Voyage (57 page)

Like everyone else York was craning forward, squinting to make out the poorly-typed, badly-projected list, her lips working as she read the names.

It was a mix of three-and four-man flights. Phil Stone’s crew – including Adam Bleeker and a senior astronaut called Ted Curval – would take up the B mission, she saw, the first, risky, shakedown of the enhanced booster, the Saturn VB. An all-USAF crew. York could see the logic behind sending up test pilots for what was basically a flight test, but it set a tone for the whole program, right from the start: the wrong tone, a military, test pilot tone.
More dumb fighter jock bullshit, just like it’s always been
.

But then the D mission, the long space soak flight, would have a crew of four, including two mission specialists:
Ralph Gershon,
she read. And –

Natalie York
.

She tried to read on. Phil Stone’s B-mission crew made up the backup crew …

Natalie York
.

She read her name over and over, unable to be sure if she was seeing it correctly, as if her eyeballs were still compressed by some invisible centrifuge.
Jesus. That really is me, up there, in a prime crew. I’m going into orbit
.

I’ll be the first American woman in space
.

She was one of just three female astronauts in the corps, and the only one who’d been named on Muldoon’s chart.

All around the room there was an explosion of tension; there were whoops, a lot of handshakes, good-old-boy back-pats. York was even the recipient of a few of those herself.

There were a lot of forced grins around her. She knew what lay behind the grins; she’d be thinking the same.
I’ve got to smile, make like I’m really pleased for you. But it should have been me, you bastard, not you. Maybe it will be, if, pray God, you break your leg or otherwise fuck up somewhere down the line
.

Now Muldoon held up his hands for silence. ‘I told you that beyond the first E mission I don’t think it’s appropriate yet to allocate crews. But I expect the selection to be made by the normal rotation system. Thanks for your attention; if you’ve no questions right now, you can come see me in my office …”

He’d said,
The normal rotation system
.

That hit York like an electric shock, burning away her brief euphoria.

She knew what that meant, and so did everybody else. She stared at the chart again, doing fast calculations.
It means I will make it to Earth orbit. But that’s as far as I’ll get. Phil Stone is going to Mars. I’m not
.

Nobody was going to get any more work out of the Astronaut Office that day; York guessed Joe Muldoon had planned the announcement around that.

She drove out to the Singing Wheel. The car park was packed with Corvettes, and inside she found Phil Stone, Adam Bleeker and a few of their ex-military cronies, already working methodically through pitchers of Bud. Stone pulled up a stool beside him, and gave her a dew-coated glass of beer.

‘Congratulations,’ he said warmly. ‘So you’re finally making it into space. America’s first space woman. Here’s to yah, Natalie. Come on, fellas –’ He led a couple of toasts, in cold beer, which she endured. ‘So,’ he said. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Mixed,’ she said bluntly. ‘I’m flying, at last –’

‘Hey, you done well. What is it, three years since you joined the Agency? Hell, we got guys who’ve waited three, four times as long as that to get a seat. I’m looking forward to working with you on the D mission. I mean that, Natalie.’

‘Yeah.’ She tried to smile.

Stone was watching her carefully. ‘Yeah,
but –’
he prompted.

‘But, Phil, what I’m really thinking is that you’re the asshole who’s going to Mars, and I’m not.’

He laughed, mildly, and took another pull of his beer. ‘Come on, Natalie. Nobody knows who’s going to Mars. Not at this stage.
If the preliminary flights don’t work out, maybe nobody will be going.’

‘Give me a break. You heard what Muldoon said. “The normal rotation system.”’

The ‘rotation system’ dated back to the earliest Mercury days, and it had been applied all the way through Apollo. Crews were assigned to missions in a leapfrog fashion. The rule was ‘back one, skip two, fly one,’ and then start over. Thus, Phil Stone and his crew were backups for the D mission, York’s space soak flight. If the rotation worked out, they would skip two missions – the E missions – and fly the next, the F mission.

Which just happened to be the full Mars landing attempt.

Stone spread his hands on the table. ‘Rotation’s not a bad system, Natalie. At least it’s orderly. I mean, Muldoon has got a pig of a job. Everyone wants to be on every crew –’

‘Oh, bullshit, Phil. The rotation stuff isn’t a goddamn machine. It’s not hard to work it out so you get the crew patterns you want.’

‘Look, Natalie, anything but a rotation system is an insult to the astronauts and destructive to morale. That’s what I think, and I reckon it’s what old Joe thinks too. Every crew should be able to fly every flight. It’s like handling a squadron of fighter pilots. You’ve got a mission to do and so many flights to fly and so many pilots to fly them …’

‘But this isn’t a goddamn fighter squadron. We ought to be hand-picking crews for the needs of the mission.’

‘And you think you should be handpicked for the F mission?’

She sipped her beer, her irritation increasing, ‘It’s foolish not to pick the very best for your key missions.’

He eyed her, amused. ‘So now you’re saying I’m not the best?’

‘That is not the point, damn it, Phil, and stop patronizing me …’

But now Adam Bleeker came in – one of Phil’s crew, another probable Mars-walker – and there was another round of general back-slapping and joshing.

For a while York joined in the wider conversation.

Her thoughts drifted back, ignobly, to her selection gripes.

She drank a little more beer; it was warming up, and tasted sour. She put the glass down and wiped her damp palm on a napkin.

She got out of the bar. She suspected half the guys were so far gone already they didn’t even notice her leaving.

She was going to have to get this out of her system.

Without stopping to think about how smart it was, she drove straight back to JSC and stormed into Muldoon’s office.

Muldoon was working through a pile of paper. ‘Natalie. You want a coffee? I can send Mabel to –’

‘No.’ She realized, suddenly, she was trembling; it seemed to be coming from somewhere deep down inside her.
From three years of frustration inside NASA. From Ben’s wasteful, needless death. From the fact that I’m thirty-three years old, and I’ve thrown away my academic career just so I can get to spend months in low Earth orbit, watching MEM components slowly degrade
.

Or, she thought,
maybe they’re all correct. Maybe I’m just a goddamn hysterical woman after all
.

Muldoon was watching her sharply. ‘I thought you’d be pleased at getting a seat in one of the prime crews.’

‘I am.’

He sat back and sighed. ‘But you want to go to Mars. And you can figure out the implications of the crew rotations as well as anyone else.’

‘Damn it, Joe, I’m far and away the best mission specialist for Mars surface operations. You know that; I should be in line for the F mission, so I can get out there and
do
what I’m having to teach everyone else!’

He steepled his fingers. ‘All I can tell you is, we’re going to follow the rotation system. If it works out that Phil Stone takes his crew to Mars, then so be it; and if things get messed up or delayed for some reason, and your crew gets back in line –
through the normal rotation system
– then you’ll have your chance. And maybe, if there’s a second or third landing –’

‘You know damn well there will be no second landing. We’re putting everything we’ve got into this one shot. Square with me, Joe. I should be on the damn flight. And if I was a man, another Harrison Schmitt, I’d be inked in already as a no-brain choice. But I’m a woman, and that’s why I’m not going.’

‘Natalie, it’s not like that.’

‘Come on, Joe. Don’t bullshit me, for once.’

He folded his fingers together. ‘No bullshit?’

‘No bullshit.’

‘I’m not going to pretend that the gender thing doesn’t cause us problems, Natalie.’

The gender thing
. ‘What problems, for Christ’s sake? That I won’t be able to fit my flight helmet over my bouffant hairstyle? Joe, it’s 1981–’

‘Give me a break, Natalie. Look, it might have been different if we’d ever built the Shuttle, if we had big roomy ships to carry seven or eight to orbit, if access to space had ever become routine. Then we would be flying women every month. But we don’t. So you work it out. If you have a mixed crew, you need extra facilities. Personal hygiene. Privacy. It’s all avoidable payload weight. And that’s not a good thing when you’re planning an eighteen-month deep-space mission.’

‘So take an all-female crew. No need for separate showers then; right? …’

Muldoon was starting to look exasperated. ‘Look, Natalie, you know you’re not going to win this argument. And I’m not even the right guy to be arguing with.’

‘Then who is?’

He shrugged. ‘American culture. The world. Hell, I don’t know; I’m just the poor schmoe who recommended you for the D mission.’ He studied her with, she thought, a little more sympathy. ‘Natalie, take my advice. The main thing is to be in the rotation. That’s all that matters; that, and doing your damnedest at the job. And I know you’ll do that. We need you in the program, Natalie. You’re an element we’ve missed before. We think a lot of you. You’d be surprised. And I noticed the work you did at capcom during Apollo-N.’

She shrugged. It wasn’t an assignment from which she wanted to gain any credit. ‘You need me in the program, but not necessarily on a ship to Mars.’

He shuffled the papers on his desk, the typed-out lists of crew assignments. ‘Maybe that’s true. Maybe you’d actually be more use to the program, overall – to the science goals – right here, in Houston, than stumbling around on Mars itself. Have you thought about that? Natalie, you’re complaining about flying the space soak mission. Hell, I understand that; in your shoes, I’d be up here beefing too. But all I get to fly these days is this damn desk.’ He looked wistful. Almost desperate. ‘Two hours on the Moon just wasn’t enough, for one lifetime.’

She couldn’t help saying it. ‘Two hours too many for your wife, maybe.’

He threw the papers down on the desk. ‘Goddamn you, York, why do you have to be so abrasive?’

‘I’m sorry, Joe.’ She shook her head. ‘I guess I’m just –’

‘Listen to me,’ he said bluntly. ‘Who the hell knows what’s going to happen? You just keep on doing what you’re doing. Do whatever
that bunch of assholes out there do, but do it twice as often, and twice as good. And offer me things they
can’t
; like your geology training. Keep yourself in the frame. Make yourself indispensable. Who knows where we’ll all be, by 1986?’

For that brief moment she felt oddly cheered – almost confident.
He’s right. I’ve got this far; maybe I can get through the final barriers. I can do this
.

But Muldoon’s eyes started straying to the heaps of papers on his desk.

York was shut out again: she was out in the dark, with her mission prospects – her career, her life – reduced once more to being a matter of little more than guesswork and hope. Her brief warm stab of self-confidence faded as quickly as it had come.

She got out of Muldoon’s office.

When he got up in the morning Lee liked to hit the ground rolling. Jennine fixed him two cups of coffee, both heavily sugared, so the second one had time to cool and he could down it in a gulp, on the run to the black T-bird in the yard.

His first task was to find somewhere to work on the proposal. He spent a day roaming around the plant.

Columbia’s plant was a bunch of decrepit old factory buildings, with the big wind tunnel snaking through the complex. The site worked pretty well for the small-run experimental work that was the norm for CA’s workload. But it was already bursting at the seams.

What Lee needed was office space.

Finally his eye settled on the canteen; it was the only open space big enough to take a hundred people or more.

‘This is it. Bella, I want you to get rid of the serving hatches and the goddamn trestle tables. I’ve got drafting tables and desks coming in here.’ He squinted upwards. ‘Not enough light. Get some skylights knocked through. And check the power; we’ll need a secured supply for the computers.’

‘Yes, sir, JK. But –’

‘What is it with you and these “buts”?’

‘Where will we eat?’

Lee waved a hand. ‘The whole of the goddamn US is full of McDonald’s. Nobody will starve.’

‘Yes, sir, JK.’

He looked around the canteen, with its battered serving bays and scuffed floor and stink of tomato sauce. It was the pits. And it was going to be a tough regime in here. He’d already issued a notice that for the duration of the proposal development he’d expect everybody to be at their desks by seven a.m. and to work through until at least nine p.m. And the work here would just be the center of a huge effort right across the company, with teams of engineers in laboratories and wind tunnels generating data to support the thesis that Columbia was going to be able to
do
this, to build this unprecedented machine …

But
this
was the focus: it was in this big, dirty room, he felt now with a growing excitement, that the final proposal for the Mars Excursion Module would be drawn up.

He started scouring the organization, taking out whoever he thought was going to be of use to him in constructing the bid. When anybody howled, he just waved Cane’s name at them, and that was usually enough. That was Art Cane’s culture, Lee reflected. He might have doubts about the wisdom of this bid, but now they had gotten into it, it was a corporate effort, all or nothing, and Cane would expect the whole organization to support Lee as best it could.