Voyage (19 page)

York floated in her sleeping bag. She was dog tired, but sleep just wouldn’t come. Her lower back was sore, and she had a stuffy headache, as if she was developing a cold. Her heart was suddenly too strong; blood seemed to boom through her ears. She missed the pressure of a pillow under her head, the security of a blanket tucked in close around her. The bag was too big, for one thing; she found herself bouncing around inside it. And every time she moved, the layer of warm air which she’d built up around her body, and which stuck there in microgravity, tended to squirt away, out of the bag, leaving her chilled.

When she managed to relax, she had a feeling of falling. Once she almost drifted off, but then her arms came floating up,
and a hand touched her face …

She let her eyes slide open.

She was inside her sleep locker, at the base of the Mission Module. The locker was little bigger than a cupboard, with a foldaround screen drawn across it. On the surface above her head was her overhead light, and a little comms station, and a fan. There were little drawers for personal things, like underwear; when she opened them the drawers had blue plastic nets stretched over them, to stop everything from floating away.

A lot of light and noise leaked around the foldaround screen. She could hear the hum and whir of the Mission Module’s equipment, and the occasional automatic burn of the attitude clusters as they kept Ares pointing sunwards. With the bright, antiseptic light of the wardroom beyond her screen, and the new smell of metal and plastic, it was like trying to sleep inside an immense refrigerator.

Apparently there had been plans to provide solid doors on the sleep lockers. She even remembered seeing a memo which talked about the need to provide privacy for astronauts ‘significantly relating,’ in the typically obscure, euphemistic doubletalk NASA employed when talking about the functions of the warm bodies they were shipping into space at such expense. But the doors had been skipped, for reasons of saving weight.
So much for significantly relating
.

And now – on top of everything else – she needed a pee.

She tried to ignore it, but the pressure on her bladder built up steadily.
Christ
. Well, it was her own fault; the relief tube – the Mission Module’s toilet, the Waste Management Station – was so
uncomfortable she’d put off using it. Besides, she seemed to be peeing more than usual, since coming up into microgravity.

She succumbed to the inevitable. She squirmed her way out of the bag, turned on her overhead light, and folded back the screen. When she moved, her back hurt like hell.

After the TOI burn, the Ares modules had undergone the first of the cumbersome waltzes the crew would have to endure before the mission was done. Under the command of Stone, Apollo, containing the crew, had separated from the nose of the stack, turned around and docked nose-to-nose with the Mission Module.

When she’d first been talked through the mission profile, waiting until
after
the TOI burn to do this separation and docking had seemed bizarre to York. Why wait until you were already on your way to Mars to cut loose of your main ship? But it made a kind of sense, in the convoluted, abort-options-conscious way the mission planners figured these things. If the MS-II had blown up during the TOI burn, the crew, in Apollo, could have got out and done an abort burn to get home. And if the injection burn was successful but the docking hadn’t been, the crew could use the Service Module’s big engine to blast back toward Earth.

Anyway, after the successful docking, the crew had been able to crawl through a docking tunnel and started moving into the Mission Module, their interplanetary home-from-home.

As long as she didn’t think about the wisdom of taking apart the spacecraft in deep interplanetary space, it didn’t trouble York.

York let herself drift across the wardroom. She was light as a feather, and invulnerable; it was like moving through a dream. The Mission Module was a lot roomier than the Apollo Command Module had been, of course. But she was learning to move around, to operate in this environment. She’d found she couldn’t move too quickly. If she did she’d collide with the equipment, dislodging switches and maybe damaging gear. It just wasn’t a professional way to behave. She was learning to move slowly, with a kind of underwater grace.

It wasn’t a big deal. Microgravity was just a different environment; she’d learn to work within its constraints.

The wardroom, with its little plastic table and three belted chairs, was clean and empty, bright in the light of strip floods. The walls and floors weren’t solid; they were a gray mosaic of labeled storage drawers and feet restraints – loops of blue plastic – and there were handy little blue rectangles of Velcro everywhere. There were
up-down visual cues, signs and lighting and color codes. Everything was obviously designed for zero G.

The whole thing had the feel of an airliner’s crew station, she thought; it was all kind of pleasing, compact, well-designed, everything tucked away. Like a mobile home in space. Of course right now everything was still bright and new, every surface unmarked; it would be different after a few months’ occupancy. Much of the Mission Module’s equipment was still in stowage; the crew would spend the next few days hauling ass around the Module, configuring it for its long flight.

The Waste Management Station was a little cubicle containing a commode, a military thing of steel and bolts and terse metal labels. She pulled across the screen, swiveled in the air, dropped her shorts and pants, and pulled herself down. Thigh bars, cushioned and heavy, swung across her legs to clamp her ass to the seat.

She pulled a hose out of the front of the commode; the hose would take her pee to a tank, for dumping in space later. The hose justified the Apollo-era nickname, ‘relief tube,’ that the crews still used for the waste station. In a cupboard beside her there was a set of funnels, all color-coded to ensure they weren’t mixed up by the crew; hers, anyway, were of the distinctive female variety. The cupboard was already starting to stink a little, and the clear plastic of the funnels was turning yellow.
Eighteen months of this
.

She fitted the funnel to the hose, clamped it over her private parts, and opened the valve to the urine store.

There was a certain strategy to this, which involved aiming for the minimum of pain when using the device. If she opened the valve too soon, the suction would grab at her. And when it resealed itself it was liable to trap a little piece of her inside it. The way round that was to start pissing a split-second
before
opening the valve. But there was a danger that the funnel would just slip off, and off would float her piss in little golden globules.

It took her a few seconds to be able to let go.

Now she’d got set up here, she considered whether to try taking a dump. That was actually easier, mechanically, than peeing. She’d have to start up the slinger, a spinning drum under the commode. The shit would stick to the walls of the drum, and later she would turn a switch to expose the drum to vacuum, and the shit would be frozen and dried out.

But, though she felt a pressure in her lower gut, there was nothing doing for now; she suspected it was going to take her a few days to relax enough to unclench. And besides, there was no gravity here
to help her, as the guys had informed her with glee; she wasn’t looking forward to the experience.

She took a couple of wet wipes and cleaned out the inside of the funnel. The wipes might have come out of any drug store back home, except for the strong stink of disinfectant about them.

She unlocked herself from the john seat. She pushed her hands into the wash-basin, a plastic globe which sprayed water across her skin and out into a waste tank. One or two droplets escaped the basin and went oscillating around the john, but she swatted them out of the air easily. There was a row of towel holders on the wall, little color-coded rubber diaphragms: towels, their corners shoved into the holders, hung out in the air like flags. She dried her hands.

She heard a noise; she turned.

Ralph Gershon was in the wardroom, wearing a T-shirt and shorts. He was just floating, with a plastic can of Coke in one hand and a silver-gray lithium hydroxide canister in the other. The lith canisters were used to scrub carbon dioxide out of the recycled air, and they had to be checked and changed regularly. The familiar red and white Coke can was pretty much the normal size and shape, expect for a baby-style microgravity dispenser at the top.

Gershon held a finger up to his lips – evidently Stone was still asleep – and he held the can out toward her.

She shook her head. ‘Too gassy.’

‘Yeah,’ he whispered back. ‘Coke paid a million bucks to get these cans on the Mission Module, but they just can’t get the damn mix right.’ He started to juggle with the lith and Coke cans, sending them spinning and oscillating from hand to hand. York had already observed that microgravity was like a three-dimensional playground for the guys; as soon as they’d got into the Mission Module’s big workshop area Stone and Gershon had started doing cartwheels and loops and spins, throwing bits of gear to each other like frisbees.

Gershon’s eyes kept straying to her chest.

She resisted the temptation to fold her arms across her T-shirt.
Well, that’s it
. She had a stock of sports bras, and in future she’d be wearing one
every
time she left her sleep cubicle.
No significant relating on this damn mission
.

Gershon looked away and sipped at his Coke.

‘What’s with the lith cylinders?’

He shrugged. ‘You know me. I catnap. I’m not sleepy now; I figured I might as well get ahead of myself.’ He cackled. ‘You know, I even got a little shut-eye during the docking.’

That was true. And now, with York still unable to rest, here he
was, drinking Coke and ogling her chest and getting ahead of his chores.

‘You’re an asshole, Ralph,’ she said with passion.

He grinned at her. ‘I know how you’re feeling, by the way,’

‘You do?’

‘Sure. Stuffy head, right?’

‘I know what it is. Zero G. Blood gathering in my chest and my head –’

‘Look, if it’s really bad you should take a scop/Dex.’

‘I’ll be okay.’

‘Suit yourself. What else? You got a sore back, right?’

‘Yeah.’ She rubbed at her lower spine. ‘How did you know?’

‘You want to know where that comes from? I’ll tell you. In your bag, you’re never perfectly stable. There’s always a little bit of movement. You drift this way and that. And you know what your body does in response?’

‘Tell me.’

‘Your toes clench. Right up, into tiny little balls.’

‘Why?’

‘Because here we are flying to Mars, but we’re still goddamn apes who think we’re going to fall out of a tree any minute. Anyhow, that’s where the back pains come from.’

‘So what do I do?’

‘Just unclench.’ He grinned. ‘Chill out and unclench. And, Natalie. Use eye masks and ear plugs if you have to. What the hell. I won’t tell.’

She went back to her closet.
Maybe I’ll give up on trying to sleep, and follow Gershon’s example. Get ahead of the day
. But she climbed back into her sleeping bag, and it felt warm, and she turned off her overhead light and stretched out again.

She made a deliberate effort to uncurl her toes. Immediately, her back felt easier.
Hey, what do you know? The asshole was right
.

She closed her eyes.

The United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics:

Considering the role which the USA and the USSR play in the
Exploration and Use of Outer Space for Peaceful Purposes;

Striving for a further expansion of cooperation between the USA and USSR in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space for Peaceful Purposes;

Noting the positive cooperation which the parties have already agreed in this area;

Desiring to make the results of scientific research gained from the Exploration and Use of Outer Space for Peaceful Purposes available for the benefit of the peoples of the two countries and of all the peoples of the world;

Taking into consideration the provisions of the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and other Celestial Bodies, as well as the Agreement on the Rescue of Astronauts, the Return of Astronauts, and the Return of Objects Launched into Outer Space;

In accordance with the agreement between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on Exchanges and Cooperation in Scientific, Technical, Educational, Cultural and other fields, signed 11 April 1972, and in order to develop further the principles of mutually beneficial cooperation between the two countries;

Have agreed as follows …

ARTICLE 3 (of 6)

The parties have agreed to carry out projects for developing compatible rendezvous and docking systems of United States and Soviet manned spacecraft and stations in order to enhance the safety of manned flights in space and to provide the opportunity for conducting joint scientific experiments in the future. It is planned that the first experimental flight to test these systems be conducted during the second half of the decade, envisaging the docking of a United States Apollo-type spacecraft with a Soviet Salyut-type space station, and/or a Soviet Soyuz-type spacecraft with a United States Skylab-type space station, with visits of astronauts in each other’s spacecraft and stations. The implementation of these projects will be carried out on the basis of principles and procedures which will be developed in accordance with the summary of results of the meeting between representatives of the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the USSR Academy of Sciences on the question of developing compatible systems for rendezvous and docking of manned spacecraft
and space stations of the USA and the USSR, dated 6 April 1972 …