Thank you…

Source: Frederick W. Michaels Chronological File, 1972, NASA Historical Reference Collection, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

Gregory Dana had spent the day at a meeting on rendezvous techniques for the upcoming Skylab missions. He came across a number of Houston people gathered in the hallway, before a notice board. “What’s going on?”

“Don’t you know? We’re going to Mars. Nixon has confirmed it at last. Look at this.” They made way for him at the board.

At first Dana could see nothing of interest to him on the board: an offer of tickets for the Cowboys vs Dolphins Super Bowl, classes in TM and acupuncture (posted in NASA HQ!), and a bright orange sticker saying simply JESUS HEALS. But there, crowded out by the trivia, was a closely printed piece of headed paper. It was a statement from Nixon, and a subsidiary statement from Michaels, the new NASA Administrator. Some supporting press briefing material was pinned up, too: a “Mars mission digest,” with simple question-and-answer chunks of information about the mission, and a few spectacular artist’s impressions of the mission’s various phases. There were even a few outlines of the mission modes which had been evaluated and discarded.

There was no mention of Dana’s Venus swing-by mode.

Since that apocalyptic Phase A meeting in Huntsville back in July, Dana had heard almost nothing of the development of the Mars options. And this was the first he’d learned of the final decision — along with the Headquarters cleaning staff, and the rest of the nation. It was clear that he’d been excluded from the decision-making process since July.

What could he do about it? Write another letter to Fred Michaels?

He felt the injustice, the stupidity of it, burn a hole in his stomach.

Well, it was nothing to do with him anymore. Maybe, at least, Jim would be able to realize some of his own dreams, in the slow unwinding of this decision.

Dana tucked his briefcase under his arm and walked away.

York floated in her sleeping bag. She was dog tired, but sleep just wouldn’t come. Her lower back was sore, and she had a stuffy headache, as if she was developing a cold. Her heart was suddenly too strong; blood seemed to boom through her ears. She missed the pressure of a pillow under her head, the security of a blanket tucked in close around her. The bag was too big, for one thing; she found herself bouncing around inside it. And every time she moved, the layer of warm air which she’d built up around her body, and which stuck there in microgravity, tended to squirt away, out of the bag, leaving her chilled.

When she managed to relax, she had a feeling of falling. Once she almost drifted off, but then her arms came floating up, and a hand touched her face…

She let her eyes slide open.

She was inside her sleep locker, at the base of the Mission Module. The locker was little bigger than a cupboard, with a foldaround screen drawn across it. On the surface above her head was her overhead light, and a little comms station, and a fan. There were little drawers for personal things, like underwear; when she opened them the drawers had blue plastic nets stretched over them, to stop everything from floating away.

A lot of light and noise leaked around the foldaround screen. She could hear the hum and whir of the Mission Module’s equipment, and the occasional automatic burn of the attitude clusters as they kept Ares pointing sunward. With the bright, antiseptic light of the wardroom beyond her screen, and the new smell of metal and plastic, it was like trying to sleep inside an immense refrigerator.

Apparently there had been plans to provide solid doors on the sleep lockers. She even remembered seeing a memo which talked about the need to provide privacy for astronauts “significantly relating,” in the typically obscure, euphemistic double-talk NASA employed when talking about the functions of the warm bodies they were shipping into space at such expense. But the doors had been skipped, for reasons of saving weight. So much for significantly relating.

And — on top of everything else — she needed a pee.

She tried to ignore it, but the pressure on her bladder built up steadily. Christ. Well, it was her own fault; the relief tube — the Mission Module’s toilet, the Waste Management Station — was so uncomfortable she’d put off using it. Besides, she seemed to be peeing more than usual since coming up into microgravity.

She succumbed to the inevitable. She squirmed her way out of the bag, turned on her overhead light, and folded back the screen. When she moved, her back hurt like hell.

After the TOI burn, the Ares modules had undergone the first of the cumbersome waltzes the crew would have to endure before the mission was done. Under the command of Stone, Apollo, containing the crew, had separated from the nose of the stack, turned around, and docked nose to nose with the Mission Module.

When she’d first been talked through the mission profile, waiting until after the TOI burn to accomplish separation and docking had seemed bizarre to York. Why wait until you were already on your way to Mars to cut loose of your main ship? But it made a kind of sense, in the convoluted, abort-options-conscious way the mission planners figured those things. If the MS-II had blown up during the TOI burn, the crew, in Apollo, could have gotten out and done an abort burn to get home. And if the injection burn was successful but the docking hadn’t been, the crew could use the Service Module’s big engine to blast back toward Earth.

Anyway, after the successful docking, the crew had been able to crawl through a docking tunnel and started moving into the Mission Module, their interplanetary home away from home.

As long as she didn’t think about the wisdom of taking apart the spacecraft in deep interplanetary space, it didn’t trouble York.

York let herself drift across the wardroom. She was light as a feather and invulnerable; it was like moving through a dream. The Mission Module was a lot roomier than the Apollo Command Module had been, of course. But she was learning to move around, to operate in that environment. She’d found she couldn’t move too quickly. If she did, she’d collide with the equipment, dislodging switches and maybe damaging gear. It just wasn’t a professional way to behave. She was learning to move slowly, with a kind of underwater grace.

It wasn’t a big deal. Microgravity was just a different environment; she’d learn to work within its constraints.

The wardroom, with its little plastic table and three belted chairs, was clean and empty, bright in the light of strip floods. The walls and floors weren’t solid; they were a gray mosaic of labeled storage drawers and feet restraints — loops of blue plastic — and there were handy little blue rectangles of Velcro everywhere. There were up-down visual cues, signs and lighting and color codes. Everything was obviously designed for zero G.

The whole thing had the feel of an airliner’s crew station, she thought; it was all kind of pleasing, compact, well designed, everything tucked away. Like a mobile home in space. Of course everything was still bright and new, every surface unmarked; it would be different after a few months’ occupancy. Much of the Mission Module’s equipment was still in stowage; the crew would spend the next few days hauling ass around the module, configuring it for its long flight.

The Waste Management Station was a little cubicle containing a commode, a military thing of steel and bolts and terse metal labels. She pulled across the screen, swiveled in the air, dropped her pants and shorts, and pulled herself down. Thigh bars, cushioned and heavy, swung across her legs to clamp her ass to the seat.