The Eye With Which The Universe Beholds Itself (Apollo Quartet) Read Free Page B

a sponge bath. And each time, it has taken an effort of will to struggle back into his A7LB. He would sooner wear a CWG, of course, and shower regularly, as he did aboard the flyby spacecraft. But the MM’s cabin is only 235 cubic feet and he has to spend seventy days cooped up in it and all he has is a sponge, recycled water and a bar of soap. He has to wear his spacesuit constantly because the walls of the Mars Module are so thin a micrometeorite could easily pierce them. The five layers of his spacesuit also provide a better shield against radiation than the thin cotton of a Constant Wear Garment.
    If not for the freefall, these past weeks—his first Christmas and New Year alone; and so far from another human being—would have been unbearable. He at least has the full volume of the cabin in which to move around. He misses Walker’s presence, though it’s been good to get some real solitude after one hundred days in the flyby spacecraft. They’d never have made it if they were just amiable strangers—no, they’re best buds, a true team. All the same, he’s not looking forward to the 537 days of the return journey…
    The mission planners have given him plenty of science to occupy him, but his tools are necessarily limited and he’s only done as tasked in a desperate attempt to stave off cabin fever. It hasn’t really worked. Instead, he has spent hours staring out the commander’s window at Mars, a rusty globe smeared with umber lines and shadows, growing larger and larger each day. He can see surface features now, Valles Marineris a cicatrix stitched across the planet’s face, Mons Olympus so high its peak pokes out the atmosphere, the Tharsis Bulge… and the blurred swirls of a vast dust storm drifting across Chryse Planitia.
    He and Walker talk every day, and together they check each system again and again and again. His course is programmed into the MGC, the numbers put together by much smarter guys back in Houston than the two of them. He trusts them, he has no choice, there is no way he can manually fly this spacecraft across millions of miles of space and hit his target. Periodically, he checks his IMU and feeds the figures to Walker, who passes them onto Houston. And sometimes they come back with updates he has to input on the DSKY. And every day, minute by minute, hour by hour, Mars draws closer, expands in the windows, its baleful presence gradually, inescapably, blotting out the heavens.
    It’s an astonishing act of faith, he belatedly realises, to imagine this mission will succeed, that he will spend nine days on the Martian surface, and then return safely to the Earth.
    Yet his conviction is unshakeable. Nothing will go wrong because the engineering is up to the job. He’s heard the stories, he knows how the space programme used to be run—Gus Grissom’s “Do good work”, and then the lemon and the Apollo 1 fire; even Alan Shepard’s crack about “built by the lowest bidder”… But he knows how they built Ares 9, he was involved in the design, he visited the suppliers, he saw the parts being made, inspected them, ensured they met specification, and worked precisely as designed; and if he had not been confident in the hardware, Elliott would never have accepted the mission. Not even to be the first man on Mars.
    Or so he told Judy.
    The days pass and the photo of his wife on the control panel keeps him company as the Red Planet swells in the windows until it fills his entire view. Once a week, he speaks to Judy, his S-Band signal relayed through the flyby spacecraft. She asks him how he is, he assures her he is fine, not mentioning he grows weaker with each day he spends in freefall and he worries he may not be strong enough to move about on the Martian surface. She tells him neighbourhood gossip, but he doesn’t recognise the names, or recalls them only dimly, and their house in Nassau Bay seems like a distant memory and only Judy, kept fresh by the photograph, is clear in his