“Americans are free,” Xu Shiyou murmured. “No intelligent person would deny that. But freedom is the minimum. I have lived and worked here for three years, and it is obvious to me that the Americans don’t understand the world beyond their borders — that they fear it, in fact.” He looked through the window; animated electronic light glimmered in his eyes.
She stared out of the car as he lectured her. The office blocks of downtown Houston thrust out of the plain like a collection of launch gantries, grey in the mist and smog.
The Big S, JSC’s trophy Saturn V, was cordoned off from the public tours today and encased in scaffolding. Under Benacerraf’s instruction the bird was being surveyed, to see if it could indeed be made operational once more. But Marcus White had been asked to host the Chinese space girl, Jiang Ling, on her brief tour of JSC, and he couldn’t think of a better item to show her. So he got hold of a couple of hard hats and escorted Jiang inside the fenced-off rectangle that contained the booster.
Besides, he wanted to see the Big S for himself. He figured he may as well combine this makeweight ex-astronaut public relations chore with a little useful work.
The two of them walked along the three hundred and sixty feet of the fallen white-and-black-painted rocket, from its escape tower and Apollo capsule — both dummies — past the widening cylinders of the third and second stages, all the way to the gaping mouths of the five big F-1 engines of the huge first stage. The Saturn V — AS-514, built and ready to fly a late J-series Apollo mission to the Moon — was lying on its side, its stages and components separated. This was so the engines and other details of the mid-stages could be viewed, but it looked, White thought, as if the booster had shattered into cylindrical fragments on hitting the ground.
After three decades on the grass, the ageing of the Saturn was obvious. He could make out corrosion, cobwebs laced across the big wheeled A-frames which pinned the booster to the ground. The Stars and Stripes painted on the side of the second stage, the hydrogen-oxygen S-II, was washed out, with big red stripes of paint running down over the white hull. There was even lichen, growing on the fabric parts of the rocket engines.
They are not looking after this old lady well, he thought.
They weren’t alone in here; workers from JSC’s Plant Engineering Division were moving around the rocket, laboring through their detailed survey. One of them, attached to ropes like a mountaineer, was walking along the top of the big S-IC first stage, taking samples of the skin up there.
Jiang stood, slim and composed, looking up at the pressurization tanks of the second stage’s five J-2 engines, big silver spheres which glowed in the diffuse Houston sunlight. She said, “It is beautiful.” She smiled.
“Yeah,” White growled. “But the damn space program was more than a series of photo-calls.”
“Was it?” Jiang looked sad. “But this creature, General White, is a dream of the 1950s. So crude! — a painted monster of rivets and bolts and gloss paint—”
“To me,” White said, “it’s not rivets and bolts and paint. This baby was designed to fly to the Moon. But it’s having a tough time fulfilling the mission we finally gave it: lying for four decades horizontally, in the Houston climate.”
There was an access hatch open near the top of the second stage, the S-II. Jiang and White took turns peering in.
“You know,” White said, “when they first opened this up — for the first time in fifteen years — they found little skeletons, mice and small birds, a foot deep. And the base of the stage was coated in guano, from pigeons and owls, islands of it in lakes of moisture trapped in there. After all, the drainage of this damn thing was designed to be end to end, not side to side.”
“They made no effort to protect it from such erosion?”
“Oh, sure,” White said. “All the openings large enough to allow in birds were covered with screens; there were ventilation openings knocked in the hull… but none of that is going to work, if you neglect the upkeep for long enough. They did try coating the second stage with polyurethane foam for insulation. But the sunlight takes its toll. All the uv we get these days. There are whole chunks of the insulation missing, great big pock marks… If you went up to the top of the S-II, you’d think you were walking on the surface of the Moon. Even the paint work isn’t authentic. They use big decals, as if it was a Revell kit, to fake up the lettering and the flags. How about that. It’s like spray-painting the Sistine Chapel. This poor old lady is going to require one hell of a refurbishment project.”
Jiang looked at him sharply. “Refurbishment?”
White knew he shouldn’t say any more. But there was no point in living seven decades and flying to the Moon and back if you couldn’t shoot your mouth off to a young girl once in a while. So he said, “Sure. You know, manufacturing has come on a long way since the Saturns were put together. CAD/CAM techniques, total quality programs, composites and aluminum-lithium alloys that are a lot lighter and stronger than this old aluminum shit… If we were to rebuild this bird, we could upgrade her performance a hell of a way.”
Jiang laughed, but not unkindly. “Perhaps. It is a fine dream. Certainly I sense how angry you are at this, the condition of your ‘big S.’ ”
“I guess the bad guys did a pretty good job of killing off this old lady after all. All they had to do was let her lie here and rust. And they even got to show her off as their capture.”
Jiang grimaced. “Like a trophy from a hunt. Yes; humans are rarely logical, even within a space program. But it could have been worse. At least the remaining Saturn hardware is honored as a relic of a great triumph.”
White ran his hand along the corroded hull of AS-514. “A relic,” he repeated.
This kid seemed to understand. She’d picked the right word. Relic. Maybe. But not for much longer.
His anger dissipated as he thought about that. The technicians crawling over the rocket were busy, competent, bustling. They nodded to White, smiled at the girl.
Okay, there had been some savage mistakes in the past, and this poor broken bird was a symbol of them. And maybe NASA was never going to be the same again; maybe it even deserved to be bust up and subsumed into Agriculture or whatever. But he had the feeling that the old days were coming back, just once more, as it had been working on Apollo, when everyone worked a hundred and ten percent and the color of your carpet didn’t matter so much as what you knew and what you could do. For just a short time, maybe NASA was going to pull together again, to achieve the Titan mission, to achieve one more moment of greatness.
If it came off, it would be a hell of a thing.
The Houston Coliseum was a huge underground arena that reminded Jake Hadamard of nothing so much as a gigantic, hollowed-out car park. Today, the roof was hung with cute little models of the Lei Feng Number One spaceship. The air-conditioning, he thought, was typically Texan, which is to say the whole place was so chill you could have stored corpses in here. As they waited for the Chinese party, everybody seemed to be standing up, and Hadamard found himself shivering in his suit jacket.
There were hundreds of people here, standing in rows: bands, police and firemen and National Guard in neat ranks, politicians and industrialists in open-topped convertibles. And Hadamard himself had brought a little party of senior NASA people: Marcus White, Paula Benacerraf and her family, some of the managers from JSC.
On a stage at one end of the arena stood Xavier T. Maclachlan, the ambitious Texas Congressman who had engineered the event. He was a thin, jug-eared man of about fifty. Now he whooped noisily into a microphone, and waved his big ten-gallon hat in the air, and gladhanded his guests.