Voyage

Ocher light, oddly mottled, shone down through the little Command Module window beside her: Mars, grown so huge it no longer fitted into the window; Mars, sliding like oil past the glass.

“Three minutes to loss of signal,” capcom John Young called up.

“Roger,” Stone replied.

The crew sat side by side in Apollo. York’s pressure suit felt hot, bulky, the angular acceleration couch uncomfortably restricting after so long in the Mission Module’s shirtsleeved environment.

“Ares, Houston, we read you as go for Mars Orbit Insertion. Everything is go for MOI. Two minutes to loss of signal. Be assured you’re riding the best bird we can find.”

“Thank you, John. We appreciate that.”

Sure. But Young’s assurances weren’t all that comforting, York thought.

Just now, Ares was free-falling past Mars. Even if the big MS-II engines failed altogether, they still had enough speed to escape from Mars’s gravity well and emerge on a free return trajectory back to Earth.

But if Stone, and Mission Control, decided to commit to MOI, the Mars Orbit Insertion burn, then their final abort option would be gone. They would be committed to Mars orbit.

MOI really was the moment of truth, the moment when Ares finally cut the long, fragile ties of gravity and celestial mechanics that could draw it home to Earth again.

But Ares was about to fall around the back of Mars, into its shadow, and out of radio line of sight of Earth; and it was at that point, with Stone able to rely on nothing but the instruments in Ares, that the burn would be initiated. The crew would be on their own — isolated by time lag and the rocky bulk of Mars — when it most mattered.

According to the ground’s best predictions, they were going to hit the MOI window within plus or minus ten miles of the required height above Mars.

However, who the hell believed predictions?

The MS-II was going to impose a tough acceleration. So all the stack’s remaining modules — the MS-II and MS-IVB booster stages, then the MEM, the Mission Module, and Apollo — were still strung out along the center line of the stack, along the line of the burn. Then, after the burn was completed, and they were safely in Mars orbit — if they got there — the crew would have to go through a complex repositioning exercise to prepare for the landing. It was one hell of a way to run a mission, York thought: to reassemble your spacecraft in Mars orbit…

“One minute to loss of signal,” said Stone.

“One minute,” John Young said, almost simultaneously. He must be timing his transmissions so they arrived to match their local events. “Ares, this is Houston. All your systems are looking good going around the corner.”

“Copy that, John.”

York could hear the tension in Stone’s voice. Gershon sat in the center couch, uncharacteristically silent, pensive.

The ocher light shifted. She looked up.

Ares was dipping low across Mars.

Less than three hundred miles beneath York, a mottled, battered landscape slid by. She could see Arabia, a bright yellow circular area, and to its right an irregular, blue-black patch, the volcanic plateau called the Syrtis Major Planum. Syrtis had been the first Martian feature observed by telescope from Earth. And now I am falling ass-backwards over Syrtis itself; I can see it before me, a lurid patch the size of my hand.

She felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up, prickling. She was so close that Syrtis slid across her field of view, falling toward her as Ares slid deeper into Mars’s gravity well, moving past her fast enough for it to change the lighting conditions in her cabin.

The belly of Mars seemed to bulge out at her. Mars was a small world; in contrast to Earth, she could see its curvature prominently, even at such a low altitude.

She tried to be analytical, to separate the panorama into geological units…

But it was a battered, tired landscape. The land was the color of bruises, inflicted by the ancient meteorite impacts: like accumulated porphyrin, which the little world was unable to break down. Bruises on the face of a corpse, left there for all time. It was a surprisingly depressing panorama, obviously lifeless.

“Thirty seconds,” Stone said.

York turned briefly to her own workstation. On the first pass around the planet, the science platform was working at full capacity, taking observations of the surface and atmosphere. Even the tail-off of the radio carrier during loss of signal, as Earth was eclipsed by the atmosphere of Mars, would give a lot of information about the structure of the Martian air.

These first observations were important. If the burn went wrong, and the mission turned into nothing more than a flyby, it could be that these contingency observations would be the most significant data that Ares would return.

Ares dipped lower, and swept over the line between night and day. She was granted a brief glimpse of a line of craters picked out by the last of the sun, their wind-eroded rims casting long shadows across the ancient, resilient surface.

“Ares, Houston, coming up to loss of signal,” Young said from distant Mission Control. “You’re go all the way, guys.”

“Thanks a lot,” Stone said. “See you on the other side, John. Ten. Nine.”

…Then the cratered contrast was gone, and Ares flew into shadow, over a land immersed in unbroken darkness. The Solar System is full of empty, unlit worlds, she thought. Earth is the exception. She felt isolated, vulnerable. A long way from home.

“Three. Two. One.”

Static burst from the grilles on the science-station racks, from the little speakers in her headset.

LOS had come right on time. That meant their trajectory was true.

Gershon laughed, explosively. “How about that. Right on the button. Hey, Phil. I wonder if they just turned it off. Wouldn’t that be terrific? I can imagine John saying, ‘They’re just a bunch of uptight assholes. Whatever happens, just turn the damn thing off…’ ”

York could see Stone in profile, beyond the cupped headrest of his couch. He was grinning, but it was a tight grin that showed a lot of teeth. “Let’s go to the MOI checklist, Ralph. Ah, coming up on ten minutes fifteen to MOI.”

York craned her head upward, staring at the circular patch of darkness that was Mars. She summoned up a map of the surface in her mind. Ares was traveling over the Hesperia Planum, another volcanic plain to the east of Syrtis, close to the equator.

She could see traces, outlines, glimmers of white against the darkness. Has to be starlight, picking out the CO2 ice.

She had seen nomads’ campfires burn, pinpricks in the night of the huge deserts of Earth. But there were no fires in the Martian desert. In fact, of all the worlds of the Solar System, only Earth — with its oxygen-rich atmosphere — knew fire.

“Five minutes to the burn.”

She was sealed into her suit, shut in with the hiss of oxygen, the whir of fans, the scratch of her own breathing. She felt isolated, cut off. Lousy design. I need to hold somebody’s hand.

“Okay, Ralph,” Stone said. “Translation control power, on.”

“On.”

“Rotational hand controller number two, armed.”

“Armed.”

“Okay. Stand by for the primary TVC check.”

“Pressures coming up nicely,” Gershon said. “Everything is great…”

A hundred feet behind them, the big MS-II injection stage was rousing from its long, interplanetary hibernation. Heaters in the big cryogenic tanks were boiling off vapor, bringing up a pressure sufficient to force propellant and oxidizer out of the tanks, and Stone and Gershon were running tests of the sequence which would bring the hydrogen and oxygen into explosive combination inside the combustion chambers of the four J-2S engines.

In the window above her, she could see a segment of a circle: bone white in the starlight, quite precise, immense.

“…Oh, my God.”

Stone twisted, awkward in his suit, and peered over his shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

“Look at that. I think it’s Hellas.” The deepest impact crater on Mars. And white, with its frozen lake of carbon dioxide. Somewhere in there, the Soviets had set down Mars 9.

Stone grunted. “You’re going to be looking at that for a long time.” He turned his back, his disapproval evident, and resumed the preburn checklist with Gershon.

“Thirty seconds,” Stone said. “Everything is looking nominal. Still go for MOI.”

He placed his gloved hand over the big plastic firing button.

The whole burn was automated, York knew, controlled by computers in the cluster’s Instrumentation Unit, the big doughnut of electronics behind the Mission Module. Multiple computers, endlessly checking everything and backing each other up and taking polls among themselves. It was hard to see what could go wrong. Nevertheless, Stone sat there with his hand on the button, ready to take over if he had to. To York, it looked comical — and yet, somehow heroic as well. Touching.

“Twenty seconds,” Stone said. “Brace, guys.”

“All systems are go for MOI,” Gershon said.

York checked her own racks. “Roger, go.”

She checked the restraints across her chest, rapidly, and settled her head against her canvas headrest. She tried to make sure there were no creases or folds in the thick layers of the pressure suit under her legs or back.

She felt her heart pound, and chill sweat broke out across her cheeks and under her chin.

“T minus ten seconds,” Gershon said.

Stone’s hands hovered over his controls.

“Eight seconds.”

“I got a 99,” Stone said. He pushed a button. “Press to proceed.”

York felt air rush out of her in a sigh.

“Six seconds,” Gershon said. “Five, four. Ullage.”

There was a brief rattle, a sharp kick in the small of her back. Eight small solid-fuel rockets, clustered around the base of the MS-II, had given the booster a small shove, helping the propellants settle in their tanks.

Gershon said, “Two. One. Ignition.”

The crisp ullage shove died, to be replaced by a smooth, steady push that she felt in her back, her neck, her thighs.

The force built up rapidly. The silence was eerie. She had her back to the direction of thrust, and she felt as if she was sitting up and being hurled forward, into some unknown future.

“Fifteen seconds in,” Stone said. “Point five G. Climbing.”

After a year of zero G, the pressure already felt enormous. So much for all those hours of exercises; didn’t do a damn bit of good.

There was a shudder, a vibration that set into the walls and equipment racks around her. Loose gear rattled. She heard a clatter somewhere behind her: some bit of equipment, inadequately stowed, falling the length of the Command Module.

“One G,” Stone called. “Two.”

The pressure built up further, compressing her chest.

“Jesus,” Gershon said. He had to shout over the rattling of the walls and equipment. “Eight minutes of this.”

“Can it,” Stone snapped. “Two point five Gs. We’re doing fine. Right down Route One. Three point six. Hang on, guys.”

She felt unable to breathe. It was as if the pressure suit was tightening around her, constricting her. It was a bizarre, terrifying, claustrophobic experience.

A fringe of bubbly darkness gathered at the edge of her vision.

They were utterly alone, inside a tiny artifact arcing above the surface of an empty planet, reliant on the smooth working of their machines to survive.

“Four point three Gs,” Stone called. She could hear the rattle of the thrust in his voice. “That’s it. That’s the peak. Coming up on pericenter.”

Stone and Gershon began to run through a readout of the status of the maneuver so far.

“Burn time four four five.” Four minutes, forty-five seconds. Halfway through. “Ten values on the angles: BGX minus point one, BGY minus point one, BGZ plus point one…” Velocity errors on the burn were amounting to only a foot per second, along each of the three axes of space. “No trim. Minus six point eight delta-vee-cee. Fuel thirty-eight point eight. Lox thirty-nine zip, plus fifty on balance. We ran an increase on the PUGS. Projected for a two nineteen point nine times twelve six eleven point three…”

York translated the numbers in her head. The burn was working. The cluster was heading for an elliptical orbit, two hundred by twelve thousand miles: almost perfect.

“Hey, Natalie.” It was Gershon.

“What?”

“Look up.”

With an effort, she tilted back her head. The helmet restricted her, and under the acceleration her skull felt as if it had been replaced by a ball of concrete, tearing at her neck muscles.

Through her small window she saw the battered southern plain of Mars.

And the bulging landscape above her was lit up, right at the center, by a soft, pink glow; it was like a highlight on a huge, ocher bowling ball.

It was the glow of the burn, the light of the MS-II.

For the first time in the planet’s four-billion-year history, artificial light had come to the Martian night.

Friday, August 17, 1984

The questions came drifting out of a sea of lights so intense that they seemed to bake York’s face dry.

“How does it feel to be on the crew?” “What about the guys you beat out?” “Who will be first on the surface?” “What’s it like in space?…”

The three of them — chaperoned by Joe Muldoon and Rick Llewellyn, head of NASA’s Public Affairs Office — sat on a rickety podium, with the NASA logo emblazoned behind them, and a Revell model of a Columbia MEM on the table before them. The briefing room in the Public Affairs Office was packed, and in front of their table there was what the Old Heads called a goat fuck, an unseemly scramble of microphones and camera lenses, pushed into the faces of the astronauts.

Rarely in York’s life had people been interested enough to ask her to explain herself, her background, her motives, her hopes and fears. And now everything about her was significant: everything that had happened in her life, every aspect of her personality.

It was probably going to last forever. And she found she hated it.

She envied Phil Stone, with his neat, crew-cut good looks and his hint of a Midwestern twang — the stereotypical astronaut hero — for the grace with which he fielded the dumbest, most repetitive questions. And the press had already taken Ralph Gershon to their hearts for his infectious grins — the glamorous, hell-raising bachelor spaceman — and for his wisecracking, and the hint of danger, of ambiguity about him. Even if he did make Rick Llewellyn visibly nervous every time he opened his mouth. And even if there was, as far as York was concerned, an undertow of racism about the patronizing affection with which Gershon was treated.

And that left York: in her own view, the least equipped to handle the media pressure, but the one on whom most interest was focused. And all for the wrong reasons.

It had started the day after her place in the crew was announced. All the outlets used the same ancient stock NASA photo of her, holding up an outdated biconic MEM model. “This quiet, intent and dedicated scientist…” “Redhead Natalie York is, at 37, unmarried and without children…” “We asked beautician Marcia Forbes what advice she would give America’s premier spacewoman. Well, to begin, with those eyebrows, you know…” “This mop-haired 35-year-old native of L.A….” “…A crop-haired brunette of medium height, Natalie York is said to be disconcerted by the prospect of publicity…” “Her dark, close-cropped hair and her Latin good looks make Natalie a woman of glamour and mystery, but a natural for the role of America’s first woman on Mars…”

Hair, eyebrows, and teeth. It drove her crazy.

Already they’d tracked down her mother, who was loving the attention, and Mike Conlig and his new family, who weren’t.

It would help if NASA had given her any preparation for handling the feeding frenzy. Even basic communications training. Instead, the only guideline was: Don’t embarrass the Agency.

Some of the questions were tougher, more pointed, than others.

“Doesn’t the case of Adam Bleeker indicate that we’re not yet ready to send humans on these immense long-duration missions? That we don’t yet know enough about the effects of microgravity on the body? That, in fact, the Ares mission is an irresponsible jaunt?”

“You’re surely right we don’t know enough,” Muldoon said smoothly. “But the only way we’re going to find out is by getting out there and working in microgravity and studying the effects. Sure there are dangers, but we accept them as part of the job. It’s a price of being first. You ought to know that Adam was broken up to be taken off the flight, medical risks or not; and I know everyone in the Astronaut Office would volunteer to take his place…”

“Ralph, you want to talk about your Cambodia runs?”

“Ah, that’s all in the public record now, and I have nothing more to add. It’s all a long time ago.”

“But how do you feel about having to distort records and maintain a cover-up that lasted for years before—”

“You can read about it in my memoirs, Will.”

Laughter.

“What about Apollo-N?”

Muldoon leaned into his microphone. “Ah, what about it, sir?”

“I took the JSC visitors’ tour earlier on. Big heroic machines. Lots of plaques about Apollo 11. Mission Control as a national monument, sure. But Apollo-N might never have happened, still less the Apollo 1 fire, for all the evidence I saw at JSC. What is it with you people? How can you pretend that everything’s upbeat, that nothing bad ever happens?”

“We don’t pretend that at all,” Muldoon said. “I think the crash is uppermost in our minds, every day.”

“That’s what you call it? The crash? The damn thing didn’t crash; it exploded in orbit.”

“We have to learn from what went wrong, move forward, make sure that the losses we suffered aren’t wasted. We can’t afford to brood, or be deterred from our intentions.”

“Look, I’m from out of town. All around JSC I saw Apollo-N car lots and shopping plazas. There’s even an Apollo-N memorial park, for God’s sake. Don’t you think a public reaction like that, spontaneous and visible, deserves something more from you people than ‘learning from what went wrong’?…”

Hell, yes, York thought. Some around JSC thought the malls and so forth were tacky, somehow undignified. York didn’t; as the reporter was implying, such things were symbols erected by the people out there as they responded to the human tragedy. Sure, it was car lots and malls: what the hell else were they supposed to do?

But she’d also gotten to know the pilots’ viewpoint well enough to understand it. They’d accepted the deaths, put Apollo-N behind them, and moved on. Ben would have done just the same. It was difficult for an outsider to accept, but that was the culture.

York wasn’t a pilot, though. She’d spent long enough agonizing over her own role in NASA, in the wake of Ben’s death. As if there wasn’t already enough doubt, enough ambiguity in her mind.

She’d resolved it by determining, in the privacy of her own mind, that everything she did from then on was for Ben. It was as simple as that.

A strident woman stood up. “Natalie, as a scientist, how do you respond to those people who claim that the whole of the Mars expedition is a stunt, a fake? — that instead of traveling to Mars you’ll just be closeted away in some studio in Houston for a year, bounding around a mock-up of the MEM?”

That did it. York was incensed. She leaned forward so her voice boomed from the speakers. “Look, I’ve really no time for crap like this. We’re training for a deep-space mission, for Christ’s sake. Why should we give up our time, put more pressure on ourselves, just to respond to dumb-ass remarks like—”

Phil Stone put his hand over her microphone.

“I understand how Natalie feels,” he said smoothly. “Believe me. The suggestion’s just implausible. I think the best proof I can offer you that our mission is genuine is this: it’s probably easier to fly to Mars for real than to fake it up.”

That got a laugh, and the moment passed.

York tried to steady her breathing. She knew she was in for a lecture from Rick Llewellyn later.

“What about sex?”

Stone asked, “What do you mean?”

A male reporter in a seedy Lieutenant Columbo raincoat got up, a grin on his face. “What about sex? You’re all normal, healthy adults — America’s first mixed space crew — and you’ll be cooped up in that dinky Mission Module for eighteen months. And Ralph and Natalie aren’t married… Come on. Two guys and one gal? What a situation.”

York felt her cheeks burn. I could just walk out of this. Yeah. And out of the mission.

Gershon was grinning, enjoying it all hugely.

Stone pursed his lips. “I take it you know the official NASA line. It’s in our induction handbooks. Close coupling of crew members is to be avoided.” He smiled, self-deprecating, completely in control. “Some help.” Another laugh. “But I’d say that advice is basically right. Hell, we’re all adults. But a sexual relationship between crew members — or, more importantly, a special emotional relationship — would be harmful to the stability of the crew as a whole, and might compromise our ability to support the whole crew through the entire duration of the mission. And if you fully understand the potential for negative impact — you’ve got jealousy, special treatment, circumvention of the chain of command, recrimination and regret when you fall out, and so on — I bet this avoidance will be adopted as a group norm on future mixed flights.”

Gershon cocked his head. “Adopted as a what?”

“Pay more attention to your psych training, Gershon.”

Another laugh. Another defused moment.

York hoped the color was fading from her cheeks. It was remarkable the way Stone could turn out the party line, though. The same bland crap, the half-lie which NASA had fed to the world since the days of Mercury.

And I’m just part of the machine now, she thought. An accomplice in the traditional lie. I’m an astronaut, now; my human needs don’t exist anymore, officially.

The reporter’s question, if facetious, was actually perceptive. NASA was terrific at the technology, she thought, but stunningly bad at dealing with the needs of the soft, pink bodies they loaded inside their gleaming von Braun dream machines — unable even to recognize that those needs existed.

The questions continued to come, sliding from topic to topic. And all of them, York thought, looking for ways into the central, banal question anyone wanted to ask of an astronaut:

What does it feel like, in space? On the Moon? On Mars?

At first it seemed just dumb to her: naive, too open, without a possible answer. And the way it cropped up, in one form or another, at every conference irritated her.

Today, Joe Muldoon tried to answer it.

“I’m just an ordinary guy. But I guess you could say I’ve done something extraordinary.

“Let me tell you what it was like. When you look down on the Earth from orbit, you forget about your hassles: the bills you have to pay, the trouble you’re having with your car. Instead, all you think about is the people: the people you know and care about, down there in that blue bowl of air. And you realize, somewhat, how much indeed you do care about them…”

Save for Muldoon’s voice, the room was silent.

She watched the questioners, tough, cynical pressmen all, as they fixed on the face of the astronaut. Even the woman who’d asked about the fake-up was listening, intent, trying to understand.

Muldoon was saying, “To see the Earth fall away behind your receding capsule… To stand on the Moon, and see that little world curve away under your feet: to be cognizant that you are one of just two humans on this whole goddamn planet, and to be able to hold your hand up and cover the Earth…”

Here you had a handful of men who had done something extraordinary: flown beyond the air, even walked on the airless surface of the Moon — unimaginable things, things which nothing in their human evolutionary heritage had prepared them for. And York began to see that something in the press people — masked by all the banter and joshing and bluster — was responding to that. Something primeval.

You’ve been up there. I could never go. Don’t say you’re just an ordinary guy. What is it like? Tell me.

As the astronauts spoke to the public — even though, for God knew what reason, even a skilled operator like Muldoon always seemed to fall into a stilted jargon littered with “somewhat” and “cognizant” — a very basic and primal communication was struggling to happen, a layer under the spoken. The words of Muldoon and the rest weren’t enough; they could never be. York often had the feeling that people wanted to close in and touch the astronauts. As if they were gods. Or as if information, sensations, memories could be transmitted through the skin.

But she could not contribute to that process. How could she? She’d never flown higher than in a T-38.

She felt like a fake, sitting there bathed in TV lights, alongside a man who had bent down and run his fingers through lunar dirt. October 1984

…How frequently we perceive our national debates about the future of SPACE TRAVEL veering between hysterical extremes! And all of it is played out against the background of the most cynically AMORAL times in living memory.

While the “yuppies” parade their Rolex watches and their BMW sports cars, and while our illusory economic “upturn” is fueled only by the President’s massive rise in MILITARY EXPENDITURE — which is itself inherently inflationary, and to which the Mars mission has become explicitly linked, by NASA’s supporters in politics — all of which is leading to an immense DEFICIT which we will bequeath to our children — the income gap between richest and poorest is at its widest in two decades.

And that very DEFICIT is itself a cynical manipulation of the economy by an administration which is determined that there shall be no opportunity, because of the DEFICIT burden, for an expansion in welfare spending or other programs in the years beyond President Reagan’s retirement in 1988.

At its grandest, the dehumanizing experience of SPACE can lead us, paradoxically, to a fuller understanding of the HUMANITY the astronauts must cast aside. Indeed it can teach us a truer perspective:

— CONTEMPT for our works.

— VALUE of ourselves.

It is a new perspective which can lead us closer to GOD.

But all too often the experience of SPACE, certainly as portrayed to the general public by the government information organizations and public bodies supporting and opposing the space initiative, veers between twin mirror-image idols, both of them false:

— MELLONOLATRY, that is the baseless worship of technology for its own sake.

— MISONEISM, an equally baseless fear and hatred of technology.

What better argument for casting aside our rocket vessels now, with their deadly NUCLEAR hearts!…

Source: Excerpt from “Mellonolatry and Misoneism: The Twin Idols of Space,” Rev. B. Seger, Church of St. Joseph of Cupertino. All rights reserved.

Monday, December 3, 1984

Ralph Gershon was standing in the hatchway of the MEM mock-up, his face visible behind his clear visor. “Okay, Natalie. You want to come in now?”

“Rog, Ralph.”

York, on the faked-up Martian surface, took a deliberate step toward the MEM.

As she moved, the harness around her chest hauled at her brutally, and she was dragged upward through a couple of feet. She tripped. The suit, pressurized at three and a half pounds per square inch, was like a balloon around her, and it kept her body stiff, like a manikin, and she couldn’t save herself.

She toppled like a felled tree.

She fell on her knees, with her gloved hands in the dirt. The soil in front of her face was dried-out Houston gumbo, sprinkled with pink gravel: she was on what the astronauts called, inaccurately, a rock pile, a simulated Martian surface. The surface was more or less flat, because flat areas were where the more conservative mission planners wanted to put the MEM down.

“Goddamn this harness.”

“You tell it, Natalie. You want any help?”

“No. No, I’ll manage, damn it.”

York was lashed up to a tethered Mars gravity simulator. The harness around her chest was attached by cables to a pole above her; the cables led to pulleys which offset two-thirds of her weight. Just like on Mars. Except on Mars, there wouldn’t be some ludicrous, clumsy rope hauling unpredictably at her back every time she took a step.

To get upright, for example, she had to push at the ground, and let the harness haul her upright, and scrabble with her ankles at the soil, hoping not to tip over backwards again.

She stood there teetering on her feet, her hands outstretched for balance. Through her helmet she could hear ironic applause from the technicians.

“Ignore the assholes,” Gershon advised.

“Rog.” She took a breath. “Here I come again, Ralph.”

“Just take it steadily, Natalie. That’s my girl…”

She took a slow and measured step. It was actually a lot easier to take her feet off the surface than to put them back down again. She seemed to drift in a shallow parabola through the air before each step was completed, and she grounded with a crunch in the dried gumbo. It was like swimming through some viscous liquid, all her motions rendered slow, dreamlike, unstable.

At last, though, she seemed to be getting up a little momentum. The mass of her backpack tugged at her, its inertia constantly dragging her off her line; whenever she wanted to change direction she had to think four or five steps ahead.

The MEM drifted before her, remote and all but unattainable, bathed in movie-set floodlights. The mock-up’s hatch gaped open, the fluorescent light within revealing the hardwood-and-ply nature of its construction.

Not far from the MEM was a mocked-up Mars Rover, the TV camera mounted on its prow swiveling to stare at her with its dark lens. The camera was live. York, under its gaze, felt like some gorilla loping around its cage.

Ralph, of course, had taken to Mars-walking as if he’d been born to it.

What they were doing was actually a simulation of their second walk on Mars, the first time they would get to do any serious work. The first walk would be an hour-long solo by Phil Stone, as commander. The purpose of the first walk — according to the mission plan — was for him to test out the systems of his suit and his general mobility, to check out the status of the MEM after landing, and to resolve any glitches with the comms systems. Stone would do little science, that first time out, except to pick up a small contingency surface sample.

Of course there was a hidden agenda.

The attention of the Earth — and all of NASA’s sponsors in the White House and on the Hill — would be on that first walk, the first small steps by a man on Mars. So all the ceremony — putting up the Stars and Stripes, the footprints-and-flags stuff, the speech by President Reagan (who was basking in his recent landslide win against Teddy Kennedy) — could be gotten out of the way in that first hour. And on Joe Muldoon’s advice, learning from his Apollo experiences, everything in that first walk was being checklisted and time-lined, including Reagan’s call.

After that, hopefully, the rest of the program would be free for some serious work.

It made some sense to York. She knew how such things had to be accommodated. But it still seemed odd to her, sometimes, that NASA should be planning the exploration of Mars around TV ratings.

At last, she reached the MEM. She skidded a little as she came to a halt, at the foot of the ladder down from the hatch.

The simulation supervisor spoke to her over her headset. “Natalie, this time we’d like you to try extracting a SNAP from its cask.”

“Rog.” She tried to keep the weary irritation out of her voice. That meant she had to trudge farther, across to the plywood Mars Rover. She swiveled on her heel like a puppet, until her body was pointing at the Rover, and then lumbered across the crunching surface.

The dummy Surface Experimental Package was already set up, its silver and gold boxes sprawling across the surface in a spiderweb of power cables and data feeds. Some of the cables still needed connecting, as did the antenna for transmitting signals back to Earth. The SNAP generator — System of Nuclear Auxiliary Power — was a box to one side of the little complex. York was supposed to activate it by inserting a little pod of plutonium. The pod — a dummy, one of several — was mounted in a little rack at the back of the Rover. It was a narrow cylinder, maybe a foot long, held inside a graphite storage cask.

She got hold of a handling rod. By pulling a trigger handle, she opened little jaws at the end of the handle and tried to engage them around the pod. Her pressurized, elasticized gloves resisted every movement of her hands; it was like trying to close a fist around a rubber ball.

When she had gotten the handling jaws open, she had to use two hands to guide the open mouth around the end of the pod.

Finally she tried to pull the pod free of its flask. But the damn thing wouldn’t come.

The jaws slipped off the pod, and she staggered backwards. She could hear her breathing rasp, the rattle of the cable on her harness.

“You got any suggestions, Ralph?”

“Hold it there. Let me try that mother.”

She rested surreptitiously against her cables, while Gershon clambered backwards out of the MEM. He wasn’t hooked up to a Peter Pan, so he labored under the full weight of his suit, and his movements were heavy and awkward.

He climbed down the ladder and took the handling rod. With York’s help he got the jaws fitted to the fuel pod. He started to pull; he even leaned back, digging his heels into the dried-out gumbo. But the pod wouldn’t come loose.

The SimSup called, “Ah, you guys want to take a break? That thing sure is jammed.”

“Nope,” said Gershon. “Natalie, let’s try the direct approach. You get hold of the rod, here.”

“Okay.” She took it from him, moving slowly, being careful not to release the grip on the trigger handle.

“Now.” He reached over and took a geological hammer from the loop at her waist. “Start pulling, babe.”

With both hands on the handling rod, she leaned back and dragged.

Gershon started hitting the cask with the hammer, with high, sweeping blows; his whole body had to swivel to deliver the blows.

Every time a blow landed York could feel the fuel pod shudder.

“It’s not working, Ralph.”

“The hell it isn’t.”

He spun like a hammer thrower, and with two hands he delivered one final almighty blow to the cask.

The graphite split right in two.

The fuel pod came free. York stumbled backwards, her boots scuffing at the gumbo in an effort to keep upright. The cables helped her that time, giving her just enough leverage to keep from falling.

The fuel pod went tumbling to the surface, like a dropped relay baton.

Gershon lumbered across to her, his face framed by his visor. “Hey. You okay?”

“Sure. How’s the pod?”

They bent over the little metal cylinder, where it lay in the pink gravel. There was a hairline crack down one seam.

“How about that,” Gershon said. “We busted it. We nuked Mars.”

“Well, it was only a mock-up. Probably the real thing will be tougher.”

“Christ, I hope so.”

“Okay, guys,” the supervisor said. “Both your heart rates are showing a little high. That is definitely it for now. Take five. We’ll resume in an hour.”

Jorge Romero came barging into the simulation chamber. “Goddamn it,” he stormed. “You did it again, Natalie! You broke my damn SEP! And you were a half hour behind schedule!”

York, free of her cabling, was sitting on the Rover with her helmet on her lap, cradling a mug of coffee. She smiled at him. “Oh, take it easy, Jorge. It’s only a sim.”

Romero, small, purposeful, pink with anger, marched back and forth across the fake Martian surface, sending up little sprays of gravel. “But that’s three times out of the last three that my SEP implementation has been screwed up…”

Her training had been intense, the compressed schedule committing her and the others to eighteen hours a day in complex exercises like this, for long weeks at a stretch. She felt her patience drawing thin as Romero paced about. I don’t have time for these debates, Jorge. But she owed him an answer.

“Look,” she said to Romero, “I know how you feel. But you have to make allowances, Jorge. Out on a field trip, you can take as long as you want, days or weeks thinking over a sample if you need to. It’s not like that here. The Marswalks can last only a few hours each. They’ll be even more curtailed than the old Apollo moonwalks. So we have to plan out every step. These simulations are” — she waved a hand — “choreography. It’s a different way of working, for you and me. Real time, they call it.”

Romero was still pissed. “Goddamn it. I’m going to write a memo to Joe Muldoon. All these screwups. Those Flight Operations people just can’t be running the mission properly.”

“But that’s the point of the sim, Jorge. We’re supposed to break things.” She found a grin spreading across her face, but she suppressed it. “I’m sorry, Jorge. I do know how you feel. I sympathize.”

He glared at her. “Oh, you do? So you haven’t gone over to the operational camp altogether?”

She winced. “That’s not fair, damn it.”

His anger seemed to recede. He sat on the Rover, small beside her ballooning white suit. “Natalie. I guess you should know. I’m resigning from the program.”

She was startled. “You can’t.” Romero was a principal investigator for Martian geology. If he was lost to the program, its scientific validity would be greatly diminished. “Come on, Jorge.”

“Oh, I mean it. I’m almost sure I’m going to do it.” He looked around at the sandpit sourly. “In fact, I think today has made up my mind for me. And if you had any integrity left, Natalie York, you’d quit, too.”

“Jorge, are you crazy? You’ll have a geologist on Mars. What more do you want, for Christ’s sake?”

“No. You’ll be a technician, at best. Natalie, Ares is a marvelous system, operationally. Scientifically, it’s Apollo all over again. Look at this.” He waved a hand around the sim site. “All the stuff you’ll actually use to explore Mars. Pulleys and ropes. The MET. That damn beach buggy, the Rover, with its carrying capacity of, what, a few hundred pounds? And the way you fumble with those gloves and that ludicrous handling rod.” His voice was tight, his color rising; he was genuinely angry, she saw “Natalie, all you have to do is look around you to see where the balance of the investment has gone. Did you know they’ve spent more on developing a long-lasting fabric for a Martian Stars and Stripes than on the whole of my SEP?”

Operational. Romero had used the word as if it was an obscenity. Once, York thought, she would have, too. But maybe she saw a better balance. A space program, especially something right out on the edge like the Ares shot to Mars, had to be a mix of the operational and the scientific. Without the operational, there wouldn’t be any scientific anyhow.

She tried to explain some of this to Romero.

“Save it, Natalie. I’ve gone over it all a hundred times. I’ll not be convinced. And as for you—” He hesitated.

“Yes? Say it, Jorge.”

“I think you’ve sold out, Natalie. I supported your application to NASA. Damn it, I got you in here. I hoped you could make a difference. But you’ve gone native. Now we have Apollo all over again, the same damn mistakes. But this time — in part, anyhow — it’s your fault. And mine. And I’m sorry.”

He climbed off the Rover, stiffly, and walked away.

York found herself shaking, inside her pressure suit, from the ferocity of his attack.

January 1985

In addition to their rising workload as launch day approached, the crew were still expected to attend PR functions. The astronauts called it “time in the barrel.” Usually a head of a chamber of commerce would need a showpiece astronaut to attend a reception and shake hands and pose for pictures and spread goodwill.

York was lousy at it, and she tended to be kept behind the scenes, mostly doing goodwill tours to various NASA and contractor facilities. Gershon spent a lot of his time at Newport, where even so close to launch, the Columbia engineers were struggling to comb out the MEM problems highlighted by the D-prime mission and other tests, and complete their flight article, the MEM that would land on Mars.

York was sent up to Marshall.

They put her up overnight at the Sheraton Wooden Nickel in Huntsville, a town which the tourist information called “Rocket City.” The next day she was taken on a tour of Marshall by a couple of eager young engineers. Marshall had been hived off into NASA from the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, but its military origins were obvious; in fact it occupied a couple of thousand acres within the Redstone Arsenal. She was shown a spectacular rocket garden at the Space Orientation Center, and shown around a huge test stand used in the development of Saturn F-1 engines. Saturn stages were assembled here, and then, bizarrely, transported by water routes to the Cape; they were shipped on barges down the Tennessee River, then moved via the Ohio and Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico, and then around the coast to Florida, where they were brought into the Kennedy waterways.

She spent most of the day in von Braun’s old conference room, with around twenty engineers. Most of them were young Americans, thus confounding her prejudice about Marshall’s domination by Germans. Each of the engineers got up for a half hour, to talk about his or her specialty, while the rest of them remained in the room, half looking at the speaker, and half at her. It seemed odd. Didn’t those guys have anything better to do than look at her looking at Vu-graphs of rockets?

She was taken to a party at the Marshall people’s country club, called the Mars Club.

There, she started to understand them a little better.

This was an isolated group, stuck there in Alabama, and they ate and drank spaceflight. To them, an astronaut was worthy of much greater homage than you were liable to receive in, say, Houston: and the Ares crew especially, as embodiments of von Braun’s thirty-year-old dream of flying to Mars. Having an astronaut come to Alabama made it all real — and reassuring, in the midst of the usual crisis over the overall NASA budget and the future of the centers.

Later she went out to the Michoud plant in New Orleans, where the big External Tanks were being constructed. She spent longer here; she was being encouraged to make the tanks a specialty during the mission.

The warehouses were immense caverns, big enough to hold the tanks in great cylindrical chunks. She watched the manufacture of a bulkhead, a huge dome which would cap the big liquid hydrogen tank. The dome came in pie-shaped aluminum slices called gores, which needed manufacturing precision far beyond the capability of any hydraulic press. So a forming die, with a flat sheet of aluminum on top, was sunk to the bottom of a sixty-thousand-gallon water tank, and a pattern of explosives was laid over the top. The gore was blasted into shape by surging shock waves.

York was awed by the scale of the enterprise. As she pursued her studies she became fascinated by the tanks, even though they were perhaps the most mundane item in the whole mission.

Each tank contained two massive, domed canisters, of propellant and oxidizer, connected by a cylindrical ring. The tanks were coated with four inches of polyurethane foam and reflective shielding, to reduce boiloff of the cryogenic propellants. Inside the tanks there were zero-G screens and cagelike baffles designed to stop the liquids sloshing during engine fire; the liquids were so heavy — more than two million pounds per tank — that the whole booster cluster could be thrown out of control by a severe enough slosh. And there were antivortex baffles, like huge propeller blades, to prevent the buildup of whirlpools — like those above the plug hole of a draining bath — that could suck bubbles of vapor into the feed pipes…

Because of the need for extreme reliability, and the extraordinary range of conditions a spacecraft faced, every component of Ares contained a hell of a lot more engineering than she’d expected from outside the program. Even these simple babies, the tanks. And because of the limited opportunities to test, traceability was essential: the ability to trace the life history of the humblest component right back to the ore from which it was smelted, to aid analysis in case of a failure.

It was the kind of attention to detail which passed by people — including Capitol Hill decision makers — who balked at the price of components NASA ordered. You want to spend how much, just on a goddamn gas can?

When she was at sites like Michoud — in the thick of the program — the discouragement of Romero’s resignation, and the skepticism, even downright hostility, of some sections of the press to the mission, all fell away from her. How could I turn down a Saturn? It would flawlessly hurl her to Mars, to perform experiments of huge importance. A billion dollars were being invested in her, a billion eyes would be on her to do a good job.

At places like Michoud, she would become convinced that the price she was paying — all the Astronaut Office bullshit, the disruption of her career, the compromises of the science, the laying waste of her personal life — all of it was justified.

…We see that a manned space mission may be viewed as a complex biotechnical and sociotechnical system consisting of manufactured and human parts. A thorough understanding of the psychological and interpersonal dimensions of the Mars mission is crucial for reducing the probability of malfunction of the human part of the system, independently of the structural, mechanical, and electronic elements, thereby forcing the readjustment of the system as a whole. Psychological and interpersonal stresses may be reduced through environmental engineering, manipulating crew composition, and the structuring of situations and tasks…

To York, the psych experts’ pseudoscientific lectures — and the role-playing group exercises, and the individual and group psych analyses the crew had to endure — were the worst part of the premission training. They were invariably excruciatingly dull, or profoundly embarrassing, or both.

York had little experience of the soft sciences; and she was dismayed by how limited the underlying thinking was — even here, in the money-no-object space program. Some of the theories that were being applied to her and her crewmates seemed speculative at best. And it was clear that the study of group psychology — as opposed to an individual’s psychology — was still primitive.

Also, more fundamentally, experience of long-duration spaceflight was still so small that there was hardly any evidence to back up the guidelines and techniques being taught to them.

A deep-space mission like Ares was basically unprecedented. So, to figure out what might befall the mental state of a Mars crew, the research psychologists were having to work from case studies of analogous situations — undersea habitats, nuclear submarines, polar research stations, isolated Canadian villages — and they used data from sensory deprivation experiments, sleeplessness studies, and work on social isolation. And sometimes, it seemed to York, they pushed those analogies a little far.

She’d gotten used to the idea that the Ares flight would take aerospace technology to its limit. It was disturbing to her that the softer disciplines, like psychology, would be pushing at the edge of their envelope, too.

It was disturbing that in this fundamental aspect of the mission, nobody actually knew if the crew could survive the flight.

Later, from Vladimir Viktorenko, York started to learn something of how the Soviets handled such matters.

Small things: the Soviet mission planners would plan the selection of food to suit the taste of the crew. Color schemes for the spacecraft’s walls and equipment would be adjusted carefully. There would be music, on personal players, to suit individual preference. There would be recordings of simple sounds from home: birdsongs, waves on a seashore, falling rain. Cosmonauts were even encouraged to take living things into orbit, perhaps as part of biology experiments: plants, grasses, tadpoles — little droplets of life, said Viktorenko, bits of Earth’s great river of existence, with its source in the great primeval sea which united humans with all living things.

The astronauts tended to dismiss the Soviets as backward, technically, compared to the U.S. But York decided she liked some aspects of the Soviet way. They’d come up with simple, practical, homely ways of dealing with the pink bodies inside the rockets.

She started bringing Viktorenko’s ideas into the psych sessions with Stone and Gershon.

“…The sheer magnitude of the publicity program, I might say, is unmatched by anything we’ve seen since Apollo 11. The Voice of America is heavily involved, of course. We estimate that the VOA can reach twenty-seven percent of the world’s population outside the U.S. This is the biggest operation in their history. Prelaunch we’ll be sending out ten thousand forty-five minute English-language tapes and scripts, to U.S. Information Agency posts around the world. During the key phases of the mission the VOA will be broadcasting live commentary in seven major languages, and summaries in a further thirty-six.

“We’re also sending out special prelaunch press materials, in addition to the regular NASA manned mission press kits we pouch out around the world. These include ninety news wire stories and features sent in the weeks before liftoff; the Life feature on you and your families; a forty-eight page ‘Man on Mars’ color-illustrated pamphlet, four hundred twenty-two thousand copies of that; and one million, nine hundred thousand postcards of the astronauts, of you three. Also we anticipate having in place at the USIA outposts overseas one million Ares lapel buttons, nine full-size Mars-walk space suits, a hundred twenty-five Ares kiosks, with lights, music, transparencies, and posters. We’ve got ten thousand maps of Mars, eight hundred and forty plastic Saturn rockets, two hundred and fifty sixteen-inch Mars globes…”

The statistics went on and on, baffling, the slides bewildering.

For someone responsible for NASA’s PR, York thought, Rick Llewellyn’s speaking style was oddly drab, uninspiring. It was hard to fix your attention on him for much longer than a couple of sentences at a time. It was like one of her early ground-training classroom sessions: all those block diagrams, the endless, droning afternoons.

But the content of Llewellyn’s slide show was terrifying, if you thought about it too hard.

“We’re already planning a world tour for you guys when you get back. Over forty-eight days you will visit thirty-five countries, meeting key groups of press, television, scientists, students, and educators, as well as politicians. You’ll go to Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Spain, France, Belgium, Norway, England…

“We set a couple of broad guidelines for the media stations around the world, a long way back in the mission planning. First, of course, Ares represents man on Mars, it’s a culmination of an age-old dream, it’s in the nature of man to accept difficult challenges, blah-blah, all of that stuff. And then, historically, Ares is built on the achievement of many scientists, Newton and Goddard and von Braun. You know the score. And today Ares has a strong international flavor, with the overseas investigators, the open access to samples and data, the tracking stations around the world, the assistance from the Russians in your training, and so on. Additionally, of course, space is benefiting man — you have a lot of stuff here about the spin-offs — and you have the hope that Ares, spectacular off-Earth achievement as it is, represents a promise that man may eventually use his technologies to resolve the Earth’s intractable problems…”

Ares, as the shop window for technocratic solutions, York thought sourly. Jorge was right. It’s turned out just like Apollo after all.

But today the mood was a little darker than in the 1960s. Today, you had Reagan’s Star Wars talk, of particle beams and lasers and smart bullets. Space was again an arena for flexing national muscles. And Ares was being used, blatantly, by the Reagan administration to appease national and international sensibilities about the aggressive use of space technology.

Ares had become twinned with the Star Wars initiative in the media. Ares was the dreaming half of the U.S. space program, coupled to its threatening sibling. Maybe that had been the administration’s intention all along, when they approved Joe Muldoon’s reshaping of the mission back in ’81.

She could see the hand of Fred Michaels in this, still pulling strings, even from his retirement in Dallas. Michaels had locked Ares together with SDI in the mind of Reagan — and the public and Congress. As long as Reagan kept on pumping billions of dollars into military spending, some of that was going to flow into NASA, to sustain Ares. It was smart footwork by Michaels. Even if it was, she reflected, completely amoral. Do anything, say anything — just keep the mission progressing.

Meanwhile, every news item about her mission — every gimmick, every toy, every image — had multiple meanings, she saw: Ares, as a geopolitical symbol; Ares, as an ad for technocracy.

It would probably always be like that. To gain political advantage was the only reason, really, why any government would fund travel into space.

And here was she, Natalie York, the great skeptic about space, being transformed into one of the great icons of the deadly space glamour business.

She looked up at the screen, at a thousand reproductions of her own face, and shivered.

The tours, the press conferences, the photo opportunities continued.

Her message was formulaic, coached by the Public Affairs Office people. I need you! Do good work!

Everywhere she went, there were people: thousands of them, all gazing at her, smiling, with an odd pregnant distance about them. As if they longed to touch her. And always, they applauded her.

She hadn’t thought much about the future. To her, “after the mission” was so remote it might as well not exist; it was as if her whole life was going to end at the moment she stepped into the Command Module.

But her life afterward would, inexorably, go on. And in a sense nothing she actually did on Mars — not even her precious geology — would matter so much as the simple fact that she’d been there.

She thought of the looks on the faces of the press and public, as they gazed on people who had been into space, to the Moon. When I get back they will look at me in the same way. They do even now. And they’ve a right to; it’s their money.

And what about herself? Would she become like Joe Muldoon, a kind of walking ghost, her life transformed by her brief, dreamlike — and forever unrepeated — interval on Mars?

She began to see a darker side to the fascination with which people regarded her. Sure, they wanted to witness that woman — that otherwise ordinary person — who might walk on Mars, take an unimaginable evolutionary step on their behalf.

But they also thought she might die.

Monday, February 18, 1985

The little cemetery struck York as classic small-town: neat, well tended, the white marble gravestones gleaming in their rows. The open grave was like a wound in the cultivated soil, waiting to be healed.

Somehow, the astronauts, current and former, among the mourners at the graveside — Joe Muldoon, Phil Stone, others — didn’t look out of place, in their crisp black suits, their military bearing. Astronauts were small-town heroes to perfection, nothing more, nothing less.

The day was glorious, the sky an infinite blue, the sunlight sharp with the edge of early spring.

York felt numb, empty, unable to mourn.

Peter Priest had died a squalid death, of a cocaine overdose, at age twenty-five. He’d pissed away his life, she thought brutally, and achieved nothing; what the hell was there to mourn in that? And she shouldn’t feel guilty for her absence of feeling. The kid would probably have opposed this heavyweight turnout for his funeral anyhow; it was all his mother’s idea.

York remembered the little boy who’d gone running around the nuclear rocket plant, all those years ago. What did his death mean? Was it somehow linked to that long-ago day at Jackass Flats — to the space program in general, to its obsessive dedication to its goals — to his father’s final consumption by it?

And how did this new; grisly, numbing event cast light on her own ambiguous relationship with Ben?

She shouldn’t have come. But Karen Priest had asked for her specifically: “Ben often spoke of you. I know you were one of his good friends. I’d be honored if you would be here to remember Petey, as best we can…”

Peter, for Christ’s sake. He wanted to be called Peter. Not much of a thing to ask.

Oddly, Karen didn’t seem as distressed as York had expected. As if she’d accepted Peter’s death as part of the ancient deal she’d made with her husband.

Sometimes York’s lack of feeling at times like this made her wonder if she was somehow less than human. Maybe her single-minded, lifelong pursuit of her own goals had made her obsessive. Hollow inside, as people perceived the space program itself. She simply couldn’t imagine how it felt to be Karen Priest, to have to attend funerals of husband and son within a few years of each other. Maybe NASA ought to fix up a sim of it for me, she thought sourly.

The service was over. The party broke up and people began heading back for their cars: battered Fords for the locals, big hired Chevies for the space program people.

York knew Karen was inviting people back, but she didn’t think she could stand what she was feeling much longer: not grief, but the awful emptiness.

A man — short, overweight, dark — came up to her. “Hi.” He was neatly groomed, and wearing an expensive topcoat. He smiled at her.

Although he looked familiar, at first she didn’t place him. She shied away, studying his face. It wasn’t impossible for press people to have gotten into even as private an event as this; she really, really didn’t want to have to say or do anything that would be quoted.

His smile faded. “You don’t recognize me, do you? My God, Natalie. Well, I guess it’s the new uniform—”

It was Mike Conlig.

“Mike. Jesus. What the hell happened to you?”

He grinned, and self-consciously ran a hand over his clean-shaven chin. “You don’t like it?”

“It’s a hell of a change, Mike.”

“Well, needs must.”

“You still with Oakland?” Conlig had left NASA after the Apollo-N debacle and moved to Oakland Gyroscope.

“Sure.” He looked at her, calculating, as if wondering how she would receive his news. “I’m doing fine there. In fact we’re making parts for the Saturn VB. Maybe you should come visit us someday.”

“Sure,” she said vaguely.

“I’ve moved away from the engineering now. Management.” He laughed, self-deprecating. “There’s talk of making me a veep of technology. Can you believe that? And you — how are you?”

Me? Still playing at being a spacewoman. “Oh, fine,” she said awkwardly. “If you read the press, you probably know more about me than I do.”

“Yeah. I was pleased for you, Natalie. Pleased you achieved what you wanted…” He sounded embarrassed, and he backed off quickly into generalities. “And it’s good the way interest has picked up in the mission, since your appointments were announced. I follow the news, of course. There has been a lot of hostility over the years, to the Mars initiative, hasn’t there? But now that seems to be reversing. It’s like Apollo 11 all over again…”

That seemed to be true, she reflected; a number of people had said it to her. Somehow the general, persistent opposition to manned spaceflight had dissipated, if briefly, as people focused on the three of them, the humans who would be making the extraordinary journey. When spaceflight came down from the realms of rocketry and scientific objectives, and turned into something human, people responded.

But York knew that Muldoon and Josephson and others were already worrying about what would come after Ares, how quickly this mood would dissipate.

“I think it’s because of you, Natalie,” Conlig said hesitantly.

“Me? How so?”

“Because you’re a woman, probably. And because you’re a recognizable human being, definitely. Not one of those damn inarticulate robots they sent to the Moon. Underneath, I figure, people always did want the space program to do well. To go places. It’s a basic human thing. And hell, we can afford it, when Reagan is talking about spending a trillion bucks on defense. But the cold, inhuman face NASA always puts up turns everybody off. But now, people want you to succeed because you are one of us. You know what I mean?” Conlig was studying her, his expression complex.

“Damn it, Mike. That’s probably the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

It was the first time she’d seen him since their final fight, after the NERVA thing. It was brave of him to come, she supposed. If her own feelings about Ben were so complex, so guilt-laden, God alone knew what Mike must be feeling.

But he didn’t seem perturbed. Maybe he’d found some way to rationalize what had happened, his own part in the disaster. If so, she thought, she envied him.

“You should come over,” he said again. “You ought to meet Bobbie.”

“Your wife, right?”

He did a double take. “You haven’t met her.” He turned and pointed vaguely to a slim, blond woman, over by the line of cars. She was holding a child, and she waved back.

“You’ve got a kid.”

“Two.” Conlig grinned, unselfconsciously. “The baby’s not here; he’s with his grandmother. You didn’t know about the kids either. Hell, Natalie. And to think—”

To think they might have been mine. She turned away from the thought, and Conlig, mercifully, shut up.

She managed to get away fairly easily. Mike had become gracious.

He extracted from her another couple of promises to come visit, to tour his gyroscope plant. They parted with a handshake.

York hurried to her car, confused.

Conlig had been much more in command of himself than she remembered. All that obsessiveness, the single-mindedness, had dissipated. Maybe it had served its purpose in propelling him to where he needed to get, and had been discarded, like a spent booster stage.

Conlig looked like what he’d become, she thought: a prosperous, aspiring forty-year-old.

Mike had started a family. Set down roots. He’d put aside the obsessive, technology-oriented goals of his youth. He’d joined the human race. He’d grown up. He’d become the kind of person she always seemed to look at from the outside, but could never imagine becoming herself.

So where the hell does that leave me?

The existence of the Mars mission had distorted the whole history of the space program, she’d come to see. NASA existed for one purpose only, to land the three of them on the surface of Mars and bring them home again. Nothing else mattered — not even whatever the hell came afterward.

And in the same way, Mars had warped her own life, as if she was a scale model of the greater world.

Hell, maybe I could have been happy, and a lot better off, as a rock hound for some oil company somewhere. But the red glare of Mars had dazzled her, and to reach it she’d sacrificed everything: her career, her science, maybe, probably, her chance of having a family, even her future after the mission.

Mike Conlig was like an image of the adult she might have become. If not for goddamn Mars.

As she got into her car, alone, a black depression settled on her.

Tuesday, February 26, 1985

Building 3 was the JSC cafeteria. York, Mars astronaut or not, still queued for lunch with the rest. She took a seat at a small table by the window. The food was sticky government issue — smothered steak with rice — washed down with soda.

The cafeteria was one of the older of JSC’s buildings, a big gloomy room with small windows and ceiling tiles, done in an early-1960s style that reminded her, claustrophobically, of her high school.

Adam Bleeker sat down opposite her. “You mind?”

She forced a smile. She hadn’t seen him approach. Bleeker’s face was calm, as empty of expression as ever. Maybe he really is like that inside. “No. I mean, hell, no, of course not, Adam. Please.”

He nodded and sat down, with his tray. He had a vegetable lasagna, today’s healthy option; he picked up bits of pasta in his fork and brought them to his mouth. The daylight made his eyes an intense blue, impenetrable.

York tried to think of something to say.

“You busy?” she asked.

He grimaced around a mouthful of pasta. “What else? Busier than when I was on the flight, if you can believe that. They’ve got me in the sims more often than I can count.”

“I guess it shows how much—”

“ — you need me. I know, Natalie.”

“Look, Adam, I know how you must feel. Your training goes back to the Moon landings, for God’s sake. And to be overtaken by a rookie like me—”

“I’ve been studying space medicine,” he said unexpectedly. “In my spare time.”

She was startled by the non sequitur. Maybe it showed something about Adam’s state of mind. “Really? Why?”

He eyed her. “Wouldn’t you? I never took it seriously before. You know what I’ve found out? Legally, as a spaceflight crew, you’re a federal agency radiation worker. How about that. And you’re covered by Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations, when it comes to radiation doses you receive in space.”

“So what does that mean? I’ll bet if we stuck to the rules, we’d never fly out of Earth orbit.”

He laughed. “Actually, that’s true. In low Earth orbit you’re protected, to some degree, by the magnetosphere. Outside, you’re exposed. But NASA does have an exemption, for ‘exceptional exploration missions.’ ”

“So they’ve covered their asses.”

“Yeah. Just like the Air Force. CYA.” He looked at her, his face unreadable. “You know, there is a lot of hazard out there, out of the shelter of the magnetosphere. You’ve got your solar particle events — solar flares, where you hide in your storm shelter — but there’s also the constant background radiation, cosmic rays from the galactic background. And women are—”

“Fifty percent more susceptible to radiation risk than men. I know, Adam,” she said.

His face was distant, inward looking. “You know, you can feel the difference up there. You’ll have to experience it, Natalie; I can’t describe it. You can feel the blood flowing through your heart valves, into your vessels. You come home with ‘chicken legs,’ as we call them. All that goes away. But then you’re hit by a kind of rapid aging… You know, Natalie, I’m not the only one.”

“The only what?”

“The only astronaut who’s come down like this. Nobody else on the active list has been grounded specifically because of radiation exposure, as far as I know. But some of the older guys, who flew in the 1960s, are showing up now with osteoporosis. Cancer. They’re turning up in their fifties and sixties, dying from risks you don’t find in the normal population.”

She felt cold; she put her fork down. “But those guys only had spaceflight records of two, three weeks—”

“Yeah. But we’ve spent four billion years adapting to life on Earth. For a while we thought spaceflight was easy. I guess we really do put our lives on the line, right? But then, some people seem to adapt well. They come home with trivial amounts of muscle atrophy, for instance. Maybe you’ll be lucky, Natalie. Maybe you’ll be an immune…”

“Well, if we were in a rational world,” York said, “we wouldn’t have a mission profile like Ares anyhow. The Ares plan is really a relic of the sixties.”

“Yeah. When the emphasis was just on getting there, not on what you do when you get there. If we were smart, we wouldn’t plan for a thirty-day stopover; we’d look to put you up there for a year. On the Martian surface you’d be relatively protected. On your brief little trip you’ll soak up almost as many REMs as on a Hohmann mission twice the duration, which would earn you five hundred days on Mars. On this one mission, you’ll come close to your legal lifetime dosage.”

“According to OSHA guidelines, right?”

“Yeah. Anyhow,” he went on, “a long stopover on Mars would probably be better for you anyway, to give you time to recover from the effects of the long zero-G transit…

“Ah, hell.” He pecked at his food. “You know, you could say we’re not ready to do this, yet. We’ve been studying Mars mission options for thirty years. Right back to von Braun. And the basic problems — the energy needed to get out of Earth’s gravity well, to cross interplanetary space — none of that has changed. And we haven’t come up with any fundamentally smarter solutions than von Braun’s, either. We’re still firing off big hydrogen-oxygen rockets, because we don’t see what else we can do.”

She felt pleased, to hear someone like Bleeker talk like this. Maybe the culture was changing, slowly. But he might have been discussing baseball scores for all the inflection in his voice.

“I can never read you, Adam,” she said frankly. “You know, I’ve often thought the same thing. That we’re not ready to go yet…”

He nodded, smiling faintly. “I figured.”

“But it won’t stop me going, anyhow.”

“No. And it wouldn’t stop me, if they’d let me.”

“You’re not trying to talk me out of it?” She tried to inject some humor into her voice, but wasn’t sure how successful she was.

“I would if I thought I could,” he said seriously. “Not that it would do me any good.” He shook his head. “You know what was the hardest thing?” he asked suddenly.

“What?”

“When I had to explain to my boy — Billy — that I’m not going to Mars. Damn,” he said, and he gazed out of the window at the muggy Houston sunlight.

She couldn’t think of anything to say.

He ate a little more of his lasagna. Mission Elapsed Time [Day/Hr:Min:Sec] Plus 371/01:32:30

Gershon gave Challenger’s attitude control rockets a final blip, a squirt to make sure they were functional.

Solenoids thumped.

“Everything is copacetic, guys.”

Stone’s face, behind his scuffed faceplate, was set, almost grim. “Good. Then let’s get the hell on with it,” he said.

Gershon grinned.

With a clatter of explosive bolts, Challenger kicked free of the rest of Ares. Then came a brief burn of the retropack, the small solid rocket cluster strapped to the base of the MEM.

The burn knocked Challenger into a new, low orbit around Mars.

York, strapped into her acceleration couch, tried to relax. Challenger would stay in its new orbit for a couple of revolutions, while the two pilots and the controllers back in Mission Control checked out its systems.

The MEM’s ascent-stage cabin, buried within the conical upper heat shield, was more or less a vertical cylinder, rising up above her. The three acceleration couches were crammed into its base, side by side. She could see, at an angle, the navigation and guidance panels with their big false-horizon displays, and the alignment optical telescope thrusting down from the ceiling.

The cabin’s main windows were big triangles, angled to face downward, so the pilots, when they stood up, would be able to see their landing site. And there was a small rectangular sighting window directly above her, with a matching panel cut in the upper heat shield. York stared up at that little window; trapped between the two pilots, she felt like a prisoner, staring up at a small window in the roof of her cell.

Where the interior of the Apollo Command Module had a warm feel to it — all browns and grays and greens — this cabin was mostly unpainted aluminum, thin and delicate and somehow unfinished. She could see lines of rivets, stitching the thing together. To York, the raw look spoke of a hurried development, a less mature technology than Apollo.

Through the window York watched Ares recede from the MEM.

It was the first time she’d seen the craft from the outside since the rendezvous in Earth orbit. The fat, faithful MS-II injection engine was still evidently the stack’s center of gravity — though the two External Tanks were long discarded — and ahead of it was fixed the slim MS-IVB stage which would brake them back into Earth orbit. The whole of Endeavor, their cylindrical Mission Module with its solar array wings, had been separated from the MS-IVB, turned around and redocked nose first; the idea was to free up the MEM from its shroud at the Mission Module’s base. Meanwhile Discovery, their Apollo, was docked to a lateral port, so it dangled sideways from the Mission Module, like a berry from the line of fuel-tank cylinders.

When Challenger returned to Martian orbit, the MEM would be discarded, and the remaining modules — booster stages, Mission Module, and Apollo — would be reassembled, once more, in a straight line, for the burn home.

The cluster was a collection of cylinders and boxes and panels, crudely assembled — and clumsily repositioned since their entry into Martian orbit. To York, all the orbital construction work — sliding modules through space like kids’ construction blocks — was unnerving. When they separated the Mission Module from the boosters, they were cutting themselves loose from their only ride home, for God’s sake! But she understood that there were backup strategies at every stage, ways they could reassemble some kind of configuration that could tolerate a ride home, even if they lost the landing.

It’s all a symptom of the clumsy way we’re constrained to do this, the lousy technology. One day, maybe we’ll have the power and energy to do this journey in something resembling comfort, without having to take the damn spacecraft apart all the time.

The assembled craft had none of the detailed, toylike brilliance she had observed about ships in Earth orbit. After a year in space, the brilliant white paint of prelaunch had faded to a pale yellow; and the shadowed areas of the hull were picking up brown shading from the battered skin of Mars. The cluster looked aged, soaked in space.

When Ares had receded from view she could see nothing through the little window but darkness.

Darkness, and, occasionally, a sliver of ocher landscape.

Challenger flew over the shadowed limb of Mars.

“Thirty seconds to DOI,” Stone said. “Everything’s go.”

“I confirm a go,” Gershon said.

DOI: insertion into descent orbit — a new, low, elliptical orbit, an orbit that would intercept the surface of the planet.

York could see Gershon’s hand, hovering over the manual fire button. Challenger was Gershon’s baby, of course; the landing — the next few minutes — were the culmination of a decade of work for him. He looked keyed up to York, tense, expectant.

Sims were spring-loaded to fail. That was the point, really: to familiarize crew and controllers with all the myriad ways the mission could go wrong, and train them to cope. However, York had the feeling that Ralph Gershon was spring-loaded the other way. It is going to take a lot to keep him from landing this bucket of bolts.

And that, as far as York was concerned, was good.

“Fifteen seconds,” Stone said. “Ten seconds to DOI. Here we go, guys. Eight. Six, five, four.”

Gershon’s gloved hand closed over the firing button.

“Two, one.”

The rockets fired in sequence. It was a muffled, rattly noise.

And then came the jolt, deep in her back.

“Retro light on.” Gershon flashed a grin. “Beautiful! Pure gold!”

It felt as if Challenger had been knocked backwards. Solid rockets, she’d been told, always burned a lot more crisply than liquid.

The burn went on, with Stone counting up the time. The rockets’ thrust of forty thousand pounds force was too small to shove seriously at the mass of the MEM, and so there was no rattle, no vibration, no real sense of deceleration. Just a steady push at her back, a smooth hiss as the retropack burned.

The push died sharply. Right on cue, the retropack had cut out.

Nothing felt different. Challenger was still in orbit around Mars, for the time being, and York was still weightless, floating within the restraints which held her to her couch.

But the MEM was following a path that would bring it arcing down until it sliced into the Martian atmosphere, at maybe thirty miles above the surface. And the drag of the atmosphere would not allow the craft to climb out again.

Challenger was committed to Mars.

Suddenly she got an unwelcome sense of perspective, a feeling of how small and fragile the little capsule was. It was different from landing on Earth. On Earth you were descending toward an inhabited planet, toward oceans full of ships waiting to pick you up.

Out here there were only the three of them, jammed up against each other in their little pod, descending toward a dead world. So far from Earth they couldn’t even see it. Out here, they weren’t closing off their journey, coming home; out there, they were pushing out still farther, into extremes of technological capability and risk, so far from Earth that Mission Control couldn’t even speak to them in real time. It was like climbing the ladder one more rung.

But what York felt was not fear, but mostly relief. Another abort threshold crossed. The farther the mission went, the fewer things were left to go wrong.

“Coming up on jettison retro,” Gershon said.

Stone counted him down. “Three, two, one.”

York heard a muffled bang as pyrotechnic charges broke the metal belt holding the small retropack against the base of Challenger. Then there was a clatter against the wall, oddly like the footsteps of a huge bird: that must be the belt of the discarded pack, scraping along the hull.

With the retropack gone, Challenger was falling ballistically, like a projectile shot out of a gun. Its heat shield gave it the form of a blunt cone, the classic Command Module shape, though the MEM was nearly three times as big as an Apollo CM.

Gershon tipped up the spacecraft, so that the blunt prow of its base, where the titanium honeycomb heat shield was thickest, led the way into the gathering air. When he fired the attitude thrusters York saw brief bursts of gray mist, beyond the small window above her.

Then the mist got more persistent, in short bursts of translucent paleness, that lingered even after Gershon had stopped firing.

Soon the mist started to turn pink. There was a thin whistle beyond the hull.

The glow was the air of Mars, its atoms smashed to fragments by impact with Challenger’s heat shield.

Gershon whooped. “We’re getting close! Old papa Mars has us!”

“Goddamn,” Stone said, his voice tight.

The first feather touches of deceleration settled over York: a gentle pressure inside her stomach, a faint heaviness about her legs.

A light went on at Gershon’s station.

“Gotcha!” he shouted. “That’s point zero five G. This is going to be a real ride. Hang on.”

Point zero five G: the traditional threshold of atmospheric drag. And here they were, reaching point zero five G in the air of Mars.

The deceleration piled up on her in sudden, brutal steps. It’s bumpier than the sims. This air is supposed to be thin, damn it. There must be a more complex structure of layers in the atmosphere than had been realized, a sharper differentiation.

The pain at her chest was already exquisite.

She kept her eyes wide-open, trying to remember every detail. Every ounce of pain will tell someone, some atmospheric scientist, more about Mars. After all, she might be one of just three people in history to endure this.

Somehow, though, at this moment it wasn’t worth it.

She heard the crisp rattle of the attitude control thrusters’ solenoids.

Gershon watched his guidance display. “Right on track. One forty-seven degrees…”

Challenger had to hit a precise reentry corridor. The allowable guidance error either way was only half a degree: less than fifty miles wide.

“Coming up on one G… now.”

Just one G? Already York felt as if her suit was made of lead tubes, as if some fat man was sitting on her chest. Can this really be Earth-normal gravity? After a year in microgravity, the burden seemed intolerable, like carrying a huge pack around on your back, for your whole life.

“One point five,” Stone said.

York groaned. She was pushed deep into her couch, her arms pressed into her body; the small components of the weights of Gershon and Stone which rested on her became immense loads.

“Hang on, guys,” Stone said. “One point eight. You’ve been through a lot worse in the Wheel. Two point one.”

Gershon worked at his guidance panel, his hand hovering over his RCS control.

“Two point five,” Stone said. “Point six!… Point five. Point three. Hey, what did I tell you.”

The light in the small window above York had become a gray-white glow, cold and brilliant, as bright as Earth daylight. Gershon and Stone were bathed in the diffuse, unearthly light, the orange of their suits washed-out, their faces invisible behind the reflections from their faceplates. It was like being inside some huge, complex fluorescent light tube.

The weight on her chest and legs began to slacken off. She could feel her chest expand, her breath flowing more easily into her lungs.

Something went flying past the little window overhead, small and brilliant, glowing yellow. Flaming. It was a piece of the heat shield, melting off the base of the craft, carrying the lethal heat energy away from the capsule. More pieces came flying past, fist-sized or bigger, some of them rattling on the hull of the cabin.

York felt panic build up inside her. Jesus. We can’t take much more of this.

This is the first chance Mars has to kill us, she thought. I wonder if it will take it.

From the ground, Challenger would look like a huge meteor, she supposed, glowing and burning and sputtering, leaving a complex, multiple trail across the dark Martian sky.

The thrusters squirted again, tipping up the nose of Challenger.

“Here we go,” Gershon said. “Coming into pull-up.”

The MEM had some maneuvering capability. The center of gravity was offset, and so by rotating and pitching up, Challenger could be made to skip like a flat stone off the thicker layers of air, closer to the surface.

“Three, two, one,” Gershon said.

Now York felt a deep lurch, a shove which quickly bottomed out; it was like reaching the base of a loop on some huge roller coaster.

“How about that,” Gershon said. “What a ride. Into the zoom maneuver.”

Challenger was ascending briefly, shedding its heat, before dipping once more into the lower air.

Stone tapped a glass panel. “Hey. I’ve got me a working altimeter. Sixty thousand feet.”

York felt a prickle at the base of her scalp. Sixty thousand feet. Suddenly the altitude reading had turned from miles — a spacecraft’s measure — to feet, read from an air-pressure altimeter. Just like an aircraft. We’re nearly there.

There was another bang of attitude jets. The capsule tipped up again.

The glow beyond the small window faded, to gray, then to a pale pink, the color of flesh.

“Lift vector up glide,” Gershon called.

The MEM was falling again, dipping into the thickening air at the better part of five hundred feet per second. But the ride was smooth, comparatively gentle, the worst of the heat and the Gs over. It really was like the sims.

Gershon unclipped his harness and threw it back over his shoulder. “All change,” he said. He pushed himself up and climbed out of his couch. To York’s left, Stone began to do the same. The crew had to stand for the last powered-descent phase of the landing.

Apprehensive, she unclipped her own harness. She stood, cautiously, on her couch, holding on to straps on the walls.

She could barely feel her legs. After her year in space York seemed to have forgotten how to stand up. Her inner ears were rotating like crazy, and the aluminum walls of the cabin tipped up around her. She felt enormously heavy.

She felt a hand on her arm. Stone’s.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “It passes.”

That was true. But after most long-duration space missions there were ground crews to lift you out of your cabin and carry you to a wheelchair, en route to the hospital…

Stone slapped his gloved hands together. “Let’s hustle,” he said. He turned to his station, and Gershon did the same, and they began to rattle through a fresh checklist.

York’s job now was to support the pilots. She hauled at levers to fold up the acceleration couches, leaving the cabin floor exposed; then she fixed restraints, elasticized cables, to the waists of the pilots as they worked.

Then she took her own position, standing in a corner of the little cabin, and hooked herself up to restraint cables. Standing room only, all the way down to the surface of Mars.

There was a sharp crack. Sunlight streamed into the cabin, strong and flat.

The conical upper heat shield, its function fulfilled, broke into segments and fell away, revealing a complex structure of propellant tanks and antennae. A plug popped out of the bottom of the craft, exposing the bell of the retro-propulsion descent engine. All around the base of the MEM, six squat landing legs rattled out of their bays.

Challenger had configured itself to land.

York could see out of the corners of the pilots’ down-slanting triangular windows. She saw sunlight, a violet sky, and a tan, curving landscape. New York Times, Monday, March 4, 1985

German-Born Nazi Expert Quits U.S. to Avoid War-Crimes Suit

Hans Udet, a German-born NASA rocket expert, has renounced his U.S. citizenship and returned to Germany, after facing the prospect of charges of war crimes, it was revealed yesterday.

Udet was one of Wernher von Braun’s V-2 rocket development team during World War II. After the war, he came to America with von Braun to work on U.S. space projects.

After the retirement of von Braun, Udet became one of NASA’s most senior managers, and he recently directed the development of the Saturn VB enhanced rocket booster. The VB will be used to launch the Ares manned mission to Mars, and has already been launched successfully several times to deliver components of the Mars ship to Earth orbit.

Now, the Justice Department has told Udet that he must surrender his U.S. citizenship and leave the country or face charges that he had been involved in a forced labor camp at Nordhausen in Germany where the V-2 was manufactured. The department is apparently acting on information that has been in the hands of the government for forty years.

Udet has apparently not been accused of committing atrocities, but of being aware of them, and failing to acknowledge that fact in his application for U.S. citizenship.

Udet maintains his innocence, but says that because of his age and financial situation, he will not undertake the prolonged legal battle that the government suit would entail.

Under an agreement with the Department of Justice Udet left the U.S. in January.

Senior colleagues within NASA have spoken out in Udet’s defense, calling the Justice Department action “cynical” and “shabby.” The feeling is that the Justice Department stayed its hand on this matter until after Udet had served out a lifetime of useful service for the government.

Among those who campaigned on behalf of Udet within NASA was Dr. Gregory Dana, father of dead Apollo-N astronaut James Dana, and a scientist who, this newspaper can reveal, was himself a conscript laborer at Nordhausen during the war… New York Times, Friday, March 8, 1985

Frederick W. Michaels, 76, NASA Administrator

Fred Michaels, who was NASA’s Administrator during its turbulent post-Apollo decade, died Tuesday at his home in Dallas, Texas. He was 76.

Born in Dallas in 1909, Michaels received a BA in education from the University of Chicago in 1933. He studied law and was admitted to the District of Columbia bar in 1939. He worked in private business from 1939 to 1963, save for a 4-year spell in the Bureau of the Budget. In this period he rose to become President of the Umex Oil Company, assistant to the President of Morgan Industries, and a member of the board of Southpaw Airlines. He joined NASA in 1963.

He served as Administrator of NASA from 1971 to 1981, when he resigned subsequent to the loss of the Apollo-N test mission and the death of its astronaut crew.

Michaels’s reign at NASA was characterized by political astuteness. His stewardship was much more worldly than that of his predecessor, the visionary but ineffectual Thomas O. Paine. Michaels effectively managed both the internal conflicts between centers, which have plagued NASA from its inception, and external pressures from political, budget, and aerospace interests and such lobbies as the universities.

Michaels was criticized for a lack of vision. NASA under his stewardship was a throwback to the Apollo-era organization under James Webb (1906 — ), in which all activities, however worthy, were valued solely in terms of their contribution to a single goal — in Michaels’s case, the eventual Mars landing. NASA appeared to suffer from a lack of direction during much of the 1970s, and when a clear mission did emerge, in the aftermath of the Apollo-NERVA disaster, NASA was left with no vision of its future beyond the Ares project, and with its facilities and systems dangerously weighted to serve Ares alone. Michaels’s successors will face a formidable challenge in keeping the large organization and workforce in place once the primary goal has been achieved.

However, history will probably look more kindly on Michaels’s achievements than do many of his contemporaries. In a time of dwindling budgets and growing hostility to the U.S. civilian space program, he followed in the footsteps of Webb by building and maintaining a political coalition behind the manned space program, which he saw as the primary goal of his Agency.

Without Michaels’s shrewd handling it is possible — as former President John Kennedy remarked this week on hearing of Michaels’s death — that the post-Apollo space program would have crumbled. It is worth remembering that Mr. Kennedy himself lobbied for Michaels’s appointment in 1971.

Whatever one’s view of this year’s man-to-Mars space spectacular, it is surely ironic that its principal architect has not lived to see it.

Mr. Michaels is survived by his wife, Elly; three daughters, Kathleen Lau of Wilmette, Ill., Ann Irving of Pal Desert, Calif, and Jane Devlin of Rockville, Md.; and eight grandchildren.

March 1985

There was one final press conference in Houston, just before they were brought out to the Cape. By then the members of the crew were in quarantine, and they had to come onto the stage wearing hospital masks, which they kept on until they were installed behind a plastic screen.

To York, exhausted, it was bizarre, unearthly, the questions and answers rendered meaningless by their endless repetition.

The Life issue of March 28 had a cover story called “Ready for Mars.” Inside there was the usual domestic stuff: Stone playing catch with his sons, Gershon at the wheel of his car, York — well, York in her den, wading through her correspondence, redirecting her mail, arranging for her goods to be taken into storage, smiling uncertainly at the camera. She’d generated her own clichй industry by now. The dedicated scientist. The single woman, coping alone. The bright visionary, focused on the goal.

She’d lost her critical faculties about the press coverage, actually. The whole thing was just a blizzard, whiting out around her. The Life piece could have been a lot worse. In fact the reporter had made the best he could, she supposed, of unpromising material.

A few days before the launch was due, they moved out of the Cocoa Beach Holiday Inn and into the crew dormitory, on the second floor of the MSOB at the Kennedy Space Center.

The Manned Spacecraft Operations Building was pretty comfortable, all things considered. There was a gym and a mess hall. And the crew quarters, tucked away inside what looked like a regular office building, were fairly luxurious compared to a lot of NASA facilities: from a mundane, sterile office, she walked through a locked door into a carpeted apartment with subdued lights, and separate bedrooms for the three of them.

It was the same apartment in which the moonwalking Apollo astronauts had bunked before their launches.

Her bedroom was individually decorated; it even had a TV. The three rooms had paintings hanging in them: nudes in two of them, a landscape in the third.

York got the one with the landscape. She stuck over it her grainy Mariner 4 blowups.

The astronauts were cut off in the apartment. To protect the crew from infection — and to keep at bay the pressure of the media attention — only “authorized personnel” were allowed into the MSOB. That didn’t include family or friends.

There was nobody York particularly wanted to see, anyhow. Her mother had called, once, and talked about her own concerns. She wasn’t planning to come to the launch; she was going to be filmed watching it by some local TV company.

But she could see that Stone and Gershon, while relieved to get out of the glare of camera spots, were soon going a little stir-crazy.

It was dumb policy. Why not let families in? Sure, there would have to be some kind of quarantine. But she could see how a little contact with children and spouses could go a long way to calming the soul.

Anyhow, whatever the merits and problems of the quarantine, to York it was a great relief. When she first shut the big heavy door of her MSOB room behind her, she threw her personal bag on the floor, flopped out on the bed, and slept for nine hours. Mission Elapsed Time [Day/Hr:Min:Sec] Plus 371/02:03:23

Ralph Gershon’s mouth was dry. That was the pure oxygen pumping through his pressure suit.

Stone stood to his right, and York, silent, was behind them both.

Gershon ran over the readouts on his station. He’d already pressurized the descent-engine fuel tanks, and he’d called up the right computer programs, and he’d taken sightings through the alignment telescope to check Challenger’s trajectory.

Houston was silent, listening, so far away they could do nothing to help.

Challenger had turned over onto its back as it fell through the air, so that its landing radar pointed at the ground. The radar hadn’t gotten a lock yet. All Gershon had through his window was a triangle of lurid violet-pink sky.

Stone said, “On my mark, three minutes thirty to ignition…. Mark. Three thirty.”

Gershon set the switch to arm the descent engine.

Gershon was ready. He was in charge for the first time in the mission. It gave him a sense of liberation, of power. He could make sure nothing fouled up.

And besides, he’d completed this run a thousand times, in the sims, and in the MLTV trainer. He could do it with his eyes shut.

Sure you could. But this is Mars, pal. Maybe that big old world out there has different ideas.

And this MEM was going to have to function better than any of the test articles that had preceded it.

“I’ve got a 63 for PDI,” Stone said quietly. A relic from Apollo. 63: a computer query about readiness to proceed to PDI, powered descent initiation.

“Do it,” Gershon said. “I’ve got go.”

Stone pressed the PROCEED button. “Ignition.”

“Right on time.”

Gershon felt nothing at first. But the gauges showed him that the descent-stage engine was firing up to 10 percent of maximum, smooth as cream.

Then, after half a minute, the engine reached full thrust.

He still couldn’t hear anything, but the cabin filled up with a grating, high-frequency vibration. It was uncomfortable, something like the sensation of having your teeth drilled at high speed. Different from the sims already.

Challenger slid down U.S. Highway One, braking easily.

“AGS and PGNS agree closely,” Stone said. Stone was acting as the navigator; he was telling Gershon that the redundant-pair primary and abort guidance systems were agreeing with each other. “We’re looking good at three, coming up… Three minutes. Altitude thirty-nine thou five.” That height reading was still only an estimate from the two guidance computers, though; the landing radar had still not acquired its lock. And Stone would also be able to read off heights from the altimeter, although that instrument, working on the pressure of the unfamiliar Martian atmosphere, was experimental, and its data excluded by the mission rules.

“Still go,” Stone said. “Take it all at four minutes… We’re go to continue at four minutes.”

“Rager,” Gershon said tersely.

“The data is good. Thirty-three thou…”

But caution and warning lights were glowing on Gershon’s station. The landing radar should have been working by now; it should have locked onto its own signals bouncing off the ground.

But it hadn’t achieved lock.

“Where’s that goddamn radar, Ralph?” Stone asked.

“Punch it through again.”

“Yeah.” Stone tried.

“Come on, baby,” Gershon said quietly. “Let’s have the lock on.” But there was no change. “Come on.”

“Does talking to it do any good?” York asked drily.

“Shut up, Natalie,” Stone said, distracted.

Gershon felt a stab of fury. Other data was still good. Velocity looked fine, and the altitude estimates from both AGS and PGNS were in agreement. But without the radar — and even if the altimeter worked — he was screwed. The mission rules said, No radar lock by ten thousand feet and you abort.

Stone said, “Try cycling the landing radar breaker.”

Gershon pulled out the radar’s circuit breaker, his muscles tense with anger, and shoved it back in its slot. “Okay, it’s cycled.”

The caution lights continued to show. No lock.

He turned to look Stone in the eye. “Fine day for a landing.”

He meant: Fuck the rules. Fuck the radar. Fuck Houston; they’re so far away we’ll be on the surface by the time they know what’s going down. We’ve come too far to quit now. I say we go for a landing, by eye if we have to. Fuck it.

Stone stared back at him.

Damn it, you cold bastard. What are you going to do?

Gershon could feel the cabin tip up around him; beyond his big window, sky and a fine edge of red landscape slid past. Challenger was beginning to pitch up, as it dropped closer to the ground.

“Twenty-four thousand feet,” Stone said. “Coming up to throttle down. Mark.”

The primary guidance program would take the descent engine down to 60 percent thrust. Gershon could feel the thin vibration subsiding smoothly. Right on schedule. “That felt good,” he said. “Better than the sims.”

“Twenty-one thousand. We’re still go. Apart from the radar lock. Velocity down to twelve hundred feet per second.”

Twelve hundred. Aircraft speed. Gershon took hold of his controls. I’m flying in the atmosphere of Mars. He looked out of his window. The stars were all washed-out, and the sky was a tall dome of brown light. And he could see the ground. It was a rumpled landscape that slid underneath him. Visibility was good: the contrast, the shadows cast by the low morning sun, made everything stand out.

Challenger was approaching the landing site in a broad sweep from the southwest, so it was flying over the ancient, cratered terrain of the southern hemisphere. It was almost like a lunar landing sim, with craters piled on craters, some so old and huge they were almost obliterated by newer strikes. But these craters had sand dunes rippling across their floors, and there was one big old fellow whose walls looked like they had collapsed under a stream of running water. The Moon, it ain’t.

The landscape was desolate, curving tightly, forbidding. It was an empty planet, no ground support… No runway lights down there, boy. On the other hand, nobody shooting at your ass, either.

“Seven minutes thirty,” Stone said. “Sixteen and a half thou. Coming up on high gate. Still no lock.”

“High gate” was the point in the trajectory where Gershon should be able to see his landing site for the first time. He peered ahead.

The designated landing site was just to the north of an escarpment at the mouth of an outflow valley. The valley, according to York’s descriptions, would look like a dry riverbed. Gershon had studied the site from orbiter photographs and plaster-of-paris models until he knew it like he knew his own apartment.

But coming in now, with the sun low, and the ship still tipped up at more than fifty degrees, and the light glinting off his little triangle of a porthole…

Nothing looked like it was supposed to. The land was complex, tortured, its nature changing rapidly. Every shadow was deep and black, and the ocher-colored surface features seemed to leap out toward him, the vertical scale magnified by the contrast.

“Fifteen thousand,” Stone said. “Still no lock.”

Shit.

“Okay, Ralph, let’s go over the abort procedure.” Stone sounded resigned.

Goddamn it to hell, he’s given up.

“We pitch over, activate the ascent program… countdown to mission abort starts at eight thousand feet—”

“No. Don’t abort,” Natalie York said suddenly.

Stone looked at her. “Huh?”

“Don’t abort. We may be flying over a radar-dark area.”

“And what,” asked Stone drily, “is a radar-dark area?”

“Volcanic ash,” she said. “Pumice.” She was straining in her harness, trying to see the battered landscape out of their pilots’ windows. “Low-density stuff; not many rocks. It reflects radar badly. There’s nothing for the landing radar to lock on to.”

“Or maybe,” Stone said, “the landing radar is screwed.”

“Don’t abort.”

Stone and Gershon exchanged looks.

“Nine thousand,” Stone said. “Still no lock.”

They’d already busted the mission rules, Gershon realized.

Stone said, “Ralph—”

And then the warning lights went out. The radar lock had come in.

York gasped, an explosion of relief.

“Jesus.” Gershon slammed his fist into his control station. “We is fucking go.”

“We is indeed,” Stone said tightly.

Gershon twisted over his shoulder to look at York. “I guess we flew right on over all that pumice stone, huh.”

She stared back at him. “I guess.”

He had no idea if she’d just been bullshitting, he realized, about the pumice stone. He didn’t think York was the type to do that, but it was possible. And he also didn’t know if Stone would really have pulled the plug, or let him go on and try to land without the radar.

He didn’t, he realized, know his crewmates as well as he thought he did.

“Eight thousand,” Stone rattled off. “Down velocity one hundred feet per second. We’re go for the landing.”

“Rager.”

Gershon took hold of his controls. He had an attitude control adjuster in his right hand — a joystick with a bright red pistol grip — and on his left there was a toggle switch called the thrust translator controller, which would squirt the down-pointing reaction thrusters to reduce the rate of fall. It was all linked up by the electronics to the reaction control subsystem, which would do most of the steering for him.

He pulsed the reaction control thrusters; solenoids rattled comfortingly.

He handed control back to the computer. “Manual auto attitude control is good.” He felt a surge of renewed confidence. The radar was locked in, and the thrusters were copacetic. When the time came, when he had to take control of the ship for the final landing, he knew that everything would be fine.

“Seven thou,” Stone said. “Here we go. High gate. Right through that gate.”

Under computer control, Challenger tipped up a little more, tilting Gershon forward. He stared ahead. Speeding over the close horizon, they were coming to what looked like an escarpment, a ridge marking out the edge of the cratered terrain. Beyond that ridge, the land looked different: smoothed over, lacking craters, kind of like mud, like a flood plain…

And there was a valley under his prow, snaking north from out of the southern plateau. It looked like a gouge in a woodcut, with a big wide crater just to the northeast.

It looked just like the maps and the models in the back rooms at JSC.

Gershon crowed. “I’ve got it! I have Mangala! Just as fat as a goose.”

He grasped the controls of Challenger, ready to land.

The MEM was standing on its rockets, drifting over the landscape, like an ICBM trying to land on its tail.

“Three thousand feet. Seventy feet per second. Everything’s go,” Stone said. “Go for landing. We’re go, hang tight. Two thousand. Windspeed ten feet per second.”

Windspeed. Another hazard they didn’t face on Apollo. But 10 fps was low enough not to matter.

“Give me an LPD,” he told Stone.

“Forty-three.”

He looked through his window, sighting along the forty-three-degree reticle, his current Landing Point Designator. He sensed invisible polynomial curves reaching out, in the computer’s imagination, to join him to his landing site, like a smooth glass highway across the Martian air. None of those damned higher-order wiggles this time. Even though it shared the clunky human interface of other Apollo-based systems, the hardware and software was an order of magnitude more powerful than the antiquated shit he’d had to fly on the MLTV.

Now he could see the site where the computer was flying him, more than a mile away, closing in fast, in line with the reticle…

Shit.

Under the guidance of PGNS Challenger was heading for a point a couple of miles beyond the big escarpment, north of the mouth of the major outflow valley, just as planned. But when he saw it close up he could see the land was uneven, scoured out, ribbed with what looked like gravel bars. And there was an impact crater, low, eroded, right in the middle of it all, with a teardrop-shaped island of debris behind that.

“Scablands,” he said. “Natalie, you’re going to love it. Because it looks like you were right. It looks like a fucking river bottom out there…”

But he couldn’t put the MEM down in that shit.

Solenoids rattled, and Challenger shuddered. The computer was revising its trajectory all the time, as information came in from the radar. Gershon was surprised how often the attitude jets were firing, though; it was much more frequent than in the sims.

Stone was still calling out height and velocity readings. “Seven hundred feet, down at thirty-one feet per second. Six hundred. Down at twenty-nine. Five hundred forty feet. Down at twenty-five.”

Decision time, Ralph.

He flicked a switch to override PGNS.

He pressed the translation controller, and toggled the little thruster switch to slow the MEM’s fall. Challenger responded smartly to his touch, with a rattle of solenoids.

Suddenly, he was piloting the ship. The response was crisp and sharp. The thrusters banged, and the MEM pitched forward. He found himself leaning into his restraints.

Challenger drifted over the surface of Mars, under his command.

He was aware of Stone’s eyes on him.

“Low gate,” Stone said. “Five hundred feet. Thirty-five degrees pitch. Coming down at twenty-one feet per second.”

The MEM was still falling, but it was skimming forward, sliding over the broken, flooded-out terrain. I’ve got to get north. Away from this shit from out of the old terrain. North; that’s the place to be. On the smooth lava plains beyond the flooding.

Test pilots had an adage. When in doubt, land long. Ralph Gershon kept on going, looking for a place where he could land long.

“Four hundred feet, down at nine feet per second. Three hundred fifty feet, down at four. Three hundred thirty… Watch your fuel, Ralph.”

Watch your fuel. Sure. The mission planners had sent him all this way, looping around the sun, to make landfall on an alien planet for the first time, and they’d given him about two minutes’ worth of hovering fuel to do it.

But this is what you wanted, Ralph. Isn’t it? This is what it’s all been about, all these years. To be able to fly to a planetfall, just like Armstrong.

He felt his heartbeat pumping up.

There was a place that looked reasonable, but when he got close up, he saw it was peppered with big boulders. Another gift for Natalie York, maybe, but a disaster waiting to happen for the MEM. And over there was a smoother area, but it looked crusty to Gershon, with lots of little rivulets and runs. He could imagine a footpad plunging through the surface, the whole damn MEM tipping over.

He pitched Challenger back again to keep it from picking up too much forward speed. Then he flew over another field of boulders; he banked to the left to avoid them.

There wasn’t a runway, he thought, on the whole fucking planet.

Sweat trickled down from his brow and into his eyes; he had to blink to clear them.

New terrain advanced over the close horizon at him, rushing up toward him, exploding in sharp, unwelcome detail. Still, he couldn’t see anywhere to set down.

“Three hundred feet, down three and a half, fifty-four forward.”

“How’s the fuel?”

“Seven percent.”

Shit. He was doing worse than in any of the sims. Except the ones he’d crashed.

There. A flat area, like a little plateau, off to his right: just a field of dust. On one side there was a field of big old boulders, on the other an eroded area. The flat place was no bigger than a parking lot, a couple of hundred square feet, but it ought to be enough.

He had his landing site.

He pushed his joystick. The MEM turned to the right. He lined up his marked window, and locked in the computer. He imagined those invisible curves, York’s magical polynomials, snaking out to join him up to his landing site.

“Two hundred twenty feet. Thirteen forward, down four. Eleven forward. Coming down nicely. Altitude velocity lights.”

The shadow of Challenger came swooping across the uneven surface of Mars toward him. The shadow was a fat irregular cone; he could see antennae bristling, and at the base the shapes of the landing pads, with their long contact probes sticking out from beneath.

There really wasn’t much of a gap left between him and that shadow.

And then dust, red and brown and yellow, came billowing up in big clouds from the surface, suspending itself in the thin air. Dust and shadows. They didn’t have those in the sims.

Guess this is for real, Ralph.

A light marked “DESCENT QTY” came on in front of him. Low fuel. If he was too low when the descent fuel ran out, he would be in a dead man’s zone: too low to abort, too high to land safely. The MEM would just fall to the surface, smashing open like a big aluminum egg.

He tried to ignore the warning light. Overdesigned crap. Let a man fly his aircraft.

PGNS released the craft from the landing program, and Challenger began its final descent.

He picked a little gully, just beyond the landing point, to use as a reference for the craft’s height and motion, and he stared at the gully as he worked toward killing his horizontal velocity. The MEM had to land straight down, with no sideways motion. Otherwise, the touchdown might break off a landing leg.

There was a haze of dust all around the craft, billowing up, obscuring his view, adhering to the window in great ocher streaks.

“Thirty seconds.”

“Any forward drift?”

“You’re okay. Hundred up. Down at three and a half.”

The haze was all around him. And now he could see dust flying away from him in all directions, scouring over the surface. The streaks confused his perception of his motion, the way fog blowing across a runway could sometimes. But he could see a big rock, sticking up through the haze, and he focused on that.

“Sixty feet. Down two. Two forward. Two forward. Good.”

He clicked the descent toggle, killing the speed, until Challenger was floating toward Mars as slow as a feather.

“Fifty feet. Thirty. Down two and a half. We’re kicking up a lot of dust.”

I can see that, damn it. The MEM was drifting backwards, and Gershon couldn’t tell why. And going backwards was bad, because he couldn’t see where he was going. He pulsed the hand controls.

“Twenty.”

Well, he’d killed the backward motion, but a sideways drift had crept in. Fuck. He was pissed with himself. He wasn’t flying his bird smoothly at all.

“Four degrees forward. Three forward. Drifting left a little. Faint shadow.”

The shadow closed up, and dust billowed, so he couldn’t see the ground anymore. He struggled to get the MEM vertical.

He kept falling, blind.

“Four forward. Three forward. Down a half. Drifting left.”

Gershon felt a soft bump.

“Contact light,” Stone said. “Contact light, by God!”

For one second, Gershon stared at Stone.

Then he killed the descent engine, fast.

The vibration that had accompanied the engine firing, all the way down through the powered descent, faded at last. He should have cut it as soon as the contact light came up; if the engine kept firing too close to the surface the back pressure from its own exhaust could blow it up…

Challenger fell the last five feet, and impacted on Mars with a firm thud. Gershon felt the landing in his knees, and every piece of gear in the cabin rattled.

“Shit,” he said.

Stone started to rattle through the post-touchdown checklist. “Engine stop. ACA out of detent.”

“Out of detent.”

“Mode control both auto. Descent engine command override off. Engine arm off…”

They got through the T plus one checkpoint, their first stay/no-stay decision.

And then they had the ship buttoned up tight, and it looked like they could stay for a while.

Out of Gershon’s window there was a flat, close horizon. He could see dunes, and dust, and little rocks littering the surface. Nothing was moving, anywhere. Without buildings, or people or trees, it was hard to tell the scale of things. The sky was yellow-brown, the sun small and yellow and low. The light coming in the window was a mix of pink and brown, and he could see how it reflected off his visor, and off the flesh of his own cheeks.

Martian light, on his face.

He saw Stone grin, behind his faceplate. “Houston, this is Mangala Valles. Challenger has landed on Mars.” Gershon could hear the confident elation in his voice.

Gershon and Stone and York shook hands, and slapped each other on the back, and threw mock punches at each other’s helmets.

Gershon said, “Houston, can you pass on my regards to Columbia Aviation. This old Edsel has brought us down. JK, you are one steely-eyed missile man.”

He checked his station. He had fourteen seconds of landing fuel left. Well, the hell with it. Fourteen seconds is a long time. Armstrong himself only had about twenty seconds left, and nobody beefed about that.

Anyhow, it’s going to be a long time before anyone comes back, to better what I did today.

Thursday, March 21, 1985