Voyage

by Stephen Baxter

  York felt numb, empty, unable to mourn.

  Peter Priest had died a squalid death, of a cocaine overdose, at age twenty-five. He’d pissed away his life, she thought brutally, and achieved nothing; what the hell was there to mourn in that? And she shouldn’t feel guilty for her absence of feeling. The kid would probably have opposed this heavyweight turnout for his funeral anyhow; it was all his mother’s idea.

  York remembered the little boy who’d gone running around the nuclear rocket plant, all those years ago. What did his death mean, now? Was it somehow linked to that long-ago day at Jackass Flats – to the space program in general, to its obsessive dedication to its goals – to his father’s final consumption by it?

  And how did this new, grisly, numbing event cast light on her own ambiguous relationship with Ben?

  She shouldn’t have come here. But Karen Priest had asked for her specifically: ‘Ben often spoke of you. I know you were one of his good friends. I’d be honored if you would be here to remember Petey, as best we can …’

  Peter, for Christ’s sake. He wanted to be called Peter. Not much of a thing to ask.

  Oddly, Karen didn’t seem as distressed as York had expected. As if she’d accepted Peter’s death as part of the ancient deal she’d made with her husband.

  Sometimes York’s lack of feeling at times like this made her wonder if she was somehow less than human. Maybe her single-minded, lifelong pursuit of her own goals had made her obsessive. Hollow inside, as people perceived the space program itself. She simply couldn’t imagine how it felt to be Karen Priest, to have to attend funerals of husband and son within a few years of each other. Maybe NASA ought to fix up a sim of it for me, she thought sourly.

  The service was over. The party broke up and people began heading back for their cars: battered Fords for the locals, big hired Chevies for the space program people.

  York knew Karen was inviting people back, but she didn’t think she could stand what she was feeling much longer: not grief, but this awful emptiness.

  A man – short, overweight, dark – came up to her. ‘Hi.’ He was neatly groomed, and wearing an expensive topcoat. He smiled at her.

  Although he looked familiar, at first she didn’t place him. She shied away, studying his face. It wasn’t impossible for press people to have got into even as private an event as this; she really, really didn’t want to have to say or do anything that would be quoted right now.

  His smile faded. ‘You don’t recognize me, do you? My God, Natalie. Well, I guess it’s the new uniform –’

  It was Mike Conlig.

  ‘Mike. Jesus. What the hell happened to you?’

  He grinned, and self-consciously ran a hand over his clean-shaven chin. ‘You don’t like it?’

  ‘It’s a hell of a change, Mike.’

  ‘Well, needs must.’

  ‘You still with Oakland?’ Conlig had left NASA after the Apollo-N debacle and moved to Oakland Gyroscope.

  ‘Sure.’ He looked at her, calculating, as if wondering how she would receive his news. ‘I’m doing fine there. In fact we’re making parts for the Saturn VB. Maybe you should come visit us someday.’

  ‘Sure,’ she said vaguely.

  ‘I’ve moved away from the engineering now. Management.’ He laughed, self-deprecating. ‘There’s talk of making me a veep of technology. Can you believe that? And you – how are you?’

  Me? Still playing at being a spacewoman. ‘Oh, fine,’ she said awkwardly. ‘If you read the press you probably know more about me than I do.’

  ‘Yeah. I was pleased for you, Natalie. Pleased you achieved what you wanted …’ He sounded embarrassed, and he backed off quickly into generalities. ‘And it’s good the way interest has picked up in the mission, since your appointments were announced. I follow the news, of course. There has been a lot of hostility over the years, to the Mars initiative, hasn’t there? But now that seems to be reversing. It’s like Apollo 11 all over again …’

  That seemed to be true, she reflected; a number of people had said it to her. Somehow the general, persistent opposition to manned spaceflight had dissipated, if briefly, as people focused on the three of them, the humans who would be making the extraordinary journey. When spaceflight came down from the realms of rocketry and scientific objectives, and turned into something human, people responded.

  But York knew that Muldoon and Josephson and others were already worrying about what would come after Ares, how quickly this mood would dissipate.

  ‘I think it’s because of you, Natalie,’ Conlig said hesitantly.

  ‘Me? How so?’

  ‘Because you’re a woman, probably. And because you’re a recognizable human being, definitely. Not one of those damn inarticulate robots they sent to the Moon. Underneath, I figure, people always did want the space program to do well. To go places. It’s a basic human thing. And hell, we can afford it, when Reagan is talking about spending a trillion bucks on defense. But the cold, inhuman face NASA always puts up turns everybody off. But now, people want you to succeed because you are one of us. You know what I mean?’ Conlig was studying her, his expression complex.

  ‘Damn it, Mike. That’s probably the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.’

  This was the first time she’d seen him since their final fight, after the NERVA thing. It was brave of him to come, she supposed. If her own feelings about Ben were so complex, so guilt-laden, God alone knew what Mike must be feeling.

  But he didn’t seem perturbed. Maybe he’d found some way to rationalize what had happened, his own part in the disaster. If so, she thought, she envied him.

  ‘You should come over,’ he said again. ‘You ought to meet Bobbie.’

  ‘Your wife, right?’

  He did a double-take. ‘You haven’t met her.’ He turned and pointed vaguely to a slim, blonde woman, over by the line of cars. She was holding a child, and she waved back.

  ‘You’ve got a kid.’

  ‘Two.’ Conlig grinned, unselfconsciously. ‘The baby’s not here; he’s with his grandmother. You didn’t know about the kids either. Hell, Natalie. And to think –’

  To think they might have been mine. She turned away from the thought, and Conlig, mercifully, shut up.

  She managed to get away fairly easily. Mike had become gracious.

  He extracted from her another couple of promises to come visit, to tour his gyroscope plant. They parted with a handshake.

  York hurried to her car, confused.

  Conlig had been much more in command of himself than she remembered. All that obsessiveness, the single-mindedness, had dissipated. Maybe it had served its purpose in propelling him to where he needed to get, and had been discarded, like a spent booster stage.

  Conlig looked like what he’d become, she thought: a prosperous, aspiring forty-year-old.

  Mike had started a family. Set down roots. He’d put aside the obsessive, technology-oriented goals of his youth. He’d joined the human race. He’d grown up. He’d become the kind of person she always seemed to look at from the outside, but could never imagine becoming herself.

  So where the hell does that leave me?

  The existence of the Mars mission had distorted the whole history of the space program, she’d come to see. Right now, NASA existed for one purpose only, to land the three of them on the surface of Mars, and bring them home again. Nothing else mattered – not even whatever the hell came afterwards.

  And in the same way, Mars had warped her own life, as if she was a scale model of the greater world.

  Hell, maybe I could have been happy, and a lot better off, as a rock hound for some oil company somewhere. But the red glare of Mars had dazzled her, and to reach it she’d sacrificed everything: her career, her science, maybe, probably her chance of having a family, even her future after the mission.

  Mike Conlig, today, was like an image of the adult she might have become. If not for goddamn Mars.

  As she got into her car, alone, a black depression settled
on her.

  Tuesday, February 26, 1985 Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, Houston

  Building 3 was the JSC cafeteria. York, Mars astronaut or not, still queued for lunch with the rest. She took a seat at a small table by the window. The food was sticky Government issue – smothered steak with rice – washed down with soda.

  The cafeteria was one of the older of JSC’s buildings, a big gloomy room with small windows and ceiling tiles, done in an early-1960s style that reminded her, claustrophobically, of her high school.

  Adam Bleeker sat down opposite her. ‘You mind?’

  She forced a smile. She hadn’t seen him approach. Bleeker’s face was calm, as empty of expression as ever. Maybe he really is like that inside. ‘No. I mean, hell, no, of course not, Adam. Please.’

  He nodded and sat down, with his tray. He had a vegetable lasagne, today’s healthy option; he picked up bits of pasta in his fork and brought them to his mouth. The daylight made his eyes an intense blue, impenetrable.

  York tried to think of something to say.

  ‘You busy?’ she asked.

  He grimaced around a mouthful of pasta. ‘What else? Busier than when I was on the flight, if you can believe that. They’ve got me in the sims more often than I can count.’

  ‘I guess it shows how much –’

  ‘– you need me. I know, Natalie.’

  ‘Look, Adam, I know how you must feel. Your training goes back to the Moon landings, for God’s sake. And to be overtaken by a rookie like me –’

  ‘I’ve been studying space medicine,’ he said unexpectedly. ‘In my spare time.’

  She was startled by the non sequitur. Maybe it showed something about Adam’s state of mind. ‘Really? Why?’

  He eyed her. ‘Wouldn’t you? I never took it seriously before. You know what I’ve found out? Legally, as a spaceflight crew, you’re a federal agency radiation worker. How about that. And you’re covered by Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations, when it comes to radiation doses you receive in space.’

  ‘So what does that mean? I’ll bet if we stuck to the rules, we’d never fly out of Earth orbit.’

  He laughed. ‘Actually, that’s true. In low Earth orbit you’re protected, to some degree, by the magnetosphere. Outside, you’re exposed. But NASA does have an exemption, for “exceptional exploration missions.”’

  ‘So they’ve covered their asses.’

  ‘Yeah. Just like the Air Force. CYA.’ He looked at her, his face unreadable. ‘You know, there is a lot of hazard out there, out of the shelter of the magnetosphere. You’ve got your solar particle events – solar flares, where you hide in your storm shelter – but there’s also the constant background radiation, cosmic rays from the galactic background. And women are –’

  ‘Fifty per cent more susceptible to radiation risk than men. I know, Adam,’ she said.

  His face was distant, inward looking. ‘You know, you can feel the difference up there. You’ll have to experience it, Natalie; I can’t describe it. You can feel the blood flowing through your heart valves, into your vessels. You come home with “chicken legs,” as we call them. All that goes away. But then you’re hit by a kind of rapid aging … You know, Natalie, I’m not the only one.’

  ‘The only what?’

  ‘The only astronaut who’s come down like this. Nobody else on the active list has been grounded specifically because of radiation exposure, as far as I know. But some of the older guys, who flew in the 1960s, are showing up now with osteoporosis. Cancer. They’re turning up in their fifties and sixties, dying from risks you don’t find in the normal population.’

  She felt cold; she put her fork down. ‘But those guys only had spaceflight records of two, three weeks –’

  ‘Yeah. But we’ve spent four billion years adapting to life on Earth. For a while we thought spaceflight was easy. I guess we really do put our lives on the line, right? But then, some people seem to adapt well. They come home with trivial amounts of muscle atrophy, for instance. Maybe you’ll be lucky, Natalie. Maybe you’ll be an immune …’

  ‘Well, if we were in a rational world,’ York said, ‘we wouldn’t have a mission profile like Ares anyhow. The Ares plan is really a relic of the ’60s.’

  ‘Yeah. When the emphasis was just on getting there, not on what you do when you get there. If we were smart, we wouldn’t plan for a thirty-day stopover; we’d look to put you up there for a year. On the Martian surface you’d be relatively protected. On your brief little trip you’ll soak up almost as many REMs as on a Hohmann mission twice the duration, which would earn you five hundred days on Mars. On this one mission, you’ll come close to your legal lifetime dosage.’

  ‘According to OSHA guidelines, right?’

  ‘Yeah. Anyhow,’ he went on, ‘a long stopover on Mars would probably be better for you anyway, to give you time to recover to the effects of the long zero-G transit …

  ‘Ah, hell.’ He pecked at his food. ‘You know, you could say we’re not ready to do this, yet. We’ve been studying Mars mission options for thirty years. Right back to von Braun. And the basic problems – the energy needed to get out of Earth’s gravity well, to cross interplanetary space – none of that has changed. And we haven’t come up with any fundamentally smarter solutions than von Braun’s, either. We’re still firing off big hydrogen-oxygen rockets, because we don’t see what else we can do.’

  She felt pleased, to hear someone like Bleeker talk like this. Maybe the culture was changing here, slowly. But he might have been discussing baseball scores for all the inflection in his voice.

  ‘I can never read you, Adam,’ she said frankly. ‘You know, I’ve often thought the same thing. That we’re not ready to go yet …’

  He nodded, smiling faintly. ‘I figured.’

  ‘But it won’t stop me going, anyhow.’

  ‘No. And it wouldn’t stop me, if they’d let me.’

  ‘You’re not trying to talk me out of it?’ She tried to inject some humor into her voice, but wasn’t sure how successful she was.

  ‘I would if I thought I could,’ he said seriously. ‘Not that it would do me any good.’ He shook his head. ‘You know what was the hardest thing?’ he asked suddenly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘When I had to explain to my boy – Billy – that I’m not going to Mars. Damn,’ he said, and he gazed out of the window at the muggy Houston sunlight.

  She couldn’t think of anything to say.

  He ate a little more of his lasagne.

  Mission Elapsed Time [Day/Hr:Min:Sec] Plus 371/01:32:30

  Gershon gave Challenger’s attitude control rockets a final blip, a squirt to make sure they were functional.

  Solenoids thumped.

  ‘Everything is copacetic, guys.’

  Stone’s face, behind his scuffed faceplate, was set, almost grim. ‘Good. Then let’s get the hell on with it,’ he said.

  Gershon grinned.

  With a clatter of explosive bolts, Challenger kicked free of the rest of Ares. Then came a brief burn of the retropack, the small solid rocket cluster strapped to the base of the MEM.

  The burn knocked Challenger into a new, low orbit around Mars.

  York, strapped into her acceleration couch, tried to relax. Challenger would stay in its new orbit for a couple of revolutions, while the two pilots and the controllers back in Mission Control checked out its systems.

  The MEM’s ascent stage cabin, buried within the conical upper heatshield, was more or less a vertical cylinder, rising up above her. The three acceleration couches were crammed into its base, side by side. She could see, at an angle, the navigation and guidance panels with their big false horizon displays, and the alignment optical telescope thrusting down from the ceiling above her.

  The cabin’s main windows were big triangles, angled to face downwards, so the pilots, when they stood up, would be able to see their landing site. And there was a small rectangular sighting window directly above her, with a matching panel cu
t in the upper heatshield. York stared up at that little window; trapped between the two pilots, she felt like a prisoner, staring up at a small window in the roof of her cell.

  Where the interior of the Apollo Command Module had a warm feel to it – all browns and grays and greens – this cabin was mostly unpainted aluminum, thin and delicate and somehow unfinished. She could see lines of rivets, stitching the thing together. To York, the raw look spoke of a hurried development, a less mature technology than Apollo.

  Through the window York watched Ares recede from the MEM. It was the first time she’d seen the craft from the outside since the rendezvous in Earth orbit. The fat, faithful MS-II injection engine was still evidently the stack’s center of gravity – though the two External Tanks were long discarded – and ahead of it was fixed the slim MS-IVB stage which would brake them back into Earth orbit. The whole of Endeavour, their cylindrical Mission Module with its solar array wings, had been separated from the MS-IVB, turned around and redocked nose-first; the idea was to free up the MEM from its shroud at the Mission Module’s base. Meanwhile Discovery, their Apollo, was now docked to a lateral port, so it dangled sideways from the Mission Module, like a berry from the line of fuel-tank cylinders.

  When Challenger returned to Martian orbit, the MEM would be discarded, and the remaining modules – booster stages, Mission Module and Apollo – would be reassembled, once more, in a straight line, for the burn home.

  The cluster was a collection of cylinders and boxes and panels, crudely assembled – and clumsily repositioned since their entry into Martian orbit. All this orbital construction work – sliding modules through space like kids’ construction blocks – was unnerving, to York. When they separated the Mission Module from the boosters, they were cutting themselves loose from their only ride home, for God’s sake! But she understood that there were backup strategies at every stage, ways they could reassemble some kind of configuration that could tolerate a ride home, even if they lost the landing.