“Well, I sometimes get my sense of priority back, Natalie. It’s not the lost year that bugs me, you know; it’s, just those fifteen pictures. There they are, sitting on that tape, even now…
“We had to send up a last command. To make Mariner turn off its radio transmitter.”
Oh, God. The poor, brave little probe. She pushed her pillow against her face until she was sure she wouldn’t guffaw. After all, it was only a couple of days since she’d called Ben in a similar mood herself, after an evening spent poring over the latest polls showing Nixon heading for a landslide over McGovern. “How long before Mariner’s orbit decays?”
“Oh, fifty years.”
“Well, maybe we’ll have a manned mission by then. You’ll get there yourself, Ben. Maybe you’ll be able to retrieve your pictures. And maybe pick up the old spacecraft itself; who knows?”
She heard him laugh. “Sure. Why, we’ll bring it back and hang it up in the Smithsonian where it belongs.”
“What next for you, Ben?”
She heard him sigh. “Apollo-N. The test flights for the NERVA. Some time in Tomorrowland.”
“At least you and Mike might get to see more of each other. Maybe I’ll see more of the two of you, in fact.”
“Perhaps. But the flights are looking a long way off, Natalie.”
“Now I think I ought to get some sleep, Ben.”
“Okay. Good night, Natalie.”
“Yeah. You, too, Ben.”
She lay in the darkness, wide-awake.
Mike wasn’t there, of course, or anywhere within five hundred miles of her. He was losing himself in the NERVA developments. As Ben had hinted, that damned project was slipping again.
Anyway, she realized, things hadn’t been quite the same between the two of them since that day in 1969 when she’d gone out to Jackass Flats with Mike and Ben.
She’d tried to talk it through with Mike. It had gone beyond a simple argument for her, beyond the kind of sparky debating exercise they’d enjoyed so many times in the past. NERVA seemed to symbolize, to her, a lot of her unease about the way the country was being run. And eventually that seemed to get through to Mike. Impatiently, he’d shown her schemes to trap the venting hydrogen, to bury the expended cores more deeply…
Somehow that didn’t help. Obviously Mike was smart enough to understand the issues that concerned her, but it was pretty clear he didn’t care; not as much as he cared about a successful project, anyhow.
She loved Mike, she believed. And he loved her. But, she thought, their disparate lives, their different perspectives over the value of projects like NERVA, all of it was steadily pulling them apart.
They’d gone out to Jackass Flats, she recalled, just six months after they’d met. And that was all of three years ago. Maybe she should start regarding those first happy six months as the anomaly, not the norm.
Meanwhile, in March — four months into Mariner’s orbital survey — the first detailed maps of Mars had begun to appear from the U.S. Geological Survey people at Flagstaff. York had gotten hold of copies of those and pored over them.
Mars was very different from what anyone had expected.
Mars was asymmetrical. The whole of the southern hemisphere was swollen, the land lifted well above the datum level and heavily cratered. The northern hemisphere was mostly below the datum, and was a lot smoother than the south… but the north had Tharsis.
Tharsis was a bulge in the planet the size of southern Africa. It was as if a quarter of the whole surface of Mars had been lifted up by some colossal event. The bulge was surrounded by an array of cracks and grooves: to the east of Tharsis, in the Coprates region, a huge canyon system stretched nearly a quarter of the way around the circumference of the planet.
The ancient cratered terrain in the south was cut by gullies and channels which seemed to have been incised by running water. York was entranced by images of Moonlike craters, eroded by flash floods. But there was no sign of water on the surface, in the quantities needed to cut the gullies; maybe the water had escaped from the atmosphere, or was trapped under the surface.
It was what intrigued her about Mars, she’d decided, the mix of exposed, lunar terrain and Earthlike weathering, a combination that made up an extraordinary world: neither Earthlike nor lunar, but uniquely Martian.
But it had nothing to do with her.
The work she was doing, she’d long realized, was building up into a solid, if unspectacular career. She was becoming just another rock hound: her future was probably in commercial geology, and would be spent in messy oil fields, or mines. She could expect a life of heat, cold, rattlesnakes, cow pies, poison oak…
The prospect left her poleaxed with boredom.
She never got to see Mike. She wasn’t interested in her work. And, meanwhile, she spent her spare time imagining geologic traverses across the ancient, battered surface of Mars.
What it amounted to, she told herself with brutal frankness, was that her personal life had been on hold for, hell, years. Just like her professional life.
She felt a germ of a new resolution somewhere inside her, like a dust mote around which a new future might crystallize.
I have to get closer to this Mars stuff. And not for Mike, not even for Ben Priest. For me.
There might be a way. Maybe she could transfer into the Space Sciences Laboratory, right there at Berkeley, that big white building on top of Grizzly Peak.
She got out of bed, dug out her loose-leaf folder of Mars photos, and began to study the eroded craters again.
Thursday, June 7, 1973
Phil Stone was the first to understand Seger’s suggestion.
“My God,” he said. “You’re going to send us to the Moon. Aren’t you?”
“Yes. Yes, that’s right. That’s what I’m considering. I want to reassign your mission a Saturn V and send you to lunar orbit.”
Chuck Jones stared at Seger, astonishment crinkling up his squat face. “Like hell you will.”
For long seconds, the three of them sat in silence.
Stone felt stunned; there in that sterile, mundane office, on an ordinary Thursday morning, it was impossible to absorb such news.
Skylab B, the second Earth-orbital Saturn Wet Workshop, was to have been Stone’s first flight into space. He’d already been training on the science and operational aspects of the mission for months. And Seger was thinking of changing it all around and sending him to the Moon? Jesus.
Seger played with the carnation in his lapel. “You got to look at the bigger picture. The NERVA is slipping again, so its program of test flights is being cut. And that’s freed up a Saturn V. And we need to use it, or we’ll lose it. And I want to use it to send you boys to lunar orbit.”
Stone frowned. “It’s a man-rated Saturn V, for God’s sake. It’s already built. How can we lose it?”
Seger shrugged. “We may have built the thing, but we haven’t yet spent the money to make it fly.”
“We can’t go to the fucking Moon,” Chuck Jones said. “We’re still waiting on the J-2S.” Lunar-orbital workshops were planned, but a few years down the road, following extensive modifications to the S-IVB: the upgraded J-2S main engine, additional payload capacity, a self-ullaging system, electrical heating blankets and Mylar insulation, additional batteries, upgraded electronics… “The fucking S-IVB doesn’t have the power to inject itself into lunar orbit.”