Voyage (70 page)

The scientific community was going ape shit about the fact that all three astronauts on the prime Mars crew were from the military. Adam Bleeker – while he was doing fine in the freshman-standard geology classes York was mounting, and while everyone acknowledged he was an intelligent, competent, experienced astronaut – was, according to the egg-heads, a completely crazy choice for the Mission Specialist slot. The National Academy of Sciences and the US Geological Survey were throwing around a lot of crap about the fact that NASA even had a fully qualified Mars surface scientist, in Natalie York, but wasn’t planning to give her even a seat on the mission. And all the other scientists in the corps, the geochemists and geophysicists and life scientists, had been overlooked as well.

It was Apollo all over again, they said.

Well, York had shown she could do a good job under pressure, on her assignment as Apollo-N capcom for instance, and she’d been putting in an impressive amount of time in the sims. She could probably handle the flight.

Muldoon knew that putting York on the mission as the MSP would shut up the science lobby for sure. And, he reflected, assigning York would have the side-benefit of closing down another couple of lobbies – the minority-interest ones – which complained long and hard about the way NASA still supposedly discriminated in favor of sending up white males.

He wrote out that list of names, now, to see how it would look:

CDR: Stone. MSP: York. MMP: Curval
.

But York was a rookie.

He remembered what York herself had said, back at the time of her selection interviews.
We need to get a scientist on Mars. But a dead scientist on Mars wouldn’t do anybody any good
. The fact was, you weren’t talking about a trolley-car ride here but an extended deep-space mission using complex, edge-of-the-envelope technology.

Sometimes, when he reflected on what they were doing here, it grabbed at his imagination. They were planning to send three people in a fragile collection of tin cans across forty million miles – and then hope that the engineering being cooked up in Lee’s ramshackle operation in Newport Beach, and whatever discipline could be adapted from a lifetime of aviation in Earth’s atmosphere, were
capable of bringing them safely down to the surface of an alien world. Plumbing, TV cameras and all.

The scale – the audacity of it all – stunned him, when he let himself think about it. And
he,
he reminded himself, had walked on the Moon.

Maybe, as many people argued, they were going too far, too fast …

He shrugged that off. Be that as it may, they were going.

As far as Muldoon was concerned it was better to get
somebody
down to that surface to do at least
some
science, no matter how dumb. And, the way he saw it, the way to maximize the chances of achieving that was to send up his three best aviators: people who had cut their teeth in the most extraordinary physical situations the home planet had to offer. And hope that was enough for Mars …

Also, while he was impressed by York, there was something about her which unsettled him a little.
All that intensity
. She’d come into NASA with a great big grudge against the world, and it was still there, and getting bigger all the time, as far as he could see.
Those goddamn twitching eyebrows of hers
. She would drive her crewmates crazy in a month.

York wasn’t ready. It was a shame.

He crossed out the draft list.

Anyhow, it wasn’t the MSP but the MMP seat that was giving him the most grief at the moment.

He was hearing a lot of bad things from the mission controllers, and others, about Ted Curval’s performance.

Curval was one of the best test pilots Muldoon had worked with. And Phil Stone, his commander, was intensely loyal to him. But Curval’s attitude looked to be a little bit off beam.

Curval was fucking arrogant. He was taking his seat for granted. He seemed to feel it was sufficient to just turn up, and laugh his way through the training, and expect just to be able to crawl into the MEM when the time came, and everything would be fine. His performance in the sims, for instance, was well below the target the SimSups expected.

Muldoon had been on Stone’s back about this; as Stone was commander of the crew, in Muldoon’s mind it was up to Stone to get Curval in gear. And he knew, for instance, that Stone had been instructing the SimSups to give Curval all the help he needed.

Everybody understood how tough it was, to learn to handle a system orders of magnitude more complex than any spacecraft
which had yet flown. But it was up to Curval to apply himself. And Curval didn’t show any sign of improving. Or even of understanding the importance of improving.

In his own mind, Muldoon kept comparing Curval with another good pilot: Ralph Gershon.

Muldoon had kept a weather eye on Gershon for a while now. He’d shown himself to be willing to work at anything he was asked to. Muldoon had followed Gershon’s performance in the sims, and he’d heard – ironically, from Ted Curval himself – how determined Gershon had been to get on the Mars Landing Training Vehicle, and then, once he was there, to make that baby his own. And he’d spent a hell of a lot of his time out at Newport Beach, working on the long, slow grind of MEM development.

Gershon was gradually putting himself into the position of being the automatic choice as MEM pilot.

He was surely aware he was doing that – he was probably even planning for it – but that was no bad thing. It showed Gershon was figuring out the system, and knew how to apply himself around here.

The contrast with the complacent Curval was marked. In Muldoon’s opinion, Gershon’s potential as a pilot wasn’t quite that of Curval, but then Curval showed no signs of realizing the potential he had.

Flying Gershon would shut up another corner of the minority-rights lobby, anyhow. America’s first black face in space … But Muldoon wasn’t about to let that influence his decision one way or the other. If Gershon was seen to be getting preference he didn’t deserve – if he was appointed to a mission ahead of guys who were better qualified – then a hundred resignations would be hitting Muldoon’s desk within a day. And Muldoon would be banding them together and sending them on to Josephson, with his own stapled to the front. He was absolutely clear in his own mind about that issue.

What was of a lot more concern to him was the fact that Gershon was a rookie. And, of course – and a big reason why Gershon was still grounded after so long in the corps – there was the question of Gershon’s stability.

Gershon had been through Vietnam.

That was a different type of war from what some of the older guys remembered. Gershon was a loner, a bachelor, too wild and eccentric for many of the guys – particularly the older ones who, in their own way, were deeply conservative.

Gershon was a risk, then. But the bottom line was that Gershon could probably land the MEM in situations where a lot of other guys would abort, or even crash.

And if Muldoon bumped him onto the upcoming D-prime mission, let him fly the test MEM in Earth orbit, he could maybe prove that quickly, and he wouldn’t be a rookie any more.

Muldoon wrote out three names.

CDR: Stone. MSP: Bleeker. MMP: Gershon
.

It didn’t look so bad. It was still a crew of pilots. All USAF, actually. You had a streak of brilliance in Gershon, which was missing in Curval, and which might make a lot of difference if it came down to the wire, forty million miles away on Mars. And, unlike Curval, Muldoon knew he could rely on Gershon to apply himself to every aspect of the mission, including all the dull shitty stuff. Like the geology.

And he could expect Stone and Bleeker, both calm and unflappable, to compensate for Gershon’s instability.

Gershon, then
.

It didn’t go any way toward satisfying the carping scientists; but, hell, he’d just have to absorb the flak about that. Bleeker was a good man, and there was no way he was going to bounce him.

And, of course, he reflected, with Gershon being a rookie that definitely ruled out any chances of selecting Natalie York, even if he could get Gershon some experience on the D-prime. One rookie, or near-rookie, on the crew was bad enough; two would be laughable, in his opinion.

He picked up the phone and asked Mabel to set up calls to Stone, Bleeker, Gershon, and Curval.

He wondered if he should call York. He decided there was no need.

Although it wasn’t yet ten a.m., the sun was already intense on Phil Stone’s head and back. He could feel the sweat pool beneath his collar and under his light Snoopy helmet, and it soaked into the shirt on his back, under the heavy pack.

The ground was just black rock, it seemed to him, and the heat from the cloudless furnace of a sky came blasting straight back up
at him. There was nothing but rock, scrubby grass, and smashed-up gravel for miles around.

Dangling in a plastic wallet at Stone’s belt there was a pack of aerial photographs of the area, together with a couple of outline US Geological Survey maps. Now he unclipped the pack; he looked around, trying to figure how the features he saw compared to the photographs and maps. The photographs had been blurred, artificially, so that he couldn’t see any detail finer than would be shown in Mariner photos of the surface of Mars.

The landscape here was extraordinary. Sculpted, full of knobby hills and canyons, some cut right into the bedrock. He’d never seen anything like it.

‘I don’t know where the hell we are,’ he admitted. ‘It’s damned difficult. Everything looks different, from the ground.’

Adam Bleeker, hiking beside Stone and similarly laden with helmet, pack and Mars boots, came to a halt. Bleeker was towing a two-wheeled cart called a MET, a Modular Equipment Transporter. Bleeker leaned forward, propping his hands on his knees. His blond hair seemed to be on fire in the sunlight. ‘I can figure where we are,’ Bleeker said wearily.

‘Huh?’

‘About a mile to the east of the Union Pacific. I just heard a whistle.’

Natalie York’s radio voice crackled in Stone’s headset. ‘Say again please, EV2; I do not copy.’ York was playing capcom in the comparative comfort of her tent.

Bleeker straightened up. He caught Stone’s eye and mouthed an obscenity.

Stone said, ‘Roger, Natalie. We’re both a little weary here, on the surface of Mars. I guess we’re using up our consumables at a heavy rate.’

‘Then take a drink, you babies.’

Bleeker mouthed more obscenities, but Stone waved him silent. ‘She’s right, goddamn it. Come on.’ He reached behind his head, to where two short plastic tubes dangled from his backpack. He pulled one of them to his mouth and sucked; tepid Tang squirted over his tongue.

Bleeker took a mouthful of water from his own plastic spigot, swilled it around and spat it onto the black rock underfoot, where it sizzled, running away and drying quickly.

‘Try some Tang,’ Stone said.

‘Tang gives me the farts.’

‘Yeah, but you need to replace the potassium you sweat out. Good for the heart …’

‘You two heroes ready to carry on?’

‘Oh, up yours, York,’ Stone said.

They straightened up and walked on.

They came to a bed of gravel and clay, broad and sweeping; the bedrock thrust through it like blackened, exposed bone. ‘We’ve found what looks like loess, Natalie,’ Stone said. ‘River valley deposit.’ He found he was breathing hard, and he was aware that Bleeker, struggling with the heavy MET, was sweating so heavily he had soaked right through his thin T-shirt. ‘I think we should go for a SEP set-up.’

‘Roger, EV1.’

Damn right it’s ‘Roger.’
Staying in one place and playing at scientists for a while was going to be a hell of a lot easier than footslogging across this goddamn volcanic battleground. After all, this was
worse
than the real thing; his Mars suit would be
air-conditioned,
for God’s sake.

‘Adam, why don’t you scout on ahead. Go that way, up across the loess.’

‘Okay.’ Bleeker set down the MET’s handle, hitched his pack on his shoulders, and set off along the loess, his blue Mars boots stained and muddy.

Stone dug out a set of gloves from the MET. The gloves were thick and stiffened with wire, to simulate the pressurized gloves he’d have to wear on Mars. With the gloves on he picked the SEP out of the buggy. The SEP – the Surface Experimental Package, a suite of scientific instruments – was folded up into a heavy dumbbell shape, weighted to mirror how the real thing would feel under Martian gravity.

Bleeker had walked maybe a hundred feet down the loess. ‘Over here,’ he called. ‘This is good and flat.’

Stone began to walk toward him. ‘Okay, Natalie, I’m deploying the SEP now.’

‘Rog.’

It was a real effort to grip the bar of the dumbbell through his stiffened gloves, and to hold the packages away from him. After maybe thirty feet, he stopped and put the SEP down.

Bleeker laughed. ‘It’s only plywood, Phil.’

‘Goddamn it,’ Stone shouted at him, ‘do you have to walk so far?’

‘You know I do.’

Of course, Bleeker was right; on Mars they would have to carry the SEPs far enough from their MEM, or from the Mars Rover, that they could be sure to find a piece of surface undisturbed by the dust kicked up by their vehicles.

He pulled off the gloves, and threw them in the general direction of the MET; he didn’t bother to look where they’d gone.

Bleeker whistled. ‘Are you supposed to do that, skipper?’

‘Sue me.’

He brought the SEP mockup to Bleeker and set it down; together, they began to deploy the instruments.

Assembling the SEP was like setting up a home barbecue.
Undo the bolts. Take the packages out of their Styrofoam blocks. Tamp down the dirt to make the ground flat – actually that wasn’t so easy here; the loess was gravely and unforgiving – and set the instruments level. Make sure each instrument is pointed the right way, and is the right distance from the others. And don’t let them get coated in dirt, goddamn it
.