Kitabı oku: «Voyage»

Book 1 DECISION

THE WHITE HOUSE WASHINGTON

Thursday, February 13, 1969

MEMORANDUM for

The Vice President

The Secretary of Defense

The Acting Administrator; National Aeronautics and Space Administration

The Science Adviser

It is necessary for me to have in the near future a definitive recommendation on the direction which the US space program should take in the post-Apollo period. I, therefore, ask the Secretary of Defense, the Acting Administrator of NASA, and the Science Adviser each to develop proposed plans and to meet together as a Space Task Group, with the Vice President in the chair, to prepare for me a coordinated program and budget proposal. In developing your proposed plans, you may wish to seek advice from the scientific, engineering and industrial communities, from the Congress and the public.

I would like to receive the coordinated proposal by September 1, 1969.

Richard M. Nixon

Handwritten addendum: Spiro, do we have to go to Mars? What options have we got? RMN.

Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard M. Nixon, 1969 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1969)

Mission Elapsed Time [Day/Hr:Min:Sec] Minus 000/00:00:08

In their orange pressure suits, York, Gershon and Stone were jammed together so close they were rubbing elbows. They were enclosed from daylight; small fluorescent floods lit up the Command Module’s cramped cabin.

There was a powerful thump. York, startled, glanced at her crewmates.

‘Fuel pumps,’ Stone said.

Now York heard a dull rumbling – like faraway thunder – a shudder that transmitted itself through the padded couch to her body.

Hundreds of feet below York, liquid oxygen and hydrogen were rushing together, mingling in the big first stage engines’ combustion chambers.

She could feel her heartbeat rising, clattering within her chest. Take it easy, damn it.

A small metal model of a cosmonaut, squat and Asiatic, dangled from a chain fixed above her head. This was Boris, the gift from Vlad Viktorenko. The toy swung back and forth, its grotesque features leering at her out of a sketch of a helmet. Good luck, Bah-reess.

The noise began, cacophonous, a steady roar. It was like being inside the mouth of some huge, bellowing giant.

Phil Stone shouted, ‘All five at nominal. Stand by for the stretch.’

The five liquid rocket engines of the Saturn VB booster’s first stage, the MS-IC, had ignited a full eight seconds ahead of the enhanced Saturn’s four Solid Rocket Boosters. And now came the ‘stretch,’ as the stack reached up under the pressure of that immense thrust. She could feel the ship pushing upwards, hear the groan of strained metal as the joints of the segmented solid boosters flexed.

It was all supposed to happen this way. But still … Jesus. What a design.

Stone said, ‘Three, two. SRB ignition.’

Now they were committed. The solid boosters were big firecrackers; once the SRBs were ignited, nothing could stop them until they burned out.

‘Clock is running –’

Zero.

There was a jolt: mild, easy. The explosive pins holding down the boosters had snapped.

Nothing as heavy as a Saturn VB was going to leap into the air.

The cabin started to shake, the couch restraints and fittings rattling.

‘Climbout,’ Stone said evenly. ‘Here we go.’

Ralph Gershon whooped. ‘Rager! Going full bore!’

Liftoff. Good God. I’m off the ground.

She felt excitement surge in her; the grainy reality of the motion pressed in on her. ‘Poyekhali!’ she shouted. Let’s go! – the spontaneous cry of an excited Yuri Gagarin.

The lurching continued.

York was thrown against her harness, to the right; and then to the left, so that she jammed up against Gershon.

The Saturn VB was inching its way upwards past the launch tower, almost skittishly, its automated controls swiveling its five first stage engines to correct for wind shear. Right, left, forward, back, in a series of spasmodic jerks hard enough to bruise her.

No simulation had even hinted at this violence. It was like riding out of an explosion.

‘Access arm,’ Stone called. ‘Clear of the tower.’

John Young, Houston capcom for the launch, came on line.

‘Ares, Houston. Copy. You are clear of the tower.’

York felt a lurch forwards. The whole stack had pitched over; she was sitting up in her couch now, the huge rattling thrust of the first stage pushing at her back.

‘Houston, we have a good roll program,’ Stone said.

‘Roger the roll.’

The Saturn was arcing over the Florida coast, toward the Atlantic.

Down there on the beaches, she knew, children had written huge good luck messages into the Florida sand. GODSPEED ARES. York looked up and to her right, toward the tiny square window there. But there was nothing to see. They were cocooned; the boost protective cover, a solid cone, lay over the Command Module.

The Command Module’s interior was the size of a small car. It was small, dingy, mechanical, metallic. Very 1960s, York thought. The walls, painted gray and yellow, were studded with gauges, dials, control switches and circuit breakers. There were scraps of notes, from the crew to themselves, and emergency checklists, and hundreds of tiny round-cornered squares of blue Velcro stuck to the walls.

The three crew couches were just metal frames with canvas supports. York lay on her back, in the Command Module’s right hand seat. Stone, as commander, was in the left hand seat; Ralph Gershon was in the center couch. The main hatch, behind Gershon’s head, had big chunky levers on its inside, like a submarine’s hatch.

‘Ares, Houston. You’re right smack dab on the trajectory.’

‘Roger, John,’ Stone said. ‘This baby is really going.’

‘Roger that.’

‘Go, you mother,’ Gershon shouted. ‘Shit hot!’ York could hear his voice shaking with the oscillation.

‘Ten thousand and Mach point five,’ Young said.

Mach point five. Less than thirty seconds into the mission, and I’m already hitting half the speed of sound.

John Young didn’t sound scared, or nervous. Just another day at the office, for him.

John had ridden around the Moon in Apollo 10, back in 1969; and if the later Apollos hadn’t been canned, he probably would have commanded a mission to the lunar surface.

In fact, if he hadn’t been so critical of NASA following Apollo-N, Young might have been sitting in here himself.

The vibration worsened. Her head rattled in her helmet, like a seed in a gourd. The whole cabin was shaking, and she couldn’t focus on the oscillating banks of instruments in front of her.

‘Mach point nine,’ Stone said. ‘Forty seconds. Mach one. Going through nineteen thousand.’

‘Ares, you are go at forty.’

Abruptly the ride smoothed out; it was like passing onto a smoother road surface. Even the engine noise was gone; they were moving so fast they were leaving their own sound behind.

‘Ares, you’re looking good.’

‘Rog,’ Stone said. ‘Okay, we’re throttling down.’

The engines cut down to ease the stack through max-q, the point when air density and the boosters’ velocity combined to exert maximum stress on the airframe.

‘You are go at throttle up.’

‘Roger. Go at throttle up.’

The pressure on York’s chest seemed to be growing; it was becoming more difficult to breathe, as her lungs labored against the thrust of the stack.

Stone said, Thirty-five thousand feet. Going through one point nine Mach. SRB combustion chamber pressure down to fifty pounds per square inch.’

‘Copy,’ John Young said from the ground. ‘You are go for SRB separation.’

‘Rog.’

She heard a faint, muffled bang; the cabin shuddered, rattling her against her restraints. Separation squibs had fired, pushing the exhausted solid boosters away from the main stack. She felt a dip in the thrust; but then the acceleration of the MS-IC’s central liquid boosters picked up again, and she was pressed back into her seat.

‘Roger on the sep,’ Young said.

‘Smooth as glass, John.’

The solid boosters would be falling away like matchsticks, dribbling smoke and flames. The strap-on solid boosters were the most visible enhancement of the VB over the core Saturn V design; with their help the VB was capable of carrying twice the payload of the V to Earth orbit.

‘Five thousand one hundred feet per second,’ Stone said. ‘Thirty-three miles down range.’

She glanced at the G-meter. Three times the force of gravity. It wasn’t comfortable, but she had endured a lot worse in the centrifuge.

Cool air played inside her helmet, bringing with it the smell of metal and plastic.

With the SRBs gone, the ride was a lot easier. Liquid motors were fundamentally smoother burners than solids. She could hear the mounting, steady roar of the MS-IC’s engines, the continuing purring of the Command Module’s equipment.

Everything was smooth, ticking, regular. Right now, inside the cosy little cabin, it was like being inside a huge sewing machine. Whir, purr. Save for the press of the acceleration it was unreal: as if this was, after all, just another sim.

‘Three minutes,’ Stone said. ‘Altitude forty-three miles, downrange seventy miles.’

‘Coming up on staging,’ Gershon said. ‘Stand by for the train wreck.’

Right on schedule the first stage engines shut down.

The acceleration vanished.

It was as if they were sitting in a catapult. She was thrown forward, toward the instrument panel, and slammed up against her restraints. The canvas straps hauled her back into her seat, and then she was shoved forward again.

The first stage engines had compressed the whole stack like an accordion; when the engines cut, the accordion just stretched out and rebounded. It was incredibly violent.

Just like a train wreck, in fact. Another thing they didn’t tell me about in the sims.

She heard the clatter of explosive bolts, blowing away the dying MS-IC. And now there were more bangs, thumps in her back transmitted through her couch: small ullage rockets, firing to settle the liquid oxygen and hydrogen in the huge second stage tanks.

Vibration returned as the second stage engines ignited, and she was shoved back into her seat.

There was a loud bang over her head, startling her, as if someone was hammering on the skin of the Command Module. Flame and smoke flared beyond her window.

‘Tower,’ Stone reported.

‘Roger, tower.’

The emergency escape rocket had blown itself away, taking the conical cap over the Command Module with it. Daylight, startlingly brilliant, streamed into the cabin, lapping over their orange pressure suits, dimming the instruments.

York peered through her window. There was a darkening blue sky above, a vivid bright segment of clouds and wrinkled ocean below.

Stone said dryly, ‘Ah, Houston, we advise the visual is go today.’

There was a lot of debris coming past York’s exposed window now, from the jettisoned escape tower and the MS-IC. It looked like confetti, floating away from the vehicle, turning and sparkling in the sun.

Young said: ‘Press for engine cutoff.’

‘Rog,’ Stone said. ‘Press to ECO.’

Whatever else happened now, Ares was to continue on, up to cutoff of the MS-II’s main engines. On to orbit.

‘Ares, you are go at five plus thirty, with ECO eight plus thirty-four.’

Ares had reached Mach 15, at an altitude of eighty miles. And still the engines burned; still they climbed upwards. Earth’s gravity well was deep.

‘Eight minutes. Ares, Houston, you are go at eight.’

‘Looking good,’ Stone said.

The residual engine noise and vibration died, suddenly. The recoil was powerful. York was thrown forward again, and bounced back in her canvas restraints.

‘ECO!’ Stone called.

Engine cutoff; the MS-II stage was spent.

… And this time, the weight didn’t come back. It was like taking a fast car over a bump in the road, and never coming back down again.

‘Standing by for MS-II sep.’

There was another muffled bang, a soft jolt.

John Young said, ‘Roger, we confirm the sep, Ares.’

‘Uh, we are one zero one point four by one zero three point six.’

‘Roger, we copy, one zero one point four by one zero three point six …’

The parameters of an almost perfect circular orbit about the Earth, a hundred miles high.

Phil Stone’s voice was as level as Young’s. Just another day at the office. But now, the stack he commanded was moving at five miles per second.

York gazed at the glistening curvature of Earth, the crumpled skin of ocean, the clouds layered on like whipped cream.

I’m in orbit. My God. She felt a huge relief that she was still alive, that she had survived that immense expenditure of energy.

Above her head, the little cosmonaut was floating, his chain slack and coiling up.

Sunday, July 20, 1969 Tranquillity Base

Joe Muldoon peered through the Lunar Module’s triangular window.

Muldoon was fascinated by the play of light and color on the lunar surface. If he looked straight ahead, to the west, away from the rising sun, the flat landscape reflected back the light in a shimmering golden brown sheen. But to either side there was a softer tan. And if he leaned forward to look off to the side, away from the line of the sun, the surface looked a dull ash gray, as if he was looking through a polarizing filter.

Even the light here wasn’t Earth-like.

Outside, Armstrong was moving about with what looked like ease, bouncing across the beach-like lunar surface like a balloon. His white suit gleamed in the sunlight, the brightest object on the surface of the Moon, but his lower legs and light blue overshoes were already stained dark gray by dust. Muldoon couldn’t see Armstrong’s face, behind his reflective golden sun-visor.

He checked the time. It was fourteen minutes after the commander’s egress.

‘Neil, are you ready for me to come out?’

Armstrong called back. ‘Yes. Just stand by a second. First let me move the LEC over the edge for you.’

Armstrong floated about the LM, pushing aside the LEC, the crude rope-and-pulley Lunar Equipment Conveyor which Muldoon had been using to pass equipment down to his commander on the surface.

Muldoon turned around in the evacuated cabin and got to his knees. He crawled backwards, out through the LM’s small hatch, and over the porch, the platform which bridged to the egress ladder fixed to the LM’s front leg. The pressurized suit seemed to resist every movement, as if he were enclosed in a form-fitting balloon; he even had trouble closing his gloved fingers around the porch’s handles.

Armstrong guided him out. ‘Okay, you saw what difficulties I was having. I’ll try to watch your PLSS from underneath here. Your PLSS looks like it’s clearing okay. The shoes are about to come over the sill … Okay, now drop your PLSS down. There you go, you’re clear and spidery, you’re good. About an inch of clearance on top of your PLSS.’

When he got to the ladder’s top rung, Muldoon took hold of the handrails and pulled himself upright. He could see the small TV camera, sitting on its stowage tray hinged out from the LM, which Armstrong had deployed to film his own egress. The camera watched him silently. He said, ‘Now I want to back up and partially close the hatch. Making sure I haven’t left the key in the ignition, and the handbrake is on …’

‘A particularly good thought.’

‘We’d walk far to find a rental car around here.’

He was ten feet or so above the lunar surface, with the gaunt planes of the LM’s ascent stage before him, the spider-like descent stage below. ‘Okay, I’m on the top step and I can look down over the pads. It’s a simple matter to hop down from one step to the next.’

‘Yeah,’ Armstrong said. ‘I found it to be very comfortable, and walking is also very comfortable. Joe, you’ve got three more rungs and then a long one.’

‘I’m going to leave one foot up there and move both hands down to the fourth rung up …’

It was routine, like a sim in the Peter Pan rig back at MSC. He didn’t find it hard to report his progress down the ladder to Houston.

But once he was standing on Eagle’s footpad, he found words fleeing from him.

Morning on the Moon:

Holding onto the ladder, Muldoon turned slowly. His suit was a warm, comforting bubble around him; he heard the hum of pumps and fans in the PLSS – his backpack, the Portable Life Support System – and he felt the soft breeze of oxygen across his face.

The LM was standing on a broad, level plain. There were craters everywhere, ranging from several yards to a thumbnail width, the low sunlight deepening their shadows. There were even tiny micrometeorite craters, zap pits, punched in the sides of the rocks littering the surface.

There were rocks and boulders scattered about, and ridges that might have been twenty feet high – but it was hard to judge distance, because there were no plants, no buildings, no people to give him any sense of scale: it was more barren than the high desert of the Mojave, with not even the haze of an atmosphere, so that rocks at the horizon were just as sharp as those near his feet.

Muldoon was overwhelmed. The sims – even his previous spaceflight in Earth orbit on Gemini – hadn’t prepared him for the strangeness of this place, the jewel-like clarity about the airless view, with its sharp contrast between the darkness of the sky and the lunar plain beneath, jumbled with rocks and craters.

Holding the ladder with both hands, Muldoon swung his feet off the pad and onto the Moon.

It was like walking on snow.

There was a firm footing beneath a soft, resilient layer a few inches thick. Every time he took a step a little spray of dust particles sailed off along perfect parabolae, like tiny golf balls. He understood how this had implications for the geology: no atmospheric winnowing here, no gravitational sorting.

In some of the smaller zap craters he saw small, shining fragments, with a metallic sheen. Like bits of mercury on a bench. And here and there he saw transparent crystals lying on the surface, like fragments of glass. He wished he had a sample collector. He would have to remember to come back for these glass beads, during the documented sampling later.

His footprints were miraculously sharp, as if he’d placed his ridged overshoes in fine, damp sand. He took a photograph of one particularly well-defined print; it would persist here for millions of years, he realized, like the fossilized footprint of a dinosaur, to be eroded away only by the slow rain of micrometeorites, that echo of the titanic bombardments of the deep past.

Muldoon’s job now was to check his balance and stability. He did turns and leaps like a dancer. The pull of this little world was so gentle that he couldn’t tell when he stood upright, and the inertia of the PLSS at his back was a disconcerting drag at his changes of motion.

‘… Very powdery surface,’ he reported back to Houston. ‘My boot tends to slide over it easily … You have to be careful about where your center of mass is. It takes two or three paces to bring you to a smooth stop. And to change direction you have to step out to the side and cut back a little bit. Like a football player. Moving your arms around doesn’t lift your feet off the surface. We’re not quite that light-footed …’

There was a pressure in his kidneys. He stood still and let go, into the urine collection condom; it was like wetting his pants. Well, Neil might have been the first man to walk on the Moon. But I’m the first to take a leak here.

He looked up. A star was climbing out of the eastern sky, unblinking, hauling its way toward the zenith, directly over his head. It was Apollo, waiting in orbit to take him home.

Armstrong peeled away silver plastic and read out the inscription on the plaque on the LM’s front leg. ‘First, there’s the two hemispheres of the Earth. Underneath it says, “Here Man from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.” It has the crew members’ signatures and the signature of the President of the United States.’

They unfurled the Stars and Stripes. The flag had been stiffened with wire so it would fly here, without any wind.

The two of them tried to plant the pole in the dust. But as hard as they pushed, the flagpole would only go six or eight inches into the ground, and Muldoon worried that the flag would fall over in front of the huge TV audience.

At last they got the pole steady, and backed away.

Muldoon set off on some more locomotion experiments.

He tried a slow-motion jog. His steps took him so high that time seemed to slow during each step. On Earth he would descend sixteen feet in the first second of a fall; here, he would fall only two. So he was suspended in each mid-stride, waiting to come down.

He started to evolve a better way of moving. He bent, and rocked from side to side as he ran. It was more of a lope than a run: push with one foot, shift your weight, land on the other.

He was breathing hard; he heard the hiss of water through the suit’s cooling system, the pipes that curled around his limbs and chest.

He felt buoyant, young. A line from an old novel floated into his mind: We are out of Mother Earth’s leading-strings now …

The capcom’s voice startled him.

‘Tranquillity Base, this is Houston. Could we get both of you on the camera for a minute please?’

Muldoon stumbled to a halt.

Armstrong had been erecting a panel of aluminum foil that he unrolled from a tube; the experiment was designed to trap particles emanating from the sun. ‘Say again, Houston.’

‘Rog. We’d like to get both of you in the field of view of the camera for a minute. Neil and Joe, the President of the United States is in his office now and would like to say a few words to you.’

The President? Goddamn it, I bet Neil knew about this.

He heard Armstrong say formally: ‘That would be an honor.’

‘Go ahead, Mr President. This is Houston. Over.’

Muldoon floated over to Armstrong and faced the TV camera.

Hello, Neil and Joe. I’m talking to you by telephone from the Oval Room at the White House. And this certainly has to be the most historic phone call ever made. I just can’t tell you how proud we all are of what you have achieved. For every American, this has to be the proudest moment of our lives, and for all people all over the world, I am sure they too join with Americans in recognizing what a feat this is. Because of what you have done, the heavens have become part of man’s world …

What Muldoon mostly felt as Nixon rambled on was impatience. He and Armstrong had little enough time here as it was – no more than two and a half hours for their single moonwalk – and every second had been choreographed, in the endless sims back in Houston, and detailed in the little spiral-bound checklists fixed to their cuffs. Nixon’s speech hadn’t been rehearsed in the simulations, though, and Muldoon felt a mounting anxiety as he thought ahead over the tasks they still had to complete. They would have to skip something. He could see them returning to Earth with fewer samples than had been anticipated, and maybe they would have to skip documenting them, and just grab what they could … The scientists wouldn’t be pleased.

He would like to have got a sample of one of those glittering fragments in the crater bottoms, or one of the crystals. There just wouldn’t be time.

Muldoon didn’t really care about the science, if truth be told. But he felt a gnawing anxiety about completing the checklist. Getting through your checklist was the way to get on another flight.

With these thoughts, some of the lightness he’d enjoyed earlier began to dissipate.

… For one priceless moment, in the whole history of man, all the people on this Earth are one. One in their pride in what you have done, and one in our prayers that you will return safely to Earth.

Armstrong responded: ‘Thank you, sir. It’s a great honor and privilege for us to be here, representing not only the United States but men of peace of all nations – and with interest and curiosity, and men with a vision for the future.’

And thank you very much. Now I want to pass you on briefly to a special guest I have here with me in the Oval Office today.

Muldoon thought, A guest? My God. Has he any idea of how much this call is costing?

And then familiar tones – that oddly clipped Bostonian accent – sounded in his headset, and Muldoon felt a response rising within him, a thrill deep and atavistic.

Hello, gentlemen. How are you today? I won’t take up your precious time on the Moon. I just want to quote to you what I said. to Congress, on May 25, 1961 – just eight short years ago …

‘Now is the time to take longer strides – time for a great new American enterprise – time for this nation to take on a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on Earth.

‘I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish …’

My God, Muldoon thought. Nixon hates Kennedy; everyone knows that. Muldoon wondered what calculations – PR, political, even geopolitical – lay behind Nixon letting old JFK back into the limelight now, today of all days.

It was hard to concentrate on Kennedy’s words.

Fifty feet from him the LM looked like a gaunt spider, twenty feet tall, resting there in the glaring sunlight. The Eagle was complex and delicate, a filmy construct of gold leaf and aluminum, the symmetry of the ascent stage spoiled by the bulbous fuel tank to the right. The craft bristled with antennae, docking targets, and reaction control thruster assemblies. He saw how dust had splashed up over the skirt of the descent stage’s engine, and the gold leaf which coated it. In the sunlight the LM looked fragile. And so it was, he knew, just a taut bubble of aluminum, shaved to the minimum weight by Grumman engineers. But here, on this small, static, delicate world, the LM didn’t seem at all out of place.

I want to tell you now how nervous I was that day, gentlemen. I wasn’t sure if I was right to ask that august body for such huge sums of money, indeed for a transformation of our national economy. But now that goal is accomplished, thanks to the courage of you, Neil and Joe, and so many of your colleagues, and the dedication of many skilled people all across our great county, in NASA and its contractor allies … Muldoon glanced uneasily at the mute TV camera on its tripod. He said ‘the goal is accomplished.’ He knew that on a hot July evening in Houston it was around ten forty. He wondered how many moonwalk parties would already be breaking up.

Maybe it really was just about footprints and flags after all.

But, back in Clear Lake, Jill would still be watching – wouldn’t she?

… Apollo has energized the American spirit, after a difficult decade at home and abroad. Now that we have reached the Moon, I believe we must not let our collective will dissipate. I believe we must look further. Here, at this moment of Apollo’s triumph, I would like to set my country a new challenge: to go further and farther than most of us have dreamed – to continue the building of our great ships, and to fly them onwards to Mars.

Mars?

The clipped voice was an insect whisper in his headset, remote and meaningless.

Maybe it was true what they whispered: that the bullets Kennedy had survived in Texas six years ago had damaged more than his body …

Standing silently, he saw now that the land curved, gently but noticeably, all the way to the horizon, and in every direction from him. It was a little like standing at the summit of a huge, gentle hill. He could actually see that he and Armstrong were two people standing on a ball floating in space. It was vertiginous, a kind of science-fiction feeling, something he’d never experienced on Earth.

… This will certainly be the most arduous journey since the great explorers set sail to map our own planet over three centuries ago: it is a journey which will take a new generation of heroes to a place so far away that the Earth itself will be diminished to a point of light, indistinguishable from the stars themselves … We will go to Mars because it is the most likely abode of life beyond our Earth. And we will make that world into a second Earth, and so secure the survival of humankind as a species for the indefinite future …

The Earth, floating above him, was huge, a ball, blue and complex; it was much more obviously a three-dimensional world than the Moon ever looked from home. He was aware of the sun, fat and low, its light slanting across this desolate place. Suddenly he got a sense of perspective of the distance he’d traveled, to come here: so far that the trinity of lights that had always dominated human awareness – Earth, Moon and sun – had moved around him in a complex dance, to these new relative positions in his sensorium.

And yet his sense of detachment was all but gone. He was as locked to Earth as if this was all just another sim at JSC. I guess you don’t throw off four billion years of evolution in a week.

He found himself wondering about his own future.

All his life, someone – some outside agency – had directed him toward goals. It had started with his father, and later – what a place to remember such a thing! – summer camp, where winning teams got turkey, and losers got beans. Then there had been the Academy, and the Air Force, and NASA …

He’d always been driven by a strong sense of purpose, a purpose that had brought him far – all the way to the Moon itself.

But now, his greatest goal was achieved.

He remembered how his mood had taken a dip, after returning from his Gemini flight. How tough was this new return going to be for him?

Kennedy had finished speaking. There was a silence that stretched awkwardly; Muldoon wondered if he should say something.

Armstrong said, ‘We’re honored to talk to you, sir.’

Thank you very much. I’m grateful to President Nixon for his hospitality toward me today, and I’ll ask him to pass on my very best regards when he sees you on the Hornet on Thursday.

Muldoon steeled himself to speak. ‘I look forward to that very much, sir.’

Then, following Armstrong’s lead, he raised his gloved hand in salute, and turned away from the camera.

He felt perplexed, troubled. It was as if Earth, above, was working on him already, its huge gravity pushing down on him.

He would have to find a new goal, that was all.

What, he mused, if Kennedy’s fantastic Mars vision came to reality? Now, that would be a project to work on.

Maybe he could join that new program. Maybe he could be the first man to walk on three worlds. That would be one hell of a goal to work toward: fifteen, twenty more years of direction, of shape to his life …

But to do that, he knew, he’d have to get out from under all the PR hoopla that was going to follow the splashdown.

For him, he suspected, returning to Earth was going to be harder than journeying to the Moon ever was.

He loped away from the TV camera, back toward the glittering, toy-like LM.

Saturday, October 4, 1969 Nuclear Rocket Development Station, Jackass Flats, Nevada

A smell of burning came on the breeze off the desert, and mixed with the test rig’s faint stench of oil and paint The scents were unearthly, as if York had been transported away from Nevada.

I read somewhere that moondust smells like this, she thought. Of burning, of ash, an autumn scent.

In 1969, Natalie York was twenty-one years old.

In Ben Priest’s Corvette they’d made the ninety-mile journey from Vegas to Jackass Flats in under an hour.

At the Flats, Mike Conlig was there to meet them and wave them through security. This late in the evening, the site was deserted save for a handful of security guys. When the three of them – York, Priest, and Petey, Priest’s son – climbed out of Ben’s Corvette, York noticed how the car was coated with dust, and popped as it cooled.

Nevada was huge, empty, its topography complex and folded, cupped by misshapen hills. The sun was hanging over the western horizon, fat and red, and the day’s heat was leaching quickly out of the air. The ground was all but barren. York recognized salt-resistant shadscale and creosote bushes clinging here and there, and the occasional pocket of sagebrush. Good place to test out a nuclear rocket, York thought. But – my God – what soul-crushing desolation.

In bursts of quick jargon, Mike and Ben started discussing some aspect of the test results they’d been reviewing that day. If York had learned one skill in too many hours in college bars and common rooms – she was finishing up her own BS in geology at UCLA – it was how to tune out someone else’s specialty. So she let Mike and Ben talk themselves out, and walked a little way away from them.

Ben Priest’s son Petey, at ten, was a lanky framework of muscle and energy; he ran ahead of the others, his blond hair a shining flag in the last of the daylight.

The test site was laid out as a rectangle confined by roads, to the south, and rail tracks, to the north. They were walking out west – away from the control buildings where the car was parked – toward the static test site, Engine Test Facility One.

This test station was cupped in an immense dip in the land delimited by two great fault blocks: the Colorado Plateau and Wasatch Range to the east, the Sierra Nevada range to the west. The station – with its isolated test stands and bits of rail track and handful of shabby tar-paper shacks – looked overwhelmed by the echoing geology of the desert, reduced to something shabby, trivial.

They reached the test facility. The assembly was maybe thirty feet high, its geometry crude, complex and mysterious. York made out a sleek, upright cylindrical form enclosed by a gantry, a boxy thing of girders. The stack was scuffed, patchy, unpainted. The whole thing was mounted on a flatwagon on the rail track, hooked up to a rudimentary locomotive. Big pipes ran out of the rig and off to other parts of the test station; in the distance she saw the gleam of spherical cryogenic tanks: liquid hydrogen, she guessed.

Petey Priest had his face pressed to the fence around the test facility, so that the wire mesh made patterned indentations on his face; he stared at the rig, evidently captivated.

York watched Conlig and Priest together.

Mike Conlig was a native Texan. At twenty-seven he was a little shorter than York; his build was stocky, his engineer’s hands callused and scarred, and his jet-black hair, which he wore tied back in a pony-tail, showed his Irish extraction. Just now, a slight paunch was pushing out his T-shirt.

York had met Mike half a year ago, at a party at Ricketts House at Caltech, which was a half-hour drive from UCLA. York had gone out there on a kind of dare; women weren’t admitted to Caltech. Natalie enjoyed his fast, lively mind, his genuine readiness to respect her for her intellect … and the compact muscles of his body.

She’d finished up in bed with Mike within a couple of hours.

Mike was quite a contrast to Ben Priest, she thought, looking at them together.

At thirty-one, Ben Priest was tall, wiry, and with an ear-to-ear, kindly grin. He was a Navy aviator with a dozen years’ experience, including two at the Navy’s prime flight test center at Patuxent River, Maryland – and, since 1965, he’d been a NASA astronaut, although he hadn’t yet flown in space.

York knew Mike and Ben had struck up a close relationship since Ben’s assignment here as astronaut representative on the project. She’d no doubt Mike was throwing himself into the camaraderie of the station here – guys together in their prefabricated shacks, at the frontier of technology, playing with NERVA all day, and knocking back a few each evening.

It was having a visible physical effect on Mike, she thought, if not on Ben …

Security lights were coming on all over the nuclear test rig now; they made it into a sculpture of shadows and glimmering reflections, an angular, deformed representation of a true spacecraft As if the ambitions driving the men and women who worked here had actually shaped the geometry of the place, making it into something not quite of the Earth.

While he was talking to Priest about the day’s events, Mike Conlig tried to keep a hawkeye on Natalie. She was gazing around the plant. Natalie was a little too tall, slim, intense, her hair jet-black and tied back; right now, those big Romanian-peasant eyebrows she hated so much were creased in concentration.

This visit was important to Conlig.

Strictly speaking, he and Priest were breaking NASA and AEC regs by bringing her here, to see their work close up; and certainly a kid like Petey shouldn’t be allowed here. But regulations got replaced by realism in a place as remote as this. We’re all good old boys together out here, he thought.

Anyhow, he was keen to show Natalie this place: where he worked, what he did with his life. It was worth breaking a few rules to achieve that. He wanted Natalie to see Jackass Flats through his eyes.

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.

After fifteen years, the X-15 program was winding up. There was only one serviceable X-15 left: this one, X-15–1, the first to fly back in 1960, a veteran of seventy-nine previous missions. The Edwards people wanted to finish up the program with one last flight, the two hundredth overall; and they had asked Phil Stone to stay around long enough for that. But then there was a series of delays and technical hitches, and the winter weather had closed in; until by now the flight was all but a year later than it had originally been planned for.

For Stone that was a year wasted out of his life. But he’d spent the time preparing for his move to NASA, trying to be sure he started off his new career as well placed as he could be.

‘Fifteen second mark to separation. Chase planes on target. Ten seconds.’

He felt his heart, somewhere under the silver surface of his pressure suit, pumping a little harder. As it was supposed to at such moments.

‘Three. Two. One. Sep.’

With a solid crack the B-52’s shackle released the X-15, and the plane dropped away from its mother, and Stone was jolted up out of his seat.

Stone emerged from the shadow of the bomber’s wing, at forty-five thousand feet, into a shock of brilliant sunshine. He was already so high that the morning light was electric blue, more like dusk. The chase planes were little points of silver light around him, with their contrails looping through the air.

The land curved below the plane’s nose, as if the Mojave was some huge, smooth dome. He could see the worn hump of Soledad, the Lonely Mountain, brooding over Rogers Dry Lake, half a mile above sea level. Everywhere the dried-up salt lakes glistened like glass, speckled with gray-green sagebrush and the twisted forms of Joshua trees. It was a flat, desolate, forbidding place. But every summer the desert sun baked the damp lake beds to a flat and smooth surface. The whole place was like one huge runway, and you could land anywhere in reasonable safety.

It was a little after ten thirty in the morning.

Stone pushed the button to ignite the X-15’s rocket engine.

He was kicked in the back, hard. The plane’s nose was tipped up into the sky as ammonia and oxygen burned behind him, and he rode higher into the deepening blue. He could hear his own breathing inside his helmet; otherwise, there was barely a sound – he was outpacing the noise and exhaust plumes behind him.

Far ahead he saw a speck of light, like a low star. It was a high chase plane. It grew out of nowhere in a flash, and plummeted backwards past Stone, as if it was standing still.

At forty thousand feet he reached point nine Mach, and he could feel a bumping, like a light airplane flying in turbulence. He was moving so quickly now that the air molecules couldn’t get out of the way of his craft in time.

The turbulence smoothed out as he went supersonic.

Eighty thousand feet.

He moved the rocket’s throttle to maximum thrust, and he was pushed back into his seat by four and a half G. X-15–1 climbed almost vertically. The sky turned from pearl blue to a rich navy. He was already so high he could see stars ahead of him, in the middle of the day; so high there were only a few wisps of atmosphere, barely sufficient for his plane’s aerodynamic control surfaces to grip.

The sensations of power, of speed, of control, were exhilarating.

Ninety thousand feet; thirty two hundred feet per second. The Mojave spread out beneath him, over two thousand feet above sea level, was like the dried-out roof of the world.

Less than a minute into the flight, the problems started.

He got a message from the ground. It sounded like they were losing telemetry from the bird. The trouble was, the voice link had suddenly got so bad that he couldn’t tell for sure what they were saying.

A warning light showed up on his panel. Another glitch. For some reason his automatic reaction control rockets had deactivated. It wasn’t too serious for now; he was still deep enough in the atmosphere that he was able to maintain control with the aerodynamics.

The X-15 flew like an airplane in the lower atmosphere. It had conventional aerodynamic surfaces – a rudder and tail planes – which Stone could work electronically, or with his pitch control stick and rudder pedals. But above the atmosphere X-15 was a spacecraft. The automatic RCS (reaction control system) – little rocket nozzles, like a spaceship’s – was controlled by an electronic system called the MH96. And there was a separate manual RCS system Stone could control with a left-hand stick.

Quickly he was able to trace through the fault The automatic RCS had shut itself off because the gains of his MH96, his control system, had fallen to less than fifty per cent. The gains were supposed to drop when the plane was in dense air; then the MH96 was designed to shut itself off, to conserve hydrogen peroxide rocket fuel. But this time the gains had dropped because the hydraulics which controlled his aerodynamic surfaces were stuttering. So the automatic control system couldn’t rely on the data it was getting, and it had shut down the automatic RCS.

It looked as if the electrical disturbance that had started with the radio was spreading. Looks as if we might be snake-bit, old buddy.

Well, he was close to the exhaustion of his rocket fuel anyhow. He pressed a switch, and the engine shut down with a bang.

He was thrust forward against his straps, and then floated back.

He had gone ballistic, like a hurled stone; now X-15–1 would coast to the roof of its trajectory, unpowered. He lost all sensation of speed, of motion. He was weightless inside the cabin, and he felt as if his gut was climbing up out of his neck.

He tried to put the problems aside. He was still flying, still in shape. And, no matter what was happening to the MH96, he had a program to work through, a whole series of experiments for NASA and the USAF.

One minute forty-one.

He activated the solar spectrum measurement gadget, and the micrometeorite collector in his left wing pod.

Suddenly, the MH96 control system’s gains shot up to ninety per cent, for no apparent reason, and the automatic RCS cut back in.

He checked his instruments. Like most experimental aircraft, the X-15’s cockpit had a primitive, handmade feel, with rivets and wires showing. Well, it seemed he had full control ability for the first time since entering his ballistic flight path. He welcomed the return, but he was unnerved, all over again. What next?

He had very little confidence left in this battered old bird. Maybe she knows it’s her last flight; maybe she’d prefer a blaze of glory to a few decades rusting in some museum.

He would soon be going over the top, the peak of his trajectory, at two hundred sixty thousand feet.

It was time to begin the precision attitude tracking work required for the solar spectrum measurement. He needed a nose down pitch, and a yaw to the left. He was already flying at almost a zero degree angle of attack, but was yawing a little to the right, and rolling off to the right as well. So he fired his wing-mounted roll control thruster for two seconds to bring his wings level, and his yaw control thruster to bring the X-15’s nose around to the left. The X-15 was like a gimbaled platform, hanging in the air, twisting this way and that in response to his commands. To stop the left roll he fired another rocket –

He was still rolling, too far to the left. Christ. What now?

The MH96 had failed again, and had cut out the automatic RCS, just as he was completing his maneuver.

He continued to rotate. To compensate he held his right roll control for eight more seconds. But the air was so thin up here that his aerodynamic controls were degraded, and the response was sluggish. He fired his manual RCS yaw rockets.

He could feel sweat pooling under his eyes; one problem after another was hitting him, blam blam blam.

Suddenly the MH96 cut back in with its automatic RCS. That stopped his yaw, short of the correct heading. Stone fired his manual yaw again; this time as he approached the reference heading the yaw was countered by the automatics, apparently correctly – but now the damn thing cut out again, and he yawed past the reference.

And now, on top of that, his roll attitude indicator ball was rotating. He had started rolling to the left again. He tried to wrestle that back with three short pulses on the manual roll RCS, but he overshot, and started a roll to the right …

Fifty miles high. The sky outside his tiny cabin was a deep blue-black, and the control lights gleamed brightly, like something off a Christmas tree. At the horizon’s rim he saw the thick layer of air out of which he’d climbed. He could see the western seaboard of the USA, all the way from San Francisco to Mexico; the air was clear, and it was all laid out under him like a relief map.

Three minutes twenty-three seconds. His yaw deviation was increasing, five or six degrees a second. And his heading had deviated from the B-52’s, maybe as much as fifty degrees. His angle was becoming extreme, and the air started to pluck at his aircraft, rolling it over to the right. He was in danger of rolling off completely. He might even reenter at the wrong attitude.

And if that happened, he’d finish up spread over the welcoming desert in a smoking ellipse one mile wide and ten miles long.

To stop the roll he applied left roll RCS, full left rudder and full left aileron. Everything he had. But the roll seemed to be accelerating. And now the nose was starting to pitch down too.

The starry sky, and the glowing desert below, started to wheel, slowly, around his cockpit, while he continued to work his controls.

At two hundred forty thousand feet above the ground – still supersonic – the X-15 went into a spin, tumbling around two axes at once.

He reported his spin to the ground.

They sounded incredulous. ‘Say again, Phil.’

‘I said, I’m in a goddamn spin.’ He wasn’t surprised at their disbelief; there was no way of monitoring the X-15’s heading from the ground, and they would only see pronounced and slow pitching and rolling motions.

And besides, nothing was known about supersonic spin. Nothing. There had been some wind tunnel tests on X-15 spin modes, which had proved inconclusive.

There was no spin recovery technique in the pilot’s handbook.

Stone tried everything he knew, using his manual RCS and his aerodynamic controls. Full rudder; full ailerons. What else is there?

The plane began to shudder around him; he was slammed from side to side; it was hard to breathe, to think. It had all fallen apart so quickly. I lost my tail. I’ve had it.

Suddenly the MH96 armed the automatic RCS again, and the little rockets started firing in a series of long bursts, opposing the spin. Stone worked with it, reinforcing the RCS with his aerodynamics.

The X-15 broke out of the spin and leveled off. The buffeting faded away.

Stone felt a brief burst of elation. He was at a hundred twenty thousand feet, and Mach five. Now all I got to do is reenter the goddamn atmosphere.

He pulled up the nose; he muttered a short, obscene prayer as the controls responded to him. He reached the correct twenty-degree nose-up angle of attack, and opened the air-brakes, flaps on the plane’s rear vertical stabilizer. A sensation of speed returned as deceleration started to bite, and shoved him forward against his restraint. The leading edges of his wings were glowing a dark, threatening red.

The sky brightened quickly. He could see Edwards, a grid laid out over the desert below, two hundred and sixty miles from his takeoff point.

At eighteen thousand feet he pulled in his air-brakes, and hauled on the aerodynamic controls to initiate a corkscrew dive. The idea was to shed more speed, and energy, as fast as possible.

At a thousand feet above the dry lake bed he pulled out of his dive and, with the slipstream roaring past his canopy, jettisoned his ventral fin. He extended the landing flaps and pulled up the scorched nose, blistered from the reentry. Chase aircraft settled in alongside him.

The X-15 hit the dirt. The skids at the rear sent a cloud of dust up into the still desert air; Stone was jolted as the crude skids scraped across the lake bed. The nose wheel stayed up for a few seconds, before thumping down to add to the dust clouds.

A mile from touchdown the X-15 came to a halt. The chase planes roared overhead.

As the dust settled over his canopy, Stone switched off his instruments, closed his eyes, and slumped back in his seat.

The ring of his pressure suit dug into the back of his neck.

Stone had proved himself as a pilot today. But a flight like today’s wouldn’t do him a damn bit of good, with NASA. I got out of a supersonic spin! I got my hide back down, and if I can figure out how I did it, I’ll be in the manual. But I screwed up. I didn’t finish the science; I didn’t make it through the checklist. And for NASA, that was what it was all about.

A fist banged on his canopy. The ground crews had reached him; through the dusty glass he could see a wide, grinning face. He raised a gloved hand and joined thumb and forefinger in a ‘perfect’ symbol.

All in a day’s work, in the space program.

Monday, April 13, 1970 Fish Hook, Cambodia

In 1970, Ralph Gershon was twenty-five years old.

He had grown up on a farm in Iowa, surrounded by near-poverty and toil, dreaming of flight. As a kid he’d gone to Mars with Weinbaum and Clarke and Rice Burroughs and Bradbury; later, he’d followed the emergent space program with fascination. He’d got himself some flight experience, had crammed his head at school, and – in the face of a lot of prejudice – had finally made it into the Academy, and the Air Force.

He’d been following a dream.

But it hadn’t worked out so wonderfully.

As soon as he had climbed away from the base, Gershon was over jungle. It was just a sea of darkness under him, blacker than the sky, rolling to the horizon.

His wingman had pushed in his power and was invisible; he would already be somewhere over the four thousand feet mark.

As the Spad climbed, the noise of its piston rose in pitch, and the prop dragged at smoky air. Now Gershon could see flashes of light, pinpricks of crimson embedded in the masked ground. The pinpricks were muzzle flashes from the bigger guns down there.

The air was dingy with the smoke: it was about twice as bad as the average Los Angeles smog. The smoke struck Gershon’s imagination. Down there hundreds, thousands of little farmers were patiently tending smoky fires in their own soggy fields, each doing his bit to thwart him, Gershon, and his fellows. If you thought too hard about it, it was awesome; it gave you a sense of the size of this land, of how it was capable of absorbing a hell of a lot of punishment.

So Gershon resolutely tried not to think about it.

Now he leveled off. ‘Back to cruise power,’ he told his wingman.

The Combat Skyspot radar controller came on the line. He’d been expecting this. He snapped on his flashlight and prepared to mark his map.

Gershon had been briefed for a target inside South Vietnam. But now, in terse sentences, the Skyspot gave him a new target.

Gershon changed his heading; more miles of anonymous, complex jungle rolled beneath his prow.

After the raid was over, ground controllers would destroy all evidence of the diversion, shredding documents and reporting that the attack had taken place, as planned, inside South Vietnam.

And not inside neutral Cambodia.

And, as on previous flights, Gershon was going to have to file a false report.

He glanced into the sky. Somewhere up there, Apollo 13 was heading for the Moon.

Gershon found it hard to reconcile the terrific adventure going on in the sky, three guys hanging their hides out over the edge, with the mindless, lying bullshit of this war.

After an hour the Spad started trembling – pogoing, vibrating longitudinally, so that he was juddered back and forth in his seat. Night flying seemed to magnify everything, every little problem, until you could damn near scare yourself out of the sky. It was hard to know if vibrations like this were a real problem or something that he’d just dismiss during daylight.

He tried to ride it out, and after a while the juddering let up. Production of the Spads – single-seater Douglas A-1 Skyraiders – had been stopped in 1957. Thirteen years ago. They shouldn’t be flying any more. Operational ships had to be nursed along with components cannibalized from wrecks.

In the dark Gershon had to fly time-and-distance: a kind of dead reckoning, based on nothing but his heading, his airspeed, and the time he flew. It wasn’t exactly accurate. Still, soon Gershon figured he was over the FAG’s reported location. The FAG was his Forward Air Guide, the friendly Cambodian spotter who had been assigned to guide his bombs home.

He twisted the knobs of his VHF radio. ‘Hello Topdog, this is Pilgrim. How you hear? Topdog. Pilgrim. How you hear?’

He heard the barking of a thirty-seven-mil airburst, miles away.

Gershon tried to keep his patience. After all, the poor guy was down there in the night, surrounded by mortar-firing hostiles.

There was a crackling of radio static, a distant voice. ‘Pilgrim. Topdog. You come help Topdog?’

‘Yes, Topdog. Pilgrim come help you. You have bad guys?’

‘Rager, rager, Pilgrim.’ Rager for roger. The FAG was talking the abbreviated lingo the pilots had worked out with the locals they had to deal with. ‘Have many, many bad guys. They all around. They shoot big gun at me.’

Big gun? Gershon peered down at the dark. Maybe it was so. He couldn’t see any muzzle flashes, so maybe the fight was just a small-arms affair.

Small-arms fire was okay with Gershon. It was even kind of interesting. It sounded like rain on tin, and put little holes in the airplane.

But ‘big gun’ could mean a mortar.

It was hard to be sure. Things would be looking kind of different to Topdog, helpless in his blacked-out hell-hole on the inky ground.

‘Okay, Topdog, you give us coordinates where you are. We come help you.’ Gershon flicked on his flashlight and wrote out the numbers, then checked them against the map.

The coordinates didn’t tie up with where the FAG was supposed to be.

Gershon called his wingman. ‘Hey. You copy that?’

‘Copy.’

‘Either he doesn’t know where he is or he’s a hundred miles from here.’

‘Your call, Pilgrim.’

Gershon hesitated, trying to figure what to do. Sometimes this kind of hide-and-seek was normal with an FAG.

Then again, sometimes voices would come floating up out of the dark to the bombers, confidently calling out positions to hit. On checking, the flyers would find the locations to be the designated areas of friendly troops.

Topdog, this is Pilgrim. You hear my airplane?’

‘Pilgrim, Topdog. I hear your airplane. You come north maybe two mile.’

Gershon pushed north.

Gershon looked down. The mountains here were high, and his cruising altitude of ten and a half thousand feet didn’t put him all that far above them.

‘Hey, Topdog. You hear my airplane now?’

‘Rager, rager, Pilgrim. You over my position now.’

There was a valley below him, a black wound in the landscape, coated with the fur of jungle.

‘Topdog. Pilgrim see big valley. Where are you?’

‘Rager, Pilgrim. Bad guy in valley. You put bomb in middle of valley.’

It was a pinpoint target. ‘Look, Topdog, I want to know where you are.’ Gershon didn’t want to bomb out the FAG himself.

‘Pilgrim, Topdog on top of mountain. You bomb bad guy.’

‘All right, Topdog, Pilgrim drop bomb in valley.’

Gershon set his wing selector to the left stub, where a five-hundred-pound napalm bomb nestled. He peered down, into oceanic invisibility. He put on a single fuselage light, so the wingman would be able to see where he was going.

He rolled over, relying on his instruments in the darkness, and stabilized into a forty-degree dive.

He descended below the tops of the mountains and closed rapidly. Through his gunsight he could see glimmers outlining the valley below.

The altimeter unwound, and Gershon’s breath was ragged and hot. He wasn’t worried about anti-aircraft fire; right now he was more concerned about not hitting the ground.

He hit the release button.

Five hundred pounds dropped away from the ship with a jolt. He pulled up, and grunted as three G settled on his chest.

The nape splashed over the landscape. It was like an immense flashbulb, exploding from the valley floor, and it lit up the smoky sky, turning it into a milky dome above him. It was eerie, alien, almost beautiful.

‘Pilgrim! You have number one bomb. Very good. You do same again.’

‘Okay, Topdog, we’ll put it right there.’

Gershon swapped altitudes with his wingman, and let the wingman dive in. The valley wasn’t dark any longer; it was a mass of fires and splotches of twenty-mil hits, which sparkled like little fire jewels. Gershon caught glimpses of his wingman’s Spad, rolling down and leveling off, silhouetted against the blaze below.

‘Very good bomb, Pilgrim.’

‘Okay, Topdog.’

‘Hey, Pilgrim. You got radio?’

Gershon couldn’t figure what the FAG was talking about; the raid was over. ‘Say again, Topdog. Say again.’

‘Topdog listen to radio. Voice of America. You brave boys in trouble.’

‘What?’

‘Apollo. Brave boys. Spaceship in terrible danger, say Voice of America. You understand?’

Jesus. He felt electrified. I wonder what the hell has happened, if they can get home …

But what a way to find out, from some poor little guy, lost in a shit-hole in the mountains of Cambodia.

‘Rager, Topdog. I copy. Thank you.’

‘And to you, Pilgrim, a good night.’

Yeah. A good night faking my records.

Somewhere in the sky above him – for all the peril those guys were in – Americans were undertaking vast, wonderful adventures. And here he was, flying this bucket of bolts, splashing liquid fire over peasants. Doing something so shitty that even his own Government wouldn’t admit it was happening.

I got to get out of this. Of course, despite a lot of pressure from the White House, NASA had yet to fly a black man into space. It would be a long haul for Ralph Gershon …

But it couldn’t be worse than this.

Gershon and his wingman climbed back to altitude, and Gershon turned his nose for home.

Mission Elapsed Time [Day/Hr:Min:Sec] Plus 000/00:12:22

Earth was a wall of blue light, as bright as a slice of tropical sky; it dazzled her, dilating her eyes, making the sky pitch black when she looked away. The Command Module’s windows were tiny, already scuffed, but even so they let in shafts of startling blue, and the cabin was bright, cheerful, light-filled.

‘Houston, we have a hot cabin.’ Stone tapped a gloved forefinger against a temperature gauge. ‘Running at seventy-seven.’

‘Copy, Ares,’ Young said. ‘We recommend you put coolant fluid through the secondary coolant loop.’

‘Rager,’ said Gershon. ‘Ah, okay, Houston, now I’m seeing a fluctuation of my water quantity gauge. It’s oscillating between, I’d say, sixty and eighty per cent.’

‘Copy, Ralph, working on that one …’

And Stone said he suspected there was a helium bubble in an attitude thruster propellant tank. Young recommended that he perform a couple of purge burns of the attitude thrusters to burn out the bubble. So Stone began to work that out. Meanwhile, Young came back with an answer to the water gauge problem; it looked as if it was traced to a faulty transducer …

And on, and on, a hail of small checks and detailed, trivial problems.

York had her own checklist to follow. She worked her way through the pale pages quickly, opening and closing circuit breakers, throwing switches, calling out instructions for Stone and Gershon. She was immersed in the hiss of the air in her closed helmet, the humming of the Command Module’s instruments and pumps, the rustle of paper, the crackle of Young’s voice calling up from the ground, the soft voices of Gershon and Stone as they worked through their post-orbit checklists.

This was a mundane procedure they’d followed together dozens of times before in the sims.

But, she realized, it was a profound shock to go through this routine – not in some stuffy ground-based trainer – but here.

If she looked ahead of the craft she could see the planet’s curve. It was a blue and white arc with black space above it. But when she looked straight down, the skin of the Earth filled her window, scrolling steadily past as if she were viewing some colorful map on a computer screen.

She was amazed by the transparency of the air. There was a sense of depth to the atmosphere, a three-dimensional appearance that surprised her. There were shadows under the clouds as they slid across the face of the seas. The clouds thickened toward the equator, and when she looked ahead, tangential to the Earth’s surface, she could see them climbing up into the atmosphere, as if Ares was heading for a wall of vapor. On the land she could easily make out cities – a gray, angular patchwork – and the lines of major roads. The orange-brown of deserts was vivid, but the jungles and temperate zones were harder to spot; their color did not penetrate the atmosphere so well, and they showed up as a gray-blue, with the barest hint of green.

She found the lack of green disappointing.

She saw the wake of a ship, feathering out like a brush stroke on the sea’s calm surface.

Gershon, in his center seat, leaned toward her. ‘Quite a view, huh.’

She turned her head – and quickly regretted it; her head felt like a tank of fluid, sloshing when she moved. She held her head steady for a few seconds, and let the sloshing settle down again. Resolutely, she tried not to think about her stomach.

Space adaptation syndrome. She understood what was happening to her. Without gravity, little particles of calcium on sensitive hairs in the inner ear took up random positions, and the body couldn’t work out which way was up. It generally went away after a few days.

But right now it was a huge embarrassment to York.

More carefully, she turned back to the window. They were passing over storm clouds now, thunderheads which piled up on top of each other as if solid, cliffs and ravines of cloud miles deep. She could see lightning, sparking in the clouds like living things, propagating across storm systems thousands of miles across. The clouds, illuminated from within, glowed purple-pink, like neon sculptures. ‘Look at that. It looks as if the thunderheads are reaching up toward us.’

‘Only about a tenth of the way,’ Gershon said mildly.

‘Pressure’s okay,’ Stone said now. He began to take off his gloves and helmet.

York unlatched her gloves and pulled them off, and shoved them into a pocket on her couch. She grasped the sides of her helmet, which came loose with a click; she pushed it up over her head.

She moved too quickly. Suddenly her head was full of sloshing fluid again, and saliva flooded her mouth.

Her helmet, rolling loose, clattered against a bank of switches. Gershon grabbed it easily, laughing. ‘Interception!’ In his pressure suit he looked small, compact, comfortable. He threw the helmet up in the air again with a twist; the helmet revolved, oscillating about two spin axes.

York felt embarrassed, clumsy. And, watching the helmet, suddenly she was retching.

‘Oh, man,’ Stone said in disgust. He handed her a plastic bag, and York fumbled it open, and pushed her face into it.

As she heaved, a greenish sphere, about the size of a tennis ball, came floating up out of the bag. It was shimmering, and complex pulsations crossed its surface.

York watched in awe. Maybe I ought to film this. It was a demonstration of fluid mechanics in the absence of gravity; she wondered if the wave patterns, dominated by surface tension, could be predicted by computer.

Now the glob of vomit split in two. One half headed toward the wall, and the other made straight for Gershon.

‘Ah, shit,’ Gershon said, and he tried to squirm out of the way.

The glob hit him in the chest, with a soft impact; it immediately collapsed and spread out over his suit, as flat as a fried egg. Surface tension again, York thought absently.

‘Oh, Jesus,’ Gershon said. ‘Oh, shit.’

Stone reached for wet wipes, and passed some to Gershon. ‘Come on, man. It might have been any of us. We got to get this place cleaned up.’

So they began chasing around the cabin, hunting down bits of vomit with paper towels and plastic bags.

Now that her stomach awareness had receded a little, York found, oddly, that it wasn’t actually so unpleasant. It was a little like chasing butterflies.

‘NC One phasing burn,’ Stone said. He held down the thrust control, watching his instruments.

The burn felt tight and rattly to York. She was shoved into her couch again; the acceleration was low, but crisp.

Through her window she could see vapor venting from attitude control thruster nozzles; the vents looked like fountains of ice crystals, the particles receding from the walls of the craft in precise straight lines.

The burn was taking place over the night side of Earth. The planet pulled away; it was as if she was rising above a floor of dark, frosted glass. The continents were outlined by chains of brilliant dots, like streetlights seen from the air. But those dots weren’t streetlights; they were towns.

She twisted in her seat and looked ahead, toward the limb of the planet.

She could see the airglow layer, the bright layer of ionized oxygen at the top of the atmosphere, a fine line that was like a false sunrise. And then, as she watched, a sliver of sky turned blue and spread along the horizon. More colors came up, coalescing around a bright patch that was the rising sun, a spectrum that washed around the curve of Earth. The light of the dawn reached her through the layer of atmosphere; for a brief moment she saw the shadows of the clouds streaming across the orange surface of the sea.

Then the sun rose high enough to illuminate the tops of the clouds. The sea turned to crimson, and a wash of pale blue and white spread from the horizon toward her.

On a whim, she dug into a pocket of her pressure garment, and pulled out the handful of grass which Vladimir Viktorenko had given her. She held it in her palm and rubbed it gently; it gave off a sweet aroma, like a herb. It was polin, a kind of wormwood, common all over the Kazakhstan steppe.

Stone finished the burn. His push-button control, released, popped back out of the panel on its spring. ‘Two hundred seven feet per second,’ he said.

‘Right on the wire,’ Gershon murmured. ‘One hundred ninety-five times two hundred zero one.’

Young called up, ‘Copy your burn, Ares. You are two hundred fifty miles from the stack, and closing.’

‘Copy, John. Preparing for NC Two …’

The crew had arrived in orbit with half the Ares cluster: their Apollo Command and Service Modules, the Mars Excursion Module – the MEM – and the Mission Module, their habitat for the journey. The rest of the cluster – the main injection booster and its huge fuel tanks – had already been placed in orbit and assembled, ready for them to dock with it.

The Mission Module was a squat cylinder, with the Apollo a slim, silvery cylinder-cone attached to its front, and the MEM – a fatter, truncated cone – stuck on the back. Fixed to the base of the MEM’s shroud was an Orbital Maneuvering Module, a fat doughnut fitted with a modified Apollo Service Module propulsion system. The OMM would be discarded before they docked with the booster cluster. But first Stone had to use the OMM in a series of four burns, to chase the booster cluster around the sky.

Stone announced: ‘Ready for NCC.’

‘Copy,’ Young said. ‘Ninety miles and closing.’

The corrective burn was crisp and short, a brief hiss.

Stone murmured, ‘Natalie, you ought to be able to see the booster by now. Right out front.’

York pressed her face to the window. The brief burns were placing Ares on segments of successively wider orbits; following the new orbits, Ares would eventually overtake the booster stack.

The craft was noticeably higher than when they had first been injected into orbit; the curvature of the Earth was much more pronounced, and she was able to see complete landmasses, speckled with cloud.

Suddenly it was there: a pencil, gleaming silver, hanging over the dipping horizon.

‘I have it.’

‘That’s a relief,’ said Stone dryly. ‘Okay, Houston, I’m going for the twenty-eight feet per second coelliptic combination burn.’

‘Copy, Phil.’

Another sharp rattle.

Young said, ‘Slight underburn that time, Ares. One point six feet per second.’

‘Copy that,’ said Gershon, and he clucked at Stone in mock disapproval.

Young said, ‘Your orbit is now ten miles under the booster’s. Range sixty-three miles and closing.’

‘Rog,’ Stone said. ‘Going for terminal phase initiation.’ York could hear solenoids clatter as Stone worked the pushbutton controls of the reaction control clusters. ‘How about that. Right down Route One.’

‘Good burn, Ares,’ Young said. ‘You’re closing at one hundred thirty-one feet per second.’

Stone went through two more corrections, and five sharp braking maneuvers. Then, maybe half a mile from the booster, he took the Apollo on a short, angular inspection sweep. The reaction control systems bit sharply, rattling York against her restraint.

York watched the cluster roll with silent grace past her window.

The booster cluster was squat, pregnant with fuel. Its heart was a fat MS-II booster, a Saturn second stage, modified to serve as an orbital injector. Fixed to the front of the MS-II was an MS-IVB, a modified Saturn third stage, a narrower cylinder. To either side of the MS-II were fixed the two External Tanks, fat, silvery cylinders as long and as wide as the MS-II stage itself. These supplementary tanks carried more than two million pounds of liquid oxygen and hydrogen, propellant Ares would need to break clear of Earth orbit.

The MS-II and its tanks looked like three fat sausages side by side, with the slimmer pencil shape of the MS-IVB protruding from the center. The rest of the Ares stack – the Mission Module, MEM and Apollo – would be docked onto the front of the MS-IVB, to complete the assembly of the first Mars ship, a needle well over three hundred feet long.

The cluster was oriented so that it was pointing toward the sun; that way, boiloff of the cryogenic propellants inside the tanks was reduced. Shadows of struts and attitude thrusters lay long against the sunlit white and silver bellies of the fuel tanks. The booster’s underside was illuminated only by the soft blue and green of Earthlight. She could see the great flaps of the cluster’s solar panels, folded up against the sides of the MS-IVB stage like wings; the panels would be unfurled when Ares was safely launched on its trajectory to Mars. There was the bold red UNITED STATES stenciled against the side of the MS-II, and the finer lettering along the long thin protective flaps masking the solar panels, and the NASA logo; and she could make out the support struts and attachment pins which held the External Tanks in place against the flanks of the MS-II, and the gold-gleaming mouths of the MS-II’s four J-2S engines, upgrades of the engines which had pushed Apollo to the Moon.

To assemble this much mass in Earth orbit had taken all of nine Saturn VB flights over the last five years – half of them manned. The booster stages and their tanks had been flown up here and assembled more or less empty, and then pumped full of gas from tanker modules. The cluster was an exercise in enhanced Apollo-Saturn technology, of course, and the essence of its design went all the way back to the 1960s. But NASA had had to develop a raft of new techniques to achieve this: the assembly in orbit of heavy components, the long-term storage of supercold fuels, in-orbit fueling.

Sailing over the Earth, brilliantly lit by the unimpeded sunlight, the booster stack was complex, massive, new-looking, perfect, like a huge, jeweled model. Once they’d docked, she wouldn’t see the cluster from outside again like this for a year. Not until, she realized with a jolt, she receded from it in the MEM, in orbit around Mars.

Stone stretched, raising his arms above his head and reverse-arching his back, so that he floated up out of his frame couch. His long limbs unfolded with evident relief; he really did look too tall to be an astronaut, York thought.

He said, ‘It’s been a long day already. What say we have ourselves some lunch before we proceed with the docking? If you can take it, Natalie.’

Food? Now? ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘I’m fine.’

‘Rager,’ said Gershon. He climbed out of his couch. He moved in microgravity as if he’d been born to it; he just floated up out of his couch, pushed at the instrument panel in front of him, and went swimming around like an eel.

He rooted in the equipment bay beneath the couches. He got to the food locker and lifted the lid; it was full to bursting with little cellophane packets of food, all Velcroed in place.

Once they got into the Mission Module, the standard of cuisine would improve, York knew. But while they were stuck inside this Apollo they had to make do with squirting water into color-coded plastic bags of dehydrated food. Still, she wasn’t about to complain. The Command Module was like a cute little mobile home, with its warm water for food and coffee, and toothpaste, even a system for the guys to shave.

Gershon came floating up with a handful of gold-painted bags. ‘Hey. I found these at the front. None of us is coded gold, are we?’

Stone smiled. ‘Nope. I had those put there for you to find.’

York studied the bags. ‘Beef and potatoes. Butterscotch pudding. Brownies. Grape punch.’ She looked at Stone. ‘What’s this? None of this was in my personal preference. In fact, I hate butterscotch pudding.’

‘I thought it was kind of appropriate. This was the first meal the Apollo 11 crew ate in space. Straight after trans-lunar injection, after they left Earth orbit for the Moon.’

‘All right,’ Ralph Gershon said, and he pulled a hose out of the potable water tank and squirted the spigot into his bags with enthusiasm.

York looked at the bags again. Butterscotch pudding, in memoriam. Bizarre.

But maybe, after all, it was appropriate.

Monday, April 13, 1970 Manned Spacecraft Center, Houston

Chuck Jones snapped closed his visor and tugged at the umbilicals on his pressure suit, testing their fittings.

He stepped to the edge of the tank. It was a big blue rectangle, like a swimming pool. T-shirted divers were already moving through the water, playing around the sim like dolphins; cables trailed through the water, around the blocky white shape of the sim itself.

It’s like a fucking kid’s game, Jones thought. Sims. How I hate sims.

He turned to see his partner, Adam Bleeker. Because his suit was so stiff, Jones had to hop around like a rabbit. ‘You okay, kid?’

Bleeker seemed to start. ‘Sure. Yeah, sure, Chuck.’

Jones snickered to himself. He knew he could put a bug up the ass of a raw kid like Bleeker, just by smiling at him. ‘Good boy. Welcome to the Weightless Environment Training Facility, here in sunny Texas. Beautiful sight, isn’t it?’

Bleeker turned to the water. ‘I think I’ve got a kind of Monday morning feeling about this, Chuck.’

‘So do I, Adam; so do I. I hate this fucking fish tank. But we gotta go through with crap like this, or they won’t let us fly their beautiful birds. You all set?’

‘Let’s do it.’

His breath loud in his ears, Jones stepped onto the white platform before him. Now he was suspended over the pool. With a whine of hydraulics, the platform lowered his clumsy, umbilicalled bulk into the water.

The divers loaded him up with weights that would neutralize his buoyancy, and so simulate weightlessness. Then they got hold of Jones’s suited arms, and began to drag him through the water toward the sim. The water was hot, for the benefit of the divers.

The WET-F, pronounced ‘wet-eff,’ was one of the largest simulator facilities here at MSC. The pool was set at the center of Building 29, a big circular building that had once served as a centrifuge. Now, a sleek ambulance stood beside the pool, and there was a decompression chamber nearby. Big clunky white pieces of kit, simulators for other exercises, stood beside the water; cranes running along the roof would lower them in when required.

Jones hated the WET-F. He could never forget the presence of the water around him: the resistance to every movement, the clammy light, the glopping of bubbles, the shadowy forms of the divers.

Conditions more different from the ice-cold stillness of space it was hard to dream up.

Looming ahead in the water he could see the sixty-feet-long hulk of a mocked-up S-IVB, a Saturn third stage, with the mouth of its single engine bell gaping at him. The Multiple Docking Adapter was a squat cylinder fixed to the front of the S-IVB, and a crude, open-ended mockup of a docked Apollo Command Module was fixed to the front of that.

The idea was that the empty S-IVB would be used as a space station shell, a Skylab, once it had reached orbit. The S-IVB and the Apollo carrying its crew would be launched separately, by Saturn IB boosters, the smaller, cheaper cousins of Saturn Vs. The astronauts would dock with the booster by nuzzling the nose of their Apollo against the Docking Adapter, and then enter through specially fitted airlocks. The crew would clean out the shell, and settle down to live inside the big liquid hydrogen tank.

This sim wasn’t painted, or finished in any way. It all looked ungainly, ugly, evidently lashed up in haste.

The simulation supervisor’s voice sounded in his headset. ‘Good morning, Chuck, Adam.’

Good morning to you, asshole.

Bleeker turned and waved at one of the ubiquitous TV cameras.

The SimSup said, ‘I just want to review the basic parameters of the sim with you, before you start. Now, you know this isn’t an integrated sim.’ Meaning they weren’t hooked up to Mission Control. ‘This is just a preliminary trial of the checklist we’re going to have to use, when we fit out the workshop in orbit. Okay, let’s proceed.’

The divers nodded to Jones, and they guided him closer to the Apollo mockup. It was just an open cone, fitted to the Docking Adapter. The simulation was supposed to start at the moment at which the crew were moving into the workshop to configure it for habitation.

Their first job was to dismantle the docking assembly in Apollo’s nose and open up the tunnel to the workshop. This part, at least, should go smoothly, because this sort of docking was standard operating practice on the Moon missions.

Jones heard Bleeker’s breath scratching as he hauled at the heavy docking probe assembly. ‘Take it easy, kid. We’re being paid by the hour.’

Bleeker laughed, and his posture relaxed a little.

When they had the probe assembly loose, Bleeker passed it to a diver.

Bleeker moved ahead of Jones into the Multiple Docking Adapter. The Adapter was a tight tunnel, lined with lockers. All the equipment for living quarters, clothes, food, experiments and the rest was stored in these lockers during the launch; when they’d fitted out the hydrogen tank for habitation, Jones and Bleeker would have to come back here, unpack the lockers, and move this equipment into the tank.

Bleeker passed on, into the hydrogen tank itself.

The metal walls of the tank opened out around him. It was pitch dark, and Jones had the feeling that he was following Bleeker into a huge, forbidding metal cave. ‘Hold up, Adam; let’s throw a little light on the situation here.’ Jones unclipped a portable light from his belt and fixed it to the fireman’s pole that passed along the axis of the tank.

The lamp sent glimmering light through the water along the length of the tank, to a wall at the far end that bulged inward toward him. This was the bulkhead between the hydrogen tank and the booster’s lox tank beyond. Helium pressurization spheres clung to the walls like big silver warts. Handrails and poles looped across the metal cave, and folded-up partitions and other bits of kit were stowed neatly against the walls of the tank. Too neatly. I wonder what those poor schmuckos will find when they meet this bird in real life, in orbit.

The Skylabs were just lash-ups, really, improvisation. But they would give NASA experience it needed of orbital operations and long-duration flights, before the real space station cans started flying later.

‘Okay, guys,’ the SimSup said. ‘As you know, in orbit the first job would be to check that the propellant lines are properly blocked. Today, we want you to skip over that and proceed straight to the assembly of the floor.’

‘We’ve read the checklist,’ Jones growled. ‘Come on, pal.’ He shimmied along the fireman’s pole, deeper into the tank.

Bleeker and Jones manhandled packs of floor panels away from their stowage against the tank walls. Their job was to fit a floor of aluminum grid across the width of the tank, maybe two-thirds of the way along its length. Putting the panels together would be like assembling a jigsaw puzzle, working their way in to the tank’s axis.

The two men worked their way around the perimeter of the tank. It was simple work, but slow, clumsy and tiring; Jones found it hard to grip tools with his suited hands, and the water resisted every motion.

Divers had followed them into the tank. One of them had brought in an underwater TV camera, and was filming them.

The SimSup tried to cheer them up. ‘We appreciate your help here, guys. We’re well aware that you two are slated for other missions, and probably won’t even be the ones to carry this out for real anyway …’

I sure as hell hope not, Jones thought.

Chuck Jones was supposed to be going to the Moon. He was backup commander on Apollo 15, which, according to the basic framework of crew rotation, would give him his own mission three shots later, on Apollo 18.

But Congress had cut NASA’s budget for Fiscal 1971, making it the leanest budget for nine years. And Nixon still hadn’t responded to the Space Task Group’s proposals for the future shape of the space program, although the word was he was now leaning toward a Mars program of some kind, under Kennedy’s relentless public pressure.

Anyhow, NASA was going to need Saturn Vs to launch its Skylabs and space station modules and NERVA test flights. So, NASA was going to have to conserve Saturn V launches. The remaining lunar expeditions, Apollos 14 through to 20, were going to be stretched out to six-monthly intervals …

There were rumors in the Office that the later flights might be cut altogether.

Jones had flown in space. Once.

He’d finished three orbits of Earth on the second orbital Mercury flight, following John Glenn. It had been a picnic. He’d enjoyed the feeling of microgravity, being able to yaw the little capsule about so that the glowing Earth sailed every which way past his tiny window.

But he used up too much of his hydrogen peroxide maneuvering fuel, playing around in orbit.

By the time he got to the retro-sequence, nobody was sure if he had enough fuel to set the capsule at the right angle to reenter. He might have burned up, having wasted all his fuel playing around in orbit. Well, he hadn’t; he’d overshot his splashdown point by two hundred fifty miles, but he was picked up within a couple of hours by choppers from the carrier.

Jones had been content with his adventure. But the NASA hierarchy were less than pleased with him. He might have augured in: killed himself by playing around.

Officially Jones stayed on the roster, for assignment to a later flight. But there was a certain distance, now, between Jones and the rest of the Astronaut Office. Deke Slayton, the chief astronaut, had dropped heavy hints that he might want to drop out of the program altogether.

But Jones, mad as hell, had flatly refused. He’d wanted to prove the astronauts really were aviators. He knew he’d done well; he knew he’d done better than Glenn, even, as far as he was concerned.

So he was going to stay on as an astronaut, and he was going to go to the goddamn Moon. In the meantime, to keep in the program, he accepted a job with Slayton and Alan Shepard – another of the original astronauts, also grounded, in his case for an ear condition – in the Astronaut Office.

Jones had served in there for eight whole years: scheduling and training, working on sims and mission profiles. Eight years.

Now enough bigwigs had moved out of NASA, it seemed, for his indiscretion to be forgotten, and he was back on flight status.

But if the Moon flights got cut, so did he. He’d probably be too damn old for Mars.

Jones didn’t want to go to the Moon for the thrill of exploration. For him it wasn’t the destination that counted but the journey: a mission that offered the most challenging flying test anyone could devise.

The Skylabs just weren’t going to offer that. He had no wish for his career to climax in a low-Earth-orbiting trash can, where the job would be to endure, just logging days, boring a hole in the sky.

He really would hate to miss out on the Moon.

Jones hauled at floor bolts with a vigor that alarmed the surgeons who were monitoring his vital signs.

When the floor was completed, the SimSup congratulated them. ‘Okay, boys; we’ll take a break and refurbish before the next session. Come out through the Docking Adapter.’

Preceded by the divers, Bleeker made his way through the cramped Adapter and toward the brightly lit water beyond.

‘Now you, Chuck,’ the SimSup said.

Jones made his way into the shadowy Adapter; the lockers clustered about, restricting his movement. He was illuminated by the tank lights behind him, and the free blue water of the facility ahead of him.

When he was well inside the Adapter, the exit to the Apollo mockup slammed shut.

Jones pulled up short. He wrapped his gloved palms around the hatch lever. It wouldn’t give.

‘What’s going on?’

‘Jones.’ The SimSup voice was terse now. ‘You’ve suffered a multiple failure. Your Command Module is disabled; you can’t return to it; you can’t get it loose of the docking port. The power in the workshop cluster is about to fail. What do you do? Go.’

Now the lights failed. He was left floating in pitch darkness. Even the tank lights had gone out.

‘What kind of asshole game is this? …’

He took a breath, and calmed himself down. SimSups were famous for throwing crap like this at you. He had to find an answer to this, and fast; he could yell at them later.

He knew the theory. If Skylab astronauts couldn’t get home, a new Apollo would be sent up from the Cape. But if the disabled Apollo was jammed to the docking port, what use would that be?

In the pitch darkness, he was starting to forget which way up he was.

These fucking sims.

He tried to concentrate; he pictured the Adapter as he’d seen it just before the ‘failure’: the useless docking port before him; the access tunnel back to the workshop behind him.

He suffered a surge of panic. He reached out at random; his gloved hands clattered against lockers and handholds. The space here was too big, he realized suddenly; that was what was disorienting him. If he were safely tucked up in Mercury –

Take it easy. You’re not in any danger. You can always back out into the tank. The divers are still there.

Yeah, he thought sourly. But if I do that I’ll have fucked up. The Grand Old Man of the Astronaut Office. Put him in a swimming bath for two minutes, and he screws the pooch.

In fact, he thought, I’m already screwing up by taking so long. How many seconds? Half a minute? There must be something obvious I’m meant to do; something I’m missing. Think, damn it. If the docking port is blocked, then how –

Then it came to him. The Docking Adapter had two docking ports. Bleeker had got out through the axial port; but there was also a radial port, stuck to the side of the Adapter for just such a purpose as this.

He reached down, and found the port on his first try; it was jammed, but it gave after a couple of tugs.

Bleeker clapped Jones on the shoulder; the impact was deadened by layers of suit fabric. ‘What were you doing in there, pops, having a shave? Next time, make sure you’ve studied the manual.’

‘Asshole,’ Jones growled. ‘You were in on that, weren’t you?’

‘Just another Monday, Chuck. Don’t take it personal.’

Fucking engineers. Fucking smart-ass rookies.

With the help of the divers, they swam clumsily to the side of the facility.

Tuesday, April 14, 1970 Manned Spacecraft Center, Houston

According to Fred Michaels’s antique vest-pocket watch, it was a little after a quarter to two. He’d been watching the time compulsively, he realized.

Tim Josephson oiled up to him. ‘Mr Agronski is here to see you, sir. He’s waiting in your office.’

‘That’s Doctor Agronski, damn it.’

‘Sorry. Shall I tell him you’ll meet him over there?’

Michaels, resenting the intrusion, turned away rather than answer. He looked through the glass, at the three rows of flight controllers.

Seen from the Viewing Room here at the back of the MOCR – Mission Operations Control Room, pronounced to rhyme with ‘poker,’ and known as ‘Mission Control’ to the world – there was no obvious drama. But the controllers looked pretty crumpled, with ties loosened or discarded, shirts creased, and the operations desks were strewn with coffee cups, manuals and scribbled notes.

He could see Joe Muldoon wandering about at the back of the MOCR. Nine months after his own lunar flight, Muldoon had just finished a six-hour stint as capcom to Jim Lovell and his Apollo 13 crew, but he showed no desire to leave; in fact, he knew that Muldoon was intending to head on over now to Building 5, where other off-duty astronauts were running continual simulations of the improvised procedures the Apollo 13 crew would have to adopt to get home.

Already seventeen hours had passed since 13 had started to fall apart; Michaels wondered how many of the controllers had got a minute’s sleep since.

Josephson coughed. The aide was a slim, prematurely balding young man, with a PhD in some discipline or other. You needed a PhD to make the coffee, here at MSC. ‘Sir, Dr Agronski –’

‘Yeah, yeah.’

Leon Agronski worked on President Nixon’s Science Advisory Committee, with special responsibility for the space program, and all its expensive evils. Michaels knew why Agronski was here: to thrash out ‘options’ for NASA’s budget for FY1971 and beyond, before any formal submission by the White House.

More cuts.

Michaels was an Associate Administrator with responsibility for Manned Spaceflight, a direct report of Thomas Paine, NASA’s Administrator. It had broken Michaels’s heart when Paine had gone public back in February to announce the cuts to Skylab, even some terminations at NASA.

‘You know,’ he mused, ‘maybe, if we can pull this off, this Apollo 13 thing, it will bring us back together, just a little. If we can remember how it feels to have worked like this, today, then maybe we’ll be able to achieve great things again …’

Josephson had been avoiding his eyes; now he confronted Michaels, a little more boldly. ‘Fred, I know you’re upset. But the wheels don’t stop turning. And Dr Agronski has flown out from Washington to catch you.’

Michaels grunted. Josephson was right, of course. The wheels never stopped turning.

And maybe, just maybe, he could use this mess to his advantage. He felt his mood lighten a little.

‘All right, let’s go see him,’ he said. ‘But not in some goddamn bureaucratic office block. Call him over here – ask him to come to the lunar surface back room.’ Another thought struck him. ‘Oh – and, Tim –’

‘Sir?’

‘Ask Joe Muldoon to join us, would you?’

The back room would have been used as the center of operations for the moonwalks. Its walls were covered with crew checklists, and with Orbiter and Apollo photographs of the landing area – called Fra Mauro, a place in the lunar uplands: the first ambitious, scientifically interesting site they’d planned to land. Now, it was deserted.

When Michaels arrived, Muldoon and Agronski were sitting at a large walnut desk in the center of the room. Agronski, thin to the point of sharpness, was leafing through some notes from his briefcase; Muldoon was hollow-eyed with fatigue, and he had folded his big, powerful hands on the desk top. He glared impatiently at Michaels. Josephson fussed around, pouring coffees.

Michaels pulled out a chair, and accepted a coffee. Then Josephson withdrew, leaving the three of them alone.

Michaels introduced Muldoon to Agronski. ‘Leon, Joe here is on the backup crew for Apollo 14, and then should command his own mission, on 17. Joe, you’re here at my invitation. To help remind us what this damn thing is all about.’

Here is the second American on the Moon, Agronski, you thin-lipped asshole, Michaels thought. Here he is! Large as life, and twice as brave! A living symbol! Show a little respect!

In the dazzle of the room’s strip lights, Michaels couldn’t see Agronski’s eyes behind his thin-rimmed glasses.

Joe Muldoon was glaring back at Michaels. Muldoon’s look, those blue eyes hard under that balding prow of a skull, said it all; he was thinking that Michaels was a paper-pushing prick who shouldn’t be wasting Muldoon’s time on a day like this. Not when he – Muldoon – could be in Building 5 or the MOCR with the other guys; not when he might be able to come up with something to save the crew out there –

Christ, Michaels thought suddenly. Maybe I’ve miscalculated. If Muldoon blows his stack here, this could turn into a hundred-kilowatt disaster. He shot an imploring look at Muldoon.

Agronski handed Michaels a document from his case. ‘I’m sorry, Colonel Muldoon; I wasn’t expecting you to be here. I brought only two copies.’

Muldoon turned that bald-eagle glare on the science adviser, who seemed oblivious.

The document was a photostat, stapled together, covered in pencil notes, and with the Presidential seal on the first page.

‘This is the statement President Nixon was drafting, to make in March,’ Agronski said. ‘A formal response to the Space Task Group report. But he withdrew it. I want you to see this draft, Fred, to understand the way the thoughts of the Administration are heading.’

Michaels scanned the statement.

… Over the last decade, the principal goal of our nation’s space program has been the Moon … I believe these accomplishments should help us gain a new perspective of our space program … We must define new goals which make sense for the seventies. We must build on the successes of the past, always reaching out for new achievements. But we must also recognize that many critical problems here on this planet make high priority demands on our attention and our resources. By no means should we allow our space program to stagnate. But – with the entire future and the entire universe before us – we should not try to do everything at once. Our approach to space must continue to be bold, but it must also be balanced …

Christ, Michaels thought. We’re in trouble.

He read on. Economies everywhere. One rationalization after another. No money for more lunar flights beyond Apollo 20. The space station projects cut back to little more than Skylab. All decisions on later stuff, beyond Apollo and Skylab, deferred: that is, canned.

The feasibility studies on the Space Shuttle seemed spared, but even that was only because Nixon perceived the Shuttle as saving the bottom line: We should work to reduce substantially the cost of space operations … As we build for the longer range future, we must devise less costly and less complicated ways of transporting payloads into space …

Michaels put the paper down. So Nixon thinks we can cost-cut our way to Mars.

It wouldn’t have been like this with LBJ.

But Johnson was gone. Now there was this new breed of shifty Republicans in the White House. And suddenly Michaels, at sixty-one, found the political levers he was used to pulling weren’t connected to anything any more. Even his links with the Kennedys didn’t seem as useful as they once had.

Sitting here, he felt old, tired, used up.

Maybe I should retire back to Dallas, he thought. Go work on my golf swing.

He noticed Agronski glancing around at the walls at the moonwalk maps. ‘Poignant, isn’t it?’ Michaels said sharply.

Agronski didn’t react.

‘Leon, why did the President withdraw this draft?’

‘Because, frankly, nobody in the White House is sure about the impact Kennedy’s remarks about the Mars option are having on public opinion. And now –’ Agronski waved a hand at the curling photographs of Fra Mauro ‘– now you people have served us up with all this. The public mood is a fragile thing, Fred; after Apollo 13 America may want to go to Mars as fast as it can – or it may want to close down the space program altogether.’

Muldoon’s nostrils went white. ‘You’re talking about the lives of three men, damn it.’

Agronski studied him, analytically. ‘You know, you people at NASA have been the same whenever I’ve dealt with you. So emotive, so unrealistic. Even you, Fred. Every time we ask for proposals, back you come wanting everything: look at this Space Task Group report with its “balanced programs,” its “wide range of technologies.” You ask for Mars, but that brings everything else in its wake, it seems: nuclear boosters, a Space Shuttle, huge space stations. The same old vision von Braun has peddled since the 1950s – even though you didn’t need a space station to get to the Moon. Your hidden agendas are not, frankly, very well hidden. Why can’t you learn to prioritize?’

Muldoon said angrily, ‘The Task Group is asking for a mandate to begin the colonization of the Solar System. And to secure the future of the human race, just as Kennedy is saying. What could be higher priority than that?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Agronski snapped. ‘We’re a country at war, Colonel Muldoon. And the war is a hemorrhage of money, resources, national morale.’

‘Sure,’ Muldoon said. ‘And Apollo is going to end up having cost as much as it takes to keep the war going for another twelve months. What a price to pay.’

Agronski ignored that. ‘The budget just isn’t big enough to do everything you want. You don’t have to be a White House insider to see that. And the public mood is against you too. I don’t suppose you fly boys have heard of a thing called Earth Day, planned by the environmentalists in a couple of weeks’ time –’

‘Yes, I’ve heard of it, damn it.’

‘Clean-ups. Marches. Teach-ins. That’s where the public is going to focus in the coming decade, Colonel Muldoon: on our problems here on Earth, not more of your stunts in space.’

‘Maybe so. But Agnew chaired the Space Task Group, not NASA,’ Michaels growled.

Agronski ploughed on. ‘it’s time you people dropped the idea that you’re some kind of heroic super-agency. During Apollo you thought you were the Manhattan Project. Well, now you’re a service agency with a limited budget. And that’s what you have to learn to live with …’

Michaels knew Agronski had a point.

In Michaels’s humble opinion, the current NASA Administrator, Thomas O. Paine, was an idiot: a naive dreamer who was pumping Agnew full of grandiose visions, without a thought about how acceptable they would be to the decision makers inside the White House. Paine was a real contrast to his predecessor, Jim Webb, whom Michaels had greatly admired. Webb was a real political operator – he had known where the bodies were buried, up on the Hill – and he had actively avoided long-term planning. NASA was bad at it anyhow – long-range plans always got bogged down in infighting between the centers – and Webb believed that long-term plans were just hostages to fortune, a distraction for budget authorizers and NASA managers.

Paine couldn’t seem to see that the real problem right now lay in holding NASA together, in the tough times to come, not starting up new programs.

It just wasn’t the way Michaels would run things.

Agronski said, ‘Fred, forget your huge space stations, your fifty men on the Moon in 1980. The President wants what he’s calling, in private, a “Kennedy option.”’ He tapped the document again.

‘In this statement he was going to pick out one element from the Task Group’s report, the Space Shuttle, on which to focus. But what if he were to choose something else – a more visible, major goal – to achieve as quickly and as cheaply as possible?’

Muldoon was staring at Agronski, evidently baffled.

But Michaels understood. He’s speaking obliquely. In code. He has to. But Kennedy is evidently making his point. Nixon wants to save money. But he doesn’t want to be the President who killed the space program, not with Kennedy bleating in the background.

‘You’re thinking about Mars,’ he said to Agronski. ‘After all that bullshit about the Manhattan Project and Earth Day, you’re here to talk about going to Mars. Aren’t you?’

Muldoon looked startled.

‘What does Paine say about this?’

Agronski looked at him carefully. ‘Let’s think about Doctor Paine later,’ he said.

I knew it. They’re forcing Paine out. He’d heard the rumors from within the White House. Not only was Paine not cooperating, he was being seen as undermining the President. We need an new Administrator who will work with us and not against us, and will reflect credit on the President, not embarrass him … Paine was a dead duck. And now – from the way Agronski was studying him – Michaels understood that he, Fred Michaels, was being offered the chance to succeed, in preference to George Low, Jim Fletcher.

Mars, and the post of Administrator, all in one day. Games within games. But I’ll have to give Agronski something to take home with him, the bones of a cheap Mars option. And there is sure as hell going to be a price to pay, and I need to find out what it is.

The talk was affecting the astronaut differently. There was a look of hope on Muldoon’s face, Michaels recognized; a delicate, fragile hope, as if Muldoon thought this magical possibility – we might go to Mars – might melt away if he longed for it too warmly.

He wondered how much, if anything, Muldoon was aware of what was really going on here, under the surface. Looking at Muldoon’s angry, open face, Michaels felt vaguely ashamed of his calculation. In fact, Muldoon’s presence seemed to be working on him the way he’d hoped it would work on Agronski.

Joe Muldoon felt scared to say anything, to disturb this difficult, mysterious process of negotiation. In case he made it all somehow go away.

Mars. They’re still talking about Mars. If Fred Michaels says and does the right things now, the road to Mars might actually be opening up, for us.

For me.

And Joe Muldoon would have something to do with his life again.

The months since his return from the Moon had been as bad as Muldoon had expected.

His most recent PR jaunt had been to some place called Morang, in Nepal. He’d given his standard-issue schoolkids’ talk. When I was on the Moon …

‘When I was on the Moon, I couldn’t see Earth so well. Tranquillity Base was close to the Moon’s equator, and right at the center of the face of the Moon as you look at it. So Earth was directly above my head, and it was difficult to tip back in my spacesuit to see it.

‘The sunlight was very bright, and, under a black sky, the ground was a kind of gentle brown. It looked like a beach, actually. I remember looking at Neil bounding around up there, and I thought he looked like a beach ball, human-shaped, bouncing across the sand. But the colors of the Moon aren’t strong, and the most colorful thing there was the Eagle, which looked like a small, fragile house, done out in brilliant black, silver, orange and yellow …’