Voyage (72 page)

‘What we need is for three guys to land there in a MEM, and dig a few deep cores.’

Stone started to see where all this was leading. He leafed through the photos again. ‘What area are these photos of?’

‘That’s one of the most striking outflow channels. It’s Mangala Vallis, Phil. Martian scabland: your landing area.’

Stone grinned.
She’s doing it again. Mangala Vallis. On Which Natalie York, leading light of the site selection committee and would-be Mars voyager, just happens to be the world’s top expert
.

And Adam Bleeker still doesn’t know what anastomosis is. I hope the guy’s watching his back
.

Twenty days from orbit insertion, Mars had opened out into a disk. Where the line between light and dark crossed the planet, she could see, with her naked eye, wrinkles and bumps in the surface: craters and canyons catching the light of the sun.

It was remarkable how much she could recognize. Almost as if she had been here before. There was the huge gouge of the Valles
Marineris – a wound visible even from a million miles out – and the polar cap in the north, swelling with water ice in advance of the coming winter, and the great black calderas of the Tharsis volcanoes.

Mars was clearly a small world, she thought. Some of the features – Tharsis, the Marineris canyons, Syrtis, the great iced pit of Hellas in the south – sprawled around the globe, outsized, dominating the curvature.

In some ways Mars was as she had expected. It looked a lot like the big photomosaic globes at JPL. But there were surprising differences too. Mars wasn’t red so much as predominantly brown, a surface wrought out of subde shadings of tan and ochre and rust. There was a sharp visible difference between northern and southern hemispheres, with the younger lands to the north of the equatorial line being brighter in color, almost yellow.

Ares was approaching the planet at an angle to the sunlight, so Mars was gibbous, with a fat slice of the night hemisphere turned toward the spacecraft. And the ochre shading seemed to deepen at the planet’s limb, and at low sun angles. These features gave the little globe a marked roundness. Mars was a little round orange, the only object apart from the sun in all the three-hundred-and-sixty-degree sky visible as other than a point of light.

In the depths of the mission – suspended between planets, with nothing visible but sun and stars beyond the walls of the craft, and ground down by the stultifying routine of long-duration flight – York had suffered some deep depressions. She’d shrunk into herself, going through her assignments on autopilot, shunning the company of her crewmates. She suspected they’d suffered similarly, but they seemed to have found ways to cope: Gershon with his love of the machinery around them, Stone with his little pet pea plants.

Already she was dreading the return journey; it loomed in her imagination, a huge black barrier.

But that was for the future. Right now she was climbing out of the pit, up toward the warm ochre light of Mars.

She spent as much time as she could just staring at the approaching globe, identifying sites no naked human eye had seen before, as if claiming more and more of Mars for herself.

As they prepared for the ignition, Bleeker had
Born in the USA
playing on the cabin’s little tape deck. It drowned out the clicks and whirs of the MEM’s equipment.

Bleeker said, ‘Ascent propulsion system propellant tanks pressurized.’

‘Rager,’ Gershon replied.

‘Ascent feeds are open, shut-offs are closed.’

On the ground, Ted Curval was capcom today.
‘Iowa,
this is Houston. Less than ten minutes here. Everything looks good. Just a reminder. We want the rendezvous radar mode switch in LGC just as it is on surface fifty-nine … We assume the steerable is in track mode auto.’

Gershon said, ‘Stop, push-button reset, abort to abort stage reset.’

Bleeker pushed his buttons. ‘Reset.’

Curval said, ‘Our guidance recommendation is PGNS, and you’re cleared for ignition.

‘Rog. We’re number one on the runway …’

A hundred miles above the Earth, as Gershon and Bleeker worked through the litany of the pre-burn checklist, MEM and Apollo drifted in formation. The Apollo, containing Command Module Pilot Bob Crippen, was an exquisitely jeweled silver toy, drifting against the luminous carpet of Earth. And the MEM was a great shining cone, at thirty feet tall dwarfing Apollo, surrounded by discarded Mars heatshield panels and rippling with foil.

Its six squat landing legs were folded out and extended. But MEM 009 was destined to land nowhere.

Gershon stood harnessed in place beside Bleeker in the cramped little cabin of the MEM’s ascent stage. He felt bulky, awkward in his orange pressure suit. In front of Gershon was a square instrument panel, packed with dials and switches and instruments. There were two sets of hand controllers, one for each man. More circuit breakers coated the walls, and there were uncovered bundles of wiring and plumbing along the floor. The cabin had two small triangular windows, one to either side of the main panel, calibrated with the spidery markings that would help guide a landing on Mars. Blue Earthlight shone through the windows, dappling the cabin’s panels.

Behind Gershon there were three acceleration couches, two of
them folded up. On a landing flight there would be a third crewman in here, the mission specialist, a passenger during the MEM’s single brief flight.

The cabin’s surfaces were utilitarian, functional, mostly unpainted, with everything riveted together, the bundles of wires lashed together by hand as if in a home workshop.

The MEM was an experimental ship: the product of hand-crafting, of thousands of man-hours of patient labor, and based on conservative designs, stuff that had worked before. The apparent coarseness of the construction was the feature of space hardware that most surprised people used to sleek mass-produced technology. It was nothing like
Star Trek
.

But to Gershon the MEM was
real,
almost earthy.

To descend to Mars, in a ship assembled by the hands and muscles of humans: to Gershon, still elated to be in space at all, there was something wonderful about the thought.

As long as the mother worked, of course.

‘Coming up on two minutes,’ Curval called up. ‘Mark, T minus two minutes.’

‘Roger,’ Bleeker said. He turned off the tape.

Glancing at his panel, Gershon could see that the ascent stage was powered up now, no longer drawing any juice from the lower stage’s batteries. It was preparing to become an independent spacecraft for the first time.

In this test, simulating a launch from the Martian surface, the whole unlikely MEM assemblage was supposed to come apart, releasing the stick-like ascent stage with its ungainly, strap-on propellant tanks.

Gershon knew this was the moment on the mission that was most feared by the engineers at Columbia and Marshall. There were too many ways for the fucking thing to go wrong. Like, the ascent stage ignition would take place with the engine bell still buried within the guts of the MEM’s descent stage. What if there was a blow-back, an over-pressure of some kind, before the ascent stage got clear? …

Well, they were soon going to find out.

Bleeker said, ‘Guidance steering in the PGNS. Deadband minimum, ATT control, mode control auto.’

‘Auto,’ Gershon responded.

‘One minute,’ the capcom said.

‘Got the steering in the abort guidance.’

Gershon armed the ignition. ‘Okay, master arm on.’

‘Rog.’

‘You’re go,
Iowa,’
said Curval.

‘Rager. Clear the runway.’

Bleeker turned to him. ‘You ready?’

‘Sure.’

‘That mother may give us a kick.’ Bleeker reminded him of the drill. ‘Okay, Ralph. At five seconds I’m going to hit ABORT STAGE and ENGINE ARM. And you’ll hit PROCEED.’

‘Rager.’

‘Here we go. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five.’

Beyond the small window in front of Gershon’s face, the shining blue horizon of Earth drifted by, a complex, clearly three-dimensional sculpture of cloud over sea.

The computer display in front of Gershon flashed a ‘99,’ a request to proceed. He glanced across at Bleeker.

Bleeker closed the master firing arm. ‘Engine arm ascent.’

Gershon pressed the PROCEED button.

There was a loud bang, a rattle around the floor of the cabin. Pyrotechnic guillotines were blowing away the nuts, bolts, wires and water hoses connecting the upper and lower stages of the MEM.

A weight descended smoothly on Gershon’s shoulders.

‘First stage engine on ascent,’ Bleeker said. ‘Here we go.’ He smiled. ‘Beautiful.’

After his unexpected, incredible assignment to the prime Mars crew, Gershon had been happy to be bumped onto this D-prime test mission. His first flight into space might not have been the most glamorous in the MEM test program – that would probably be the one remaining E mission, the attempt to bring a reinforced MEM in through the Earth’s atmosphere and land it on the salt flats around Edwards Air Force Base. That had been given to an experienced crew led by John Young. But the D-prime, an eleven-day Earth-orbit shakedown flight, was arguably the more important test. In an untried spacecraft, the crew would rehearse every phase of the Mars landing mission save only the atmospheric entry and final powered descent; and, as well, they would rehearse many contingency procedures which might save future missions.

Already, in the MEM, Gershon and Bleeker had ventured as much as a hundred miles from Apollo. In a craft which nobody had tried to rendezvous with before. Which didn’t have a heatshield strong enough to get them back to the ground. And on top of that, the whole flight was in low Earth orbit, where communications and
navigation challenges were even tougher than on, say, a flight to the Moon.

If they got through this flight the MEM would be man-rated, with only the Mars heatshield remaining to be test-flown. It was a connoisseur’s spaceflight, a flight for true test pilots.

And besides, Gershon had been happy to bury himself in the mission, to get away from the attention his assignment to the Mars crew had brought him.
The first black man in space: the first brother on Mars
. He was learning to deal with it, but it was relentless, distracting. And nothing to do with him.

As far as he was concerned he was Ralph Gershon, complete and entire, and not a symbol of anyone else’s agenda.

However, the mission had been snake-bit: nothing but problems from the beginning.

It started even before the launch, in fact. Gershon had seen JK Lee’s people at Columbia tearing their hair out as they tried to coax Spacecraft 009 through its final prelaunch checkout in the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Cape. There had been times when Gershon had become convinced that it wouldn’t come together at all.

Then, once they had reached orbit and opened up the docking tunnel between Apollo and MEM, Gershon found himself floating in a snowstorm of white fiberglass. It had blown out of an insulation blanket in the tunnel wall. Gershon and Bleeker had spent their first couple of hours in the MEM just vacuuming all that crap out of the air, and they had finished up with white stuff clinging to their hair, their eyelashes, their mouths, until they’d looked like nothing so much as a pair of plucked chickens.

After that Bleeker and Gershon had crawled all over the MEM, putting the subsystems through comprehensive tests. And every damn one of those tests had given them problems, which had needed diagnosis and repeated testing.

There had been that odd, sour smell coming from the environment control system in the surface shelter, for instance, which they had finally traced to a piece of scuffed insulation slowly scorching behind a panel. The electrical power system had shown some severe faults, with whole panels of instruments just cutting out. Meanwhile the inertial guidance system was a pig, wallowing inside its big metal sphere, constantly losing its lock. And the MEM’s big antennae complex had gotten stuck, and for a while it couldn’t talk to the Apollo or the ground …

Relationships between the crew and the ground had gotten
strained in all of this. As they wrestled with the craft, Bleeker, as commander, had become concerned that Houston was reluctant to make any compromises in the scientific and PR elements of the flight plan – which, as far as Bleeker and Gershon were concerned, came a long way down the list in comparison to the engineering objectives of the mission. So Bleeker, showing an unexpected assertiveness, got into battles with the flight controllers. He canceled TV broadcasts, and he blue-penciled whole sections out of the flight plan.

At one point the capcom told the crew that the controllers were plotting to bring the Command Module down in a typhoon, and Gershon suspected it was only half a joke.

Finally Gershon had got so sick of the problems that he’d taken a little plastic juice-dispensing lemon from the food lockers, and hung it up between the MEM’s triangular windows, in full view of the onboard TV, to show what the crew thought of their new ship.

All Gershon could hear right now was the rattling thump-thump of the ascent engine’s ball valves opening and closing. The noise was oddly comforting, giving him a feeling of security, that the mission was unfolding as it should.

The Earth slid away from Gershon, as the ascent stage climbed smoothly up toward its rendezvous with
New Jersey,
the waiting Apollo; it was so smooth it was a ride in a glass-walled elevator.

There wasn’t much for Gershon to do. Because the ascent stage engine had no backup –
it had to work
– it had been made as simple as possible, with just two moving parts: ball valves, to release propellant and oxidant into the combustion chamber. The engine, fueled with oxygen and methane, had no throttle or choke; all you could do was throw the master arm and turn the engine on, and it would just burn steadily for ten minutes or so, just as it was designed, to lift its crew off Mars and back to a parking orbit.