“Go over there,” Jennine said suddenly. She had her Polaroid in her hand.
“Huh?”
She waved her free hand. “By the TV. Go ahead.”
He thought of the lawn, half-cut.
Then he went to stand by the TV.
Slowly, JK Lee raised his hand in salute, standing there beside the TV image of the Mars ship, while his wife took his picture with her Polaroid.
LAUNCH COMPLEX 39A, MERRITT ISLAND
The bulk of the eight-mile journey from the MSOB to the pad was via the regular highway, U.S. 1, the main coastal road. This section of the road had been cleared by the local cops, but even so the van, with its convoy of backup vehicles, proceeded incredibly slowly along the wide, empty freeway.
Stone glared stoically out of the windows, and Gershon’s gloved fingers drummed on his thigh.
KSC was big and empty, a rectilinear complex of dusty, straight roads and alligator-infested drainage ditches. The buildings were tour-story blocks, square, low, and weathered — uglier than anything at Houston — with the feel of a government research establishment. In the low morning sunlight, everything was flat and dusty, beachlike.
Occasionally, beyond the cordon, York would see a little knot of people, regular citizens, waving at her and clapping. She felt numbed, isolated.
On the eastern horizon she could see the misty forms of launch complexes, the blocky gantries protruding above the grassy beach. Many of the gantries were disused and half-demolished; they looked like relics, washed up on this scrubby, rubbish land, here at the corroding, entropy-laden margin between sea and land.
The transfer van turned off the highway and started down the access road to the pad.
And suddenly — for the first time that day — York could see the Saturn: the central, gleaming white needle, slim and powerful, with its cluster of four squat Solid Rocket Boosters, the whole enclosed by the massive, blocky gantry, sitting atop the pad’s octagonal base. The assembly was picked out by powerful searchlights, augmenting the morning light. She could see ice coating the sides of the cryogenic fuel tanks, and there were puffs and plumes of vapors emerging from the central column, little clouds drifting across the launch complex.
The rising sun came out from behind a thin cloud, and splashed the sky with orange and gold. Light washed over the launchpad, and, beside its access tower, the Saturn shone like a pearl.
The van pulled up at the foot of the pad’s concrete base. The van doors swung open, and York was helped to the tarmac by suit techs.
Up close, the Saturn, looming before her, had a gritty reality that made it stand out in the washed-out dawn light. It had almost a home-workshop quality: the huge bolts holding it together, the white gloss paint on its flanks. Its complexity, its man-made-ness, was tangible.
There was a sign fixed to the concrete base of the launchpad: GO, ARES!
She looked back down the crawlerway to the Vehicle Assembly Building. The VAB was a black-and-white block, squat on the horizon; it was impossible to judge its size. The crawlerway was a path of big yellow river-gravel blocks running straight as an arrow to the VAB, at infinity; it ran alongside the canal built for the barges which hauled huge Saturn stages up to the VAB. She could see the tracks ground into the road surface where the crawler-transporter had hauled the Saturn to the launch complex; they looked like dinosaur footsteps.
Suddenly it struck her. The event they’d practiced and talked about for months was about to happen. She really would be sealed into the little cabin at the top of this stack and thrown into space. My God, she thought. They’re serious.
In the weeks before launch day, York had been out to the pad many times. She’d come to think of the pad as a noisy, busy place, like an industrial site: machines running, elevators going up and down the gantries, people clanging and banging and talking.
Launch day was different. Save for the crew and their attendants, there was no living soul within three miles.
After the press of people at the MSOB — the glimpses she’d had of the million-strong throng around the Cape — to be at the epicenter of this concrete desolation, with the overwhelming bulk of the Saturn VB before her, was crushing, terrifying. Like a glimpse of death.
Still carrying her air unit, accompanied only by the whisper of oxygen, York followed Stone toward the steel mesh elevator at the base of the launch tower scaffolding.
Perhaps these are my last moments on Earth. Right here and now, on this blasted concrete apron. Maybe this is indeed a kind of death, time-delayed by hardware.
JACQUELINE B. KENNEDY SPACE CENTER
The breeze off the Atlantic ruffled the flags behind the wooden bleachers at the viewing site, close to the VAB. The grandstand crowd was more than twenty thousand, Muldoon was told, including five thousand special guests and four thousand press. There were celebrities, politicians, families and friends of the crew.
There were one million people within seventy-five miles of this spot.
JFK was there, in his wheelchair, behind big sunglasses, looking a lot older than his sixty-eight years. The rest of Muldoon’s old Apollo crew showed up, and the NASA PAO people had the three of them line up — Armstrong, Muldoon, Collins — behind the frail old former President, with the Saturn gleaming on the horizon behind them.
The PR done, Muldoon sat down.
He was looking east, into the low morning sun. It was a clear, still morning, with a few scattered clouds; the PAO said the probability of meeting launch weather rules was good, more than 80 percent.
The VAB was a huge block to Muldoon’s left, the windows of the cars clustered around it glistening like the carapaces of beetles. There was a stretch of grass before him, with its clustered cameramen, the flagpole, and the big digital countdown clock, and on the other side of that the barge canal stretched across his vision. Beyond the canal was a line of trees. And beyond that — there on the horizon, made faint by morning mist — he could see the blocky, blue-gray forms of the two LC-39 gantries. The pad for Ares, 39A, was on the right.
If he turned to look farther to the right he could make out more launch complexes, gaunt, well-separated skeletons: ICBM Row, stretching off down the Atlantic coast.
KSC had changed a hell of a lot since he’d first flown, in Gemini. Even from where he was you could see how the space program had receded. Employment here was less than half what it had been then. The launch complex he’d flown Gemini from, LC-19, was still there — used for unmanned Titan launches — but only ten complexes out of twenty-six at KSC remained operational. The launchpads rotted, the gantries had rusted and were pulled down, and NASA executives let local scrap merchants bid to take away the junk.
But Complex 39A was still there. In 1969, he’d flown out of there on Apollo. And sixteen years later, the Ares stack was there, assembled and ready to fly.
Behind Muldoon’s seat, two old ladies chatted about the launch parties they’d held over the years in their Florida gardens, as brilliant manned spacecraft had drifted through the night sky, directly overhead.
NASA had set up a series of press porta-kabins, and reporters in short-sleeved shirts trooped in and out carrying photocopied mission time lines, and glossy goodies from the contractors. To Muldoon’s left, toward the VAB, the big network TV cabins were full of activity; their huge picture windows shimmered in the morning light.