Voyage (33 page)

‘Even if we get to Mars, and even if –
if
– a scientist is selected,’ and Jones’s tone of voice made his feelings about that clear enough, ‘there are too many people in line ahead of you new guys. Including previous batches of scientists, some of whom have been here for years and haven’t got to fly yet. It’s even worse than with Apollo. At least with Apollo several Moon flights were planned. For Mars only a single flight has been inked in, and competition for places on that flight is going to be ferocious.’

Jones swiveled his cold black eyes, and York found it difficult to withstand the pressure of that gaze, as if his vision had contained some sizzling, hostile radar energy. ‘You’re looking at long delays, and maybe no flights, ever.
We don’t need you around here
. I’m saying this just so you’ll understand.’

Ben Priest took her out to lunch at the Nassau Bay Hilton.

She surveyed the menu. ‘Steak. Seafood. Salad. Potato. More steak. Jesus, Ben.’

He grinned as he sipped at a Coke. ‘Welcome to Houston.’

‘How does a civilized man like you stand it here, Ben?’

‘Now, don’t be a snob, Natalie.’

York ordered chicken-fried steak. When it arrived, it was a great plate-sized disk of meat, heavily fried and coated in batter. The first few mouthfuls tasted good, but the meat was tough, and her jaws soon started to ache.

Oh, how I am going to love Houston. A home away from home
.

‘So tell me,’ Priest said. ‘What do you think of the astronauts, now you’ve seen them en masse?’

‘Football captains and class presidents. Straight out of Smallville.’

He laughed. ‘Maybe. Well, that describes me too. Round here I’m just a “bug-eye” from Ohio.’

‘Look, I’m serious, Ben. Maybe this is what’s wrong with NASA. These guys have had it easy.’

‘Easy?’

‘Sure. For all their great achievements. Every day of their lives the astronauts are handed single, easily visualized objectives; all they have to do is go ahead and achieve. Unlike the rest of mankind.’

He grunted and cut into his steak, a big T-bone. ‘Well, one thing’s for sure,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Whether you’re right about this colony of Eagle Scouts, or whether it’s just your perception we’re talking about here, you’re going to have one hell of a job trying to find a niche.’

He was right, she felt. Flying to Mars could turn out to be the easy part.

After lunch, Priest took her sightseeing, and apartment hunting.

Sitting in the familiar comfort of Ben’s Corvette, she felt a great relief when they got away from the JSC area. And it was a relief to be with Ben.

She turned to him. He drove steadily, not speaking. If he reached out to her now –

But he didn’t. He sat stiffly, as if unaware of her.
Hell, he probably doesn’t know how to handle this any better than I do
.

Her relationship with Ben was an odd thing, she thought. Almost as odd as her long-running relationship with Mike Conlig.
Sure. So what’s the common factor, York?

When she and Ben came closer, physically, they talked a lot less. And when they did it was about superficialities. Ben didn’t seem able even to contemplate leaving Karen, and as for York, her on-off relationship with Mike Conlig continued its stuttering course, accreting a kind of emotional mass the longer it lasted.
Are Ben and I having an affair, then? Just the occasional jump in the sack?

It was as if their two bipolar relationships drew the two of them, Ben and York, apart every time they got close.

She was sure of one thing, though. If her first morning at JSC was anything to go by, she was going to need Ben’s patient company just to keep her sane.

Houston dismayed her. The place sweltered under a layer of air that was hot, laden with humidity and thick with smog. The land was flat and at sea level, without a hill for a hundred miles, and criss-crossed by muddy rivers and swamps. Out of town, the soil was a gluey mixture the locals called ‘gumbo,’ a mess of mud, clay and oyster shells; pines and snarled oaks thrust reluctantly out of fields of stiff, bristly grass.

Ben drove her out to the San Jacinto monument, a grandiose 1930s
obelisk topped by a Texas star, celebrating the victory of General Sam Houston over the Mexicans. They rode to the observation deck at the top. Around the monument’s landscaped park, square miles of oil refineries stretched away. From here, JSC might not have existed; the oil-price fluctuations of the 1970s had been good to Houston, and to York, looking down at the great spaghetti-bowl of pipelines below, it was obvious that Houston was built on oil money, and the space program was no more than just another local employer.

Around the base of the monument, there was a faint reek of petrochemicals.

To find an apartment, Ben drove her back to the NASA-Clear Lake area, south-east of downtown. Clear Lake, as Ben pointed out in what was evidently a standard JSC joke, was neither clear nor a lake, but actually a sluggish inlet of Galveston Bay. NASA Road One, the road from JSC, ran parallel to the coast of the Lake, and there were big communities of modern housing developments – Nassau Bay, El Lago – set between aging coastal resorts. The resort areas were old-fashioned, strange to find so close to the Space Center: faded, shabby, a little sinister, eroded by the sea and sun. York thought it must have been a hell of a shock to the locals when NASA had landed here, by Presidential decree, twenty years earlier.

The developments were all ranch houses, cute little bungalows with tiny private docks. Everything was green, prosperous, well-maintained.

York grunted. ‘My God. The American dream, vintage 1962. The little home, the mom and two kids, the barbecues and the sailing. We’re in
The Dick van Dyke Show.’

‘No.’ Priest smiled behind his sunglasses. ‘This is astronaut country, remember. You’re thinking of
I Dream of Jeannie
. Anyhow, you’re not giving the place much of a chance, Natalie.’

‘No?’

‘No. Clear Lake is a kind of academic community. That’s because of JSC, and also the chemical industry in the area. It’s got more PhDs per square yard than most places outside of the university towns. I figure you might feel at home here.’

‘Stop trying to cheer me up, damn it, Ben.’

‘I’m not! Believe me. Anyhow things could be a hell of a lot worse. Starry Town in Moscow, where the cosmonauts have to live, is more like a military barracks …’

The apartment complexes Ben showed her were called The Cove and El Dorado and Lakeshire Place and The Leeward. A lot of them looked good, and the more expensive had access to the water.
But they were all depressingly similar within: boxy, with inefficient air-conditioning, plainly furnished, and with unimaginative prints hanging on the walls.

She settled on a place called Portofino. The architecture was as dull as everywhere else, but it did have a large, clean-looking swimming pool which she was anxious to try out.

When she’d settled terms, the landlady – a compact, knowing woman with an incomprehensibly thick Texas accent, and wearing a T-shirt saying
‘Kiss Me, I Don’t Smoke’
– left the two of them alone in the apartment.

York sensed Ben move away from her, subtly.

She went to the window. The air was so thick it was hard to breathe. There were thick gray clouds overhead now, threatening rain and trapping even more of the heat.

She felt a dumb misery envelop her, as dense as the air.
What am I doing here, in this lousy apartment, working in this goddamn Boys’ Town?

Out back of the apartment building, she spotted a car that had gotten mildewed from the moisture in the air.

As he flew into Salt Lake City Gregory Dana got a spectacular view of the Lake. Feeder streams glistened like snail tracks, and human settlements were misty gray patches spread along ribbons of road. The morning was bright and clear, the sky huge and transparent and appearing to reach all the way down to the desert surface far below the plane.

Dana allowed himself briefly to imagine that he was landing on some foreign planet, a world of parched desert and high, isolated inland seas.

To most people, he reflected, the complex world of human society was the entire universe, somehow disengaged from the physical underpinning of things. Most people never formed any sense of
perspective
: the understanding that the whole of their lives was contained in a thin slice of air coating a small, spinning ball of rock, that their awareness was confined to a thin flashbulb slice of geological time, that they inhabited a universe which had emerged from, and was inexorably descending into, conditions unimaginably different from those with which they were familiar.

Even the view of the air traveler gave a perspective that hadn’t been available to any of the generations who went before.
If spaceflight gives us nothing else than an awareness of our true nature,
he thought,
then that alone will justify its cost
.

He glanced back into the cabin. Most of his fellow passengers – even those attached to NASA and the space program, as he was – had their faces buried in documents, or books, or newspapers.

Morton Thiokol sent a car to meet him at the airport. The driver – young, breezy, anonymous behind mirrored sunglasses – introduced himself as Jack, and loaded Dana’s bags into the trunk, although Dana kept his briefcase with him.

Jack drove onto the freeway heading north, toward Brigham City. The driver told him that he was to be taken straight to the first test firing of the SRB, the new Saturn VB-class Solid Rocket Booster.

Dana grumbled at this, but saw no option but to submit.

Dana had been asked by Bert Seger to participate in the Critical Design Review of the new SRB, the formal checkpoint that marked the end of this phase of the rocket’s development. The use of solid rockets in a man-rated booster stack was one of the most controversial elements of the whole Saturn upgrade program, and it was one on which NASA was determined to be seen to be absolutely clean.

But Dana had been uncertain about working with Udet, about his own ability to get the Marshall people to listen to him. And anyway, such an assignment was well outside his own area of competence.

Seger had insisted: ‘You can inspect what you like, and recommend what you like, and I’ll make sure you get a hearing. We have to get this right, Doctor Dana …’

But what was he to learn from viewing a test firing? This was a stunt, obviously, designed to impress and overwhelm him. It was typical of Hans Udet; Dana felt immediately irritated at the waste of time.

He opened up his briefcase with a snap; as if in revenge he turned away from the landscape unrolling beyond the car windows, and buried his attention in technical documentation.

The car delivered him to the Wasatch Division of Morton Thiokol, a few miles outside Brigham City. With a touch of Dana’s elbow, Jack led the way to a small prefabricated office module, set on trestles a little way from the dusty road.

The test site was a bleak, isolated clutter of buildings, cupped by
a broad crater-shaped depression in the desert. Low hills peppered with green-black vegetation rimmed the site. To the east, blue mountains shouldered over the horizon.

Jack pointed to a test rig, a couple of miles away. Dana squinted to see in the brilliant light; he made out a slim white cylinder laid flat against the ground.

The office module, surprisingly enough, was air-conditioned, equipped with a refrigerator and some coffee-making equipment, and Dana breathed in its warm, moist air with relief. Inside, Hans Udet was waiting for him.

‘Doctor Dana. I’m delighted to see you here today.’

Really? Quite a contrast to the last time we were up against each other, Hans, at the Mars mission mode presentations in Huntsville …

Dana shook the German’s hand, warily, and glanced around the office module. There was a cutaway model of the SRB, and artists’ impressions executed in the compelling, visionary style which had, Dana thought, become so much of a cliche from NASA in recent years. A loudspeaker taped high on one wall carried muted commentary on the progress of the test.

Obviously this office was a honeytrap, designed to impress visiting decision makers.
Like me. I suppose I should be flattered
.

‘We’re alone here?’

‘Doctor Dana, this is a big day for us – the first integrated test firing – and I particularly wanted you to be here to see it. As my guest. Come; sit down. Let me take your briefcase. Would you like some coffee? – or perhaps cold beer –’

Dana accepted a glass of orange juice – chilled, it felt like, almost to freezing – and he sat on a stackable chair.

Udet was already moving into what appeared to be a standard sales pitch. ‘I want you to be aware of the full background of our SRB project,’ Udet said smoothly. He pointed to a chart showing the intended launch profile. ‘The Solid Rocket Boosters will stand one hundred and fifty feet tall from engine bell to nose, and will be twelve feet in diameter; in the Saturn VB’s launch configuration four of them will be strapped to the core MS-IC first stage. The SRBs will supplement the MS-IC’s thrust with more than five million pounds of thrust combined, making the VB capable of raising more than four hundred thousand pounds of payload to low Earth orbit: that is,
twice
as much as the base Saturn V. The MS-IC itself features many upgraded features, including the new F-1A main engines, manufactured with new techniques and materials. The SRBs will
be the largest solid-fueled rockets in the world – and, for economy, the first designed for reuse …’

‘And the first used on a manned booster.’

‘Yes, that is so.’

Dana opened his briefcase and spread a briefing document across his lap. ‘Doctor Udet, our time is limited. Can we get to specifics? It is the launch sequence which particularly concerns me.’

Udet’s eyes were pale blue behind his glasses. The German studied Dana, analytically, as if computing the way forward. Then, every movement evidently calculated, he sat down beside Dana; he sat easily, with his arms open, in a friendly and welcoming posture. ‘I understand your concerns, Doctor Dana; I have read the memoranda you have prepared for Bert Seger. My purpose today is to alleviate those concerns – to assure you that they are groundless.’