Voyage (41 page)

The strategic importance of the flight was obvious to everyone: NERVA’s nuclear technology had to succeed – it had to be demonstrably safe – because if public hostility wasn’t assuaged, and if the nuclear program was cut back or even terminated altogether, well, hell, you could kiss good-bye to Mars.

Donnelly had to make the right call. By tradition only Flight, or Surgeon, the mission doctor, could call an abort. NASA senior management had never before overridden a Flight Director’s decision during a mission.

It was a first Donnelly didn’t want to happen on his watch.

Natalie York, as capcom, was sitting in the workstation row in front of Rolf Donnelly. She watched the faces of the controllers around her. She’d got to know them all, during the intensive training for this mission, the long, complex integrated sims, the frenetic drinking sessions later. They were all men, all very young. They shared a brand of intense, fragile intelligence which made them socially awkward, maybe temperamental, ultimately unstable.

They’d all had a tough time during the flight to orbit, and they faced equally tough decisions now.

Mike sat in the Trench, the row in front of her, a little to her left. He was hunched over his console now, his posture redolent of tension, his hair loose and greasy at his neck. He was bent in some huddled discussion with a colleague from Marshall.

She remembered all her old doubts about Mike’s temperament – whether he was suited to high-pressure situations like this, involving erratic boosters and manned spacecraft and rapidly unraveling missions …

She had an impulse to reach out and touch him, to try to reassure or calm him. But she knew that her intrusion wouldn’t be welcomed. Mike was off on some trajectory of his own, now, as out of her
control as had been the Saturn/NERVA stack, guiding itself into space.

Anyhow, she ought to be concentrating on herself. This assignment was a big moment for her. York was an ascan no more. She was now officially on the flight roster, and this capcom posting was her first operational duty: quite a vote of confidence.

It was much more difficult than she’d expected. The capcom was the only person allowed to speak to the crew. She was the funnel for inputs from all around the MOCR, and beyond; she had to be alert, to think constantly, to filter and integrate all the information she received. Nobody was writing her a script; she had to figure it for herself, in real time.

So far, she reckoned, she was doing fine. But nobody was noticing her, one way or the other. They wouldn’t until she screwed up.

I just hope you make the right choices today, Mike. For Christ’s sake, it’s Ben up there …

Jones and Priest drifted down to sleeping compartments in the equipment bay. Each of these was actually just a six-foot-long shelf with a foot of clearance, big enough to take a body-sized mesh hammock.

Dana strapped himself into the left couch, in front of the control panel. He knew that being in the couch he’d drawn the most comfortable sleeping berth. But as Command Module Pilot Dana had to keep his headset on during the night, in case the crew had to be woken by Houston. And even if Houston restricted their chatter, there was always a dull roar of static, which wasn’t going to help him sleep.

None of this mattered.

My first night in space
. All around him the cabin of the Command Module hummed and glowed, gray and green and warm, a small boy’s dream of the perfect den. A loose page from a checklist came drifting over his head, on some random air current; when he blew toward it, the page crumpled a little and drifted away.

He turned to the window. Apollo-N was flying over a mountain range. He could see the wrinkles in the land, as if the world were some huge, sculptured toy beneath him; thick clouds lapped against one side of the range, like a turbulent fluid.

He felt detached from the frustrations and complexities of his life below: the routine, the time-eating training, the press stuff he hated so much, the endless waiting he’d had to endure for this, his first flight. All of the problems seemed flattened, two-dimensional,
like the surface of the Earth, and he felt a warm love reach out from him to envelop Mary and the kids, his parents, the whole of the glowing planet of his birth.

Christ, it’s true. I was born to be up here. None of the rest of it
– the engineering, the science, even the prospect of going to Mars
– none of it counts, compared to this moment. I never want to go back down
.

They’d checked out everything they could, and all the telemetry looked good, and the inertial table was lined up, and the subsystems checked out, and all the back-room guys and the engineers and the contractors with their test rigs were saying, yes, we know what went wrong; and no, we’re confident this mission is going to throw you no more curved balls.

I’ll tell you how we can achieve zero risk, Donnelly thought. We won’t fly
.

Donnelly stood up and turned to face Bert Seger, who stood behind him in Management Row.

‘Bert, I’m going to recommend we proceed with the mission. All the parameters have fallen into line.’

Seger, hollow-eyed with jet lag, just nodded.

It was 4 a.m. The decision was obvious.

Donnelly sat down. He’d been resting his hands on sheets of his flight plans; when he lifted his hands now he found he’d left behind two perfect, wet images of his palms.

Adam Bleeker was the first of the Moonlab crew to eyeball the approaching Soyuz. ‘Hey, Phil, Joe. Come see.’

Stone drifted down to the wardroom’s big picture window.

Soyuz T-3 was silhouetted sideways-on against the pale brown Moon, which slid liquidly past.

Soyuz was shaped, Stone supposed, something like a green pepper pot, a cylinder topped by a squat dome. The cylindrical body was the Instrument-Assembly Module, containing electrical, environmental, propulsion systems. Two matte-black solar panels jutted from the flanks of the Instrument Module, like unfolded wings. A parabolic antenna was held away from the ship, on a light gantry. Stone was able to make out the flat base of the craft; there was a
toroidal propellant tank fixed there, surrounding small engine bells. The dome at the top of the pepper pot was the Descent Module: living quarters for the cosmonauts, and the cabin that would carry them through reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. For Earth-orbit missions the Descent Module would have been capped, Stone knew, by a large, egg-shaped Orbital Module, a work and living area.

The body of the ship was a light blue-green, an oddly Earthlike color set against the bleak uniformity of the Moon. Soyuz looked, frankly, like a piece of shit to Stone. The solar cells were big black squares, crudely tiled onto the panels, and thick wires ran along the edges of the panels; Stone could see fist-sized big blobs of solder where some greasy technician had finished his job crudely.

The engineering was agricultural. The approaching Soyuz was like something out of a parallel universe, he thought.

The crew pulled away from the window; there was still work to do before the Soviets arrived.

Stone went up through the hole in the open mesh floor, and climbed the fireman’s pole to the Multiple Docking Adapter at the far end of the hydrogen tank, the main experiment chamber. The Adapter had three clusters hanging from its ports. There was the Apollo which had brought the crew up from Earth, known as
Grissom
to thousands of school kids.
Grissom
had actually been adapted to carry five men home if need be, with two additional couches stowed in the Command Module’s lower equipment bay. Then there was the Telescope Mount, a small lab module with four wide solar arrays and a battery of science experiments and sensors. The Mount had been adapted by Grumman engineers from a left-over LM ascent stage; in a different reality, that LM would have carried the astronauts of Apollo 16 up from the lunar surface.

The third component fixed to the Adapter was a short, squat cylinder called the Soyuz Docking Module, an interface between the incompatible atmospheres and docking kits of Soyuz and Apollo. Viktorenko and Solovyov were going to have to dock with this Module, and use it as a kind of airlock to get into Moonlab.

Now Stone began putting the Docking Module through a final check-out. As such assignments went, it wasn’t too frustrating. At least the Module was a new piece of kit. People had lived and worked in the rest of Moonlab for five years now, and it showed.

When he’d done, Stone drifted back down to the wardroom. His next job was to run a visual sextant check of the Soviets’ position.

As he made his observations, Soyuz maneuvered away from the backdrop of the Moon, and floated against the stars.

‘Moonlab, this is
Komarov
. Moonlab –’

Muldoon replied for Moonlab. ‘We hear you,
Komarov
. The VHF link is working fine.’ Viktorenko, on Soyuz, had used English; Muldoon replied in halting Russian.

Now Muldoon went through a four-way conversation between Moonlab, Soyuz, and the two ground control stations at Houston and Kalinin, testing out links and confirming system status.

Soyuz wheeled around so that it faced Moonlab. ‘Moonlab,
Komarov
. We are ready for the final docking maneuver. I will turn on my beacon.’

A light began to flash on the spine of Soyuz, easily visible through the picture window.

‘I see you,
Komarov
.’

‘And I you, Joe. Your elegant Moonlab is difficult to miss. We have our spacesuits on, all ready for docking. And our bow ties on top, for we are ready for a fine dinner with you.’

Houston and Kalinin both called up ‘go’ for the docking. Soyuz spun slowly on its long axis, rolling through sixty degrees to align correctly with the Docking Module. The solar arrays made Soyuz look almost bird-like, swooping around the Moon like some unlikely metal swallow.

Soyuz came in slowly and hesitantly, with many small attitude and angle corrections. At one point the ship even backed off from Moonlab. The Moonlab crew and Houston kept quiet; Stone listened to the soft, tense, dialogue in Russian between
Komarov
and Kalinin.

Komarov
was evidently a pig to fly. Soyuz was a flexible ferry craft, but it was essentially a contemporary of the American Gemini, lacking much of the sophistication and power of Apollo. There was a real lack of precise attitude control and translation instruments, with most of the operations conducted by pre-programmed mission event sequencers.

In fact, the poor maneuverability of Soyuz had caused some friction during the planning stages of this joint flight. Some on the US side had suggested, half-seriously, that Soyuz should be the ‘passive’ partner – that Apollo should haul the bulk of Moonlab into the docking with the tiny Soyuz …

Anyhow it looked now as if Soyuz was coming in on its final approach. As it neared, bristling with detail,
Komarov
arced up and out of Stone’s view, and he heard Muldoon calling out in Russian.

‘Five yards … three yards … one …’

There was a soft clang, a rattle of docking latches.

‘Well done, Vlad,’ Muldoon called. ‘Good show,
tovarich
. You came in at just a foot per second.’

‘Indeed. Now Apollo and Soyuz are shaking hands, here in the shadow of the Moon. Yes?’

The cosmonauts moved into the small Docking Module and sealed it up. They had to sit out three hours as the pressure was reduced to match Moonlab’s.

Stone pulled himself into the tunnel at the core of the Multiple Docking Adapter, close to the entrance to the Soyuz Module. Muldoon and Bleeker were already there, and the little tunnel, packed with instrument boxes and oxygen bottles, was crowded. Stone’s job now was to work the small hand-held TV camera, and relay handshake pictures back to Earth.

There was a soft tapping. Muldoon opened the hatch.

Vladimir Viktorenko, beaming broadly, reached out and shook Muldoon’s hand. ‘My friend. I am very happy to see you.’ He came tumbling out of the hatch, squat and exuberant, and gave Muldoon a bear-hug. He gave Muldoon a little packet of bread and salt, a traditional Russian greeting. Solovyov followed his commander out. And there were the five of them crowded into the Docking Adapter’s tunnel, grinning and hugging, always with one eye on the camera.

Muldoon led them through the clutter of Moonlab toward the wardroom. Viktorenko and Solovyov made the obligatory polite remarks about the bird, but, Stone thought, they were being kind.

The first task of each new crew up here was to use their Apollo Service Module to tweak Moonlab’s orbit. The Moon’s gravity field was so lumpy that anything left in low lunar orbit would soon fall to the surface. And when he’d first approached ’Lab in
Grissom,
Stone might have been tempted to let the thing just fall.

After five years Moonlab’s outside hull was pretty much dinged up, with big fist-sized meteorite holes knocked in the shield. The solar cells, also dented by meteorites, had degraded, and so the power was down to half its peak. Inside, the lights were dim, and jerry-built air ducts ran everywhere to make up for the broken fans. Stone was already sick of half-heated meals, lukewarm coffee, and tepid bathing water.

And the interior was like someone’s utility room – more like a survival shelter than a laboratory, Stone thought – with every surface scuffed and scarred, every piece of equipment patched up,
every wall encrusted with junk. Moonlab was an improvised lash-up anyhow, and the place really hadn’t been designed for growth; and every time a crew had come up here with some new experiment or a replacement article they had just bolted the kit to whatever free hydrogen-tank wall space there was, and left it there forever. Now, after five years, the walls were growing inwards, as if coated with a metallic coral. Sometimes you couldn’t even find the pieces of kit you needed, and you had to radio down to previous crews to find out where they’d left stuff.

The place was kept hygienic – it had to be – but you wouldn’t call it
clean
. Hell, you had highly trained pilots and scientists up here. They didn’t want to spend their lives on maintenance, for God’s sake; they had work to do. And the result was unpleasant, sometimes.