Voyage (42 page)

Like the black algae that had finally put paid to the shower.

Even the toilets never seemed to vent properly. And the old bird was a chorus of bangs, wheezes and rattles when they tried to sleep at night. Some long-duration Moonlab crews had gone home with permanent hearing loss, he’d been told.

It was much worse than his first flight out here. It was all a kind of hideous, long-drawn-out consequence of Bert Seger’s original decision to redirect this ’Lab from Earth orbit, back in 1973.

Maybe I shouldn’t be so sniffy about that big tractor out there, the Soyuz. At least the Soviets must feel at home, here; ’Lab’s no worse than a Moscow hotel
.

Still, you could see Moonlab as a kind of huge experiment in space endurance. Moonlab was a Type II spacecraft. Type I you’d never repair; you’d use it once and bring it home to discard, or fix on the ground, like Apollo. Type II, like the ’Labs, were supposed to be repairable, but with logistic support from nearby Earth. Type III, the ultimate goal, would be able to survive for years
without
logistic support. Any Mars mission would have to be aboard a Type III spacecraft, a level of maturity beyond Moonlab.

Without the long-duration experience of Moonlab and Skylab, the Mars mission would not be conceivable.

They reached the wardroom, where the plastic table was fixed to the mesh floor, and the crew had rigged up five T-cross seats. They sat at the table, hooking their legs under the bars of the seats, and Stone fixed the TV camera to a strut.

Now the performance really began.

There were flags to swap, including a UN flag which had been carried up by Soyuz and would be returned home by Apollo. Each
crew had brought along halves of commemorative aluminum and steel medallions, which Muldoon and Viktorenko joined together. They traded boxes of seeds from their countries: the Americans handed over a hybrid white spruce, and the Soviets Scotch pine, Siberian larch and Nordmann’s fir.

Now it was time for the ritual meal. The Americans were hosts today, so, from the customary plastic bags, the cosmonauts were treated to potato soup, bread, strawberries and grilled steak. There was much forced bonhomie and laughter in all this. Tomorrow it would be the Russians’ turn, and – as Stone knew, because they’d practiced even this – the menu would be tins containing fish, meat and potatoes, tubes of soft cheese, dried soup, vegetable puree and oats; there would be nuts, black bread, dried fruit.

As he ate, Stone looked dubiously at the TV camera staring at him from above. As space PR stunts went, this one was turning out to be a stinker.
Jesus,
he thought.
I hope nobody I know is tuned in to this
.

Now Viktorenko said, ‘Of course, as the philosophers say, the best part of a good dinner is not what you eat, but with whom you eat.’ He dug out five metal tubes from a pocket of his coverall. The tubes were labeled: ‘vodka.’ The astronauts made dutiful noises of pleasure, and when they opened the tubes up, they found borscht, which they displayed to the camera.
A Soviet joke. Ha ha
.

With the meal cleared away, the telecast should have been finished, so the crews could relax. But Bob Crippen, capcom for the day, called up from Houston. ‘Moonlab, we have a surprise for you. Go ahead, Mr President; you’re linked up to Moonlab.’

Familiar Georgian tones crackled over the air. ‘Good evening, gentlemen. Or is it morning where you are? I’m speaking to you from the Oval Office at the White House, and this must be the most remarkable telephone call since John Kennedy spoke to you, Joe, and Neil Armstrong on the surface of the Moon, eleven years ago …’

The crews sat around the table, staring into the camera, smiles bolted in place.

Carter made a speech of stunning banality, a ramble that seemed to last forever. Solovyov and Viktorenko looked pole-axed. Carter was duller than Brezhnev.

Stone thought, It wouldn’t be so bad if we didn’t know that Carter was on his way out. And that he has always been dead-set against the space program
.

Carter went around the table, speaking to each astronaut and
cosmonaut in turn. ‘So, Joe, I believe this is your first flight in eleven years.’

‘Yes, sir, that’s so, my first since the Moon landing. And it’s wonderful to be back.’

‘Do you have any advice for young people who hope to fly on future space missions?’

Muldoon’s face might have been carved from wood. Stone knew exactly what he was thinking.
Yeah. Don’t fuck yourself over by mouthing off against the Agency
. ‘Well, sir, I’d say that the best advice is to decide what you want to do and then never give up until you’ve done it …’

As long as Carter doesn’t ask if he’s missing his wife, Stone thought, Muldoon will be home clear; everybody in Houston knew that Jill had walked out a couple of months before the launch, but somehow it had been kept out of the press.

Across the table from Stone, Viktorenko dug out five more ‘vodka’ tubes; wordlessly he passed them around. Stone opened his and sniffed at it. Viktorenko nodded to him, holding his gaze.
Yes, this really is vodka. But they will think it is borscht. A double joke!

Stone drained his tube in one pull and crushed the metal in his fist.

As the banal speeches and ceremonies went on, the mountains of the Moon, ignored, cast complex shadows over the table top.

Rolf Donnelly went round the horn, one last time.

‘Got us locked up there, INCO?’

‘That’s affirm, Flight.’

‘How about you, Control?’

‘We look good.’

‘Guidance, you happy?’

‘Go with systems.’

‘FIDO, how about you?’

‘We’re go. The trajectory’s a little low, Flight, but no problem.’

‘Booster?’

‘Everything’s nominal for the burn, Flight,’ Mike Conlig said.

‘Rog. Capcom, how’s the crew?’

Natalie York was on capcom duty again. ‘Apollo-N, Houston, are you go?’

‘That’s affirmative, Houston,’ Chuck Jones replied briskly on the air-to-ground loop.

‘Rog,’ Donnelly said. ‘Okay, all controllers, we are go. Thirty seconds to ignition.’

York said, ‘Apollo-N, you are go for the burn.’

Apollo-N was drifting over the darkened Pacific; Ben Priest could see a bowl of white light in the waters below – the reflection of the Moon – and, all but lost in that milky vastness, the lights of a ship.

The crew lay side by side in their couches, cocooned in their pressure suits once more. Priest felt his heart pumping harder.
We’ve done everything we can to check this damn bird out; now we have to go full bore on it, and that’s all there is to it
.

At ten seconds the DSKY threw up a flashing ‘99.’ Chuck Jones reached out and pushed PROCEED.

Through the changing numbers on his console, Mike Conlig watched as NERVA’s nuclear core was brought back up to its working temperature. Liquid hydrogen was already gushing out of the big S-NB tank and pumping into the cladding of pressure shell and engine bell, and, Conlig knew, would be reaching the radioactive core about
now,
where it would be flashed to vapor as hot as the surface of a star.

The core temperature began to climb, following the curve laid out in the manuals –

No, it didn’t. The rise was too fast.

Conlig watched with dismay as his numbers drifted away from nominal.

As NERVA lit, the spacecraft shuddered.

Priest was pushed back into his seat with a long, gentle pressure.
Perfect. Just like the sims
.

Natalie York called up, ‘You’re looking good here. We’re hawk-eyeing your trajectory. You’re right down the center line.’

Priest’s job was to watch the pressure and temperature readouts from the S-NB stage, the NERVA engine and its big hydrogen tank. Jones was monitoring the attitude indicator with its artificial horizon, ready to take over the steering if the automated systems failed. Dana was calling out their increasing velocity from the DSKY readout. ‘Thirty thousand feet per second … thirty-three …’

Mike Conlig was aware of a deadly dryness in his mouth. On the loop from the back room, someone was screaming in his ear.

The numbers, white on a green screen, filled his world.

The computers worked constantly to update the numbers, and making sense of them wasn’t easy. He had to check the data-source slots at the top right-hand corner of the screen, to make sure that the sources of his numbers were all still updating him properly, and he had to be sure that he wasn’t diagnosing some problem incorrectly because of a mismatch in numbers of different vintages, fifteen or thirty seconds old.

But he discounted all that. He understood exactly what the silent parade of numbers was telling him. The NERVA core was still overheating.

He tried to increase the flow of hydrogen through the core. That would take away some of the excess heat.

He got no response. In fact, one readout told him that the volume throughput of the hydrogen was actually
falling
.

Maybe there was a problem with a hydrogen feed line. Or maybe a pump had failed. Or maybe it was his old enemy, cavitation, somewhere in the propellant flow cylinders.

The core’s temperature continued to rise. More screaming in his ear.

Damn, damn
. He’d have to abort the burn. And this was probably the end of the mission; he doubted they’d be allowed to go ahead with another engine restart after this.

He sent a command to the engine’s moderator control. He would slow the reaction in the NERVA core, reduce the temperature that way.

He got no response.

If the temperature had gotten high enough, the fuel elements could have distorted, even melted, and it would be impossible to insert the control elements into the core. Was that happening already?

If it was true, there wasn’t
anything
he could do to retrieve the situation. As he watched his numbers evolve, Conlig felt the first touches of panic.

Priest could clearly see the cones of the volcanoes of Hawaii, upthrusting, broken blisters. Earth receded visibly, as if he was rising in an elevator. The ride was exhilarating.

He felt a surge of elation.
The damn nuke works
.

It unraveled with astonishing speed.

Conlig watched power surge through the overheating core. After that, the resistance to hydrogen flow through the core sharply increased. Bubbles built up everywhere. The nuclear fuel assemblies were starting to break up. Pressure rose abruptly in the propellant channels, which were also beginning to disintegrate.

The whole structure of the core was collapsing.

The pressure in the reactor began to rise, at more than fifteen atmospheres a second. And, because of the massive temperatures, chemical and exothermic reactions were starting in the core.

And now the increased pressure inside the reactor backed up to the pumps, and the pumps’ feedback valves burst. With the pumps disabled the flow of hydrogen through the core stopped altogether.

The reactor’s main relief valves triggered, venting hydrogen to space. That offered some respite. But the discharge was brief; unable to cope with the enormous pressures and flow rate, the valves themselves were soon destroyed.

And now the massive pressure was working on the structure of the pressure shell itself.

I’ve lost it. I’ve lost the reactor
. It had taken seconds, for his life to fall apart. He tried to react, to think of something to do, to make a report to Flight. But his mouth was dry, the muscles of his jaw locked.

There was a loud, dull bang, and the Command Module shook: bang, whump, shudder.

Dana, strapped into his center seat, could feel the spacecraft quake under him. Hollow rattles and creaks sounded from around the cabin, a groan of metal as the can around him was stressed; it was a noise oddly like a deep-throated whale song.

The master alarm shrilled in Dana’s headset, a shrill of staccato beeps. Yellow warning lights lit up all over the control panels.

He turned to look at his companions. Jones was staring at the instrument panel, and Priest’s eyes were round.
That sure as hell wasn’t routine, whatever it was
.

Jones cleared the master alarm.

The feeling of thrust died abruptly. It was like a slow collision in a car; Dana was thrown forward, gently, against his straps.

Jones said, ‘Jim. The Main A light is on. Check it out.’

Dana looked at his console. A red undervolt light was glowing.
Damn. I should have been the first to see it
. The Command Module’s systems were Dana’s responsibility.

‘Confirm that,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a Main A undervolt.’ He was surprised his voice was level. He began to check voltage and current levels; they were showing erratic, inconsistent readings.

He heard pinging and popping noises. It was the sound of metal flexing. The spacecraft was still shuddering.
Some damn thing has blown up on us
.

Earth was wheeling past the windows. The Service Module thrusters ought to be firing, as the spacecraft tried to maintain its orientation. But he couldn’t hear any solenoids thumping.

Jones was talking to Houston. ‘Natalie, we be a sorry bird up here. We’ve got a problem.’ He unbuckled his restraints and floated up to the left-hand window. Dana knew he was following an old pilot’s instinct: at a moment like this, regardless of the telemetry, you needed to take a walk around the bird, to look for leaks and kick the tires, see for himself what was wrong.

Dana glanced out of the window to his right, past Ben Priest.

He saw sparks, chunks of some material, flying up past the Command Module. The material was glowing, red hot.

Now he could smell something, inside his helmet. It reminded him, oddly, of Hampton: his childhood, the ocean.

Ozone.

Donnelly didn’t even need to hear the specific words. He could
feel
the event, see it in the changed postures of controllers all over the room, hear it in the sudden urgency of their voices.