A Step Beyond (4 page)

“I believe it is the rehydratable asparagus that you detect,” Endicott said. He considered Carter’s behavior childish, but he kept that thought to himself, for he knew that he would have to spend the next two years in close quarters with Carter, and it was best that they got along. With his thin lips pressed tightly together, he returned his attention to the preparation of the food.

Al Carter was the pilot for the American-led team. He had taken the experimental X-51 on its first flight into space six years earlier, an accomplishment that would almost certainly guarantee him a place in aviation history alongside Yeager. He had been president of his class at the Air Force Academy and had graduated with a degree in aeronautical engineering. He understood the complex propulsion systems that powered the crafts he flew better than most auto mechanics understood a simple four-cylinder engine.

But he did not fit the clean-cut image NASA liked to project. He was known for his reckless behavior, and though such behavior was not unusual for test pilots, Carter was more reckless than most. One antic had nearly gotten him fired. Late at night, after he had drunk a few at the local bar, he would take his car, a black Porsche, and head for the nearest highway. He would don a pair of night-vision goggles a few miles after the entrance ramp, turn the car lights off, and floor the accelerator. The police had clocked his car at speeds upward of 160 miles per hour. They did not bother chasing him. It would have been futile. But after a few months, they noticed a pattern and shortly afterward enlisted the assistance of a helicopter. Carter pulled over as soon as the beams from the powerful searchlight struck his car. When the ground police finally arrived, they found him sitting on the grass, smoking a cigarette. He was still wearing the goggles. The incident had been the reason the selection board had first passed him over for the Mars mission. It was rumored the president had secretly intervened in his favor.

“You may wish to inform the others that lunch is being served,” Endicott said.

Still sniffing the air, Carter pushed his way through the galley and through the docking adaptor to the utilities module. Carter found Colonel Tom Nelson in the forward habitability module. He was above Carter, strapped to a multipurpose exercise bench pulling against a three-inch-wide strip of rubber. There was barely enough room for his long legs to fit between the machine and the wall. Drops of sweat were floating in the air around him. He was the oldest member of both crews, and the most fit.

“C’mon, you ol’ warhorse, chow time,” Carter announced.

“It’ll take a few minutes for me to clean up,” Nelson responded.

“Where’s Jean Paul?”

“In the GP lab.”

Carter made his way to the general purpose laboratory, where he found Jean Paul Brunnet, a doctor of planetary science and biology, wearing a pair of virtual goggles and moving his hands in midair as if they held something. The blue veins in the back of his hands were visible.

“Chow time,” Carter announced.

“Shhh . . .” Brunnet waved his arm behind his back for Carter to be quiet and did not notice him leaving. He was examining particles, less than two-thousandths of an inch in diameter, from a Martian rock that contained possible evidence of fossilized cells. The rocks had been brought back by a Japanese robotic mission. They weren’t much different from the rocks returned by an earlier American mission. Like the American samples, the evidence was inconclusive. The formations resembled a variety of bacteria found on Earth, but were much smaller, so small, in fact, most scientists doubted that they could be fossilized cells. Brunnet disagreed. The sample currently under his scope was several billion years old.

He took a slide of a more recent sample and examined it closely. Nothing. Not even evidence of organic material. It was as if life and any trace of it had completely ceased to exist, for none of the younger rocks contained the controversial fossils. But Brunnet did not accept this conclusion. He knew that life evolved to meet the changing conditions of its environment, particularly the lower life-forms such as bacteria. It seemed the surface of Mars was too much for it now. Mars’s thin atmosphere did not filter out the ultraviolet rays of the sun. The combination of the rays with a highly oxidizing soil created an environment that was destructive to organic material. But still there could be pockets of life, perhaps deep below the surface. Small oases protected from the deadly radiation. He pulled up another slide. Again nothing. He had spent the entire morning preparing the rack of slides in front of him.

With a sigh, he carefully removed the slide and filed it with the others he had examined. He vaguely recalled that Carter had said something about lunch, then realized he was hungry.

He was the last to enter the galley. There were five men altogether, the four astronauts chosen to go to Mars and Jack Robbins, a space-station specialist, who had been aboard the
Unity
several months prior to the astronauts’ arrival. His primary responsibility was to oversee preparations for the Mars trip.

Having pulled up the daily assignments on the main screen, Nelson commenced his review of the morning’s activities while they ate. His voice was sharp and clear, and sounded as if he were giving commands. He listened to Endicott’s report on the medical facility and Brunnet’s account of the Martian rocks, then looked at Carter and pointed with his free hand at the final item on the screen.

Carter responded to the look. “Performed an exterior check of the propulsion stage this morning. The propellant lines outside the truss and both the propellant and the oxidizer manifolds checked out. I still want to take a closer look at the main pump assembly; otherwise, everything appears to be in order.”

“Any questions about the afternoon assignments?” Nelson asked as he pulled up the next screen.

Carter cleared his throat. “Says here, you and I are to run out to the co-orbital platform to complete the electrical maintenance check on the Liberty. It also says fully suited. Why the formality?”

“A routine computer check detected a possible pressure leak. We suspect it’s just a bug in the software. Jack here is checking on it. If our hunch is correct, we should be able to do shirt-sleeves by tomorrow afternoon.”

Carter grimaced at the prospect of a fully suited maintenance check, then tossed back his head and gobbled down a naked slice of corned beef. When the meal was done, conversation turned to the Russians.

“They should be arriving at thirteen hundred hours Tuesday,” Nelson confirmed.

“Been a while since I’ve seen that ol’ son of a bitch Dmitri,” Carter said with a smile that revealed his friendship for his ex-rival. Colonel Dmitri “Dima” Fyodorovich Komarov was the mission commander for the Russian-led team. Prior to becoming a cosmonaut, he had been, like Carter, a test pilot and had gone head-to-head with Carter in establishing many of his records. He had attended the Furuze Military Academy, where, again like Carter, he had graduated with an engineering degree in aeronautics. “He didn’t want this to be a joint mission, you know. He was hoping, like President Kerimov, to do it alone.”

“Yes,” Nelson confirmed. “I’ve heard that the backroom politics at the Kremlin got quite ugly. Kerimov was threatening to fire the entire Russian Space Agency. At first, he wouldn’t even consider a joint mission. He still wanted to demonstrate the greatness of the New Republic by reaching Mars first. But he had lost a lot of credibility with the
Volnost
disaster. Then there was the tape of the late Commander Titov telling his wife that a joint mission was the safest way to proceed.”

“Did they ever learn how the press got the tape?” Brunnet asked.

“Not that I know of. Some say that Valentina, his wife, sneaked it out. Others say it was Colonel Schebalin’s doing— that he didn’t want another disaster on his hands. Kerimov had a more serious problem though. The New Republic simply didn’t have the means to put together another mission in time to beat us. Kerimov’s only viable option was to accept our offer of a joint mission. He was lucky to score a draw.”

“I hear Dmitri’s cheating on his wife,” Carter said, returning to his original subject. “Why she puts up with the son of a bitch is beyond me.”

“I suspect that Tatiana will present an interesting challenge,” Endicott said.

Major Tatiana Sergeievna Pavlova was the only female selected to go to Mars. She was attractive and full-figured, and she would be aboard the
Unity
within three days’ time. Despite her outstanding scientific qualifications, it was rumored that the Russians had selected her so they could say they had put the first woman on another planet. She was married to Vladimir Pavlov, who would pilot the Russian-led ship, the
Druzhba
, to Mars. They had met during a training exercise and had married shortly afterward. The marriage had made her the obvious choice for the female slot of the Mars mission, and some people suspected it was the reason she had married Vladimir.

“They should have never included a woman,” Endicott said. “The potential complications introduced by sexual relationships between crew members could prove detrimental.”

“She is married,” Nelson said.

“That only makes it worse.” Carter was chewing a dried peach. “The
Druzhba
is only so big. By the end of two years the men will be at each other’s throats trying to get into her pants. Except for her husband. He’ll be at their throats trying to keep them out.”

Nelson interrupted the discussion by glancing at his watch and declaring in a loud voice that lunch was over.

“S
okop
, this is
Unity
, initiate roll maneuver,” Carter instructed. “Twenty-five meters and closing.”

“Initiating fourteen-point-two-degree roll,” came the response over the intercom in a thick Russian accent. It belonged to the pilot of the Russian Space Shuttle
Sokop
. The
Sokop
was making its approach for a soft dock with the space station.

“
Sokop
, you’re coming in high. Correct pitch by zero-point-three degrees.”

“Correcting pitch.”

“
Sokop
, hold your position at seventeen meters,” Carter said.

“Holding position.”

“Extending the MSC arm,” Carter announced. “Prepare for soft dock.”

A long, robotic manipulator arm slowly unfolded from the Mobile Service Center of the space station and reached out to snag the Russian shuttle. The metallic appendage was capable of handling a two-hundred-thousand-pound load. Television cameras served as the eyes for the arm and were located at the elbow and wrist joints. At the far end of the arm was the capture mechanism, a hollow tube that resembled a fingerless stump, inside of which were three wires that crossed to form a triangle. When a grapple was placed inside the stump, a ring attached to the wires would rotate, shrinking the triangle until the wires were tightly wrapped around the grapple.

Carter maneuvered the arm with a joysticklike control. The control was connected to a panel cluttered with an assortment of dials and switches. When turned, the dial marked JOINT

would activate a different section of the arm, which could then be manipulated through the joystick. Carter viewed the two monitors to his right as he carefully extended the mechanical arm toward the Russian craft. He had practiced the soft-docking maneuvers in the simulator the day before. This was his first actual docking, and, as far as he could determine, there was no detectable difference from the simulator.

When the robotic arm was within two meters of the Russian shuttle, Carter stopped its forward motion. He activated the wrist joint. The capture mechanism swung back and forth, allowing the camera mounted on the mechanism to scan the hull. Carter located the grapple and slowly moved the arm forward. He stopped chewing his gum as the two came in contact. Because of the enormous mass involved, the slightest miscalculation could severely damage the robotic arm.

“The grapple is secured,” Carter said. “Commencing approach.”

He adjusted the sensitivity of the joystick and slowly pulled it back. At first the movement was imperceptible. But then, after a few seconds, the two ships began to visibly close. The robotic arm brought the Russian shuttle to within a meter of the space station.

“Prepare for docking,” Carter said, and resumed chewing his gum.

The Russians extended the cylindrical docking adaptor, through which the cosmonauts would crawl to reach the space station, and mated it to the adaptor on the
Unity
. Neither adaptor was male or female. The sexless coupling had evolved from the universal docking mechanism introduced in the mid-seventies during a joint mission between the Soviet Union and the United States, when both nations mutually realized that neither wanted to be identified with the receiving end. The delicate issue was skirted as the obvious benefits of a universal mechanism became apparent. Any ship could dock with any other ship without the complications of various adaptors.

Colonel Tom Nelson was standing at the portal waiting to greet the first cosmonaut through. The other astronauts were floating behind him, peering over his shoulder. The large smile of Colonel Dmitri Fyodorovich Komarov and his extended hand appeared at the portal.

“Good to see you again, my friends,” Komarov said, grinning, as he pulled his large frame through the adaptor.

“Greetings, Colonel Komarov,” Nelson said. “I believe you have met everyone, except perhaps Jack Robbins here.”

“It is good to meet you in person,” Komarov said, and then took Jack’s hand and shook it heartily.

“Indeed an honor,” Jack replied.

Komarov released the hand, then walked past Robbins and wrapped his arms around Carter in a large bear hug.

“How’s my old comrade doing?” Komarov asked in a loud and booming voice.

“It’s been a while, Dmitri.”

“We must talk later,” Komarov said, holding Carter at arm’s length. “I am much interested in hearing of the X-51.”

“It would be my pleasure,” Carter responded, masking his uneasiness at being approached so suddenly and so forwardly on such a sensitive matter. Much of the information he could relate regarding the plane was still classified. But this was Komarov, his Russian counterpart, one of the few men Carter truly admired. He would talk with him, but he would be cautious. “We have much to talk about.”