it was true what they whispered: that the bullets Kennedy had survived in Texas six years ago had damaged more than his body …
Standing silently, he saw now that the land curved, gently but noticeably, all the way to the horizon, and in every direction from him. It was a little like standing at the summit of a huge, gentle hill. He could actually see that he and Armstrong were two people standing on a ball floating in space. It was vertiginous, a kind of science-fiction feeling, something he’d never experienced on Earth.
… This will certainly be the most arduous journey since the great explorers set sail to map our own planet over three centuries ago: it is a journey which will take a new generation of heroes to a place so far away that the Earth itself will be diminished to a point of light, indistinguishable from the stars themselves … We will go to Mars because it is the most likely abode of life beyond our Earth. And we will make that world into a second Earth, and so secure the survival of humankind as a species for the indefinite future …
The Earth, floating above him, was huge, a ball, blue and complex; it was much more obviously a three-dimensional world than the Moon ever looked from home. He was aware of the sun, fat and low, its light slanting across this desolate place. Suddenly he got a sense of perspective of the distance he’d traveled, to come here: so far that the trinity of lights that had always dominated human awareness – Earth, Moon and sun – had moved around him in a complex dance, to these new relative positions in his sensorium.
And yet his sense of detachment was all but gone. He was as locked to Earth as if this was all just another sim at JSC. I guess you don’t throw off four billion years of evolution in a week.
He found himself wondering about his own future.
All his life, someone – some outside agency – had directed him toward goals. It had started with his father, and later – what a place to remember such a thing! – summer camp, where winning teams got turkey, and losers got beans. Then there had been the Academy, and the Air Force, and NASA …
He’d always been driven by a strong sense of purpose, a purpose that had brought him far – all the way to the Moon itself.
But now, his greatest goal was achieved.
He remembered how his mood had taken a dip, after returning from his Gemini flight. How tough was this new return going to be for him?
Kennedy had finished speaking. There was a silence that stretched awkwardly; Muldoon wondered if he should say something.
Armstrong said, ‘We’re honored to talk to you, sir.’
Thank you very much. I’m grateful to President Nixon for his hospitality toward me today, and I’ll ask him to pass on my very best regards when he sees you on the Hornet on Thursday.
Muldoon steeled himself to speak. ‘I look forward to that very much, sir.’
Then, following Armstrong’s lead, he raised his gloved hand in salute, and turned away from the camera.
He felt perplexed, troubled. It was as if Earth, above, was working on him already, its huge gravity pushing down on him.
He would have to find a new goal, that was all.
What, he mused, if Kennedy’s fantastic Mars vision came to reality? Now, that would be a project to work on.
Maybe he could join that new program. Maybe he could be the first man to walk on three worlds. That would be one hell of a goal to work toward: fifteen, twenty more years of direction, of shape to his life …
But to do that, he knew, he’d have to get out from under all the PR hoopla that was going to follow the splashdown.
For him, he suspected, returning to Earth was going to be harder than journeying to the Moon ever was.
He loped away from the TV camera, back toward the glittering, toy-like LM.
Saturday, October 4, 1969 Nuclear Rocket Development Station, Jackass Flats, Nevada
A smell of burning came on the breeze off the desert, and mixed with the test rig’s faint stench of oil and paint The scents were unearthly, as if York had been transported away from Nevada.
I read somewhere that moondust smells like this, she thought. Of burning, of ash, an autumn scent.
In 1969, Natalie York was twenty-one years old.
In Ben Priest’s Corvette they’d made the ninety-mile journey from Vegas to Jackass Flats in under an hour.
At the Flats, Mike Conlig was there to meet them and wave them through security. This late in the evening, the site was deserted save for a handful of security guys. When the three of them – York, Priest, and Petey, Priest’s son – climbed out of Ben’s Corvette, York noticed how the car was coated with dust, and popped as it cooled.
Nevada was huge, empty, its topography complex and folded, cupped by misshapen hills. The sun was hanging over the western horizon, fat and red, and the day’s heat was leaching quickly out of the air. The ground was all but barren. York recognized salt-resistant shadscale and creosote bushes clinging here and there, and the occasional pocket of sagebrush. Good place to test out a nuclear rocket, York thought. But – my God – what soul-crushing desolation.
In bursts of quick jargon, Mike and Ben started discussing some aspect of the test results they’d been reviewing that day. If York had learned one skill in too many hours in college bars and common rooms – she was finishing up her own BS in geology at UCLA – it was how to tune out someone else’s specialty. So she let Mike and Ben talk themselves out, and walked a little way away from them.
Ben Priest’s son Petey, at ten, was a lanky framework of muscle and energy; he ran ahead of the others, his blond hair a shining flag in the last of the daylight.
The test site was laid out as a rectangle confined by roads, to the south, and rail tracks, to the north. They were walking out west – away from the control buildings where the car was parked – toward the static test site, Engine Test Facility One.
This test station was cupped in an immense dip in the land delimited by two great fault blocks: the Colorado Plateau and Wasatch Range to the east, the Sierra Nevada range to the west. The station – with its isolated test stands and bits of rail track and handful of shabby tar-paper shacks – looked overwhelmed by the echoing geology of the desert, reduced to something shabby, trivial.
They reached the test facility. The assembly was maybe thirty feet high, its geometry crude, complex and mysterious. York made out a sleek, upright cylindrical form enclosed by a gantry, a boxy thing of girders. The stack was scuffed, patchy, unpainted. The whole thing was mounted on a flatwagon on the rail track, hooked up to a rudimentary locomotive. Big pipes ran out of the rig and off to other parts of the test station; in the distance she saw the gleam of spherical cryogenic tanks: liquid hydrogen, she guessed.
Petey Priest had his face pressed to the fence around the test facility, so that the wire mesh made patterned indentations on his face; he stared at the rig, evidently captivated.
York watched Conlig and Priest together.
Mike
