"Titan" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baxter Stephen)Day 325The blood trickled sluggishly out of Angel’s arm. As he tended the donation bag, Rosenberg couldn’t tell what Angel was thinking. Bill just didn’t seem the same guy Rosenberg had got to know down on Earth. Floating around up here in the usual semi-foetal position, so many of his gestures and postures had changed: he would never sit with his legs crossed like he used to, or stand with his hands on his hips, or cross his arms… Microgravity had even messed up their body language. Rosenberg just couldn’t read Angel any more. It sure didn’t help them all get along, cooped up in here. Now Rosenberg watched, irritated, as the clear plastic bag suspended from Angel’s arm slowly filled up. “Clench, God damn it, Bill.” Angel’s fist closed harder around the little rubber grip, and the dripping flow of blood accelerated a little. “Fuck you, double-dome. You should be grateful. I got better things to do than bleed myself to death to preserve that shrivelled dyke in there.” Paula Benacerraf came out of her quarters and joined them in the common area of the hab module. She looked as if she had been sleeping; her face was slack and baggy, and she was struggling into a grubby T-shirt. They were all wearing stinking, dirty clothes right now, because the laundry was malfunctioning again — clogging and leaking water — and none of them had had the will to fix it. “I think we’ve all heard what you have to say, Bill, a dozen times.” “Oh, you have. Then screw you.” Angel pulled the loose bandage off his arm, and began to tug at the needle protruding from his skin. Rosenberg said, “Hey, leave that alone. You’re not done.” “Yes, I am.” The needle came loose, and Rosenberg hastily swabbed at the puncture wound in Angel’s flesh. Angel glared at him, his eyes wild above his tangle of floating, greyed beard. “This isn’t a goddamn nursing home. We don’t have the resources for this. I say we cut our losses.” Rosenberg held up the half-full bag. “Paula, he didn’t complete the donation.” Benacerraf looked at him from eyes sunk in pads of puffy flesh. “Make it up from stores, Rosenberg.” Rosenberg kicked off the wall and caromed in front of Benacerraf, thrusting the bag in her face. “Don’t you get it? We don’t have any stores. This is all there is.” “Make it up,” she said wearily. Without waiting to see if he complied, she pulled herself along the hab module to the waste management facility. Angel snorted contempt, and went into his own quarters, slamming the door closed behind him. Rosenberg was left alone in the common area, his own anger surging. He threw the bag of blood against a wall. It bounced off, soggily, and began drifting away from him, the viscous blood undergoing complex, slow-motion oscillations. After a couple of minutes, his heart still rattling with anger, he scooted along the module to retrieve the blood. Rosenberg’s personal theory of Angel was that he was the kind of bad-mouthing asshole who would always bitch at any leadership shown by anybody else, but would always be unwilling to take any real responsibility for himself. He reacted, not acted, and in the meantime made life a living hell for the rest of them stuck here with him. But strictly speaking, of course, he was right about Libet. Rosenberg was a biochemist, but he was also doubling up as the nearest thing But here they were — still inside the orbit of Earth, with a deep space maneuver and their second Venus flyby still to come — and not even one of the six years of the mission elapsed. Yet already one of the crew was basically hospitalized. The purpose of the crew’s med training had been to enable them to prevent biological death. They had all rehearsed in resuscitation procedures: mouth-to-mouth, sternum compression to get the heart pumping, electroshock paddles, endotracheal intubation, cricothyroidotomy, tracheostomy. They had even — back in the remote early days of the mission when they had all still been talking to each other — tried to rehearse such procedures under microgravity conditions. It had soon become comically obvious that grappling with a limp crewmate in microgravity was physically awkward, distasteful, almost grotesque. And many of the steps in their manuals — Anyhow, the theory of their training was that if they could just stabilize whatever situation came up, there would be time to wait for radio waves to crawl across the Solar System and bring advice from the medics on the ground. But they simply weren’t geared up to nursing anyone — even one person, twenty percent of their crew — long term. This was a marginally capable interplanetary craft, not a convalescent home. The blood had been the first, and most visible, stock to be diminished; the almost daily routine of drawing blood from the crew — who were already weakened by their own reactions to microgravity — had jammed the cost of maintaining Libel’s life in the faces of everybody on board. Then there were the drugs. There was a pretty wide range of products in long-term storage. They had intravenous fluids, whole blood, crystalloid solutions: both saline and normal serum albumin, morphine sulphate, lidocaine, digitalis preparations… But the difficulty they faced now was that Libet had already absorbed a lot of the resources they’d started out with. And that had caused growing resentment among everybody else. Including, Rosenberg admitted, himself. He tried not to think about it. There were other problems to face. He dug out his softscreen, with his copy of today’s checklist. He was scheduled to put in a little time in the centrifuge himself right now. But he could feel the steady whir of the arm as it rocked the spacecraft. That was Nicola Mott; even as Libet declined, Mott seemed to be taking an obsessive interest in her own health, and was putting in extraordinary hours up there. He listened for a moment to Mott wheeling overhead, grimly fighting back the tide of microgravity changes. Whump, whump. According to the checklist, Mott should have been putting in some time in the farm. Rosenberg decided he might as well cover for her. He pulled himself through the hab module hatchway, along the little flexible access tube, where Siobhan had gotten her close, and into the CELSS farm. He pulled on the protective gear — now, after months, rank with the sweat of others — and began to work around the racks of plants. He didn’t like it in here. Most of Rosenberg’s work, though on living systems, had been at the microbiological or biochemical level. The fact was, he hadn’t had much contact with living creatures, human or otherwise, and he found these ranks of straining plants a little sinister. Overall the hydroponic system was working as it should, and he could see that many of the plants had the large leaves and small roots characteristic of such a facility. But he could also see, at a glance, there were the usual mechanical problems with the facility: clogged irrigation nozzles, a couple of failed fans, a suspiciously dark hue to the solution in one tank, indicating maybe a problem with the nutrient mix. And here was one place where the solution looked aerated, full of fat, sluggish bubbles which clung to the roots of the plants. Aeration was bad. The roots had to stay in contact with the solution to prevent dehydration and nutrient starvation, and to Rosenberg those plants looked, even to his naked, inexpert eye, undernourished. There were more fundamental problems. Within the muddy hydroponic nutrient he could see roots growing — not downwards — but in straight lines away from the seed plate, and at bizarre angles to the shoots. And in these late-generation growths, healthy plants were dotted among many unhealthy and abnormal growths. It wasn’t a surprise to Rosenberg that after billions of years of adaptation to a gravity well the plants were having trouble with microgravity. There were gravity-related mechanisms that controlled branch angles and leaf orientation, and gravity dominated plant cell growth, elongation and development. Without gravity, the physical stresses and loading on cells disappeared. In fluids buoyancy was lost, and gas-filled volumes and vesicles would not move as they should… He could see that some of the wheat crop would need reseeding. Several generations since leaving Earth, the yield of the crops was reducing, and although he could see no gross morphological defects there was some evidence of discoloration and perhaps malformation of the stem growth. He reached into the trays and took out a couple of stems as samples. He was sure he would find problems in cell division, nuclear and chromosomal behavior, metabolism, reproductive development and viability. He understood, deep down, that it had always been a gamble that they could make this little farm work, and they were just going to have to work their way through the problems as they came up. The truth was, nobody knew what the long-term effects of microgravity and GCR would be. The handful of experiments on biological systems in space — in Libet had been the most assiduous farmer; her absence, here, among these fragile green things, was keenly felt. In his softscreen he made a brief list of the main problems he found, to raise at a crew meeting later, and he began to strip off the protective gear. Back in the hab module he had to climb past the wreckage of the laundry, which, it appeared, Benacerraf had been disassembling. The front cover was drifting loose, and he had to shove it aside to get by. It took a little experimentation; if he pushed away from the line of its center of mass the cover just spun, or oscillated in space. There was also other debris from the half-finished job, mops and small tools and a little clear plastic bag of nuts and washers, cluttering up the air. He looked absently inside the laundry. Benacerraf had opened up the exit vents, and he could see there was some kind of growth in there, what looked like a black algae, coating the walls and vent grilles. He’d found some of the same growth himself on the shower curtain. Micro-organisms tended to flourish in the habitable compartments, surviving on free-floating water droplets in the air. But the problem was deeper than that. Their miniature biosphere had fundamental problems of scale. It was poorly buffered; the biota were connected with a much smaller reservoir of biogenic materials than on Earth. Carbon dioxide, for instance, was recycled through the This algal growth was a typical, relatively harmless, example. The others bitched about scraping this stuff out of the shower, but things could get a lot worse: if, for instance, the levels of cee-oh-two rose or fell away from nominal too dramatically, the whole life support system could crash altogether. Nobody knew what was really going on in here, and they just had to cope with it as best they could. Rosenberg felt he understood this, that he’d understood it before he got on board As he waited for his mail to open on the softscreen he listened to the continuing slow rattle of Mott in the arm. He wondered if he ought to get her down out of there. These long periods in the arm wouldn’t do Mott any harm, but if she started giving them all an excuse not to do their hours in there she could damage them all… One of his messages, from the surgeons on the ground at JSC, was a little worrying. They had been monitoring the routine electrocardiogram readings Rosenberg had been sending down the loop. All five of them had suffered minor heart irregularities over the last twenty-four hours. Rosenberg himself had suffered a so-called bigeminy rhythm, in which both sides of the heart contracted at once. Rosenberg thought he could feel his own heart thumping now inside his chest, huge and vulnerable, as he tried to digest this piece of information. He checked the time of his bigeminy. He didn’t remember anything wrong, except maybe feeling tired. He frowned. He’d have to look into this later; the surgeons wanted more EKGs taken of all the crew, and they had a number of suggested causes for the irregularities… He moved his analysis of the farm plant samples up his mental priority list. He was becoming convinced many of the problems with the biosphere could be related to deficiencies or surpluses of trace elements. The plants, on analysis, would be a good check of such problems. He looked again at his checklist. He couldn’t find any excuse to avoid his patient any longer. Siobhan Libet was slung in her sleeping bag, and her cramped little quarters had been made over as a kind of miniature hospital ward. The place was cluttered, but it was clean and smelled fresh, if a little antiseptic. That was thanks to Mott, Rosenberg knew. As far as he was aware neither Benacerraf nor Angel ever ventured in here. Libet was unconscious. She’d been that way for three days now. He pulled the door closed behind him, and started his examination. Siobhan’s problems were multiple, and linked. The effects of microgravity were marked in Libet, who, after all, hadn’t been able to get to the centrifuge for a hundred and sixty days. Her skeletal muscles were deeply atrophied. The wasting of her cardiac muscles seemed to have stabilized at about eight percent. That was higher than the crew’s average, and Rosenberg worried about eventual cardiac arrest. Libet’s hemoglobin was down by fifteen percent, enough to mark her out for treatment, on Earth, as an anemic. That hemoglobin count meant less oxygen being carried to the debilitated heart and skeletal muscles. Her white cell count was down too, so her ability to fight off infection was reduced. Rosenberg was administering interferon to her, a protein involved in the immune system — production of which was also suppressed. A couple of simple tests showed him that Libet’s flexor muscles had lost around twenty percent of their strength, the extensors twenty-five percent. Even the cell structure of her muscle fibers was changing, he knew; microgravity was working on her right down to a micro-anatomical level. Libet’s bone calcium continued to wash out in her urine, at a half percent a month. Rosenberg thought there was a danger of her inner spongy bone, the trabeculae, vanishing altogether, without hope of regeneration. He didn’t have any way of monitoring the build-up of some of that calcium in Libet’s kidneys, which could lead ultimately to kidney stones. And on top of all of that, Libet was working her way through the classic symptoms of acute radiation sickness. In the first few days after the solar storm incident Libet had suffered from nausea, pain, a loss of appetite, extreme fatigue, vomiting. After a couple of weeks she had started to suffer diarrhea, hemorrhaging from the mucous membranes in her nose, mouth and other parts of her body, and hair loss, from patches all over her scalp. Libet had taken a dose of around five hundred rem. The textbooks said her chances of survival in the short term were less than fifty percent; and in the long term — when effects like cancer had time to work through — even more marginal… He suspected she’d done well to survive so long, even to stay conscious. He looked at Libet’s face. He could see tears leaking steadily, and when he raised a lid, her eye was bloodshot. That was partly due to the changed fluid balance, and partly to the dustiness of the air: in microgravity, dust didn’t settle out. The eyes produced tears, and blink reflexes cut in, intended to wash foreign bodies off the eye, into the lacrimal duct and into the nose. The nose was supposed to run, then, to wash the particles out of the system. But in microgravity there was no gravity feed to the lacrimal duct. The blinking could only redistribute particles over the eye; Libet’s cornea was, as a result, red and scratched. And the particles which were forced into Libet’s lacrimal duct did not run out of her nose, because her nose was almost stopped up by excessive mucous secretions. If she ever pulled through this he didn’t want Libet to emerge with eye damage. So he had set Mott the task of bathing Libet’s eyes, and treating them with various drops… Complex, messy, unanticipated problems. As he worked, Rosenberg thought about death. If — when — Siobhan Libet died, it would be Rosenberg who would have to sign her death certificate. He would have to perform the autopsy. He would have to provide standard and X-ray documentation, and subject tissue samples to toxicologic, bacteriologic and biochemical analysis; he’d have to take samples from the liver, a kidney, the brain, a lung, cerebrospinal fluid, vitreous humor, hair, skin, spleen and the skeletal muscles… The legal position wasn’t very clear. NASA spaceflight crews were judged to be federal agency radiation workers, and so were covered by Occupational Safety and Health Administration radiation protection measures. But those measures had not been drawn up for spaceflight, and NASA had prepared its own standards for crew dosage. As far as he could make out, because of get-out clauses, there were actually For sure, though, they hadn’t adhered to the ALARA principle that the standards laid down: exposure As Low As Reasonably Achievable. If the law suits started flying, Rosenberg might even be asked to preserve the body. That would mean, as far as he could see, mummification. Jesus. What a situation. In the course of his med training, Rosenberg had had some preliminary introduction to psychology. It wasn’t exactly a subject he was interested in, but what he had learned had pretty much confirmed his preconceptions about NASA: that the psychological preparation of NASA crews, including this one, was pitiful. Nobody had figured out how they should respond to a situation like this. What Maybe the worst problem was that the five of them had, prior to Libet’s accident, come to some kind of accommodation with each other, and with their situation. But the injury to Libet during the solar storm, and now her likely death — the loss of her skills, her muscles, her dedication to the farm, her contribution to the collective personality of the crew — was likely to destabilize them all, he feared. Or worse. It might destroy them altogether. …In sleep, her skin was smoothed out, almost glowing in the soft light of her cabin’s reading lamp. She looked young, trouble-free, save for the occasional grimace, pain echoes which crossed her face. It was an odd thing, but he’d never really gotten to know Libet, in the years they’d spent together training for this mission, even the months they’d been cooped up together in this hacked-up Space Shuttle. To him she was a kind of sketch, a collection of barely understood traits: her readiness to laugh, her obvious sense of wonder, her youthful impatience to fly in space, her relationship with Mott. But then, he hadn’t really gotten to know any of the rest of the crew, except in so far as their interests crossed his own. It was only now, when he had been forced more or less to suspend his own work on the Titan data and had been reduced to a kind of low-level nurse for Libet, that he had started to see her as some kind of human being. There was a person in there, he realized now: an interior presence as deep and complex as his own, inside this shell of damaged flesh. And she was suffering. He hadn’t quite understood his own reaction when he saw how Mott, in her distress, held Libet, and how Libet responded to her. He had been baffled, angry, as if Mott was intruding. It was a funny thing, but it was as if, out here, so isolated from all but this ill-assorted handful of people, Rosenberg was starting to gain some kind of psychic connection with his fellow humans, for the first time in his adult life. And it wasn’t all that hard for him to figure out why he had gotten so angry at Nicola Mott, Libet’s grieving lover. It was because — in a stupid, unworthy way, now that she was utterly dependent on him — he was falling in love with Libet himself. Rosenberg was jealous. When he got back to the common area, he found Angel and Benacerraf screaming at each other. Paula had algal growth smeared over her cheek. “Were you aware of this?” “Aware of what?” “What he’s been taking.” She stabbed a finger at Angel, who loomed in the air beyond her, his beard floating, his body hunched over in the shape of a huge, brown-jacketed claw. “Are you talking about drugs?” Paula seemed to be trembling, so extreme was her anger. “God damn it, am I supposed to watch over every damn thing on this fucking ship? Rosenberg, you’re the surgeon up here. You got a responsibility for this stuff.” “Woah.” Rosenberg held his hands up. “Back off, Paula. As far as I’m concerned all I have is a field assignment. I’m no doctor, and I sure as hell will not accept sole responsibility for our medical supplies.” Now it was his turn to point at Angel, who laughed at him. “If that asshole wants to shoot himself up, that’s his responsibility. There’s no lock on the cupboard, and I’m not prepared to hold any key—” “Fuck this,” Angel snapped now. “Look, Benacerraf, I’m not taking any orders from you over this.” “Then you can take them from NASA.” “NASA are ten million miles away,” Angel yelled. “We’re on our own out here. Don’t you get it?” Benacerraf tried to face him, but they were both bobbing in the air as they gestured, their centers of mass adjusting as they threw their arms back and forth. It added an air of absurdity to the whole situation, and was maybe even extending the row. “Steroids,” Rosenberg said. They turned to look at him. “Anabolic steroids. That’s what this is about, isn’t it? He’s taking steroids, against microgravity wasting of his bones.” “Steroids,” Benacerraf said, “and fluoride to promote calcium growth. That’s what I’ve been able to trace anyhow.” Angel shrugged. “Sue me,” he said. “It’s a hell of a sight easier than those dumb hours in the arm.” “It doesn’t work,” Rosenberg said. “What is it you’re using, the nandrolone? Look, steroids work by increasing muscle strength, not by acting directly on the bones. The stronger the muscles, the more stress they impose on the skeleton; and your skeleton adjusts itself until it’s just strong enough to withstand muscle stress. But — here’s the catch, Bill — you still have to do your exercise to get the benefit. Don’t you get it? And as for the fluoride, that really is dumb. You’ll start getting calcification where you don’t want it. And—” “Up your ass, double-dome,” Angel said savagely. “You’re no doctor. What do you know?” Rosenberg shrugged. “Fine. Your choice. Don’t come to me when your tendons ossify.” “Fuck you,” Angel said. He pulled himself into his quarters, and slammed the door closed behind him. Now that the shouting had stopped, the routine noises of the hab module became more apparent: the whir of the high-speed fans, the hiss of the vents, sixty decibels of white noise. For a moment Benacerraf hung there in the air, her legs drawn up towards her chest. Her breathing was rapid, her face flushed, her eyes, over puffed cheeks, red-rimmed and irritated. Rosenberg wondered vaguely about the state of her heart. “Rosenberg,” she said now, “I want you to take responsibility for this. I want you to find a way of locking those damn drugs away from Bill.” He didn’t respond. He had no intention of locking away anything. He sure wasn’t going to intervene in some argument between Benacerraf and Angel, for the benefit of a control freak like Benacerraf. Anyhow, he figured, he had enough responsibility already. He got away from Benacerraf. He made his way past the debris of the laundry, and in the galley he tried to find something easy to fix for lunch. Hadamard was in Washington during the inauguration of Xavier Maclachlan, after his wafer-thin win in the 2008 election. Maclachlan called it a “liberation of the capital.” Armed militia bands came in from Idaho and Arizona and Oklahoma and Montana, to fire off black-powder salutes to the nationalist-populist who promised to repeal all gun control laws. In the crowd, Hadamard saw a couple of Ku Klux Klan costumes, a sight he thought had gone into an unholy past. Come to that, there was a rumor that a former Klan leader was being made ready to become a future White House chief of staff. And in his speech Maclachlan appealed to the people to end what he called the “Israeli occupation of Congress…” And so on. As soon as Maclachlan lifted his hand from the Bible, U.S. peacekeeping troops in the Balkans and Africa started to board their planes to leave. Foreign aid stopped. The U.N. was being thrown out of New York, and there was a rumor that Maclachlan was planning some military adventure to take back the canal from Panama. Army engineers — set in place during the handover from the last Administration — started to build a wall, two thousand miles of it, along the Mexican border, to exclude illegal immigrants. While it was being built, troops brought home from peacekeeping abroad were operating a shoot-to-kill policy. There was chaos in the financial markets. Maclachlan had withdrawn the U.S. from the North American Free Trade treaty, from the World Trade Organization, from GATT. Reviews of the country’s membership of the World Bank and the IMF had started — arms of an incipient world government, Maclachlan said, designed to let in the Russians. He had raised tariffs — ten percent against Japan, fifty percent against the Chinese — and world trade collapsed. The Chinese, particularly, screamed. And so Maclachlan sent the Seventh Fleet to a new station just off the coast of Taiwan. Meanwhile all the strategic arms treaties with Russia were torn up, as Maclachlan ordered his technicians to dig out the blueprints for Reagan’s old dream of SDI. In fact, Maclachlan wanted to go further. He was inviting ideas for what he called his “da Vinci brains trust.” The press was full of schemes for fantastic new weapons: smart remote sensors; dream mines that could shoot at passing traffic; smart armor that would use explosive tiles to deflect incoming projectiles; maybe even an electrical battlefield in which electricity-propelled shells would be zapped in by low-flying aircraft. And back home, Maclachlan had cut off any remaining programs which benefited blacks and other minorities, and any funding that appeared to support abortion, which had been made illegal in any form. Xavier Maclachlan was a busy man, and he was fulfilling his campaign promises. Jake Hadamard was still in his job at NASA, trying to maintain support for the Titan mission, still coping with the fall-out from the Hadamard had thought he could work with Maclachlan. All his life, Hadamard had put himself, his career, first; he’d thought he could work with anybody. Maybe he’d been wrong. He thought Maclachlan was causing a lot of people a lot of misery, needlessly. He was stirring up hate that might rebound on him. And he was taking one hell of a risk by enraging China like this. Hadamard felt afraid of the future. But his greatest fear was that Maclachlan might actually be The future, his personal future and the nation’s, was more cloudy than ever before. Marcus White asked to meet him at the KSC Visitors’ Center. He parked his car and walked through the Kennedy rocket park. Hadamard remembered how you used to be able to see the rockets as you approached the Visitors’ Center, sprouting from the far side of the freeway, white and silver, like the ash-coated stumps of burned-out trees, tied to the ground by their stay-wires. Now, though, those silver treestumps were almost all fallen; those that hadn’t been dragged away to be dismantled lay against the hot ground like discarded matches. He was early. The old Visitors’ Center was deserted — the ticket booths closed up, the once-sparkling VR displays of the Moon and Mars just empty stages — but the main work of dismantling the place hadn’t yet begun, and as Hadamard walked the click of his patent leather shoes on the floor echoed. He walked around the old-fashioned displays of real hardware: Gemini, Mercury, Apollo. The Mercury capsule — America’s first manned spaceship — was just a cone of corrugated metal, packed with equipment, enclosed in a glass sheath; the controls were glass and Bakelite and metal toggles, clunky and crude. It looked as if it dated from the 1930s, not the 1960s. It was hard to see how a man in a pressure suit could get inside there, let alone fly the thing into space. Even the Apollo Command Module seemed small, dingy and primitive: impossibly cramped, with the metal frames of those three couches jammed in together. The interior finish had faded to a muddy yellow. There was big chunky machinery on the hatch, and tiny, thick windows, and Velcro patches everywhere. “I know what you’re thinking.” The gravelly voice in his ear made him jump. He turned. In the dimmed lights he made out the tough leather face of Marcus White. “I know what you’re thinking. How the hell did they go to the bathroom in there? Well, I’ll tell you. You had to strip naked, see, and then take this plastic bag and clamp it to your ass. And when the turds came out you had to hook them down into the bag with your finger, through the plastic. No gravity; nothing to make stuff fall by itself, right? And then—” Hadamard forced a smile. “Marcus,” he said, “I know how Apollo astronauts went to the bathroom.” “So you came to see these old birds before they are taken out for scrap?” “They’re not being scrapped, Marcus,” Hadamard said patiently. “As you know. They’ll be put in storage, here at the Cape or at Langley or Vandenburg. It’s just—” “I know. Nobody wants to see this old junk any more. Right? So, you believe that too, Jake?” Hadamard shrugged. “Hell, I don’t know any more, Marcus. Most of the population is too young to remember Apollo anyhow. And the opinion polls say most of them don’t believe it ever happened, that it was all faked, a Cold War stunt. Attendances here have dropped right off. What do you want to see me about?” White let his mouth drop open. “You don’t know what’s going on here — you, the big cheese?” “I don’t get to hear everything.” “Sure. Not since Maclachlan took the oath, right?” Hadamard stiffened. “So tell me.” White made an odd, growling sound at the back of his throat. “I’ll show you. I was called in to do a VR recording. For the new arcade. They called us all in, those who are left alive. Pete, Neil… Quite a reunion.” “Sounds like fun.” “Not really.” They walked on, past more mummified, dust-covered 1960s hardware. “You know, I see these guys once every five or ten years. And all I can think is, once you could bounce around on the Moon as light as a feather, and now, my God, look what all this gravity has done to you… “Anyhow, come on. You won’t believe your fucking eyes.” The new arcade was a lot smaller and more compact than the old, sprawling Visitors’ Center — it had an atmosphere more like a chapel, in fact, as opposed to the old center’s VR whizz-bang. There were no Geminis suspended from the ceiling, no wax dummies of spacewalking astronauts, no Jim Lovell spacesuits or Lunar Rovers on faked-up moonscapes. There were a few simple decorations — abstract paintings of the Earth, Moon and stars — and a discrete row of VR booths, almost like confessionals. White pulled back the curtain on the first booth. It showed a simulated Buzz Aldrin, as he’d been when aged around seventy: tanned, seated, relaxed in a sports shirt and slacks. As the curtain opened he went into action. “Are these recordings?” Hadamard asked. White shrugged. “Some recordings, some cleaned-up and digitized, some straightforward faked-up sims. The story about Buzz’s communion on the Moon is true, though. Look at this next one.” He pulled back a second curtain; another spectral simulation popped into life. Irwin looked thin, pale, wasted to Hadamard; two decades after his return from the Moon, Irwin had died of a massive heart attack. White was looking into his face, waiting for a response. Hadamard spread his hands. “Maybe this isn’t so bad, Marcus. After all, maybe we’ve been too hot on the technology, rockets and capsules, for all these years. Maybe we neglected the spiritual side too much. This is just a — course correction.” “Bullshit,” White growled. He stalked forward and pulled another curtain. White seemed to be grinding his teeth; big animal muscles worked under the silvery stubble of his cheeks. “They’re calling this display ‘Testimony.’ They want a contribution from each of us, the Moonwalkers, the story of our spiritual revelations on the Moon, or in space. For the guys who died, like Irwin and Tom Lamb, they’re assembling VR sims using old interview clips and autobiography stuff.” “You won’t cooperate?” “Like hell I will. Jake, believe me, it just wasn’t like that. It was about getting through the checklist, and not screwing up. No damn hand of God helped me wipe my butt in one-sixth G…” Hadamard shrugged. “I guess this is what you get if you out-source your visitors’ center to the Foundation for Thought and Ethics.” “That bunch of fucking creationists?” “They have buddies in the White House now, Marcus. Look, you just have to go with the flow on this one. It’s a sign of the times. Maybe we’re entering a more spiritual age.” “Come on, Jake. You don’t believe that. This is all just Maclachlan and his tub-thumping fundamentalism. We’re going to get dragged back to the fucking Dark Ages if we go on like this. You know they’re teaching creationism again in the schools?” “I know.” Hadamard sighed. In fact there was more, probably unknown to White: for instance NASA press releases were already being “vetted” by a monitor appointed by the Foundation for Thought and Ethics, for any anti-religious “bias;” the archive of images garnered from the Hubble space telescope and other satellite observatories was being “purged” of any images which might directly support theories like the Big Bang, in a manner which was not conducive to a “reasoned response” from proponents of alternative “theories…” “So it goes, Marcus,” Hadamard said gently. “I guess you heard about the RLV.” “Yeah.” The final cancellation of the much-delayed, budget-strangled Reusable Launch Vehicle program had been one of Xavier Maclachlan’s first executive decisions. “I’d like to think,” White said heavily, “that the decision was made over your head.” Hadamard made, routinely, to deny that — then hesitated. “Effectively. I didn’t have much choice, after the President and his budget chief got together to beat up on me. The basic argument is the need to free up federal funds to counter the secession threats from Washington State and Idaho. Not to mention Nevada, if Maclachlan goes ahead with his threat to shut down the godless gambling in Vegas… Maclachlan thinks that the whole point of us launching off the Titan mission before he got elected was so we would have a peg to hang the RLV program on. He thinks we tried to pre-commit him to an expenditure of billions on space, year on year ongoing, before a vote was cast in the ’08 ballot. So he just shut the damn thing down.” “So we don’t have a way to retrieve those guys. My God. A year out, and we already abandoned them.” “That’s not the official position. That’s not “But at least you argued against the shutdown,” White said evenly. “Maybe you’re more than the paper-pushing fucker we all thought you were, Jake.” “Thanks a lot,” Hadamard said drily. The thing of it was, White was right. Hadamard He was still trying to figure out why he’d done it. It sure wasn’t anything misty-eyed to do with the safety of Our Men and Women in Space. To hell with Benacerraf and the rest, frankly; they had known the risks, technical and political, when they climbed on board that last Shuttle. For Hadamard, it was something deeper than that. Hadamard found himself resisting Maclachlan, on whatever turf he could defend. It all seemed to be becoming symbolic, for Hadamard. My God, Jake, he thought. I think you’re growing principles, in your old age. But White was still talking. His praise, Hadamard thought drily, was less than unqualified. “Of course you got it all wrong,” White said. “How so?” “Going to Titan in chemical rockets “So what we should be doing is—” “What we should be doing is building for the future. An integrated program. With this Chinese scare we had the chance to change hearts, to thrill and terrify, to lead America to space… We should be building the new RLV, and launching fission rocket stages to orbit, and going to Mars and back in a fortnight. We need an integrated vision of the colonization of the Solar System: Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars, beyond. It’s not impossible, technically. It’s just will, and politics. Politics is just paperwork. And this country has carried through great, world-changing projects before. Look at World War Two…” And Hadamard let the old man talk for a while, until he ran dry. Then he said, “We’ve been here before, Marcus. In the 1950s we dreamed of Tsiolkovsky: the orderly conquest of space. But in the 1960s, what we built was Apollo. That’s the kind of species we are, it seems. And the smart guy, the guy who achieves things, is realistic — about what we’re capable of, what we’re willing to do — and works in that framework.” “Like Jim Webb.” “Like Jim Webb. In the middle of the Vietnam war, after his President was shot out from under him, Jim Webb got “You sent us to Titan.” “Hell, yes. I know it’s not ideal, the smartest thing. But we ain’t so good at doing the smart thing, Marcus. You have to do what you can. Anyhow, would you rather “No. Of course not,” White rumbled. “It’s just I’d rather have had half a lifetime…” “That wasn’t an option,” Hadamard said severely. “We do what we can.” They walked on through the rest of the half-finished center. White’s temper didn’t improve, as he picked out more VR highlights for Hadamard: Ed Mitchell’s cislunar ESP experiment, endless items from NASA apocrypha — “sightings” by astronauts all the way back to Armstrong of UFOs and alien bases on the Moon, a reconstruction of the supposed “lost” transcript of the last couple of minutes of the White was getting very upset, the muscles and veins in his neck standing out like steel cords. “You know, when I was a kid, Titan was just a point of light in the sky, like thousands of others. Now, we’ve landed a probe there. It’s a new fucking world. We have maps of the surface. We have a crew on the way to land there, for Christ’s sake. But if Maclachlan and the Foundation for Thought and Ethics and all those other assholes have their way, in another hundred years Titan will just be a dot in the sky again. How the hell can we lose all that knowledge, Jake?” Hadamard said, “But you walked on the Moon. Whatever else happens, they can’t take that achievement away. Not for all time.” White studied him. “You “Or maybe the world is changing and leaving me behind.” He took White’s arm; he could feel bunched muscle, still hard, through a light cotton sleeve. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get out of here. I’ll buy you a beer.” They walked out, towards Hadamard’s parked car. In the rocket park, a wrecking crew was hauling down the Atlas-Mercury. It was a slim silver cylinder topped by the dark cone of a Mercury capsule, the configuration that had taken John Glenn to orbit. The Atlas left the vertical with a groan of tearing metal. |
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