“You attend,” said Priest firmly. He set his beer can on the bedside table with a kind of finality. “Listen to me, now, Natalie, for once in your life. You need to come to a decision. All this damn griping… If you want to go back to academic life, back to your old work, then just pick up and go.”
“Plenty have.”
“Sure. And plenty more will. But if you want to stick around, you have to play the game. By their rules, the Old Heads, or whatever you want to call them. Jack Schmitt was the most successful scientist-astronaut in the sixties. How come?”
“Because he was the best geologist?”
“He was a fine geologist. But there were plenty of fine geologists who left the program, leaving Schmitt standing there. Schmitt made himself useful, and in ways the other guys — the decision makers — could recognize. He was asked to be the astronaut representative on the Apollo lunar surface gear, and he did it. And without waiting around to be asked he went on to cover the whole of the Lunar Module’s descent stage. He worked on lunar exploration strategies. He helped to get the other guys to take the geology seriously.”
“But, Ben — Schmitt never walked on the Moon.”
Priest shook his head. “You aren’t listening. Because Schmitt was around at the time, the geology we did on the Moon was a hell of a lot better than it might otherwise have been. You ought to think about that. The late landings got canceled out from under him, and that was that. But if any scientist was ever going to walk on the Moon, it would have been Schmitt. He gave himself the best possible chance.” He eyed her. “Anyhow, Schmitt has had a tour in Moonlab. He’s gotten as close to the Moon as sixty miles, at least. And you know Ralph Gershon, don’t you?”
“Sure. One Grade-A asshole.”
“No,” Ben snapped. “You’re being the asshole, Natalie. I’m sorry, but that’s the truth. Listen: Gershon is having just as hard a time as you, but from a different angle. He’s the best pilot in the Agency, and most of us know it. But he doesn’t fit in. He’s a different generation from these other guys. He’s fought in a dirtier war, and maybe they think that’s left him a little dirty.
“But,” Priest went on, “Ralph hasn’t given up. He’s doing his damnedest to get a seat. Here he is, for instance, making himself useful by nursemaiding you guys.”
“But he’s a lousy instructor!”
Priest shook his head. “Wise up. That’s not the measure. Taking the assignment, completing it, being a team player: that’s what counts. And on top of that Ralph spends half his life out at Langley, and Rockwell, wherever the hell they are trying out bits of MEM concepts. And you know why? Because he figures that when push comes to shove, he doesn’t want there to be anybody around here who knows more about flying the MEM than he does. Just like Schmitt, he’s giving himself the best shot he can.”
“And that’s what I should do?”
“That’s what you should do. More. Stop griping, for Christ’s sake. You have a great opportunity here. Get on the sims. Grab all the training you can, no matter how obscure and irrelevant it seems. Go to the meetings about the damn EVA gloves, or whatever. And try to find ways to leverage your own skills. Get on the Mars landing site selection board, for instance…”
“I didn’t know there was one.”
“Well, there you are,” he said heavily.
“Goddamn it, Ben, I hate it when you give me advice.”
He laughed. “Only because I’m right.” He checked the time on his Rolex, which he’d put on her bedside table. “Shit. I’ll have to go. Classroom work for me, too, now. The latest modifications to the NERVA control systems.”
“So,” she said. She stroked his back. “We’ve still got unfinished business, huh?”
“Yeah. Unfinished business. We’ll talk.”
He swung his legs out of the bed.
A couple of weeks later, life got more interesting.
York’s cadre was moved on to systems training. York worked her way up through the hierarchy of training systems, at first paper-based, later electronic and computer-driven, heading toward a more complete representation of the spacecraft she would fly.
There were single-systems trainers — fragments of Apollo control consoles — set up in offices scattered through Building 5, with computers running simple simulations behind them; and there were integrated trainers for each of the three crew stations in an Apollo Command Module.
Finally she was taken into Building 9, the Mock-up and Integration Lab. Full-size training mock-ups of spacecraft littered the floor of the hangar-sized building. The equipment was for generic training, to develop skills applicable to any flight; the more elaborate simulators were assigned to specific missions.
This was a low-tech place, the trainers scuffed and scarred, visibly aged. There were chalked graffiti on the wall, and the workbenches scattered around the place were littered with mundane items: paper towels, a big pail full of empty Coke cans. No astronaut on the active roster came down here. If she came in on a weekend, the place was generally deserted; after so many years of routine, long-duration missions, there was pretty much a nine-to-five atmosphere about much of JSC.
Building 9 made her feel her place, she thought; as an ascan she was a long way down the food chain.
She tried out the air-bearing facility, an office chair suspended by a hovercraft-like cushion of downward air jets. She floated over the epoxy-resin floor like an ice-hockey puck, pulling her way around a mocked-up Skylab workstation, learning about action and reaction in an environment that simulated zero G, if only in two dimensions.
At last she clambered into the Crew Compartment Trainer, a full-scale mock-up of an Apollo Command Module, which sat like a metal teepee in the middle of the floor of Building 9. The hatch was incredibly small, and she had to swing herself in feetfirst. The three couches were just metal frames slung with canvas slings, constricting, jammed against each other. Under the couches, in the fat base of the cone, was a storage area called the lower equipment bay.
York sat in the center couch, the Command Module Pilot’s. She was looking up toward the apex of the cone. The windows seemed small and far away; even though the hatch was open, she felt enclosed in there. Directly in front of her there was a big, battleship-gray, 180-degree instrument panel. There were five hundred controls: toggle switches, thumbwheels, push buttons, and rotary switches with click stops. The readouts were mainly meters, lights, and little rectangular windows containing either “gray flags” or “barber poles”; the barber pole was a stripy piece of metal that would fill the window when the setting had to be changed. There were a tiny computer keypad, a small cathode-ray tube, and eight-balls — artificial horizons. There were small joysticks and push buttons: translational controllers, to work the Command Module’s clusters of attitude rockets.
The panel seemed complex, almost ludicrously so. How the hell was she going to find her way around all this?
She experimented with the switches. They were mostly of two types: little silver three-way tabs, or — for more critical functions — cylindrical levers, two-way, that you had to pull out before they would move. These would be awkward in pressure-suit gloves, she thought. The switches were protected by little metal gates on either side, to save them being kicked by a free-fall boot. She worked her way across the panel, practicing flipping the dead switches, getting used to the feel of them.
There were little diagrams etched into the panel, she saw, circuit and flowcharts. She consulted her manuals. For example, there was one diagram which connected a set of switches that controlled water output from the fuel cells. The little gray lines mirrored the way the water flowed, either to controls for the storage tanks, or for the dumps.