raised his face to the sun, a vague half-smile on his face. Bleeker was pale, freckled – a northern boy – and he wore plenty of sun-block on his exposed skin, here in the Californian heat. York hadn’t spent any time alone with him before today. He seemed bland, unimaginative, rather empty. Ideal profile for a moonwalker, she thought wryly.
‘I guess this training is very different from what you’ve been used to,’ she said.
‘Oh, you bet. Especially compared to my assignment before joining the Astronaut Office.’
‘What was that?’
‘510 Squadron. That’s a fighter-bomber squadron, based in Virginia. Beautiful part of the country. Do you know it?’
‘No … What kind of bombs?’
He glanced at her, professional reserve coming down behind his eyes. ‘Special weapons.’
Oh. Nuclear.
‘We were trained to deploy out of West Germany. We’d have flown low, a hundred feet, under the enemy’s radar.’ He mimed the maneuver with a dusty hand. Now he pulled his hand so it soared straight upwards. ‘The idea was to let go of the payload at just the right moment. The package would follow a two-mile arc to the target.’ He grinned again, almost shyly. ‘While it was falling I’d be high-tailing it out of there, as fast as I could go, before the detonation.’
‘I’ll bet. It sounds risky.’
‘All flying is risky,’ he said levelly. ‘But the F100s we flew were beautiful ships …’
He waxed lyrical about the F100 for a while: the ‘Super Saber,’ the world’s first fighter capable of sustained supersonic speed.
York tuned out.
The F100 had been produced by Rockwell: the company who had built Apollo, and who were now bidding to go to Mars. Given where the bulk of the money went, it was as if the space work of companies like Rockwell was a thin, glamorous patina on the surface of their real mother lode, military development.
‘The part I didn’t enjoy so much was ejecting.’
‘Ejecting?’
‘It was a one-shot mission. The planes didn’t carry enough fuel to make it to their targets and back. We had to eject hundreds of miles short of home, let the planes crash, and then survive as best we could.’
‘Christ,’ York said. ‘Walking home, through a nuclear battlefield?’
‘I was trained for it,’ he said. ‘I was part of a global strategy. The weapons are new, so you need new strategies to use them. It’s all about mutual deterrence. “Safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation …”’
She was startled by the quote. ‘That’s well expressed.’
‘Winston Churchill.’ His eyes were like blue windows.
He wasn’t unintelligent, she realized. Just – different from her, and the people she mixed with. A Cold Warrior. She shivered.
He glanced at his checklist. ‘Hey, look; we’ve missed our last stop.’
They turned and retraced their footsteps, reaching for fresh sample bags.
At the end of the afternoon, they met up back at the truck. Romero, was still grinning, even joking with Jones, but York thought she could see a strain around Romero’s eyes, under the dust and sun-block.
On the truck radio, a commentator was quoting a speech by Walter Mondale in Congress, where NASA’s budget submission was being debated … I believe it would be unconscionable to embark on a project of such staggering cost as this Mars proposal when many of our citizens are malnourished, when our rivers and lakes are polluted, and when our cities and rural areas are dying. What are our values? What do we think is more important? …
York and Ben Priest got cups of coffee from a communal flask, and walked off a little way. The sun was low, now, and blasted directly into their eyes; it had lost little of its heat.
‘I guess Romero is soaking up a lot of Chuck’s frustration at losing his flight,’ York said.
‘Naw. Chuck is always like this, when it comes to the “science,”’ Priest said. He took a pull of his coffee. ‘It’s damaging.’
‘Damaging is right. Can’t you exert some influence on him?’
He grinned at her. ‘I’m afraid you don’t know astronaut psychology, Natalie. Where these guys are concerned, the commander’s word is everything. He sets the tone for the crew, the whole mission. If the commander is somber and quiet, like Armstrong, then that’s the way the crew must be; if he wants to wear a beanie hat with a Teflon propeller on it, and sing all the way to the Moon, like Pete Conrad, then we all have to wear our beanie hats and like it. That’s the way it is. Thank God Dave Scott is taking the science seriously. I think if Chuck was the prime commander, 14 might be the nadir of Apollo’s science program, not the zenith.’
Now, she heard, voices were raised again. Romero was telling Jones how important it was to take samples from large boulders, if they could, because large rocks wouldn’t have moved far from where they were formed. And the context of a sample was just as important, to the good geologist, as the content of the rock –
Jones was telling Romero where he could stick his geological hammer.
This isn’t good enough, York fumed. We can’t keep sending these clowns to the Moon. Beanie hats, and kids’ jokes –
We can’t go on like this. If we’re really going to Mars we need a new class of astronaut. A better breed.
Ben had continued to encourage her to apply, to join the program. Maybe I should. I know I could do a better job than a moron like Chuck Jones.
She went back to the truck, and got more coffee.
Mission Elapsed Time [Day/Hr:Min:Sec] Plus 001/13:45:57
‘You are go for TOI,’ capcom Bob Crippen said. ‘One minute thirty.’
‘Thank you,’ Gershon replied.
York pulled on her helmet and locked it to the neck of her pressure suit. She fumbled slightly, her fingers clumsy inside her stiff gloves. She buckled her canvas restraints around her.
Once more she felt cool, stale air wash over her face.
Ares, assembled, was a slim, fragile pencil of metal. It was a big, bright object, and it would be easily visible from Earth, as a naked-eye star passing over Cape Canaveral.
Stone said, ‘Go for ET H-two pressurization.’
‘Confirm.’
York began closing switches that would raise the temperature inside the booster’s two great External Tanks.
