Stephen Baxter: Voyage

The coordinates didn’t tie up with where the FAG was supposed to be.

Gershon called his wingman. “Hey. You copy that?”

“Copy.”

“Either he doesn’t know where he is, or he’s a hundred miles from here.”

“Your call, Pilgrim.”

Gershon hesitated, trying to figure what to do. Sometimes this kind of hide-and-seek was normal with an FAG.

Then again, sometimes voices would come floating up out of the dark to the bombers, confidently calling out positions to hit. On checking, the flyers would find the locations to be the designated areas of friendly troops.

“Topdog, this is Pilgrim. You hear my airplane?”

“Pilgrim, Topdog. I hear your airplane. You come north maybe two mile.”

Gershon pushed north.

Gershon looked down. The mountains there were high, and his cruising altitude of 10,500 feet didn’t put him all that far above them.

“Hey, Topdog. You hear my airplane now?”

“Rager, rager, Pilgrim. You over my position now.”

There was a valley below him, a black wound in the landscape, coated with the fur of jungle.

“Topdog. Pilgrim see big valley. Where are you?”

“Rager, Pilgrim. Bad guy in valley. You put bomb in middle of valley.”

It was a pinpoint target. “Look, Topdog, I want to know where you are.” Gershon didn’t want to bomb out the FAG himself.

“Pilgrim, Topdog on top of mountain. You bomb bad guy.”

“All right, Topdog, Pilgrim drop bomb in valley.”

Gershon set his wing selector to the left stub, where a five-hundred-pound napalm bomb nestled. He peered down, into oceanic invisibility. He put on a single fuselage light, so the wingman would be able to see where he was going.

He rolled over, relying on his instruments in the darkness, and stabilized into a forty-degree dive.

He descended below the tops of the mountains and closed rapidly. Through his gunsight he could see glimmers outlining the valley below.

The altimeter unwound, and Gershon’s breath was ragged and hot. He wasn’t worried about antiaircraft fire; just then he was more concerned about not hitting the ground.

He hit the release button.

Five hundred pounds dropped away from the ship with a jolt. He pulled up, and grunted as three Gs settled on his chest.

The nape splashed over the landscape. It was like an immense flashbulb, exploding from the valley floor, and it lit up the smoky sky, turning it into a milky dome above him. It was eerie, alien, almost beautiful.

“Pilgrim! You have number one bomb. Very good. You do same again.”

“Okay, Topdog, we’ll put it right there.”

Gershon swapped altitudes with his wingman, and let the wingman dive in. The valley wasn’t dark any longer; it was a mass of fires and splotches of twenty-mil hits, which sparkled like little fire jewels. Gershon caught glimpses of his wingman’s Spad, rolling down and leveling off, silhouetted against the blaze below.

“Very good bomb, Pilgrim.”

“Okay, Topdog.”

“Hey, Pilgrim. You got radio?”

Gershon couldn’t figure what the FAG was talking about; the raid was over. “Say again, Topdog. Say again.”

“Topdog listen to radio. Voice of America. You brave boys in trouble.”

“What?”

“Apollo. Brave boys. Spaceship in terrible danger, say Voice of America. You understand?”

Jesus. He felt electrified. I wonder what the hell has happened, if they can get home…

But what a way to find out, from some poor little guy, lost in a shit-hole in the mountains of Cambodia.

“Rager, Topdog. I copy. Thank you.”

“And to you, Pilgrim, a good night.”

Yeah. A good night faking my records.

Somewhere in the sky above him — for all the peril those guys were in — Americans were undertaking vast, wonderful adventures. And there he was, flying this bucket of bolts, splashing liquid fire over peasants. Doing something so shitty that even his own government wouldn’t admit it was happening.

I’ve got to get out of this. Of course, despite a lot of pressure from the White House, NASA had yet to fly a black man into space. It would be a long haul for Ralph Gershon…

But it can’t be worse than this.

Gershon and his wingman climbed back to altitude, and Gershon turned his nose for home. Mission Elapsed Time [Day/Hr:Min:Sec] Plus 000/00:12:22

Earth was a wall of blue light, as bright as a slice of tropical sky; it dazzled her, dilating her eyes, making the sky pitch-black when she looked away. The Command Module’s windows were tiny, already scuffed, but even so they let in shafts of startling blue, and the cabin was bright, cheerful, light-filled.

“Houston, we have a hot cabin.” Stone tapped a gloved forefinger against a temperature gauge. “Running at seventy-seven.”

“Copy, Ares” Young said. “We recommend you put coolant fluid through the secondary coolant loop.”

“Roger,” said Gershon. “Ah, okay, Houston, now I’m seeing a fluctuation of my water quantity gauge. It’s oscillating between, I’d say, 60 and 80 percent.”

“Copy, Ralph, working on that one…”

And Stone said he suspected there was a helium bubble in an attitude thruster propellant tank. Young recommended that he perform a couple of purge burns of the attitude thrusters to burn out the bubble. So Stone began to work that out. Meanwhile, Young came back with an answer to the water gauge problem; it looked as if it was traced to a faulty transducer…

And on, and on, a hail of small checks and detailed, trivial problems.

York had her own checklist to follow. She worked her way through the pale pages quickly, opening and closing circuit breakers, throwing switches, calling out instructions for Stone and Gershon. She was immersed in the hiss of the air in her closed helmet, the humming of the Command Module’s instruments and pumps, the rustle of paper, the crackle of Young’s voice calling up from the ground, the soft voices of Gershon and Stone as they worked through their post-orbit checklists.

It was a mundane procedure they’d followed together dozens of times in the sims.

But, she realized, it was a profound shock to go through this routine — not in some stuffy ground-based trainer — but here.

If she looked ahead of the craft, she could see the planet’s curve. It was a blue-and-white arc with black space above it. But when she looked straight down, the skin of the Earth filled her window, scrolling steadily past as if she were viewing some colorful map on a computer screen.

She was amazed by the transparency of the air. There was a sense of depth to the atmosphere, a three-dimensional appearance that surprised her. There were shadows under the clouds as they slid across the face of the seas. The clouds thickened toward the equator, and when she looked ahead, tangential to the Earth’s surface, she could see them climbing up into the atmosphere, as if Ares was heading for a wall of vapor. On the land she could easily make out cities — a gray, angular patchwork — and the lines of major roads. The orange-brown of deserts was vivid, but the jungles and temperate zones were harder to spot; their color did not penetrate the atmosphere so well, and they showed up as a gray-blue, with the barest hint of green.

She found the lack of green disappointing.

She saw the wake of a ship, feathering out like a brushstroke on the sea’s calm surface.

Gershon, in his center seat, leaned toward her. “Quite a view, huh.”

She turned her head — and quickly regretted it; her head felt like a tank of fluid, sloshing when she moved. She held her head steady for a few seconds and let the sloshing settle down again. Resolutely, she tried not to think about her stomach.

Space adaptation syndrome. She understood what was happening to her. Without gravity, little particles of calcium on sensitive hairs in the inner ear took up random positions, and the body couldn’t work out which way was up. It generally went away after a few days.