Voyage (56 page)

Which he’d done with success. But Cane had fiercely resisted growing Columbia too fast or too big, and he’d also defended his company astutely from the takeover bids that came along regularly from the big boys.

Well, today Lee was going to ask Cane for a couple of million bucks of company money, to bid for a contract so big it was bound to transform Columbia out of all recognition.
So I damn well need to understand how Art ticks
.

Lee opened the pitch. He kept his introduction flat, neutral and brief. Time enough for tub-thumping later.

First up after Lee was Julie Lye, a smart young MIT graduate. Lee had pulled her out of her regular research to give the proposal some academic weight. Lye gave a brief, concise talk on what was known, from the various spaceprobes, of Mars: the structure of the atmosphere, the properties of the surface. It was an introduction to the problems anyone would face in landing humans safely on Mars, keeping them alive, and bringing them home. Lye was trim, precise, reassuring.

Cane watched her with his face blank and his fingers steepled before him.

Next came Chaushui Xu, another smart kid, a Chinese American who was taking a doctorate in aerodynamics based on his work at Columbia. Xu’s presentation was about the options for getting through the Martian atmosphere, and how Columbia’s expertise could be leveraged to solve the problems.

Cane’s eyes narrowed to slits, as if he was falling asleep.

Xu started to get nervous, and he fumbled a little. But Lee wasn’t perturbed; he knew that Cane valued brains above everything else, and these were some of the brightest kids in the company. Cane was listening.

Xu got to the end of his presentation. He sat down, fumbling again.

Now Bob Rowen took the floor. A good bit older than the others, Rowen had worked with Lee on the old B-70 project, and with Lee and Storms on the later X-15 development. Rowen outlined how Columbia could handle the challenges of the spacecraft’s avionics.
Soon, it was pretty clear that a Columbia MEM would be the smartest spacecraft that ever flew.

Half-way through Rowen’s pitch, Cane very visibly turned off his hearing aid and started going through his paperwork.

Jack Morgan leaned over to Lee. ‘Christ,’ he whispered. ‘What the hell do we do now?’

Lee grinned. ‘We keep briefing. He’s hooked, believe me. If he didn’t like us we’d be out of here by now.’

The last pitch was Jack Morgan’s, and he described how a Columbia MEM would keep four humans alive on Mars for a month. Clearly irritated by Cane’s manner, Morgan rattled through his spiel as quickly as he could, and sat down with a clatter of showcards.

Lee got to his feet again. He summed up everything that had been said, and made a little speech about the future, and then just waited.

He was aware of his team getting restless behind him, but Lee had been here many times before. He stood before Cane’s desk, unperturbed.

After a full two minutes, Cane put down his stone pen and leaned back in his chair. He turned his hearing aid back on. ‘JK, you’re a crazy man. I don’t know why I keep you on the payroll.’

Lee leaned forward and rested his clenched knuckles on the table surface. ‘Goddamn it, Art, we’re in the aerospace business. And this is the finest opportunity to achieve something new in our field since Apollo.’

Cane rubbed his eyes. ‘We’re an experimental shop. One of life’s subcontractors. Not a big player.’

‘But it doesn’t have to stay that way,’ Lee insisted. ‘And maybe it shouldn’t.’

‘And we wouldn’t win anyway.’ Cane picked up a piece of paper from the seemingly random pile on the desk top before him. ‘Look at this, now. Look who we’re up against. McDonnell, Martin, Convair, General Electric, Boeing. Not to mention Rockwell, who are going to win anyhow. Some of these guys have been involved in the MEM base-technology studies since ’72. They’ve got a jump on us of years, damn it.
Years
. Look at this. Martin have spent three million bucks of their own money, and they’ve already got a detailed analysis that runs to
four thousand pages
. And we’re starting from scratch.’

Lee waved his hand. ‘Look, we can’t get into a blueprint duel with these guys. But remember how Bell fumbled on its bid for the
X-15. Bell built the X-1 – the ship that Chuck Yaeger took through the sound barrier –’

‘I know my aviation history, JK.’

‘Sorry. Anyway, Bell
should
have won the X-15 contract. But what they proposed was an exotic spaceplane that was years ahead of its time. Rockwell won by giving NASA what it wanted, straight down the line, a simple brute force machine. And later, when the bidding for Apollo was going on, there were companies like Martin and Douglas who spent millions on all kinds of Buck Rogers stuff, lenticular shapes and lifting bodies and you name it. Rockwell won out by giving NASA precisely what it wanted and needed, which was a three-man Mercury capsule.’

‘Yes, but, JK,’ Cane said dryly, ‘we’re bidding
against
Rockwell this time. And you’re saying you know better than Rockwell, and Martin with their team of three hundred engineers, and –’

‘Yeah. Yeah, I do. Because those guys are going to be too busy defending the pet projects they’ve built up over the years to be able to see what the goddamn customer
wants,
Art.’

Cane thought about that. ‘You’re a smart guy, JK. Only you could turn the fact that we don’t know what the hell we’re doing into a strength. What’s more, I have the feeling that you actually believe it when you say it.’

‘Sure I do. Look, we have a real opportunity here; we could achieve something unique.
Columbia could go to Mars
. Now: are you going to back me or not?’

Art Cane studied him through small, sharp, watery eyes.

‘I guess I got to allow you to bid. But if you spend more than two million bucks, I swear I’ll have your ass in a sling. Now get out of my office.’

With a heavy whir, the Wheel started to rotate. It felt as if her chest was being pressed back to meet her backbone.

York, strapped into her couch, tried to comfort herself with the thought that according to pilots who’d actually made it into space, this fake experience was a lot worse than the real thing.

It was cold comfort.

She reached five Gs; she had to make a conscious effort to open
up her ribs to suck in air. The cage rattled her back and forth, and from side to side – she felt like a pea in a cup, being whirled around on a rope –
a real flight’s a lot smoother, Natalie …

She had a checklist she was supposed to work through, and she conscientiously pressed her dummy switches with gloved fingers.

A gray curtain started closing in on her vision, as if sweeping in around her head. It was the first symptom of blacking out. There was an array of colored lights on a panel in front of her so she could tell how far gone she was. When she relaxed, the gray curtain was prominent; when she tensed herself up the curtain would disappear. She tried to ignore the pain in her chest; but every time she raised her arms or moved her head she felt giddy. That was the Coriolis force – the sideways force associated with fast rotation.

York was in the middle of a series of simulated reentries from Earth orbit. This particular exercise, the worst of the set, was modeling a high, steep trajectory, as if her Command Module were cutting into the layers of Earth’s atmosphere too rapidly, and so undergoing terrific deceleration.

When she reached eight Gs, she found she couldn’t raise her arms any more. She could only lie in the cage, and endure it.

Now the gray curtain around her eyes was thickening, and it wouldn’t go away.

Of course it’s worse than a real mission. The damn doctors design it that way
.

Her vision started to blur. She found it hard to read her instruments. Twelve Gs; far higher than anticipated during a real mission. Enough to flatten her eyeballs. Her head was being battered against the inside of her pressure suit helmet. The lights of the lab beyond the cage whirled past the mockup cabin’s small windows.

Fifteen Gs. Now she couldn’t breathe at all. She became sure she was going to black out.
But I’m only half-way through the run
. And the doctors were watching her, every twitch of her flattened face, on closed-circuit television.

At last the load began to drop away; the pressure eased from her chest, and she sucked in great gulps of air.

Of course, nobody would complain about being subjected to high-tech torture in instruments like the Wheel, or query the relevance of all these exercises to actual spaceflight, or – still worse – admit that he or she had any problems with the routines.
Because if you complain, it’s bound to get back to Muldoon, and a note will go into whatever damn system he uses to select his crews, and you’ll
never get off the ground
. And that was the name of the game at the moment. Joe Muldoon, in his new role as head of the Mars program, had also assumed unto himself the old, separate function of director of Flight Crew Operations.

It was Muldoon who assigned crews to missions. And everyone knew that Muldoon was in the middle of drawing up his crew rota for the first flights in the new program, leading up to the Mars mission itself; the only thing that mattered in life right now – the
only
thing – was getting a berth in that rota.

So York was going to have to put on a front when she came out of the cage.

How’d it go? You didn’t black out, did you?

Me? Come on. I felt like I was riding a little heavy on a T-38 afterburner, that’s all …

Sure.

When the doctors helped her to limp out of the cage, she found her back covered with ruptured capillaries, where the blood had been forced through her flesh, and she had a headache like the worst hangover in the world.

Piece of cake. Problems? Me? Come on
.

While she was soaking in a tub, recovering, she got Muldoon’s message.

She – along with the rest of the astronaut pool – had to return to Houston by the next flight, for a meeting with Muldoon.

It was an unusual request, even unprecedented. But she knew what it had to signify.

She got out of her tub and began toweling herself off. She could feel her heart thumping a little faster, and it had nothing to do with acceleration.

Ares. It’s beginning
.

By the time York arrived, the small conference room on the third floor of Building 4 was crowded. Joe Muldoon sat isolated at a small desk on a stage at the front of the room; he was riffling through Vu-graph foils.

York pushed through a forest of sports-shirted male astronauts and found a seat near the back of the room. A man who had flown around the Moon sat down next to her.

Muldoon must know, York thought, that he had every person in the room by the metaphorical balls.

One of the many things she speculated about regarding the
mysterious crew selection process was whether men like Muldoon actually
enjoyed
wielding their power. Looking at Muldoon now, his foot tapping nervously on the stage, his shoulders knots of tensed-up muscles, she somehow doubted it.

Which, as far as she was concerned, was all to his credit.

All around her there was a babble of conversation, lively, deep-throated, maybe a little nervous. There was a kind of competitive cheerfulness in the air. Like none of this really mattered.
Oh, it’s only the crew rota for the most significant new program of flights in years. Hey, you catch the ball game Monday?

Now Muldoon got to his feet, and stood with his hands on his hips, facing the astronaut corps. Blue-eyed, his sharp crew cut graying blond, he looked like a caricature of a drill sergeant, York thought.

The remnants of conversation died off immediately, leaving Muldoon facing rows of silent faces.

Muldoon spoke without a mike, without preamble, and his words carried to every person in the room. He said: ‘The guys who are going to be the first to fly to Mars are right here, in this room.’

‘You’ve heard by now we’ve got a first cut of Ares mission profiles.’

He snapped on the Vu-graph projector, and an image was thrown up on a screen behind him; it was a simple list, typed and copied onto the foil. ‘We’ve got eight flights here, both manned and unmanned. We’ve defined six preliminary classes of mission, designated here A to F. They are mostly Earth orbit tests of the system components. But they lead up to the final flight – mission class F – which will be the full Mars landing attempt.

‘You can see from the foil that the two A-class missions will be unmanned shakedown tests of the new Saturn VB booster system, carrying boilerplate Apollos and MEMs. The B mission will be the first manned flight to Earth orbit – or maybe lunar orbit – to man-rate the Saturn VB. A live Apollo, obviously, but a boilerplate MEM again. The C mission is another unmanned shakedown, this time of a MEM test article in near-operational condition. The D mission will be the first manned MEM flight, to Earth orbit; this will be a long-duration mission to test for space soak.

‘The two E-class missions will be further manned MEM tests; we’re intending to trial the new descent systems with lunar and/or Earth landings. Also in this period we expect to confirm orbital assembly procedures. Finally, the F mission will be the Mars flight itself, and it’s got to be ready to depart on March 21, 1985. Otherwise we wait two more years for the next opposition. The
precise sequencing of the other missions, and their dates, is to be determined; we’re intending to take advantage of success …’

York was hardly listening. Nor was anyone else, she suspected.
You’ve got just five manned flights up there
.

Just five flights
.

Muldoon whipped away the foil; it showed for a moment as a gray curl in the light of the Vu-graph lamp. Then, without ceremony, he put up the next slide.

It was a list of names.

Muldoon said, ‘It’s not appropriate, at this stage, to assign crews all the way through to the F mission. I’m sure all of you understand that. You have here, instead, the assignments for classes B, D and the first E mission – that’s the first three manned flights – plus backups …’