Now, showing on a TV monitor, there was a film of the two cosmonauts — Vladimir Viktorenko and Aleksandr Solovyov — taken earlier in the day. In their pressure suits, they were leaving their quarters and climbing aboard a bus. The bus looked like a tourist coach.
Seger felt a pull inside him, a protective urge. He offered up a brief prayer for the safety of the cosmonauts, and he touched his crucifix lapel pin.
Michaels observed that and raised an eyebrow.
“You do need to take it easy, Bert. I figure you’re just going through — what do they call it? — culture shock. Hell, Bert, these aren’t our boys. We’re just going to have to accept the Soviets know what they’re doing, in their own sweet way. After all the N-1 seems to be getting there as a launch system. They’ve fired off two unmanned circumlunar Soyuz shots and brought them back to Earth. And we’ve got Muldoon, Bleeker, and Stone up there in lunar orbit waiting for their bird; the Soviets really, really don’t want to screw up with this shot.”
“Maybe. I just wish they’d let some of our guys redesign their launch facilities a little bit.”
Michaels guffawed. “That would have gone down very well. Anyway, we need some success, too, Bert. As you know well enough.”
That was true, Seger realized.
The TV played a snatch of music; it was bland, slow stuff, and a PR announcer said in clipped English that this was being played simultaneously to the Soyuz, as a relaxant for the cosmonauts. Good grief, Seger thought. It would be like being stuck in an elevator.
And then, Seger saw from the timers, there was just a minute to go. He raised his binoculars.
The electrical and propellant umbilicals fell away from the walls of the ship, and the N-1 stood alone: huge, clumsy, fragile. My God. It looks like boilerplate.
Ignition came at four seconds.
Smoke and light flooded from the broad base of the N-1, across the steppe, and fire billowed into the trenches beneath the ship.
Seger watched as the glare built up. That broad first stage contained no less than thirty rocket engines, compared to five on a Saturn.
The first few moments of launch were critical. Unlike Saturn, the N-1 was not held back for a controlled release while its thrust built up. Rather, it simply lifted from the pad once its thrust exceeded its weight. And there was no provision for engine shutdown.
The huge stack lifted, impossibly, on its pillar of fire. It was like watching a cathedral raise itself off the ground.
Once the stack was more than its own length from the ground, the N-1 accelerated quickly. Following its flight path it tipped over, its base an explosion of light.
Then the sound reached the observation bunker, and the window before Seger rattled; the light blazed into the room, as if a small sun had arisen from the steppe. He felt the throb of the rockets deep in his gut.
Michaels leaned over to Seger. “It seems to be going okay.”
“Max-Q,” Seger shouted back over the noise. “It has to get through max-Q.” The point of maximum aerodynamic pressure was the point at which problems had occurred on previous flights. It was the early failure of the N-1 which had, essentially, lost the race to the Moon for the Soviets. For example the last N-1 trial before Apollo 11, in 1969, had suffered such violent vibration that an internal line had come loose. Liquid oxygen had sprayed through the body of the rocket. Engines exploded; turbopumps tore themselves apart… The explosion was equivalent to a tactical atomic bomb, so powerful it had been detected by American reconnaissance satellites.
The timers on the wall said sixty-six seconds.
“I think that’s it,” Seger breathed. “The engines will be throttling back up to full power.”
“So they’re through the worst of it?”
“Oh, no. No, with this bird it isn’t over until the fat lady sings, Fred.”
Michaels clapped him on the shoulder and went to talk to the other guests.
Seger stayed at the window long after the others had moved away, and the rattling of the launch had dispersed. He watched the dwindling light in the sky, and counted through the launch events in his head. Mission Elapsed Time [Day/Hr:Min:Sec] Plus 121/12:23:34
Gershon floated out of the docking adapter and into the Command Module’s forward access tunnel. He emerged headfirst at the top of Apollo’s conical cabin. He did a neat somersault in the air, translating from the “up” of the Mission Module to the “down” of the Apollo.
To Gershon, this inversion was one of the strangest aspects of the whole trip.
He closed the hatch behind him, dogging it loosely.
He settled into Stone’s seat, at the left-hand side of the cabin, and stuck his checklist to a Velcro square on the control panel in front of him. He had a little foil tube of orange juice in the top pocket of his Beta-cloth coveralls, and he dug that out, pulled out the straw, and took a sip. He adjusted his headset and made sure he had a working comms link to the rest of the Ares cluster — both York and Stone responded from intercoms in the Mission Module — and he fired off a call to Fred Haise, who was the capcom on the ground. He didn’t wait for his signal to crawl across the Solar System to bring him a reply before beginning work, however.
He began to power up Apollo’s systems.
During the transfer to Mars and back, all but essential systems were quiescent on Apollo. There were umbilical connections through the docking system which hooked up Apollo to the main solar panel arrays, so Apollo didn’t have to run on its own power. Every fifty days or so, Gershon was supposed to go through this routine of checking Apollo’s systems. He was making sure they would be working when it came time for the crew to ride Apollo home, back down through the air of Earth.
The chore took maybe 40 percent of his attention.
He dug a cassette tape out of his pocket and slid it into the deck forward of Stone’s flight station. The sound of violins — a light, delicate phrase — came drifting out into the cabin’s thin air. Gershon closed his eyes, and let the music wash over him. Mozart: Symphony Number 40. Exquisite. He felt himself relax, and even the cabin around him started to feel bigger.
Nam vets were supposed to live up to the image of spaced-out Jimi Hendrix fans. And in Houston, image was an important thing: when you had ten guys, with equally good qualifications, competing for one seat, intangibles like image could win you a flight, or lose you one.
So Gershon kept his Mozart to himself.
He was alone in the cabin as he worked through his checklist. Closing the hatch was strictly against regs, and he had to clear it with Stone every time he went in there. But Apollo was one of the few places in the whole cluster where you could get a little genuine privacy. Stone understood. You had to have a little space, a little time to yourself.
It was strange to think that there were only three human beings within tens of millions of miles of this point, and yet here they were cooped up together, for months on end, in this collection of tin cans. The only solid interior partitions in the Mission Module were those around the crapper.