Voyage

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘Maybe. Fifty thousand feet.’

  ‘Banking for fourth roll.’

  The plaster of paris plain, unobscured now by the fake plasma glow, tipped over again.

  ‘Okay, coming out of the roll. Coming out … come on, baby … coming out of the roll … Shit.’

  Here it comes, York thought. Every sim, they were out to get you somewhere. Her stomach contracted.

  The attitude indicator was tumbling. Gershon worked his controls and snapped through emergency checklists. ‘The aerosurfaces are biting. But just not enough. Fuck. What’s going on?’

  York glanced out of her window. Gershon couldn’t get out of the roll, and the landscape had tilted up through more than ninety degrees, now; the biconic, in the imagination of the computer, had almost tipped over completely.

  ‘Recommend you abort,’ the SimSup said calmly, breaking his radio silence.

  ‘Screw you,’ Gershon said. He kept working through his lists, checking instruments, snapping switches.

  This is what pilots do, at times like this, York realized. Work through the book. Keep it logical, but move fast. Try A. If it doesn’t work, try B. If it doesn’t work, try C …

  But now the plaster landscape was upside down completely, the fake craters and canyons like a crimson roof above them.

  York was shocked to find that only seconds had elapsed since the first sign of the problem. That was all you were granted: seconds, to figure out the underlying cause of what could be a complex, multiple failure.

  There was virtually no chance of succeeding.

  If anything went wrong, you had to get out of there, more or less immediately. Or you’d die. The equation was as simple, as finely balanced, as that.

  ‘Ralph, we have to hit abort.’

  Gershon didn’t even bother to reply; he just kept working feverishly.

  The landscape tilted further, visibly coming closer. The biconic was starting to go into a hypersonic spin.

  ‘Hit abort,’ she told Gershon again. ‘Christ, Ralph, once we go into a spin we’re through.’

  The light in the cabin flickered as the fake Martian sky hurtled past the window. She had a sudden, comical image of a little TV camera on its robot arm spinning around over a plaster of paris floor.

  If this were for real, my head would be shaking now, battering against the helmet, my inner ears coming apart from Coriolis forces. If this were for real the craft would start to break up, maybe before I lost consciousness.

  ‘MEM, we recommend you abort. We recommend –’

  ‘Ralph! Jesus Christ! Ralph!’

  There was a shudder, a crunch, a puff of white powder.

  The landscape froze in place.

  ‘Welcome to Mars,’ the SimSup said dryly. ‘We’re just figuring out the size of the crater you made.’

  ‘Fuck,’ Gershon said. He pulled off his helmet and threw it across the fake cabin.

  The two of them clambered out of the back of the simulator. From outside it looked like the nose of a small light aircraft, a cockpit section roughly sheared off, with wires and umbilical cables dangling from the gaping rear.

  The technicians were grinning at them. ‘Hey, Ralph, you busted our camera. Flew it right on down into the plaster of paris. How about that.’

  Gershon wasn’t laughing. He confronted York. He pointed a gloved finger at her face. ‘Don’t you ever give me orders when we’re flying.’

  She was amused rather than disquieted; she’d seen such tantrums before. Most of the time she was able to cope with Gershon, and he seemed prepared, in his rough way, to accept her as an equal in exercises like this. Even though he’d lectured to her, back when she was an ascan. Then, every so often, he would blow his stack like this.

  ‘Orders? Me? You’re the pilot, Ralph.’

  ‘Don’t you fucking forget it.’ And he went stalking off for the wake.

  Phil Stone came strolling up to her, dressed in a light blue coverall, his hands in his pockets. ‘Don’t take it personally.’

  ‘I don’t.’ York shrugged, and began to pull off her gloves. ‘Pretty soon he’ll be bawling out the techs. And then the SimSup. And then you, and … Bawling his way up the chain of command. I was just the first one to hand, the place to start. He hates to fail.’

  ‘He didn’t fail,’ Stone said. ‘That failure wasn’t recoverable.’

  ‘That hypersonic spin –’

  ‘I wrote the book about hypersonic spins,’ he said, and she suspected he had a war story behind that somewhere. ‘I know about the spin. But even before that point, you couldn’t have got out of it.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘You don’t want to wait for the wake?’ The wake was the long, harrowing official debrief.

  ‘Just give me the headline.’

  ‘Your nose RCS thrusters started firing. Just as you went into that fourth roll reversal. The aerosurface couldn’t handle the additional torque.’

  She thought about that. ‘But that firing didn’t show up in the instruments. And besides, it’s impossible for the RCS to fire at that point. We’d dumped the fuel.’

  ‘You thought you had.’ He grinned. ‘Just one damn thing after another, huh?’

  ‘Christ.’ She shoved her gloves into her helmet. ‘Sometimes I think these guys want us to fail.’

  ‘No. But you have to fail, a hundred times maybe, so you can succeed the one time when you need to. Besides, this is the place to do it. Nobody ever got killed in a sim. Anyhow, this was primarily a proving flight for the biconic design, not for the pilots.’

  That was true, York reflected. The biconic sim was so unpopular, in fact, that only real sim hounds, people desperate to rack up some sim time, any sim time, in order to get a better seat in the crew rotation, would consider working on it.

  People like Natalie York and Ralph Gershon.

  Stone said now, ‘And I don’t think this thing is ever going to fly. There’s too damn many things to go wrong. The percentage of biconic crashes we get in the sims is a joke …’

  ‘It’s just a shame Ralph doesn’t have that perspective.’

  ‘He may be the best we’ve got,’ Stone said quietly.

  She was surprised to hear Stone say that.

  Stone went on, ‘He kept on trying. Everything he had, trying to pull her out of that spin. He came closer to saving the MEM than I thought anybody could get.

  ‘By the way,’ he said. ‘You did pretty well in there yourself. Calling for abort when you did was the second best option.’

  ‘What was the best?’

  ‘What Ralph did. Come on.’ He slapped her on the back, the pressure of his hand heavy through the layers of her pressure suit. ‘I’ll buy you a coffee before the wake.’

  They walked out of the training building.

  Wednesday, August 12, 1981 Headquarters, Columbia Aviation, Newport Beach

  They flew into Newport News, the night before the presentations: Lee and Morgan and Xu and Rowen and Lye and all the others – even Art Cane, who had decided to top and tail Lee’s presentation himself, to show that the corporation was committed to the bid.

  They checked into the Chamberlain Hotel at Old Point Comfort, near Langley, where the presentations were to be held. Morgan beat a path to the bar, where he started drinking rum: Lemon Hart, a hundred and fifty proof.

  But Lee went to his room with his boxes of slides.

  He’d had a final run-through in front of Cane the day before and he was horrified to find that he still overran, by nearly twenty minutes. So he opened the boxes and began sorting the slides, trying to find something he could cut.

  At about three thirty a.m. Jack Morgan came to the door, thoroughly oiled. He took a flash photo of Lee, with his slides spread out all over the hotel room’s polished desk. ‘For Christ’s sake, JK, put that crap down and go to bed. If you don’t know the pitch now you never will.’

  Lee gave in. He cleared up the slides and got into bed. He even turned the light out, and lay there in
the dark.

  But he could see the slides more clearly than when they were physically in front of him.

  After maybe thirty minutes of this he got out of bed, had a shower and a shave, and started working again.

  His wake-up call came, and when he looked out of the window he found the planet had rotated again, and it had become light.

  Thirty minutes before the Columbia pitch was due to start he went down to reception to meet the others. Bob Rowen was carrying a fat pc. The computer contained the whole Columbia case, split into little chunks and indexed so that in response to questions Lee could get at any point of it quickly.

  Lee glad-handed the others, trying to radiate confidence and surety.

  But suddenly his stomach clenched up, and he knew he was going to be ill.

  Jack Morgan had been watching him, and he dragged Lee off to a bathroom, away from the others, where Lee threw up violendy: a thin, brown, stinging liquid, nothing but coffee.

  Morgan didn’t say anything, but Lee knew what he was thinking. He’d been running on adrenaline and coffee and no sleep and little food for ten weeks now.

  Morgan made him pull down his pants, and gave him a shot in the cheeks from a needle full of something, vitamin B-12 and other crap. But it worked; it got Lee back together again. And in a couple of minutes he was able to walk out of there, smart and spruce and neat and feeling just fine.

  They arrived at the ballroom where the presentations were to be made.

  The MEM Evaluation Board were sitting in rows before the stage: seventy-five of NASA’s most senior people.

  Lee knew many of the members by sight. There was Hans Udet from Marshall, and Gregory Dana from Langley – famous enemies, sitting stiffly side by side – and he spotted Ralph Gershon, skulking at the back of the room. Gershon nodded to Lee and grinned.

  Joe Muldoon was sitting front and center, chairing the session; Muldoon might have become a power in the hierarchy, Lee thought, but he still didn’t look like he fitted the blue pinstripe he had tucked himself into.

  Tension hung in the room like ozone.

  As the Columbia team set up, the team that preceded them was coming out. It was McDonnell, whose invitation for a joint pitch Lee had famously rejected. And among their subcontractor partners was Hughes, who had rejected Columbia’s approach.

  The contrast between the two groups struck Lee strongly. The McDonnell/Hughes cadre was sleek, weighty-looking, all middle-aged white men with slicked-back hair and comfortable guts. Here was Gene Tyson from Hughes, for instance, still stinking of cologne and tobacco, looking like he had stepped off the cover of Fortune. By contrast, Lee was carrying his own slide projector, for Christ’s sake, and all he had to back him up was with this bunch of college kids and a hung-over doctor.

  Lee had actually seen a copy of McDonnell’s final report, the result of millions of dollars’ worth of study. It called for a biconic approach, a variant of the theme Rockwell would be developing. The study was damned clever stuff, and so vast that nobody at Columbia had had time to read it.

  Tyson came over to Lee. ‘Well, JK. I’m surprised to see you here.’

  ‘Oh, we were passing,’ Lee said. ‘So we thought we’d throw something together, and see how it hangs.’

  Tyson laughed, quite good-natured, and he clapped Lee on the shoulder and walked off.

  Now Art Cane walked up to the lectern, slow and dignified and very impressive, and he gave a short speech about the commitment of his company to the bid, and referred to their tradition and values.

  Then Lee strolled to the front of the room, smiling and nodding, and exchanged a brief formal handshake with Cane. He stood at the lectern and called for his first slide.

  The room lights dimmed and the slide came up, right on cue.

  Thursday, September 24, 1981 Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, Houston

  Phil Stone and Adam Bleeker watched her steadily.

  The three of them were in a small conference room that had been turned over to the Ares landing site selection committee. The walls were covered with images of Mars: Mariner orbiter photographs, US Geological Survey maps, false-color stratigraphic profiles, geological surveys. The long tables which ran in rows down the walls of the room were covered by more charts and pictures and ring-bound folders.

  York unrolled a chart and pinned it up on a wall, covering maps and photos. It was a bright, simple, block-color map, with little flags scattered over it.

  ‘Mars,’ she said. ‘In as much detail as you need to understand it for now. Know your enemy, right? This is a geological map of the planet, drawn from Mariner data.’ Actually that wasn’t true; the map was kiddie stuff, too simple to be anything but an operational guide. Useful if you were planning to bomb Mars rather than study it. ‘Now. What’s the first thing you notice?’

  Stone grinned. ‘I see seven little Stars-and-Stripes, and seven little Hammer-and-Sickles, all with labels beside them.’

  ‘We’ll come to the flags. Think about the geology first. Just describe what you see.’

  Bleeker shrugged and said, willingly enough, ‘North and south are different. The top half of your map is pink, the bottom yellow. More or less.’

  ‘Right. The logical basis of geology is that no solid planet is either a homogeneous blob, or a disorganized jumble. They’re all made up of pieces – called geologic units. Each unit was formed in a certain way at a certain time; each has depth as well as breadth and width, and when we do geology we’re always trying to look beneath the surface, to reconstruct the three-dimensional structure that is hidden from direct view. The relations between the units show their age relations, something about the processes that formed them, and something about how far beneath the surface they extend …’

  Stone, surreptitiously, was checking his watch.

  ‘Have I got your full attention, gentlemen?’

  Stone and Bleeker glanced at each other, like guilty children.

  ‘I’m sure you’re just doing your job, Natalie,’ Bleeker said languidly, ‘and we’re glad you’re running the site selection committee –’

  ‘I’m not running it. I’m just on it.’

  ‘Whatever. But we’d have a year en route to Mars with nothing much else to do but study this stuff. Can’t this wait until then?’ As usual, Bleeker sounded calm, rational, reasonable, colorless.

  A year? Yes, but I won’t be there to hold your hands, or make you think. I’ll be light minutes away …

  And this guy was likely to be designated the Ares mission specialist. My God.

  Phil Stone waved Bleeker quiet. ‘Go on, Natalie. We’re committed to the science. You’ve got us.’

  ‘All right. Now,’ she ploughed on, ‘the probes have shown us that in the case of Mars we have two main types of landscape. The yellow stuff in the south is heavily cratered, and looks ancient. And this pink stuff, to the north, is made up of smooth, young plains. The planet bulges out below the equator; most of the south is above the mean altitude, and most of the north is below.’

  ‘You say “ancient” and “young,”’ Stone said. ‘Meaning?’

  ‘“Young” is maybe half a billion years old. The plains are volcanic – frozen lava fields. And the ancient cratered stuff is three to four billion years old. That’s almost as old as the planet itself …’

  Bleeker said, ‘So let’s get back to the flags. I guess those seven Hammer-and-Sickles are the sites the Soviets have identified as prime interest.’

  ‘Yes. You can see –’

  ‘So screw that,’ Stone said easily. ‘Let’s look at the good old American selections. Those two white stripes at the top and bottom of your chart – I guess we’re looking at the polar caps.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I see no flags up there.’

  ‘No. We have to rule out high latitudes.’ Spacecraft arriving from Earth would naturally settle into a parking orbit around Mars with not much inclination to the equator; changing the orbit to reach the poles would take a lot of ext
ra energy. ‘But it’s a shame; the poles are interesting.’

  ‘What are the caps? Water ice?’

  ‘Maybe. The orbit of Mars is more elliptical than Earth’s. And that distorts the seasons. In the south you get a short, hot summer, but a long, cool winter. And the make-up of the caps seems to differ as well. We think the cap in the north is water ice, yes. But the southern cap is probably carbon dioxide – dry ice.

  ‘There are a lot of puzzles about the poles.’ She walked across the room to a blow-up photograph; it showed a thick band of layering in brownish terrain.

  ‘What the hell’s that?’ Bleeker asked. ‘It looks like melted chocolate.’

  ‘These are bands of thick layered deposits, thirty or forty feet thick, that surround the poles for hundreds of miles; they are made up of dust and ice, mixed up, laid down by the Martian winds. The bands tell us that the deposition process must vary, over the years. Or the millennia, anyhow. But what caused the variation? We’ve got three possible mechanisms. First, maybe the eccentricity of Mars’s orbit changes.’

  ‘Why should it?’ Stone asked.

  ‘Mars is a lot closer to Jupiter than we are; Jupiter’s mass is capable of a lot of perturbation. Or maybe the tilt of the planet’s axis changes.’

  ‘I can see how that would happen,’ Stone said. ‘That bottom-heavy southern hemisphere would make a hell of a difference to Mars’s moment of inertia. The whole damn thing must wobble like a spinning top.’

  She smiled. ‘On geological timescales, yes.’

  ‘And what’s your third mechanism?’

  ‘That the heat output of the sun changes, in some way we don’t understand.’

  Bleeker frowned. ‘But that would change the Earth’s climate.’

  ‘That’s right. And that’s why the layering is a good reason for going to the poles some day. Mars is like a dusty mirror, Phil, Adam; every time we look into it, we learn something about the Earth.’

  They were silent for a moment, digesting that.

  York felt pleased with herself. Even if they learned nothing else, if she could puncture their complacency, make them think about the significance of the flight they were likely to take, she’d have achieved something.