Voyage to the red planet, p.3
Voyage to the Red Planet, page 3
“Monday we’ll be in high orbit,” Bass said, relieved. He hated press conferences.
“That’s where the press conference is going to be held,” Kirov said. “The first press conference in space in twenty years.”
The De Havilland Comet was the first commercial jet, a 471-knot craft with four Rolls-Royce engines. Two Comets had come apart in midair, terminating the aircraft’s commercial viability, and one of the leftovers had ended up on Landfill, at the end of the airstrip, where it had been peeled open and turned into the Comet Diner.
“Oil is already a million years old in the can,” Bass said in answer to Glamour’s question. They were sitting at the end of the counter, by the big window, waiting for the Hollywood doctor and the Movie Stars. Since loading the Demogorgon on the Old Moulmein Pagoda, they had drunk three rounds of Red Stripe and watched six incoming flights (two Lear jets, one commercial STOL, and three out-island DC-3s), mostly half-filled with mechanics, used rocket-ship brokers and seafood buyers. There were plenty of middle-thirtyish Black men (Markson’s description of Jeffries), but none with doctor bags, and no Movie Stars whatsoever.
“So then you crank her up,” Glamour prompted.
“She runs smooth as silk until I get to a stoplight, and this kid in a pickup is pointing under the car,” Bass said. “Jesus, I wish they would get here. It’s ten o’clock already.”
“If they don’t get here by tomorrow, we leave without them,” Kirov said.
“So then you get out,” Glamour prompted.
“I get out and look under the car. She’s pumping oil out the front and the back, and water through the water pump, and transmission fluid out the front and rear seals.”
Bass paused; he looked at Glamour, as if waiting for a response.
“That’s it? I don’t get it,” said Glamour.
Kirov stepped to the door. Overhead the stars gleamed in their splendid, meaningless array. Once you had been in space, they never looked right from Earth.
Down the runway a replica Ford Trimotor was landing, its turbines almost silent in the night. Maybe this is them, Kirov thought.
“The point is, the mechanical parts were perfect but the seals were dried out all through the engine. It’s not just miles but time that wears out a car. I had to have the whole thing torn down and new seals put in from front to back. It cost me thirty-six hundred dollars.”
“I still don’t get it,” insisted Glamour.
No one got out of the Trimotor except the pilot, who took a leak and got back in. The cockpit light went out, as if he had bedded down for the night.
“I think he’s trying to tell us that we’re going to drip oil across the solar system,” Kirov said, turning and signaling the waiter. “Check, please! Gentlemen, let’s hang it up and go to bed. We leave at nine A.M. with or without the Hollywood doctor or the Movie Stars. They can come up later with the press conference.”
Bass raised his bottle of club soda. “One last toast. To the Mary Poppins.”
Glamour raised his Red Stripe. “To the first film on Mars.”
Kirov clinked her Diet Coke. “To the first trip to Mars.”
Glamour set his bottle down carefully so that it didn’t clink.
“Wait wait wait wait wait,” he said. He looked at Bass and then at Kirov as if seeing them both for the first time. “First trip to Mars? You mean, you guys have never been there before?”
6
“START CABIN LEAK CHECK.”
“Roger.”
“Arm OMS engines.”
“Roger.”
“Open cabin vents,” said Bass, for this was his flight: second-in-command on the voyage, he was pilot for the first leg on the Columbia-class Old Moulmein Pagoda.
“Roger,” said Kirov, for she was faithful to the vernacular of flight that had been passed down from the barnstormers and their Jennys, through the Southern-fratboy lingo of NASA, to the Soviet crew that had exchange-trained in secret at Houston.
“Pagoda, this is Control,” came a singsong Bahamian accent. “Crew access arm retract beginning. Please affirm.”
“Okay,” said Bass.
“Pagoda, this is Control. Your side hatch is dis-secure on visual. Please affirm.”
“Okay,” said Bass. Then, back over his shoulder to Glamour: “Hey, Scotty, would you pull that door shut?”
“Pagoda, this is Control. You may initiate APU prestart procedure.”
“Okay.”
“You are on internal power,” said Kirov. “And please say ‘roger’ instead of ‘okay.’”
“Aye-aye, Cap’n.” Bass ran through the checklist, amazed at how easily it all came back to him. The rocket felt like a racehorse straining under his seat; its flanks trembling with pent-up excitement.
“Main engine gimbaling check.”
“Hydraulic check.”
“Roger,” said Kirov. “Main engines gimbaling check completed.”
“Ten,” said Bass.
“Nine.”
“Eight.”
“We have Go,” he said, reaching for the override.
“Pagoda, this is Control,” said the Bahamian voice. “You have an abort.”
“What?”
“You have a scrub, a stay-home, a no-go. Confirm. Kill your APUs.”
Bass killed his APUs. “What’s going on? Do you see a leak?”
“Negatory. This is not an equipment failure, it’s a command override.”
“Then to hell with it,” Bass said, reaching for the APU switch to resume the countdown, but Kirov stopped him, her hand touching the back of his with the gentle but firm touch of command.
“Control, this is Captain Kirov, what’s the problem?”
“Captain, you have a passenger here on the tarmac. A Brother with a big black bag.”
“Start cabin leak check.”
“Roger.”
“Arm OMS engines.”
“Roger”
“Open cabin vents…”
While Bass redid the countdown, Kirov did a visual of the flight deck. Their new passenger was securely stowed beside Glamour in the row of seats just below the flight deck. His big black doctor’s bag, which he had refused to stow, was on his lap. Was it her imagination or was it squirming? Or was he just nervous?
“Eight.”
Or was she just nervous? This was her first trip into space in almost twenty years.
“Six”
“Five.”
“Four. …”
“We have SSE ignition.”
“SSE ignition.”
“We have SBR ignition.”
“SBR ignition.”
“We have liftoff.”
“Have liftoff.”
Kirov closed her eyes for a long delicious moment and let the sound wash over her. It was like long thunder, like a waterfall of fire, like the booming of a glacier, like a hundred Colorados; like mountains that had learned to sing, and learned to fly, and flew straight up. Like a rocket taking off.
“Engine specs look good,” Kirov read.
“Look good,” Bass repeated.
“Ten feet per second. Twelve. Twenty.”
“Twenty.”
The Old Moulmein Pagoda shook the Earth, rattled, rose. Bass felt the launch press him back deep into his seat as his weight increased to two gs, then three, then almost four. Tame compared to the new parabolic roller coasters, but still a thrill. Beside him he saw Kirov with her lips pulled back over her teeth in that wide, forced, terrified, ecstatic, blissful and familiar spaceman grin.
“Air speed 7,294.”
“Check.”
“8,225.”
“…225.”
Bass trimmed the burn and reached behind the console, pulled out a pack of Red Man chewing tobacco, and picked out a good wad. He only chewed when he was flying, and he was flying.
“Elevation 110,325.”
“110, check.”
Columbias were supposed to have a life span of three hundred launches, but what about clones? Kirov wondered. Better or worse? How many times had this old tin can ridden the elevator of fire? Probably five hundred. How many more before it came apart in the air?
“Speed 9,725.”
“Check.”
“Ten and up. How’s our pitch?”
“Okay,” Bass said. Fighting the increased gs, he reached behind the console for another chaw of Red Man. In the rear-view mirror he caught a glimpse of Glamour squashed in his seat, looking angry. The doctor’s face showed only boredom and no terror. Bass wondered how long it had been since he had been in the Navy.
“Pitch down two.”
“Check.”
“Yaw check.”
“Check.”
Glamour gritted his teeth as the roaring grew to a howl and seven million pounds of thrust flattened him into the cheap composite of his seat. The oversized (even for full-sized people) barca made Glamour feel even smaller than usual, and the thrust slamming the seat into his backside made him feel even more insulted by gravity. It went on, past discomfort, past terror, to indignity: the certainty that he would disappear altogether and be found by the ship cleaners, Louis Glamour, ASC, jammed between the cushions like a lost billfold.
“We have rollover.”
“Have rollover.”
“Critical burn, throttle back to sixty-five.”
“Back to sixty-five.”
Dr. S. C. Jeffries jiggled the bag on his lap gently until it stopped squirming. Then he relaxed and stared at the curved wall, wishing it were a window. He had been to the orbital station twice when the Navy had run half of it as the Farragut Space Medicine Center. Now, as then, he found Earth separation dull: a brute force exercise as unexciting as a one-car drag race.
“We have ET separation.”
“Have ET.”
“ET phone home,” Bass and Glamour said at the same time.
The ship leaped ahead in one final lunge for orbit. Then there it was: the sudden silence and weightlessness together as if sound had weight and silence, wings. Zero g was familiar to Kirov, Bass and Jeffries, but as strange to Glamour as light to a newborn babe. Feeling his heart turn a loop inside his breast, Glamour gulped, then grinned. Then took his heart for another loop for fun.
“Mission time thirty-three.”
“Thirty-three.”
Kirov was just savoring the almost forgotten feeling of weightlessness when there was a familiar, unwelcome, not totally unexpected sound.
“It’s Glamour,” Bass said.
“I know,” said Kirov. “I can smell the oysters.” Kirov looked back at Jeffries, pointed at the wall slot that held the cudbuster, and said, “You’re on duty, Bones. You have a sick passenger.”
“Got it,” said Jeffries; then muttered, “Please don’t call me Bones.”
Glamour looked surprised rather than sick: he was staring at his own puke which was spinning in a small globe, gray with swirls of blue and cream, like a model of Neptune.
Jeffries took the cudbuster out of its wall slot and tried it; it was dead. He shook it. The globe was drifting toward the wall, where Jeffries knew from his Navy experience, it would shatter into droplets and spread around the room.
Glamour reached for the cudbuster and swiftly opened it, pulling the batteries out. He cracked them together and touched his tongue to the ends. That did it: Jeffries threw up himself, neatly, the Navy way. Then he turned away while Glamour vacuumed up both drifting vomit globes.
Kirov turned back to the controls, where Bass was locking in for the approach to the orbital station. This Hollywood doctor didn’t look too swift to her. But she would deal with him later.
“OME’s charged.”
“Charged,” Bass repeated.
They were in medium Earth orbit: floating in space, but still tied to the familiar dock of the Earth. Kirov was amazed at how easily the routines came back. She signed orbital insertion complete, and Bass checked the engine specs while they both watched the blue agate Earth, like a new and more interesting sky replacing the old one, drift “overhead.” There were the still smoldering Amazon plains, a brown sear touched with new green in one corner. To the east, the sun shone brilliantly off a Scotland-sized oil slick that spun lazily, like a gleaming Sargasso, in the South Atlantic. Clouds puffed eastward across the Sahara like sheep.
“We have visual,” said Bass.
“Have visual.”
Pitch and yaw corrected, they sailed at 15,588 mph toward the flashing speck that had just come over the horizon.
“How’s the situation back there?” Kirov asked.
Jeffries pulled himself forward to her barca and spoke in a whisper. “I don’t like it. Something’s wrong with this guy.”
Behind them both, illuminated by the blue Earthlight, Glamour’s eyes were shining; his teeth were gleaming through his bright red beard. His arms were folded across his chest. Bass looked at him and recognized his expression immediately.
It was ecstasy.
7
NIXON STATION WAS BOTH bigger and smaller than Jeffries remembered. He had been here as part of the Farragut Space Medicine Center Team, before the Navy had been acquired by Beatrice-Texaco, and the station he remembered was boy-awesome: a spinning chrome and plastic wheel with a quarter-mile-long tube through the middle; a complex as big as a mall, one third military-scientific, and the other two thirds divided among gambling concessionaires, each vying to outdo the others in luxury, plant life and the interior architectural style known as Texas Hotel. The wheel was, since the Trump Sky Palace disaster, dark, still and no longer spinning. The casinos had all gone home, driven to ground by the negative publicity of an eighteen-month shower of shooting stars, each, at least in the popular imagination, a grinning space-bloated gambler.
The Old Moulmein Pagoda approached from darkside through a mismatched and seemingly random collection of fuel tanks, parts nets, experimental lab cells and hab tanks tied together with poly lines like rubber bands. The entire station complex was a mile long, and most of it was dark. At the far end, distinguished by a blinking light, were the tied-together tin cans of McAuliffe Orbiting Lodge, their destination.
According to Park Service rules, the ship had to be docked by a Ranger, but over the years the reg had been modified into a talkdown.
“Johnson?” Bass asked when he heard the smokey’s voice “Leroy Johnson? Houston, 19—?”
“Bass? Is that you? I’ll be damned. Don’t bang up my station docking that scrap iron.”
Bass trimmed the ship with the OMEs so it glided in between the scarred bumpers with a minimum of fuss. “Your station?”
“I’m station chief here.”
“You’re dowxxxzzzxxx,” said a computer-generated voice over the cabin speaker. “Welcome to Nixon Staxxzzxxzzxxzx.”
Jeffries unstrapped, and floated down from the flight deck to the air lock, with Kirov right behind. Glamour unstrapped but stayed by his seat. Bass listened to the muffled clunks as the air locks sealed, then to the hissing as the two craft equalized pressures, both at .8 Earth atmosphere. He wasn’t in any hurry to leave the Old Moulmein Pagoda. “Cash or crexxzzxxzz?” the computer voice asked. Bass punched in the credit code Markson had given him; in a moment he heard the low rumble of LOX boiling into the lines.
He heard a sigh of pleasure and turned around. “You’re still here?” he asked the red-bearded midget floating upside down over his barca.
“Ever take acid?” Glamour asked.
The good old days were over, Kirov could see. When she had been with NASA, on exchange, the equipment had been second-rate and new; now it was second-rate and old. The interior of Nixon Station’s McAuliffe Orbital Lodge was as cheerless and dank as the steerage of an oil tanker—which in a way it was, being made out of discarded external fuel tanks welded together. The pumps whined, the filters howled, the air was smelly and the walls were slick with cold moisture, so that the entire effort of zero-g maneuvering was to stay away from them.
She followed Jeffries through the passage from the air lock into a large cylindrical room. Two tourists, overweight American white folks in their sixties, were parked on the Velcro lounger in front of a curved crystal window with a supertaped crack running across it, looking out at the panorama of the Earth sweeping below them. At the bar on a Velcro stool “sat” a young woman, no more than a teenager, with dirty blond hair; she was wrapped in two sweaters and shivering. EARTH-LIGHT LOUNGE, the sign behind the bar said: All drinks $45 no Canadian money, s’il vous plait. “It’s the honor system,” the teenager said. “But let me mix them. I’m trying to learn.”
“A Stoly, please,” Kirov said. She wouldn’t be flying until day after tomorrow, when they were scheduled to go up to the Mary Poppins. Might as well enjoy this little break.
“Oh, are you Commander Kirkov? There’s a phone call for you.”
“Captain, and it’s Kirov.”
“I’ll have the same,” said Jeffries.
“We don’t have actual Russian vodka,” the teenager said.
“How about Illinois? The phone’s over there by the door.”
When Glamour was sixteen, working in Hollywood as a location extra for his uncle’s Gaelic Little People, Ltd., a friend had slipped him a tab of sunshine at Coyote Farms’ backlot. The world had taken on its proper dimensionality: they spent the afternoon climbing a tree, admiring the interaction of bark and light and time. Now the third and fourth dimensions were there again, without the tree. Plus, there was something special about this blue Earth-reflected light that rang through the flight deck, filtered through seas of air! And with his compact size Glamour seemed to be having less trouble than even the old salts in maneuvering.
“That’s pretty good,” Bass said. “But don’t make all those little swimming motions. You’re not a goldfish. That’s better.” He had never seen anyone take to zero g so easily.
A head poked into the cabin: a grizzled almost-old man, Bass’s age, in the archaic forest green of the National Park Service.
“Johnson,” Bass said. “You old space dog. Meet Louis Glamour, ASC. I thought you had retired.”
