Voyage (17 page)

Fun to be with. Comfortable. Married.

She felt vaguely restless.

Right now, she admitted, she was basically drifting, doing some post-doc work here and there. She was looking for a focus, a topic, trying to figure out what she wanted to do with her life.

And she was still in her mess of a relationship with Mike Conlig, who was so immersed in his NERVA work he barely seemed aware she was there, when she got any time out of him at all. NERVA was the center of Mike’s life; a kind of monomaniacal obsessive seemed to be emerging from inside the gentler, more intellectual outer shell that had first attracted her.

She got the impression that the space program was full of people like that.

The question for York was, did she really want to be a bit-part player in the story of someone else’s goals?

They reached the communications center. The walls were coated with TV screens, all filled with grainy, obscure black and white images. Hard copies littered tables, and ribbons of computer printout trailed across the tables and floor and along the walls. The workers here – mostly men, mostly shirt-sleeved, uniformly hairy – pored over the images and print-outs, their security badges dangling from their top pockets. There were cups of stale coffee all over the tables, some perched close to precious print-out, and in one corner she spotted a half-eaten doughnut, the jelly still oozing from its center.

There was a smell, faint but distinctive, of body odor.

Priest shrugged, looking a little sheepish. ‘It’s always pretty much like this, Natalie. Kind of slow chaos. This is the heart of the SFOF, what they call the Space Flight Operations Facility. The results from Mariner are coming in all the time; the guys work in shifts here. And it’s adaptive; the results from one orbit may be used to influence what they do on the next. There isn’t a lot of time for housekeeping.’

‘You don’t need to apologize. You ought to see the average geology field site after a couple of days.’

There was a model of the Mariner 9 spacecraft itself, a couple of feet across, hanging in one corner of the room. She slowed, looking up at it. Four silvery solar panels unfolded like sails from a central octagonal box. A rocket engine with propellant tanks was mounted on top of the box, and underneath sprouted a cluster of
instruments. York could recognize the tiny lenses of TV cameras, glinting in the fluorescent light. The craft was comparatively crude, compared to the heavy Viking landers which were already under development for the 1975 launch opportunity. But still, Mariner 9 was quite beautiful, like a fine watch.

York retained lingering suspicions about the value of spaceflight in terms of its science. As a kid she’d been intrigued, even startled by the Mariner 4 pictures. But that had worn off, and she hadn’t followed the progress of later probes closely. But still, this beautiful, delicate thing had been assembled by humans – made by hands like hers – and then thrown across interplanetary distances, to orbit Mars itself: it had become the first man-made object to orbit another planet.

It was quite a thought.

Priest was talking about the dust storm. ‘It covered the whole damn planet, Natalie. When we arrived we couldn’t see a thing. They did some measurements at the limb of the planet, and found the dust reaching an altitude of fifty miles. It seems impossible, but it’s true. Anyhow, the storm did us one favor.’

‘How’s that?’

‘All of a sudden, funnily enough, everybody got
very
excited about looking at the moons. Listen, you want me to get you a coffee? A doughnut, maybe?’

‘No thanks, Ben.’

He led her through more corridors, to a smaller laboratory. More shirt-sleeves, working at terminals and screens.

‘Image Processing,’ Priest said. He took her to an unoccupied monitor, and they sat on rickety fold-up chairs. He began tapping at the key-pad. ‘They got the first reasonably clear image of Phobos on revolution thirty-one – just last night. I stayed up until the small hours watching them process the data …’ An image began to build up on the video monitor now, line by line, working from top to bottom. ‘Mariner records its pictures on magnetic tape, and sends them back to Earth in pretty much the way a newsprint wire-photo is transmitted. This is exactly how the first image emerged, for the team last night.’

She smiled. ‘What’s this, Ben? Why not just show me the finished picture? More NASA showmanship?’

He raised his eyebrows. ‘You’re too cynical. Or would be, if I thought you meant it.’

Impulsively she touched his hand. ‘I’m sorry, Ben.’ His skin was warm and leathery.

He grinned at her easily.

Today she was finding Ben, with his intelligence and enthusiasm for this wonderful Mars project, unreasonably attractive.
Damn it. I’m not supposed to feel like this
.

She concentrated on the pictures.

The upper few lines of the image had been black – just empty space. But now she saw some detail, a curve of gray and white, building up line by line. At first she thought she was seeing the limb of a sphere, but the shape soon looked much too irregular for that.

Phobos turned out to be a rough ellipse, half in shadow, with a battered, irregular edge. It looked much more like York’s preconception of an asteroid than any moon. There were craters everywhere, huge and ancient, some so deep that the impacts that caused them must have come close to splitting the battered little moon in half.

‘Natalie, this is more or less the face of Phobos, about half the size of our full Moon, that you would see if you were standing on Mars right now.’

Phobos looked like a diseased potato. Priest was staring at the picture, and its gray and black reflected in his eyes. ‘This is history, Natalie. Think about it: mine were among the first human eyes ever to see Phobos and Deimos, the moons of Mars. I wanted to show you this, kind of share it with you, the way I saw it.’

She was moved to touch him again, but she resisted the impulse.

‘Show me Mars, Ben.’

‘Sure.’

After a few more minutes Priest had retrieved images of the surface of the planet itself. But the dust storm was still continuing. There was only one place away from the poles where any detail was visible: an area called Tharsis, close to the Martian equator. Here the pictures showed four dark, irregular spots, roughly circular, three in a line running at an angle to the equator, and the fourth a little way away to the west.

She asked, ‘What the hell can these be?’

‘Who knows? I guess we’ll figure it out when the storm clears. The lab staffers are calling them “Carl’s Marks.” After Sagan, see –’

The shapes in the images intrigued her; they were familiar, somehow. If only she could see just a little more … ‘You say this region’s called Tharsis. Do we know anything else about it?’

‘Actually, yes. You’re the geologist, Natalie. You ought to know.’

‘Just tell me, asshole.’

‘There have been radar studies of Mars since the mid-sixties. This
Tharsis region – which is just a bright splotch seen from Earth – looks as if it’s the highest plateau on the planet.’

‘Really? How high?’

He shrugged. ‘Ten or twenty miles above the mean datum. We can’t say for sure.
Mean datum –
you understand there’s no ocean on Mars, so no convenient sea level to –’

‘You must have some better resolution images than these. It’s the only visible spot on the planet, for Christ’s sake. Somebody must have pointed the cameras again.’

Priest began to work the keyboard. He found a couple of images which showed her some more detail. She stared at the screen, pressing close to the glass.

‘You’re telling me these features are stable? That they aren’t, uh, whirlwinds in the dust storm or somesuch?’

‘No way. They’ve lasted since Mariner got to Mars, a couple of weeks ago. We’re undoubtedly looking at some kind of surface feature, here.’

She could see circular markings within each spot. And there was some kind of scalloping.
They almost look like volcanic caldera. The mouths of volcanoes
.

But why should these features, of all of Mars, be showing up at all?
Because they’re in Tharsis. And Tharsis is the highest region on Mars
. And why these particular features?
Because they are the highest points in Tharsis – therefore the highest points on the planet …

‘My God,’ she whispered.

‘Natalie? What is it?’

These spots had to be volcanoes, sitting on top of some kind of vast shield system. Big enough to dwarf anything on Earth. Everest was only five miles high; those babies must be fifteen miles at least. So high they were poking above the dust storms; so high they were above the bulk of the atmosphere itself.

‘Natalie? Are you okay?’

York couldn’t believe her eyes. She had Priest call up image after image.

At least, she reflected later, the mystery of the Martian geology had taken her mind off Priest.

After Fred Michaels hung up, Tim Josephson sat in his office, a glass of whiskey in his hand.

The decision was made.

He supposed he ought to be feeling triumph. Exultation.
We’ve got what we wanted, by God. Another huge boondoggle, a program that ought to keep thousands of us NASA employees gainfully employed for a decade or more
.

But the truth was, he felt too tired and beat-up to care. He was having a little trouble focusing his eyes. He’d been chained to his desk and phone all day, working in support of Fred Michaels’s machinations. And there were still a hundred and one things to be finished up. But, he told himself, there was nothing that wouldn’t keep until the next day.

So he took his shoes off and got his feet up on his desk, and he started dictating into a pocket tape recorder.

The last few months had given Josephson, working as a close aide of Fred Michaels’s, a startling insight into the way major national decisions were made: at the highest level in the land, with at stake national prestige, tens of billions of dollars spread across many years, and hundreds of high-profile careers in politics, industry, the military. Some day he was going to write a book about all this.
Management in the Space Age,
maybe.

The decision about America’s future in space had turned out to be extraordinarily painful.

It had been clear to Josephson from the beginning that Nixon wanted to spend as little as possible on space.

The fact was, Nixon – belying his image – had brought a pretty liberal domestic agenda to the White House; in the midst of a debilitating war, he wanted to free up money to pay for expanded social entitlement programs, and wage and price controls.

Space was one place that money could come from. But space was a tough lobby to fight.

So, soon after coming into office, Nixon had allowed Congress to reorganize the standing space committees out of existence, so that now space was the purview of the Senate Commerce and House Science and Technology subcommittees. Losing its special interface to Congress, NASA was in danger of being emasculated, losing its heroic status, becoming just another spending department fighting for funds.

To most people involved in the space program, even within NASA, such changes were all but invisible; but to an insider like Josephson – and Michaels – they were dramatic, a potent signifier of Nixon’s real determination to downgrade the profile of space.

But then the White House had come up against the aerospace industry.

Aerospace was ailing, as ever. In fact technological progress was making life even tougher. New systems were either not deployed at all or had short production runs:
if it works, it’s obsolete
. Aerospace firms had to bet the farm every time they accepted a contract.

But obviously the government needed a healthy aerospace industry. So ways had to be found to feed the industry in slack times: to spread wealth, and to subsidize research. The civilian space program was perfect for this purpose. It always had been.

So, from the start of 1971, Fred Michaels had started to put it about that the aerospace industry might not be able to survive another year of diminished space work; he spoke particularly to Congressmen from states like California, Texas and Florida, where aerospace depression was an acute electoral issue. And he quietly encouraged the contractors contributing to the various program studies to talk up their estimates of the employment the various options would stimulate. It was all designed to keep the pressure on the White House.
1972 is an election year. We need a space program to keep the aerospace guys in work … But what’s that program going to be?

Josephson was mildly shocked how quickly the scientific and exploratory aspects of spaceflight were discarded as factors in shaping the new program. Nobody with any clout cared about going to Mars, or anywhere else, for the
science
. And nobody argued – he was more surprised to observe – on the basis of the benefits of space spin-offs. After all, if you wanted the spin-offs, why go into space at all? Why not turn the R&D money and NASA’s fabled management skills directly to other, more worthy programs?

These were hard questions to answer. So Michaels, bluntly, avoided them.

In public, Michaels played up space as an adventure – something a nation like the US ought to be able to afford, damn it. Astronauts from the heroic days, including Joe Muldoon, were wheeled out to serve as living reminders of good moments gone. After Michaels’s skillful PR hoopla, Mars came to seem a little more acceptable. There was a snowball effect, and some support for the option started to appear on the Hill.

And, slowly, the opinion polls showed public opposition to a Mars option dropping.

But NASA’s budget was still far too high. In July, members of Congress had moved twice to delete manned spaceflight altogether from the FY1972 budget.

It was a dangerous moment in history, and the hard bargaining continued.

What can we drop?

At one point Josephson had believed Nixon was coming close to approving the Space Shuttle system – just that one item, out of all the options his Task Group had presented. At least the goal of the Shuttle was to do with reducing costs, and the Shuttle would actually have been the favored option of the aerospace lobby because of all the new development it would have entailed.