Year's Best Scifi 2 Part 22

Lucky to be here. All because Morris Udall and a determined band of party conservatives took the Democratic nomination away from the McGovernites' Children's Crusade, all because Nixon got a little paranoid and pulled that Watergate c.r.a.p, c.r.a.p that lost him the election.

President Udall standing up there on Inauguration Day, decreeing that U.S. military forces would turn their equipment aver to the ARVN in situ and, evacuate Vietnam forthwith, "...because, right or wrong, it's time we were done with this sorry business..."

President Udall sitting in the Oval Office signing an executive order that canceled Nixon's s.p.a.ce transportation system, reinstating Apollo and AAP, "...because we spent forty billion dollars acquiring this technology. Let's get the benefit of it before we go out and buy another one."

And, three weeks after that, astronaut trainee Nick Jensen had been a.s.signed to the Apollo 21 prime crew. Apollo 17, to the Moon, numbers 18 through 20 up to Skylab 1, then back to the Moon again.

Ten more flights to the Moon were decreed, and another Skylab, and anywhere between three and seven freestanding AAP missions. After that? Who cares? This will keep us busy through 1981....

They walked on into the deeper darkness, picking over rocks, skirting small, shallow craters, taking samples, talking to Santori in orbit, back through the LM link to Mission Control.

"Okay, let's get the lights on." This was the other limiting factor. It was still seventy Kelvins here, not enough to redline the suits, not even close, but the power necessary to run this new lighting system would drain the backpack batteries in less than forty-five minutes. Ten minutes in here was what the profile called for.

Flame on. The crater bottom lit up around them, rock and dirt and dust and nothing else. Disappointing."Over there." Nick pointed at what looked like a low ridge of black talus near the steeper southern wall of the depression.

He kneeled by it and prodded with his rock hammer. "Sintered solid, I guess, whatever it is."

"Crack off a sample and let's get out of here. This place is a bust." The commentators would be talking about than one, all right....

Nick hit the rock a sharp blow with the hammer's pointed end, breaking a chunk loose. Flash of bright white. "Uh." He picked up the sample and turned it over. Opaque white rock, colored like chalk but hard like granite, no crystalline structure, covered by a thin black rind.

Freeman was suddenly kneeling beside him, reaching out, taking the piece, looking at it himself, watching light glint off the flat, exposed ice surface. "Well, well. Happy birthday, Nick."

Summer 1977. It was the best of times.... Period. No d.i.c.kensian dichotomies at all.

Nick Jensen floated cradled in the arms of his gas-powered astronaut maneuvering unit sixty meters from Apollo 29's CSM, silver and white cone-cylinder-cone hanging above Earth's bright limb. Beautiful day for an EVA. You could look straight down eight hundred kilometers on the brilliant blue Pacific, through thin stratus above the green hills of Hawaii. Not as good a view as the one from higher up. You couldn't really tell it was all one giant s.h.i.+eld volcano, just like the bigger one on Mars, but still...

Viking 1. Still laughing about that badly tuned color camera. "Jeez, it looks just like Utah! Wait a minute, let's have a look at the color wheel...." Red sky at night, sailors' delight.

A red-helmeted head poked out of the command module's open hatch, and Amy Jordan's voice was sharp and distinct in his earphones. "Nick? We should be able to eyeball the Agena any time now."

"Copy that." She was a superb engineer, had had a decisive hand in designing the radio-telescope mission, but the media had ignored all that, going on and on and on about having this sweet young thing fly in the cramped confines of an Apollo capsule with two men, about how she'd have to do all her private business right in front of them....

Worth an exasperated sigh, an attempt at explanation: This is business. Important business, and we're all professionals, polite to each other... Order of the Dolphin, my a.s.s...

Smirk, smirk; wink, wink. All business. Right. Sure it is, buddy...

Nick hit the hand controllers, compressed air stuttering behind his back, and did a slow turn. About ten meters away the completed radio telescope floated, a twenty-meter dish they'd brought up disa.s.sembled in the CSM's science bay, where a lunar mission would've carried camera packs and one of those little subsatellites. When they'd begun, just a week ago, it had been no more than a collection of wire mesh and cabling and electronic boxes. Now...

A lovely, s.h.i.+ning flower of silver and black, floating in low Earth orbit, waiting for its life in s.p.a.ce to begin.

There. The Agena booster was just a scintilla of light on the edge of vision, out in black night. "I've got it.

How far?"

Amy said, "Radar says ten klicks."

"Okay. Bring her in." Once they had this thing coupled to the telescope and got it on its way to GEO, they could go home.... Christ, I love being in s.p.a.ce, but... two weeks packed into a cabin the size of a compact station wagon interior with two offer people, people who smelled a little worse with eachpa.s.sing day.... That sort of thing could wear thing fast.

Another voice in his ears, faintly tinged with a hiss of static, a little echoey from its trip through two ground links and one comsat: "Apollo 29, Mission Control."

"That you, Jake?"

"Roger." Jake Burnett was the third-s.h.i.+ft capcom, hoping to get up here one of these days. He said, "Be advised the two-man crew of Soyuz L-4 has successfully touched down on the edge of Ocea.n.u.s Procellarum."

So, Bykovsky and Leonov on the Moon. "Took 'em long enough." And it would be a big help. Udall had won reelection, still supported the ongoing program, but the 1980 election would get here sooner or later, and once Apollo 40 flew...

No one knew what would be coming after that.

Burnett said, "Here's hoping. We do need the compet.i.tion." You could say things like that now; the press didn't listen to orbital work chit-chat anymore.

"Yeah. Wonder if they know that?"

"Probably better than we do."

Amy Jordan said, "Guys? Coming up on Agena rendezvous in four minutes. We'd better get onto the business at hand."

Business. All business.

He said, "Roger. Copy that." Get to work.

Late spring 1980.

Nick stood on the gra.s.s beside Mosquito Inlet not far from the VIP Viewing Stand, just across the big ditch from the Press Site, waiting, sweating a little in the hot Florida sun. Always makes me itch a little bit.... Reporters seldom came for the launches anymore, big countdown clock tallying away for no one sometimes, even when it was a trip to the Moon.

Moon? Ho-hum. Seen one moon, seen 'em all. Let us know when you're ready for Mars. Or, better still, the stars, just like on TV....

Out in force today though, clogging the press bleachers, forming long, yackety lines by the washroom doors, crowding the wagons of the hot dog vendors they'd let in for the day.

Nick looked at his watch, then across the inlet, up the length of the causeway to the launch site. Above the vehicle there was still a wisp of smoky vapor, but they'd be shutting the pressure bleed and topoff valves in a few minutes, going into the final countdown.

The Saturn 5M was not a pretty vehicle. Not pretty at all. Our future, though. You couldn't even see the core Saturn 5 vehicle, S-ID and S-II stages hidden by four 360-inch segmented-solid strap-on boosters.

All you could see was the S-VB poking out the top, a modified S-II stage with five restartable J-2s that had takes the place of the old S-IVB, surmounted by an odd-looking, forty-foot-diameter hammerhead payload shroud.

Could be a big mistake, using the first test vehicle to fly a real mission. An important mission. One ofthose never-flown field joints springs a leak at alt.i.tude, maybe right after max-Q, we'll see a pretty big up there....

Well. At least it was unmanned. It's only money.

Nick looked around again, at the sprinkling of VIPs who'd come to see the thing off. Outgoing President Udall standing with D.C. Senator Jesse Jackson and Vice President Mondale, Udall's designated successor. President come to see his last big s.p.a.ce-related decision come to fruition.

Fritz Mondale looking away, hardly interested in what was going on, just knowing he had to show the flag as he steadily slipped in the polls. Primaries not going too well. There's never going to be a Present Mondale. Are we in deep s.h.i.+t?

He looked at the slender man at his side. Governor Brown, standing next to Gene Roddenberry, had a pair of binoculars pressed to his eyes, looking intently toward the pad, teeth showing in what looked like a little bit of a grin, or maybe just a glare-squint grimace. Hard to tell with this... very strange dude.

Watching the governor walk around with Linda Ronstadt this morning, he'd tried to listen in. What would I have said, with a little cutie like that in my clutches? Telling her all about the vast resources we'd find out in the Asteroid Belt. How it would postpone the coming world crisis for centuries. Maybe that's what I would've said, too. Right.

So this is, just maybe, the Democratic front-runner, some little ex-seminarian determinedly levering the fat cats' hands off the wheels of power. Political journalists licking their chops. Because, on the other side of the aisle, it was looking to be Ronald Reagan. Battle of the Californians, they said. Or better still, Moonbeam versus Bonzo.

Jesus Christ.

Out on the pad, the vehicle had stopped smoking, thin haze of white frost evaporating away in the sun.

Nick said, "Thirty seconds, Governor.."

Brown pulled the binoculars off his face, leaving little red rings where he'd been pressing them in too hard. "Okay, Nick. You promise me this thing's going to work?" Thin grin, sardonic, not a man who said things by accident.

Nick nodded slowly. "Well. 'Four neins,' Governor."

Brown grinned wider, recognizing the reference. "We'll see," he said, putting the binoculars back to his eyes. "Call me Jerry."

The loudspeaker said, "T minus ten seconds. Sustainer core ignition..." Out on the pad, a glare of orange light down in the flame trough, a thick boil of greasy black smoke as high-grade jet aviation fuel burned in liquid oxygen. Silence. "...three, two, one... solids..."

A huge burst of white smoke, blowing the black smoke away, clouds forming, yellow fire boiling crazily in their depths.

Loudspeaker: "Liftoff..."

The Saturn 5M bounded off the pad, then seemed to pause, staggering visibly, Nick's breath trapped in his chest, heart pounding. Oh, G.o.d.... It seemed to take hold of itself, straighten visibly, then climb into the sky, climb, trailed by a thick column of gray-white smoke, smoke that seemed to grow organically from the base of the rocket....Crackling roar, sound having crossed the intervening three miles, a few brief seconds of familiar F-1 fire, then the hard b.u.mp-ROAR of the solid lighting, some almighty powerful beating on his chest, trying to ash him backward, sixteen million pounds of thrust from the four strap-on boosters, another seven and a half million from the liquid fuel engines, seven hundred thousand pounds of payload headed for low Earth orbit.

Nick glanced over at the governor. Jerry Brown's head was tipped back, following the Moonbase as it left for its new home not far from Amundsen Crater and the south pole of the Moon. He had Roddenberry by the arm, shaking the producer hard. And he was laughing out loud.

Nick looked back at the Saturn 5M, listened to its diminis.h.i.+ng thunder, and thought, Maybe President Brown will want to give that little cutie an asteroid for her birthday. And, just maybe, we can talk him into funding the S-VI nuclear stage we'd like to stick on this thing, calling it the Saturn 5N. Just maybe.

What was it the governor had said? "We'll see..."

In the late summer of 1984, Nick was back on the Moon, walking the dusty plain not far from Lunar Poor Station 1, not quite relis.h.i.+ng the job of escorting the VIP. Not quite. But the old man had proven to be an interesting enough character, making the professional astronauts want to like him, despite their irritation with the whole program.

A journalist in s.p.a.ce was bad enough, but sending one of these b.a.s.t.a.r.ds to the Moon? It was an order of magnitude more outrageous than putting that teacher in s.p.a.ce aboard Skylab 3, wasting an Apollo Transport flight just to put her up there for two weeks. Now this, wasting a flight to the Moon...

But it happened as President Brown decreed, probably just part of his reelection strategy.

They were setting up at what appeared to be a strategic location, the base down-Sun, a collection of half-buried modules, rovers parked here and there, solar collectors sticking up like silver radar dishes against a dramatic backdrop, the low, rounded hills of a crater ringwall, looking for all the world like some denuded and dead Appalachian range.

And the old man was the most useful member of the EVA team just now. He knew just how to set up the cameras, which connectors to plug in where, how to lay the cables so no one would trip over them, issuing commands in a calm, quiet voice....

That same rea.s.suring voice of wisdom I've been hearing since I was a kid. And you know that's why Brown picked him. The President's one smart cookie, all right. Dole doesn't have a chance.

It was a smart choice, but we were all against it, especially when we found out who was going. Come on... a man his age up here? But he's pus.h.i.+ng seventy! D'you realize what it's like, three f.u.c.king days stuffed inside the cabin of a five-man Apollo Transport?

Sure, he'll be all right at Moonbase, but what about the trip?

But the oldest professional astronaut still on flight status is sixty-three now. You want us to can him? No, but... How about you, Nick? Going to be forty-four this fall. When you think we should retire you?

Vision of the upcoming Mars mission crew a.s.signments. Um. Well, I sorts hoped I had a few good years left in me....

And he'd been okay on the trip up after all. Keeping his hands off the hardware, looking out the window, doing his standups. . . and suffering not a trace of s.p.a.ce sickness, while the flight's other rookie floated in his acceleration couch, retching quietly....And, sitting there on the pad, just as T minus thirty seconds was called, he'd chuckled softly and said, "This kinds reminds me of Paris..."

Uh. Paris.

"Sure. I went in with the Airborne. Jumped with them, carrying a G.o.dd.a.m.n typewriter..."

Then, sitting on the Extended LM's floor, as required, face far below the level of the window while the engine rumbled and we dropped toward touchdown, he'd whipped out a kid's folding cardboard periscope, the kind of thing you could still buy for 98 cents, holding it up so he could see out. That won us over, a kind of guileless astronautical ingenuity, like smuggling a ham sandwich onto the first s.p.a.ce flight....

Now, the old man came bouncing gently over. "You all set?"

"Yes, sir. Just tell me where to stand."

The old man looked around, quickly, professional, glancing briefly at the camera, then scuffed an "X" in the dust. "On your mark, Nick. Now open your faces.h.i.+eld so the folks at home can see that pretty face."

The old man grinned at him from under his trademark mustache. "And please. Call me Walter..."

The red light came on then, and the old man turned to face the world. "August 14, 1984," he said. "Good evening. This is Walter Cronkite reporting to you live from the surface of the Moon..."

May 1988.

Nick sat, sort of, in front of the telefax console in the science module, toes tucked into foot restraints, seatbelt across his lap. A little unsteady, hard to keep the mouse cursor positioned on the little white b.u.t.ton, but... click-click.

Breathtaking. Unbelievable. Voyager 3's Io lander had sent back a steady stream of images, almost in real time as it dropped out of orbit, actually pa.s.sing through the thin, hazy umbrella-plume of an erupting sulfur volcano, taking samples on its way to the surface.

Click-click. On the surface now, looking out across a rolling, low-relief yellow plain. In the distance, the eruption was a faint, almost invisible inverted cone against a featureless black sky.

Click-click. Christ... The camera had panned around, deliberately tilted up by the programmers, looking just where they figured...

Fat, banded Jupiter, a sullen orange crescent lying on its side, sun beyond it a dimmed-out spark. There.

That little bit of crud had to be Amalthea, and...

Image of myself out on the surface of that moon, clad in an Apollo moonsuit, bounding across the dusty yellow plains, Jupiter in the sky above me, and the other moons and...

Nick shook his head slowly. Not in my lifetime, anyway. Not until we work out a technology to s.h.i.+eld against the ambient radiation. By the time we have that, we'll be thinking about Bussard ramjets and what star we'll be wanting to visit first. I wish...

He smiled to himself. Listen to me, wis.h.i.+ng for the stars. Sudden memory of himself as a teenager, a senior in high school, turning on the TV and hearing Frank McGee discuss the significance of Sputnik.

And hearing some expert say that, just maybe, some small child, a toddler perhaps, would one day walkon the Moon. Incredible. And, of course, the first man who did walk on the Moon was already an adult, already flying jet aircraft...

He pulled the mouse cursor up to the menu bar and popped open the SELECTION pulldown, clicked on "V-4, G-IV Lander." -The surface of Callisto, seen close up, was almost indistinguishable from the cratered highlands of the Earth's moon. Outside Jupiter's Van Allen belts. Just maybe, someone will go there soon....

Maybe. Maybe. But no one knew what Jesse Jackson would do if he won the election this fall. Continue the program? Cancel it? Maybe. But then, no one knew what would happen if the Republicans somehow took over either. J. Danforth Quayle? Christ...

He sighed and clicked the EXIT icon, docked the mouse in its little monitor-side pocket, and unhooked from the chair. This is all very nice, but there's work to be done. He floated out through the forward hatch, through the node and into the command module, where Jake Burnett was holding down the fort.

"About time you got up here, pal. I've really got to pee!"

Nick smiled. "Sorry. I keep looking at those d.a.m.ned Voyager photos..."

Jake unhooked himself from the acceleration couch and floated above the control console, essentially filling the window. He grinned and nodded. "You and me both. Wouldn't that be a kick, going to f.u.c.king Jupiter?"

"Yeah."