Voyage

by Stephen Baxter

  The noise of the chopper increased to a muffled drone. She felt her heart pump harder. There was a pounding on the hull, and then a soft, slithering scraping, as, York guessed, cables slid over the surface of the craft.

  Ralph Gershon picked his gum out of his mouth and stuck it under his seat, seemingly unconcerned.

  The chopper’s engine roared. There was a brief strobing of the light at her window – helicopter blades, passing over the Command Module – and then a yank upwards, as if the Soyuz had turned into a high-speed elevator.

  York felt the air rush out of her lungs, and the pressure points of her couch dug into her back and hips.

  Beyond her window the receding steppe rocked back and forth like a plaster-of-paris model in a sim. She saw a little circle of engineers, waving their caps, their faces turned up like dusty flowers.

  Grit fled in concentric circles across the steppe, away from the capsule, and the technicians staggered back, shielding their eyes.

  Then she could no longer see the ground: her window was a disk of clouded sky.

  York’s pressure suit was getting hot. She could feel perspiration pooling under her, in a little slick that gathered in the small of her back. But at the same time, thanks to some quirk of the Soviet suit’s cooling system, her feet were cold. She tried to curl up her toes, inside the layers which constrained them.

  Gershon, lying beside her, was all elbows.

  There was a TV camera – a crude-looking thing, like something out of the 1950s – fixed to the cabin wall, just above Gershon’s head. York didn’t know if it was live or not. A small metal toy, a spaceman, dangled in front of the lens on a metal chain; as the cabin swung about under the chopper, the little toy rocked back and forth.

  Viktorenko caught her eyeing the model. ‘You are admiring my friend Boris.’ He pronounced it Bah-reess. ‘Boris has a major role to play, in the correct functioning of the Soyuz.’ He pointed. ‘You see the TV camera. That is trained on Boris at all times. By watching his antics, the ground can determine the exact moment at which we become weightless. Ingenious, no? …’

  Now the capsule lurched to the right. York felt the weight of the two men compressing her against the wall.

  Viktorenko roared with approval. ‘It is just like Disney World! Ha ha! Now, Ralph and Natalie. You must imagine that we are returning to Earth aboard a real Soyuz, perhaps after spending a hundred days or more aboard our wonderful space platform Salyut. We have endured the gentle buffeting of reentry – a mere three or four G, thanks to the cunning aerodynamic design of the Command Module – and soot has coated our window following the scorching friction of the air. But we discard our window shields, and we see bright sunlight, a Kazakhstan morning. Now here come the parachutes: the three drogues, crack crack crack in swift succession, and then the main chute, a great white sail above us.’ Viktorenko mimed a slow, feather-like rocking. ‘So we drift downwards, like a snowflake, all three tonnes of us …’

  She closed her eyes. She was certain something was intended to go wrong, somewhere down the line. It was just a question of when, and how bad it would be, and whether she’d be able to cope when it came. It was like every sim: this was a sadistic game, in which Viktorenko was in complete control. And the bastard knew it.

  ‘And now the moment approaches,’ Viktorenko said. ‘The reunion with the mother planet! But her embrace is hard. So compressed gases have been pumped into the base of your seats, to absorb the shock, you see. And, less than two meters from the ground, retrorockets will fire to cushion the impact. Of course we have no retrorockets, for this is only a training mockup … Perhaps we will be fortunate, and the wind will be low; otherwise, we may bounce –’

  There was a crackle, a brief Russian message on the radio. Viktorenko acknowledged and checked a chronometer. ‘Three, two, one.’

  Loose cables clattered against the hull. The chopper had released the capsule.

  The Command Module fell, dragging her down with it.

  The Soyuz slammed against a hard surface, with a vast metallic slap.

  The impact was more violent than York had expected. Her ill-fitting couch rammed into her back, all the pressure points gouging her body.

  ‘Fuck,’ Gershon gasped.

  At least I’m down. She glanced around, quickly, at the still, almost silent cabin; she could hear the distant noise of the climbing chopper. Is that it? Is it over? No bouncing, no dragging – are we down?

  Then the capsule tipped to her left, quite smoothly, so that her weight was pressed against Gershon’s.

  ‘Fuck,’ Gershon said again.

  York shouted, ‘What the hell’s this, Vladimir?’

  The window beyond Viktorenko was briefly darkened, though York couldn’t see by what. Viktorenko grinned. ‘Evidently something has gone wrong.’

  Now the capsule started to roll the other way, to York’s right, and the weight of the two men came down on York again. Beyond her window, obscuring the glass, water, silvery-gray with murk, was bubbling up.

  So that’s it. This is the carefully designed screw-up. The Soyuz is supposed to come down on land …

  ‘Fuck,’ said Gershon.

  ‘Welcome to Ozero Tengiz,’ Viktorenko said. ‘Tengiz Lake, a salt lake all of twenty miles wide, and less than a hundred miles from –’

  York groaned. ‘Do we really have to go through with this? I mean, rehearsing for an emergency water landing? After an emergency retrieval from orbit by a Soyuz?’

  ‘Would you rather endure such an occurrence without preparation? All of your training has a context. You must understand that. Our cosmonauts are trained to handle all conceivable survivable emergencies.’

  ‘Not the un-survivable ones,’ York said.

  ‘But few points in a mission are true dead zones; in most situations there are options. The present exercise covers just one contingency. Of course for this particular exercise you must thank my old friend, Joseph Muldoon.’

  Gershon retrieved his wad of gum from the base of his chair, mashed it in his gloved hand to make it soft, and pushed it back into his mouth. ‘Fuck Muldoon,’ said Gershon. ‘And fuck you.’

  The Russian watched with appalled fascination.

  York said, ‘All right, Vladimir, we’ll play ball. What’s the drill?’

  ‘Survival gear,’ Viktorenko said. He unzipped his pressure suit.

  York felt enormously weary. But she didn’t have a choice.

  She took off her helmet and jammed it behind her seat.

  The outermost layer of her suit was a coverall of a tough artificial fabric, with pockets and tool-loops and flaps. It opened up at the front, revealing the flaps of cloth called the ‘appendix,’ bound up with rubber bands; when York slipped off the bands the bunched material unfolded.

  With the outer suit layer lolling around her like a deflated balloon, York went to work on the inner layer, of an airtight, elasticated material.

  In the restricted space, with the ceiling of the cabin just inches from her nose, movement was virtually impossible, and she kept catching at controls and switches with her feet and hands. The interior of the cabin was becoming chaotic now, with the squirming bodies of the three of them and discarded bits of equipment sloshing back and forth in the confined, rocking space.

  ‘It is easier if you help each other!’ Viktorenko called cheerily.

  ‘Fuck off,’ Gershon said.

  When her pressure garment was off, she was down to her long thermal underwear. She started to pull on her survival gear: a red sweater, a jumpsuit, a jacket, thickly padded trousers, an outer jacket …

  ‘But this is poor,’ growled Viktorenko. ‘Poor! You must work as a team. On Mars, forty million miles from Earth, there are only your crewmates. You must turn to each other for aid as a child might turn to his mother, instinctively, without asking. Do you understand? And that aid must be offered without calculation or hesitation. It is the way you must adopt. Tomorrow we will do this better.’

  ‘You must be ki
dding,’ York snapped. ‘We have to go through all this again?’

  Viktorenko, pulling on his own gear, continued to lecture them. ‘Listen to me. Our Soviet training is tougher than yours, and some within NASA have come to understand this. In some of our exercises, there is no chance of seeking help. There is no rescue team! For there will be none on Mars! It is all purposeful. For, when a man realizes a mistake might cost him his health or even his life, the situation is transformed. Suddenly there is an incentive to concentrate.

  ‘In space, one needs the courage and resourcefulness to continue to work on a problem long after an average person, with hope of rescue, might have given in. And this is what I begin to instill in you now.’

  York was tired, in pain, hugely irritated. The trouble was, there was a strand of thinking inside NASA that approved of the Soviets’ tough approach: mostly the old military fly-boys, who seemed to think NASA astronauts were getting pampered. Joe Muldoon, for instance, Viktorenko’s great Moon-orbiting buddy. Yeah, pampered. Especially all these goddamn new-fangled hyphenated-astronauts who want to go to Mars …

  She said, ‘All this macho training didn’t help Ben Priest and the others, did it?’

  Viktorenko studied her. More gently he said, ‘No. It did not help Ben Priest.’ He plucked at the cuffs of his thick sweater. ‘Listen, Natalie. There is an old Russian folk tale. A young woman named Marushka was famous for being able to embroider fantastical designs. Her fame reached the attention of Kaschei the Immortal, an evil sorcerer, who fell in love with her and wished her to go away with him. She turned him down, despite his magic powers, for she was modest, and wished only to stay in the village where she was born.

  ‘Enraged, Kaschei turned her into a fire-bird with brilliant plumage, and himself into a huge black bird of prey. The bird of prey seized the fire-bird in its talons and flew away with it.

  ‘Marushka, realizing she was dying, willed that she should shed her plumage. Her feathers fell to the ground on the land she loved.

  ‘Marushka died, but her feathers were magical. They remained alive, but only to those who appreciated beauty and chose to share it with others …

  ‘So it is with death, among us. No kosmonaut dies in vain, Natalie York.’

  The Command Module rocked harder, swinging back and forth through thirty, forty degrees. Water lapped, gurgling, against the hull. York had a nightmare vision of the capsule sinking, dragging them, padded trousers and all, down to the bottom of this lousy little salt lake.

  It’s so hot in here. Her head seemed full of blood; she could feel her pulse at her neck, and there was a yellow haze at the edge of her vision.

  Christ. I’m going to faint.

  But then the cabin tipped again, over to the right, and her stomach knotted up. Saliva pooled at the back of her throat. No. No, that’s not fainting.

  She turned away from the others, toward the wall; when it came, the vomit splashed against the port and wall and slid down under her seat.

  There was a hand on her shoulder. ‘York. You okay?’

  It was Gershon; she waved him away. She tried to talk, but her throat was still closed up.

  And then the stink hit Gershon. ‘Oh, Jesus.’ He lunged, sticking his head over the back of his couch, and began to throw up too, in huge, noisy spasms.

  Viktorenko laughed. ‘So, Bah-reess, only you and I are able-bodied seamen, eh?’

  ‘Fuck,’ Ralph Gershon groaned.

  The water lapped against the hull of the Soyuz, and Boris the cosmonaut dangled from his silver chain above York’s head.

  She wondered what had happened to Gershon’s gum.

  Washington Post, Monday, February 23, 1981

  … We have no hesitation in devoting this editorial exclusively to the report of the Presidential Commission into the Apollo-N space disaster, which has at last, after weeks of leaks, rumors and counter-rumors, been formally published. The report is 3,300 pages long and weighs in at nineteen pounds, and it does not mince words. The report makes it clear that the accident was not the result of a chance malfunction, in a statistical sense, but rather resulted from an unusual combination of mistakes, coupled with a deficient design.

  The Apollo-N disaster has sparked a fresh national debate, led by a skeptical Congress, over whether the country should be spending tens of billions of dollars on a ‘footprints-and-flags’ program to send men to space, when it faces so many problems at home. Public opinion polls find many citizens asking if the program is costing too much, and feeling that any trip to Mars would be as much a political stunt as was the Apollo race to the Moon.

  Meanwhile, many prominent scientists, such as Professor Leon Agronski, a former science adviser to President Nixon, are arguing in public fora that less expensive unmanned probes could teach us more about the composition of Mars and the other planets than astronauts.

  On the other hand, supporters of the space program point out that the average American spends much more per year on cigarettes and alcohol than on sending fellow countrymen to other planets, and that untold scientific and technological benefits will flow from the continuing program.

  This paper remains skeptical.

  The most damaging pan of the Commission report is a frank indictment of NASA and its senior contractors. The Commission’s investigation revealed many deficiencies in design and engineering, in manufacturing and quality control. Numerous examples have been exposed, in addition to the simple and avoidable defect that led to the tragedy itself.

  This newspaper is appalled at the incredible complacency of NASA engineers. Even a high school physics student would have known not to allow a nuclear core with instability built into its very design onto an operational space mission.

  It seems likely that this nation will continue on to Mars, and beyond; successes in space travel have become essential to the image of the United States as the world’s leading power in science and technology: an image projected to the Soviet Union, our allies around the world, the uncommitted nations of the Third World, and – perhaps most importantly – to our own citizenry. And we should not forget the cold, cynical political calculation that a cancelation of the space program would immediately cause a drastic oversupply in the aerospace industry, and inevitable job losses and shutdowns in that area.

  But as we put Apollo-N behind us and strive to move forward, we should never forget how the dry technical prose of the Presidential Commission report convicts those in charge of NASA of gross incompetence and negligence …

  Friday, February 27, 1981 NASA Headquarters, Washington

  Joe Muldoon called on Fred Michaels in his office in Washington. He arrived a little after seven, having flown out from Houston.

  Without getting up, Michaels waved Muldoon to a chair. ‘Sit down, Joe. It’s good to see you. You want a drink?’

  ‘Sure.’ Muldoon sat uncertainly, studying Michaels.

  There was a decanter and glasses in a corner of Michaels’s desk; Michaels poured Muldoon a careless couple of fingers and passed it over. It was good Kentucky bourbon. The place was darkened, somber, with the lights dimmed; the brightest source of light was the small TV set in one corner of the room, which was showing a news program, with the sound off.

  Michaels rocked back in his chair, with his boots on the corner of his wide desk; his gold-braided vest hung open, and the dim light emphasized the deep grooves in his face as – in typical Michaels style – he waited for Muldoon to say what he wanted to say.

  Muldoon began to tell the Administrator about the progress he was making in his new role as head of the Program Office. ‘The NERVA contractors were running a fucking country club, Fred. And those bastards at Marshall have been letting them get away with it.’

  Michaels, with one eye on the TV, shrugged. ‘That’s maybe a little harsh, Joe. We’ve been putting them all under a hell of a lot of schedule pressure. Maybe too much.’

  ‘No, it’s not that. In a lot of cases it’s just sloppy practice. For instance, the first time I went
up to the S-NB test installation at Michoud I found some of the technicians going for a few beers with their lunch. That’s just outrageous, when you’re working on man-rated hardware. And I saw some guy pumping lox out of a tank on the ground up into an umbilical tower. I asked him where the lox was going. “Beats the hell out of me,” he said. Once it got out of the other end of his hose, that little guy didn’t have a clue what happened to the lox. After that, I told them that I wanted every engineer to learn everything there is to know about every system he was running – where the stuff came from, where it was going, and all the things that might go wrong in between. Every one of those guys has got to know his system from womb to tomb.

  ‘I made a list – I copied you on it – of thirty-odd things that got up my ass, in my first hour up there. Lousy materials handling, mixed-up demarcation of work spaces, wasted time …

  ‘Sure, the schedule pressures are working against us, too. With the sloppy practices the manufacturers have got, there’s no way they can keep to their development timetables. And then they cut corners on testing, to try to make the end date, which means you end up with a candle that’s late and lousy quality.’

  Michaels was nodding, rubbing the thick jowls under his chin. ‘Yeah. I understand. You’re doing a good job, Joe. You’re doing just the job I hired you for.’

  ‘Fred, we’ve gone wrong, somewhere. We scraped this kind of crap out of Apollo; back then we had an operation, right across the country, that was as slick as snot. But now we’ve slipped back.’

  Michaels grunted and sipped his drink. ‘Maybe. But we had many things working for us, back then. A goal you couldn’t have defined more sharply, a lot of goodwill – even though Congress squeezed the budgets – and, hell, I don’t know, a kind of romance about it all. We were still moving outwards, Joe; it was still a great adventure, a time of firsts, every year. And we had one hell of a schedule pressure; we still thought the Russians might beat us to it.

  ‘Now,’ he ruminated, ‘it’s different. All the forces working on us have changed. Even though we’ve got the prospect of Mars, somewhere out there in the future, we’ve been mooching about in Earth orbit for a decade, and what the hell have we got to show for it but a couple of tin-can fuel-tank ’Labs, Apollo hardware still in orbit a decade after the Moon landings, a Saturn upgrade booster that hasn’t flown once, and a lethal bucket of bolts called NERVA?’