Voyage

by Stephen Baxter

  He used his attitude controller to tip up the MLTV until the numbered marking on his windshield overlying the target matched the number displayed by the computer on the CRT. ‘Thirty-eight,’ he called out to Curval.

  The MLTV started to float toward the target. Now, the PGNS program was computing a trajectory to take him to the ‘three’ – or rather, to a position just above it.

  ‘I don’t know the math behind it,’ Curval said, ‘but you got to know the basics, Ralph, to follow the logic of this thing, here.’

  ‘I know it.’

  ‘The PGNS works by the same system, basically, as the old Lunar Module. And there’s enough equipment on the MLTV, a computer and a radar, to let you do a complete Powered Descent. What you have is your computer taking your current position and velocity, and your target vector – which will be hovering, just above the ground – and it works out a nice smooth curve between the two for you to follow. Every couple of seconds, it recomputes, and figures out another curve. And the numbers it flashes up on the CRT tell you where to look on your reticles, and you should see your computed landing site right there, behind the mark.’

  ‘I got it.’ He swept across the tarmac, smooth, easy.

  ‘If you want to change the landing site you just use your attitude control to swivel and point your window, and the PGNS starts recomputing. You can set to ATTITUDE HOLD and just glide for a while, if you like. And you can change your down velocity by –’

  ‘I know it, Ted. I –’

  Now York came on the line. ‘Ralph. It’s Natalie. I think you ought to pull out.’

  ‘Huh? Why?’

  ‘You’re coming in too fast. Too low.’

  He checked over the crude instrument panel. Everything looked fine to him. It was true he was coming in low and fast, but that was intentional; he knew Curval’s gassing hadn’t left him a lot of time, and he didn’t want to run out of fuel. ‘What’s your problem, York?’

  ‘I think you’re going to overload the PGNS.’

  ‘Come on. Everything up here is sweet as a nut.’

  ‘It’s not as simple as that, Ralph.’ She started talking about best-fitting polynomials and higher-order curves, and a lot of other crap that went right over Gershon’s head.

  He just tuned her out.

  He watched the tarmac roll away under him. He swept along, the PGNS working smoothly; he barely needed to touch his controls. He felt a surge of success, of achievement. Here’s something else I can do, ma. Another step on the long fucking ladder I’m climbing to Mars.

  He’d just let her land, this first time through. He’d made his point; he didn’t want to antagonize Curval too much. Maybe he could persuade Curval to get the MLTV refueled and he could take her up again. Next time he’d try changing the landing site a couple of times.

  That big old ‘three’ started to loom up toward him, upside down as he looked at it, slightly obscured by the dust his rockets and the jet were kicking up.

  Now the MLTV tipped itself back, to slow his forward velocity. He checked his numbers; the CRT display evolved smoothly to match what he saw through his plexiglass screen.

  The MLTV started to drop down as the auxiliary thrusters throttled themselves back.

  Maybe that dip down was a little sharp.

  York was still yammering in his ear. He needed to think. He watched his trajectory and tried to visualize where he was going.

  Something was wrong, for sure. He was coming down too quickly.

  He let another couple of seconds wear away, checking his instinct. Yes: his trajectory was a tight downward curve that would bring him to the ground maybe a hundred yards short of the ‘three.’

  Well, so what? Maybe the PGNS was out by a little; maybe all these damn reticles on the window needed recalibrating. If he came to a smooth halt in mid-air, but short of his target, he could blame fucked-up equipment …

  But he wasn’t coming to any smooth halt. The lift rockets were cutting right back, and he was starting to fall, hard, toward the ground.

  York and Curval were both shouting at him.

  He watched the ground explode toward him, resolving into unwelcome detail, bits of dirt and dust and concrete ridging highlighted by the low morning sun.

  He pushed the button to disable the automatics.

  He didn’t waste time trying to straighten up the MLTV’s attitude; instead he just throttled up the turbofan jet and let it push him away from the ground. He felt a surge of acceleration, a good crisp couple of G, strong enough to keep him away from Earth’s unwelcome clutch.

  He pulled up maybe a hundred feet from the ground. He throttled back the turbofan, and landed softly.

  York ran toward the downed MLTV.

  Technicians in white protective suits surrounded the trainer. Ralph Gershon had already climbed out. His hair had been compressed flat by his flight helmet, and his face, released now from behind the visor, was round and shining with sweat. His eyes were bright red, she guessed from the dose of peroxide he’d taken earlier.

  ‘You asshole, Gershon,’ Curval said. ‘I told you that if you wrecked the trainer –’ Curval towered over Gershon, his hands bunched into heavy fists. He started to chew out Gershon.

  In a way the anger was justified, York knew; if Gershon, with his gung-ho heroics, had got himself killed, or smashed up a key piece of equipment like the MLTV, he could have put the whole program back a long way. York decided Gershon needed the bawling out, and she let it run on for a couple of minutes.

  Then she stepped forward, putting herself between the two of them. ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘none of it was Ralph’s fault.’

  Curval turned to face her, still high on his anger.

  ‘It was the landing program. I think it has a bug, Ralph. It nearly killed you.’ She turned to Curval. ‘We can prove it by running Ralph’s trajectory through the sims a couple of times.’

  Curval said, ‘What the hell do you know about programming?’

  She sighed. ‘Not a hell of a lot. But I’m the big-brained, tight-assed college girl, remember? It’s not my field, but I’ve done enough math to know how routines like the PGNS work.

  ‘Look.’ She mimed the MLTV coming down. ‘The PGNS tries to fit a smooth curve between your position and velocity, at any time, and your destination. But it isn’t magic. It’s just math. And it has its limitations.

  ‘The curves the program uses are polynomials. Smooth curves, with wiggles. The higher the order of the polynomial, the more the curve will wiggle about. You don’t have an infinite choice of curves; it’s like trying to fit a template out of a fixed set to suit the job. And the more complicated the data you feed the program, the more the polynomial will have to wiggle to fit your data points. You see?’

  ‘So why is this bad?’ Gershon asked with a kind of fake innocence. ‘And why do I need to know about it?’

  She struggled to keep her patience. ‘Because the program doesn’t know the ground is there. It’s not like a human pilot, Ralph. It’s really pretty dumb. All PGNS is doing is fitting a curve to two positions in space. It doesn’t care how much the curve wiggles in between. And if one of those oscillations happens to carry you down into the ground, and up again –’

  Curval whistled. ‘So because Ralph was flying low and fast –’

  ‘The polynomial solutions, the best the PGNS could come up with, were high order. Full of wiggles.’

  ‘Helicopter experience,’ Gershon muttered.

  York was confused by the non-sequitur. ‘Huh?’

  ‘Helicopter experience. That’s a nice bird, and it’s easy enough to fly. But it goes against everything, every instinct you build up flying a plane.’ He obviously hadn’t listened to her. Or maybe he had taken in what she’d said, as much as he felt he needed to know, and had moved on to his next thought, the next step of his inexorable approach to Mars. ‘If that’s the way the MEM is going to handle, anybody with a lot of chopper proficiency is going to have an edge. That’s obvious.’

&n
bsp; ‘And you have, I suppose?’

  ‘No. But I will soon.’

  His helmet under his arm, he stalked off across the tarmac, short, purposeful, bristling with determination, back toward the MLTV.

  Curval scratched the back of his crew-cut head. ‘What a day. What an asshole.’

  Maybe, York thought. But he looks to me like an asshole who is going to Mars.

  November, 1983 Newport Beach

  As he walked into the low fieldstone building that served as office space for Columbia’s executives, Gershon could all but smell the tension in the air.

  The CARR was to be held in a big bleak conference room here. The CARR, the Contractor’s Acceptance Readiness Review, was a major event in the life of a spacecraft, the moment when it was judged to have met the specifications of the contract and became the property of the United States government. And since Spacecraft 009 was the first MEM designated for a manned mission – the man-rating D-prime flight – the pressure on Columbia Aviation to get this CARR right was intense.

  There were a dozen senior NASA managers, and a lot of the top people from Columbia involved in the project: Chaushui Xu, Bob Rowen, Julie Lye and others. People Gershon had got to know well.

  But the CARR was starting late.

  JK Lee, the chairman for the day, hadn’t turned up for work yet. In fact, the word was, he hadn’t shown up at all since Friday afternoon; here it was Monday morning, and everyone knew that Lee normally worked right through the weekend. Gershon felt vaguely disturbed. This sure as hell wasn’t like Lee.

  Gershon got himself a coffee and a bag of peanuts from one of the ubiquitous vending machines.

  Without a single article having yet left the ground for a flight test, the MEM program was suffering very visible delays and failures and cost overruns. Columbia was coming in for a huge amount of criticism: from NASA, from the Congress, from other subcontractors.

  In fact Gershon knew that Joe Muldoon had gotten so impatient with what he saw as lax management of the project that he’d ordered a ‘tiger team’ review of the whole thing. It was a technique NASA had borrowed from the Air Force. The tiger team, led by Phil Stone, had a free hand to descend on Columbia’s plant and rake through any and all aspects of the operation. Gershon knew that the tiger team was likely to be here today, even in the middle of the CARR review; and their draft summary report was all but completed. This, and the CARR, were in addition to the usual review process, which might involve as many as four hundred NASA staff out here at Newport, looking over the shoulders of the Columbia staff. It all added to the pressures, already barely tolerable, on JK Lee and his people.

  Now JK Lee came bustling in at last, his tie on crooked, a fat stack of papers under his right arm. He was holding his left arm a little stiffly, Gershon thought. He dumped his papers on a lectern at the front of the room, and spent a few minutes glad-handing some of the NASA people.

  Then he went up to the lectern and called for order.

  ‘Okay,’ he opened. ‘This is the CARR for Spacecraft 009. It’s a meeting specifically concerned with 009 and its suitability to leave the plant, here, and begin the checkout procedures and booster mating procedures down at the Cape. We should try not to get ourselves tangled up with design changes; we’re concerned with the specific checkout of this spacecraft as it is presently configured.’

  He faced his audience. ‘Now, it’s not a meeting where I want to see us bring up old bitches. We know the ship has been moving slowly. I acknowledge that. In fact it’s still not completely through all of its tests, so the CARR is in that sense somewhat provisional. But I intend to go ahead with it anyway …’

  There was some grumbling at that, but nobody protested out loud.

  Gershon picked up his thick briefing papers.

  Under Lee’s bustling chairmanship, the meeting began to work its way through the list of problems. Most of them were minor, and had been hashed over in previous sessions. Lee tried to keep the discussion short on each point, cutting off arguments and summarizing the mood of the group in a series of Action Responses for each itemized problem.

  Even so, the list of items to be reviewed was so long that it was soon obvious to Gershon that the CARR was going to go on for many hours; maybe it wouldn’t even finish that day.

  Still, Lee was in good form today, Gershon thought. He was hyped up, but he took them briskly through the items. He arbitrated disagreements, joking and laughing. It made for a good atmosphere, relaxed and constructive and with plenty of humor.

  But Lee still seemed to be having trouble with that left arm of his. He rubbed it frequently, up around the armpit, and he was having difficulty standing for long periods.

  Lunch was a finger buffet. Gershon gulped down a quick plateful. Lee sought him out, and invited him to take a walk around the plant. Gershon appreciated that, and accepted. Right now it might have been more politically astute for Lee to be oiling up to the NASA bigwigs. And Gershon hadn’t exactly been uncritical of Columbia, over the years. But Lee had evidently never forgotten the favor that Gershon had done him, by pushing the MEM RFP his way in the first place.

  They reached the Clean Room. Here, the four flight test articles were being assembled, in antiseptic conditions. Lee and Gershon had to sign in, and they had to put on white coats and soft plastic overshoes and tuck their hair inside little plastic caps with elasticated brims. They were given strict instructions by the foreman to keep to the marked paths, and away from the spacecraft if you please.

  The Room stretched off in all directions, white-walled and illuminated by brilliant fluorescents. Clusters of workmen, all kitted out in soft hats and overshoes, toiled at huge pieces of equipment. There was a soft murmur of conversation, a clank of metal on metal, a whir of machinery. Huge winches and cranes dangled from the reinforced roof, empty and potent.

  The Clean Room reminded Gershon more of a sculptor’s foundry than a factory; there was no sense of the routine here. Only a handful of MEMs would ever be built, and so everything here was new, special, a one-of-a-kind.

  And in the middle of all this, four conical shapes were starting to emerge, as if crystalizing from some superconcentrated solution. They looked like religious artifacts, Gershon thought, like four pyramids in a row, with their silvery, shining skins punctured by mysterious nozzles and inscribed windows.

  This was the mark of Lee’s achievement, Gershon reflected. Amid all the management chaos – and blizzards of changes, and balky subcontractors, and awkward customers, and engineering unknowns, and cost overruns – JK Lee was creating something magical: four Mars ships, coalescing on a factory floor in Newport Beach.

  Beside each of the cones there was a sign: This is a Manned Spacecraft. Your PRIDE – Personal Responsibility In Daily Effort – will ensure their safe return.

  Lee grinned. ‘Something I stole from McDonnell,’ he said. He kept on rubbing his arm, and he looked drawn and tired, with none of the intense energy Gershon had come to associate with him. Maybe the CARR was taking it out of him.

  They stopped alongside one of the four glittering spacecraft. ‘Spacecraft 009,’ Lee said. ‘The subject of the CARR today; the first MEM intended to carry a crew. How about that.’

  The MEM loomed over Gershon, all of thirty feet tall, like some fat metal teepee. The shining heat-resistant skin was incomplete in many places, and he was able to see the subsystems in the interior, exposed as if this was some big cutaway model.

  He could make out the overall layout of the ship. There was the slim shaft of the ascent stage at the axis of the teepee – a spacecraft buried within a spacecraft – with the angular, truncated crew cabin at its tip. And there at the base of the MEM was the fat half-torus that was the surface shelter, with the curving access tunnel snaking upwards to the ascent stage cabin at the top of the stack. And opposite the shelter, balancing its weight, were propellant and oxidant tanks: big spheres for the descent stage, squat cylinders for the ascent stage, grouped in an asymmetrical cluster like big s
hining berries.

  A service platform, on wheels, had been set up beside the MEM. Corrugated walkways snaked over from the platform into the interior of the MEM, and Gershon could see workmen in white coveralls on their bellies in there, laboring over wiring, control panels, ducts and pipes, like little worms crawling around inside the gleaming machine.

  Gershon ducked down to get a view of the interior of the surface shelter. He could see the big storage lockers, which would hold the Mars surface suits and EVA equipment. The pale green walls of the shelter were encrusted with control panels, twenty-four of them, and five hundred switches. There were warning lights everywhere. Here and there loose wiring spilled out of an open panel, but some of the panels and lights were already operational, and they glowed softly, sending complex highlights off the experiment tables and science equipment.

  Gershon could have drawn this layout blindfolded. After so many years with Columbia, so many hours in simulators here and at the Cape and Houston, he knew the position of every damn switch. He could even lay claim to have designed half the panels he saw from here.

  There was a scent of wiring, of lubricant, of ozone, of fresh-milled metal. The MEM was unfinished, but it had a live feel to it, much more so than any simulator. It was like the cockpit of a new, gleaming aircraft.

  And it was homely. It was the kind of den Gershon would have loved to have owned as a kid, a mixture of workshop, radio station and clubhouse.

  He would have no trouble living in here for a month, on Mars, he realized now; no trouble at all.

  If he got himself the chance.

  There was some kind of commotion going on, and Gershon straightened up to see.

  Jack Morgan stalked down toward Lee and Gershon with a document in his hand. ‘JK! Have you seen this?’

  Gershon recognized the document as a draft summary of Phil Stone’s tiger team review of the MEM program. It was a photocopy marked ‘Confidential’; Gershon guessed that some sympathizer inside NASA had leaked it to the Columbia people.