The Throne of Saturn, page 48
“In the wake of new disaster and misfortune all sensible Americans must register once more their vigorous protest against this Caesar’s-circus of blood and treasure.
“There is still time to stop the Mars flight.
“It must be done.
“There exists, in the Committee Against Unilateral Space Exploration (CAUSE), a powerful medium through which immediate and effective protest can be made. CAUSE drew the support of many hundreds of thousands of concerned citizens during the opening weeks of the Mars mission. Many thousands more have joined its ranks in succeeding months. Many of America’s most informed and most outstanding citizens and organizations have placed themselves unreservedly in the forefront of its continuing activities.
“Never were its purposes more valid and its chances for success greater than they are now.
“Two weeks ago, the National Executive Board of CAUSE voted unanimously to hold a nationwide moratorium of protest against the Mars flight at the time of launch. It was intended then that this should be a symbol to the world that many millions of Americans do not, and cannot, support their government in this ill-fated venture. Now symbol must become reality—the reality of the end of Planetary Fleet One as it now exists and a return to a steady, unhurried, sensible Mars program that will take its place over the decades in proper priority after the many other pressing problems of the United States have been fully and adequately met.
“We urge all Americans truly concerned for the welfare of their country to join CAUSE. We urge its executive board to authorize not just one, but several, massive protests between now and launch time. And we suggest that in the days immediately preceding that event, CAUSE and all other Americans truly interested in the long-range good of their country register in unmistakable terms their determination that this fearful folly should come speedily and completely to an end.
“The scheduled flight of Planetary Fleet One can be stopped.
“It must be.
“Reason, common sense, and the highest type of patriotism—the patriotism that thinks of all Americans, not just a handful of glory-seeking men in NASA and the White House—demand it.”
To this, and to many other sentiments like it that screamed from headlines, roared from editorial pages, insinuated from news stories, and preached from television screens, the president’s rejoinder was terse and to the point.
Two days later at nine in the morning the White House issued a brief statement:
“The president wishes to make clear to the country that Planetary Fleet One of Project Argosy, the flight to Mars, will continue as planned.
“The tragic disasters which occurred at the test sites in Huntsville and Mississippi damaged but did not destroy important space equipment.
“The damage can and will be speedily repaired.
“Those responsible for the explosions will be found and punished to the fullest extent of law.
“Planetary Fleet One will be launched on schedule.”
Grimly and anxiously, and with a newly embittered determination, those who were directly concerned with Piffy One moved ahead.
Chapter Twenty-Four
And now, soon, they would be leaving for the Cape and the final weeks in the simulators there, and suddenly Piffy One loomed directly ahead, enormous and inescapable. Up to now it had somehow never seemed quite real despite field trips and training and the many crises that had surrounded it. But here it was.
The feeling of being on a steadily accelerating toboggan from which there was no escape began to grip them all.
It was an odd mood, filled with many things. If he had to define the single overriding element, Connie decided, it would probably be a curious melancholy; arising, he supposed, from the fact that they were finally face to face with the thought, and the very real possibility, that they might not come back.
Plans were fine, training was splendid, machinery and equipment—now that they were being rigidly and thoroughly checked—were apparently reliable, but the harsh red planet was still mysterious and forbidding and it was becoming more so each day as the time of challenge neared. Maps, studies, photographs by the Mariner probes, landings by the Vikings, scientific computations, analyses, projections—they were good as far as they went. But they still did not answer the fundamental questions that only men could answer: What’s it like? And after we find out, can we get away from it and get home?
“All this stuff is great,” Jazz had remarked recently, pushing aside a stack of reports a foot high, “but it’s a little different when you know that baby out there is waiting for you, personally.”
“You don’t regret it, do you?” Pete had asked and Jazz had given him a scornful glance.
“Are you kidding? Hell, no.”
But while that instant rejoinder probably reflected accurately the public mood of all of them, even Jayvee, Connie knew from his own feelings that privately they were not so cavalier about it as all that.
To Jane, who had felt from the beginning that this mission carried the possibility of something ominous and unkind to those who would fly it, the now hurrying days only seemed to increase her underlying uneasiness. She was not giving in to it, she was still, as he told her jokingly from time to time, Mrs. Space Program in all her public appearances, but underneath there was a rising tension she could not entirely conceal at home. Even the kids, who had dismissed his Moon flights and Mayflower visits with a matter-of-fact acceptance, were quieter and more loving now. Lately they had taken to hanging around when he was home; they were not so apt to go rushing off pell-mell on their own pursuits. He found all this touching—more than he could bear sometimes, almost—and under the pressure of it he had gradually come to a decision that made him feel better about himself and perhaps, in a sense, better able to meet whatever Mars might have in store for him.
By a sort of unspoken agreement, and with a mutual respect and consideration he knew would always leave a residue of affection and good will on both sides, he and Monetta had decided several weeks ago to stop seeing one another, at least on the previous basis. He had been amazed at how gently and with what grace and instinctive dignity she had carried off her part of it, and he only hoped his own conduct had been as becoming to him. Apparently, it had, for they had parted friends and would, he knew, continue friends. In fact, he had already begun the process of bringing her into his family life; and, he congratulated himself, successfully.
“I imagine Monetta Halleck’s a little lonely down there in Galveston,” he had suggested casually one day to Jane a couple of weeks ago. “Why don’t we have her over for dinner next Friday when we have Jazz and Clare and Pete and the Yules?”
“Do you think Jazz can refrain from commenting on her husband?” Jane asked with a smile that indicated nothing but a genuine friendly interest of her own.
“Oh, Jazz isn’t all rough edges,” he said. “And anyway, I guess she must be going to get a divorce. What does Yo-Shin Yule say, aren’t they rather close?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll have to ask. Sure, let’s have her, I think it would be nice. And maybe she’d like to join the Book Club, too.”
“I heard some place that she’s working, but I imagine if she could get away, she’d really like to.”
“I’ll ask her,” Jane said, and gave him an amiable glance which he knew from long experience he was never going to quite figure out. “I wonder why I didn’t think of it before?”
“I’m sure I don’t know,” he said, and returned the smile in the sudden instinctive knowledge that they understood one another perfectly; but also sensing instinctively that he was over the danger point and it was all right. “It’s a great idea.”
She chuckled and to his surprise came over and kissed him.
“I’m a great girl.”
“You are that,” he agreed with a laugh that told her a door in his life was closed as finally as she had hoped it was. “You really are.”
Whether all doors were closed, he did not know as he went methodically about the routine tasks of clearing his desk at the office, putting his things in order at home, getting ready to say goodbye to Houston and all it meant, for eighteen months—or perhaps forever. But he thought so. It was a necessary conviction, for now life was narrowing down to just one thing and nothing at all outside its predetermined parameters could be permitted to interfere with it in any way whatsoever.
For Jazz and Pete and Jayvee; for Al Freer at the Cape and Hans Sturmer in Huntsville; for Bob Hertz in Mission Control and all his network of guidance and communications around the world, on Space Station Mayflower, and on the surface of the Moon; for the president, the vice president and the administrator in Washington; for Percy Mercy and Clete O’Donnell and Senator Kenny Williams and all their friends; for Jim Matthison at North American Rockwell, for his colleagues at Boeing, Grumman, Bendix, IBM, General Dynamics, McDonnell Douglas, and all the other contractors and subcontractors around the country; for Alexei Kuselevsky in Moscow and all his assistants and helpers and sympathizers at home and abroad who wished the mission ill; and for all the millions and billions around the globe who either wished it ill or, if they were Americans or in some measure possessed of a reasonable friendliness and good will, wished it well—life also narrowed down in these final racing weeks.
As it had with all previous missions, “T,” meaning “Time of launch,” became the metronome of the world; and as T minus two months passed into T minus six weeks and then to T minus five weeks and so finally to T minus one month, the final things were done according to routines and traditions established and perfected in the great days of Apollo; not lately used, in these recent arid and penurious years, but quickly re-established by those who remembered and placed their remembrance, almost reverently, at the service of Planetary Fleet One.
The ritual of a launch, as set and unchangeable as the rite of some mystical religion—which, perhaps, in a sense, it is—entered its concluding stages for the greatest launch of all.
“Beautiful,” Albrecht Freer said reverently as the metal screens of three of the great doors of the Vehicle Assembly Building rolled simultaneously up with a slow and impressive grinding. “They are beautiful.”
And so, they were as they stood ready at last for the roll-out to the pads, on the three Crawlers: 36 stories high, enfolded in the arms of the three mobile launchers, draped with cables, laced with umbilicals, white and almost ghostly against the cavernous depths of the VAB behind them; carrying high above, on the spacecraft that looked so tiny and vulnerable from below, the names chosen by a majority of the crew:
Nina, Pinta, Santa Maria.
“You’ve done it, Jim,” the vice president said, trying to keep the emotion from his voice but not succeeding very well.
“Yes,” Jim Matthison said huskily. “So far, so good.”
In front of the enormous building, on a special flag-draped platform erected for the occasion, surrounded by some two hundred of the already gathering news corps, they watched in silence as the engines of the Crawlers turned over with a simultaneous roar. For a moment there was no other sound, no other movement anywhere, save for the whirring television cameras that were photographing the roll-out live for worldwide distribution. Then ponderously, mightily, inexorably, the Crawlers began to inch forward.
Still there was no other sound, no other movement. For five minutes they watched, hushed and immobile, only the cameramen busily working.
Then the Crawlers approached the thresholds of the three bays. The first rays of the chill autumn sun fell slanting across the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. And from most of them, even from some who were determined not to be affected, a great and emotional cheer went up.
“Well,” Bob Hertz said to the administrator when it had died down, “somebody seems to like us, anyway.”
“They can’t help it,” Andy Anderson said. “Second thoughts will set in in about one minute. Or less. Come on, let’s climb aboard. We’ve got a four-hour ride ahead.”
“I shall enjoy every minute of it,” Bob Hertz said. “Which Crawler are we riding?”
“We’re on Nina,” Andy said. “We’ve given the vice president and the crew the Santa Maria, and Al Freer and Hans Sturmer will be on the Pinta.”
“And so, in triumph we will ride our antediluvian monsters down the crawlerway like Caesar in his prime.”
The administrator chuckled.
“To be followed by cocktails and a buffet luncheon in Firing Room I of the VAB. No Caesar ever had it so good.”
“I think it was a smart decision to do it this way,” Bob remarked as they left the platform with the others and walked toward the Crawlers, now stationary two hundred feet away, their giant burdens looming above. “It symbolizes something that needs to be symbolized, I think. Particularly having the vice president here.”
“It was his idea, bless his heart. He said it would show the world how much importance the Administration attaches to the mission.”
“Too bad the president couldn’t come,” Bob said dryly. “But we can’t have everything.”
“No,” the administrator said, waving to the others as they began to climb up to the cabins of their respective Crawlers. “And you must admit we have a good deal on this day, in spite of everything.”
“Oh, yes,” Bob agreed. “I think we should have a little talk after lunch about a few things. It will probably be the last time we’re all together before the launch.”
“That’s the vice president’s idea,” Dr. Anderson said as the engines started again with a growl that made further conversation difficult.
“Four hours of this?” Bob shouted quizzically.
“Just routine,” Andy Anderson shouted back cheerfully. “Relax and take a nap.”
But a nap was not what they had, nor did they have much relaxation. Things that should not have happened, did happen; things that had never happened before, happened. To the media, which suddenly, to the horror of many, found some of its own members involved, it was absolutely fantastic, improbable, impossible, lurid, melodramatic, and insane. But it was an insane age, in America, and those who had helped to coddle the unbalanced should not really have been too surprised to find insanity unloosed. It just wasn’t supposed to be unloosed among them. And quite suddenly and desperately, it was.
Reconstructing it later when the official party was back in Firing Room I at the VAB, drinking their cocktails rather unsteadily and trying to settle down, the blame, if any, appeared to attach to some degree to Marlon Holloway and his colleagues of the news staff at Kennedy Space Center. But as he pointed out with unassailable logic and a certain amount of temper he knew how to get away with, he could not be responsible for every damned crackpot who showed up asking for press credentials. He could check and check and check and so could the news staff at KSC, but short of running complete FBI scans on everybody, there was a limit. He pointed out tartly that 251 press and television newsmen, newswomen, cameramen, and technicians had already been accredited and were on site, and that there awaited processing on his desk in Washington, and on the desks of his colleagues in Florida, the applications of some 3000 more. And the end, he predicted with considerable annoyance, was not yet. So how could he know if half a dozen subversive screwballs got in under cover of a press badge? They could probably all be thankful there hadn’t been more.
“We assume you’ll tighten up considerably from now on,” the vice president suggested.
“Yes, sir,” Marlon said promptly. “Whatever the government gives us money and staff for, we’ll do.”
“Mmmm,” the vice president commented. “I’ll see what I can do for you, Marlon, but whether there’s more money or no”—his expression turned serious and determined—“we have got to have complete security from now on at the Cape.”
“Yes, sir,” Marlon said again. “We’ll do what we can.”
“And so will we,” Dr. Freer remarked. “But you cannot outguess all the crazy people in this world.”
“No,” the vice president agreed somberly. “No, you can’t.”
Enough of them had been present midway in the Crawlers’ majestic clanking progress to the pads to cause quite a sufficient stir for one day, though they had not, fortunately, been allowed to do any serious damage. It could be said for the guards at KSC that they had reacted promptly and without hesitation after the first shocked second or two, and it could also be said for most of the newsmen present that they had turned on what they had thought to be their own with a commendable and courageous speed. Together the forces of impromptu law and order had brought the invaders down, but not without a real risk to their own persons. The risk to the three Saturn V’s, of course, had been potentially even graver.
The Crawlers, inching slowly over the ground with their towering cargo at less than one mile per hour while reporters, guards, and technicians walked alongside, had been roughly half the three-mile distance between the VAB and the launching sites when without warning there had come a sudden movement in the casually straggling ranks of the press. At the heart of it had been two conservatively dressed youths later identified as having claimed badges as representatives of something called, “The Student Liberation Scientific Free Press”; a middle-aged, rather frowzy woman who wore a badge saying, general guidance magazine; a scrawny long-haired youth who had managed to get himself accredited as a messenger for the Associated Press; and an elderly, nondescript, insignificant-looking man whose badge said simply, midwest news.
The two conservatively dressed youths had begun running suddenly toward the base of the first Crawler, carrying Santa Maria, the vice president, and the crew. The frowzy woman and the insignificant man had run for the second Crawler, carrying the Pinta, Dr. Freer, and Dr. Sturmer. The long-haired youth had charged toward Crawler No. 3, bearing the Nina, Andy Anderson, and Bob Hertz. Fortunately, they had begun shouting as they ran.
