Voyage

by Stephen Baxter

  When he first got to Hangar ‘O’ Seger found things moving slowly. Nobody had touched anything in the interior of Apollo – except for the medical team on the recovery ship, who, in their radiation-proof protective clothing, had removed the suited bodies of the astronauts – and the investigating teams at Canaveral now were in a paralysis of indecision on how to proceed, for fear of fouling up this highly public operation.

  So Seger made some calls, and looked out some old records, and radioed up to Muldoon a recommendation on how to proceed. Muldoon, still on his way home from the Moon, agreed.

  The first task was to put together a cantilevered Lucite platform, hinged so that it could fit inside the hatch of the Command Module and then be unfolded to cover the interior of the craft. That way the investigators, hampered by radiation-proof gear, could crawl on hands and knees around the interior, looking and photographing and disassembling, but without touching anything they didn’t need to.

  Next Seger initiated the disciplines he wanted in the disassembly process itself.

  For example he watched as a crew checklist – doused by sea water, pathetic and battered – was lifted out of the spacecraft. The disassembly team had prepared a TPS, a Test Preparation Sheet, for this, and every other action in the disassembly. The TPS detailed the physical action required, the part number of the checklist, its location. Before the checklist was touched the presiding engineer read out an instruction from the TPS. A Rockwell quality inspector moved into place to see, and a NASA inspector got ready. A photographer was called over. A Rockwell technician got carefully into the craft and then, using the specified procedure, took the checklist from its Velcro holder. The technician had to record the effort it took to get the checklist free, and any other anomalous observations he made.

  The technician handed the checklist to the Rockwell quality inspector, who made sure that it was the right part and the right part number, recording his results on his copy of the TPS. The NASA inspector took the list, and he recorded his independent observations. The photographer took a picture of the part. The engineer put the list into a plastic bag, sealed it up, labeled it, and took it off to the appropriate repository.

  If the engineer hadn’t been able to get the checklist out, because of some unanticipated obstacle, everything would have come to a halt while a revised TPS was sent to a review panel for approval of the modification.

  … And on, and on.

  And, meanwhile, everybody working on the hot Command Module was in a white radiation suit, and they had to shower and get tested for dosage every few hours.

  It was painstaking, agonizing, intense work, made all the more difficult by the fact that only two or three workers could get into the Command Module at any one time. But Seger insisted on adhering to the procedure, and Muldoon supported him. It was the way they had done it on Apollo 1, after the fire, and it was the way they were going to do it on Apollo-N. It was just the kind of detailed, meticulous job Seger enjoyed getting his teeth into.

  Sometimes he thought back over the incidents surrounding the flight. He recalled the hostile faces of the protesters on launch day. That still returned to haunt him. And he was worried by the way the internal communication of his organization had fallen apart, even within Mission Control, on the day. Seger as Program Office head had been keeping up the pressure, of budgets and timescales, on his people for years now, and they’d seemed to be responding well; but he wondered now if there were greater problems under the surface than he’d been perceiving. Hell, maybe he hadn’t wanted to perceive them.

  Well, if there were such issues, he would address them. You had to be rational, to overcome doubt, in order to go forward, to achieve things. The crew had known the risks, when they climbed aboard the NERVA ship in the first place. They’d paid the ultimate price. Now Seger owed it to their sacrifice to ensure that their lives hadn’t been wasted, that NASA learned from this and moved forward.

  Away from the hangar, Seger spent a lot of time on the phone lines arguing with Fred Michaels and Tim Josephson and others about the future shape of the program.

  It couldn’t be denied that the incident was going to set the program back. But Seger wanted to make up time by putting the all-up testing approach to work. The next flight, Seger argued, should be another manned Saturn/NERVA launch. Maybe they should even be more ambitious, such as by taking an S-NB out of Earth orbit and sending it around the Moon.

  But he found Michaels opposing him. Michaels said if they weren’t forced to discontinue the nuclear program altogether, they should run a couple more unmanned tests and then repeat the Apollo-N mission profile. If Apollo-N had been a useful mission (and if it wasn’t, why had they lost three men to it?) they owed it to the program and to the memory of the crew to do the mission.

  Seger thought that was just an emotional argument.

  They chewed it over for hours. Sometimes it bothered Seger that his personal position was so different from that of Michaels and Josephson. He had to take care not to get himself isolated. But, now that the first shock of the accident had passed, he felt confident once more, in command; the accident was a finite thing, within the ability of human beings to comprehend and resolve, and they shouldn’t let this tragedy get in the way of their greater ambitions.

  He tried to catnap in his office, but he couldn’t sleep.

  By seven each morning he would be back in ‘O,’ or on the phone to the people at the Cape and Houston and Marshall who were working around the clock on the various facets of the investigation.

  At the end of the first week he flew out to Houston, and spent the evening with his family. And then the next day he drove with Fay around Timber Cove and El Lago, visiting the wives and families of Jones, Priest and Dana.

  Then it was back to the Cape on Sunday, where he threw himself into the investigation once more.

  He was working with an intensity that eclipsed any effort he had made in his life. It was the only way he knew to deal with the way he felt about the incident: to burn it out of his system with work, to make damn sure nothing like this happened again. And he spent a lot of his spare time in church, alone, praying and contemplating. Coming to terms with it all.

  In a way he was enjoying it. As he got to grips with the issues he felt suffused with strength, courage, certainty. He prayed every day, and he felt that God was helping him.

  Sometimes he needed a little help to get to sleep. A couple of pills or a drink or two. He allowed himself that. He was on high blower, he told his wife; he was like a T-38 on afterburner.

  Thursday, January 8, 1981

  … On admission, Colonel Priest was nauseated, chilled, and agitated, with glassy eyes. His temperature was a hundred and four degrees. He had been cut from his pressure suit. He suffered repeated vomiting, and swelling of the face, neck and upper extremities. His arms were so swollen, in fact, that his blood pressure could not be taken with the normal cuff, and the nurses had to enlarge it.

  He was periodically conscious, and sometimes coherent and logical, but I judged he was not strong enough to contribute to any debriefings concerning the accident.

  Priest’s difficulty in speaking and lapses into incoherence made his relatives in attendance, and some of my staff, feel uncomfortable.

  Twenty-four hours after admission I ordered four samples of bone marrow to be taken from Priest’s sternum and iliac bones (both front and rear). Priest was very patient during the proceedings. The samples were used to determine the whole body dose.

  During the fourth and fifth days after admission, Priest was in great pain from injuries to the mucous membranes of the mouth, oesophagus and stomach. The mucous membranes were coming off in layers. Priest lost both sleep and appetite. Starting on the sixth day his right shin, on which the skin was now disintegrating, began to swell and feel as if it was bursting; it then became rigid and painful.

  On the seventh day, on account of a profound agranulocytosis – that is, a drop in the number of granular forms of leucocytes, res
ponsible for immunity – I ordered an administration of seven hundred and fifty milliliters of bone marrow with blood.

  Priest was then moved to a room sterilized with ultraviolet light. A period of intestinal syndrome began: bowel movements occurred between twenty-five and thirty times every twenty-four hours, containing blood and mucus; there was tenesmus, rumbling, and movement of fluids in the region of the caecum.

  Owing to the severe lesions in the mouth and oesophagus, Priest did not eat for several days. We provided nutrient fluids intravenously. In the meantime, soft blisters appeared on the perineum and buttocks, and the right shin was bluish-purple, swollen, shiny and smooth to the touch.

  On the fourteenth day Colonel Priest began to lose his hair, in a curious manner: all the hair on the back of his head and body fell out. He grew weaker, and his lapses into unconsciousness or incoherence grew more prolonged.

  On Friday January 2, the thirtieth day after the accident, Priest’s blood pressure suddenly dropped.

  Fifty-seven hours later, Colonel Priest died; I recorded the immediate cause of death as acute myocardial dystrophy.

  Under the microscope, it was quite impossible to see Priest’s heart tissue. The cell nuclei were a mass of torn fibers. It is accurate to say that Priest died directly from the radiation itself, and not from secondary biological changes. Gentlemen, it is impossible to save such patients, once the heart tissue has been destroyed.

  Of the three crew of Apollo-N, only Colonel Priest was found to be alive when the capsule was recovered after reentry. The radiation from the ruptured NERVA core had hit Colonel Priest from behind, doing most harm to his back, his calves, his perineum and buttocks.

  His mother, wife and son were in attendance at his death.

  Report of the Presidential Commission on the Apollo-N Malfunction, Vol I: Testimony of Dr I. S. Kirby to the Medical Analysis Panel (extract) (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1981)

  January, 1981 Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center; Clear Lake, Houston

  One of the back rooms behind the MOCR had been turned into the primary site for investigating the telemetry data received from Apollo-N in the moments leading up to the accident. The walls were papered with strips displaying the readouts from every sensor they’d had the crew and craft wired up to.

  And it was here that Natalie York had to sit and listen to voice tapes from the Command Module cabin, and read through and annotate typed transcripts.

  Everyone was clinical, of course. Even scientific. The point was to gather data. Had the astronauts had any earlier indication that some problem was developing with the NERVA? Perhaps a close enough analysis of the tapes could tease that out, provide further clues about the cause.

  And York, as capcom on the day, was the best placed to interpret their words.

  She had to listen to the tapes over and over.

  Every time York went through the tapes it was like reliving the whole incident. Did it fail because of me? If only Mike hadn’t frozen. If only she’d had a little more intuition about what was going on – if she could have warned Ben that the core was getting out of control, he might have overridden the automatics from the Command Module and shut the damn thing down …

  Eventually York got to a point where she felt that if she had to listen to Ben’s weakening voice one more time her heart was going to burst.

  I guess our business will stay unfinished, Ben. Oh, God.

  They hadn’t even let her see him, before he died.

  ‘Mom?’

  ‘I’m coming out there, Natalie.’

  ‘No, Mom.’

  ‘Now, don’t try to stop me. I know you need me right now.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘I know how much Ben meant to you.’

  York was silent, for long moments; she even considered hanging up. ‘What do you know, exactly?’

  ‘You aren’t very experienced in this stuff, are you, dear? When I saw you at that party, when you first moved into Portofino … It was obvious, Natalie. Even if I hadn’t been your mother I would have known. I only had to see the way you two behaved toward each other. The way you were careful not to pay each other attention. And the way, when you did come together somehow, it was as if you knew each other so well you could anticipate the other’s needs …’

  Jesus. Well, I guess I’m not so much of an actress. So does everybody know?

  There was a rattle of keys at the door.

  ‘I’ll have to go, Mom.’

  ‘I’ll come out there.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ben Priest was married, wasn’t he? I read in –’

  ‘Good-bye, Mom.’ She put the phone down.

  Mike Conlig stood in the middle of the room, looking at her. He carried a bag, with airline stickers that betrayed he’d been out to Marshall.

  It was the first time she’d seen him since the accident. More than a month.

  ‘You froze,’ York said without hesitation. ‘You froze. What the hell were you thinking of, Mike?’

  Mike put his bag down, and started to pace about the apartment, his coat heavy. His hair straggled out of an unkempt pony-tail, and his beard had grown down over his neck. ‘I didn’t freeze,’ Conlig said.

  ‘If you knew you were going to choke up like that you should have just got out of that goddamn chair,’ York said. She felt her throat tighten up, a pressure behind her eyes; but, by God, she was going to see this through without falling apart. ‘You had a responsibility! Those men in orbit were relying on you …’

  He stood over her, his face twisted in disgust. ‘First time I see you in a month and it’s straight on the attack. Happy fucking New Year to you, Natalie. So I killed them. Is that what you’re telling me?’

  ‘But the damn NERVA wasn’t ready to fly. Was it?’

  ‘Natalie, you don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Was it? You worked on the cooling systems for years, and in the end, with three men on board, the damn thing overheated and exploded –’

  ‘I knew what I was doing, Natalie.’

  ‘You knew you were letting the NERVA melt down?’

  ‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘No, damn it. Natalie, it’s the easiest thing in the world to abort. If I’d aborted, we’d have lost the mission –’

  ‘But not three men.’

  ‘– and maybe,’ he went on doggedly, ‘we’d never have known what went wrong. And we’d have had to risk throwing three more men up there to try all over again.’ He pulled at his beard in quick, nervous gestures. ‘At the time – it happened so fast – I just wasn’t sure. I thought the situation might stabilize, that we might be able to salvage control of the NERVA. It might have happened that way, Natalie, and saved us risking more lives. As we’ll have to now. It’s a question of cost and benefit.’

  She was appalled. ‘God, you callous asshole, you did kill them.’

  ‘But it isn’t like that.’ He sounded querulous, hurt, misunderstood. ‘Look: NASA is too cautious. Every safety precaution increases the complexity and cost of the mission. With fewer safety precautions we could have reached the Moon a little sooner, done a lot more exploring, learned more, and’ – defiantly – ‘yes, and created a martyr or two –’

  ‘How can you talk about martyrs? If you hadn’t screwed up, Ben might be alive now. And the others, damn it.’

  ‘Oh, sure. Precious Ben. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?’ He was angry now.

  ‘What are you saying?’

  He snorted. ‘I know all about you and Ben fucking Priest, Natalie. Come on. I’ve known for years.’

  You, too? She considered protesting, telling him he was mistaken. But Ben was dead. It would be beneath her.

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t want to hear when, or how, or why. I don’t give a damn. And you know what? Right now, I don’t know if I ever did.’

  She watched him pace around the room. He was like a stranger, an alien, here in her apartment. ‘No. You never did give a damn, did you? I ca
n’t believe –’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I can’t believe I ever thought I loved you.’

  That took him aback for a moment, and he looked at her; but then his face resumed its mask of anger. ‘Yeah, well, you can believe what you like.’

  ‘How can you rake up all of this now? Ben’s dead, for God’s sake.’

  ‘I know he’s dead!’ he shouted. ‘As dead as my fucking career!’

  ‘Is that all you care about?’

  His anger was consuming him now. ‘Yeah. Yeah, maybe it is. That and the fact that this will probably kill off the nuke program.’

  ‘Get out,’ York said.

  ‘Omelets and eggs, Natalie! You don’t get anywhere without taking a few risks! And with what we learned from this flight – if we’re allowed to fly again – we’ll get it right next time.’ Under the anger in his voice, she thought she heard vulnerability, still, a plea for understanding. ‘Christ, Natalie, we could be on Mars by now. But fucking NASA –’

  She turned away from him. ‘Get out. Go, Mike.’

  She didn’t watch him leave.

  Mike was right, in a way. He spoke a truth, as perceived by many within NASA. If only public sentiment would get out of the way, and let us move as fast as we know we can …

  Lower reliability would mean lower development costs, and a faster schedule.

  It was an insidious, strangely seductive argument.

  The machine is everything! Oh, we have to put men inside those machines, and we have a few problems with that, and some of them are driven crazy by their experiences, and some of them die, in squalid, painful, unheroic ways – as dear Ben had died, decaying in a hospital bed, a month after his flight – but it’s worth it for the goal.

  And besides, we’re never short of volunteers.