— MELLONOLATRY, that is the baseless worship of technology for its own sake.

— MISONEISM, an equally baseless fear and hatred of technology.

What better argument for casting aside our rocket vessels now, with their deadly NUCLEAR hearts!…

Source: Excerpt from “Mellonolatry and Misoneism: The Twin Idols of Space,” Rev. B. Seger, Church of St. Joseph of Cupertino. All rights reserved.

Ralph Gershon was standing in the hatchway of the MEM mock-up, his face visible behind his clear visor. “Okay, Natalie. You want to come in now?”

“Rog, Ralph.”

York, on the faked-up Martian surface, took a deliberate step toward the MEM.

As she moved, the harness around her chest hauled at her brutally, and she was dragged upward through a couple of feet. She tripped. The suit, pressurized at three and a half pounds per square inch, was like a balloon around her, and it kept her body stiff, like a manikin, and she couldn’t save herself.

She toppled like a felled tree.

She fell on her knees, with her gloved hands in the dirt. The soil in front of her face was dried-out Houston gumbo, sprinkled with pink gravel: she was on what the astronauts called, inaccurately, a rock pile, a simulated Martian surface. The surface was more or less flat, because flat areas were where the more conservative mission planners wanted to put the MEM down.

“Goddamn this harness.”

“You tell it, Natalie. You want any help?”

“No. No, I’ll manage, damn it.”

York was lashed up to a tethered Mars gravity simulator. The harness around her chest was attached by cables to a pole above her; the cables led to pulleys which offset two-thirds of her weight. Just like on Mars. Except on Mars, there wouldn’t be some ludicrous, clumsy rope hauling unpredictably at her back every time she took a step.

To get upright, for example, she had to push at the ground, and let the harness haul her upright, and scrabble with her ankles at the soil, hoping not to tip over backwards again.

She stood there teetering on her feet, her hands outstretched for balance. Through her helmet she could hear ironic applause from the technicians.

“Ignore the assholes,” Gershon advised.

“Rog.” She took a breath. “Here I come again, Ralph.”

“Just take it steadily, Natalie. That’s my girl…”

She took a slow and measured step. It was actually a lot easier to take her feet off the surface than to put them back down again. She seemed to drift in a shallow parabola through the air before each step was completed, and she grounded with a crunch in the dried gumbo. It was like swimming through some viscous liquid, all her motions rendered slow, dreamlike, unstable.

At last, though, she seemed to be getting up a little momentum. The mass of her backpack tugged at her, its inertia constantly dragging her off her line; whenever she wanted to change direction she had to think four or five steps ahead.

The MEM drifted before her, remote and all but unattainable, bathed in movie-set floodlights. The mock-up’s hatch gaped open, the fluorescent light within revealing the hardwood-and-ply nature of its construction.

Not far from the MEM was a mocked-up Mars Rover, the TV camera mounted on its prow swiveling to stare at her with its dark lens. The camera was live. York, under its gaze, felt like some gorilla loping around its cage.

Ralph, of course, had taken to Mars-walking as if he’d been born to it.

What they were doing was actually a simulation of their second walk on Mars, the first time they would get to do any serious work. The first walk would be an hour-long solo by Phil Stone, as commander. The purpose of the first walk — according to the mission plan — was for him to test out the systems of his suit and his general mobility, to check out the status of the MEM after landing, and to resolve any glitches with the comms systems. Stone would do little science, that first time out, except to pick up a small contingency surface sample.

Of course there was a hidden agenda.

The attention of the Earth — and all of NASA’s sponsors in the White House and on the Hill — would be on that first walk, the first small steps by a man on Mars. So all the ceremony — putting up the Stars and Stripes, the footprints-and-flags stuff, the speech by President Reagan (who was basking in his recent landslide win against Teddy Kennedy) — could be gotten out of the way in that first hour. And on Joe Muldoon’s advice, learning from his Apollo experiences, everything in that first walk was being checklisted and time-lined, including Reagan’s call.

After that, hopefully, the rest of the program would be free for some serious work.

It made some sense to York. She knew how such things had to be accommodated. But it still seemed odd to her, sometimes, that NASA should be planning the exploration of Mars around TV ratings.

At last, she reached the MEM. She skidded a little as she came to a halt, at the foot of the ladder down from the hatch.

The simulation supervisor spoke to her over her headset. “Natalie, this time we’d like you to try extracting a SNAP from its cask.”

“Rog.” She tried to keep the weary irritation out of her voice. That meant she had to trudge farther, across to the plywood Mars Rover. She swiveled on her heel like a puppet, until her body was pointing at the Rover, and then lumbered across the crunching surface.

The dummy Surface Experimental Package was already set up, its silver and gold boxes sprawling across the surface in a spiderweb of power cables and data feeds. Some of the cables still needed connecting, as did the antenna for transmitting signals back to Earth. The SNAP generator — System of Nuclear Auxiliary Power — was a box to one side of the little complex. York was supposed to activate it by inserting a little pod of plutonium. The pod — a dummy, one of several — was mounted in a little rack at the back of the Rover. It was a narrow cylinder, maybe a foot long, held inside a graphite storage cask.

She got hold of a handling rod. By pulling a trigger handle, she opened little jaws at the end of the handle and tried to engage them around the pod. Her pressurized, elasticized gloves resisted every movement of her hands; it was like trying to close a fist around a rubber ball.

When she had gotten the handling jaws open, she had to use two hands to guide the open mouth around the end of the pod.

Finally she tried to pull the pod free of its flask. But the damn thing wouldn’t come.

The jaws slipped off the pod, and she staggered backwards. She could hear her breathing rasp, the rattle of the cable on her harness.

“You got any suggestions, Ralph?”

“Hold it there. Let me try that mother.”

She rested surreptitiously against her cables, while Gershon clambered backwards out of the MEM. He wasn’t hooked up to a Peter Pan, so he labored under the full weight of his suit, and his movements were heavy and awkward.

He climbed down the ladder and took the handling rod. With York’s help he got the jaws fitted to the fuel pod. He started to pull; he even leaned back, digging his heels into the dried-out gumbo. But the pod wouldn’t come loose.

The SimSup called, “Ah, you guys want to take a break? That thing sure is jammed.”

“Nope,” said Gershon. “Natalie, let’s try the direct approach. You get hold of the rod, here.”

“Okay.” She took it from him, moving slowly, being careful not to release the grip on the trigger handle.

“Now.” He reached over and took a geological hammer from the loop at her waist. “Start pulling, babe.”

With both hands on the handling rod, she leaned back and dragged.

Gershon started hitting the cask with the hammer, with high, sweeping blows; his whole body had to swivel to deliver the blows.