Voyage

Natalie’s head was habitually full of suspicion and disapproval of Big Government Science like this. But the world looked different to Conlig. To him, this shabby test site was the gateway to the future: to other worlds, colonies on the Moon.

Even Mars itself.

Ben Priest was trying to explain the test rig to Natalie. He made her look more closely at the object inside the gantry, trying to get her to make sense of it. A nozzle, gracefully shaped, flared from the top toward the sky …

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I’ve got it. It’s a rocket. There’s the nozzle, at the top of the stack. It’s a rocket, on its launch gantry. Gee. Just like Cape Kennedy.’

Ben Priest laughed. ‘Except it’s upside down.’

‘One day we’ll see this at Kennedy,’ Conlig said, aware he sounded a little defensive. ‘One day soon. Its descendants, anyhow; this poor bird is never going to fly.’

‘This is actually a late generation engine,’ Ben said. ‘Our newest pride and joy. The XE-Prime: quite close to a flight configuration. The first rigs here, ten years ago, were called Kiwis.’

‘Oh,’ York said. ‘Flightless birds.’

‘Now,’ said Ben, ‘there are a string of projects working under the generic title NERVA. For “Nuclear Engine –”’

‘“– for Rocket Vehicle Application.” I know.’

‘But we’re still restricted to building flightless birds,’ Priest mused. ‘We’re proud of this baby, Natalie. We’ve managed to get close to fifty thousand pounds of thrust with her. And we managed twenty-eight restarts. Reliability is going to be a key factor in long-haul space travel …’

Conlig watched Natalie, trying to gauge her reaction.

All of six years older than Natalie, Conlig had finished his PhD – on exotic, heat-tolerant refractory materials for lightweight fission reactors – in a near-record time.

Conlig was certain – so was Natalie, come to that – that he was heading for the top of his chosen profession. And since, if Spiro Agnew could be believed, nuclear rockets were going to be the Next Big Thing in space, that top could be a very high summit indeed. Meanwhile, York’s geology was likely to take her away for months at a time. Their relationship was going to be odd, to say the least.

It was odd to know that his whole life might be shaped by the success, or failure, of a nuclear rocket. I really am living in the future, he thought.

To Conlig, nuclear rockets were the simplest, most beautiful machines in the world. You didn’t burn anything, like in a Saturn. You just heated up high-pressure liquid hydrogen in a reactor core, and let hot gas squirt out of the rear of your ship.

A nuclear upper stage would uprate a Saturn V by a factor of two: Moon payloads could be increased by more than half.

But there were major technical challenges.

The working fluid was liquid hydrogen at twenty-five degrees above absolute zero. Once it was pumped to the reactor the hydrogen had to be flashed to above two thousand degrees.

Cooling systems were Mike Conlig’s specialty.

There were other difficulties. Like, if you were looking at space applications, there was the need to shield the crew from radiation. And the fact that you couldn’t cluster too many of these babies in a given stack, because their neutron emissions interfere with each other, and, and …

Still, the project was making progress. In the short term they were aiming for a RIFT, a Reactor-in-Flight Test. But there was a hell of a lot of work to do before then. You couldn’t cut corners with nuclear technology: nobody wanted a live nuclear pile to be smeared over Florida thanks to some fuck-up at Kennedy.

But, Conlig thought, they’d fly one day. They had problems to solve. But they’d solve them. Just as soon as Nixon gave his go-ahead to the Space Task Group’s proposals.

The Space Task Group was a committee, headed by Vice President Agnew, which Nixon had set up to formulate post-Apollo goals for the space program. The STG had been due to report in September. The rumors were they’d endorsed a manned Mars landing program. When a manned Mars landing program happened, this project would get some serious money to spend.

Ben Priest was still talking Natalie through the details of the XE-Prime. They looked good together, Conlig thought suddenly. Relaxed. He felt a remote stab of unease.

But Natalie was giving Priest a hard time. She was talking about politics, as usual.

Natalie York laughed, uncomfortable; a shiver of awe – or maybe disgust – swept over her, as she studied the slim XE-Prime.

‘You said there have been nuclear rocket developments here for ten years?’

‘Yes,’ Priest said.

‘Why? We’ve not been considering Mars missions that long, have we?’

Priest scratched his ear. ‘Well, the original objectives of the site didn’t have much to do with spaceflight, Natalie. Back in the late 1950s, big chemical rockets were still a thing of the future. And the nuclear weapons were bulky, heavy –’

‘Oh. They were building ICBMs here. Nuclear ICBMs.’

‘Just engineering experiments,’ Priest said evenly. ‘In case of need. And remember, the USSR was well ahead of us then, with their big, heavy-lift chemical ICBMs. But our chemical rockets got bigger, and the bombs got lighter, and the need went away. Later NASA thought they might need the nukes for Apollo Moon missions. But then the Saturn rockets came along …’

‘And now, we still need to build nuke rockets because we’re going to Mars.’

‘Hey, Ben,’ Mike said now. ‘Maybe you’ll be the first man on Mars. In the nuclear rocket ship Spiro Agnew.’

Ben snorted. He cupped his hand over his mouth, and intoned Cronkite-style, ‘And now we take you live to the aptly-named Jackass Flats, where the good ship Agnew is ready to lift Man In Space to his new destiny … over to you, Dan.’

‘Thanks, Walter, and here as I stand under the painted sky of Nevada, I cannot but help recall …’

On they clowned, like two kids, laughing and bumping against each other. Petey came away from the fence, drawn by their laughter, and pulled at his father, punching his back playfully.

York, indulgently, let them walk ahead of her.

She looked around more carefully now, trying to figure the layout of the place. When the laughter had faded, she said to Priest, ‘Tell me how they operate here.’

‘Well, the rail track is the key to everything.’ He pointed. ‘The track runs out of that building, the Radioactive Material Storage Facility. The test articles aren’t too radioactive, you know, until they’ve been fired. They are delivered on their flatwagon trucks to the test cells, and go through their firing. Afterwards they are taken to a dump over there, at the eastern end of the track.’

‘Because they are too radioactive to recover?’

‘Yeah.’ Priest shrugged. ‘Mike talks about restart capabilities, but it looks more likely now that an interplanetary ship is going to have a whole host of big NERVA rockets clustered together. After you’ve fired one, you’d dump it, to save the crew from the radioactivity. And you’d use them all up at Earth departure; you’d stick to chemical rockets for mid-course corrections.’

‘Good grief. And this strikes you as a rational way to fly?’

He grinned at her, his teeth pale in the gathering darkness. ‘If it’s what it takes to get me to Mars, hell, yes.’

‘Have they had any accidents here?’

‘Sure. It’s a development site. What do you expect?’

‘What kind of accidents?’

‘Ruptured cores. Ozone production in trapped air bubbles. Loss of moderator –’

‘And injuries?’

‘Ruptured ear drums. A few burns.’ Priest looked uncomfortable. ‘Natalie, what do you want me to tell you? The NRDS was born in a different age. You have to see things through the eyes of the times.’

‘Oh, sure.’ A different age. But we’re still using this hideous place now. And Mike works here, for God’s sake. She shivered, as if she could feel old Cold War radioactive particles sleeting through her flesh.

She looked around. ‘How do they do their containment? When the test rockets fire. All that radioactive hydrogen, pluming into the air –’

Ben said, ‘What containment?’

They all piled into Ben’s Corvette and roared off down the Interstate toward Vegas, where they were going to spend the night, and Sunday. Petey quickly drifted off to sleep, his head lolling against the seat cushions.

Ben turned on the radio. A news program was broadcasting; York, sitting up in front with Ben, listened desultorily to dreary statistics from Vietnam.

Outside, light leaked from the sky, and hard starlight poked through the desert blue.

Ben leaned forward and turned up the volume. ‘Hey, Mike, listen to this. It’s Agnew.’

… the three options identified by our Space Task Group represent a balanced program … a wide range of manned flights, unmanned planetary expeditions and applications satellites – serving people on Earth and increasing international cooperation in space …

Wernher von Braun’s cultured voice came on, testifying to the Senate. I say let’s do it quickly and establish a foothold on a new planet while we still have one left to take off from …

‘So they are still talking about going to Mars,’ York said.

‘Sure they are,’ Ben said. ‘Agnew’s three options are all about going to Mars; the only difference between them is, the more you spend per year, the faster you get there. Although –’

‘What?’

‘Although he did put in a fourth option, where we give up manned spaceflight altogether.’ Priest stared at the road ahead. ‘We’re just going to have to see, I guess.’

‘Agnew is an asshole,’ York said mildly.

‘Maybe, but he’s an asshole who likes spaceships and astronauts,’ Mike said, leaning forward from the back. ‘And that makes him my kind of asshole.’

‘Going to Mars is a beautiful idea,’ York said. ‘But it’s science fiction. Isn’t it?’

Mike squeezed her shoulder. ‘You’ve seen the XE-Prime. We can build this bird. All we need is the money.’

‘How much money?’

‘It’s not outrageous,’ Ben said. ‘Probably not as much as Apollo, in real terms. The whole program is going to be modular. A few basic components, used in different combinations for different missions. You’d have a Space Shuttle to get to orbit cheaply, a nuclear rocket for long-haul missions to the Moon and beyond, and cans – space station modules – you could assemble in different configurations. You’d put together your Mars ships using space station cans as habitation modules, and nuclear boosters –’

York felt like arguing, trying to get the unease out of her system – she had been shaken by what she’d seen at the test station. ‘But what’s it all for? More footprints and flags, like Apollo?’

‘No,’ Mike snapped.

There had been an edge of impatience in his voice since they’d left the Flats. She sensed her response there hadn’t been what he’d hoped for.

He said now, ‘Haven’t you been listening, Natalie? Agnew’s presented a great vision. We could be on Mars by 1982. And by 1990 we’ll have a hundred men in Earth orbit, forty-eight on the Moon, and forty-eight in a base on Mars –’

‘Oh, sure,’ she said, bristling. ‘Yes, actually, I have been listening. And I hear that Agnew gets booed when he talks in public about going to Mars. People don’t want this, Mike; the war is fucking up the economy too comprehensively.’

Ben, gratifyingly, looked startled to hear her swear.

“Well, I doubt Nixon’s going to buy it all anyhow,’ Ben said. ‘The word is he’s leaning a little toward the Space Shuttle, as the one element in the STG proposals to preserve over all the rest. Because it promises low-cost access to space. On the other hand, Nixon likes heroes …’

‘But he’s backed into a corner, by what Kennedy said to Armstrong and Muldoon in July,’ Mike said. ‘And by the pro-Mars statements he’s been issuing ever since.’

York grunted. ‘Nixon hates Kennedy. Besides, Kennedy’s just another opportunist. Do you really think he would have continued pumping funds into Apollo the way Johnson did, if he’d not been invalided out of the White House back in ’63? If he’d actually had to pay for any of the things he was able to call for, from his wheelchair?’

‘Johnson was a genuine space enthusiast,’ Mike said. ‘You’re too cynical, Natalie.’

‘Johnson was interested in his own advantage. Why else have you got so many NASA centers in the south?’

‘Does make you think, though,’ Ben said. ‘What if Kennedy hadn’t taken those bullets in Dallas? Or – what if they’d killed him, instead of his wife? Without him as a cheerleader on the sidelines, maybe the whole program would have got itself canceled.’

‘Anyway,’ York said, ‘I just hope that whatever happens this time around they make room for a few scientists among all you av-i-at-ors.’

‘Don’t listen to her, Ben,’ Conlig said. ‘She’s playing it cool. Guess what she keeps on the wall of her bedroom in her mom’s house.’

‘Shut up, Mike –’

‘Pictures of Mars.’

Priest looked at her, evidently intrigued.

‘Hell, I was just sixteen. For a while I got caught up in all that showbiz about Mariner 4 …’

Mariner 4 was a NASA space probe which reached Mars in July, 1964. Mariner hadn’t carried the fuel to put itself into orbit around Mars; it made one sweep past the planet, firing off pictures as it went. Mariner sent back twenty-one pictures, in all. They covered maybe one per cent of Mars’s surface.

Natalie York had never even thought about Mars, other worlds, before Mariner. She wasn’t even interested in astronomy, or space travel, or other worlds, or any of that. Astronomy was a subject for the handful of old men who controlled access to the big telescopes, and used them to pursue their obscure, decade-spanning projects. Even back in 1964, geology – the study of the Earth – was what captured her imagination. Stuff you could walk around in, and pick up, and examine with your eyes and hands.

Mariner made everything different. For a while, anyhow.

She remembered a teacher at school, trying to put over the basics of astronomy.

In July 1964, when Mariner reached Mars, the planet had been in opposition. Mars was a planet that circled the sun, like Earth; but its orbit was outside the Earth’s, and its year was twice as long. That meant its distance from Earth was constantly changing, as Earth scooted by on the inside track. But when sun, Earth and Mars were lined up, in that order, Mars would come closest to Earth. Opposition. That’s what it means. So at opposition, Mars is almost opposite the sun, seen from Earth. At its closest point.

She remembered, as she’d learned of this, a sudden sense of herself as a passenger on the Earth – as if it was a giant spinning spaceship, steaming past this great red liner called Mars.

To do their jobs, astronomers have to be able to figure out where they are, in relation to the rest of the universe. They have to be able to imagine, really and truly, that they aren’t living on a flat Earth.

She’d gotten copies of the pictures radioed back by Mariner 4, and had indeed taped them to her bedroom wall.

The first photo showed the limb of the planet, seen from close to; the horizon curved, and surface markings were vaguely, frustratingly visible. Still, the image was a hell of a contrast to the misty, unreal disk you could see through a telescope.

Mariner’s photos showed how Mars would look to an orbiting astronaut.

The next few pictures showed views of the surface, as if looking down from directly overhead. The monochrome images looked like aerial pictures of a desert, Arizona maybe …

Ben Priest said now, ‘You know, Mariner was a big shock to us all. Before Mariner, we thought we understood Mars pretty well. You could walk around on the surface with nothing more than a facemask. We thought we saw seasonal changes in dark patches on the surface, that were maybe down to some kind of spreading vegetation.

‘But now, everything looks different. We had it wrong – all of it. Earth-like Mars certainly isn’t.’

It was Mariner’s seventh picture that was the real surprise.

The seventh picture showed craters. Nobody was expecting to find those.

Not Arizona, then. Mars looked more like the Moon.

Priest said, ‘We know now the atmosphere is impossibly thin. It’s mostly carbon dioxide, and there’s no oxygen, and hardly any water vapor. Not even nitrogen … Mariner didn’t find any canals, incidentally. Even though it flew over an area where a lot of the most prominent canals were expected.

‘All our ideas were turned upside down by this. With such a thin atmosphere, any life must be very hardy. Nothing like terrestrial life at all. But, of course, the question of life won’t be settled until humans land there. It was one hell of a disappointment, the NASA guys tell me. Suddenly, Mars became a place it wasn’t worth traveling to. If we don’t make it to Mars, if the funding and resources aren’t assembled, then for me, that shock of Mariner 4 will have been the turning point.’

York shrugged. ‘But NASA oversold Mars for years. It was a kind of holiday resort in the sky, teeming with life, justifying all the billions they wanted to pour into rockets and spaceships …’

Priest laughed. ‘A holiday resort. I like that.’

To York, Mars was much more than that. After Mariner she’d become interested in Mars, and its history in the human imagination. She got books from the library. Mars as the Abode of Life by Percival Lowell, New York, 1909; Mars and its Canals by Lowell, New York, 1906 … She remembered fantastic, gaudy pictures of huge irrigation canals dug across the face of a dying, drying Mars, long descriptions of the waves of vegetation and the herds of animals which must sweep across the red Martian plains. The Mars Project: Wernher von Braun, University of Illinois, 1953. It had a big rocket ship on the cover, like a kid’s book. Von Braun wanted to build ten spaceships in Earth orbit, each weighing three and a half thousand tons, and carrying seven men. It would take nine hundred flights to orbit to assemble the fleet. There would be two-hundred-ton landing boats, to take fifty people down to the surface for a year-long stay … These visions, she’d thought, were a boy’s dreams of power, dressed up as serious engineering plans.

York had put this stuff aside. Even at the age of sixteen, York was hot on science, on the strictness and logic of it; she found herself getting unreasonably impatient at illogic, and wishful thinking, and the emotional coloration of rational processes of all sorts.

(Actually she was much too severe for most of the boys her mother tried to match her with. You’d think that someone who’d suffered as messy a divorce as Maisie York would learn not to meddle in other people’s relationships …)

The fact was, to her, the real Mars was a hell of a lot more interesting than Lowell’s anthropocentric dreams.

Because of Mariner, Mars had turned into a place you could do some geology.

How would the geology of Mars differ from Earth’s? What would that tell you about Earth, that you couldn’t have learned from staying at home? A hell of a lot, probably.

Mariner’s thirteenth frame had electrified her.

The thirteenth picture showed craters with frost inside them.

My God. Not the Moon, not Arizona. Mars is something else. Something unique.

Ben eyed York, interested, speculative. ‘So you’re a closet Mars nut. I ought to take you out to JPL sometime. That’s where they run the planetary probes from … Hey, Natalie. Maybe you ought to apply.’

‘What for?’

‘The astronaut corps.’

‘Me? Are you joking?’

‘Why not? You’re qualified. And we need people like you. Even Spiro says so; he thinks people were turned off by Apollo because it was too engineering-oriented.’

‘Well, so it was.’

Priest eyed her. ‘I’m serious, actually, Natalie. It’s a genuine opportunity for you. You could go work for Jorge Romero’s geology boys in Flagstaff, and train the moonwalkers. That’s how Jack Schmitt got into the program, and they say he’ll make it to the Moon.’

‘You worry me, Ben. How can a crazy man like you be allowed to drive a car at night?’

‘Here.’ Driving with one hand, he reached up, turned back his lapel, and unclipped a silver pin, in the shape of a shooting star trailing a comet’s tail.

‘What is it?’

‘My rookie’s pin. Some day soon I’m going to get a flight. So you need this more than I do. Take it. And when you’re the first human on Mars, when the Spiro Agnew lands in 1982, drop it into the deepest damn crater you see, and think of me.’

‘You’re crazy,’ she said again. ‘You should give it to Petey.’

They fell silent.

Her thoughts turned back to Jackass Flats.

They don’t even contain the vented hydrogen. And Mike never thought to tell me about any of this. Why? Because he thought I couldn’t stand to hear it? Or because he can’t even see what’s wrong, here?

What does that say about us? And – do we really have to do this shit, to get to Mars?

She closed her fingers around the little pin Ben had given her.

Ahead of them, the Interstate was a band shining in the starlight and stretching toward the glow of Vegas.

Monday, October 27, 1969 Edwards Air Force Base, California

Major Philip Stone joined the USAF in 1953, at the age of twenty.

He arrived in Korea in time to make a series of hazardous sorties. Well, Korea had been a turkey shoot. But Stone hadn’t enjoyed combat. His buddies called him too serious – a straight arrow. But for Stone, the important thing was what he could learn in each flight, either about his machines, or about himself.

After the war, his disciplined curiosity found a new focus.

In the early 1960s the most promising route to space, if you were inside the USAF, had looked like the experimental high-altitude rocket aircraft program. The X-15s could even give their pilots astronaut wings, by flying through the officially recognized lower limit of ‘space,’ at fifty miles high. The X-15s were to lead on to the advanced X-20 – the Dyna-Soar – in which a guy would have been boosted into orbit, and then he would have flown back down, landing like an airplane.

But with men routinely being hurled into space in ballistic capsules like Mercury and Gemini, the X-20 looked too advanced for its time, and it soon ran up a bill as large as that for the entire Mercury program without delivering a single flight article. And it was canned.

Now, the only way for a pilot to reach space was to transfer to NASA. Neil Armstrong was another X-15 pilot who had gone that way before. And so that was what Stone had determined to do.

But first he had some unfinished business.

In 1969, Stone was thirty-seven years old.

‘Drop minus one minute.’

‘One minute,’ Stone said. ‘Rog. Data on. Emergency battery on. I’m ready when you are, buddy. Master arm is on, system arm light is on …’

The B-52 reached its launch station over Delamar Dry Lake in Nevada. The rocket plane was suspended from the bomber’s wing pylon like a slim, black, stub-winged missile, crammed full of liquid oxygen and anhydrous ammonia, ready for its mid-air launch.

Stone was sealed up inside the X-15. The B-52’s engine was just feet away from his head, but Stone, cocooned inside the pressurized cockpit, could barely hear its noise. From the corner of his eye he could see the chase planes clustered close to the B-52. At last, this damn flight is going to be over and done with.