A Step Beyond (7 page)

Vladimir’s jealousy annoyed Tanya. He had struck her the other night because he thought she was getting too friendly with Komarov. Of course, he had overreacted. Komarov had placed his hand on her shoulder, that was all. She thought that perhaps it was guilt that made Vladimir act so. She suspected him of having an affair just a few months earlier during a training exercise in Japan. She hadn’t confronted him yet, because she still wasn’t sure. A friend of hers was checking into it. Or, she thought, perhaps his jealousy stemmed from suspicions that she had married him to secure a spot on the mission. There was some truth to that, but not to the extent imagined. She had fallen in love with Vladimir and would have married him anyway—just not so quickly.

She had to admit, though, that she was attracted to Dmitri and felt a certain warmth when she was near him. The gray streaks in his hair gave him an air of distinction.

She remembered an incident back on Earth when all four of them had been submerged underwater in the immersion facility. The facility was used to approximate weightlessness. During the two-hour session, she, at first unconsciously, had stayed close to Komarov through the training maneuvers. As Vladimir grew visibly irritated, Tanya became angered by his distrust and paid less attention to him. That, of course, only aggravated the situation. The tension increased until everyone in the tank felt it. When they finally emerged, she and Vladimir exchanged a few sharp words before charging off in separate directions; under any other circumstance no one would have noticed, but they were training for a two-year stay in space, and their trainers were instructed to notice such things. The trainers filed their report that evening.

The next morning the couple was called before a special review board, which included several mission psychiatrists. It was just a marital spat, they explained to the board. A perfectly normal thing. These were not perfectly normal circumstances, they were informed by one of the psychiatrists. Confinement of the sort they were about to endure could place unusual demands on the human psyche. Even a spat had the potential to blossom into something of graver consequence. It was their responsibility to select cosmonauts who could control their emotions. If a repeat of such behavior occurred, the board might be forced to reconsider its selection. It was the first and last public outburst between the two. But in private . . . Tatiana didn’t want to think about that.

“Prepare for separation, over,” announced a voice over the intercom.

Komarov turned toward Vladimir. Vladimir, without looking up from his console, nodded to confirm they were ready.

“The
Druzhba
is set for separation,” Komarov announced.
“Sokop?”

“The shuttle is set.”

“Initiate separation.”

Vladimir flipped the switch that instructed the computer to initiate the separation sequence. A message appeared on the main console that the grapples had been released; moments later, he noticed that the stars outside his portal had shifted as a spring pushed the two ships apart. Several tiny rockets, each with 870 pounds of thrust powered by a mixture of monomethyl hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide, fired on the shuttle when it was a safe distance away.

“Separation complete,” Komarov announced. His voice was cold, professional, without emotion. It was Vladimir’s duty to announce the separation. But Komarov had noticed Vladimir’s mind had drifted, and this was his way of getting Vladimir’s thoughts back on track.

“Your orbit looks good.”

Vladimir glanced over at Komarov. He had a great deal of respect for his commander. Ever since Vladimir’s days in the Furuze Military Academy, Komarov had been a hero of his. Dmitri Fyodorovich Komarov was spoken of with godlike reverence by the young cadets. He was the great Russian test pilot, running neck and neck with his famous American counterpart, Al Carter. Everyone knew that he would have beaten Carter in the race to put the space plane into orbit had it not been for budget constraints. It was not Komarov’s fault he had lost that race. The previous century’s rash of programs to reform the Russian economy, each more chaotic and corrupt than its predecessor, was to blame. Vladimir’s respect for his commander did not, however, alleviate his suspicions.

He had no proof. He had never caught them in the act. There was no hard evidence he could point to. Just suspicions. The way she acted around Komarov. Hands sliding by each other and hesitating before continuing, the tone of her voice when she talked to him, or a smile when there was no reason for a smile. When he confronted her she would become angry and deny it was anything more than his overactive imagination. The more suspicious he became the more angered she would become and the more it would seem, as a result of her anger and a desire to strike back, that her attentions were diverted to Komarov.

Vladimir did not want to believe that his wife could be unfaithful. There were periods when she would act as if no other man could possibly interest her, and she would love him and caress him and speak softly to him, and he would forget his suspicions. But he had no way of knowing for certain whether or not she was having an affair. It angered him not to know, and it angered him even more that he did not know whether his anger, which she resented, was justified.

Komarov, he knew, was not to be trusted. He did not know if he could trust his wife. He did not know if he were distorting innocent gestures into something secretive and lustful. It might be, as she said, nothing more than his imagination. There was only one way to know for sure, and that was to catch them in the act. His thoughts were disrupted by a distant voice that he recognized as Colonel Schebalin’s. The colonel was reviewing the scheduled activities with the crew.

They would spend the next three days in geosynchronous orbit, running through a seemingly endless checklist to verify that the system components functioned according to specifications. The components and their redundant counterparts had been checked and rechecked a multitude of times, at the manufacturers’, prior to assembly at the RSA plant, after assembly, prior to launch, after launch while in low-Earth orbit, and now in geosynchronous orbit, before the final burn that would send the ship and its crew on their way toward Mars.

Queen’s Gambit Declined

“L
iberty
, this is control. You are go for burn, over.”

The crew aboard the
Liberty
were making final preparations for trans-Mars injection, a maneuver which would free their ship from the gravitational pull of the Earth and establish a trajectory for Mars. Carter checked his flight-deck console and, pleased with what he found, gave Tom Nelson a thumbs-up.

“Roger, we are go for burn. Out.”

Carter could feel his heart beating. He watched his hand as it moved in slow motion through the weightless environment of the spacecraft. His finger trembled as it pulled down on the metallic gray switch to ignite the main engines of the spacecraft’s Trans-Mars Injection stage. The TMI stage held 450,000 kilograms of propellant. Within the next few minutes, the entire 450,000 kilograms would explode in the rocket combustion chambers beneath them. The force of the explosions would accelerate the ship to a velocity of 26,000 kilometers per hour. Carter heard a voice counting backwards.

“. . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one. We have first-stage ignition.”

A stream of supercold liquid hydrogen flowed into preburners, where it combined with liquid oxygen to produce hydrogen-laden steam. The steam drove the turbopumps, which fed the fuel and oxidizer into the main injectors. The
Liberty
was fitted with two engines; each engine had four turbopumps and one main injector. The injectors sprayed a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen into the combustion chambers. The entire fuel supply for the first stage was forced through the system within a matter of minutes. If an injector failed to maintain a critical pressure within a combustion chamber, then the chamber would become unstable and explode. The ship would be destroyed. Despite the danger, the risk was relatively low. The basic design of the engine had been in use for many years in the space shuttle. The thrust from the engines pushed the crew back into their seats and propelled the ship to a speed twenty-two times that of sound.

“Control, this is
Liberty
,” Nelson said. “The first-stage engines are at seventy percent, over.”

“We confirm, over.”

As the ship accelerated, the g forces increased. After several weeks of weightlessness, the astronauts could feel their bodies regain their normal weight. Then they grew heavier, several times heavier than they would have felt on Earth, and since they had begun to adapt to the weightless environment of the space station, the effect was intensified. Carter lifted his arm from his seat and placed his hand several inches in front of his face. As he struggled to hold it steady, the g forces caused it to shake. He occupied his mind with the struggle and found a certain pleasure in it. And then suddenly his hand became very light and flew away from his face. He was able to stop it within inches of the flight-deck panel.

“Control, this is
Liberty
. We have first-stage burnout, over.” When the first-stage rocket had consumed its fuel, the ship stopped accelerating, and the g forces created by the acceleration vanished. Once again the crew was weightless.

“Roger,
Liberty
, prepare for separation.”

The computer began the countdown to jettison the large TMI stage, which would reduce the spacecraft to less than one-half its original size and weight. Bright green numbers flashed across the screen. The astronauts felt a slight jolt as the TMI stage separated from the spacecraft.

“We have first-stage separation,” Nelson announced. “Trans-Mars injection burn complete. Do you copy? Over.”

“Roger, TMI burn complete. Out.”

“Module extension to commence in ninety minutes,” Nelson said as he released his safety straps.

Dr. Endicott experienced a momentary uneasiness at the mention of the maneuver. It involved the extraction of the habitat and lab modules from behind the aeroshields, where they were safely tucked at the front of the ship, and their extension outward on a pair of trusses eighteen meters in length. The ship’s final configuration would look something like a crucifix, with the lab module at one end and the habitat module at the other. The two modules were connected to the main vehicle by a collapsible tunnel. Once extended, the modules would begin to spin to produce a gravitational effect four-tenths that of Earth’s.

Ninety minutes later both Endicott and Brunnet were pressed against a portal watching the long trusses slowly extricate themselves from the inner structure of the space vehicle.

“Does not exactly fill one with confidence, does it?” Endicott whispered to Brunnet.

Brunnet, who had been admiring the mechanical aspect of the maneuver, realized with some reluctance that Endicott’s doubts were not completely unfounded. He did not want to express his opinion, particularly in the presence of Nelson and Carter, and merely shrugged. The structure is perfectly safe, he told himself. It only appears unsafe.

But Brunnet could not rid his mind of the knowledge that the engineers had argued strenuously against the trusses, that they had agreed to their implementation only after it could not be determined how to maintain the necessary levels of calcium in the bones of an astronaut without the constant stress imposed by gravity. The bones would become so brittle after two years in a weightless environment, the length of the Martian voyage, that the g forces of reentry would snap them like dried-up twigs. The ill-fated
Volnost
had not been equipped with artificial gravity. The expense had been too great. The Russian scientists had opted for a constant regimen of exercise and calcium supplements. But the cosmonauts had complained continuously about the exercise and had often been too exhausted to do much else. Once it was agreed that gravity was necessary, the debate shifted to the amount required. The physiologists pushed for one g, which called for trusses over sixty-one meters in length, three times longer than the .4 configuration. The engineers refused to compromise the structural integrity of their ship any further and .4 was finally adopted.

The flight deck console blinked blue at Carter.

“Fully extended,” he responded.

“We have full extension.” Nelson turned to Carter. The next step was to spin the trusses using the Reaction Control System. “Proceed with spin.”

“Initiating RCS burn,” Carter announced as he punched the instructions on the keyboard to activate the miniature hydrazine-powered rockets located at the ends of the extensions.

The ship remained stationary as the two eighteen-meter extensions gradually achieved a speed of two revolutions per minute. The Russian craft possessed similar extensions, but was different in one notable respect. The entire ship spun, not just the extensions. Although the design was simpler to engineer, it had its own complications. Certain navigational and astronomical devices, such as telescopes, had to be spun in the opposite direction to avoid a constantly spinning image.

“Two rpms,” Carter announced.

“Houston, gravitational spin achieved, over.”

“Roger,
Liberty
. Congratulations, gentlemen. Godspeed and have a safe trip.”

D
r. Takashi Satomura was seated on the floor with his legs crossed beneath him. He was studying a holographic chessboard that floated several centimeters from the ground. Miniature Russian soldiers, dressed in winter rags, stomped their boots to keep their feet warm as they glared across the board at their adversary, the French. Behind a line of foot soldiers, adorned in full military regalia with one hand tucked conspicuously inside his jacket, stood Napoleon and, beside him, his lovely wife Josephine. A royal purple evening gown flowed from her shoulders and fluttered delicately in the wind. She acknowledged Satomura’s gaze with an elegant curtsy. The French foot soldier several squares in front of her shook his bayonet at his opponents and spat in their direction to register his disgust. A Russian soldier yelled back profanities and soon the entire board was engaged in a violent shouting match.