at us in our Command Module here. We’re in the middle of our TOI maneuver. We see through our windows the sun going by, and, of course, the Earth. We can give you the time of day in our system of mission elapsed time: thirty-seven hours, and fifty-one minutes, and umpteen seconds. Now maybe Ralph can show you the view.’
Stone nodded to York. She reached up to pull the TV camera off its mount. Because of the thrust she couldn’t just float it; she had to pass the camera to Gershon. It felt massy, awkward, in the gentle acceleration of the MS-II.
‘Okay, Houston, here you go,’ Gershon said. ‘Here you see the Earth, falling away beneath us.’
‘Copy, Ares. Fine images.’
‘It really is a fantastic sight,’ Gershon said. ‘We’re somewhere over the Atlantic right now, and I can see the eastern seaboard, from Florida all the way up to Newfoundland, as clear as crystal. I don’t know if that’s visible in your images.’
‘We see it.’
‘And as I look to my right, I can see, just toward the limb of the planet, what must be Western Europe and Africa. I can see Spain, and the British Isles, all kind of foreshortened. The British Isles are definitely a greener color than the brownish-green that we have in Spain. There’s a little haze over Spain, and what looks like cumulus clouds piled up over the south of England.’
‘Copy. That matches the weather reports we have today.’
‘Good to know I’m looking at the right planet, Houston …’
Stone said now, ‘I got a comment about the point on the Earth where the sun’s rays reflect back toward us. In general the color of the ocean is uniform, a rich blue, except for that region – a circle, maybe an eighth of the Earth’s radius. In this circular area, the blue of the water turns to a grayish color and I’m sure that’s where the sun’s rays are being reflected back on up toward us.’
‘Roger, Phil,’ Crippen said. ‘That’s been observed before. It’s similar to a light shining on a bowling ball. You get this bright spot and the blue of the water then turns into a grayish color.’
‘A bowling ball, yeah. Or maybe the top of Phil’s head.’ Gershon laughed at his own joke.
It was true, York saw, twisting her head; there was a huge highlight on the blue surface of the ocean. Damn. The thing really is a sphere. Like a ball of steel.
‘Thank you, Ares. How about an internal position now, please? Maybe you’d like to talk us through what the TOI is all about, today.’
Gershon passed the camera back along the cabin, and York fitted it to its pedestal, so it had a panoramic view of the three of them. She caught Stone’s face; he rolled his eyes, and pointed to her, and to the camera.
York was on.
She turned back to her displays, and tried not to look up too often at the camera. Her throat felt tight, her face flushed inside her helmet; suddenly she could feel every hot crumple of her pressure suit. She keyed the press-to-talk switch on her headset cable. ‘Okay, Houston. This is our TOI maneuver: TOI, for Transfer Orbit Injection. Right now, the big engines on our main booster stage, the MS-II, are firing to push us out of Earth orbit. The MS-II is just a version of the second stage of the old Saturn V, modified to serve as an orbital injection vehicle. The S-IIs which took Apollo to the Moon had five J-2 engines. Well, we’ve got just four engines, upgrades called J-2S; the central one was removed to accommodate a lox tanker docking port. The MS-II has got more insulation, to stop boiloff, and its own small maneuvering engines, and more docking ports at the front.
‘I guess you can say we’re all pretty much relieved that the MS-II is working as well as it is; we’re going to rely on the MS-II not just to leave Earth but to slow us when we get to Mars, and to bring us out of Martian orbit when we’re ready to come home …’
She dried up. She was speaking too fast, waffling. ‘Stand by,’ capcom Crippen said. ‘Okay, we’ve cut the live feed. Ares, you’ve got a pretty big audience: it was live in the US, it went live to Japan, Western Europe and much of South America. Everybody reports good color, they appreciate the great show.’
Gershon said, ‘Keep those cards and letters coming, folks.’
‘Missing you already,’ said Crippen.
Christ, what rubbish. No wonder they cut the feed.
She hadn’t meant to say any of that; she’d wanted to say something personal.
To say how it felt, to see the Earth fall away.
She’d always criticized earlier generations of astronauts, for their lack of eloquence. Maybe it wasn’t so easy, after all.
‘ETs depleted,’ York reported. ‘Ready for sep.’
‘Roger,’ Stone said.
More than two million pounds of fuel, a treasure that had taken five years to haul up to Earth orbit, had burned off in sixteen minutes.
‘Three, two, one. Fire.’
Right now, pyrotechnics would be severing the securing bolts and frames at top and bottom of each Tank, and guillotines should be slicing across the wide feed pipes which had carried fuel from the Tanks into the MS-II’s belly. York half-expected to hear a rattle of bolts, muffled clangs, like the staging during the Saturn VB launch; but she heard and felt nothing.
‘ET sep is good,’ she said.
‘Confirm ET sep,’ said Crippen.
‘Hey, how about that.’ Gershon was looking out his window. ‘I can see a Tank.’
York twisted in her couch, and turned to look. Silhouetted against the gray-blue of Earth, the discarded ET was a fat, cone-tipped cigar case, colored muddy brown and silver. On its flank she could see bits of lettering, and small patches of orange insulation amidst the silver. Propellant dribbled from one of the severed feed pipes, a stream of crystals which glittered against the skin of Earth. The dribble made it look as if the ET had been wounded, like a great harpooned whale.
The Tank rapidly receded from Ares, falling away and tumbling slowly.
Both Tanks were moving quickly enough to have escaped Earth’s gravity field, with Ares. The Tanks would become independent satellites of the sun, lasting maybe for billions of years before falling into a planet’s gravity well.
She waved the Tank good-bye, with a little flourish of her gloved fingers. Good luck, baby.
The engines finally died. She felt it as an easing away of acceleration; a gentle reduction of the subliminal noise and vibration from the remote engines.
‘That’s it,’ Stone said. ‘Shutdown. Everything looks nominal.’
Crippen called up: ‘You got a whole room of people down here who say you are looking good, Ares.’
Gershon whooped in reply. ‘It was one hell of a ride, Bob.’
Stone said dryly, ‘From up here the burn was copacetic, Houston. Thank you.’ He began to uncouple his helmet and gloves.
York watched the receding Earth fold over on itself, becoming a tight, compact ball in space, with the Atlantic Ocean thrust outwards toward her, wrinkled, glistening.
The Ares cluster was only a couple of hundred miles further from the Earth than in its low orbit. But now, it was traveling so fast that Earth’s gravity could no longer hold it. Four hundred miles a minute, York thought: so fast that she would cross the orbit of the Moon in just twelve hours.
Crippen said, ‘Is that music I hear in the background?’
‘No,’ Stone said. ‘Ralph is singing.’
Saturday, August 7, 1971 Manned Spacecraft Center, Houston