Authors: Stephen Baxter
NASA, it seemed, was still headed for Mars.
She’d intended to talk to Mike about it tonight. Somehow, though, the subject hadn’t come up.
She put the leaflet back in the drawer.
Beside her, Mike shifted a little, but he didn’t wake up. He was turned toward her, and his hair lay in a dark halo about his head. He slept like a child, she thought: face down, with his arms up around his head, and his face turned sideways. In sleep the tension had drained out of his face, and he looked years younger than his age of thirty-four.
She’d hardly seen Mike in the last few months. His schedule was grueling. NERVA 2 was now only seven months away from the Critical Design Review at the scheduled end of its Phase A development. After that Phase B, production and operations, should be starting up in earnest, with the first unmanned flight tests scheduled for 1978, and the Preliminary Flight Certificate – issued after the first manned flight – to be obtained by mid 1979.
But Mike’s people still hadn’t been able to demonstrate a sustained burn of their huge new engine for more than a couple of seconds.
Mike seemed to be taking it particularly hard. He’d clearly been working fifteen or eighteen hours a day for weeks now. He’d become gaunt, his eyes sunk deep in shadows, his clothes and hair rumpled and ill-maintained. She wasn’t sure if that reflected the way he was coping personally, or the fact that a lot of the problems seemed to be in the cooling systems for which he was responsible.
Still sleepless, she turned on the TV.
An old
Star Trek
re-run was flickering through its paces. The warp engines were in trouble again, and Mr Scott was crawling through some kind of glass tube with a spanner.
‘If only it was as easy as that,’ Mike mumbled.
His head was lifted off the pillow, and, bleary, he was squinting at the TV.
‘I didn’t mean to wake you, Scotty.’
He reached for a cigarette. ‘You want something else to drink?’
‘No. The brandy is keeping me awake, I think.’ The comforting smell of stale smoke reached her; it reminded her of her mother. ‘It’s times like this I wish I smoked.’
He grunted. ‘Don’t even think about it.’
She debated telling him about the form in the bedside drawer.
But he was checking the clock. ‘I think I’d have woken up anyhow. They should be running the latest burn about now. Something inside me, some dumb kind of timer, wakes me up at moments like this, even when I’m twenty miles away from the Facility.’
‘The burns. The tests. Always the fucking tests. Mike, unless you can figure out a way to relax, you’ll make yourself crazy.’
He blew out smoke. ‘I think we’re all a little crazy already.’
The trouble was, driving people like this had become part of NASA culture.
We all worked eighteen hours a day for eight years to get a man on the Moon with Apollo, and if we have to do it all over again to get to Mars, well, by gosh, that’s what we’re going to do …
But mistakes
had
been made on Apollo, and those mistakes had claimed lives.
She put her hand over his; she could feel how it was bunched up, almost into a fist. She stroked his knuckles. ‘Listen. I’ve been thinking. We don’t see enough of each other.’
‘Hell, I know that. But what can we do about it? We’ve always known what the deal would be.’
She sought for words. ‘But I think our lives are kind of hollow, Mike; we’ve been neglecting ourselves too much. Too many other things to distract us.’ She waved a hand at the motel room. ‘We
need something more than patches of neutral territory like this. We need something solid. I think we should get a place to live –’
He snorted out a billow of smoke. ‘Where? We’re lucky if we’re both in the same state for more than twenty-four hours.’
She was irritated at his dismissiveness. ‘I know that. “Where” doesn’t matter. Anywhere. Here, or Berkeley maybe. And it wouldn’t even matter if the damn place was empty for three-quarters of the year.
It would be ours,
Mike; that’s the point. It would be a kind of base for us. At the moment, all we have is this. Holiday Inn. I don’t think it’s enough.’
I’m twenty-eight years old, for God’s sake
.
He stubbed out his cigarette and watched her; on the TV screen, ignored, Captain Kirk was facing another crisis. ‘You’re a crazy woman, Natalie York.’
‘Maybe so. What do you say?’
‘Why now? I mean, it’s not going to make a damn piece of difference to the way we live our lives, the extent to which we see each other. You’re not going to give up your career.’
‘Of course not, and neither are you.’ She pulled at his fingers. ‘But that’s not the point.’
Then what is, Natalie? What primeval instinct has dragged this up, after all this time? And right at this moment, when you’re thinking of getting on a road that could take you off the Earth altogether …
She surely hadn’t come to terms with what had happened last night, yet.
Maybe this – tonight, with Mike – was all just some kind of way of dealing with Ben, she thought bleakly.
But if that was true, where did it leave her and Mike? …
Christ. What a mess
.
The phone rang, its sharp tone startling her.
‘Jesus.’ He reached out and took the receiver. ‘Hello? … All right, I’ll be there.’ He put the phone down.
‘Mike –’
He was already half-way out of bed; he scrabbled over the floor, looking for his pants. ‘The burn was another failure. Sustained for less than half a second.
Shit.’
He touched her hair. ‘I’ve got to be there, Natalie. You go back to sleep.’
‘I haven’t been asleep.’ She kicked away the sheets and stood up; the air in the room was distinctly cold now. ‘I’ll come too.’
‘You don’t have to.’
‘I’d prefer it. Anyway we have a conversation to finish.’ Mike
had already pulled on his shirt; he was muttering to himself, as his mind started to whirl around the problems of the engine.
He’s probably already forgotten what we were talking about
.
They set off for the Test Facility a little after three a.m. It was going to take half an hour to drive out to Santa Susana from downtown LA.
Mike drove out of the San Fernando Valley, and York could see streetlights glowing down there, neat rectangular blocks of light plastered over the Valley floor and walls.
Mike drove anxiously, too quickly, without speaking to her.
The Test Facility nestled in a rough, boulder-strewn depression in the Santa Susana Mountains. When Mike stopped the car, York was struck by the chill of the air.
She walked with Mike to the center of the Facility.
The stars were out overhead, though the young Moon had long set.
Santa Susana was operated on behalf of NASA by Rockwell International. It had been built as part of the development program for the old S-II, the Saturn V second stage. There was still some S-II development work going on here, in fact. The whole site was a swarm of activity, with technicians – some of them in flame-proof or radiation-proof gear – crawling all over the rig. To York, they looked like ungainly insects.
The NERVA 2 engine stood upended at the heart of the Facility, surrounded by a wire-mesh safety fence. Glowing in powerful floodlights, the broad engine bell flared toward the sky.
When they got close to the rig, technicians came up to Conlig. Mike managed one last, apologetic glance back at York, and then he was lost.
Alone, she began to walk slowly around the rig.
‘Hi. You look like you need this.’
She turned. A man was at her elbow, grinning; he was tall, pale, with blond hair; he wore grimy coveralls. He looked as if he had been up all night. He bore two plastic cups of a brownish liquid. ‘It’s from a dispenser. It’s supposed to be coffee,’ he said, ‘but I wouldn’t bank on it without a full chemical analysis.’
‘I know you. Don’t I?’
‘Yup. Adam Bleeker. We took a field trip together a few years back, in the San Gabriel Mountains.’
‘Oh.’ The Cold Warrior astronaut. ‘With Ben, and Charles Jones. What a disaster that was.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that. You did your job well. And everyone calls him Chuck, by the way.’
‘Whatever.’
She took the coffee gratefully and sipped it. It was warm, but almost flavorless.
Bleeker told her he was the Astronaut Office representative on the project here. Ben Priest had covered the same assignment some years before.
‘It’s kind of an odd time of day to run an engine test,’ York observed.
‘Well, we’re so far behind schedule. Every hour counts.’
‘Tell me about it. I came out with Mike. Do you know him? – Mike Conlig –’
‘Sure.’
‘Nothing was going to keep him away from here, once the call came.’
They started to walk around the test rig, slowly. Technicians were everywhere, arguing desultorily. There was an almost tangible air of tension, of depression; it was Mike’s mood writ large.
The contrast to Jackass Flats – to the raw enthusiasm Mike had represented to her there – was marked.
In the middle of it all, the huge NERVA 2 engine stood erect and silent, aloof, remote behind its safety cordon. This motor, Mike had told her, was the ‘Integrated Subsystems Test Bed Engine’; it was a complete, more or less operational machine, but it was trapped in this ungainly test rig, and when it fired, it could only drive itself into the solid Earth.
Just looking at the rig, York could tell that NERVA was still years away from flight status, from delivering its promised two hundred thousand pounds of interplanetary thrust.
The upturned nozzle sat atop a short, fat cylinder, and two smaller bells protruded from the cylinder’s sides. The cylinder was the pressure shell which contained the radioactive core, and the smaller nozzles, gimbaled, were attitude control rockets. She saw the ring of cone-shaped actuators at the base of the engine; the actuators operated the control drum which moderated the reactor. A huge spherical hydrogen tank sat close to the engine, and pipes snaked from it to swaddle the pressure shell and nozzle. Plumes of vapor vented from the tank, and sheets of ice encrusted its sleek metal walls.
Adam Bleeker helped her trace out the engine’s operation.
‘Liquid hydrogen works as both propellant and coolant – it’s
called regenerative cooling. A pump pushes the hydrogen through that cooling jacket surrounding the pressure shell and the bell. Then the hydrogen is forced through the radioactive core, where it flashes to vapor, and drives its way out through the bell …’
There was still no trap for the vented hydrogen, York noted absently.
Bleeker showed her how an efflux pipe from the reactor carried a proportion of the hot hydrogen gas to a turbine, to power the engine’s pumps in flight. The turbopump exhaust was used as attitude control gas, vented off through the small supplementary nozzles.
‘What’s the problem tonight?’
‘Cavitation. Gas bubbles in the liquid hydrogen flow. We raised the core temperature to its working regime, and we’d started the hydrogen flow. We reached nominal thrust, for about half a second. But then the core temperature started to climb. We were cavitating, somewhere below the pump: hydrogen bubbles, stopping the circulation of coolant. And that was why the core temperature was climbing. We had to shut down.’ He sounded tired. ‘You can imagine the safety restrictions we’re under here. If the pressure shell had been breached, we’d have had radioactive products reaching the atmosphere, and there would have been hell to pay. So as soon as we saw the problem, we had to obey the rule book, which said to shut off the hydrogen, and flood the whole damn core with water to ensure the temperature comes down. Now we’re going to have to siphon off all that radioactive water, and take the core apart by remotes, and make sure the propellant flow cylinders haven’t been damaged in the heat … It will be days before we’re set for the next test.’
‘Christ. What a mess.’
York studied his profile; picked out by the powerful floods, Bleeker’s skin looked thin, almost translucent. She found it hard to read Bleeker’s own reaction to all this. Was he impatient at the restrictive rules, the need for safety? Did he have any qualms about handling lethal substances in such an unstable, unproven rig? She couldn’t tell. Just as when she’d first met him, Bleeker struck her as utterly calm, cool. Or, perhaps, completely without a soul.
‘You’re all under a lot of pressure,’ she said. ‘I know a lot of questions are being asked about the ability of NASA to deliver NERVA 2.’
‘By who?’
She shrugged. ‘The press. Congress.’
‘Yeah,’ he said evenly, showing no resentment. ‘Well, hell, maybe there are questions to ask. You know, the program’s led by the Germans, from Huntsville. And they didn’t pick the design goal – which is two hundred thousand pounds of thrust for thirty minutes – because they
knew
they could build it; they chose the goal because that’s what we
need
for the Mars mission profile. They didn’t go through a lot of analysis to try to figure it out; they just started building toward it. It’s the way they’ve always worked. And it’s kind of hard to argue against their kind of record. But …’
‘But you’re not so sure.’
He hesitated. ‘The truth is, the development schedule we’re working to was modeled on experience of chemical technology. Nuke stuff is
different
. I think they’re only just figuring out how different. And that’s even after we’ve eliminated a lot of nice-to-haves, like a deep throttling capability … I think maybe we’ve underestimated the schedule, here. We’re pushing too hard.’
Now a crew, in white protective gear, was moving into the cordoned-off zone, converging on the NERVA. York wondered vaguely if one of them was Mike. There was no way of knowing.
She stared at the inert NERVA 2, resentful.
Thanks to that broken-down thing, I’m not going to see a trace of Mike for weeks now
.
Bleeker had to leave her, to get on with his own work.
She watched the slow, painstaking demolition job for a few minutes, then she went back to the car, and managed to fall asleep in the passenger seat.