LITMIR.BIZ

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      Another sharp rattle.

      Young said, ‘Slight underburn that time, Ares. One point six feet per second.’

      ‘Copy that,’ said Gershon, and he clucked at Stone in mock disapproval.

      Young said, ‘Your orbit is now ten miles under the booster’s. Range sixty-three miles and closing.’

      ‘Rog,’ Stone said. ‘Going for terminal phase initiation.’ York could hear solenoids clatter as Stone worked the pushbutton controls of the reaction control clusters. ‘How about that. Right down Route One.’

      ‘Good burn, Ares,’ Young said. ‘You’re closing at one hundred thirty-one feet per second.’

      Stone went through two more corrections, and five sharp braking maneuvers. Then, maybe half a mile from the booster, he took the Apollo on a short, angular inspection sweep. The reaction control systems bit sharply, rattling York against her restraint.

      York watched the cluster roll with silent grace past her window.

      The booster cluster was squat, pregnant with fuel. Its heart was a fat MS-II booster, a Saturn second stage, modified to serve as an orbital injector. Fixed to the front of the MS-II was an MS-IVB, a modified Saturn third stage, a narrower cylinder. To either side of the MS-II were fixed the two External Tanks, fat, silvery cylinders as long and as wide as the MS-II stage itself. These supplementary tanks carried more than two million pounds of liquid oxygen and hydrogen, propellant Ares would need to break clear of Earth orbit.

      The MS-II and its tanks looked like three fat sausages side by side, with the slimmer pencil shape of the MS-IVB protruding from the center. The rest of the Ares stack – the Mission Module, MEM and Apollo – would be docked onto the front of the MS-IVB, to complete the assembly of the first Mars ship, a needle well over three hundred feet long.

      The cluster was oriented so that it was pointing toward the sun; that way, boiloff of the cryogenic propellants inside the tanks was reduced. Shadows of struts and attitude thrusters lay long against the sunlit white and silver bellies of the fuel tanks. The booster’s underside was illuminated only by the soft blue and green of Earthlight. She could see the great flaps of the cluster’s solar panels, folded up against the sides of the MS-IVB stage like wings; the panels would be unfurled when Ares was safely launched on its trajectory to Mars. There was the bold red UNITED STATES stenciled against the side of the MS-II, and the finer lettering along the long thin protective flaps masking the solar panels, and the NASA logo; and she could make out the support struts and attachment pins which held the External Tanks in place against the flanks of the MS-II, and the gold-gleaming mouths of the MS-II’s four J-2S engines, upgrades of the engines which had pushed Apollo to the Moon.

      To assemble this much mass in Earth orbit had taken all of nine Saturn VB flights over the last five years – half of them manned. The booster stages and their tanks had been flown up here and assembled more or less empty, and then pumped full of gas from tanker modules. The cluster was an exercise in enhanced Apollo-Saturn technology, of course, and the essence of its design went all the way back to the 1960s. But NASA had had to develop a raft of new techniques to achieve this: the assembly in orbit of heavy components, the long-term storage of supercold fuels, in-orbit fueling.

      Sailing over the Earth, brilliantly lit by the unimpeded sunlight, the booster stack was complex, massive, new-looking, perfect, like a huge, jeweled model. Once they’d docked, she wouldn’t see the cluster from outside again like this for a year. Not until, she realized with a jolt, she receded from it in the MEM, in orbit around Mars.

      Stone stretched, raising his arms above his head and reverse-arching his back, so that he floated up out of his frame couch. His long limbs unfolded with evident relief; he really did look too tall to be an astronaut, York thought.

      He said, ‘It’s been a long day already. What say we have ourselves some lunch before we proceed with the docking? If you can take it, Natalie.’

      Food? Now? ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘I’m fine.’

      ‘Rager,’ said Gershon. He climbed out of his couch. He moved in microgravity as if he’d been born to it; he just floated up out of his couch, pushed at the instrument panel in front of him, and went swimming around like an eel.

      He rooted in the equipment bay beneath the couches. He got to the food locker and lifted the lid; it was full to bursting with little cellophane packets of food, all Velcroed in place.

      Once they got into the Mission Module, the standard of cuisine would improve, York knew. But while they were stuck inside this Apollo they had to make do with squirting water into color-coded plastic bags of dehydrated food. Still, she wasn’t about to complain. The Command Module was like a cute little mobile home, with its warm water for food and coffee, and toothpaste, even a system for the guys to shave.

      Gershon came floating up with a handful of gold-painted bags. ‘Hey. I found these at the front. None of us is coded gold, are we?’

      Stone smiled. ‘Nope. I had those put there for you to find.’

      York studied the bags. ‘Beef and potatoes. Butterscotch pudding. Brownies. Grape punch.’ She looked at Stone. ‘What’s this? None of this was in my personal preference. In fact, I hate butterscotch pudding.’

      ‘I thought it was kind of appropriate. This was the first meal the Apollo 11 crew ate in space. Straight after trans-lunar injection, after they left Earth orbit for the Moon.’

      ‘All right,’ Ralph Gershon said, and he pulled a hose out of the potable water tank and squirted the spigot into his bags with enthusiasm.

      York looked at the bags again. Butterscotch pudding, in memoriam. Bizarre.

      But maybe, after all, it was appropriate.

       Monday, April 13, 1970 Manned Spacecraft Center, Houston

      Chuck Jones snapped closed his visor and tugged at the umbilicals on his pressure suit, testing their fittings.

      He stepped to the edge of the tank. It was a big blue rectangle, like a swimming pool. T-shirted divers were already moving through the water, playing around the sim like dolphins; cables trailed through the water, around the blocky white shape of the sim itself.

      It’s like a fucking kid’s game, Jones thought. Sims. How I hate sims.

      He turned to see his partner, Adam Bleeker. Because his suit was so stiff, Jones had to hop around like a rabbit. ‘You okay, kid?’

      Bleeker seemed to start. ‘Sure. Yeah, sure, Chuck.’

      Jones snickered to himself. He knew he could put a bug up the ass of a raw kid like Bleeker, just by smiling at him. ‘Good boy. Welcome to the Weightless Environment Training Facility, here in sunny Texas. Beautiful sight, isn’t it?’

      Bleeker turned to the water. ‘I think I’ve got a kind of Monday morning feeling about this, Chuck.’

      ‘So do I, Adam; so do I. I hate this fucking fish tank. But we gotta go through with crap like this, or they won’t let us fly their beautiful birds. You all set?’

      ‘Let’s do it.’

      His breath loud in his ears, Jones stepped onto the white platform before him. Now he was suspended over the pool. With a whine of hydraulics, the platform lowered his clumsy, umbilicalled bulk into the water.

      The divers loaded him up with weights that would neutralize his buoyancy, and so simulate weightlessness. Then they got hold of Jones’s suited arms, and began to drag him through the water toward the sim. The water was hot, for the benefit of the divers.

      The WET-F, pronounced ‘wet-eff,’ was one of the largest simulator facilities here at MSC. The pool was set at the center of Building 29, a big circular building that had once served as a centrifuge. Now, a sleek ambulance stood beside the pool, and there

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