Voyage

Stephen

Baxter

VOYAGE

For my nephew, William Baxter

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

Book One: DECISION

Book Two: TRAJECTORIES

Book Three: APOLLO-N

Book Four: APPROACHES

Book Five: ARES

Book Six: MANGALA

About the Author

AUTHOR’S NOTE

CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR STEPHEN BAXTER AND VOYAGE

Books by Stephen Baxter

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

This is Ares Launch Control, Jacqueline B. Kennedy Space Center.

We have passed the six-minute mark in our countdown. Now at T minus five minutes fifty-one seconds and counting.

Ares waits ready for launch on Launch Complex 39A.

We are on schedule at the present time for the planned liftoff at thirty-seven minutes past the hour.

Spacecraft test conductor has now completed the status check of his personnel in the control room. All report that they are go for the mission, and this has been reported to the test supervisor.

The test supervisor is now going through additional status checks.

Launch operations manager reports go for launch.

Mission Control at Houston reports that all systems on the Ares orbital booster cluster are also nominal and ready to support the mission. The need to be in plane with the cluster, to enable the docking, is imposing a tight window on today’s launch.

Launch director now gives the go. We are at T minus four minutes fifty seconds and counting.

At launch time, you may wish to look out for flights of pelicans, egrets, and herons, from the marshy land here on Merritt Island. Forty years ago Merritt pretty much belonged to the birds, and they’re still here, although nowadays they’re disturbed every few months by a new launching.

It has taken nine Saturn VB launches so far to put the Ares complex into orbit. Today’s will be the tenth. So nesting isn’t so good anymore.

T minus four minutes and counting. As a preparation for main engine ignition, the fuel valve heaters have been turned on. T minus three minutes fifty-four seconds and counting. The final fuel purge on the main engines has been started. That’s the vapor you can see there, billowing across the launchpad, away from the Saturn booster.

The liquid oxygen replenish system has been turned off, so we can pressurize the tanks for the launch.

The wind is below ten knots, and we have a thin cloud layer. That’s pretty nearly perfect launch weather, well within mission parameters.

It is typically hot, humid Florida weather here, on this historic day, Thursday, March 21, 1985.

T minus three minutes forty seconds and counting.

I am told that there are an estimated one million here with us today, the largest turnout for a launch since Apollo 11. Welcome to all of you. You might like to know that among the celebrities watching the launch today in the VIP enclosure are Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Joe Muldoon. and Michael Collins, cosmonaut Vladimir Viktorenko, along with Liza Minnelli, Clint Eastwood, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, William Shatner, sci-fi authors Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and Isaac Asimov, and singer John Denver. We’re sure you aren’t going to be disappointed.

T minus three minutes twenty seconds and counting. Ares is now on internal power.

Coming up on T minus three minutes.

T minus three minutes and counting.

The engine gimbal check is under way, to ensure that the engines are moving freely, ready for flight control.

T minus two minutes fifty-two seconds. The liquid oxygen valves on both stages have been closed and pressurization of fuel and oxidizer tanks has begun.

T minus two minutes twenty-five seconds and counting. The liquid oxygen tanks are now at flight pressure.

Coming up on two minutes away from launch.

T minus two minutes mark, and counting. Two minutes from launch.

The liquid hydrogen vent valves have been closed and the hydrogen tanks’ flight pressurization is under way.

T minus one minute fifty seconds and counting. No holds so far.

Capcom John Young has just said, Smooth ride, baby, to astronauts Phil Stone, Ralph Gershon, and Natalie York. Mission Commander Stone has replied, Thank you very much, we know it will be a good flight.

T minus one minute thirty-five seconds and counting.

T minus one minute ten seconds and counting. All liquid hydrogen tanks are at flight pressure.

T minus one minute, mark, and counting.

The firing system for the sound-suppression water system will be armed just a couple of seconds from now.

The firing system has now been armed.

T minus forty-five seconds and counting.

T minus forty seconds and counting. The development flight instrumentation recorders are on. We are still go with Ares.

Astronaut Stone reports: It feels good.

T minus thirty seconds.

We are just a few seconds away from switching on the redundant sequence. This is the automatic system for engine cutoff.

T minus twenty-seven seconds and counting.

We have go for redundant sequence start.

T minus twenty seconds and counting. Sound-suppression system fired. Solid Rocket Boosters armed.

T minus fifteen, fourteen, thirteen.

T minus ten, nine, eight.

Main engine start.

Book One

DECISION

Thursday, February 13, 1969

MEMORANDUM for

- The Vice President

- The Secretary of Defense

- The Acting Administrator, National Aeronautics and Space Administration

- The Science Advisor

It is necessary for me to have in the near future a definitive recommendation on the direction which the U.S. space program should take in the post-Apollo period. I, therefore, ask the Secretary of Defense, the Acting Administrator of NASA, and the Science Advisor 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 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.

Source: 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 shielded 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.

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 next came the stretch, as the stack reached up under the pressure of that immense thrust. She could feel the ship pushing upward, 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.

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 upward 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 the 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 forward. The whole stack had pitched over; she was sitting up in her couch, 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, blocking out the daylight.

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 was behind Gershon’s head, with 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 point Five Mach, Young said.

Point five Mach. 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 the cabin 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.

Point nine Mach, 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 back to ease the stack through max-Q, the point when air density and the booster’s 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 Mach one point nine. 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 match-sticks, 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 downrange.

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 purr of the Command Module’s equipment.

Everything was smooth, ticking, regular. 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 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 out of her window. There was a darkening blue sky above, a vivid bright segment of clouds and wrinkled ocean below.

Stone said drily, Ah, Houston, we advise the visual is go today.

There was a lot of debris coming past York’s exposed window, 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, 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 at eight plus thirty-four."

Ares had reached Mach 15, at an altitude of eighty miles. And still the engines burned: still they climbed upward. 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 the stack he commanded was moving at five miles per second.

York gazed out of the window, 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 Earthlike.

Outside, Armstrong was moving about with what looked like ease, bouncing across the beachlike 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 backward, 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, which Armstrong had deployed to film his own egress, sitting on its stowage tray hinged out from the LM. 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 spiderlike 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 on to 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, zappits, 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, resilien 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 on the Moon, 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 there 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 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 1969 A.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 there, 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; on the Moon, 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 Office 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, in his oddly unstructured way. was impatience. He and Armstrong had little enough time there 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 gotten 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, 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 country, 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 farther. Here, at this moment of Apollo’s triumph, I would like to set my country a new challenge: to go farther and farther than most of us have dreamed—to continue the building of our great ships, and to fly them onward 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 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 that desolate place. Suddenly he got a sense of perspective of the distance he’d traveled, to go there: 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 the experience 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 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 one terrific 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, toylike LM.

Saturday, October 4, 1969

NUCLEAR ROCKET DEVELOPMENT STATION, JACKASS FLATS, NEVADA

Asmell 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 remember reading 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. That 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 west—away from the control buildings, where the car was parked—toward the static test site, Engine Test Facility One.

The 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 ponytail, showed his Irish extraction. 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. She 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 developed a close relationship since Ben’s assignment as astronaut representative on the project. She’d no doubt Mike was throwing himself into the camaraderie of the station—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; 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 there 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; those big Romanian-peasant eyebrows she hated so much were creased in concentration.

The visit was important to Conlig.

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

Anyhow, he was keen to show Natalie the 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 that. But the world looked different to Conlig. To him, that 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. You see, 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 Ph.D.—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 strange to think 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, as 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 outperform 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 would 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 were due to report in September. The rumors were they would endorse a manned Mars landing program. And when that happened, Conlig’s 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. "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, 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. Afterward 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 cushion.

Ben turned on his 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’re 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 shaken by what she’d seen of the nuclear test station, and she felt like arguing, trying to get it out of her system. 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 that her response there hadn’t been what he’d hoped for.

He said, 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 hadn’t 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 do you have 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? If he’d not been around as a cheerleader on the sidelines, maybe the whole program would have gotten 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—

Tell me.

Pictures of Mars.

Priest looked at her, evidently intrigued. Really?

"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 1 percent 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. Like all planets, Mars circled the sun; 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 Mars would come closest to Earth when sun, Earth, and Mars where lined up, in that order. 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 that, a sudden sense of herself as a passenger on the Earth—as if it were a giant spinning spaceship, steaming past that 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, "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 face mask. We thought we saw seasonal changes in dark patches on the surface that were maybe due to some kind of spreading vegetation.

"But now, everything looks different. We had it wrong—all of it. Earthlike, Mars certainly isn’t."

It was Mariner’s seventh picture that was the real