Seger cut the discussion short. “Chuck, Phil, every so often you’ve got to take a chance like this. To go back to the Moon so soon would be a hell of a thing for us. A hell of a thing. The nation needs a boost right now: why, you’ve got two White House aides testifying in the Senate against the President right this minute. And as for the risks, remember, they flew Apollo 8 to the Moon and back on only the second manned Apollo, the first manned Saturn V, and the first V to fly after the unmanned Apollo 6, which was a shambles…”

Stone finally understood. Seger had been reading his history. This is Bert’s Apollo 8. Back to the Moon! A grandiose stunt, a way to make his mark. And Skylab B is to be sacrificed for it.

Seger was saying, “Just think what a hell of a lift it will give us when you’re successful…”

“If, Bert,” Jones said. “If.”

When he’d thought it over, Stone still wasn’t happy.

But he wanted to fly in space. If he was going to have to swallow this ill-thought-out, gung-ho crap to do it, then that was the price he would pay.

And anyhow — Stone reflected, in the midst of the revised, hectic training schedule — he kind of liked the idea of going to the Moon…

The piece was splashed over the front page of yesterday’s Washington Post. Ralph Gershon sat in the public library of his hometown, reading it over and over.

…American B-52 bombers dropped about 104,000 tons of explosives on Communist sanctuaries in neutralist Cambodia during a series of raids in 1969 and 1970… The secret bombing was acknowledged by the Pentagon the Monday after a former Air Force major described how he falsified reports on Cambodia air operations and destroyed records on the bombing missions actually flown…

Ralph Gershon felt a deep satisfaction. At last it was coming out.

He was convinced all that covert crap had worked against his career progression in the years since. Maybe it had also killed off the tentative feelers he’d put out about getting into the space program. That and the color of his goddamn skin. Maybe there were people afraid of what he might say, if he got to be a public figure, right? Well, at last it was all going to be out in the open, and there was nothing anybody could do about it.

He made his decision, sitting there in the musty heat of the library’s reference section, with some old guy opposite him drooling in his sleep. As soon as he got back to his squadron he’d start preparing a new application to NASA.

Before he got up he read some more about how Ehrlichman and Haldeman were going to have to testify in front of the Senate. At last, he thought: at last that asshole Nixon was getting his. Erosion by Catastrophic Floods on Mars and Earth

Ronald R. Victor (Department of Geological Sciences, University of Texas at Austin),

Natalie B. York (Space Sciences Laboratory, University of California at Berkeley)

RECEIVED MARCH 18, 1974; REVISED OCTOBER 6, 1974.

ABSTRACT:

The large Martian channels, especially Kasei, Ares, Tiu, Simud, and Mangala Valles, show morphological features strikingly similar to those of “channeled scabland.” Features in the overall pattern include the great size, regional anastomosis, and low sinuosity of the channels. Erosional features are streamlined hills, longitudinal grooves, inner channel cataracts, scour upstream of flow obstacles, and perhaps marginal cataracts and butte and basin topography. Depositional features are bar complexes in expanding reaches and perhaps pendant bars and alcove bars.

Scabland erosion takes place in exceedingly deep, swift floodwater acting on closely jointed bedrock as a hydrodynamic consequence of secondary flow phenomena, including various forms of macroturbulent vortices and flow separations. If the analogy to the channeled scablands is correct, floods involving water discharges of millions of cubic meters per second and peak flow velocities of tens of meters per second, but lasting perhaps no more than a few days, have occurred on Mars…

Source: From The Bulletin of Geophysical Research, vol. 23, pp. 27 — 41 (1974) Copyright 1974 by Academia Press, Inc., all rights reserved.

Later, York would pinpoint the divergence in the trajectory of her life to a couple of days in the middle of 1976.

After that point, things just seemed to unravel, for her, as she fell toward a new destiny.

York wished she had something to drink. Even with all the windows open, the sun beating down on the roof made the car as hot as hell. Her sunglasses kept slipping down her nose, and every time she rested her arm on the sill of the window frame she burned her skin.

She rattled her nails on the steering wheel, waiting for Ben Priest.

In the middle of the aimless mess of her life, she seemed to be regressing, to some kind of childhood.

She’d had a huge image of Mars taped to her bedroom wall, a black-and-white photomosaic compiled from fifteen hundred Mariner 9 photographs, with the scar of Olympus Mons square at the center. At least, she’d had it there until Mike had made her take it down. He said Olympus Mons looked like a huge nipple.

And here she was hanging around at the gates of JPL — without a security pass — like a goddamn groupie, hoping to get an early look at the Soviets’ new pictures from the Martian surface.

At last, here was Ben Priest. With his graying crew cut he looked every inch the military man. He was carrying a fat cardboard folder with a blue NASA logo stenciled on the front. He was moving at a half trot, despite the heat, but he showed no signs of sweat; his crisp short-sleeved shirt glowed white in the brilliant noon light.

This time he hadn’t been able to get her into the lab itself. Nobody was supposed to see the stuff the Soviets were sending back from Mars.

Ben clambered into the car beside her. “Got it.”

She reached over. “Give.”

“Hell, no. Is that any way to greet an old friend? Let’s get out of this heat first. Mars can wait a few more minutes.”

She suppressed her eagerness. Be polite, Natalie. And, after all, it was Ben. She started the car. “Let’s find a bar. Do you know anywhere?”

“Only the water holes where the JPL hairies hang out, and I’d rather take a break from them.”

“I’m staying at the Holiday Inn. It’s only a few minutes from here.”

“Go for it.”

She pulled out.

“I was expecting to see Mike, too,” Ben said.

“Oh, in the end he couldn’t get away. He has his head shoved much too firmly up a NERVA 2 exhaust pipe.” Or up his own ass, maybe, she thought sourly.

“You know the NERVA thing still isn’t going too well. My flight on Apollo-N has been delayed again, and—”

“Mike doesn’t tell me anything. Half of it’s classified, anyhow.”

“Well, that’s the word in the Astronaut Office. So how’s life for my favorite girl-geologist?”

She grunted and pushed her slippery sunglasses back up her nose. “Shitty, if you want the truth. My professor at Berkeley — Cattermole — is a jackass.”

Priest laughed out loud. “I wish you’d say what you mean.”

“Cattermole’s smart at departmental infighting, and putting together grant applications. But that’s it. The rest of his head shut down long ago. His projects are lousy, as are his methods. He sees Berkeley’s Space Sciences Lab as just a way to chisel money out of NASA. If I was smart enough to have seen that before I signed up, I wouldn’t have gone within ten miles of the man.”

“But your contract is only short term.”

“Yeah, and then I have to find another.”

“Which you will. If you want it. You’re a bright girl, Natalie.”