Lee looked quite gaunt, his skin stretched tight as if by wires under the flesh, and his posture was stooped over. Lee was a man just eaten up by nervous energy and adrenaline.
Gershon had come to spend a lot of time at Newport as the MEM had moved through its development. He’d served as a guinea pig for the life sciences boys, and he’d crawled in and out of hatches and down ladders to sandpits stained red like Mars dust.
He’d spent hours in plywood-and-paint mock-ups of the spacecraft interior, trying to imagine that this was real, that he was all but alone on the far side of the Solar System, trying to bring a spacecraft down to Mars. Just like Pete Conrad.
He wanted nobody to know the MEM better than he did. And he was achieving his goal.
He’d become aware that the whole place, the whole of Columbia Aviation, was kind of high-octane, driven forward by the relentless, destructive energy of JK Lee. And under the high pressure and the enormous complexity of the project, the place always seemed on the point of being overwhelmed.
But Gershon still believed, as he had at the time of the RFP, that the Columbia vision of the MEM — inspired and led by JK Lee — was the best shot they had of building something that might actually work sufficiently well to fly people down to Mars a few years from, now.
Gershon had been tough on Columbia himself. But basically he wanted the project to succeed. He wanted to fly to Mars, damn it, not hang JK Lee’s scalp on his wall.
But, even as he framed that thought, he tripped over a wire, stretched across the floor. And when he looked down he saw more wires and loose components and discarded equipment: bits of spacecraft, scattered over the floor like detritus, washed up by the overwhelming tide of specification changes
Monday, February 21, 1983
Gershon, flight helmet under his arm, walked around the training vehicle. Natalie York walked with him, her hair lifted by the breeze, her sunglasses hiding her eyes.
Ralph Gershon couldn’t help himself. “That’s the MLTV? Holy shit,” he said.
Ted Curval, from Phil Stone’s prime crew, was the senior astronaut assigned to oversee them for the day. He just grinned. “Your regulation Mars Landing Training Vehicle, Number Three. Brutal, ain’t she?”
The Mars Landing Training Vehicle was an open framework, set on six landing legs. Gershon could see a down-pointing jet at the center, surrounded by a cluster of fuel tanks. Reaction control nozzles were clustered at the four corners of the frame, like bunches of metallic berries, and there were two big auxiliary rockets, also downward-pointing. The pilot’s cockpit was an ejector seat partially enclosed by aluminum walls, with a big, bold NASA logo painted on the side, under a black-stenciled “three.” The whole thing stood maybe ten feet high, with the legs around twelve feet apart. There was no skin, so you could see into the guts of the thing, jet and rockets and fuel tanks and plumbing and cabling and all; it was somehow obscene, as if splayed.
In the low morning sunlight the bird’s complicated shadow stretched off across the tarmac of the wide runway.
“Shit,” Gershon said again, coming back to Curval. “It’s like something out of a fucking circus.”
“Tell me about it,” said Curval. “But it’s the nearest thing we have to a MEM trainer. You want to fly a MEM, you have to learn to handle one of these things, guy.” Curval was grinning, laughing at him.
Ted Curval was one of the Old Heads. A classic astronaut profile: a Navy test pilot, he’d even been an instructor at Pax River, and he’d logged a lot of time in space already. In the endless battle to climb up the Ares selection ladder, Curval had the great advantage of being from an earlier recruitment class than Gershon, and had already accrued plenty of live, free-flying MLTV experience. While the best Gershon had managed, for all his angling and hours spent at Columbia, had been some time on the tethered facility at Langley, where a MEM-type mock-up dangled from cables.
So Curval was in Phil Stone’s crew and was on his way to Mars. And Ralph Gershon was still on the outside looking in.
But what the hell. As of today, Ralph Gershon would be able to add MLTV experience to his list of accomplishments. So screw Ted Curval, and all the other complacent assholes.
As far as Gershon was concerned the contest wasn’t over until the bird left the pad, on April 21, 1985.
Gershon jammed his helmet on his head. He jumped up into the MLTV’s open frame. With a single twist he was able to lower himself into the single seat. “How about that. Just my size.”
Curval stepped forward. “Hey, Gershon—”
Gershon was strapping himself in. “The seat’s a Weber zero-zero, right?”
“Come on down from there, man, you’re not prepared. You’re not supposed to—”
“And the jet back there is a General Electric CF-700-2V turbofan. Come on, Ted, I know the equipment. I’ve come out here to fly the thing, not listen to you yack about it.” He glanced down at the control paneclass="underline" a few instruments, a CRT, a couple of handsets. Just like the sims.
He found himself blinking; the sun was strong, almost directly in his face, and his eyes hurt. On the Plexiglas windshield in front of him he could see reticles — fine lines — etched in there, labeled with numbers -
But suddenly the pain in his eyes amplified. “Yow.” He threw his arm across his face. His eyes itched unbearably, and started to flood.
“For a start,” Curval called up drily, “you can close up your visor. You’re being hit by hydrogen peroxide leaking from the attitude controls. You sure you know what you’re doing, guy?”
Gershon snapped shut his visor and squeezed his eyes closed. “Let me bust my neck, Ted. It’s my neck. What do you care?”
“Okay,” Curval said at length. “Okay, you win.”
Curval, with York, went over to the control truck and clambered in the back. In a moment, Gershon heard Curval’s crisp voice sounding in his flight headset. “Okay, Ralph. What we’re going to do is take the MLTV up fifty feet, twice around the block, and back home again, just as nice as pie. Just to let you get the feel of her. And then you’re coming out for an eye bath. You got that?”
“Sure.”
Gershon kicked in the jet, and there was a roar at his back. Dust billowed up off the ground, into his face. Vapor puffed out of the attitude nozzles, as if this was some unlikely steam engine, a Victorian engineer’s fantasy of flight.
The runway tarmac fell away. The lift was a brief, comforting surge. The MLTV was like a noisy elevator.
Gershon whooped. “Whee-hoo! Now we is hangin’ loose!”
Of MLTV Number Three’s four cousins, two had crashed during the last half year. The pilots had ejected and walked away. Nobody was sure about the cause. Well, vertical takeoff and land vehicles were notoriously unstable; maybe you had to expect a percentage of failures. The hope was that these crashes weren’t showing up fundamental flaws in the design of the MEM itself.
Anyhow, the MLTV itself still needed test flights. Nobody was too keen to risk it, so far away from the Mars landing itself.
Nobody except somebody so desperate to get on the selection roster he’d do almost anything.
Gershon took the MLTV up to maybe sixty feet and slowed the ascent.
The principles of the strange craft were obvious enough. You stood on your jet’s tail. You kept yourself stable with the four peroxide reaction clusters, the little vernier rockets spaced around the frame, squirting them here and there. In fact, he found, he didn’t even need to work the RCS control when he was trying to hold the craft level; the little rockets would fire by themselves, in little solenoid bangs and gas hisses.