Voyage

by Stephen Baxter

  At one point the capcom told the crew that the controllers were plotting to bring the Command Module down in a typhoon, and Gershon suspected it was only half a joke.

  Finally Gershon had got so sick of the problems that he’d taken a little plastic juice-dispensing lemon from the food lockers, and hung it up between the MEM’s triangular windows, in full view of the onboard TV, to show what the crew thought of their new ship.

  All Gershon could hear right now was the rattling thump-thump of the ascent engine’s ball valves opening and closing. The noise was oddly comforting, giving him a feeling of security, that the mission was unfolding as it should.

  The Earth slid away from Gershon, as the ascent stage climbed smoothly up toward its rendezvous with New Jersey, the waiting Apollo; it was so smooth it was a ride in a glass-walled elevator.

  There wasn’t much for Gershon to do. Because the ascent stage engine had no backup – it had to work – it had been made as simple as possible, with just two moving parts: ball valves, to release propellant and oxidant into the combustion chamber. The engine, fueled with oxygen and methane, had no throttle or choke; all you could do was throw the master arm and turn the engine on, and it would just burn steadily for ten minutes or so, just as it was designed, to lift its crew off Mars and back to a parking orbit.

  Gershon leaned forward, resting against his restraints. Through his window he could see the descent stage falling away; it was a truncated cone, with a great gouge dug out of its center. Cables and hoses, cut by the guillotines, dangled. Foil insulation had been blown off the stage by the ascent engine’s blast, and Gershon could see sheets of the stuff floating away, spreading outwards in rings.

  JK Lee was standing in the Viewing Room in back of the MOCR, chain-smoking. Whenever TV pictures had come down from the orbiting MEM over the last couple of days, you could clearly see the little plastic lemon, floating about under the alignment telescope. He could decode that symbol: it was a little message from the crew, from Ralph probably, meant for him.

  But it didn’t faze him, or dilute his elation. No, sir! Sure the crew were having problems, but they had to expect that; combing out the problems was what this proving flight was for, after all. He was a little disappointed Ralph Gershon didn’t understand that, in fact. The important thing for Lee was that he was watching his ship, up there in orbit, glitches or not; his ship, delivered on time and against all the odds.

  Lee felt a huge glow of triumph. It was as if, to achieve this day, he’d had to fight everybody – NASA management, the suppliers, the astronauts, half of Columbia, even his own treacherous body. But he’d made it, and the monument to his achievement was up there in orbit right now, larger than life in the big screens at the front of the MOCR, and on TV sets all around the world. What a victory! Lee had the feeling that nothing in his career from now on would mean as much to him as this triumph, right here, right now. Not even the moment when another of his babies, hatched from the Clean Room at Newport, set its pads on Mars itself.

  He could care less about Ralph’s fucking lemon.

  He laughed out loud, uncaring who stared at him, and hauled out another cigarette.

  Bleeker said, ‘Twenty-six seconds. We’re going to pitch over a little. Very smooth, very quiet ride.’

  Gershon prepared for the MEM to pitch over. Thinking that it had reached five thousand feet above the surface of Mars, the MEM should tip up, programmed to head for a Mars-orbital rendezvous with the rest of the Ares cluster.

  The horizon tilted to his right.

  Gershon, already feeling heavy, was thrown against his restraints.

  The pitch had been right on cue. But the tipping had felt sharper, more of a rattle, than he’d expected.

  And the pitch continued; beyond his window, the cloudscape of Earth was rolling upwards, turning from a floor to a wall.

  Bleeker said, ‘What the fuck?’

  ‘Hot mike, Adam,’ Ted Curval called up.

  They don’t know what’s going on, Gershon realized.

  The shining landscape passed over his head now, and shadows shifted across the banks of circuit breakers. Vapor, squirting from the reaction control system clusters, sparkled past the window.

  But the automatics couldn’t regain control. The spinning speeded up.

  ‘Jesus,’ Bleeker said wryly. ‘It’s a real whifferdill. I need to cage my eyeballs.’

  An orbital tailspin: Bleeker was right, Gershon realized.

  Soon the MEM was twisting through a full turn every second, and Earth flashed past the windows. Sunlight strobed across the cabin, dazzling, disorienting.

  Gershon’s vision started to blur as he searched the instrument panel. Time to earn your flight pay, boy.

  He started throwing switches, methodically trying to isolate the problem. Maybe an attitude thruster was stuck on; he looked at that first. Whatever it was, he had to get the spin killed quickly. The guidance systems were in danger of locking up altogether; he needed to get manual control before that happened.

  He grasped his hand controller and started squirting the RCS clusters, using the Earth as a reference, trying to push against the tumble of the ascent stage and stabilize Iowa.

  For a time the whirling got faster; it was as if the RCS motors were having no effect at all, and he started to feel dizzy. Both he and Bleeker continued to snap breakers furiously. If they didn’t get the MEM under control soon, there was a danger they would both black out, and after that, even if the ship didn’t break up, it would be impossible for the Apollo to dock with the spinning Iowa.

  At last, they got both primary and abort guidance systems shut off. With the automatics offline the RCS clusters started to slow the pitching.

  Bleeker cut the ascent stage engine. The spinning continued to slow.

  Gershon had to eyeball the horizon to judge when he finally got the stage stabilized; his inner ear was shot to pieces by the spin.

  Bleeker sounded strained, as if he was working to keep from throwing up inside his helmet. ‘Jesus. You were right, Ralph. This ship is an Edsel.’

  Gershon kept his eyes fixed on Earth’s horizon; the sense of tumbling slowly receded from his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘An Edsel’s a clunker, but it’s harmless. This mother is downright dangerous.’

  From the ground, Curval told them that Bob Crippen, in Apollo, was already on his way down from his higher orbit to retrieve them.

  August, 1984 Houston; Newport Beach

  JK Lee hung around the MOCR through the rest of the mission, right up until the moment when Bleeker’s crew returned to Earth in their Command Module.

  Outside Building 30, Art Cane was waiting for him.

  ‘Art!’ Grinning, Lee went up to his boss. ‘I didn’t know you were coming out here.’

  In his shirt-sleeves, Cane stood there in the sweltering humidity of Houston like an ancient, denuded tree. ‘I wasn’t intending to. Get in the car, JK.’

  The car, parked in a Building 30 space, was a hired stretch limo, with a bar in the back. It was pleasantly cool, a relief after the heat of the day. Lee got in and lit up a cigarette.

  Cane nodded to the driver, and the car pulled smoothly away.

  Lee eyed Cane. ‘Not like you to be so extravagant as this, Art.’

  Cane shrugged and loosened his tie. ‘I’m an old man, JK. What can I say? I can’t put up with this Texas heat; I need the air-conditioning.’ Cane folded his jacket neatly on his lap, and then put his hands together over the jacket, one on top of the other. ‘Now, look here, JK. You know the pressure we’ve been under.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘That goddamn tiger team thing. And the CARR on 009, and the delays in shipping the bird to the Cape, and those problems with the busted fuel tanks. And now that business in orbit.’

  ‘But that’s all resolved, Art.’ Lee launched into a bubbling description of how the whifferdill problem had already been diagnosed to a mis-set switch in the MEM’s cabin. ‘… When the ascent engine fired, the switch to
ld the abort guidance system it should start looking for the Command Module, to get a lock on for a fast emergency docking. But of course the Apollo was miles away at the time.’ He laughed. ‘So the MEM just started tumbling, looking for that old Command Module for all it was worth …’

  Cane held up a hand, the skin on it so loose it reminded Lee of a plucked chicken’s claw. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘But it wasn’t a crew mistake, was it? I mean, they thought they’d set that switch correctly. We had mislabeled the switch. So it was our fault, not theirs.’ He shook his head, looking gaunt and old. ‘Jesus Christ, JK, how in hell did you let something like that out of the factory? It could have killed those guys.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Art. It wasn’t so serious. It’ll be trivial to fix. All of the problems we had were trivial. Finding problems is what proving flights are for. Now, I can take the D-prime records and transcripts and test results back to Newport Beach, and we can begin raking out the remaining flaws in their hardware.’ He felt enthused, energetic, renewed by the flight of his machine. ‘Why, I want to set a new record, coming out of this. I want 010 to show the smallest number of defects in its preflight checkout of any craft of any generation ever shipped to the Cape. Why the hell not? We’re going to make history, Art. With the D-prime behind me, I’ll hit the next one out of the park –’

  Cane cut him off. ‘Listen to me, JK. There are some things you just don’t understand about this business. I’m not talking about specific problems. I’m talking about –’ He waved his hands vaguely. ‘A cumulative effect.’

  Lee was uneasy, but baffled. ‘Cumulative?’

  ‘Things kind of pile up, one on top of another. It’s an image thing. There’s been a lot of comment about the performance of the Apollo hardware – the proven stuff, which brought the astronauts home flawlessly – compared to the problems of the MEM. Maybe the contract should have gone to Rockwell after all, is what they’re muttering. With talk like that around, before you know where you are you can’t do anything right. Even fixing what’s wrong, specifically, isn’t going to help. When you’re in this kind of mess all kinds of questions get asked. Queries about the basic competence of my company.’ Lee heard frustration and anger in Cane’s thin voice. ‘Once they’ve decided you’re dogshit, you’ve had it.’

  He turned to Lee, his face crumpled with anger and sadness, his rheumy eyes shining. ‘And that’s what’s happened to us, JK. NASA, the Congress, the press – they’ve decided we’re dogshit. That I’m dogshit.’

  The pain in his words tore at Lee. ‘Oh, Christ, Art, it isn’t as bad as that.’

  ‘You know they’re talking again about moving the contract away.’

  ‘They can’t do it,’ Lee said vigorously. ‘You know that. Not without abandoning the schedule altogether.’

  Cane was growing angrier. ‘They’re talking about reassigning a lot of the MEM work to Aerojet, Boeing, GE, McDonnell, Martin, maybe bringing in Rockwell project managers to Newport –’

  Lee laughed. ‘All the usual suspects.’

  ‘This isn’t a fucking joke, JK,’ Cane snapped. ‘Maybe NASA won’t do it. Maybe they can’t. But they’re talking about it. And that’s the point. Goddamn it, don’t you understand any of this? NASA is trying to show us – and Congress and the press – how seriously it’s taking all of this.

  ‘And heads have been rolling in NASA. Did you know that? Guys who’ve been jerking off instead of keeping a hawk-eye on us.’ He rattled off a list of names, people at Marshall and Houston.

  ‘Yeah, but look, Art, those guys are mostly administrator types. It won’t make a damn bit of difference if they go or stay. It’s engineers that count. You know that.’

  ‘But it doesn’t matter what I think. Don’t you see it, JK? It’s all a demonstration of intent. It might seem abstract to you, all a game, but believe me, up on the Hill, it’s real. And now, in response, we have to make our own gesture.’

  And suddenly, through his euphoria, Lee did see; he saw it in a flash of comprehension, all of it. ‘Oh, Christ, Art. Oh, no. You can’t do this.’

  Cane reached out and spread his long fingers over Lee’s arm. ‘I’m sorry, JK. I think I have to. I’m looking at schedule and budget overruns. Shoddy manufacturing practices. A test flight that turned into a fiasco, almost a goddamn lethal fiasco at that.’

  Lee looked at the back of the driver’s crew-cut head, at NASA Road One sliding by beyond the car windows. He tried to focus on the here and now: the leather smell of the upholstery, the air-conditioning’s crisp coolness. But he felt numb, as if he was insulated within some pressure suit, like Adam Bleeker and his crew.

  ‘I almost gave my life for this goddamn project, Art.’ And my marriage. ‘You know how close we are to the finish line, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, JK, I –’

  ‘That close.’ He held up thumb and forefinger a fraction apart. ‘And it’s me who got you there. The whole damn conception, the MEM design based on the old Apollo shape, all of that was mine, Art. And it’s me who’s been holding everybody’s feet to the fire ever since. Now we’ve built it, and it’s going to be the finest spacecraft ever flown. And you’re yanking me out of the saddle, all at the behest of some bunch of do-nothing jerk-offs in Washington who couldn’t find their asses with both hands –’

  ‘Cut it, JK.’

  ‘Who’s going to replace me? Bob Rowen? Jack Morgan, maybe? Or –’

  ‘No. Nobody internal. JK, I’ve decided we need a heavyweight program manager to follow you. A top guy, to step into your shoes –’

  ‘Who? Who are you giving my job to?’

  Cane looked away. ‘Gene Tyson.’

  Lee stared at him, then laughed out loud. Tyson: the slick, fat veep from Hughes who had laughed Lee out of his office during the MEM bid. ‘Gene Tyson. Are you kidding me?’

  ‘Gene’s a fine engineer, and a good man.’

  ‘Sure, Art. But he’s no –’

  Cane looked at him. ‘No what? No JK Lee?‘

  ‘That’s right, damn you. Anyhow, it wouldn’t work. My people wouldn’t work with him. They wouldn’t –’ Betray me.

  Cane coughed, and avoided his eyes again. ‘Tyson has already agreed to take the job. And I’ve spoken to your people.’

  ‘I … you’re kidding me.’

  ‘Morgan and Xu and Lye and Rowen and –’

  ‘And they agreed to go along with this?’

  Cane shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t say they were happy about it. But –’

  But they accepted it. And the sons of bitches never said a word to me.

  ‘Listen to me, Art. Don’t do this. We’ve got a fine ship there. And a fine manufacturing process. All we have to do is fine-tune a few items, and we can keep right on course, keep on doing what we’re doing, all the way to Mars. Nothing needs fixing, Art. I really believe that.’

  ‘I know you do,’ Cane said. His voice was harder now, colder. ‘The trouble is, JK, there aren’t many people left who agree with you.’

  Lee flew home, and told Jennine what had happened. He felt a stab of anger, of resentment. ‘I suppose you’re glad. I suppose you think this is good news.’

  Her tired, slack face showed no irritation. ‘Oh, JK.’ She came across to him and held him.

  After a while, he felt some of the tension leaking out of him, and he lifted his arms to encircle her.

  The next day he went in to the plant. He drove his black T-bird into its usual parking slot, as if nothing had happened.

  At her desk, Bella was in tears. He just squeezed her shoulder; he didn’t trust himself to say anything.

  Inside the office they were waiting there for him, lined up in front of his old gun-metal desk: Morgan, Xu, Lye, Rowen. Their faces were long, and not a damn one of them could meet his eye.

  A smell of sweet-sickly cologne, of stale tobacco, wafted around Lee’s office.

  There – standing behind Lee’s gun-metal desk – was Gene Tyson.

  Lee went straight to Tyson and shook his h
and. ‘Congratulations, Gene. Art is showing a lot of faith in you. You’ve got a hell of a job, but you’ve got the best people in the industry here, and I know you’re going to pull it off.’

  Tyson gripped his hand. ‘I’ve got one big act to follow.’ He sounded sincere, his big fleshy face solemn. ‘I’m going to need your support during the handover, obviously. JK –’ He glanced around the office. ‘You don’t need to move out of here. It’s not necessary. I mean –’

  ‘No.’ Lee released Tyson’s hand; his own fingers felt moist from the perspiration of Tyson’s soft flesh. ‘No, that’s okay, Gene. Just give me a day to get out.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Then, graciously enough, Tyson left the office.

  When Tyson had gone the room felt empty, purposeless.

  ‘Damn it, JK,’ Bob Rowen said suddenly, and his big round moon of a face, under its grizzle-gray crew-cut, looked alarmingly as if it might crumple up into tears. ‘I didn’t want it this way. You know that. The MEM is your ship.’

  Lee took his shoulders and shook him gently. ‘Well, now you’ve got the ball coming out of the sky at you, boy,’ he said softly. ‘And there isn’t a pair of hands anywhere in the industry I’d rather see under it.’

  ‘We go back a long way, JK. All the way back to the old B-70.’

  ‘Christ, it’s not as if I’m going to Mars myself. I’ll even be on site here, most days.’ It was true; Cane had offered him a staff job, a way to keep his rank of vice president. ‘Any time you need me, you know you’ve only got to pick up the phone.’

  Now Rowen’s face did crumple. ‘I know, JK. Oh, Jesus.’

  Lee felt as if he might fold up too. Destructive testing, again.

  He stepped back and clapped his hands. The sound was loud, startling, and they all looked at him.

  ‘Come on, guys. You’ve all got work to do. Let’s get on with it.’