Voyage

by Stephen Baxter

  In fact, since the Three Mile Island thing a few weeks ago, she’d even lost touch with some of her friends back at Berkeley; they’d decided it was immoral of her to keep on working in a Big Technology program that was going to fly nuclear materials into orbit, for God’s sake.

  Without Ben to beat up about all the problems she was having inside the program, she suspected she’d go quickly crazy.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said now, ‘how’s Mike?’

  She looked away. ‘I don’t know. Busy. Wound up like a watch spring.’ She hesitated. ‘Now you tell me how Karen is.’

  He winced. ‘I didn’t deserve that.’

  ‘… I guess not. I’m sorry.’

  He grunted. ‘Me too.’

  She gripped her Coke can, trying to force herself to focus on the issue. We can talk about Mars, and culture clashes at NASA, but we always skirt around us. ‘I don’t know whether Mike wants me to follow my career here or not.’

  ‘Would it make a difference?’

  No. Not any more. She couldn’t bring herself to say it.

  Priest drained his beer. ‘I think you’re kind of making your choice, Natalie. And maybe Mike is too. It’s a pity. I love you both. But I guess we’re not all cut out to bake bread and raise kids.’

  ‘Probably not. You neither, huh.’

  He looked defensive. ‘What the hell’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Nothing. I’m sorry, Ben.’

  He cradled his beer can, avoiding her eyes. ‘I’ve thought of leaving home.’

  ‘What for?’

  He looked irritated. ‘What do you think? To come here, for Christ’s sake. To be with you.’

  ‘Oh.’ That took her aback. ‘So,’ she said gently. ‘What’s stopping you?’

  ‘… I don’t think I can leave Karen.’

  ‘Why not? Do you still love her?’

  He turned to her and ruffled her hair. ‘Come on, Natalie, you’re a scientist. What kind of question is that? What does “love” mean when you’ve been married to someone for more years than you can count, when you’ve raised a son … You go beyond love. Love’s for teenagers.’

  ‘So, why don’t you leave?’

  ‘Because I owe her.’ He shook his head, irritated. ‘No, that’s not right. Because we have a kind of deal, going right back to the start. Karen has had to – invest in me. Every time I fly –’

  ‘Oh, I get it,’ she said. ‘She’s a Navy wife.’

  ‘Don’t you dismiss it, Natalie. It might seem odd to you, but it’s a stable system. Karen has bought all my risk, over the years, and I’m asking her to buy even more when I go up on Apollo-N. I owe her. Maybe we’ll split up; but if we do, it ought to be her decision.’

  She grunted. ‘Well, that’s as clear as gumbo.’

  He laughed. ‘So what are you telling me? That if I turned up here with a suitcase, you’d have me?’

  She thought about it. ‘I don’t know,’ she said honestly. ‘I could never be a Navy wife.’

  ‘I know it.’ He cupped her cheek. ‘You’re something new, Natalie.’

  She sipped her Coke. Her thoughts drifted back to NASA. ‘You know, in the Office, the Old Heads don’t even want us around …’

  ‘Old Heads?’

  ‘Ben, don’t pretend you haven’t heard that before. Old Heads. It’s what we call you guys, the senior cadres.’

  ‘Even me?’

  ‘Even you, asshole. And the worst of the Old Heads are the oldest. Chuck Jones and the rest of the Mercury generation.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ Ben said. ‘Those guys are straight enough. I mean, these are the good guys. The ones who’ve stuck with the program, trying to get another flight; the ones who didn’t take early retirement to make Amex commercials or take worthless corporate directorships, or appear on talk shows, or sell off bits of their spacesuits. Guys like Joe Muldoon and John Young and Fred Haise and Chuck Jones …’

  ‘Maybe so.’ It was hard for her to remember, even now, the reverence she’d brought here for those guys. But it was remarkable what a deep change of attitude could be induced by a couple of months of being snubbed by a person. ‘All they talk about is flying,’ she said, peevish. ‘And goose hunting, and racing their Corvettes in from their cute little houses in El Lago.’

  ‘Well, how do you expect them to behave? Those guys are basically test pilots.’

  ‘But I’m not going to be taught how to fly! Anyway, it’s more than that. Even the science activities we want to do are frowned on.’

  ‘By Chuck Jones too?’

  ‘By Jones especially. Like, do you know Bob Gold, in my group?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Bob wanted a leave-of-absence faculty appointment at the University of Texas, to start next year. Ben, when we were inducted we were all promised the chance of appointments like that – back at our home universities, keeping our careers alive. Well, Jones wouldn’t do it. He said he needed Bob here! For what, for Christ’s sake? To make up the numbers in the Crew Compartment Fit and Function tests? Ben, for some of this work all they need is a warm body. You don’t even have to be conscious. Anyhow, now Bob is thinking of quitting.’

  ‘Then let him.’ That restlessness she’d perceived in him seemed to be getting closer to the surface. ‘Look, I hear what you say. But you got to work this out for yourself, Natalie –’

  York wasn’t done yet. ‘And there’s more. Maybe you’re sitting in the Office trying to catch up with your reading. Then some grinning asshole walks in and says, “Hey, Natalie, there’s a meeting over in Building 4 on EVA overshoes, or S-band antenna mounts, or some other damn thing, that I think you ought to attend.” So what do you do?’

  ‘You attend,’ said Priest firmly. He set his beer can on the bedside table with a kind of finality. ‘Listen to me, now, Natalie, for once in your life. You need to come to a decision. All this damn griping … If you want to go back to academic life, back to your old work, then just pick up and go.’

  ‘Plenty have.’

  ‘Sure. And plenty more will. But if you want to stick around, you got to play the game. By their rules, the Old Heads, or whatever you want to call them. Jack Schmitt was the most successful scientist-astronaut in the ’60s. How come?’

  ‘Because he was the best geologist?’

  ‘He was a fine geologist. But there were plenty of fine geologists who left the program, leaving Schmitt standing there. Schmitt made himself useful, and in ways the other guys – the decision makers – could recognize. He was asked to be the astronaut representative on the Apollo lunar surface gear, and he did it. And without waiting around to be asked he went on to cover the whole of the Lunar Module’s descent stage. He worked on lunar exploration strategies. He helped to get the other guys to take the geology seriously.’

  ‘But, Ben – Schmitt never walked on the Moon.’

  Priest shook his head. ‘You aren’t listening. Because Schmitt was around at the time, the geology we did on the Moon was a hell of a lot better than it might otherwise have been. You ought to think about that. The late landings got canceled under him, and that was that. But if any scientist was ever going to walk on the Moon, it would have been Schmitt. He gave himself the best possible chance.’ He eyed her. ‘Anyhow, Schmitt has had a tour in Moonlab. He’s got as close to the Moon as sixty miles, at least. And you know Ralph Gershon, don’t you?’

  ‘Sure. One Grade A asshole.’

  ‘No,’ Ben snapped now. ‘You’re being the asshole, Natalie. I’m sorry, but that’s the truth. Listen: Gershon is having just as hard a time as you, but from a different angle. He’s the best pilot in the Agency, and most of us know it. But he doesn’t fit in. He’s a different generation from these other guys. He’s fought in a dirtier war, and maybe they think that’s left him a little dirty.

  ‘But,’ Priest went on, ‘Ralph hasn’t given up. He’s doing his damnedest to get a seat. Here he is, for instance, making himself useful by nursemaiding you guys.’

  ‘But he’s
a lousy instructor!’

  Priest shook his head. ‘Wise up. That’s not the measure. Taking the assignment, completing it, being a team player: that’s what counts. And on top of that Ralph spends half his life out at Langley, and Rockwell, wherever the hell they are trying out bits of MEM concepts. And you know why? Because he figures that when push comes to shove, he doesn’t want there to be anybody around here who knows more about flying the MEM than he does. Just like Schmitt, he’s giving himself the best shot he can.’

  ‘And that’s what I should do?’

  ‘That’s what you should do. More. Stop griping, for Christ’s sake. You got a great opportunity here. Get on the sims. Grab all the training you can, no matter how obscure and irrelevant it seems. Go to the meetings about the damn EVA gloves, or whatever. And try to find ways to leverage your own skills. Get on the Mars landing site selection board, for instance …’

  ‘I didn’t know there was one.’

  ‘Well, there you are,’ he said heavily.

  ‘Goddamn it, Ben, I hate it when you give me advice.’

  He laughed. ‘Only because I’m right.’ He checked the time on his Rolex watch, which he’d put on her bedside table. ‘Shit. I’ll have to go. Classroom work for me too, now. The latest modifications to the NERVA control systems.’

  ‘So,’ she said. She stroked his back. ‘We’ve still got unfinished business, huh?’

  ‘Yeah. Unfinished business. We’ll talk.’

  He swung his legs out of the bed.

  A couple of weeks later, life got more interesting.

  York’s cadre was moved on to systems training. York worked her way up through the hierarchy of training systems, at first paper-based, later electronic and computer-driven, heading toward a more complete representation of the spacecraft she would fly.

  There were single-systems trainers – fragments of Apollo control consoles – set up in offices scattered through Building 5, with computers running simple simulations behind them; and there were integrated trainers for each of the three crew stations in an Apollo Command Module.

  Finally she was taken into Building 9, the Mockup and Integration Lab. Full-sized training mockups of spacecraft littered the floor of the hangar-sized building. The equipment here was for generic training, to develop skills applicable to any flight; the more elaborate simulators were assigned to specific missions.

  This was a low-tech place, the trainers scuffed and scarred, visibly aged. There were chalked graffiti on the wall, and the work benches scattered around the place were littered with mundane items: paper towels, a big pail full of empty Coke cans. No astronaut on the active roster came down here. If she came in on a weekend, the place was generally deserted; after so many years of routine, long-duration missions, there was pretty much a nine-to-five atmosphere about much of JSC.

  Building 9 made her feel her place, she thought; as an ascan she was a long way down the food chain.

  She tried out the air bearing facility, an office chair suspended by a hovercraft-like cushion of downwards air jets. She floated over the epoxy-resin floor like an ice-hockey puck, pulling her way around a mocked-up Skylab workstation, learning about action and reaction in an environment that simulated zero G, if only in two dimensions.

  At last she clambered into the Crew Compartment Trainer, a full-scale mockup of an Apollo Command Module, which sat like a metal teepee in the middle of the floor of Building 9. The hatch was incredibly small, and she had to swing herself in feet first. The three couches were just metal frames slung with canvas slings, constricting, jammed against each other. Under the couches, in the fat base of the cone, was a storage area called the lower equipment bay.

  York sat in the center couch, the Command Module Pilot’s. She was looking up toward the apex of the cone. The windows seemed small and far away; even though the hatch was open she felt enclosed in here. Directly in front of her there was a big, battleship-gray, one-hundred-and-eighty-degree instrument panel. There were five hundred controls: toggle switches, thumb wheels, pushbuttons, and rotary switches with click stops. The readouts were mainly meters, lights and little rectangular windows containing either ‘gray flags’ or ‘barber poles’; the barber pole was a stripy piece of metal that would fill the window when the setting had to be changed. There was a tiny computer key-pad, a small cathode ray tube, and 8-balls – artificial horizons. There were small joysticks and pushbuttons: translational controllers, to work the Command Module’s clusters of attitude rockets.

  The panel seemed complex, almost ludicrously so. How the hell was she going to find her way around all this?

  She experimented with the switches. They were mostly of two types: little silver three-way tabs, or – for more critical functions – cylindrical levers, two-way, that you had to pull out before they would move. These would be awkward in pressure-suit gloves, she thought. The switches were protected by little metal gates on either side, to save them being kicked by a free-fall boot. She worked her way across the panel, practicing flipping the dead switches, getting used to the feel of them.

  There were little diagrams etched into the panel, she saw, circuit and flowcharts. She consulted her manuals. Here, for example, was one diagram which connected a set of switches that controlled water output from the fuel cells. The little gray lines mirrored the way the water flowed, either to controls for the storage tanks, or for the dumps.

  All the switches were contained by one diagram or another. Once she started to see the system behind the diagrams, she began to figure the logic in the panel, how the switches clustered and related to each other.

  Sitting alone inside the quiet Apollo, she worked her way through her manuals, learning how the spaceship was flown.

  Monday, June 11, 1979

  Starry Town, Moscow

  The convoy of buses skirted around Moscow, following the freeways. They were heading northeast, toward Kaliningrad. There was a lot of traffic, most of it freight, and the road was lined with apartment blocks, huge, drab monoliths.

  Joe Muldoon stared out of a grimy window. It was the most depressing sight he had ever seen.

  Here they were, hauling ass direct from the airport, straight out of the city to Starry Town. This was Muldoon’s second visit here. Their first trip out had been better. Then, the American crew – Muldoon, Bleeker and Stone, with the NASA technical people and program managers – had stayed in an Intourist Hotel. It was no palace, but it was right in the middle of downtown Moscow, with Red Square and the Kremlin a walk away. Every morning the Soviets had arrived with buses to take the Americans out to Starry. Town, and every evening they’d brought them back.

  And the hotel had had a bar, in the basement.

  That bar had proved to be a magnet for foreign nationals, one of the few congenial places in the city. There were other Americans to be found there, and Germans, Cubans, Czechs. Muldoon and the NASA guys had made that bar their own.

  There’d been no harm done, save for a few late nights and bleary mornings. But in retrospect, he could see the problem for the program managers. Not to mention the Soviets. In that bar, they are out of control, those Americanskis!

  So this time out, things were arranged differently.

  At Kaliningrad the convoy turned east toward Shchelkovo. The architecture changed. Now there were wooden houses, along both sides of the road; unlike the Soviet-style apartments closer to Moscow, these were painted brightly, and they were decorated with ornate wood carvings. Muldoon could smell wood smoke. And every few hundred yards there were hand-pumps.

  It was all kind of cute and rural, but desperately primitive. Wooden houses and hand-pumps, next door to a cosmonaut training center.

  The convoy turned right on an unmarked road, into a pine forest. Just around the bend there was a guard post. After a couple of minutes’ checking with the drivers, the convoy went on into a large clearing in the forest. There were several tall apartment buildings here, a few low office buildings, some stores. At one end of the clearing there were
small lakes, at the other a dozen large, blocky structures.

  Shawled babushkas pushed baby carriages along the sidewalks, while the noise of jet aircraft ripped down constantly from the air.

  This was Starry Town, purpose-built to house and train the cosmonaut corps. It struck Muldoon as a cross between a university campus and a military training camp.

  The driver pointed out the hydro pool, a neutral buoyancy trainer, the Cosmonaut Museum. At the center of the clearing, facing the convoy, was a statue of Gagarin: larger than life, heroic, inspirational.

  Muldoon grimaced. There were no statues to him, anywhere, even though he’d gone so much further than Gagarin. But then, he wasn’t safely dead.

  His apartment was huge. More like a suite. He wandered through the rooms. The place was crammed with furniture, all of it heavy and old-fashioned: sofas, overstuffed chairs, heavy tables. There was a thick shag pile on the floor, and flock paper on every inch of wall. He found the bathroom, and there he had to laugh. There was no soap, and there were no plugs for the bath or sink, and only one towel.

  And probably a bug in every damn light fitting.

  He glanced out of the window. He saw white pines, barbed wire. A black limousine cruised along one of the central access roads: probably KGB, Muldoon thought. Home from home. Like a fucking prison camp.

  He jammed a facecloth in the plug hole and ran a bath.

  He dressed in his dinner suit and went down to the bar.

  It wasn’t much like the Intourist place in Moscow. But there was a barman, polishing glasses; he had a thin, Asiatic face. Muldoon asked for a beer. It proved to be cold; it was a Czech brand, and it tasted good. There was nobody else here. Some kind of god-awful piano music tinkled over a PA.

  There was going to be a reception tonight, before a dinner in the place’s dining room, all to celebrate the progress of Moonlab-Soyuz. Fred Michaels himself was supposed to be here, and God alone knew how many Soviet big fish. You’ll have to take it easy, Muldoon. Watch what you say. No more hostages to fortune. He knew what to expect at the dinner, though: meat, lots of it, with piles of cream and butter. Deliciously bad for him.