Voyage (24 page)

When she awoke, the sun was well above the horizon, and the car was stuffy and hot. There was no sign of Mike. She found a bathroom, and left a note for Mike.

She drove herself back to LA.

Daily execute packages were uploaded from Mission Control overnight, as twenty feet of teleprinter output. The packages contained suggested timelines, and a few personal messages. York split up her portion of the list and put it into her ring binder, throwing away yesterday’s draft, and began to figure out how to follow the day through.

She looked down the list, searching first for time-critical items.
Then she looked for stuff that would need advance setup and preparation, and items that weren’t solo, where she’d have to work with the others.

The execute package wasn’t so much a detailed timeline, as the first generations of astronauts had had to follow, but a ‘shopping list’ of objectives. Mission planning was a lot more laid back now, compared to the days when moonwalks had been choreographed down to the minute. The shopping list approach had evolved during the long-duration Skylab flights of the 1970s. York was relieved; she was a senior professional, after all – they all were – and she didn’t need her activities hand-held by some remote roomful of experts down in Houston.

In her pocket, to help her with the timing, she carried a small personal alarm clock, a cute clockwork thing she’d picked up from a five-and-dime in a mall in Nassau Bay. Its crudity and lack of accuracy appealed to her, in the midst of all this high technology.

Her main objective for the day was going to be powering up the Ares Transfer-Orbit Science Platform. She drifted upwards, along the cylindrical length of the Mission Module.

The Mission Module was based on the design of the Skylabs which had been in use for more than a decade now. Such was the lifting capacity of the Saturn VB, the Mission Module had been delivered to Earth orbit ‘dry’ – carrying no fuel, and with interior partitions and equipment already fitted. The crew occupied what had been the hydrogen tank, all forty-eight feet of it, with its domed ceiling and floor. Hidden under the floor was the lox tank, much smaller, a cramped, squashed sphere. The lox tank was used to hold stores, and with its thicker walls it would serve as the crew’s storm shelter – shielding them from solar flares, if any blew up in the course of the mission.

The hydrogen tank was split into three levels by partitions of triangular metal mesh. York was wearing Dutch shoes, with v-flanges in the sole, to enable her to cling to either side of the floors. There was a fireman’s pole running down the middle of the workshop, and there were straps and guide ropes and harnesses everywhere.

The tank’s bottom level was ‘home’ – the wardroom, sleep and waste compartments. The middle belt doubled as a command and control area, covering all of the spacecraft’s subsystems, environmental processes and flight operations, and as an experiment and exercise area, with a running strip around the tank’s circular wall. The exercise machines, still in their launch configuration, were
strapped against the pressure hull. And the top level, closest to the prow of the Ares cluster, was the Science Platform.

The whole Module was something like a big engine room, York thought, with clunky tanks and storage boxes stuck to the curved walls, and cables and pipes running everywhere, under smooth covers of yellow plastic.

When she floated up into the Science Platform, it was like entering an octagonal cave. Bulky equipment racks and storage bays were fixed all around the curved hull. One side of the octagon served as a ceiling, broken by a couple of high-quality viewing ports – disks of darkness – and by small science-experiment airlocks, sturdy wheeled hatches like the doors of little safes. Everything was still in its place, stowed neatly away, still in the wrapper.

She pulled herself to the right-hand wall, and locked her feet into a couple of stirrups. This was the display and control console: a long rack of switches, cathode ray displays, and numeric and qwerty keypads. She closed switches and began booting up the Science Platform’s computers, and started to power up and check out the rest of the equipment.

As it started to come to life, the cramped little science station reminded her of some bespectacled kid’s bedroom laboratory; it was compact, miniature, kind of sweet.

Some of the experiments carried by Ares were part of long-term microgravity research programs. There were experiments in protein crystal growth, and the diffusion of bacteria in microgravity conditions, and a chunky arrangement called the Heat Pipe Performance experiment, a dry engineering test of the diffusion of heat from hot-spots on pipes and ducts in microgravity.

But Ares offered some special opportunities. There was a scheme to observe major solar events like spots and flares from the two widely separating vantage points of Ares and Earth, and so there was a whole bunch of instruments which would be directed at the sun: a coronagraph, a spectroheliograph, a spectrographic telescope. Since in flight the Ares cluster would keep itself aligned to point at the sun, to save boiloff, all this equipment was mounted in a pallet which would be unfolded and held out from the body of the Mission Module, like a rear-view mirror.

The setting up took longer than she expected. The computers, Hewlett-Packard minis, were slow. The models Ares was carrying were out of date: the design of the Platform, already nearly a decade old, had become frozen around these customized, low-weight, low-power machines years before. Hewlett-Packard and the other
computer suppliers had made a commitment to keep supporting NASA’s in-flight equipment as long as was necessary. But it was ironic that here York was – in deep space, en route to Mars – having to make do and mend with technology which no self-respecting middle-sized savings and loan in Gary, Indiana, would put up with any more.

And besides, microgravity was turning out to be a pain in the butt to work in. Anything that wasn’t tied down just floated away. It was easy enough to remember that for major pieces of equipment, but it also applied to her notebook, pens, pencils, handkerchief. She wasted a lot of time chasing down elusive items of equipment. And she had to make a conscious effort to anchor herself – with foot stirrups, or by holding on to a rack surface, or by wrapping her legs around a strut – before she tried to move anything. Otherwise, every time she turned a switch on the control panel, the switch would just turn her back.

It was like working on an ice-rink: a huge, invisible, three-dimensional ice-rink, across whose surface items kept escaping from her, slithering away along perfectly straight lines, and on which she felt she was constantly losing her balance.

When York came floating back down into the wardroom, Phil Stone was already in the little galley area, working on the lunch. Food packages and trays floated in the air beside him.

A TV camera, fixed to the wall of the wardroom, was fixed on him; York vaguely remembered that they were scheduled for another public broadcast about now. She wondered how many people were still watching.

Stone glanced up at York. ‘You’re starting to look like an astronaut, Natalie.’

‘How so?’

‘Take a look in the mirror.’

The nearest mirror was fixed over the wash basin. York floated over and inspected herself. Stray wisps of hair floated up around her head in a kind of halo, and the skin under her eyes looked puffy, as if she had been crying. This was another effect of microgravity: the accumulation of fluids under the skin of the face. She prodded at the fleshy pads under her eyes; the skin was tender, as if stretched.

Gershon came soaring down the fireman’s pole, upside down. ‘Hello, Japan-ee lady,’ he said, pulling his eyes slantways.

There was a hiss of static from the comms panel fixed to the
wall. ‘Ares, Houston. We see a box of goodies there, Phil.’ Capcom today was Bob Crippen.

York sensed the others stiffening, subtly. Crippen’s forced banter signalled they were going out to the public.
We’re on stage again, guys
.

Stone held up an anonymous brown bag. ‘Good day, Bob. Would you believe you’re looking at chicken stew? All I have to do is push the pack inside this little sliding drawer here like so, and that injects the bag with three ounces of hot water, and I pull it out and mush it up a little. And there you go; beautiful chicken stew.’ He stuck the stew onto a tray floating beside him; now the tray held four bags, a can of nuts, and a sachet of tropical punch, all fixed with Velcro. Stone floated the tray to Gershon. ‘Come and get it.’

‘Yum.’ Gershon snipped the top off his chicken stew bag and began to spoon it into his mouth. He waved at the camera and grinned; he was eating his meal upside down relative to Stone.

Stone said smoothly, ‘We’ve been flying in space now for more than twenty years, and I guess we’ve figured out how to provide decent food. We’re basically having much the same kind of food that the workshop crews are eating right now, in lunar and Earth orbits. We have a menu that repeats, every six days or so. Most of our food is rehydratable. Like my noodles and chicken here.’ He pointed at his tray. ‘That’s because rehydratable gives the best food value per pound of weight. But we do have some foods which are thermostabilized – cooked before launch, and then stored in a cold box. I’ve got here stewed tomatoes, and ground beef with pickle sauce, for instance. And some foods we can carry in their natural form, like my almonds here. And then I have these freeze-dried pears, and this strawberry drink … We don’t have a refrigerator or a food freezer, as the Skylabs have, but we do have something new: an oven. It’s fan-forced, of course, not convection. Because hot air doesn’t rise anywhere, in zero G. And we’ve even got hot and cold running water, here in this little galley of ours.’

Gershon said sotto voce, ‘Tell him about the farts, Phil.’

Oh, sure. Hot mike, asshole
.

Actually the farts were a real problem. There was a device in the spigots that was supposed to scrape excess hydrogen out of their water supply, which was a by-product of the Mission Module’s power cells. But the gizmo didn’t work too well, and a lot of gas got into the crew’s stomachs. And out again almost as quickly.

‘Ares, Houston.’ Ares was already so far from Earth that it took a full six seconds for their signal to reach Houston, and for
Crippen’s reply to come back. ‘Phil, we’re told we have a pretty good audience here.’

‘We’re gratified to hear that.’

‘Phil, would you say you actually enjoy the in-flight catering?’

Stone hesitated. ‘It’s hard to say. Even stuff in its natural form tends to taste different, somehow, up here; I guess there’s some subtle physiological change – a response to microgravity – we don’t understand yet. Then there’s the packaging. I know this form of food has a lot of advantages. There’s little chance of food particles getting into the equipment. But the Russians have been sending their cosmonauts up with cakes and bread since 1965 …’

Six seconds
.

‘Copy all that, Phil,’ Crippen said, ‘but it wasn’t quite the question I asked.’

Stone said firmly, ‘It’s the answer you’re going to get, Bob.’

After the delay, York heard laughter in the background, in the MOCR.

‘Ares, Houston, thank you. Ah, Ralph, Phil, Natalie, could we get you all in shot for a moment, please?’

Stone looked puzzled. ‘Say again, Houston.’

‘If we can have you all in the camera’s field of view for a couple of minutes.’

Stone drifted close to York, who stayed by the table; and Gershon floated down behind them, facing the camera.

‘Ares, Houston,’ Crippen said. ‘Just about now, ah, at five plus one plus forty-two –’ one hour into the mission’s fifth day ‘– you are passing a significant boundary. Although you may not feel it. It’s something you might like to think about as you eat your meal today.’

‘We look forward to hearing about it, Bob.’

‘… Maybe one of you could tell us what you can see out of your picture window right now.’

York turned. The ‘picture window’ was a two-feet-wide viewport set in the wall of the wardroom, big enough to have to curve to follow the concavity of the pressure hull; it was triple-paned, with the thick, tough feel about it of an airplane window.

‘I see Earth and Moon,’ she reported. ‘They’re both pretty much full, although I can see a thin slice of shadow down the right-hand limb of each of them.’ Earth was now so distant its sphericity wasn’t obvious; it was reduced to a flat blue bowl of light, with its pale, shrunken companion close by its limb. ‘The Earthlight is still bright,’ she said. ‘Strong enough to read a book by, I’d say. But …’

‘Go ahead, Natalie.’

‘Something is different.’ She peered into the window to see better. ‘The sky is just like a clear night on Earth. And – my God – it’s
full
of stars. Earlier in the flight the glare of Earth was so bright it blacked out everything else. Now, I can see the stars. I can recognize the constellations again, for the first time on the trip.’

‘Ares, I guess you’ve really gone up into night.’

‘Yes, we have. A huge, empty, cold night at that.’

‘Ares, Houston. Thank you, Natalie. Ares, here’s the significance. You’re now almost exactly five hundred and sixty-two thousand statute miles from the Earth. That’s twice as far as any human has traveled before. And you’re now passing out of the Earth’s sphere of influence.’

Sphere of influence
– an imaginary bubble in space centered on Earth, an almost perfect sphere where the gravitational potential of Earth and sun were in balance. Inside the sphere of influence, Ares had essentially been in an orbit dominated by Earth; beyond this point, however, the craft had escaped from Earth, and was in solar orbit, a new planet.

Stone said, ‘Thank you, Bob. We understand, and we’re impressed, almost humbled, with the thought …’ Stone seemed dissatisfied with his own trite words. He was looking at York thoughtfully. ‘Natalie, you want to add anything to that?’

She stared back, frozen, her mind suddenly empty.
Well, you’ve griped often enough about the inarticulate grunts they send into space. Now’s your chance to do better
.