Voyage

by Stephen Baxter

  Today was different. Today, save for the crew and their attendants, there was no living soul within three miles.

  After the press of people at the MSOB – the glimpses she’d had of the million-strong throng around the Cape – to be at the epicenter of this concrete desolation, with the overwhelming bulk of the Saturn VB before her, was crushing, terrifying. Like a glimpse of death.

  Still carrying her air unit, accompanied by only the whisper of oxygen, York followed Stone toward the steel mesh elevator at the base of the launch tower scaffolding.

  Perhaps these are my last moments on Earth. Right here and now, on this blasted concrete apron. Maybe this is indeed a kind of death, time-delayed by hardware.

  Jacqueline B. Kennedy Space Center

  The breeze off the Atlantic ruffled the flags behind the wooden bleachers at the viewing site, close to the VAB. The grandstand crowd was more than twenty thousand, Muldoon was told, including five thousand special guests and four thousand press. There were celebrities, politicians, families and friends of the crew.

  There were one million people within seventy-five miles of this spot.

  JFK was there, in his wheelchair, behind big sunglasses, looking a lot older than his sixty-eight years. The rest of Muldoon’s old Apollo crew showed up, and the NASA PAO people had the three of them line up – Armstrong, Muldoon, Collins – behind the frail old former President, with the Saturn gleaming on the horizon behind them.

  The PR done, Muldoon sat down.

  He was looking east, into the low morning sun. It was a clear, still morning, with a few scattered clouds; the PAO said the probability of meeting launch weather rules was good, more than eighty per cent.

  The VAB was a huge block to Muldoon’s left, the windows of the cars clustered around it glistening like the carapaces of beetles. There was a stretch of grass before him, with its clustered cameramen, the flagpole, and the big digital countdown clock, and on the other side of that the barge canal stretched across his vision. Beyond the canal was a line of trees. And beyond that – there on the horizon, made faint by morning mist – he could see the blocky, blue-gray forms of the two LC-39 gantries. 39A, the pad for Ares, was on the right.

  If he turned to look further to the right he could make out more launch complexes, gaunt, well-separated skeletons: ICBM Row, stretching off down the Atlantic coast.

  KSC had changed a hell of a lot since he’d first flown, in Gemini. Even from here you could see how the space program had receded. Employment here was less than half what it had been then. The launch complex he’d flown Gemini from, LC-19, was still there – used for unmanned Titan launches now – but only ten complexes out of twenty-six at KSC remained operational. The launch pads rotted, the gantries had rusted and were pulled down, and NASA executives let local scrap merchants bid to take away the junk.

  But Complex 39A was still there. Once, he’d flown out of there on Apollo. And now the Ares stack was there, assembled and ready to fly.

  Behind Muldoon’s seat, two old ladies chatted about the launch parties they’d held over the years in their Florida gardens, as brilliant manned spacecraft had drifted through the night sky, directly overhead.

  NASA had set up a series of press portakabins, and reporters in short-sleeved shirts trooped in and out carrying photocopied mission timelines, and glossy goodies from the contractors. To Muldoon’s left, toward the VAB, the big network TV cabins were full of activity; their huge picture windows shimmered in the morning light.

  Loudspeakers boomed with the voices of the astronauts on the air-to-ground loop, and with updates from Mission Control at Houston and the Firing Room here at the Cape. The Public Affairs Officer intoned countdown highlights. A way down from Muldoon, a girl reporter was fanning herself with a crumpled-up press release.

  Muldoon, stiff and hot in his dark business suit, felt aged, restless, thirsty.

  The mist was burning off the horizon. Now, at 39A, he could see the slim white needle of the Saturn, emerging from the blue haze.

  Launch Control Center, Cape Canaveral

  When he’d first come to work here at the Cape, Rolf Donnelly had found the LCC very different from the MOCR, back at Houston.

  The Firing Room was full of the same computer consoles and wall-sized tracking screens; but there were also sixty TV screens showing the Saturn stack from different angles. And in the viewing room behind the Trench, there was a huge picture window with a panoramic view of Merritt Island, with its launch gantries poking up out of the sand, three miles away. Unlike the MOCR, the Firing Room wasn’t closed to the outside world.

  And at the moment of launch, the Firing Room flooded with real, honest-to-God rocket light.

  The atmosphere was different here, too. The controllers here were independent of the Mission Control guys, by job description and inclination. They were more like blue-collar technicians. The LCC controllers were in charge for the first few seconds of the flight; they were the guys who had to get the mission off the ground by doing the dirty work of the launch.

  It was an atmosphere Donnelly liked. He’d come out here to Florida, bringing his family, soon after the Apollo-N fiasco, hoping to rebuild his career.

  As he’d feared, some of the shit flying around then had stuck to him. Well, he wasn’t a Flight Director any more; Indigo Team was just embarrassing history, and Donnelly’s brilliant career probably wouldn’t look so brilliant ever again. But he was still here, still involved, still with NASA.

  They reached T minus five minutes, and the controllers moved into the final pre-automatic check.

  ‘Guido?’

  ‘Go.’

  ‘EECOM?’

  ‘Go.’

  ‘Booster?’

  ‘Go.’

  ‘Retro?’

  That was Donnelly.

  He glanced at his console. His vision was misty. ‘Go,’ he said.

  Go, by God. Go!

  Jacqueline B. Kennedy Space Center

  Helicopters flapped over the pads: that was Bob Crippen and Fred Haise, Muldoon knew, checking out the launch weather conditions.

  At T minus ten minutes, the countdown went through the last of its planned holds. After that, there were no more holds; and for Muldoon, events unfolded with the inevitability of falling off a cliff.

  At thirty seconds, Muldoon stood with the rest, and faced the Saturn. Save for occasional flags of vapor from the cryogenic tanks, the pad was still static, like a piece of a factory.

  There was a moment of stillness.

  Plumes of steam – from the sound-suppression water system – squirted out to either side of the slim booster. Muldoon could see the last umbilical arms swinging aside. Main engine start.

  Then a bright white light erupted from the base of the Saturn.

  The Saturn lifted from the ground, startlingly quickly, trailing a column of white smoke which glowed orange within, as if it were burning. The booster was a splinter of bone white riding on a lozenge of liquid, yellow-white light – the fire of the Solid Rocket Boosters – light that was stunningly bright. This, the brilliance of rocket light, was what the pictures never captured, he thought; right now the TV images would be stopped down so much they would tame the rocket light, turn the sky dark blue, make the smoke a dull gray.

  The stack arched over, following a steep curve away from the tower: the pitchover maneuver, violent, visible. Already the gantry was dwarfed by the smoke column; it looked denuded.

  The Saturn punched through an isolated thin cloud, threading it like thread through a needle. The surface of the barge canal rippled, glaring with the reflected rocket light.

  Now, after maybe ten seconds of the flight, the sound reached him. There was a deep reverberation that he sensed in his gut and chest, and then a clattering thunder which rained down from the sky above him, in sharp multiple slaps: that was shock waves from the booster engines, huge nonlinear waveforms collapsing and battering at each other. Through that bass pounding he could hear the people around him whoo
ping and clapping.

  Before him, silhouetted in rocket light, JFK raised up a wizened fist.

  Muldoon could feel that he was in the presence of a huge release of energy: it was like being close to a huge waterfall, maybe. But this energy was made and controlled by humans. He felt a surge of triumph, a deep exhilaration … a huge outpouring of relief.

  It was done. And after this last effort, he thought morbidly, he could get to work on pickling his liver seriously. It was a kind of release. No more goals.

  The Saturn arced upwards, its vapor trail leading right into the sun; Muldoon, dazzled, couldn’t see the first staging.

  His vision was blurred. He was crying, damn it. ‘Go, baby!’ he shouted.

  Merritt Island

  Seger had been leading his group in hymns, and handing out leaflets about how Ares was carrying plutonium casks, for its SNAP generators, into space. ST JOSEPH OF CUPERTINO IS THE PATRON SAINT OF ASTRONAUTS. JOIN WITH US IN PRAYER …

  But they were mainly ignored by the crowds around them on the road, with their cameras and binoculars, their eyes shaded by hands against the sun.

  When the Saturn light burst over the road, the hymn dissolved, as the members of the group turned to look.

  The white needle, clearly visible, had lifted off the ground on a stick of fire. There was no sound yet.

  Seger fell to his knees, dazzled. It was the first launch he’d viewed since Apollo-N. He let his leaflets fall to the dust, and tears stung his eyes. He could see some of his congregation staring at him, amazed; but it was as if he was back in the MOCR again.

  He knew now he’d never left it, really; in fact, he never would.

  ‘This is holy ground,’ he said. ‘Holy, holy ground.’

  Gulls wheeled overhead, crying, oblivious to the lethal noise cascading toward them.

  Jacqueline B. Kennedy Space Center

  Muldoon stayed in the stand until the news came that Ares had reached orbit successfully. When he got to the limousine that had brought him here – in the VAB car park, maybe thirty minutes after liftoff – the vapor stack still loomed in the sky above, a man-made column of cloud, miles wide and slowly dispersing.

  Book 6

  MANGALA

  Mission Elapsed Time [Day/Hr:Min:Sec] Plus 374/14:23:48 Mangala Base

  Through the airlock’s small window, Natalie York could see stars, embedded in a black sky.

  There was Jupiter, high in the sky, a good third brighter than as seen from Earth, bright enough to cast a shadow. And in the east there was a morning star: steady, brilliant, its delicate blue-white quite distinct against the violet wash of the embryonic Martian dawn. That was Earth, of course. The twin planet was close to conjunction – lying in the same direction as the sun – and was about as close as it ever got to Mars; right now it was actually a crescent in the Martian sky, with its shadowed hemisphere turned to Mars.

  The constellations themselves were unchanged from the familiar patterns of her childhood. It was a sobering reminder of what a short distance they’d come: the stars were so remote that they reduced this immense interplanetary journey – achieved at the very limit of human technology, far enough to turn Earth itself into a starlike point – to a child’s first step.

  Today, though, they would reach the climax of this journey, when Phil Stone became the first human to walk on Mars. The MEM had already been on the surface for three days. The crew had had to spend that precious chunk of their stay time adapting from zero G.

  As she’d been warned, York had found herself a few inches taller and a stone lighter than when she’d left Earth. At first, she’d had trouble walking around the MEM’s tight compartments; she’d kept walking into walls and forgetting which way was down. And she had the scrawniest pair of ‘chicken legs.’ Rapid aging, huh, Adam, she thought. You were right. We’re three old people, stuck here on the surface of Mars. But anyhow, chicken legs were all she needed in Mars’s one-third gravity.

  But after three days on the Martian surface, she still felt disoriented, as if the Jupiter-lit landscape beyond the window was just another plaster-of-paris sim mockup.

  When she walked out there, though, it would become real.

  Stone joined her at the port. Stone, like York, was wearing thermal underwear, with his Cooling and Ventilation Garment over the top. The cooling garment was a corrugated layering of water coolant pipes. York had her catheter fitted, and Stone wore his own urine collection device, a huge, unlikely condom. The two of them looked bizarre, sexless, faintly ridiculous.

  ‘Pretty view, huh,’ Stone murmured. ‘You know, Ralph claims he can see the Moon with his naked eye.’

  ‘Maybe he can. It’s possible.’ The Moon ought to look like a faint silver-gray star, circling close to its master.

  Stone had brought over York’s Lower Torso Assembly; this was the bottom half of her EVA suit, trousers with boots built on. ‘Come on, York; enough rubbernecking.’

  She stared at the suit with a feeling of unreality. ‘That time already, huh.’

  ‘That time already.’

  She hooked the sleeves of the cooling garment over her thumbs; the hook would stop the sleeves riding up later. She looked at her hands, her own familiar flesh, with the plastic webbing over the balls of her thumbs; it was the first step in the elaborate ceremonial of donning the suit, and the simple act had made her heart pump.

  She stepped into the Lower Torso Assembly. The unit was heavy, the layered material awkward and stiff, and it seemed to wriggle away from her legs as Stone tried to pull it up for her. She found she was tiring rapidly, already.

  Now she fitted a tube over her catheter attachment. It would connect with a bag large enough to store a couple of pints of urine. There was nothing to collect shit, though; she was wearing a kind of diaper – an absorbent undergarment – that would soak up ‘any bowel movement that cannot be deferred during EVA,’ in the language of the training manuals.

  York planned to defer.

  Now it was time for the Hard Upper Torso. Her HUT was suspended from the wall of the airlock, like the top half of a suit of armor, with a built-in life support backpack.

  She crouched down underneath the HUT and lifted up her arms. She wriggled upwards, squirming into the HUT. In the darkness of the shell there was a smell of plastic and metal and lint, of newness.

  She got her arms into the sleeves, and pushed her hands through; the cooling garment’s loops tugged at the soft flesh around her thumbs. Her shoulders bent backwards, painfully. Nothing about this process was easy. Still, these suits were a hell of a lot simpler than the old Moon suits; the Apollo crew had had to assemble their suits on the lunar surface, connecting up the tubes which would carry water and oxygen from their backpacks.

  Her head emerged through the helmet ring. Stone was grinning at her. ‘Welcome back.’ He pulled her HUT down, jamming it so that it rubbed against her shoulders, and guided the metal waist rings of the two halves of the suit to mate and click together.

  Now she helped Stone don his suit.

  York and Stone had already been inside the cramped airlock for two hours. Challenger’s atmosphere was pressurized to seventy per cent of Earth’s sea level, with a mix of nitrogen and oxygen, but to stay flexible their suits would contain oxygen only, at just a quarter of sea level pressure. So York and Stone had had to pre-breathe pure oxygen to purge the nitrogen from their blood.

  It was a tedious ritual. And EVAs on Mars could last only three or four hours, at most. Apollo backpacks had been capable of supporting seven hours of surface working. But Mars’s gravity was twice as strong as the Moon’s, and Mars suits had to be proportionately lighter, and could therefore only sustain much briefer EVAs. There would also have to be a long tidy-up period after each EVA: the suits would have to be vacuumed clean of Mars dust, which was highly oxidizing and would play hell with their lungs if they let it into Challenger.

  The brief EVAs, with the surrounding preparation and cleanups and anti-contamination swabbing,
were going to occupy most of each exhausting, frustrating day on Mars.

  York fixed on her Snoopy flight helmet, and over the top of that Stone lifted her hard helmet with its visor, and twisted it into place against the seal at her neck.

  The last pieces were her gloves; these were close-fitting, and snapped onto rings at her wrists.

  Stone flicked a switch on her chest panel, and she heard the soft, familiar hum of pumps and fans in the backpack, the whoosh of oxygen across her face. He rapped sharply on the top of the helmet, and held up a gloved thumb before her clear faceplate. She nodded out at him and smiled.

  She held up her arm; there was a reflector plate stitched into her cuff, allowing her to see the panel on the front of her chest which gave her a readout of oxygen, carbon dioxide and pressure levels, and various malfunction warnings. She could see her oxygen pressure level stabilizing.

  Stone tested out the radio link. ‘Hi, Natalie. Able Baker Charlie …’ His voice sounded soft and tinny, echoed by muffled sound carried through the thick glass of her faceplate.

  She checked the small plastic tubes protruding from her helmet’s inner surface; she sipped out little slugs of water and orange juice. The OJ was okay, but the water was too warm. It didn’t matter. She pushed her suit’s internal pressure up to maximum, briefly, to test for leaks. She fixed her little spiral-bound EVA checklist to her cuff.

  When they were through with the suit checkout they studied each other. Stone’s suit was gleaming white, with bright blue Mars overboots, and the Stars and Stripes proudly emblazoned on his sleeves.

  Stone asked: ‘Are we done?’

  She was sealed off from Challenger, now: locked inside her own, self-contained, miniature spacecraft. She took a deep breath, of cool, blue oxygen. ‘Yes. Let’s get on with it.’

  ‘Roger.’ He looked away from her to talk to Gershon, who was up in the ascent stage. ‘Ralph, we’re waiting for a Go for depress on time.’