Titan (18 page)

She clambered into the back of the limousine. It was like climbing through a long, padded corridor. There was a little drinks table, molded into the upholstery, with champagne glasses and a decanter, and there were tiny TVs and softscreens. Waiting for her was a Chinese: Xu Shiyou, a senior Party official attached to the Embassy here, who would chaperon her. He was a fat man—American-diet fat, she thought—and his bald head was a round, sleek globe. Jiang was used to such meticulous planning and control; she was prepared to accept that she was a valued asset of the Party now, who required careful management.

It was a price she would pay, as she worked her way through these ceremonial duties, en route to space once more, some time in the imagined future.

The door was closed behind her, cocooning her in a little bubble of glass and new-smelling leather upholstery. The driver was sealed off by a partition; Jiang could only make out the back of the woman’s head.

The limousine pulled away. The windows of the car were clear, but Jiang became aware of a faint rippling effect, as the landscape slid past. The glass was thick, no doubt bullet-proof. She shivered, not just from the cold. Though she had circled the Earth in the
Lei Feng
Number One, she had never before traveled outside China. Now she wondered how she, as her country’s first space traveler, was going to be welcomed here in the home of Glenn and Armstrong.

The airport was on the northern outskirts of the Houston conurbation, and Jiang’s limousine, at the heart of a little cluster of cars, swept down the freeway towards downtown. The traffic was heavy, the smog thick in the air.

The land was hot, flat, the conurbation sprawling. The infrastructure—the layout of the roads—was clean and functional. And yet she had an impression—not of newness—but of middle age. Much of Houston’s growth, she knew, dated back to the space program growth period of the 1960s, and the oil boom of the 1970s. But those times were decades gone, and Houston was starting to age, to slump back into the plain.

Much of the time her view was obstructed by the roadside ads—huge, colorful, many of them animated—which battered at her senses, exploiting their slivers of competitive advantage. Most of the signs and ads were in Spanish.

There were water towers on the horizon, rusted, dominating. The land was greener than she had expected, but parklike, with orderly trees and thick-bladed grass; there seemed to be water sprinklers buried everywhere, many of them in full operation even now at high noon, when much of the water would be wasted. Jiang looked at those glittering fountains, the shining green lawns, imagining the tons of water vapor being lost to the air each second, all over this baking city.

She remarked on this to Xu Shiyou. The contrast with the water shortages suffered in her own country was marked, she said severely. And it was a global problem: the growth in the population and the demands of the industrializing nations—including China—was poised to outstrip the planetary supply of fresh water which fell from the sky…

Xu smiled. “That is of course true,” he said. “But until we can build pipelines to link the aquifers of Texas with the parched gardens of Beijing, there is little we can achieve by complaining about it.”

Jiang had the disquieting sense that Xu was mocking her.

“You are nevertheless right in your perception,” said Xu Shiyou, comfortingly. He waved a hand at Houston, beyond the car window. “America is a crass, empty-headed culture. And—look at that!—in the middle of this shower of advertising, you have their God, great neon crosses and beaming preachers, sold with the same methods as hamburgers.”

She looked out of the window anew. Xu was right, she saw; the ads for hair products and soft drinks and face implants were punctuated with immense crucifixes, images of Jesus.

“Americans are free,” Xu Shiyou murmured. “No intelligent person would deny that. But freedom is the minimum. I have lived and worked here for three years, and it is obvious to me that the Americans don’t understand the world beyond their borders—that they fear it, in fact.” He looked through the window; animated electronic light glimmered in his eyes.

She stared out of the car as he lectured her. The office blocks of downtown Houston thrust out of the plain like a collection of launch gantries, gray in the mist and smog.

The Big S, JSC’s trophy Saturn V, was cordoned off from the public tours today and encased in scaffolding. Under Benacerraf’s instruction the bird was being surveyed, to see if it could indeed be made operational once more. But Marcus White had been asked to host the Chinese space girl, Jiang Ling, on her brief tour of JSC, and he couldn’t think of a better item to show her. So he got hold of a couple of hard hats and escorted Jiang inside the fenced-off rectangle that contained the booster.

Besides, he wanted to see the Big S for himself. He figured he may as well combine this makeweight ex-astronaut public relations chore with a little useful work.

The two of them walked along the three hundred and sixty feet of the fallen white-and-black-painted rocket, from its escape tower and Apollo capsule—both dummies—past the widening cylinders of the third and second stages, all the way to the gaping mouths of the five big F-1 engines of the huge first stage. The Saturn V—AS-514, built and ready to fly a late J-series Apollo mission to the Moon—was lying on its side, its stages and components separated. This was so the engines and other details of the mid-stages could be viewed, but it looked, White thought, as if the booster had shattered into cylindrical fragments on hitting the ground.

After three decades on the grass, the aging of the Saturn was obvious. He could make out corrosion, cobwebs laced across the big wheeled A-frames which pinned the booster to the ground. The Stars and Stripes painted on the side of the second stage, the hydrogen-oxygen S-II, was washed out, with big red stripes of paint running down over the white hull. There was even lichen, growing on the fabric parts of the rocket engines.

They are not looking after this old lady well, he thought.

They weren’t alone in here; workers from JSC’s Plant Engineering Division were moving around the rocket, laboring through their detailed survey. One of them, attached to ropes like a mountaineer, was walking along the top of the big S-IC first stage, taking samples of the skin up there.

Jiang stood, slim and composed, looking up at the pressurization tanks of the second stage’s five J-2 engines, big silver spheres which glowed in the diffuse Houston sunlight. She said, “It is beautiful.” She smiled.

“Yeah,” White growled. “But the damn space program was more than a series of photo-calls.”

“Was it?” Jiang looked sad. “But this creature, General White, is a dream of the 1950s. So crude!—a painted monster of rivets and bolts and gloss paint—”

“To me,” White said, “it’s not rivets and bolts and paint. This baby was designed to fly to the Moon. But it’s having a tough time fulfilling the mission we finally gave it: lying for four decades horizontally, in the Houston climate.”

There was an access hatch open near the top of the second stage, the S-II. Jiang and White took turns peering in.

“You know,” White said, “when they first opened this up for the first time in fifteen years they found little skeletons, mice and small birds, a foot deep. And the base of the stage was coated in guano, from pigeons and owls, islands of it in lakes of moisture trapped in there. After all, the drainage of this damn thing was designed to be end to end, not side to side.”

“They made no effort to protect it from such erosion?”

“Oh, sure,” White said. “All the openings large enough to allow in birds were covered with screens; there were ventilation openings knocked in the hull … but none of that is going to work, if you neglect the upkeep for long enough. They did try coating the second stage with polyurethane foam for insulation. But the sunlight takes its toll. All the uv we get these days. There are whole chunks of the insulation missing, great big pock marks… If you went up to the top of the S-II, you’d think you were walking on the surface of the Moon. Even the paint work isn’t authentic. They use big decals, as if it was a Revell kit, to fake up the lettering and the flags. How about that. It’s like spray-painting the Sistine Chapel. This poor old lady is going to require one hell of a refurbishment project.”

Jiang looked at him sharply. “Refurbishment?”

White knew he shouldn’t say any more. But there was no point in living seven decades and flying to the Moon and back if you couldn’t shoot your. mouth off to a young girl once in a while. So he said, “Sure. You know, manufacturing has come a long way since the Saturns were put together. CAD/CAM techniques, total quality programs, composites and aluminum-lithium alloys that are a lot lighter and stronger than this old aluminum shit… It we were to rebuild this bird, we could upgrade her performance a hell of a way.”

Jiang laughed, but not unkindly. “Perhaps. It is a fine dream. Certainly I sense how angry you are at this, the condition of your ‘big S.’”

“I guess the bad guys did a pretty good job of killing off this old lady after all. All they had to do was let her lie here and rust. And they got to show her off as their capture.”

Jiang grimaced. “Like a trophy from a hunt. Yes; humans are rarely logical, even within a space program. But it could have been worse. At least the remaining Saturn hardware is honored as a relic of a great triumph.”

White ran his hand along the corroded hull of AS-514. “A relic,” he repeated.

This kid seemed to understand. She’d picked the right word.
Relic.
Maybe. But not for much longer.

His anger dissipated as he thought about that. The technicians crawling over the rocket were busy, competent, bustling. They nodded to White, smiled at the girl.

Okay, there had been some savage mistakes in the past, and this poor broken bird was a symbol of them. And maybe NASA was never going to be the same again; maybe it even deserved to be busted up and subsumed into Agriculture or whatever. But he had the feeling that the old days were coming back, just once more, as it had been working on Apollo, when everyone worked a hundred and ten percent and the color of your carpet didn’t matter so much as what you knew and what you could do. For just a short time, maybe NASA was going to pull together again, to achieve the Titan mission, to achieve one more moment of greatness.

If it came off, it would be a hell of a thing.

The Houston Coliseum was a huge underground arena that reminded Jake Hadamard of nothing so much as a gigantic, hollowed-out car park. Today, the roof was hung with cute little models of the
Lei Feng
Number One spaceship. The air-conditioning, he thought, was typically Texan, which is to say the whole place was so chilly you could have stored corpses in here. As they waited for the Chinese party, everybody seemed to be standing up, and Hadamard found himself shivering in his suit jacket.

There were hundreds of people here, standing in rows: bands, police and firemen and National Guard in neat ranks, politicians and industrialists in open-topped convertibles. And Hadamard himself had brought a little party of senior NASA people: Marcus White, Paula Benacerraf and her family, some of the managers from JSC.

On a stage at one end of the arena stood Xavier T. Maclachlan, the ambitious Texas Congressman who had engineered the event. He was a thin, jug-eared man of about fifty. Now he whooped noisily into a microphone, and waved his big ten-gallon hat in the air, and gladhanded his guests.

Hadamard, bored and cold, checked his watch; there were still some minutes to endure before the Chinese spacewoman arrived.

Al Hartle came bearing down on him, resplendent in his Brigadier General’s uniform. He was clutching a full tumbler of bourbon. Hartle was a power in the USAF Space Command; Hadamard had encountered him in briefings for the Cabinet. “This is some display,” Hartle said. “Some fucking display.”

Hadamard was amused; Hartle was upright and rigid, his head like a steel cylinder jutting up from his great box of a body. But he was clearly a little drunk, and anger seemed to be seething inside him, hot and deliquescent, like a pupa within its rigid chrysalis.

He prompted, “You think so?”

“In 1961 we sent John Glenn on a fucking world tour. Now we’re on the receiving end of the tours, and we have to kowtow to some damn Red Chinese.”

“Well, they have made it to orbit, Al.”

“For the same reasons we did,” Hartle growled. “Geopolitics. Just to prove their balls are as big as ours.”

“Space as the symbolic arena. Well, I guess you’re right. But they hardly need symbols, Al. China’s GDP passed ours years ago.”

“I know. That, and this woman in orbit, and this damn Shuttle crash, have sent us all into a fucking panic. I tell you, it’s like Sputnik all over again. And look what came out of the dumb decisions that were made when Sputnik went up. Apollo. Holy shit. A disaster that has reverberated for fifty years.” He eyed Hadamard. “So you still throwing money down the john for another Shuttle?”

Hadamard laughed. “I’ll tell you all about it when you tell me about your Black Horse program, Al.”

Hartle grunted, and took a deep slug of his bourbon. “And your space cadets haven’t responded to our L5 proposal yet.”

The L5 proposal was the Air Force’s official recommendation on what to do with the left-over Shuttle and Station technology. The Station should be completed, and converted to a surveillance station—maybe even some kind of weapons-bearing battle station—and towed out to L5, the stable Lagrangian point two hundred and forty thousand miles from Earth, at the third corner of a triangle including Earth and Moon.

Hartle stabbed a finger at Hadamard’s chest. “You heard the case. It’s the new heartland of space. Circumterrestrial space encapsulates Earth to an altitude of fifty thousand miles. Who rules circumterrestrial space commands Earth; who rules the Moon commands circumterrestrial space; who rules L4 and L5 commands the Earth-Moon system.”

Hadamard sipped his drink. “Maybe you’re right, Al. But—”

“The Red Chinese,” Hartle hissed.
“The Red Chinese.
Those bastards think this is going to be their century. They’re making expansionist noises all over, impacting ten countries, from Taiwan to Russian East Asia to the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea… Christ, even the Australians are worried.”