“So the D mission, my space soak mission, is gone. Joe, I know as much about Mars as anyone in the Astronaut Office. And you’re not going to let me fly.”
Muldoon made a visible effort to control himself. “Natalie, you have to believe this. It isn’t personal. Except that I don’t think this is such a loss. It’s precisely because you know so much that you’re a lot more use to me here, on the ground, than hanging around in some tin can in LEO watching the paintwork yellow. I need you here, Natalie. To teach us about Mars. To remind us why we’re going there in the first place.”
She thought it over, trying to contain her anger. “All right. What choice have I got? But I’m going to continue with my training, and my time in the sims, and I’m going to grab every bit of flight experience I can. And if you’re telling me now you’re going to stop me doing that, I’ll be walking out of that door, and I won’t be back. Mars expert or not.”
He held his hands up. “Enough! You’ve got yourself a deal, Natalie.”
She narrowed her eyes as a new suspicion entered her head. “ERA,” she said.
He looked baffled. “Huh?”
“The Equal Rights Amendment. It was thrown out in June.” She felt her anger blossom inside her, an unreasonable rage. “The political climate’s changing. Is that why you feel able to pick on me now?”
“Fuck it, Natalie, that’s got nothing to do with it!” He leaned forward, visibly angry, unhappy. “You know, you, and the other women, would get on a lot better around here if you didn’t walk around with such goddamn immense chips on your shoulders.”
She glared at him. Muldoon sat tall in his chair, trim, sharp, irritated, studying her frankly, his blue eyes empty of calculation. He really believed that he was benefiting her with such advice, she saw; he couldn’t see anything wrong with what he’d said.
She didn’t trust herself to speak.
Later, in the dingy apartment she was renting in Timber Cove, she tried to get drunk, and failed.
Her life was going steadily down the toilet. At thirty-four she was getting old as a practicing scientist, and her academic career was probably beyond repair; her commitment to the space program — all those hours in sims and survival training — meant the time and energy she’d had to devote to her research just wasn’t enough, and she knew that her papers, briefer and sparser every year, just weren’t enough to enable her to prosper if she returned to a university.
And what had it all been for? She’d just lost her one chance — limited as it was — to get some genuine space experience.
She was farther from Mars than ever.
It looked as if she’d blown it, as if she’d made one damn foul-up in her life after another.
Mike Conlig was ancient history. But she was still on her own. Generally that suited her.
But, God, she missed Ben.
Monday, December 6, 1982
The MEM simulator at Newport was an ungainly assemblage, without much resemblance to the sleek lines of the final spacecraft shape. It looked like a car smash, surrounded by the blocky forms of mainframe computers, all laid out in this corner of the echoing, refurbished manufacturing shop.
Ralph Gershon clambered out of the simulator, pissed as all hell. “That fucking thing is a lemon,” Gershon said. “A big fat lemon, JK.”
JK Lee was waiting for him at the hatch, his round face creased with anxiety. “Christ. Talk to me, Ralph.”
“Look,” Gershon said, “the simulator’s supposed to match the real thing — that’s the whole point — it’s no good looking for your left-hand joystick here when on the real thing it would be placed over there. JK, you have to keep these things up-to-date with the changes you’re making to the design.”
“Hell, I know that, Ralph. But what can I do? The MEM design is still so fluid that there are always a couple of hundred changes outstanding, and so the sim never catches up with the real thing…”
“Oh, it’s worse than that,” Gershon said. He pulled off his gloves and jammed them in his helmet. “This thing doesn’t even make sense in itself. The changes you have made aren’t consistent.” He looked into Lee’s anguished, stressed-out face; his sympathy for the man struggled with his anger. “Look, Lee, I’m going to raise Cain about this. That’s my job, damn it. It’s impossible to gain genuine experience with such a flawed sim — in fact, in my view the simulator itself is a severe danger to the overall progress of the project.”
Lee led him away from the sim and lit up a cigarette. “Oh, Christ, tell me about it. Change is my bugbear, Ralph. Change is killing me.” He painted a picture of a whole industry plowing its way toward Mars, a vast national network of craftsmanship and expertise slowly coming to focus on a single problem, and all of it flowing through this one site. “We’re working in places no one has touched before,” Lee said. “It’s not surprising nothing is right the first time. So we get a thousand change requests a week, from all across the country. And every time we change something, every piece that component touches has to be modified as well. And I’ll tell you who the worst offenders are.” He eyed Gershon. “Your good buddies in the Astronaut Office.”
Gershon laughed. He wasn’t surprised to hear it.
The astronauts still exerted a lot of power, official and unofficial. It was their asses on the line, after all. Lee was trying to get them all to submit to his change request process, just like everybody else, to keep everything orderly. But he was also aware of the need to keep this key group sweet. So he’d set up a private lounge for the astronauts, just down from his office, with a shower and a couple of fold-out beds, a place where they could sack out and hide from the press. And he’d take them home with him and have Jennine throw swank dinner parties for them, and make a hell of a fuss over them, and laud them to the skies. And the astronauts would come away thinking IK Lee was the greatest thing to have happened to the space program since the invention of Velcro.
At least, Gershon reflected, until he bounced their next request for a change.
Then Lee spotted something else, in another part of the shop floor. He stalked over to an operator of a six-ton turret lathe, who was shaving thin slices off an intricate aluminum sculpture. The thing looked beautiful, like a work of art in itself; Gershon, who was supposed to be an expert on MEM systems, couldn’t place it or identify its function. Lee picked up the engineering drawing the guy was working from. Then he called Gershon over; Lee was agitated, and the operator avoided Gershon’s eyes, obviously embarrassed. Gershon felt sorry for him.
“Look at this,” Lee said, waving the drawing in front of Gershon.
“What about it?”
“We’ve got a policy that any drawing with more than a dozen changes has to be redrawn. This one must have over a hundred, for Christ’s sake. And that’s not the worst of it.” He picked up the component the operator had been modifying. “This fucking thing is obsolete! I know it is! Even before it’s been manufactured!” He threw the thing to the floor, where it landed with a clatter.
The operator, baffled, wiped his hands on a rag and looked around for his supervisor.
Lee stalked away, a tight little knot of tension; Gershon walked with him, his flight helmet under his arm.