She could see that the whole damn thing was bending Lee in half. But to relax, he generally wouldn’t think of coming home to her. Instead he would go out with Bob Rowen or Jack Morgan or some such, out to some Newport Beach hot spot like the Balboa Bay Club, and he’d come home in the small hours roaring drunk and sleep it off. He wasn’t an alcoholic, she believed; the drinking was just one more example of the way JK’s life was never stable, never routine, but swung constantly between crazy extremes.
And the next morning he would be back at his desk, hungover or not, with his two cups of sugary coffee inside him.
The night was so quiet that she could hear both halves of the phone conversation.
“JK, you’d better get down here,” Julie Lye’s insect voice whispered. “I’m at the pressure test of the oxidizer tank. We’ve had a failure. Catastrophic. I’m looking into the test pit right now. We had seven tons of nitrogen tet down there. Now, all we’ve got is a few fragments of titanium stuck in the walls.”
“All right. I’ll be straight over.” JK began to rattle out instructions while he hunted for his pants. Lye was to begin with a scrutiny of the evidence of the explosion. Just by looking at the distribution of the pieces it was possible to figure out the order in which the tank had come apart. Then there would have to be more structural tests. They should pressure up other test tanks with plain water instead of the nitrogen tet. That way, they could tell if the failure was due to something mechanical — like a faulty weld — or some kind of chemical reaction to do with the propellant. And Lye should get onto the tanks’ manufacturer, a division of General Motors out in Indianapolis. The manufacturers should run identical tests. That way, they could see if the failure had been caused by damage in shipment, or some kind of local phenomenon…
He was still barking out instructions as he left the bedroom. He threw the phone back on the receiver cradle, and left the house at a run.
He didn’t say good-bye to Jennine.
Jennine lay there, trying to summon up sleep. It didn’t work.
She felt as if something was cracking inside her, as if she was one of JK’s goddamn oxidant tanks, pumped full of pressure.
She got out of bed and walked barefoot to the bathroom. She had a couple of bottles of tranquilizers there.
She looked at herself in the mirror. She saw a slack, sagging woman, with worry lines etched into her face and tired, graying, mousy hair.
She took the pills, popping them into her mouth like jelly beans. Viewing the image in the mirror, the little pills pushing into the small sour-looking mouth, was like watching somebody else, someone on TV maybe. She couldn’t feel anything.
When she’d done, she threw the empty bottles into the trash and went back to bed.
Even then, sleep wouldn’t come.
After a time, she reached out for the phone and dialed Jack Morgan’s home number. By a miracle he was there, and not throwing rum down his throat in some bar. She told him what she’d done.
At around 6 A.M., JK came running in, with his hair mussed and no tie and his shirt sticking out of his pants.
Jack Morgan was sitting on the bed, with an overcoat thrown over his pajamas, rubbing Jennine’s limbs. “Where the hell have you been? I called you an hour ago.”
JK started talking about the oxygen tank, and batches of contaminated nitrogen tet, and all the rest of it; but Jack just glared at him.
So JK broke off, and then he started trying to take command. “Have you called a hospital? What about a stomach pump?” It was typical JK. Arrive too late, then order everyone else around.
“She doesn’t need a pump,” Jack snapped back at him. “But she’s going to sleep for a hell of a long time. She should be asleep now. And then I want her to go into the hospital, for observation.” He nodded at the bedside table. “I’ve left a number there.”
JK, looking restless and bewildered, sat on the bed. Then he took Jennine’s hand and began to rub, as Jack had been doing, along the length of her forearm. His hands were warm, but they were trembling, and his touch was uncertain, wavering between too hard and too soft. She managed to smile at him, and he seemed to get a little confidence, and the strokes evened out.
“This is a hell of a thing,” he said, his voice thin. “A hell of a thing.”
“Listen to me,” Jack Morgan said. “You’ve got to get your head out of your ass, JK. You’ve got to start paying some attention to your family. And yourself, come to that. Or Jennine is going to walk out on you, and nobody’s going to blame her. In fact, I’ll be here to drive her away.
“I’ll come back in a couple of hours. You take care, Jennine.” And he went to get his coat, and she heard the door bang behind him.
JK looked devastated. He really hadn’t seen this coming, she realized.
“So,” he said stiffly. “I guess it was a cry for help, huh.”
Oh, JK. Pop psychology slogans. She closed her eyes and thought of the face in the mirror, the steady stream of pills passing her lips. Have I really become such a clichй?
JK sat silently for a while, rubbing her arm. And then he began jabbering about the tank failure. “It was amazing,” he said. “The tanks only blew when they were filled with nitrogen tet. So we knew there had to be some kind of chemical thing going on. But the tanks would only blow here, at Newport. We ran identical tests over at the manufacturers’, in Indianapolis, and zippo.
“So we started doing a trace on the nitrogen tet. It comes from a big refinery run by the Air Force. And guess what we found? The stuff we had at Newport was from a later batch than the stuff at Indianapolis. Our stuff was purer. The Indianapolis batch had impurities, a tiny amount of water in it. So we set up another lab test back at Newport. And we found that when the nitrogen tet is too pure — better than 99 percent — it becomes corrosive! It attacks titanium! But add a dash of water, like in the Indianapolis batch, and the problem goes away. Anyhow, to hell with it. I think we’re going to switch to oxygen-methane for our propellant. The performance is okay, and it’s nontoxic, and we can store it easily for months in space, even if it isn’t hypergolic…”
Jennine lay there listening to this, with her arm in JK’s hands. He was full of his story by now, with the technological sleuthing and all the rest of it, and she could feel his hand jerk around, animated by the storytelling, quite oblivious of her flesh lying passively inside his.
She thought of the immense project, the pieces of the Mars ship flowing into the Newport assembly bays from every state in the Union: fuel and oxygen tanks from Buffalo and Boulder, instruments from Newark and Cedar Rapids, valves from San Fernando, electronics from Kalamazoo and Lima. And probably every one of those pieces left an invisible trail behind it, of drunkenness, and heart attacks, and smashed-up marriages.
She thought, oddly, that JK really ought to understand what had happened to her.
It’s destructive testing, JK. That’s all. Destructive testing.
Tuesday, August 10, 1982
“You’re not going to let me fly.”
Joe Muldoon sat back in his office chair, which creaked under his weight. There was an empty Dr. Pepper can on his desk, out of place among the executive stationery and leather blotters; he grabbed the can and crushed it with a quick movement. “It isn’t like that, Natalie. I told you; I wanted to explain all this to you in person, myself, rather than let you hear it another way…”
“I appreciate that. But you’re not going to let me fly.”
“You’re not going to be the only disappointed dude in JSC. Look, I told you: because we lost that damn Saturn VB, and because we’ve had our budget pared even more — goddamn it, Natalie, the whole country’s been in recession for a year; that’s hardly my fault — because of all that we’re having to compress the schedule. And we’ve still got a deadline to meet. The crew of the first E-class mission will now fly a mission we’re calling D-prime, which will combine the objectives of the old D and E-classes. And—”