Voyage

by Stephen Baxter

  She went along with it all. She went through the motions of the tests and reviews, as if numb; she figured she must be in some kind of state of denial.

  In the meantime she tried to make plans for the rest of her life, here on Earth. And she tried, unsuccessfully, to figure out some way to talk to Mike.

  A month after the revised medical reviews, the phone rang. When York picked it up, she recognized Chuck Jones’s voice.

  ‘Natalie?’

  Her breath caught in her throat.

  It had been an ordinary day, one among thousands, soon to recede from her short-term memory and become lost in the blur of time; now, she realized, whatever Jones said, she would remember this day as long as she lived.

  ‘Yes. York.’

  Jones said bluntly: ‘The new medico stuff is fine. How would you like to come fly for us?’

  My God.

  ‘Natalie? Are you there?’

  ‘Uh, yes, I’m here.’

  ‘Are you going to accept?’

  … Is that it? But what about all the normal things that come with a job offer? Salary, reporting date, duties? What about the pension plan, for Christ’s sake? Am I just supposed to leap in gratefully, blindfolded?

  ‘Well, I guess there’s a ninety-nine per cent chance I’ll accept.’

  There was a long silence. When Jones came back his voice was stern. ‘We need a yes or no, Natalie. What’s with these shades of gray?’

  She took a breath. What the hell. Geronimo. ‘You got a yes.’

  Mission Elapsed Time [Day] Plus 066 [Hr:Min:Sec] 06:34:51

  Phil Stone hadn’t slept well. It was almost a relief when his intercom started piping out some kind of music, gentle elevator stuff with guitars.

  He closed his eyes and buried his head in his sleeping bag; perhaps he could grab a couple more minutes.

  He heard thumps, bangs and suppressed curses from the sleep locker next to his. A fist slammed into an intercom control panel. Shut the fuck up.

  Ralph was awake, then.

  He could hear Natalie sneezing. That would be the dust. It was a problem; dust didn’t settle under microgravity, and, despite the circulation and filtering of the air, there was a lot of it in the atmosphere: from the food, from hair and whiskers being shaved off, from epidermal flaking.

  The music cut off.

  Now Fred Haise, working as capcom, came on the line. ‘When you’re ready, Ares, I’ve got a couple of flight plan updates and an update on your consumables, and the morning news, I guess.’

  ‘Give us the news, Houston,’ Gershon growled.

  ‘Surely. What have we got … The Lakers have beaten the Boston Celtics four to two for the NBA title. Natalie might be glad to hear that. Or she might not. The TWA hijack continues. It looks as if the passengers have been moved out and dispersed around the Beirut slums … Here’s something for you, Ralph; I know you’re a sci-fi buff. Gene Roddenberry has said he’s scrapping the treatment he’d prepared for a new Star Trek series. It was going to be like the first, with the huge space cruiser Enterprise with massive phaser banks, bigger and more powerful than anything they’re likely to encounter. But he’s changed his mind; he’s been inspired by you guys, apparently. Now, Roddenberry says he’s aiming for something called Star Trek: Explorer, about a small, pioneering band of humans and aliens in their fragile craft, going much further than anyone has gone before … How about that, guys. Science fact changing the face of science fiction. It says here.’

  Gershon laughed. ‘Who’s playing me? And which one of us is the alien?’

  Haise, good-hearted but no public speaker, read on. After a couple of minutes, Stone found he was able to tune out the halting voice from his awareness.

  The news from home was important, though, he figured. It reminded them all that there was still a whole world back home, something more to go back to than the confines of these cans they were stuck inside.

  Stone took a leak, washed, and pulled on a T-shirt and shorts. He suspended a pair of reading glasses around his neck on a string.

  Actually today should be a good day. The mission plan said that Stone was due to do some optical tracking work to complete in advance of the TCM-2, tomorrow’s course correction maneuver. It was a mission highlight he’d been looking forward to since the flight plan had been drawn up.

  But he had a lot of crap to get through first.

  [Hr:Min:Sec] 08:15:31

  After the usual slow, messy breakfast, the crew’s first task of the day was to swab down the walls of the Mission Module with disinfected wipes.

  This had to be done every couple of weeks – more often sometimes, if the boffins on the ground told them that bacterial activity in the Mission Module was becoming unacceptably high. It was a microgravity problem. Microorganisms tended to flourish on free-floating water droplets, and they collected in odd corners of the Module. On top of that, microgravity lowered the crew’s immunity response: something to do with reduced numbers of lymphocytes in the blood.

  After that, the three crew drifted to the Space Ark.

  The Ark was a collection of cute-animal experiments, some suggested by high school kids. There were plastic cages of varying sizes, bearing minnows, six mice, a few hundred fly pupae, and a spider called Arabella. There was even a box of worms. Stone tapped a perspex wall; he could see that the minnows were swimming about in tight circles, evidently disoriented by the lack of gravity.

  During mission planning York had been earnestly skeptical about the validity of the Ark’s science, and Gershon had flatly refused to have anything to do with such crap. But now, Stone noticed, both of them were drawn to the little kit.

  Stone found the worms interesting. They were called palolo, from Samoa. They lived in tunnels gnawed deep into coral reefs, and they timed their emergence, to mate, by the last quarter of the October Moon. Every year. But nobody knew how the worms did this. At Samoa, the tides, linked to the Moon, were too small to be noticeable by the worms. And moonlight could hardly penetrate more than an inch or two into the worms’ rocky burrows.

  So this experiment was to find out what would happen to the worms when they were no longer in Earth’s gravity field.

  Meanwhile, the spider was contained in a shallow box, labeled Araneus Diadematus. A healthy web, at least a foot across, spanned the box, with the spider plucking at its heart.

  ‘Okay, Arabella,’ Stone murmured, ‘so you’re an astronaut now, eh? Let’s see how smart you really are.’ He moved the front of the box, and the web’s longerons were ripped; the web rapidly imploded, leaving the spider drifting. He felt obscurely cruel in wrecking the web. But the point of the experiment was to record fresh web-building. There were acoustic transducers which set up a high frequency sound field in the cage; any movement of the spider would disturb the sound, and trigger lights and a still camera.

  The three crew clustered around the little box, making wisecracks about the spider and poking at the cage and its equipment.

  Now Stone moved over to a little experimental garden. It was more like a window-box, a tray of soil the size of a suitcase. There were peas, wheat, cucumbers, parsley, onions, dill, fennel and garlic. Some of the plants were growing in pure microgravity and some in a small botanic centrifuge, simulating lunar and Martian conditions.

  Stone tended the rows of little plants. The peas had grown well for the first four or five weeks, but now they looked as if they were dying, and he fed them water and nutrient carefully. The plants wouldn’t consistently go to seed, but tests had shown that the food value of the plants was high; microgravity didn’t impair protein synthesis. Their roots straggled, though, unable to orient themselves without gravity.

  Stone was struck by the contrast of the warm, green, fertile little plants, and the cold blackness a few inches away, beyond the wall of the Mission Module. He breathed on the little pea plants, hoping to provide a richer mix of carbon dioxide for them.

  [Hr:Min:Sec] 09:57:57

  Stone hauled at the isokineti
c exerciser. The machine was bolted to a bracket in the middle of the Mission Module, and it had a two-handled lever, with shoulder pads and handgrips, linked by a sprocket chain to an air turbine. The exerciser was a new-fangled gadget, to replace the treadmills and rowers that had been carried on earlier flights. By bracing himself on a foot platform, Stone could do squats, toe raises, shoulder presses, high pulls, bench presses, tricep presses.

  Every so often he would glance at the machine’s timer, and get newly depressed at how much more time he had to spend at this. He was uncomfortable, his vest soaked, pools of sweat clinging to his chest and between his shoulder blades. His only distraction was a small round observation port, set in the pressure hull near him, and he stared into its darkness.

  After a couple of months – the way Stone understood it – the various functions of the body adapted to microgravity, settling down to a new equilibrium, different from that on Earth. The neurovestibular system, the balance mechanism within the ear, was the first to fall apart – hence, space sickness – but also the first to recover, after a few days. The body’s fluid balance would adjust then, and next the cardiovascular system, the heart and blood vessels.

  But things didn’t go back to Earth-normal.

  Stone’s brain, which didn’t know about microgravity, thought that all that extra blood was pooling in his head because there was too much fluid in his body, and it told his kidneys to release more urine. And that way lay dehydration. So Stone had to drink an extra five pints of fluid a day, laced with water-salt imbalance counteragents. That was something NASA had learned from the Russians.

  But all this extra pissing flushed the calcium and potassium out of his bones. The calcium deficit could make his bones brittle, or give him kidney stones, and the potassium could leave him prone to heart problems; so he had to take diet supplements, and there were anabolic steroids in case any of them suffered severe bone loss.

  His muscles didn’t do any work they didn’t have to, and – if he left them alone – they would atrophy. So he had to go through all this exercise on the isokinetic device. There were other measures, too, like the penguin suit – so called because it made you waddle around on the ground during training – a set of elastic straps that tried to pull you into a foetal position all the time, so your muscles were constantly working, as if against gravity. And there was the chibis, a Russian word for lapwing bird, another idea loaned from the Soviets: reinforced leggings that reduced the air pressure over the legs, to make the heart work harder to pull blood up from the lower body.

  The isokinetic exercises ought to help with reducing bone mineral loss, too; bones always kept themselves just strong enough to resist the maximum loads imposed by the muscles.

  The crew had to submit, every two or three days, to electrocardiograms, seismocardiograms, measurements of their breathing rates and volume. All of this was fed back to the surgeons on Earth. All the biomed stuff added up to a whole day lost out of every week.

  None of it was popular. Stone realized, though, that it was up to him to set an example to the others. If he skimped, so would they. So he made sure he did at least his regulation hour’s exercise, every day.

  Despite all the precautions, though, Stone was developing a classic case of chicken legs, as astronauts called them, as his leg muscles atrophied. The soles of his feet were as soft as an infant’s. And the parts of his body which got most tired, every day, were his hands. His hands worked constantly, in ways they didn’t have to on Earth, hauling him around the Module, braking his mass.

  [Hr:Min:Sec] 11:43:24

  Today was Stone’s shower day. Each of them was allowed one shower a week.

  He stripped off his vest and shorts, and swung his legs over into the collapsible shower. It was a cylinder of white cloth, like a big concertina. He pulled the curtain up around him and hooked it to a metal lid fixed to the ceiling. He soaped up and rinsed himself with a spray; airflow, rather than gravity, drained away the water.

  He felt as if layers of skin were coming off as he worked; the sponge baths that were all that was possible between showers just weren’t sufficient. And the shower seemed to be getting some of the stiffness out of his muscles.

  Actually, with the way the water hung suspended in the air, it was more like a sauna than a shower.

  He thought about his crew.

  They had all been trained up by NASA psychologists in how people behave during long periods of isolation. Stone saw himself, after his several flights, as pretty level-headed and robust. But he could recognize, at one time or another, most of the signs of isolation in his crew: sleep disturbance, boredom, restlessness, anxiety, anger, depression, headaches, irritability, lowering concentration, a loss of the sense of time and space.

  Ares was bombarded daily with messages from well-wishers, families and friends, but the time lag was so great that it was impossible to conduct a meaningful conversation. And, somehow, hearing those familiar voices calling from behind a lightspeed barrier made the crew’s isolation that much more poignant.

  All of this was telling on the crew.

  Gershon seemed the less affected, on the surface. He was still the bullshitting jock, always there with the jokes. But there was an increasingly jagged edge. Gershon was basically a pilot, used to short, sharp bursts of adrenaline-pumping action.

  Still, in Stone’s judgment Ralph would be fine. Gershon knew he would get his chance when he took the lander down to the surface. Stone saw his job as being to keep the guy together until they reached Mars.

  York was different, though.

  York was uptight, a stickler, a little reclusive. A lot arrogant and patronizing. And a civilian at that. Gershon’s jokes and gotchas irritated the hell out of her, clearly, but she wouldn’t say a word about it; instead she kept it to herself, and just kind of smouldered. Which didn’t do anyone any good.

  York was like a lot of professional women Stone had met before, he thought. That is, she had one hell of a chip on her shoulder.

  But he envied, and admired, her inner resources.

  To him, Stone was ready to admit, the mission was everything: flying the craft, doing his job when they eventually hit the Martian dirt, getting home again.

  York, by contrast, had an awareness of the grandeur of it all: this remarkable experience, the interplanetary flight. These were depths inside herself which York was able to tap, and – as she’d come out of her shell during the mission – to articulate to others.

  She was almost poetic, at times.

  Stone felt he understood how important that was. He’d hoped it would work out that way. And according to Houston, even the ratings for their weekly TV briefings – which had dipped pretty fast after the excitement of the launch – were reviving again, mainly thanks to York.

  He dried himself off with a towel, and then he had to suck up stray drops inside the shower with a vacuum hose. It was fiddly and time-consuming.

  In the end, as usual, by the time he was able to dismantle the shower and fold it away he felt frustrated and tense once more, the benefits of the shower lost.

  [Hr:Min:Sec] 13:12:51

  Stone set himself at the Mission Module’s control station. He ran quickly through the parameters of the cluster’s operation: consumables usage, attitude control propellant usage, cryogenic store boiloff …

  Most of it looked nominal.

  But the big solar panels, sticking out like wings from the sides of the S-IVB booster, were getting too hot. The panels could tilt through twenty-five degrees, so that the sun’s radiation would come in on them at a slant, reducing their temperature. Stone put together a recommendation that Mission Control should think about performing the tilt a few days ahead of schedule; minutes later, Houston replied that they would evaluate the proposal.

  Then there was a problem with the feed system of one of the steerable dish antennae, which was targeted back at Earth. There was a three decibel loss in downlink signal strength: maybe some part of the system had cracked under th
ermal stress. That was a potentially serious problem; it would reduce the bit rate at which high-quality images could be sent back to Earth. The ground said they wouldn’t take any action on that one at this time, but would do some simulations and analysis first.

  And now he found a problem with some of the Module’s seventeen chargeable battery regulator modules. One of them, number fifteen, had malfunctioned days before, and now number three was off-line. All this cut the power available in the Module by around two hundred watts. Houston thought there might be a low-voltage trip occurring somewhere, which was switching out the regulators too often, and Stone had to go around the Module firing up systems and calling out power consumption numbers to the specialists in the back rooms behind the MOCR.

  It was slow, dull, almost mindless work. The routine stuff really ground you down; it was a hazard of long-duration missions. But all of it was essential to keep this hand-crafted bucket of bolts flying.

  [Hr:Min:Sec] 15:49:01

  At last he could get to his interplanetary navigation.

  He headed down to the wardroom, to the picture window there, and dug out his optical kit.

  The kit contained a one-power telescope and a twenty-eight-power sextant. The sextant was a chunky little gadget with an eyepiece and a calibrated semicircular dial, to measure angles between stars. These were nice devices, compact, heavy things of brass, which Stone enjoyed handling. If he was going to take away any one souvenir of this flight, then to hell with a Mars rock; it would be this little kit.

  Stone set to work by the picture window.

  First he measured the apparent size of the sun’s disk, which would give him a good measure of how far the craft was from the sun, and then he measured the angles between Venus and a fixed star, and the Earth and a fixed star. Those three basic measurements would fix him in three-dimensional space. He would finish up with a couple more redundant measurements.