Voyage

by Stephen Baxter

  Wednesday, December 3, 1980

  Timber Cove, El Lago, Houston

  Gregory Dana found it a scramble to get out of JSC. Dozens of TV, radio and print reporters were turning up at the security blockhouse, requesting clearance and asking for access to whatever briefings NASA was planning. The car park opposite Building 2, the Public Affairs Office, was one of the busiest on the campus.

  It was pitch dark by the time Dana arrived at the ranch house in Lazywood Lane.

  Jim and Mary lived in a pretty place. Timber Cove was a development that had sprung up in the 1960s, a couple of miles from JSC. Around the tidy, manicured streets the ranch houses were sprinkled in the greenery like huge wooden toys, individually styled, encrusted with stone cladding. The grass was rich and cool-damp, and the cultivated pine trees on the lawns were a dark green, almost black in the low lamp light.

  The area was soaked with NASA connections. Once, Jim liked to boast, no less than Jim Lovell had lived next door, with his family. Here, on happier days, Dana had come to throw baseballs with Jake, and to make paper airplanes for little Mary, and argue the politics and engineering of spaceflight with his son …

  For a few minutes Dana sat in the car. He felt as if the strength had been drawn out of him. He rolled down the window and let the cooler air waft over his face.

  He could hear water lapping at the back of the house, the clink of the chain that tied up Jim’s little dinghy.

  He took off his glasses, and wiped them on his crumpled tie.

  Later tonight Gregory was going to have to fly up to Virginia to be with Sylvia, and bring her back here. He’d spoken to her on the phone several times already – the Mission Control people had given him a line – and she’d sounded calm enough. But Dana couldn’t begin to imagine how she was going to react to this.

  Well, how am I reacting? Do I even understand that? My son, my only son, is in orbit right now – perhaps trapped up there – with his poor, fragile body irradiated by Marshall’s hellish abortion of a nuclear rocket. It was a situation, he thought, which the human heart simply wasn’t programmed to cope with.

  And, under all his grief, he felt the dull, painful glow of anger that none of this need have been so – that it wasn’t, never had been, necessary to build nuclear rockets to get to Mars.

  He pushed his glasses back on his face, shoved open the car door, and got out.

  There was a Christmas wreath on Jim’s front door.

  It was physically hard for him to walk up the drive, he observed, bemused. He watched his feet, his shoes of brown leather, as they lifted and settled on the gravel path, as if they belonged to some robot.

  He reached the door.

  He felt exhausted, as if the path had been a steep climb. It won’t be so bad, he told himself feverishly. Just ring the doorbell; that’s all you have to do. Seger had said someone from the Astronaut Office would have been here by now. So you won’t have to give her the news, at least. And besides, Walter Cronkite was probably already intoning gloomy predictions on CBS.

  You won’t even have to break the news. So ring the bell, damn you.

  His hands hung at his sides, heavy, weak, useless.

  Wednesday, December 3, 1980

  Apollo-N; Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, Houston

  ‘Apollo-N, Houston. We’re going to bring you home. Just take it easy, and we’ll bring you down. The Command Module systems are looking good at this time. You might want to dig out the medical kit –’

  Natalie’s voice remained calm and controlled, and Priest, through the mounting pain in his chest and eyes, felt a surge of pride. Good for you, rookie.

  ‘I think we’ll have to pass on that,’ he said. ‘I doubt if any of us could reach the kit, Natalie.’

  ‘Just hang tight, Apollo-N.’

  ‘Hey, bug-eyes,’ Jones said to Priest. ‘I got Jim’s pin in my pocket.’

  ‘What pin?’

  ‘His flight pin. The gold one. He’s no rookie now. I was going to give it to him after the burn. You want to reach over? He might like to see it.’

  ‘Maybe later, Chuck. I think he’s sleeping.’

  ‘Sure. Maybe later.’

  Donnelly, listening to the clamor of voices on the loops, felt numb, unreal, as if all that radiation had gone sleeting through his own body.

  The reentry was going to be a mess. The systems guys were hurrying through an improvised checklist, designed to get the Command Module configured to bring itself home. At the same time, the trajectory guys were figuring out where they could bring the bird down; it had to be near enough to a Navy vessel that could effect an emergency recovery and offer medical facilities …

  He became aware that he’d said nothing, even in response to direct questions from the controllers, for – how long? A minute, maybe.

  Christ, what a mess.

  At the end of her shift York turned and looked for Mike, but his seat at the Booster console was already occupied by somebody else, some Marshall technician she didn’t know. He’d left and she hadn’t realized – and nor, she thought, had he chosen to seek her out.

  She considered asking where Mike had gone, but the new Booster guy was already immersed in his work.

  Some of the controllers coming off shift were going to the Singing Wheel, a roadhouse near JSC that was a traditional hangout. They invited York, but she refused.

  When she got out of JSC she drove quickly to the Portofino. Mike wasn’t there.

  She prowled around the place, restless; she felt caged in by her few possessions, depressed by the images of Mars taped to the walls.

  She took a bath, and lay down on the double bed to try to sleep. It was past eleven p.m. But sleep wouldn’t come; she seemed to feel the pressure of the headset around her skull, see the numbers glowing on the screen before her, hear the voices whispering on loops in her head.

  She tried the TV news; every channel was full of Apollo-N, of course, but there was no substantive information.

  Ben’s up there.

  Mike still hadn’t showed up.

  She got dressed again, picked up her purse, and drove out to the Singing Wheel.

  Some of the Indigo Team controllers were still there. The Wheel was usually a venue for bright, noisy conversations; it was a redbrick saloon crowded with dubious antiques, and the Mission Control staff went along to wind down after simulations or to celebrate milestones, like splashdowns. But tonight nobody was rowdy. They just sat around a cluster of tables, drinking and talking quietly. In this regard, York knew, the controllers had a lot in common with flight jocks, when they lost one of their number: their reaction was just to sit and talk about how and why it happened, and get drunk while doing so.

  York stayed with them until the small hours.

  When he finally got away from his desk Donnelly pulled his flight log toward him. He checked the clock on the wall to fill in the Mission Elapsed Time column, and signed himself out. His hands were trembling, and the signature was shaky.

  He flipped back through the log. The last few pages were all but illegible.

  Thursday, December 4, 1980

  Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, Houston

  It was already after midnight when Bert Seger called Fay from his office.

  He asked Fay to send him some fresh clothes. He made a mental note to arrange a security pass for her; JSC, and the Cape, had been sealed off as soon as news of the accident’s severity had started to break.

  He asked after the kids, and failed to hear the answers. Then he told Fay he loved her. He hung up.

  It was evident he was going to be working out of Houston for a while, or maybe the Cape, if and when the Command Module was retrieved after reentry. Fred Michaels had already told him that Carter was ordering a Presidential Commission to look into the accident, to which he’d expect NASA to respond fully, and for which response he’d be holding Seger accountable.

  Seger expected nothing else.

  Sooner or later, he’d always known, an astrona
ut was going to die on him.

  The systems they were building simply weren’t reliable enough to guarantee safety. Most of the astronaut corps, even now, were test pilots; they knew the odds better than anyone else, and they accepted them. But the people on the ground were Seger’s greater concern. His ground crews would have to live with the knowledge that they might have done something differently. It won’t fail because of me. What happened when that transmuted to: It failed because of me?

  The phone rang. It was Tim Josephson, who wanted to talk about nominees for NASA’s internal investigative panel, that would be set up to anticipate and assist the Presidential Commission.

  Seger forced himself to focus on what Josephson was saying.

  He and Josephson soon agreed on a core list, save for the astronaut representative.

  ‘What about Natalie York?’ Seger said. ‘She was capcom when the stack blew; she showed herself to be cool and analytical under pressure. And she’s a personal friend of Priest’s.’

  Josephson vetoed that. ‘York is still a rookie. And besides, she’s attached to Mike Conlig. Had you forgotten that? How can she assess a case, maybe involving defective designs or suspect management practices, involving her boyfriend?’

  They went through some more names, without success.

  Josephson cut him off. ‘Bert, I’ll tell you who Fred wants. Joe Muldoon.’

  ‘Muldoon? Are you crazy? Muldoon is a loose cannon.’

  ‘Yeah. He’s been a loud-mouth, but that maybe gives him a reputation for independence, which wouldn’t harm right now. And he was a moonwalker. Fred has a lot of time for him.’

  ‘Muldoon’s not available anyway. He’s in lunar orbit.’

  ‘But he’s due to return in a week. That’s time enough …’

  They argued around it for a while, but eventually Seger gave in.

  He was uneasy about having someone as crass and loud as Muldoon in a role as high-profile as this. There was bound to be a lot of dirt to be dug out over this incident, particularly from Marshall; he shuddered when he imagined what kind of stuff Muldoon, hero astronaut, might start feeding the press.

  He would have to keep a lid on all of that.

  When Josephson hung up, it was three a.m.

  Seger knew he needed sleep. He kept a fold-up bed in a closet for times like this.

  He slipped off his shoes, and got to his knees and tried to pray. But he couldn’t concentrate; his mind kept on making up lists of things he had to do, prioritizing.

  Strangely, the doubts he had felt earlier in the mission – doubts induced by the hostility of the anti-nuke protesters – had melted away, now that the worst had come to pass. He felt confident about his ability to cope with all of this. NASA’s ability, in fact. It was only some damned hardware fault, after all. A fault they could fix, now it had identified itself.

  And NASA had survived problems like this before: he remembered that just two years after the Apollo 1 fire, Armstrong and Muldoon had landed on the Moon. And after Apollo 13 had blown up on the way to the Moon, not only had they got the astronauts back, but they’d gone on to fly, on 14, the most successful damned mission of them all.

  He touched the gold crucifix at his lapel. He felt oddly light, almost giddy. They’d get through this; he had no doubt about it now. With God’s help.

  But it was difficult to pray. Somehow, he felt God was far away from him, that night.

  Finally, at around four a.m., he slept. But he was up again and making his first calls of the day by seven.

  Thursday, December 4, 1980

  Apollo-N; Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, Houston

  The pain was everywhere now, unbelievably intense, a huge cellular agony that went on and on until he couldn’t bear it, and then on some more. It felt as if every soft surface of Priest’s body, inside and out, had been coated with acid, as if he was rotting away from the outside in.

  He still wore his pressure suit, and that was maybe just as well, because the pain was like one immense itch; he’d probably have rubbed himself raw if he could get to his skin. But the suit had its disadvantages. His bowels had been loose for hours, and he’d thrown up inside the helmet, which was every aviator’s nightmare. But by now at least the floating globs of vomit had stopped drifting about in front of his face, and had stuck to something: the helmet’s visor, or maybe his hair and skin; he didn’t really care, as long as he could forget about the damn stuff.

  He couldn’t seem to smell anything now, and that was probably just as well.

  He tried to turn his head to the left, to see Chuck and Jim. But he couldn’t move. Anyhow, they hadn’t answered the last time he’d spoken to them. They’d looked surprisingly composed, sealed up inside their pressure suits, as no doubt he did himself; all the vomit and shit and human pain was neatly confined to the inside of the suits, leaving the Command Module cabin antiseptic and efficient, save for the banks of glowing warning lights on the instrument panel.

  Anyway, he didn’t really want to turn away from his window. That window was very, very important to him, because it framed the night side of Earth. He could see the auroras: colored waves surging down from the poles, high layers of air glistening red and green under the impact of the particle wind from the sun. And he could see flashes, high in the atmosphere, and sometimes straight streaks of light that lingered in his retina for long seconds – meteors, specks of extraterrestrial dust plunging into the atmosphere …

  Priest used to sit with Petey, when he was small, gazing up at the meteor showers caroming into the roof of the air. And now, he was watching meteors burning up beneath him. This is one hell of a trip, Petey.

  There were other lights in the night.

  At the heart of South America, he saw a huge, dispersed glow: a fire, devouring trees at the center of the Amazon rainforest. And as Apollo-N sailed over deserts, he would spy oil and gas wells sparkling brightly, captive stars in all that darkness.

  Cities stunned him with their night brightness. If there was cloud it would soak up and diffuse the illumination, and he would see the shape of the city as a huge, amorphous bowl of light. And if the sky was clear he seemed to be able to make out every detail as clearly as if he were taking a T-38 on a buzz just over the roof-tops. He saw streets and highways like ribbons of light, yellow and orange, and tall buildings ablaze like boxes of diamonds. He saw bridges and out-of-town highways shining with the headlamps of queues of cars. It was as if he could feel all that light, and heat, pouring up out of the atmosphere to him …

  ‘We need you to help us, Ben. You’re the only one talking to us up there. Stay with it, now.’

  ‘Yeah.’ But it hurts, Natalie …

  ‘I know it’s hard, Ben. Come on. Work with me. Can you reach the pre-burn checklist? It’s Velcroed over the –’

  ‘Walk me through it, would you, Natalie.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, sure. You just follow me. We’ll be fine. Okay. Thrust switches to normal.’

  ‘Thrust switches normal.’

  ‘Inject prevalves on.’

  He had to reach for that one; the pain lay in great sheets across his back and arms. ‘Okay. Inject prevalves on.’

  ‘One minute to the burn, Ben. Arm the translational controller.’

  Priest pulled the handle over until the label ARMED showed clearly. ‘Armed.’

  ‘Okay, now. Ullage.’

  Priest pushed the translational controller; the Apollo-N shifted forward, the small kick of its reaction jets settling the propellants in the big Service Module SPS engine, in preparation for the main deorbit burn.

  ‘Good. Very good, Ben. Thirty seconds,’ York said. ‘Thrust-on enable, Ben.’

  Priest unlocked the control and gave it a half-turn. ‘Enabled.’

  ‘Say again, Ben.’

  ‘Enabled.’ Even his throat hurt, damn it.

  ‘Fifteen seconds. You’ve done it, Ben. Sit tight, now.’

  Sure. And what if the SPS doesn’t fire? Christ knows what condition the Serv
ice Module is in after the goddamn NERVA blew up under it; we’ve been losing power and telemetry since the explosion … And they had to assume that the Command Module’s systems – the guidance electronics and the computers for instance – hadn’t been too badly damaged by NERVA; he didn’t think all those roentgens passing through could have done the ship’s brains a lot of good.

  He braced himself for the kick in the back.

  ‘Two, one. Fire.’

  Nothing.

  He shuddered, the tension in his aching muscles releasing in spasms.

  ‘Okay,’ York said calmly. ‘Direct delta-vee switch, Ben.’

  ‘Direct delta-vee.’ He reached for the manual fire switch and jerked it out and up, ignoring the pain in his arm.

  Now there was a hiss, a rattly thrust which pushed him into his couch.

  There was a green light before him. ‘Retrofire,’ he whispered.

  The pressure over his wounded back increased, and he longed for microgravity to return. But it didn’t, and he just had to lie there immersed in pain, enduring it.

  ‘Copy the retrofire, Ben.’ York’s voice was trembling. ‘We copy that. We’ll do the rest. Stay with me, now.’

  The pain overwhelmed him, turning his thoughts to mud.

  Beyond his window, Earth slid away from him. The big SPS was working, changing the ship’s trajectory.

  ‘Be advised that old SPS is a damn fine engine, Houston,’ he whispered. Even after having a nuke go off under it, the thing had still worked, faithfully bringing him home. How about that.

  Now someone was talking to him. Maybe it was Natalie. He couldn’t even recognize her voice now, through the fog of pain. That last checklist had just about used him up. Either this bird was going to fly him home or it wasn’t; there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it any more.

  He could see Natalie’s face before him now: serious, bony, a little too long, with those big heavy eyebrows creased in concentration; he remembered her face above his, in the dark, that night after the Mars 9 landing.