Voyage - Stephen Baxter

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there for eight whole years: scheduling and training, working on sims and mission profiles. Eight years.

      Now enough bigwigs had moved out of NASA, it seemed, for his indiscretion to be forgotten, and he was back on flight status.

      But if the Moon flights got cut, so did he. He’d probably be too damn old for Mars.

      Jones didn’t want to go to the Moon for the thrill of exploration. For him it wasn’t the destination that counted but the journey: a mission that offered the most challenging flying test anyone could devise.

      The Skylabs just weren’t going to offer that. He had no wish for his career to climax in a low-Earth-orbiting trash can, where the job would be to endure, just logging days, boring a hole in the sky.

      He really would hate to miss out on the Moon.

      Jones hauled at floor bolts with a vigor that alarmed the surgeons who were monitoring his vital signs.

      When the floor was completed, the SimSup congratulated them. ‘Okay, boys; we’ll take a break and refurbish before the next session. Come out through the Docking Adapter.’

      Preceded by the divers, Bleeker made his way through the cramped Adapter and toward the brightly lit water beyond.

      ‘Now you, Chuck,’ the SimSup said.

      Jones made his way into the shadowy Adapter; the lockers clustered about, restricting his movement. He was illuminated by the tank lights behind him, and the free blue water of the facility ahead of him.

      When he was well inside the Adapter, the exit to the Apollo mockup slammed shut.

      Jones pulled up short. He wrapped his gloved palms around the hatch lever. It wouldn’t give.

      ‘What’s going on?’

      ‘Jones.’ The SimSup voice was terse now. ‘You’ve suffered a multiple failure. Your Command Module is disabled; you can’t return to it; you can’t get it loose of the docking port. The power in the workshop cluster is about to fail. What do you do? Go.’

      Now the lights failed. He was left floating in pitch darkness. Even the tank lights had gone out.

      ‘What kind of asshole game is this? …’

      He took a breath, and calmed himself down. SimSups were famous for throwing crap like this at you. He had to find an answer to this, and fast; he could yell at them later.

      He knew the theory. If Skylab astronauts couldn’t get home, a new Apollo would be sent up from the Cape. But if the disabled Apollo was jammed to the docking port, what use would that be?

      In the pitch darkness, he was starting to forget which way up he was.

      These fucking sims.

      He tried to concentrate; he pictured the Adapter as he’d seen it just before the ‘failure’: the useless docking port before him; the access tunnel back to the workshop behind him.

      He suffered a surge of panic. He reached out at random; his gloved hands clattered against lockers and handholds. The space here was too big, he realized suddenly; that was what was disorienting him. If he were safely tucked up in Mercury –

      Take it easy. You’re not in any danger. You can always back out into the tank. The divers are still there.

      Yeah, he thought sourly. But if I do that I’ll have fucked up. The Grand Old Man of the Astronaut Office. Put him in a swimming bath for two minutes, and he screws the pooch.

       In fact, he thought, I’m already screwing up by taking so long. How many seconds? Half a minute? There must be something obvious I’m meant to do; something I’m missing. Think, damn it. If the docking port is blocked, then how –

      Then it came to him. The Docking Adapter had two docking ports. Bleeker had got out through the axial port; but there was also a radial port, stuck to the side of the Adapter for just such a purpose as this.

      He reached down, and found the port on his first try; it was jammed, but it gave after a couple of tugs.

      Bleeker clapped Jones on the shoulder; the impact was deadened by layers of suit fabric. ‘What were you doing in there, pops, having a shave? Next time, make sure you’ve studied the manual.’

      ‘Asshole,’ Jones growled. ‘You were in on that, weren’t you?’

      ‘Just another Monday, Chuck. Don’t take it personal.’

      Fucking engineers. Fucking smart-ass rookies.

      With the help of the divers, they swam clumsily to the side of the facility.

       Tuesday, April 14, 1970 Manned Spacecraft Center, Houston

      According to Fred Michaels’s antique vest-pocket watch, it was a little after a quarter to two. He’d been watching the time compulsively, he realized.

      Tim Josephson oiled up to him. ‘Mr Agronski is here to see you, sir. He’s waiting in your office.’

      ‘That’s Doctor Agronski, damn it.’

      ‘Sorry. Shall I tell him you’ll meet him over there?’

      Michaels, resenting the intrusion, turned away rather than answer. He looked through the glass, at the three rows of flight controllers.

      Seen from the Viewing Room here at the back of the MOCR – Mission Operations Control Room, pronounced to rhyme with ‘poker,’ and known as ‘Mission Control’ to the world – there was no obvious drama. But the controllers looked pretty crumpled, with ties loosened or discarded, shirts creased, and the operations desks were strewn with coffee cups, manuals and scribbled notes.

      He could see Joe Muldoon wandering about at the back of the MOCR. Nine months after his own lunar flight, Muldoon had just finished a six-hour stint as capcom to Jim Lovell and his Apollo 13 crew, but he showed no desire to leave; in fact, he knew that Muldoon was intending to head on over now to Building 5, where other off-duty astronauts were running continual simulations of the improvised procedures the Apollo 13 crew would have to adopt to get home.

      Already seventeen hours had passed since 13 had started to fall apart; Michaels wondered how many of the controllers had got a minute’s sleep since.

      Josephson coughed. The aide was a slim, prematurely balding young man, with a PhD in some discipline or other. You needed a PhD to make the coffee, here at MSC. ‘Sir, Dr Agronski –’

      ‘Yeah, yeah.’

      Leon Agronski worked on President Nixon’s Science Advisory Committee, with special responsibility for the space program, and all its expensive evils. Michaels knew why Agronski was here: to thrash out ‘options’ for NASA’s budget for FY1971 and beyond, before any formal submission by the White House.

      More cuts.

      Michaels was an Associate Administrator with responsibility for Manned Spaceflight, a direct report of Thomas Paine, NASA’s Administrator. It had broken Michaels’s heart when Paine had gone public back in February to announce the cuts to Skylab, even some terminations at NASA.

      ‘You know,’ he mused, ‘maybe, if we can pull this off, this Apollo 13 thing, it will bring us back together, just a little. If we can remember how it feels to have worked like this, today, then maybe we’ll be able to achieve great things again …’

      Josephson had been avoiding his eyes; now he confronted Michaels, a little more boldly. ‘Fred, I know you’re upset. But the wheels don’t stop turning. And Dr Agronski has flown out from Washington to catch you.’

      Michaels grunted. Josephson was right, of course. The wheels never stopped turning.

      And maybe, just maybe, he could use this mess to his advantage. He felt his mood lighten a

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