Only the pilots had window seats.Through the front of the spacecraft Reese could see nothing but the reds and grays of the Florida dawn. He listened to the pilots move through the pre-flight check, relieved that he wasn’t having to gamble on his own nerves and reflexes.
At T minus three minutes they switched onto internal fuel tanks, and at minus two minutes they cleared the warning memory.At minus one minute 20 seconds they had flight pressure on the liquid hydrogen. Eyes closed, Reese followed them through the sequence from memory.At T minus 55 seconds the hydrogen igniters were armed and at minus 30 the hydraulics went on.Then the long count, and at minus five seconds the main engines ignited.
The ship began to vibrate, massive bolts holding it to the pad while the pressure built to full thrust, 375,000 pounds from each engine, and then the Solid Rocket Boosters cut in with five million more, and then the bolts exploded, and Reese felt the thrust press him gently down-ward.The smoke from the exhaust, billowing up from the fire pits on either side of the pad, was visible through the front windows, shimmering in the blazing heat.
The real view, Reese knew, was from the pursuit planes following them, planes that Morgan was sure to have laid on to get the maximum publicity from his expense.They would be shooting footage now of the launch pad, falling away until it became a neat gray hexagon against the greenish-brown land and the distant blue of the sea.The long teardrop of flame from the boosters would be too bright to watch with the naked eye, but Morgan’s cameras would get it all, piping it into the cable and onto tv screens around the world as soon as he decided they weren’t going to be consumed in a humiliating fireball.
“Okay, Enterprise, we’ve got nominal performance.”
Nominal being nasa-ese for letter-perfect, Reese thought. So far, so good.
“Roger. Main throttle at 104 percent.All three main engines go at throttle up.”
The sky deepened into violet and at 30 miles the exhausted srbs were blown away, spattering brown film across the windows.“Christ,” the pilot complained,“where’s the windshield wipers?”The other pilot laughed, but Reese had misplaced his sense of humor. He glanced over at Takahashi, who was staring ahead out the windows, impassive.
Eight minutes after launch, the external tank fell away, and the orbiter climbed the last few miles on the nitrogen and hydrazine in its own tanks. Night was falling across the Mediterranean below them, and bright, unwinking stars rose over the crescent Earth.
“Holy Christ,” the first pilot said. Reese stripped the thick webbing away and floated out of his seat.The orbiter still flew on its back, the Earth directly overhead as Reese drifted up between the pilots’ seats for a look.
Morgan’s presence seemed to have stayed behind on the planet, dropped away with the pull of gravity.Though he knew it was a simpleminded and even dangerous illusion, Reese felt as if his perspective was intact for the first time since he left Mexico.
Lena and Kane rose through the hatch, Lena pale and unsteady.“Oh my God,” she said, at the sight of the blue slice of planet over her head.
Kane strapped her in Reese’s seat and gave her a pill to swallow.“Stay put,” he said,“keep your eyes closed, and just concentrate on holding that down.”
Space Adaptation Syndrome, nasa’s fancy term for space sickness. Reese could already feel his own facial tissues swelling and his inner ear sending garbled signals to the brain. If Lena was the only one incapacitated, they would be ahead of the percentages. But he couldn’t do anything more for her than Kane already had, and at the moment he was more interested in the tracking signal from the Mars Mission Module, less than an hour downrange of their current position.
They spent a second long, frustrating hour as the novice pilot tried to dock with the mm. His instincts were useless; increased thrust moved them into a higher, slower orbit, and by dropping low enough to catch up they overshot, time and again. Reese finally went below decks and suited up to begin denitrogenating.
And then they were docked, and Reese was finally through the airlock and out the open bay doors, strapped to an ms09 maneuvering unit, rising into the shadow of the Mission Module.The fifth booster stage lay in the orbiter’s payload bay; when it was in place the spacecraft would be nearly two hundred feet long, a tall, thin cylinder pointed into space. He squirted nitrogen from his jets and lifted to the top of the ship.
“Reese?” Kane said.“How does it look?”
“Fine,” he said.“Listen, can you leave me alone for a minute?”
“Uh, sure.”
Reese cut the radio off and watched the planet slowly turning beneath his feet. Looking down the ship gave him an eerie sense of perspective, as if it were a tower running all the way to the surface, flexing in the wind as the planet moved.
There it is, he thought.A fragile accident of a world, the one place in the solar system, maybe in the universe, that is truly hospitable to the human race. Could you turn your back on it forever?
He touched his gloved index fingers to his thumbs, closed his eyes, and waited until he could feel the stillness all the way through his lungs and stomach and heart. Here he could feel a deeper, slower rhythm, a music inaudible on Earth.
One single world, no matter how rich or familiar, was not enough. He’d been stranded down there, rescued by circumstances he didn’t fully understand. Before he would let himself be trapped there again, he would risk anything.
Anything.
He opened his eyes and turned the radio on.“Let’s go to work,” he said.
The pilots fitted the final stage into position with the orbiter’s manipulator arm. Lena, nearly recovered from her sas, hovered outside with Takahashi and gave directions.
Meanwhile Kane and Reese opened the Mission Module to hard vacuum.Then they blasted the inside surface clean with nitrogen jets and pumped in a fresh atmosphere.The module still smelled faintly of rotting food. In time, Reese thought, the Sabatier units would clean it up, or they would just get used to it.
During the second day the abandoned Antaeus facility passed slowly overhead. Reese had spent three redundant weeks there after the first Mars landing, quarantined even though they’d been isolated for nearly ten months on the return trip. Later the station had been turned over to genetic engineers, then evacuated when the government fell.
There had been rumors, doubtlessly exaggerated, of some strange experiments in the station, and it gave Reese a momentary chill to see, through the orbiter’s telescope, a light still burning in the lab.
That afternoon Takahashi pronounced the ship’s computers functional, and the four of them said their goodbyes to Morgan’s pilots and watched the shuttle move slowly away.And then they stood in awkward silence in the Command Center of the Mission Module as the first stage ignited, building slowly to the one-G thrust that would ease them out of Earth orbit and into the long fall away from the sun.
For nearly a month Reese kept them on a tight nasa schedule of exercise, eva, and simulations. He watched with twinges of misplaced desire as Lena and Kane dabbled in zero-G sex, then settled into quiet antipathy.And when the schedules began to break down, he found himself unable to argue. He spent more time alone in his cabin or struggling with his personal demons in the midnight, hallucinatory silence of the command center, leaving Takahashi to his fanatical exercise and quiet arrogance.
For Reese, familiarity reduced the trip to a few milestones: the passage of lunar orbit, shutdown of the last engine, the midpoint of the Hohmann ellipse; nothing else seemed real or significant. He had internalized the voice on the tape, and he lost any desire to talk about it, even though he was no longer afraid of Morgan.
Only as they strapped themselves in for aerobraking did he realize that the time was coming when he would have to act, to try for the astrometry diskette on Deimos if he wanted it.There could be no second chance, no other way of giving the person named Verb “enough information about the terminus” for her to give him what he wanted.