Voyage. Stephen Baxter
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Shepard after this.
Jones had his own points to make, though.
He left it a couple of hours, then he went storming into Slayton’s office.
‘Damn it, Deke, I shouldn’t be backup. You ought to be making me commander of the prime crew for 14, in place of Scott.’ After all he – Jones – had been one of the original batch of Mercury astronauts, and the fourth American in space. And he’d already started his training for his own later J-class mission besides.
He’d waited a hell of a long time for this, the crown of his career, and he wasn’t giving up his mission – to be busted down to hole-in-the-sky trash-can Skylab flights – without a fight.
But Deke had just waved him away. ‘You don’t have a case, Chuck. Listen: A1 Shepard is also one of the original batch, in case you forgot that, and he’s been waiting for a lot of years for a second flight after that damn ear illness. And he was the first American in space; Al outranks you, Chuck. But I’m still standing him down in favor of Dave Scott. You’ve got to face it, Chuck. I don’t like this any more than you do, but Scott’s is the best prepared crew I have, for the one mission we’ve got left.’
‘Yeah.’ Of course Jones understood that. The mission was the thing; nobody within NASA wanted to do anything that carried the slightest risk of a foul-up.
Nobody, that is, save the astronauts who weren’t aboard the last Apollo Moon ship.
Understanding it didn’t stop him trying, though; and he had stayed in Slayton’s office for a long time, arguing hard …
There was another piece of the old rock, anorthosite or whatever shit it was, in his way. Jones kicked it aside and stalked on.
The afternoon was to be a simulated three-hour moonwalk. York had to make up the numbers, in the absence of enough astronauts. Jones teamed with Priest, and Bleeker paired off with York. Jorge Romero would stay behind in the truck, and act as a capcom. The astronauts wore backpacks, radios and cameras, and they followed traverses laid out on coarse maps designed to match the quality of low-resolution orbital photographs.
York and Bleeker stopped at the first sample point. There was a large, fractured boulder here, shot through with anorthosite. Bleeker set up a gnomon and took a photograph of the rock face. The gnomon was a device for calibration, a little tripod with a color scale for the photography, and a free-hanging central rod to give local vertical. Bleeker hit the rock with his hammer, and broke off a piece the size of his fist. He placed the sample in a small Teflon bag and dropped it into the pack on York’s back. He’d donned lunar gloves to do the work; York could see how stiff and clumsy the gloves were.
‘How was that?’
She grinned back at him. ‘Standard operating procedures, Adam; Jorge will be proud of you.’
They walked on.
Bleeker raised his face to the sun, a vague half-smile on his face. Bleeker was pale, freckled – a northern boy – and he wore plenty of sun-block on his exposed skin, here in the Californian heat. York hadn’t spent any time alone with him before today. He seemed bland, unimaginative, rather empty. Ideal profile for a moonwalker, she thought wryly.
‘I guess this training is very different from what you’ve been used to,’ she said.
‘Oh, you bet. Especially compared to my assignment before joining the Astronaut Office.’
‘What was that?’
‘510 Squadron. That’s a fighter-bomber squadron, based in Virginia. Beautiful part of the country. Do you know it?’
‘No … What kind of bombs?’
He glanced at her, professional reserve coming down behind his eyes. ‘Special weapons.’
Oh. Nuclear.
‘We were trained to deploy out of West Germany. We’d have flown low, a hundred feet, under the enemy’s radar.’ He mimed the maneuver with a dusty hand. Now he pulled his hand so it soared straight upwards. ‘The idea was to let go of the payload at just the right moment. The package would follow a two-mile arc to the target.’ He grinned again, almost shyly. ‘While it was falling I’d be high-tailing it out of there, as fast as I could go, before the detonation.’
‘I’ll bet. It sounds risky.’
‘All flying is risky,’ he said levelly. ‘But the F100s we flew were beautiful ships …’
He waxed lyrical about the F100 for a while: the ‘Super Saber,’ the world’s first fighter capable of sustained supersonic speed.
York tuned out.
The F100 had been produced by Rockwell: the company who had built Apollo, and who were now bidding to go to Mars. Given where the bulk of the money went, it was as if the space work of companies like Rockwell was a thin, glamorous patina on the surface of their real mother lode, military development.
‘The part I didn’t enjoy so much was ejecting.’
‘Ejecting?’
‘It was a one-shot mission. The planes didn’t carry enough fuel to make it to their targets and back. We had to eject hundreds of miles short of home, let the planes crash, and then survive as best we could.’
‘Christ,’ York said. ‘Walking home, through a nuclear battlefield?’
‘I was trained for it,’ he said. ‘I was part of a global strategy. The weapons are new, so you need new strategies to use them. It’s all about mutual deterrence. “Safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation …”’
She was startled by the quote. ‘That’s well expressed.’
‘Winston Churchill.’ His eyes were like blue windows.
He wasn’t unintelligent, she realized. Just – different from her, and the people she mixed with. A Cold Warrior. She shivered.
He glanced at his checklist. ‘Hey, look; we’ve missed our last stop.’
They turned and retraced their footsteps, reaching for fresh sample bags.
At the end of the afternoon, they met up back at the truck. Romero, was still grinning, even joking with Jones, but York thought she could see a strain around Romero’s eyes, under the dust and sun-block.
On the truck radio, a commentator was quoting a speech by Walter Mondale in Congress, where NASA’s budget submission was being debated … I believe it would be unconscionable to embark on a project of such staggering cost as this Mars proposal when many of our citizens are malnourished, when our rivers and lakes are polluted, and when our cities and rural areas are dying. What are our values? What do we think is more important? …
York and Ben Priest got cups of coffee from a communal flask, and walked off a little way. The sun was low, now, and blasted directly into their eyes; it had lost little of its heat.
‘I guess Romero is soaking up a lot of Chuck’s frustration at losing his flight,’ York said.
‘Naw. Chuck is always like this, when it comes to the “science,”’ Priest said. He took a pull of his coffee. ‘It’s damaging.’
‘Damaging is right. Can’t you exert some influence on him?’
He grinned at her. ‘I’m afraid you don’t know astronaut psychology, Natalie. Where these guys are concerned, the commander’s word is everything. He sets the tone for the crew, the whole mission. If the commander is somber and quiet, like Armstrong, then that’s the way the crew must be; if he wants to wear a beanie hat with a Teflon propeller on it, and sing all the way to the Moon, like Pete Conrad, then we all have to wear our beanie hats and like it. That’s the way it is. Thank God Dave Scott is taking the science seriously. I think if Chuck was the prime commander, 14