Voyage (74 page)

At her desk, Bella was in tears. He just squeezed her shoulder; he didn’t trust himself to say anything.

Inside the office they were waiting there for him, lined up in front
of his old gun-metal desk: Morgan, Xu, Lye, Rowen. Their faces were long, and not a damn one of them could meet his eye.

A smell of sweet-sickly cologne, of stale tobacco, wafted around Lee’s office.

There – standing behind Lee’s gun-metal desk – was Gene Tyson.

Lee went straight to Tyson and shook his hand. ‘Congratulations, Gene. Art is showing a lot of faith in you. You’ve got a hell of a job, but you’ve got the best people in the industry here, and I know you’re going to pull it off.’

Tyson gripped his hand. ‘I’ve got one big act to follow.’ He sounded sincere, his big fleshy face solemn. ‘I’m going to need your support during the handover, obviously. JK –’ He glanced around the office. ‘You don’t need to move out of here. It’s not necessary. I mean –’

‘No.’ Lee released Tyson’s hand; his own fingers felt moist from the perspiration of Tyson’s soft flesh. ‘No, that’s okay, Gene. Just give me a day to get out.’

‘Of course.’

Then, graciously enough, Tyson left the office.

When Tyson had gone the room felt empty, purposeless.

‘Damn it, JK,’ Bob Rowen said suddenly, and his big round moon of a face, under its grizzle-gray crew-cut, looked alarmingly as if it might crumple up into tears. ‘I didn’t want it this way. You know that. The MEM is your ship.’

Lee took his shoulders and shook him gently. ‘Well, now you’ve got the ball coming out of the sky at you, boy,’ he said softly. ‘And there isn’t a pair of hands anywhere in the industry I’d rather see under it.’

‘We go back a long way, JK. All the way back to the old B-70.’

‘Christ, it’s not as if I’m going to Mars myself. I’ll even be on site here, most days.’ It was true; Cane had offered him a staff job, a way to keep his rank of vice president. ‘Any time you need me, you know you’ve only got to pick up the phone.’

Now Rowen’s face did crumple. ‘I know, JK. Oh, Jesus.’

Lee felt as if he might fold up too.
Destructive testing, again
.

He stepped back and clapped his hands. The sound was loud, startling, and they all looked at him.

‘Come on, guys. You’ve all got work to do. Let’s get on with it.’

His people made attempts at good-byes, at more eulogies.

He chased them out of his office.

When they’d gone he stood there for a while, looking at his big metal
desk. It looked like a piece of a wrecked battleship, stranded in the middle of a sea of blue-gray corporate-colors carpet.

Suddenly he couldn’t stand it any more.

He went out, closing the door behind him. He asked Bella, who was sobbing openly, to pack up his effects and send them on.

Outside, Jack Morgan was waiting. ‘Come on,’ Morgan said. ‘I could use a day off. Let’s get down to the Balboa Bay and drown in Lemon Hart.’

It sounded like a hell of a good idea to Lee. But, there in the middle of the car park, something slowed him, snagging at him like a trapped thread.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Thanks, Jack, but no.’

‘Huh?’ There was the concern of a doctor mixed in with Morgan’s surprise.

Lee grinned. ‘I’m fine. It’s just that –’

Morgan clapped his shoulder. ‘Don’t worry about it Next time, huh.’

‘Sure.’

Lee walked to his T-bird. He guessed Morgan understood.

It’s just that today, I think I should go on home to Jennine
.

Bleeker, in blue coveralls, sat in a small padded chair, opposite Muldoon’s desk. Bleeker’s eyes were large and pale, and had always seemed somehow calm to Muldoon. Like windows to a church. But now little creases bunched up around those eyes, and the color drained out of Bleeker’s face.

When Bleeker spoke his voice had tightened up, but it was under control. ‘So tell me, Joe. I did something wrong?’

‘No. No, of course not. You know that.’ Muldoon tapped the fat brown card folder on his desk, it’s just surgeon shit … Listen. You want a drink?’ He opened the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet. ‘I got a bottle of sour mash down here, and –’

‘No thanks, Joe. Just tell me, will you?’

Muldoon opened the folder on his desk. It was the preliminary surgeon’s report from Bleeker’s D-prime mission post-flight checkup. He started leafing through it, through the metabolism graphs and radiation dosimetry charts and countersigned forms and
all the rest, wondering where to begin. ‘Hell, Adam. You know how it is with surgeons. You only walk out of their office two ways: fine, or –’

‘Or grounded. And I’m grounded. Is that what you’re going to tell me, Joe?’

Impatient, Muldoon banged the folder closed with the palm of his hand. ‘Adam, you’ve spent a hell of a lot of man-hours in space, in Skylab, Moonlab, and now D-prime –’

Bleeker ducked his head.

‘In fact, that’s one of your main qualifications to be on Ares. Right? We know you can cope with long-duration missions, because you’ve done it already. And now you’ve got experience with the MEM, the new technology … But you know that space exposure gets to you in the end.’

‘So what’s the problem? Muscle wastage?’ For the first time Bleeker looked vaguely alarmed. ‘Is it my heart?’

‘No,’ said Muldoon quickly. ‘As far as I can tell from this crap, your heart is fine. Adam, you’ve always been outstanding in adhering to your exercise regimes. Your muscle decline has been small, every trip, and you’ve recovered quickly.’

‘What then? Calcium loss?’

‘Not that. Adam – it’s radiation exposure.’

‘I’m within the limits,’ Bleeker said quickly.

Muldoon tried to suppress a sigh. ‘Yes, but they changed the rules on you, pal. To be fair to the surgeons, they keep on learning; they still don’t know much about the effects of long-term low-level radiation exposure, and they keep on coming up with new ways for you to get hurt … Listen: what do you know about free radicals?’

Bleeker frowned.

‘Free radicals are bits of molecules. Highly energetic. Like ions – with charges knocked out of their atoms – only with more horse power. They’re highly oxidizing, which means they got a taste for hydrogen. They’ll strip hydrogen atoms out of nearby molecules, even. And that can cause havoc if it’s happening inside your cells.

‘Now, we all got free radicals in our bodies. We need them for the operation of the metabolism. But there’s a
balance
. Your body produces them, and absorbs them, and keeps everything together. But if you’re exposed to high energy radiation, or light, or extremes of temperatures –’

‘You get more free radicals.’

‘Right. The balance is lost.’ Muldoon looked over the report once more. ‘These babies propagate. A free radical will return to normal
by stealing its neighbor’s electron. But that makes that neighbor into a free radical in turn. Your body has a scavenger system to fight these things, but it can get overwhelmed or inactivated. And then the damage you suffer depends on what gets hit. You can get radiation-induced cancers if a DNA base is damaged, or your system loses control of its functions if protein is damaged, or you can get internal bleeding if membrane lipids are broken.’

Bleeker frowned. ‘
Membrane lipids,
Joe?’

Muldoon tried to put together an answer in plain English: how free radicals contributed to aging, and cancers, and degenerative diseases of the heart, liver and lungs; how the loss of free radical balance contributed to a lot of other microgravity problems like disturbing the inner ear’s balance mechanism, and bone degeneration …

‘Look, Adam, you ever left a slab of butter out in the sun?’

Bleeker thought about it. ‘Gets rancid.’

‘Well, there you are. That’s free radical damage.’

Bleeker, his eyes locked on Muldoon’s, started pulling at his cuff, in a precise, apparently unconscious gesture.

Bleeker really did seem to have a kind of inner calm, an even temper. It had evidently got him through all that A-war shit he’d trained for, Muldoon supposed. Maybe the psychos were right, that Bleeker had a lack of imagination.

But now Muldoon could see the tension building in him, under the surface. How was he going to react to this, the worst news of his life?

‘Look, Adam. You got to understand. You’re not ill. It’s just that because of this kind of study, they’ve tightened the limits. On everybody. And you, with all your exposure to space, have finished up outside the limits. If the free radical study had come in a couple of months earlier you probably would have been bumped off D-prime too. Look – you might have suffered some of this free radical damage. Or not. Or something else –’

‘I’ve proved myself in space, Joe, and on the ground, time and again. Look how I pulled off the D-prime flight. I deserve this goddamn trip.’

‘I know that, but –’

‘And I know about surgeons’ reports. They talk about risks. Likelihoods and percentiles. Not certainties. And besides, it isn’t logical. The Ares crew is going to run up a lot more time in space than I’ve accumulated anyhow.’

‘But starting from a lower base, Adam. Even Phil Stone.’

‘Joe, I don’t care about the risks. I want to go anyhow.’

‘If it costs your life?’

‘Even so.’

Bleeker lifted up his head, and there were those wide, church window eyes looking right into Muldoon, open, honest, committed.

I have to kill this, here and now. I can’t leave him with any hope
. And he didn’t intend to tell Bleeker about the pressure he’d been under: from the flight surgeons, even from Administrator Josephson himself. He wasn’t going to hide behind any of that.

‘That’s not the point, Adam,’ he said, and he tried to get some steel into his voice. ‘I can’t risk having you fall ill, half-way to Mars. I can’t risk sending you. Because you would endanger the mission.’

Bleeker smiled, a small motion of the muscles of his cheeks. Then he stood up, stiffly, still tugging at his cuff. ‘I appreciate the way you’re handling this, Joe.’

‘Oh, God. Don’t be kind to
me,
for Christ’s sake. Adam, we’ll talk later. You know I need your help now. We haven’t got a lot of time to recover from this. And later – hell, there are still good careers here, on the ground.’ He laughed, a little hollowly. ‘Look at me. You’re still in the team, Adam.’

‘Sure. I know my duty, Joe. I’ll do everything I can.’

Goddamn this job. This is the most competent man in the Office, and I have to bump him
. ‘Yeah. I know you will.’

Bleeker turned back. ‘By the way. Who’s replacing me? You decided yet?’

Joe Muldoon hesitated.

His orderly crew rotation system had gone out of the window, first with Curval bombing out, and now this bad shit from the surgeons about Adam. He felt an unreasonable anger at the doctors, the managers, the psychologists, all the rest of them who wanted a piece of his decision.

He felt like shocking them all, taking back the responsibility in his own two hands.

He’d already spoken to Phil Stone, the Ares mission commander. Stone had defended Bleeker to the hilt. But when he’d come to accept Bleeker was off the mission, Stone had been surprisingly clear about who he wanted to replace Bleeker.

Well, Joe, you got to pick the best Mission Specialist. The most knowledgeable: more so than Adam, for sure. And the most committed: the one who’s been spending time in the sims, and trailing around trying to train the prime crew, and all of that. And –

What?

And someone who can maybe see things, the mission, in a way old jocks like you and me can’t. A different perspective. Someone who can articulate it better, maybe …

Rookie or not, Phil?

Hell, yes, Joe. Rookie or not
.

Muldoon found himself grinning. He knew that the candidate he had in mind had spent a lot of time working with Ralph Gershon, in the MLTV and various sims and survival exercises. But only because they were both outsiders, pushed together by circumstance. Still, they’d proved they could work together, although they would never be bosom buddies.
The goddamn shrinks will jump up and down, over having two dipsticks on one flight, with only Phil Stone to keep ‘em apart …

So, fuck ‘em
.

‘Yes,’ he said to Bleeker. ‘Yes, I’ve decided. But, Adam –’

‘Yeah?’

‘She doesn’t know yet.’

Vladimir Viktorenko had his shoes off, and he was sipping at a miniature bottle of mini-bar malt whisky. He was in Houston to work on more aspects of the Ares training program. Right now, he was listening desultorily to the evening news and wondering what to do with the evening.

The newsreader – a stunningly beautiful young woman – said that the crew for Ares had just been announced.

Viktorenko coughed, and dropped the little bottle.

He sat up, wiping a fine spray of the liquor from his upper lip. He couldn’t have heard correctly.

But no: there was a picture of Natalie herself, an official portrait in which she sat before a nondescript background, staring past the photographer’s shoulder, nervously clutching a long-obsolete model of a biconic MEM.

He picked up the phone and dialled York.

‘Marushka! I just heard! You are going to Mars!’

York’s voice was flat, unemotional. ‘It isn’t true.’

‘What? But I have seen the news …’

‘Yeah. Me too. But I haven’t heard anything from NASA. Until they call me, I don’t know anything about it.’

Viktorenko felt his mouth opening and closing, like a fish’s.
You are going to Mars! You should be dancing, singing!
The silence on the line stretched out.

‘Marushka. You are alone?’

‘Uh huh.’

Of course you are
. ‘Do I have your permission to come wait with you, until the phone call comes? Perhaps this will help you.’

‘If you like. You don’t have to. I’m fine, Vladimir.’

‘Of course you are.’

Viktorenko hung up, swept up six of the miniatures from the mini bar, and ran out of the room.