Kitabı oku: «Voyage», sayfa 2

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 –’