Voyage

by Stephen Baxter

  She took a pencil, and signed her name on the back of the wooden door. A little cosmonaut tradition, shown her by Vladimir Viktorenko.

  Then, with determination, she opened the door and stepped out of the room.

  Banana River

  Gregory Dana had stayed overnight in the Holiday Inn. He’d been lucky to get a room. Every motel in central Florida had been booked since February. Some of them were even charging overnight rates for the use of poolside deck chairs. But the Inn management had remembered Dana, and given him the room he habitually used on his working visits to the Cape.

  In the motel lobby, Dana bought up bumper stickers, T-shirts, button badges for Jake and Maria. ARES: I WAS THERE. The youngsters, with Mary, were with Sylvia at Hampton; both of them were teenagers now – and hauntingly like their father – and they would probably be too cool for all this junk; but Dana didn’t mind. Let them save it for their own kids.

  He’d hired a small cabin cruiser for the day, and he picked it up well before dawn. He set off down the river. He was aiming for an anchorage three miles south of the pad.

  He could have got a pass for a grandstand, or followed the events of the launch from one of the NASA centers, of course. But this seemed more appropriate. He preferred to be alone. He needed the space to remember Jim, today of all days – the day when Jim might have been one of three Mars explorers, wadded into the tip of the huge rocket on Pad 39A.

  Anyway, he liked to be on the water. It was a reason for staying in Hampton as long as he had. And he’d always been struck by the siting of this spaceport here at the border of land and ocean. It was as if three elements – land, sea and space – had come together in one place, here where the long line of stark ICBM gantries challenged the erosion of the flat landscape.

  So it was appropriate to be on the water. And besides, he knew he’d have a better view of the launch at his planned anchorage than from the VIP stands.

  He began to thread his way up the channel through the thousands of yachts, houseboats, dinghies, catamarans and kayaks. The waterway was almost as choked as the roads. It was going to take him a couple of hours to get to his vantage spot, but he had the time.

  The sun was coming up, through the low clouds out over the Gulf Stream.

  Manned Spacecraft Operations Building, Cocoa Beach

  The suit room was about the size of a large hotel suite: white-walled, windowless, surgically sterile. There were three reclining couches in the middle of the room. Three orange pressure suits, their empty helmets like gaping mouths, lay on the floor. The white light was dazzling; the room looked like a futuristic laboratory, and the suits were like the cocoons of gigantic, dissected insects.

  Suit techs, in their white coveralls, caps and surgical masks, approached the crew, applauding. Some of the techs wore that gentle, misty look that had followed York around her tours of the country in the last few months.

  After her dorm room and the mess hall, it was the first truly inhuman environment York had entered today.

  She felt her blood pool in her stomach.

  She didn’t want her step to falter. She was grateful for the calm, purposeful stride of Phil Stone, just ahead of her; all she had to do was follow Phil and she’d be okay.

  She was taken behind a screen by a couple of nurses. Now she had to strip down. Her own warm clothes were taken away from her; she watched the little bundle being packed away, and she wondered if she’d see the clothes again.

  For a moment she stood naked, bereft of all possessions, poised between the ground and the sky.

  Her chest was swabbed and a biomedical instrument belt was buckled around her waist, with wires snaking up to four silver chloride electrodes that were plastered to her chest. The little electrodes were cold and hard.

  Now she had to massage her backside with a salve before she slipped on her fecal containment bag, a large plastic diaper with a pee-hole in the base. It was humiliating, but mandatory. If something went wrong in orbit it could be five or six days before she could be brought back to Earth. And you’ll be stuck inside this suit for that whole time. You’re going to have a bowel movement in that time, no matter how much steak you’ve shipped. So wear the goddamn diaper.

  So here was York, beginning her journey to Mars by rubbing zinc cream over her own skinny butt.

  After the diaper she slipped her legs into a kind of jock strap, and then came a tough, comfortable sports-style brassiere, and then a set of underwear, wrist and ankle length.

  She was fitted with a catheter, which led to a tube attached to a urine collection device, a thing that looked like a hot water bottle.

  Now two suit techs came toward her carrying her pressure suit. It was a pristine orange carapace in human shape, its arms and legs dangling, emblazoned with the NASA logo and the mission patch. The techs sat her down and began to load her into the suit.

  The suit had three layers. The inner layer was five-ounce Nomex, soft and satin-smooth against her flesh, and the outer layer was tough Beta-cloth. The middle layer, the pressure garment assembly, was a bladder of neoprene laced with a network of hoses and valves; when inflated it would compress her body with a quarter-G pressure. The suit was fitted out with pulleys and cables and joints, to help her move around when the thing was pressurized.

  To York it was like climbing inside a second body, with veins of rubber, pulleys for joints, cables for muscles.

  She was led out from behind the screen to the reclining couches. Stone and Gershon were already sitting there, side by side. Evidently it didn’t take as long to fit a condom as a catheter.

  Six techs attended her. Two led her to her couch and sat her down, and plugged tubes from metallic blue and red connectors in her chest into a small couch-side air-supply console. They lifted black rubber pressure gloves onto her hands, and heavy boots onto her feet. A second pair of techs lifted her Snoopy skullcap into place, fiddling with the microphone under her chin.

  It was like an extended grooming, she thought. All this touching. Maybe there was a subtext to this preparation, something deep, something reaching back to primate history; she needed to be handled, stroked, before being sent off to impossible danger.

  The last two techs approached with her helmet. It was a big goldfish bowl with a thin metal rim.

  She took one last sniff of the antiseptic air, listened to the murmurs of the techs, felt the faint air-conditioned breeze on her face.

  Then the helmet was lowered over her head. At her neck, metal rasped against metal.

  She was sealed in. The sounds from outside were diminished, her vision distorted by the curvature of the glass of the helmet. The noise of her own breathing, and of the blood pumping at her neck, was loud in her ears.

  Now she had to lie back in the chair and wait, for a half-hour that seemed much longer. Her air-supply console was filling her suit with pure oxygen, purging her system of nitrogen:

  The suit techs fussed around the three of them, checking things, smiling through the glass, their faces broad and unreal. The techs moved through an intricate, silent choreography. They were like workers around three queen ants, she thought.

  Ralph Gershon had a suit tech drape a towel over his helmet, and he lay back in his reclining chair with his gloved hands folded over his chest. He showed every sign of taking a nap.

  When the waiting period was done, the suit techs covered her boots with yellow overshoes, and lifted her up out of the chair. They swapped her air hoses over to a suitcase-sized portable unit, and handed the unit to her to carry.

  The three of them formed up in a line – Stone first, then York, Gershon last – for the short walk out of the MSOB to the transfer van.

  It was an effort just to walk. The weight of the suit would have been bad enough, but she had to fight with every step against the grip of the inflated garment around her legs and waist; it was like trying to walk against elastic rope. It was confining, alienating.

  The irony was, these bulky, clumsy, antiquated, Apollo-style pre
ssure suits would only be needed during the launch phase, and later for the return to Earth. The suits would spend most of the mission stowed in the Command Module of their Apollo ferry craft. The MEM contained suits of a much more modern design for the EVA operations on Mars.

  The halls were lined with people: astronauts and managers and NASA support staff, friends and family, all applauding soundlessly. York had to walk through a kind of corridor of faces, smiling in at her, smeared out and distorted by the helmet over her head.

  They passed Stone’s family, Phyllis and the two boys. Stone stopped, put down his air unit, and reached out. He hugged his wife against the huge, crumpling chest of his suit, and he let the boys grab at his gloved fingers. He ruffled their hair and blew kisses at them. The boys looked tiny, skinny, against the suit’s soft orange expanse.

  But York knew the suit had sealed Stone off from his family; he wouldn’t be able to feel them through the thick, elasticated gloves, nor hear anything of their voices through his helmet save a muffled blur. Inside the suit, the only sound was the hiss of air, the rustle of your own breathing.

  Stone was only inches from his boys, but already he might have been a thousand miles away.

  They stepped out of the MSOB.

  It was not yet six a.m. There were press here, beyond barriers, and she was confronted by a barrage of flashlights, popping all around her. The last photo-opportunity, before they walked on a new world, or died.

  There was a little gangplank leading into the transfer van. She was startled to see Vladimir Viktorenko standing by the van door. He was dressed in his full Soviet air force uniform.

  Phil Stone drew himself up and saluted Viktorenko, and she heard his voice over her headset radio. ‘My crew and I have been made ready, and now we are reporting that we are ready to fly the Ares mission.’

  Viktorenko saluted back. York couldn’t hear his reply, but she could guess what he said. I give you permission to fly. I wish you a successful flight, and a gentle landing. Another little Soviet ritual.

  Stone stepped forward to the van, and let the suit techs help him toward his seat.

  York, in line, moved up to Viktorenko. His smile softened, and he spoke again, silently. Marushka.

  She felt something break open inside her, something she’d been holding in, from the moment she’d woken that morning.

  She dropped her air unit, careless of how it fell, and stepped toward Vladimir. His uniform pushed into the softness of her pressure suit, and his arms circled her back, tightly enough that she could feel his strength through the layers of the suit.

  He stepped back, and she forced a smile. ‘I found Bah-reess. Thank you.’

  He spoke again. He dug into a pocket, and pulled out a little handful of steppe grass. He showed it to her, and tucked it into a pocket on the sleeve of her pressure suit. Then he gripped her arms one last time, and helped the techs guide her up into the van.

  Newport Beach

  It was a fine and clear spring morning.

  JK Lee stepped out onto his porch and sniffed the air deeply; he could smell growing things, grass and flowers and such.

  He found himself coughing.

  His lungs seemed to have gotten attuned, over the years, to the characteristic scents of an aviation plant: kerosene, lubricant, ozone, rubber, hot metal. Now that he’d emerged from that cocoon of engineering, he found himself stranded on a planet whose atmosphere was alien to him.

  He lit up a cigarette, and, behind a gathering cloud of nicotine and tar, he started to feel more comfortable.

  It would be a good day to cut the grass.

  So he went to his tool-shed and started fiddling with the mower, lubricating the blades and checking the plugs. The shed was warm and dark, redolent with the smell of stained wood.

  He could hear the voices of commentators at the Cape, drifting out from the windows of all the houses nearby. The launch was all around him, as if it had soaked its way right into the fabric of the neighborhood. And all the other neighborhoods, right across America, this Thursday morning.

  Jennine called him into the house.

  She handed him the phone. Jack Morgan was calling. He asked if Lee and Jennine wanted to come over to his house to watch the launch over a couple of beers. Lee thought about it, but said no, he wanted to work on his lawn today.

  Actually, Lee had been hoping for an invitation from NASA to go down to the Cape, to watch the launch. It would have been a nice touch. It hadn’t come.

  He and Morgan gassed on the phone for a while about the old days.

  Morgan had quit Columbia now, and had set up as an independent consultant in aerospace medicine, and was making a hell of a lot more money selling himself back to Columbia as a freelance. At that he’d lasted longer at Columbia than Lee, though.

  The frustration of his do-nothing sinecure had slowly driven Lee crazy, and he’d taken an early retirement.

  Art Cane had died a while back, less than eighteen months before MEM 014, his company’s finest product, was due to touch down on Mars. And now Gene Tyson – the smug jackass who had once taken over JK’s own job – was head of the company.

  Anyhow, Lee went back to his mower, and eventually he rolled the thing out into the sunshine, and when he started it up the rattling roar of the petrol engine drowned out the thin Canaveral voices from the neighborhood.

  After a while, Jennine came out again. The sunlight caught the gray in her hair, making it silvery, shining. She brought him a glass of lemonade, and then she took him by the hand and led him into the house.

  The TV was on, of course.

  And there it was, the already familiar image of the Saturn VB stack, a bundle of white needles. The ripple of early-morning Florida heat haze betrayed the distance of the camera from the launch pad. JK picked out the pregnant bulge of the MEM shroud at the middle of the stack, above the fat first stage and its boosters, beneath the slimmer lines of the Mission Module and the Apollo spacecraft.

  ‘Go over there,’ Jennine said suddenly. She had her Polaroid in her hand.

  ‘Huh?’

  She waved her free hand. ‘By the TV. Go ahead.’

  He thought of the lawn, half-cut.

  Then he went to stand by the TV.

  Slowly, JK Lee raised his hand in salute, standing there beside the TV image of the Mars ship, while his wife took his picture with her Polaroid.

  Launch Complex 39A, Merritt Island

  The bulk of the eight-mile journey from the MSOB to the pad was via the regular highway, US One, the main coastal road. This section of the road had been cleared by the local cops, but even so the van, with its convoy of backup vehicles, proceeded incredibly slowly along the wide, empty freeway.

  Stone glared stoically out of the windows, and Gershon’s gloved fingers drummed on his thigh.

  KSC was big and empty, a rectilinear complex of dusty, straight roads and alligator-infested drainage ditches. The buildings were four-story blocks, square, low and weathered – uglier than anything at Houston – with the feel of a government research establishment. In the low morning sunlight, everything was flat and dusty, beach-like.

  Occasionally, beyond the cordon, York would see a little knot of people, regular citizens, waving at her and clapping. She felt numbed, isolated.

  On the eastern horizon she could see the misty forms of launch complexes, the blocky gantries protruding above the grassy beach. Many of the gantries were disused and half demolished, now; they looked like relics, washed up on this scrubby, rubbish land, here at the corroding, entropy-laden margin between sea and land.

  The transfer van turned off the highway, and started down the access road to the pad.

  And suddenly – for the first time that day – York could see the Saturn: the central, gleaming white needle, slim and powerful, with its cluster of four squat solid rocket boosters, the whole enclosed by the massive, blocky gantry, sitting atop the pad’s octagonal base. The assembly was picked out by powerful searchlights, augmenting the mornin
g light. She could see ice coating the sides of the cryogenic fuel tanks, and there were puffs and plumes of vapors emerging from the central column, little clouds drifting across the launch complex.

  The rising sun came out from behind a thin cloud, and splashed the sky with orange and gold. Light washed over the launch pad, and, beside its access tower, the Saturn shone like a pearl.

  The van pulled up at the foot of the pad’s concrete base. The van doors swung open, and York was helped to the tarmac by suit techs.

  Up close, the Saturn, looming before her, had a gritty reality that made it stand out in the washed-out dawn light. It had almost a home-workshop quality: the huge bolts holding it together, the white gloss paint on its flanks. Its complexity, its man-made-ness, was tangible.

  There was a sign fixed to the concrete base of the launch pad: GO, ARES!

  She looked back down the crawlerway to the Vehicle Assembly Building. The VAB was a black and white block, squat on the horizon; it was impossible to judge its size. The crawlerway was a path of big yellow river-gravel blocks running straight as an arrow to the VAB, at infinity; it ran alongside the canal built for the barges which hauled huge Saturn stages up to the VAB. She could see the tracks ground into the road surface where the crawler-transporter had hauled the Saturn to the launch complex; they looked like dinosaur footprints.

  Suddenly it struck her. The event they’d practised and talked about for months was about to happen. She really would be sealed into the little cabin at the top of this stack and thrown into space. My God, she thought. They’re serious.

  In recent weeks York had been out to the pad many times. She’d come to think of the pad as a noisy, busy place, like an industrial site: machines running, elevators going up and down the gantries, people clanging and banging and talking.