14

So here was Henry back at Johnson Space Center, the heart of NASA, which he’d fled with such ill feeling. The old Saturn V still lay beside the entrance drive, as it had for decades, its most recent refurbishment leaving it sparkling white, like a Disney mockup. The mid-June air was heavy and humid, particularly after the clarity of Scotland, and the sky even here was an oppressive blue-grey dome, laden with ash.

From the security building, Henry was escorted to the Astronaut Office. He walked across the campus, the blocky buildings of oyster shell and glass, a solidification of a 1960s future that had never quite come to pass. Concrete paths criss-crossed between the buildings, lacing across bristly, bottle-green grass; the paths, Henry had observed in the past, never seemed to take you where you wanted to go, and he had developed a habit of jaywalking over the lawns, something that had not improved his popularity around here.

Today, following the girl from security, he stuck to the path.

There seemed to be a lot of people around, groups of them running between the buildings, carrying laptops and vu-graphs and folders of mission rules and procedures. There was a sense of urgency, in fact, that hadn’t been apparent in the time he’d spent here before. JSC, the centre of the nation’s space effort, had with time become just another place where big government work was done, with the nine-to-five schedules and leisurely pace that entailed.

Not now, though. Now, there were things to be done, missions to be mounted, a sense of urgency the place hadn’t known since the Apollo days.

All because of me, he thought. Jesus.

But then, it was as if NASA had been waiting for this call to arms since the curtailing of Apollo.

It seemed to Henry that once he had gotten through Monica Beus’s OSTP review, the official initiation of the scrambled Moon program had been extraordinarily fast.

He had to make another presentation, more formal, to the National Space Council: another presidential advisory group, this one chaired by the Vice President himself. And away from his own involvement, support built up. He read of Congressmen being hauled into the White House to be pressured into supporting the emergency bill authorizing the release of federal funds to NASA to implement the program. Opponents in the Senate, who appeared to think this was just another NASA job-creating publicity stunt, tried to filibuster the bill. But the White House orchestrated public opinion and concern, focusing on fence-sitting senators, who soon started to feel the heat from their home districts.

Maybe it shouldn’t have been such a surprise, Henry thought. This President had emerged from Congress herself; she was said to be the most skilled Chief Executive at dealing with Congressmen since Johnson. And that was just as well given the sexual harassment charges still being laid against her.

And when she went public — as, of course, she must have anticipated — she found herself, as the first President since Kennedy to approve a start-up Moon program, riding on a wave of popular approval. The language of the commentators was helpfully blunt. This is America. We aren’t going to sit here and let some nano-bug screw us over like in Scotland. Let’s go to the Moon and kick butt…

The comforting myth of American can-do, Henry thought: the idea that we can do something, President and military and nuclear fleets and spaceships, act to save ourselves just like in the past. Maybe it was all a delusion, wish fulfilment. But when it was harnessed behind a coherent project, the can-do myth was powerful indeed.

And the approval ratings it was giving the President didn’t hurt either.

So NASA had been given the funds and go-ahead to assemble the mission. But the decision was being made in stages; the approval to launch was still being withheld. It seemed to Henry that there was still a component of the public’s thinking — and hence of the Administration’s — that wished for this problem to go away. More rationally, the President was being urged to wait until the results of attempts to disrupt the Moonseed — with conventional bombs, nukes and other methods — were known. Maybe it wouldn’t be necessary to risk the lives of astronauts in this jaunt to the Moon.

So the Prez was hanging fire, waiting for the news to get worse, as it surely would.

…Here was Henry, delivered to the heart of the Astronaut Office. It was just a plain-looking briefing room filled with hard-backed chairs. It could have been a briefing hall in any large corporate or government building, he thought, anywhere in the country. All there was to betray its true nature were the rows of Shuttle mission plaques on the walls, nearly a hundred of them dating back to 1981, the bold, patriotic designs and rings of crew names commemorating forgotten missions, strangely old-fashioned.

Henry had never been here before, inside the lair of the hero jock pilots; his interest had always been solely in unmanned space exploration, and he would never have come to Houston, centre of the manned effort, at all, if not for the location of the extraterrestrial samples facility here.

And here, waiting for him in a grubby blue Shuttle astronaut’s coverall, was Geena, his ex-wife, with others he didn’t know. Geena had a look he’d come to recognize. I really, really don’t want to be here, with you, Henry…

“Henry,” she said, “we’re going on a little trip together.”

He frowned. “The Cape?”

“Further than that,” she said sourly.

And then he saw it, and his heart sank. “The Moon. You’re going to the Moon, with me.”

“No,” she snapped. “You’re going with me. I’m the fucking mission commander.” She eyed him. “It isn’t my fault. Thanks to you I’ve been involved in this from the start. Championing it. Who else would they pick?”

“Not the kind of scenario you generally have to think about in marriage guidance counselling sessions, huh.”

“Just as well we didn’t have any,” she said heavily. “As long as we’re both professional about this we’ll get through it.”

“Maybe.” He grinned. “It sure does appeal to my sense of irony.”

“Henry—”

“Aren’t you going to introduce me to your colleagues?”

With Geena was a mission designer she introduced as Frank Turtle, a skinny, owlish, bearded guy in bell-bottom jeans who was probably older than he looked. And there were a couple of astronauts: both men, both aged around forty, both with hard-muscled arms folded across their sports shirts. They regarded Henry with evident distaste, and said as little as they had to.

Turtle, it turned out, had been at the heart of devising this improvised lunar mission from the start, and so had found himself catapulted upwards in terms of responsibility — if not, Henry suspected, in such tangibles as his salary, the size of his office, and the colour of his carpet. He looked as if the responsibility was crushing him.

Frank Turtle coughed. “Dr Meacher, we’ve tried to devise a training program to get you through as much as possible in the time we’ve got. There are three main phases. Suitability, where the medicos assess if you could survive a space mission at all. Generic training, in emergency procedures, weightlessness, so on. Finally crew training, where you’ll be taken through the launch and docking procedures.” He scratched his receding hairline. “It’s going to be a scramble; I don’t know what resources we can offer you. I don’t think NASA personnel have ever been so stretched. For instance we’re going to have to force through Shuttle launches to take up the spacecraft components. We’re all working double shifts… equivalent to a pace of sixteen Shuttle launches in a year, if we had to keep it up that long…”

Geena said to Henry heavily, “Guys like Frank in operations and Mission Control, and the engineers at the Cape, and the flight crews, are the true heroes of this, Henry. The greatest pace we achieved in the history of the Shuttle program was nine launches, in the year before Challenger. I have guys working their asses off, doing double or triple shifts. Just don’t forget it. This mission isn’t about you. It’s about them.”