Voyage

by Stephen Baxter

  A few days before the launch was due, they moved out of the Cocoa Beach Holiday Inn and into the crew dormitory, on the second floor of the MSOB at the Kennedy Space Center.

  The Manned Spacecraft Operations Building was pretty comfortable, all things considered. There was a gym and a mess hall. And the crew quarters, tucked away inside what looked like a regular office building, were fairly luxurious compared to a lot of NASA facilities: from a mundane, sterile office, she walked through a locked door into a carpeted apartment with subdued lights, and separate bedrooms for the three of them.

  It was the same apartment in which the moonwalking Apollo astronauts had bunked before their launches.

  Her bedroom was individually decorated; it even had a TV. The three rooms had paintings hanging in them: nudes in two of them, a landscape in the third.

  York got the one with the landscape. She stuck over it her grainy Mariner 4 blow-ups.

  The astronauts were cut off in here. To protect the crew from infection – and to keep at bay the pressure of the media attention – only ‘authorized personnel’ were allowed into the MSOB. That didn’t include family or friends.

  There was nobody York particularly wanted to see, anyhow. Her mother had called, once, and talked about her own concerns. She wasn’t planning to come to the launch; she was going to be filmed watching it by some local TV company.

  But she could see that Stone and Gershon, while relieved to get out of the glare of camera spots, were soon going a little stir crazy.

  This was dumb policy. Why not let families in? Sure, there would have to be some kind of quarantine. But she could see how a little contact with children and spouses could go a long way to calming the soul.

  Anyhow, whatever the merits and problems of the quarantine, to York it was a great relief. When she first shut the big heavy door of her MSOB room behind her, she threw her personal bag on the floor, flopped out on the bed, and slept through nine hours.

  Mission Elapsed Time [Day/Hr:Min:Sec] Plus 371/02:03:23

  Ralph Gershon’s mouth was dry. That was the pure oxygen, pumping through his pressure suit.

  Stone stood to his right, and York, silent, was behind them both.

  Gershon ran over the readouts on his station. He’d already pressurized the descent engine fuel tanks, and he’d called up the right computer programs, and he’d taken sightings through the alignment telescope to check Challenger’s trajectory.

  Houston was silent, listening, so far away they could do nothing to help.

  Challenger had turned over onto its back as it fell through the air, so that its landing radar pointed at the ground. The radar hadn’t got a lock yet. All Gershon had through his window was a triangle of gaudy violet-pink sky.

  Stone said, ‘On my mark, three minutes thirty to ignition … Mark. Three thirty.’

  Gershon set the switch to arm the descent engine.

  Gershon was ready. He was in charge for the first time in the mission. It gave him a sense of liberation, of power. He could make sure nothing fouled up.

  And besides, he’d completed this run a thousand times, in the sims, and in the MLTV trainer. He could do it with his eyes shut.

  Sure you could. But this is Mars, pal. Maybe that big old world out there has different ideas.

  And now, this MEM was going to have to function better than any of the test articles that had preceded it.

  ‘I got a 63 for PDI,’ Stone said quietly. 63: a relic from Apollo, a computer query about readiness to proceed to PDI, powered descent initiation.

  ‘Do it,’ Gershon said. ‘I got go.’

  Stone pressed the PROCEED button. ‘Ignition.’

  ‘Right on time.’

  Gershon felt nothing at first. But the gauges showed him that the descent stage engine was firing up to ten per cent of maximum, smooth as cream.

  Then, after half a minute, the engine reached full thrust.

  He still couldn’t hear anything, but the cabin filled up with a grating, high-frequency vibration. It was uncomfortable, something like the sensation of having your teeth drilled at high speed. Different from the sims already.

  Challenger slid down US Highway One, braking easily.

  ‘AGS and PGNS agree closely,’ Stone said. Stone was acting as the navigator now; he was telling Gershon that the redundant-pair primary and abort guidance systems were agreeing with each other. ‘We’re looking good at three, coming up … Three minutes. Altitude thirty-nine thou five.’ That height reading was still only an estimate from the two guidance computers, though; the landing radar had still not got its lock. And Stone would also be able to read off heights from the altimeter, although that instrument, working on the pressure of the unfamiliar Martian atmosphere, was experimental, and its data excluded by the mission rules.

  ‘Still go,’ Stone said. ‘Take it all at four minutes … We’re go to continue at four minutes.’

  ‘Rager,’ Gershon said tersely.

  ‘The data is good. Thirty-three thou …’

  But now caution and warning lights were glowing on Gershon’s station. The landing radar should be working by now; it should have locked onto its own signals bouncing off the ground.

  But it hadn’t achieved lock.

  ‘Where’s that goddamn radar, Ralph?’ Stone asked.

  ‘Punch it through again.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Stone tried.

  ‘Come on, baby,’ Gershon said quietly. ‘Let’s have the lock on.’ But there was no change. ‘Come on.’

  ‘Does talking to it do any good?’ York asked dryly.

  ‘Shut up, Natalie,’ Stone said, distracted.

  Gershon felt a stab of fury. Other data was still good. Velocity looked fine, and the altitude estimates from both AGS and PGNS were in agreement. But without the radar – and even if the altimeter worked – he was screwed. The mission rules said, No radar lock by ten thousand feet and you abort.

  Stone said, ‘Try cycling the landing radar breaker.’

  Gershon pulled out the radar’s circuit breaker, his muscles tense with anger, and shoved it back in its slot. ‘Okay, it’s cycled.’

  The caution lights continued to show. No lock.

  He turned to look Stone in the eye. ‘Fine day for a landing.’

  He meant: Fuck the rules. Fuck the radar. Fuck Houston; they’re so far away we’ll be on the surface by the time they know what’s going down. We’ve come too far to quit now. I say we go for a landing, by eye if we have to. Fuck it.

  Stone stared back at him.

  Damn it, you cold bastard. What are you going to do? Gershon could feel the cabin tip up around him; beyond his big window, sky and a fine edge of red landscape slid past. Challenger was beginning to pitch up, as it dropped closer to the ground.

  ‘Twenty-four thousand feet,’ Stone said. ‘Coming up to throttle down. Mark.’

  Now the primary guidance program would take the descent engine down to sixty percent thrust. Gershon could feel the thin vibration subsiding smoothly. Right on schedule. ‘That felt good,’ he said. ‘Better than the sims.’

  ‘Twenty-one thousand. We’re still go. Apart from the radar lock. Velocity down to twelve hundred feet per second.’

  Twelve hundred. Aircraft speed. Gershon took hold of his controls. I’m flying, in the atmosphere of Mars. He looked out of his window. The stars were all washed out now, and the sky was a tall dome of brown light. And he could see the ground. It was a rumpled landscape that slid underneath him. Visibility was good: the contrast, the shadows cast by the low morning sun, made everything stand out.

  Challenger was approaching the landing site in a broad sweep from the south west, so it was flying over the ancient, cratered terrain of the southern hemisphere. It was almost like a lunar landing sim, with craters piled on craters, some so old and huge they were almost obliterated by newer strikes. But these craters had sand dunes rippling across their floors, and here was one big old fellow whose walls looked like they had collapsed under a stream of running wate
r. The Moon, it ain’t.

  The landscape was desolate, curving tightly, forbidding. It was an empty planet, no ground support … No runway lights down there, boy. On the other hand, nobody shooting at your ass, either.

  ‘Seven minutes thirty,’ Stone said. ‘Sixteen and a half thou. Coming up on high gate. Still no lock.’

  ‘High gate’ was the point in the trajectory where Gershon should be able to see his landing site for the first time. He peered ahead.

  The designated landing site was just to the north of an escarpment at the mouth of an outflow valley. The valley, according to York’s descriptions, would look like a dry river bed. Gershon had studied the site from orbiter photographs and plaster of paris models until he knew it like he knew his own apartment

  But coming in now, with the sun low, and the ship tipped up still at more than fifty degrees, and the light glinting off his little triangle of a porthole …

  Nothing looked like it was supposed to. The land was complex, tortured, its nature changing rapidly. Every shadow was deep and black, and the ochre-colored surface features seemed to leap out toward him, the vertical scale magnified by the contrast.

  ‘Fifteen thousand,’ Stone said. ‘Still no lock.’

  Shit.

  ‘Okay, Ralph, let’s go over the abort procedure.’ Stone sounded resigned.

  Goddamn it to hell, he’s given up.

  ‘We pitch over, activate the ascent program … countdown to mission abort starts at eight thousand feet –’

  ‘No. Don’t abort,’ Natalie York said suddenly.

  Stone looked at her. ‘Huh?’

  ‘Don’t abort. We may be flying over a radar-dark area.’

  ‘And what,’ asked Stone dryly, ‘is a radar-dark area?’

  ‘Volcanic ash,’ she said. ‘Pumice.’ She was straining in her harness, trying to see the battered landscape out of their pilots’ windows. ‘Low-density stuff; not many rocks. It reflects radar badly. There’s nothing for the landing radar to lock onto.’

  ‘Or maybe,’ Stone said, ‘the landing radar is screwed.’

  ‘Don’t abort.’

  Stone and Gershon exchanged looks.

  ‘Nine thousand,’ Stone said. ‘Still no lock.’

  They’d already bust the mission rules, Gershon realized.

  Stone said, ‘Ralph –’

  And then the warning lights went out. The radar lock had come in.

  York gasped, an explosion of relief.

  ‘Jesus.’ Gershon slammed his fist into his control station. ‘We is fucking go.’

  ‘We is indeed,’ Stone said tightly.

  Gershon twisted over his shoulder to look at York. ‘I guess we flew right on over all that pumice stone, huh.’

  She stared back at him. ‘I guess.’

  He had no idea if she’d just been bullshitting, he realized, about the pumice stone. He didn’t think York was the type to do that, but it was possible. And he also didn’t know if Stone would really have pulled the plug, or let him go on and try to land without the radar.

  He didn’t, he realized, know his crewmates as well as he thought he did.

  ‘Eight thousand,’ Stone rattled off. ‘Down velocity one hundred feet per second. We’re go for the landing.’

  ‘Rager.’

  Gershon took hold of his controls. He had an attitude control adjuster in his right hand – a joystick with a bright red pistol grip – and on his left there was a toggle switch called the thrust translator controller, which would squirt the down-pointing reaction thrusters to reduce the rate of fail. It was all linked up by the electronics to the reaction control subsystem, which would do most of the steering for him.

  He pulsed the reaction control thrusters; solenoids rattled comfortingly.

  He handed control back to the computer. ‘Manual auto attitude control is good.’ He felt a surge of renewed confidence. The radar was locked in and the thrusters were copacetic. When the time came, when he had to take control of the ship for the final landing, he knew now that everything would be fine.

  ‘Seven thou,’ Stone said. ‘Here we go. High gate. Right through that gate.’

  Under computer control, Challenger tipped up a little more, tilting Gershon forward. He stared ahead. Now, speeding over the close horizon, here came what looked like an escarpment, a ridge marking out the edge of the cratered terrain. Beyond that ridge, the land looked different: smoothed over, lacking craters, kind of like mud, like a flood plain …

  And there was a valley under his prow, snaking north from out of the southern plateau. It looked like a gouge in a woodcut, with a big wide crater just to the northeast.

  It looked just like the maps and the models, in the back rooms at JSC.

  Gershon crowed. ‘I got it! I got Mangala! Just as fat as a goose.’

  He grasped the controls of Challenger, ready to land.

  The MEM was standing on its rockets now, drifting over the landscape, like an ICBM trying to land on its tail.

  ‘Three thousand feet. Seventy feet per second. Everything’s go,’ Stone said. ‘Go for landing. We’re go, hang tight. Two thousand. Windspeed ten feet per second.’

  Windspeed. Another hazard they didn’t face on Apollo. But ten fps was low enough not to matter.

  ‘Give me an LPD,’ he told Stone.

  ‘Forty-three.’

  He looked through his window now, sighting along the forty-three-degree reticle, his current Landing Point Designator. He sensed invisible polynomial curves reaching out, in the computer’s imagination, to join him to his landing site, like a smooth glass highway across the Martian air. None of those damned higher-order wiggles this time. Even though it shared the clunky human interface of other Apollo-based systems, the hardware and software was an order of magnitude more powerful than the antiquated shit he’d had to fly on the MLTV.

  Now he could see the site where the computer was flying him, more than a mile away, closing in fast, in line with the reticle …

  Shit.

  Under the guidance of PGNS Challenger was heading for a point a couple of miles beyond the big escarpment, north of the mouth of the major outflow valley, just as planned. But now he saw it close up he could see the land was uneven, scoured out, ribbed with what looked like gravel bars. And there was an impact crater, low, eroded, right in the middle of it all, with a teardrop-shaped island of debris behind that.

  ‘Scablands,’ he said. ‘Natalie, you’re going to love it. Because it looks like you were right. It looks like a fucking river bottom out there …’

  But he couldn’t put the MEM down in that shit.

  Solenoids rattled, and Challenger shuddered. The computer was revising its trajectory all the time, as information came in from the radar. Gershon was surprised how often the attitude jets were firing, though; it was much more frequent than in the sims.

  Stone was still calling out height and velocity readings. ‘Seven hundred feet, down at thirty-one feet per second. Six hundred. Down at twenty-nine. Five hundred forty feet. Down at twenty-five.’

  Decision time, Ralph.

  He flicked a switch to override PGNS.

  He pressed the translation controller, and toggled the little thruster switch to slow the MEM’s fall. Challenger responded smartly to his touch, with a rattle of solenoids.

  Suddenly, he was piloting the ship. The response was crisp and sharp. The thrusters banged, and the MEM pitched forward. He found himself leaning into his restraints.

  Challenger drifted over the surface of Mars, under his command.

  He was aware of Stone’s eyes on him.

  ‘Low gate,’ Stone said. ‘Five hundred feet. Thirty-five degrees pitch. Coming down at twenty-one feet per second.’

  The MEM was still falling, but now it was skimming forward, sliding over the broken, flooded-out terrain. I got to get north. Away from this shit from out of the old terrain. North; that’s the place to be. On the smooth lava plains beyond the flooding.

  Test pilots had an adage
. When in doubt, land long. Ralph Gershon kept on going, looking for a place where he could land long.

  ‘Four hundred feet, down at nine feet per second. Three hundred fifty feet, down at four. Three hundred thirty … Watch your fuel, Ralph.’

  Watch your fuel. Sure. The mission planners had sent him all this way, looping around the sun, to make landfall on an alien planet for the first time, and they’d given him about two minutes’ worth of hovering fuel to do it.

  But this is what you wanted, Ralph. Isn’t it? This is what it’s all been about, all these years. To fly to a planetfall, just like Armstrong.

  He felt his heartbeat pumping up.

  Here was a place that looked reasonable, but when he got close up, he saw it was peppered with big boulders. Another gift for Natalie York, maybe, but a disaster waiting to happen for the MEM. And over there was a smoother area, but it looked crusty to Gershon, with lots of little rivulets and runs. He could imagine a footpad plunging through the surface, the whole damn MEM tipping over.

  He pitched Challenger back again to keep it from picking up too much forward speed. Now he flew over another field of boulders; he banked to the left to avoid them.

  There wasn’t a runway, he thought, on the whole fucking planet.

  Sweat trickled down from his brow and into his eyes; he had to blink to clear them.

  New terrain advanced over the close horizon at him, rushing up toward him, exploding in sharp, unwelcome detail. Still, he couldn’t see anywhere to set down.

  ‘Three hundred feet, down three and a half, fifty-four forward.’

  ‘How’s the fuel?’

  ‘Seven per cent.’

  Shit. He was doing worse than in any of the sims. Except the ones he’d crashed.

  There. A flat area, like a little plateau, off to his right: just a field of dust. On one side there was a field of big old boulders, on the other an eroded area. The flat place was no bigger than a parking lot, a couple of hundred square feet, but it ought to be enough.

  He had his landing site.

  He pushed his joystick. The MEM turned to the right. He lined up his marked window, and locked in the computer. He imagined those invisible curves, York’s magical polynomials, snaking out to join him up to his landing site.