The Tranquillity Alternative (23 page)

Ryer had pulled the pilot’s T-yoke up between her legs; her right hand gripped the yoke while her left hand rested on the throttle bar. “Roger that, Commander,” she said, her eyes fastened to the screens above her head. “On your mark.”

Parnell nodded and lay back in his couch. “Five … four … three … two … one … zero and mark.”

He pushed the button, and felt the massive vessel tremble as twenty-five engines simultaneously ignited, producing a combined thrust of over four hundred tons. There was no roar, yet he heard a dull moan from somewhere beneath him, combined with the strained creak of the fuselage and the faint rattle of loose objects within the bulkheads and fuselage. His couch shuddered as the unaccustomed force of gravity gently shoved him back into the foam upholstery, as if an invisible hand were pushing against him, a hand that grew more insistent as Ryer eased the throttle forward, pumping nearly three thousand pounds of fuel per second from the departure tanks into the engines.

“We have ignition!” he called out.

Roger that,
Conestoga,
looking good.
Vaya con Dios …

He looked up at the monitors. The Moon seemed no closer, yet the Wheel had disappeared from view, and so had Earth’s broad, blue-green curve. He raised his hand against the mounting g-force and pushed a button that changed the view on his monitor; the aft camera, mounted just above the bow, showed a bright orange-yellow nimbus of light surrounding the engines. Beyond it, Earth was falling away, slowly at first, more quickly now, as if it were a giant sphere plummeting into an infinite black well.

For better or worse, they were on their way.

From
Time;
July 30, 1983

A SOVIET SPACE SECRET

COMES TO LIGHT

After 11 Years, A Mystery Is Solved …

And With It, New Doubts About

“Star Wars”

For more than a decade, it’s been one of the most daunting mysteries of the Cold War: why did the Soviet space program, which once rivaled the United States for superiority on the high frontier, suddenly collapse?

At one time, Russian space scientists seemed to be gaining on their American counterparts. They launched the first two-man space station in 1961, then soft-landed an unmanned probe on Mars in 1969, only 11 days after John Harper Wilson walked on the Moon. Shortly afterward, the Kremlin announced that the U.S.S.R.’s primary space objective would be to establish a permanent colony on the red planet by 1980 … and few people doubted that the Soviets were capable of doing this.

Yet by 1976, when Ares One carried the first—and last—American-Russian expedition to Mars, it was already clear that the Soviet Union was abandoning its manned space efforts. Indeed, many observers noted that Ares was largely an American effort, with a few Soviet cosmonauts hitching a ride for the sake of
détente
. The Soviets have claimed that they shifted their technological priorities to solving domestic problems, but this week the truth was finally revealed: a catastrophic disaster, rather than a central policy change, was responsible for the Russian retreat from space.

The revelation came from no less than dissident Russian physicist Andrei Sakharov, who was released from internal exile in Siberia and allowed to return to Soviet Georgia. Unrepentant and outspoken as ever, Sakharov told visiting Western correspondents last week about a 1972 launch pad explosion at the Baikonur cosmodrome at Tyuratam which killed at least two dozen people, including three cosmonauts and several leading Russian space scientists, just as the Soviets were on the verge of achieving a goal which had previously eluded the U.S. Space Force: the development of a man-rated nuclear spacecraft.

According to Sakharov, the Russian spacecraft was designated the G-1, code-named Zenith. Unlike the Atlas-B spacecraft briefly used by the USSF in the sixties, which was composed of a liquid-fuel booster and a nuclear-powered upper stage, Zenith was a single-stage rocket with a nuclear engine. Somewhat resembling a streamlined spaceship from a 1950s sci-fi movie, Zenith was capable of both vertical liftoffs and landings, alighting on tripodal landing gear which extended from its aft fuselage. Eighty feet tall and capable of carrying a six-person crew, the sleek vessel’s nuclear engine was rated at 900 ips (impulse per second). This is comparable to the Atlas-B’s 950 ips, and far outstrips the performance of NASA’s new
Challenger
space shuttle, which is rated at 450 ips.

The top-secret project was initiated in the late fifties, when the Kremlin hoped to use Zenith to beat the USSF’s Project Luna to the Moon. But development of a reliable nuclear rocket proved to be more complex than originally envisioned; it also soaked up most of the resources of the Russian space program. By 1972, though, two prototypes had been built, and in the early morning hours of September 3, Zenith-1 was rolled out to its Baikonur launch pad, where a three-man test crew climbed aboard and awaited final countdown for its maiden flight.

The launch never took place. Sakharov is uncertain about what happened, since he himself was not present at the time, and exact details of the disaster are still a closely guarded secret. Nonetheless, Sakharov believes that the main fuel tank ruptured during fueling and its hydrogen fuel ignited. The result was a massive non-nuclear explosion which not only destroyed Zenith-1 and killed its crew, but also snuffed out the lives of scientists, engineers, and workers who were on the launch pad at the time. It was only luck that prevented the rocket’s uranium-core reactor from being breached; otherwise, a nuclear fire might have destroyed the entire Baikonur complex.

The disaster was successfully hidden by GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency. The wreckage was masked from American satellites by massive camouflage tarps hastily thrown over the pad after the fires were extinguished, and the fatalities were ascribed to a fictional airplane crash in the Urals. The remaining Zenith rocket was never tested; it was transported by rail to a Red Army warehouse somewhere in Siberia, where it presumably remains mothballed to this day.

As crude as this cover-up may seem, it apparently worked; Western intelligence agencies never learned about the launch pad explosion, much less the existence of the G-1 program. Yet the Soviet space program was delivered a blow from which it never recovered. Indeed, says Sakharov, the reason why Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev so readily agreed to Russian participation in Project Ares was not diplomatic so much as it was to save face.

The new Kremlin government of Yuri Andropov has categorically denied Sakharov’s allegations, but a number of Western space experts say that it seems to fit previously available information … including the mysterious crash of a Tupolev transport jet on September 4, 1972, in which it was claimed no bodies were recovered. They also say that it casts new doubt upon the validity of the Reagan Administration’s proposed “Star Wars” strategic defense initiative.

The first stage of the program is already underway as
Challenger
nears completion at North American Rockwell’s plant in Sunnyvale, California. SDI was dealt a setback last April by the death of one of its major proponents, nuclear physicist Edward R. Teller, and now many space experts are beginning to doubt whether the Soviet Union’s “secret space superiority,” previously claimed by the White House as justification for an orbital defense system, is a paper tiger … a tiger born in the predawn fires of a Baikonur launch pad, 11 years ago.

2/17/95 • 0852 GMT

C
ONESTOGA
DID NOT LEAVE
Earth for the Moon by itself. For the first 6,525 miles of its journey, it had an escort.

A few minutes after the moonship commenced its upward climb through Earth’s gravity well,
Fido’s Pride
ignited its main engine and began to follow its lunar trajectory. The retriever ship couldn’t hope to keep up with the massive vessel in front of it; even if it had attempted to do so, the fuel in its seven strap-on tanks would have been long exhausted before it got halfway to the Moon.

Yet that wasn’t its mission;
Fido’s Pride
’s small role in the greater scheme of things was to shadow
Conestoga
only until it reached the first checkpoint. So, for the next half-hour, the retriever chased the moonship like a greyhound pursuing a mechanical rabbit down a racetrack six thousand miles long.

Through the canopy windows, Ed McGraw could see the brilliant flare of
Conestoga
’s engines against the dense blackness of cislunar space as it gradually outraced his small, aged ship. The computer and radar screens showed that they were both right on course, following a shallow semielliptical arc which would eventually take
Conestoga
into lunar orbit. By then, of course, McGraw’s job would be done; he would have long since returned to the Wheel, bringing with him fragments of history.

In the aft cabin behind the cockpit, an R.E.M. tape blared from a small Sony deck which dangled on its strap from an equipment rack, swaying backward with the force of constant acceleration. Poppa was getting just familiar enough with recent rock ’n’ roll to recognize “Orange Crush” when he heard it; either that, or Billy had played it so many times that he could practically mime Michael Stipe’s voice.

“‘Follow me, don’t fall on me … ’” Poppa sang under his breath until he forgot the rest of the words. Sort of appropriate, although he would have preferred Beethoven’s Fourth just now. Maybe a little Elvis, if he had to listen to rock, although he knew he was dating himself with that thought; the last time he had caught up with the King, he was touring with U2. Leave it to the younger generation to make you feel so goddamn old….

“How’s it coming back there?” he shouted over his shoulder, careful not to take his eyes off the screens.

“Almost ready,” Billy called back. “Go ahead and pressurize the bottle.”

Billy had pulled on a pressure suit and was fitting a bubble helmet over his head; the suit was just sufficient to protect him if the ship’s bottlesuit suffered decompression, although that had never occurred while he was a pilot. Poppa pumped air into the bottlesuit; when the gauges told him the pressures had equalized, he hit a switch which popped the round hatch in the floor of the aft compartment. Billy climbed down into the bottlesuit’s cocoon and shut the hatch above him.

By now, thirty-three minutes had passed since
Conestoga
had left Earth orbit. McGraw didn’t need the computer to prompt him on the next event; he whispered the countdown under his breath. “MECO in five … four … three … two … one …”

Right on time, the distant flare of the moonship’s engines abruptly disappeared as the giant vehicle began its long glide to the Moon. Keeping a sharp eye on the radar screen, McGraw throttled the engine back by 50 percent.

“Okay, Gene,” he murmured, “don’t keep me waiting. Get rid of your baggage now …”

Sure enough, the blip on the radar screen split into three smaller parts; the one in the center remained on its original heading while its two other parts cleaved away.

“Okay,” McGraw said aloud, “we’ve got departure tank separation.”

Got it
, Billy said through the comlink.
Are they staying in range?

Poppa watched the radar display for another few seconds. Although the two blips were drifting in opposite directions, they remained within a few hundred feet of each other. “Ayup, they’re in the ballpark,” he replied. “Let’s go get ’em.”

Conestoga
no longer needed the four spherical tanks that had contained the lox and hydrazine necessary for departure, so they had been jettisoned, in racks of two apiece, from the moonship’s frame. Under normal circumstances they would have been ejected with small explosive charges which would have sent them tumbling into deep space, never to be seen again, but because it was desirable to retrieve the tanks so that they could later be remated with the rest of the moonship as a museum exhibit, the pyros had been removed from the strutwork. Instead,
Conestoga
’s flight had rolled the ship on its axis, causing the departure tanks to gently disengage from the frame and drift away so that they could be retrieved by
Fido’s Pride
.

“Nice job, Gene.” Poppa Dog grinned as he turned his ship toward the closer of the two braces. “Fido to Wheel Command,” he said, toggling the KU-band radio, “this is Mars Retriever One-Three. We’ve got a lock on the DTs at angles six-two-fiver and going to collect.”

It took a few moments to get a response; the Wheel was now of the far side of Earth, so McGraw’s signal had to bounce across a series of low-orbit Comsats.
We copy, Mars Retriever One-Three
, a voice replied through his headset.
Keep us posted, over.

“Will do, Wheel,” Poppa replied as he throttled back the main engine another ten points. “Poppa over and out.”

Most of the time, Wheel Command couldn’t care less what he and Billy were doing out here, so long as they didn’t interfere with other space traffic. On the other hand, this time they weren’t hauling in a dead weather satellite or somesuch piece of orbital flotsam. Today, they were bringing home a piece of history….

Yeah. And when he was a doddering old fool, he could take the grandkids to the Smithsonian and show it to them. McGraw’s grin faded as he considered the prospect.
See those fuel tanks? They’re from the last American spaceship to visit the Moon, and your grandpappy brought ’em home for you to look at. Doesn’t that make you feel proud?

“Hell of a note,” he muttered to himself.

What’s that?
Billy asked.

“Never mind, son. Just thinking aloud.”

Still, it wasn’t often that he got to take
Fido’s Pride
out this far. Besides the occasional run out to geosynchronous orbit, most of the salvage missions he and Billy performed were in lower orbit; if they’d had enough fuel and oxygen aboard, he would have liked to chase
Conestoga
all the way to the Moon. Almost twenty years in the saddle and he had never walked on the Moon, and unless he cared to learn how to speak German and handle a new type of vessel, he probably never would.