now you may be going to the Moon! You must grasp this opportunity, and go there with open hearts and minds. Believe me when I say that I would give anything to exchange places with you.’
Chuck Jones stepped forward and spat a piece of gum onto the dusty ground. ‘Yeah, well, we won’t be going either unless Dave Scott and Jim Irwin drive their Lunar Roving Vehicle over a goddamn cliff on one of these dumb jaunts. They’ll be taking the last Apollo to the Moon, and not us. So I think you should cut the speeches, Prof, and let’s get on with the checklist, and get this over.’
He kicked a piece of ancient anorthosite out of his way, and stalked out of the valley.
There should have been at least four astronauts on this field trip. But the good old guys seemed to have lost heart in what they saw as pointless training exercises, after the program cancelations Fred Michaels had announced earlier in the month. At least these three had turned up, but Jones’s attitude was turning the whole thing into a walk through Purgatory.
York was pretty uniformly appalled by the astronauts she’d met so far. Ben was clearly atypical. And she couldn’t believe guys like Jones; they were like relics from some grisly Flintstones version of the 1950s. The whole bunch of them seemed utterly self-obsessed, to her.
Well, screw them.
She and her friends at Berkeley had done little, over the last couple of months, but follow the fall-out from the events at Kent State, in May. Some of them were preparing their own demonstrations in support and sympathy. She was prepared to bet Chuck Jones – probably Bleeker too, even Ben – hadn’t even heard of the Kent State trouble, the way it was tearing the country apart. They were so cocooned inside their precious programs.
She felt blind, unreasoning anger, almost a hatred of these astronauts, and the system that had produced them.
As he stumped over the landscape, Chuck Jones could barely see the rocks around him. He just kept on going over and over the events of the last few days.
Fred Michaels, Associate Administrator, had come to the Astronaut Office in Building 4 personally, to wield the axe. He’d stood there in his waistcoat, plump as a seal, in front of a room full of sports shirts and crew cuts.
Michaels’s personal presence wasn’t much consolation, for Chuck Jones.
Michaels was here to announce, tersely, that the bean counters were cutting all the remaining Moon flights – save only for one more, Apollo 14, which was due to fly early in 1971.
Jones couldn’t believe it; in a few words, Michaels was shredding his, Jones’s, one-and-only chance of a Moon flight.
There was some argument from the floor, but Michaels slapped down their questions. ‘It’s for the good of the program, damn it, the longer-term good of the Agency. We’ve done what we’ve had to do. And Tom Paine –’ the NASA Administrator – ‘doesn’t like this any more than I do. Less, even. But we’ve had to accept this, to give us all a future. I’m sure most of you men understand that.’
Sure, Jones thought, you might understand it in your head. But, when you’ve just had the flight you’ve trained for over years taken away, you can’t take it in your fucking gut.
And the anguish in the Office had gotten all the greater when Deke Slayton stood up, his face like granite, to announce that it had been decided that this last mission, 14, should be upgraded to a J-class, a sophisticated scientific expedition. So 14 would get the advanced LM with the Lunar Rover, and the Service Module with orbital instrument pallet, which had been assigned to Apollo 15. And with 15’s equipment had come its landing site: a place called Hadley, in the foothills of the lunar Apennines.
But 15’s original crew – Dave Scott, Jim Irwin and Al Worden – were already in intensive training for the Hadley site.
So, Deke said, he was standing down Alan Shepard and his crew, who had been the prime assignment for Apollo 14. Scott and his crew had been promoted to 14 instead, and they’d take their backup crew of Jones, Bleeker and Priest with them. The date of the flight would be put back a few months, to give Boeing a chance to get the Rover ready, and let Grumman finish their LM upgrades. Deke said he’d expect Shepard’s crew to pitch in and support Scott’s training from here on in.
Jones saw Al Shepard walk out of that meeting, his face like a tombstone. You didn’t want to cross Al at the best of times, and it was obvious that despite his seniority he hadn’t been taken into confidence about the rearranged schedules before the meeting. Slayton was a good old buddy of Al’s, too, all the way back to the Mercury days. A hell of a way to handle things, Deke. Well, Jones expected Slayton would be getting a few choice words of advice from Shepard after this.
Jones had his own points to make, though.
He left it a couple of hours, then he went storming into Slayton’s office.
‘Damn it, Deke, I shouldn’t be backup. You ought to be making me commander of the prime crew for 14, in place of Scott.’ After all he – Jones – had been one of the original batch of Mercury astronauts, and the fourth American in space. And he’d already started his training for his own later J-class mission besides.
He’d waited a hell of a long time for this, the crown of his career, and he wasn’t giving up his mission – to be busted down to hole-in-the-sky trash-can Skylab flights – without a fight.
But Deke had just waved him away. ‘You don’t have a case, Chuck. Listen: A1 Shepard is also one of the original batch, in case you forgot that, and he’s been waiting for a lot of years for a second flight after that damn ear illness. And he was the first American in space; Al outranks you, Chuck. But I’m still standing him down in favor of Dave Scott. You’ve got to face it, Chuck. I don’t like this any more than you do, but Scott’s is the best prepared crew I have, for the one mission we’ve got left.’
‘Yeah.’ Of course Jones understood that. The mission was the thing; nobody within NASA wanted to do anything that carried the slightest risk of a foul-up.
Nobody, that is, save the astronauts who weren’t aboard the last Apollo Moon ship.
Understanding it didn’t stop him trying, though; and he had stayed in Slayton’s office for a long time, arguing hard …
There was another piece of the old rock, anorthosite or whatever shit it was, in his way. Jones kicked it aside and stalked on.
The afternoon was to be a simulated three-hour moonwalk. York had to make up the numbers, in the absence of enough astronauts. Jones teamed with Priest, and Bleeker paired off with York. Jorge Romero would stay behind in the truck, and act as a capcom. The astronauts wore backpacks, radios and cameras, and they followed traverses laid out on coarse maps designed to match the quality of low-resolution orbital photographs.
York and Bleeker stopped at the first sample point. There was a large, fractured boulder here, shot through with anorthosite. Bleeker set up a gnomon and took a photograph of the rock face. The gnomon was a device for calibration, a little tripod with a color scale for the photography, and a free-hanging central rod to give local vertical. Bleeker hit the rock with his hammer, and broke off a piece the size of his fist. He placed the sample in a small Teflon bag and dropped it into the pack on York’s back. He’d donned lunar gloves to do the work; York could see how stiff and clumsy the gloves were.
‘How was that?’
She
