Titan (3 page)

She’d even formulated the thought that maybe Lamb wasn’t actually good for anything else. To stay in the office you had to resist promotion, after all. You had to demonstrate sustained mediocrity. John Young, the other great surviving Moonwalker, had been taken off the active roster when he’d been so vocal in criticizing NASA safety procedures after
Challenger

Besides, all that ancient astronaut-as-Cold Warrior garbage from the 1960s, which still clung around NASA, just did not cut any ice with Benacerraf. It had nothing to do with the future of space travel as she saw it, which could only be about a steady, logical and gradual expansion of the space frontier, beyond Earth. Or even with the actions required of NASA, the space agency, to survive in a future of decreasing funding, increasing irrationality, a growing sense of military threat from China and elsewhere which was causing the ancient Cold Warriors to come rearing from their bunkers once more…

It might take all of her career to build the Space Station; she might never get to see another human being walk on the Moon. Well, that was fine by her. Space was a damn difficult place to work.

But as long as Lamb, and one or two others, still hung around, you still had the hero-centered distortion of the whole organization. As if everything that had happened after 1972 had been a long, dull coda. Even the Mission Controllers and their backroom staff were mostly aviation people of some kind, she was finding; and a startling number of the controllers—who were supposed to be there as specialist engineers or scientists—would apply to join the astronaut office at every recruitment round, regular as clockwork.

… But all that was before she’d begun to train with Lamb for this flight, STS-143. Before she’d sat with him through hours of sims, observed his prowess at the antique complexities of the Shuttle system, seen him demonstrate his calm control in the abort options. Tom Lamb could
handle
things, she’d come to realize. His old-fashioned jock bull hid a central, deep-rooted competence.

As she’d been strapped into
Columbia
’s flight deck for her first launch, she’d been grateful for Lamb’s calm voice, responding to the ground. It anyone could get her home alive, it would be Tom Lamb.

And anyhow, now she was up here, she started to see his point of view.

She swung herself around, and faced back down into the payload bay. She blipped her left-hand controller to slow her rotation.

Columbia
’s cabin was above her head, the tail section below her feet. The starboard wing was in the shadow of the sun; the big Stars and Stripes on the port wing was obscured by the open bay doors. Her eyes were dark-adapted to Earthlight, so she could see no stars beyond the orbiter.
Columbia
was like a complex toy, brilliant white and silver, set against complete blackness.

At first glance
Columbia
looked faintly ridiculous: that fat, boxy body, the patchy coloration of the thermal protection system, the snub nose, those thick wings and that huge tail:
Columbia
was like an airliner stranded in space, its aerodynamic surfaces useless in vacuum.
Columbia,
the first of the five Shuttle orbiters built—and so the most primitive—weighed all of a hundred and eighty thousand pounds dry. You had to haul all that mass up into orbit, and back down again, every flight, to deliver just fifty thousand pounds of payload to orbit.

And after thirty flights
Columbia
was showing her age. She could see how the white-painted hull was scarred and battered, the slight discolorations between the tiles, the scuffs on the windows that sparkled in the sunlight, the stains on the thermal fabric lining the payload bay.

But all of that seemed to fade from her awareness, as she saw the orbiter drifting serenely against the blackness of space. Bizarrely,
Columbia
looked as if she belonged up here.

The Shuttle system was the technology of the 1970s, still flying in the ’00s, with the hard wisdom of the intervening years built into it. And, realistically, no replacement system in sight.
Columbia
was fresh paint over rusty, obsolescent technology. But somehow, up here, she was able to make out the 1960s von Braun dream of spaceplanes which the orbiter embodied.

Her throat hurt. Damn it, she felt as if she was going to cry.

The light around her changed. The shadow of the starboard wing was growing longer.
Columbia
was passing into another forty-five minute night.

“… Hey, Paula,” Tom Lamb said now. “Scutdebutt from home. Some double-dome from JPL is saying he’s found life on Titan.”

“Really?”

“So they say. Nice place to hear about it, huh.”

“Yes,” she said.

… She turned again, to face Earth.

At the rim of the planet she could see the airglow layer, a bright layer of oxygen radiating at the top of the atmosphere, like a false horizon. The lights of cities, strung along the coasts of the land, looked like streetlights scattered along a road. There was a thunderstorm over central Africa, and she could see lightning sparking constantly, over cloud systems spanning thousands of miles. The lightning propagated through the clouds like a living thing, growing and spreading; its glow shone from beneath the layer of cloud, and she could see three-dimensional structure within the cloud, edges and swirls of purple.

The leading edges of
Columbia
glowed, a taint orange, in an aura a few inches thick. The glow came from a thin hail of atoms of atomic oxygen, interacting with the orbiter’s surfaces.

Even here, she thought, they were not truly free of Earth.

She thought about the news from Titan, wondering vaguely what it might mean for her.

The low-level arc floodlights in the payload bay glowed like a captive constellation.

T
he suit technician removed
the protective cover from Jiang Ling’s helmet. Jiang sat down on the lip of the hatch and hauled herself into the orbital module, head first. Another technician pulled off her outer boots, and she swung her legs inside the module.

She was alone, here in this orbital compartment, this elongated sphere within which she would spend a week in low Earth orbit. The compartment was like a miniature space station, crammed with storage lockers, provisions, scientific equipment and literature. Everything was gleaming white, new and shiny.

The technicians were framed in the hatchway. They were both Han Chinese: military officers, with their brown uniforms visible under their white coats. They grinned at her. But, she thought, their eyes were hard.

One of them passed her a small brass bell. She took it in her gloved hand. It was inscribed with the face of Mao Zedong, in comfortable, corpulent middle age.

The technician grinned at her. “Maybe
ta laorenjia
will bring you luck.”

She raised her hand in thanks.

The technicians stepped back into the white room beyond the doorway, and hauled the hatch closed. It shut with finality. Even the quality of the sound changed. She was aware of a sense of enclosure, almost of claustrophobia.

Clutching the brass bell, she put such thoughts aside as irrelevant.

Beneath her was an inner hatch. She twisted around and lowered herself through this. Now she was entering the second of her craft’s three modules, called the command compartment, which she would ride to orbit—and home to Earth again, to her planned soft landing in the Gobi Desert.

Below her, inaccessible now, was the third part of her craft: an equipment module, containing fuel tanks, oxygen, water supplies, life support, and the mass of equipment that ran the on-board systems. The equipment module would be used to maneuver the craft in orbit, and when Jiang finally returned to Earth this stage would be used as a retro-rocket, before being jettisoned along with the orbital module.

She settled into her couch. The command compartment was a compact hall-sphere, its walls curving up before her. There were bulky compartments and packs all around her, strapped to the walls and floor, most of them containing equipment that would be needed for the return to Earth: parachutes, flotation gear, emergency rations, blankets and thick clothes. The spacecraft’s main controls were set out before her: an artificial horizon, handsets for attitude controls, communications and monitoring gear.

She was hemmed in, embedded in this solid mass of equipment like a wrapped-up porcelain doll.

The astronaut trainees, morbidly, called the command compartment the
xiaohao,
after the small isolation cells which were still operated within Qincheng Prison in Beijing. But her brief feeling of confinement had passed, for the capsule was already alive: the cabin floodlights glowed cheerfully, complex graphics scrolled through the softscreens embedded in the walls, and green lights shone all over the instrument panels.

There were two small circular windows, one to either side of her. Now there was only darkness within them, because the spacecraft—perched here a hundred and seventy feet above the ground at the tip of the Long March booster—was enclosed within its protective fairing. But there was a small periscope, its eyepiece set in the center of the instrument panel before her, whose extension poked out beyond the fairing.

Seen through the periscope, the sky was a vast blue dome, devoid of moisture.

This was Inner Mongolia, the northeast of China. The desert was a vast, tan brown expanse, as flat as a table-top, stretching to the horizon in every direction. Beijing was hundreds of miles east of here. To the north, beyond the shadow of the Great Wall, camel trains still worked across the Mongolian Gobi.

The Jiuquan launch center itself was modest. There were just three launch pads set in a rough triangle a few hundred yards apart. The pads were concrete tables, a hundred feet across, with minimal equipment at each; there was a single gantry almost as tall as the Long March booster itself, which was moved on rails between the pads. She could see the railway spurs which brought booster stages here. There was no surrounding industrial complex, as at Cape Canaveral or Tyuratam. There was only an igloo-like blockhouse close to each pad, buried partly underground, containing the firing rooms; further away there were gleaming tanks and snaking pipelines for propellant storage and delivery, and a small power station.

The launch complex, in fact, was dwarfed by the thousandmile hugeness of the Gobi.

To Jiang, the elemental simplicity of this facility was its power. Here in the mouth of the desert it was as if her booster had barely any connection with the Earth it was soon to shake off. To Jiang, Jiuquan was the reality of spaceflight, reduced to its core…

The flight was still to come, of course. But already, she sensed, the worst of her mission was over: the public tours, the attention from TV and net correspondents, the speeches to thousands of Party cadres in Tiananmen Square, even the meeting with the Great Helmsman himself. Of course there would be many more such chores after the flight, but that was far from her mind.

For now she was alone in here, contained within the
xiaohao
—in this environment she had come to know so well. Here, she was in command, and she was ready to confront destiny: to become the first Chinese, in five thousand years of history, to break the bonds of Earth itself.

A voice crackled in the small speakers on her headset. “
Lei Feng
Number One from the firing room. Are you ready to begin your checklist?”

She was still clutching the brass bell. She reached up, and fixed it to the handle of the hatch above her with a twist of wire. She touched Mao’s face with a spacesuited finger. The bell rang gently. She smiled. Now,
ta laorenjia
could protect her as he did millions of Chinese; Mao Zedong, three decades after his death, had become the most popular household folk god.

She settled back in her couch. “This is Jiang Ling in
Lei Feng
Number One. Yes, I can confirm I am ready to proceed with the checklist. Today is a good day to fly!”

The work seemed to come in waves, with clusters of switches to throw and settings to check in a short time. In addition she had to record measurements in her log book. And she had to work to reduce the condensation inside the cramped compartment. In orbit this would be done automatically, but on the ground the light pumps were overwhelmed by Earth’s gravity, and she had to open and close valves at set times, and she had a little hand-pump she used to move condensate from one part of the cabin to another.

There were several long holds in the countdown, when malfunctions were encountered. During these periods she had literally nothing to do, and she found them difficult times.

She was aware of continual movement and noise. She could feel the rocket
swaying
as the thin desert wind hit its flanks; and there was a succession of thumps, bangs and shudders, as ancillary equipment was moved to and from the booster. She was very aware that she was suspended at the top of a thin, fragile steel tower housing thousands of tons of highly explosive propellant.

There were cameras all over the cabin, focused on her face behind its open visor, their black lenses glinting in the floods. She tried to keep her expression clear, her movements calm and assured.