The limousine worked its way south, toward downtown, on I-59, and then east and south around 610, the Loop. The Nassau Bay Hilton was close to JSC, more than twenty miles from the city center, out on I-45.
Houston was hot and flat, sprawling, evidently very new. The roads were well maintained and modern. Huge, colorful billboards battered at her eyes, lining the interstate. Many of the signs and ads were in Spanish; after all, Texas had nearly been part of Mexico.
There were few indications of the presence of the space program here: inflatable rockets in the used-car lots, a “Tranquillity Plaza” shopping mall, the basketball team called the Rockets.
Beyond the heat haze of the freeway, the downtown skyscrapers thrust out of the plain like a collection of launch gantries, isolated, crowded. There were water towers, big oval tanks, like the Martian fighting machines from The War of the Worlds. They passed roadside neon thermometers, which read high nineties or low hundreds, even so late in the day.
Houston was going to be very different from the older cities she’d grown used to. Do I really want to live here?
All the other candidates were talking about the death of Elvis, a few days earlier. She had nothing to say to that — in fact the endless, obsessive coverage bored her — and she was glad when they got to the hotel.
The Nassau Bay Hilton was a tower block by the shore of Clear Lake, a few minutes from JSC. The receptionist’s voice contained a strong Texas twang, and there was a gift store in the lobby, with ten-gallon hats and cowboy boots. Her room, a single, was plush. It had a view of a marina, and a bright blue swimming pool, which she wouldn’t have time to use.
In the morning she was up at five-thirty. Three-thirty, Berkeley time. The sun was already high.
Her interview was directly after breakfast. And so there she was, with the time not yet seven-thirty, being driven in a limousine west along NASA Road One.
The cow pasture to her right, along the north side of the interstate, had been fenced off. Blocky black-and-white buildings were scattered across the plain, each numbered with big black round figures, like toys from some giant nursery.
The driver — a beefy, sweating man called Dave — took a right into a broad entrance. On the right was a granite sign saying “Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center.” And on the left a Saturn V lay on its side, its stages separated and mounted on wheeled trailers.
Dave grinned when he caught her gawping at the Saturn. “That’s just a test article,” he said. “The first one built. The story is that when it looked as if we might be canning Apollo altogether, there was talk of taking one of the flight articles and putting it on display here, or maybe at the Cape. A man-rated moon rocket as a lawn ornament.” He chuckled and shook his head. “Can you believe it?”
It seemed to take forever for the limousine to drive past the grounded Saturn. The booster was aging. York could see corrosion around its big rivets, cobwebs on the big A-frames which supported it, and some of the fabric parts around the engine bells were stained with lichen. The Stars and Stripes painted on the flank of the fat second stage was washed out, the red of the stripes running down toward the ground.
Beyond the Saturn there was a small rocket garden. York recognized a Redstone, the slim black-and-white pencil which had thrown the first Mercury capsules on their suborbital hops. The Redstone was upright, but held to the ground by wires, like Gulliver. And she saw a Space Shuttle, a wind-tunnel test article, a scale model of a ship which had never been built; it was an airplane shape, upright against the gleaming white of a big external fuel tank.
The Shuttle’s body looked chunky, clumsy. But York was entranced by the curve of the wings, set against the crude cylinders of the throwaway rockets around it; the spaceplane looked elegant, a stranded relic of a lost future.
She was checked into security, in Building 110, and given a photocopied map and directed toward Building 4. She set off on foot.
The buildings were black-and-white blocks. Many of them were clustered around a kind of courtyard, where thick-bladed grass shone in the sunlight, bright green. There were cherry trees, and a duck pond with an attractive stone margin. But no ducks: Ben Priest had told her how they left too much mess, and had been chased away. We’re not here for ducks. There was a flat tropical heat, the air still, suffused by the chirp of crickets. It was hard to move around; she could feel the heat drain energy out of her.
She tried to imagine working here.
Bicycles leaned up against every building, and there were big sand-filled ashtrays by the doorways, with stubs sticking out of them.
There was an air of calm. The blocky buildings didn’t have the feel of most government establishments. It was more like a university, she thought. In fact, Dave, her driver, had called it the “campus.”
JSC had its own Martian water towers. There was an “antenna farm,” a fenced-off field of big white dishes, turned up like flowers. And, here and there, huge tanks of liquid nitrogen gleamed.
Inside Building 4, the air-conditioning was ferocious; it must have been thirty degrees cooler than outside. The building was actually quite gloomy, even cramped; it had small ceiling and floor tiles, and the walls were painted a 1960s corporate yellow-brown. She felt her spirits dip a little. It was like an aging welfare office.
She took the elevator. The interview was in the “astronaut library.”
When she knocked, the door opened, and a man greeted her: tall, wire slim, with gray-blond hair and blue eyes. He wore jeans and a Ban-Lon shirt. He smiled at her easily and shook her hand.
She recognized him. He was Joe Muldoon. A moonwalker was shaking her hand.
It hit her suddenly, a change of perspective, in a surge. It really was the space center. There were astronauts there, for Christ’s sake. Veterans.
She tried to look at Muldoon, but found it impossible to face him directly; her vision seemed to moisten up, and it was as if he was glistening, shining.
But now I’m applying to become one of these people. My God. Will people look at me the same way? How the hell will I cope with that?
Joe Muldoon guided her to her seat, a chair stuck in the middle of the room.
There were hardly any books in the “library.” On the wall behind her chair was a row of photographs: portraits of dead astronauts, Russian and American. Jesus. Put me at my ease, why don’t you. There was a big TV running in the corner, the sound turned down low. It ran a continuous feed from the crew up in orbit in Skylab A; the split screen showed a shot of the Earth, taken from Skylab, and Mission Control ground track displays. Occasionally she heard the controlled murmur of the air-to-ground loop.
The panel was seven people: seven white males behind a long oaken desk. Many of the faces were familiar to her from TV and newspaper coverage of the space program: astronauts, senior NASA science managers, administrators.
And there at the center of the table — she recognized with a sinking heart — was Chuck Jones. He nodded at her, dark and squat, his graying black hair a fine bristle.
Christ. Chuck Jones. She hadn’t seen him since Jorge Romero’s ghastly field trip in the San Gabriel Mountains, all those years ago. She wondered if Jones remembered her.
Jones rapped on the table and called the group to order. “Thanks for coming in, Natalie. We’ve all seen your application, and it’s very impressive.”
“Thank you.”
“So we can skip all of the stuff you’ve covered before. Now we want you to tell us about your scientific studies, and how they are going to help us get to Mars. In your own time.”
Suddenly, her mouth was dry as the sands of Jackass Flats. What a question. It was so loaded.