The mountains of the Moon. ‘Oh, Jesus. Look out there.’

  ‘It’s only the fucking Moon,’ Jones said. ‘You’re going to be staring at it for a long time. Come on, get back to your lists. Thousand miles out. Six and a half thousand feet per second … We’ve fifteen minutes until LOS, twenty-three minutes from the LOI burn …’

  The sun was hidden behind the orb of the Moon, Dana saw, and the Moon was back-lit by the corona, the sun’s outer atmosphere. So there was light all around the Moon, as if the far side was on fire. But Dana could see the shadowed side quite clearly; it swam past the window, illuminated by Earthlight, ghost-pale.

  The Moon looked like a ball of glass, its surface cracked and complex, as if starred by buckshot. Tinged pale white, the Moon’s center loomed out at Dana, given substance by the Earthlight’s shading: the Moon was surprisingly three-dimensional, no longer the flat yellow disk he had known from Earth.

  He picked out a large, deep crater; perhaps it was Tycho. There was an elusive quality to the Moon’s features, an uncertainty about the shading. Sometimes the craters looked like domes, the mountains like pits. The dead surface of the Moon was like a mask, reversing itself in his vision.

  In Earth orbit, Dana had been able to see the curve of the horizon, but the Earth was so huge that most of it was out of his view. But the Moon was a small world. The curvature was so tight he could extrapolate the rest of the sphere; he could see that he really was flying around a ball of rock, suspended in space, with darkness stretching to infinity in all directions.

  It looks so alien. This isn’t our world. And yet three Stars-and-Stripes, three abandoned LM descent stages, already stood on those silent hills.

  ‘Thirty seconds to LOS,’ Jones said.

  ‘Enterprise, Houston.’ Ralph Gershon was the rookie astronaut serving as capcom today. ‘Coming up on LOS. Going around the corner, all your systems are looking good. We’ll see you on the other side.’

  ‘Roger, Ralph, thank you. Everything looks okay up here.’ The hiss of static from the comms units faded suddenly, to be replaced by a low-volume hiss.

  ‘Going around the corner,’ Phil Stone said quietly. ‘Loss of signal.’

  Dana stared at the little loudspeaker grille closest to his position. He was startled by his own reaction: he felt abandoned, bewildered. Apollo was out of the line of sight of Earth, for the first time since launch; for the first time, Mission Control couldn’t get in touch with the crew, and it was as if a rope had been cut.

  Dana quietly suspected that a kind of dependency culture had grown up among the astronauts over the years. Whether it was healthy or not, the knowledge that Mission Control was always there, always staffed up with the best and the brightest, took a lot of the responsibility away from the pilots. It was as if Houston was flying your ship for you. By contrast, these few moments when you and your bird would have to function entirely independently of the ground – well, these times brought fear. Not of the inherent danger, but of failure. Don’t let me be the one who screws up.

  Now the stack was barreling toward the Moon. They were falling steeply into the satellite’s gravity well, and the Moon was growing – getting visibly larger by the minute, its features sliding past the windows.

  ‘Look at that old Moon,’ Jones said. ‘Rougher than the surface of my butt. Well, I guess I’m never going to get to land down there, but I’m glad I came along after all. That smartass kid Gershon should be here now. Make him feel right at home. It’s just like Cambodia.’ He cackled.

  Dana tried to grin along with his commander, but he failed. To his left, Phil Stone looked uncomfortable too.

  This jock banter crap just wasn’t appropriate any more, Dana thought. Maybe it never had been.

  The craft fell into lunar shadow, and entered total darkness: no sunlight, no Earthlight touched the hidden landscape rushing below.

  The radio remained silent.

  We’re alone, the three of us. All of humanity, imprisoned on the Earth, is hidden by the bulk of the Moon.

  Dana felt a sudden surge of conviction. However it was arrived at, we made the right decision, to continue the space program. How could we have turned our backs on adventures like this? We have to keep on going out. Experiences like this will change us. We’ll become something more: something beyond the human.

  The broken, complex lands scrolled beneath his window.

  ‘Okay, you assholes, enough rubber-necking,’ Jones said. ‘Let’s get in shape for this fucking burn.’

  Enterprise sailed around the limb of the Moon.

  Wednesday, May 25, 1977 NASA Headquarters, Washington

  Mike Conlig hated Washington.

  As soon as he got off the plane the steamy, oppressive heat closed in around him, and he felt a kind of psychic pressure, from all the people crowded into this shabby corner of the Earth.

  Now, along with Hans Udet and Bert Seger, he sat in Tim Josephson’s immense, plush office. Conlig felt awkward, out of place, lost in the huge room, in this great, soft armchair. And he wasn’t so keen on wearing a suit either; the knot of his tie seemed to be compressing his throat.

  Tim Josephson came bustling into the room, a file under his arm. He slid behind his modest, polished desk. ‘I’ll come straight to the point,’ Josephson said. ‘I’ve read your status reports. You know the question you have to answer here today. NERVA is a hell of a long way behind schedule. The Critical Design Review is scheduled in three months. And from what I hear you’re not going to be ready.’

  Seger shrugged. ‘You won’t hear any argument about that, Tim.’

  Josephson steepled his fingers. ‘All right. We’re under a lot of pressure on this; we’re having to defend your work against attack in Congress, and elsewhere. People are saying that we’ve put our shirts on the wrong horse here. Nuke rockets are a new development; maybe we should be following an incremental process of change, by enhancing our chemical technology. And on top of that you have the nuclear safety lobby, who say we shouldn’t be throwing up tons of radioactive fuel on top of Saturn rockets.’ He looked at them, one by one. ‘I suppose you have read about the Seabrook protest, up in New Hampshire: two thousand people demonstrating, trying to stop the construction of the fission plant there. By using nuclear technology we’re swimming against the tide, gentlemen.

  ‘But it’s clear to me that we can’t let the problems on this one development stop the whole goddamn program. You know that since 1972 Rockwell have been carrying through a parallel chemical-technology development, based on an S-II enhancement. Fred Michaels is thinking of going to Congress to ask for funding to be switched away from NERVA to that development stream …’

  Hans Udet shook his head; his blond-gray hair shone in the fluorescen
ts. ‘No. You must understand –’

  Josephson leaned forward. ‘No. Today, you must listen, and understand, Hans. This isn’t a game we’re playing, here. It takes a hell of a lot of effort to build and sustain a political coalition behind a program like ours. Jim Webb did it for NASA in the 1960s; we’re lucky to have Fred Michaels in the same role now. But he can’t work miracles …’

  This was the first time Conlig had met Josephson in the flesh. The Assistant Administrator gave off the aura of sleek, bureaucratic competence which came over on TV. Every inch the organization man. In his early forties, and with that small face perched on a long neck, that prematurely high forehead, the thick spectacles, and those rapid, decisive movements, Josephson was like some tall, flightless bird.

  But his dry words connected with Conlig; suddenly it was an intense, electric moment for him. My God. He’s serious. We’re in real trouble here; it’s genuinely possible that these bastards could close us down. And you can bet your life if that happens, none of us working on NERVA would be allowed within a thousand miles of whatever new program they turn to. Conlig’s whole career – everything, all his self-belief – funneled through this one moment in time, this decision point. If I say the wrong thing now, my professional life will be over. Because there will never be another NERVA project; not for me.

  ‘Now.’ Josephson had finished his preamble. He swiveled his head and stared at each of them. ‘Sum up. I want you to tell me where you are, and what your prospects for success are. I want the truth as you see it; this isn’t the moment for false pride. The whole program depends on us making the right decision.’ He glared at Udet. ‘How about you first, Hans?’

  The old German sat up straight in his chair. ‘The truth, Tim? The truth, as you can tell from the reports, is that NERVA, at this stage of its development, is in trouble. We haven’t been able to sustain a single worthwhile burn yet …’ In his clipped, accented, slightly imprecise English, with its bizarre overlay of Alabaman drawl, Udet began to go through NERVA’s myriad problems – pump stresses, nozzle hot spots – and the steps the teams were taking to resolve them.