few inches below the knee. Goddamn tricks the cold played on him down here.
But damn if it didn’t feel good to be in charge again, he thought, catching a dim reflection of himself in the reinforced plexiglass window. Even now, in his sixties, he still cut a commanding figure. Most of the baby faces on the base had no idea who he used to be way back when. Or, rather, who he was supposed to have been.
Griffin Yeats should have been the first man on Mars.
TheGemini andApollo space veteran had been tapped for the job in 1968. The Mars shuttle, as originally formulated by rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun in 1953 and later revised by NASA planners, was scheduled to depart the American space station Freedom on November 12, 1981, reach the red planet on August 9, 1982, and return to Earth one year later.
If only politics were as predictable as the orbit of the planets.
By 1969 the war in Vietnam had sapped the federal budget, and the moon landing had temporarily satiated Americans’
appetite for space exploration. With congressional opposition to the mission mounting, President Nixon rejected the Mars mission and space station program. Only the space shuttle would get the green light. It was a catastrophic decision that set the Mars program back for decades, left the space shuttle all dressed up with no place to go, and cast a rudderless NASA adrift in the political backwaters of Washington without a clear vision.
It also killed Yeats’s dreams of greatness.
The desk console buzzed and broke Yeats’s trance. It was O’Dell in the command center. “Sir, we think we’ve picked them up on radar. Twenty minutes to landing.”
“Where are we with the runway?”
“Clearing it now, sir, but the storm—”
“No excuses, Colonel. I’ll be there in a minute. You better have an update.”
Yeats took another shot of whiskey and stared outside. At the time Nixon decided to scrap the Mars mission, Yeats was here in Antarctica, in the middle of a forty-day stay in a habitat specifically designed to simulate the first Martian landing. They were a crew of four supported by two Mars landing modules, a nuclear power plant, and a rover for exploring the surrounding territory.
Antarctica was as cold as Mars, and nearly as windy. Its snowstorms packed the same kind of punch as Martian dust storms. Most of all, the continent was almost as remote as the red planet, and in utter isolation a crew member’s true character would reveal itself.
For Yeats it was an experience that would forever change his life, in ways he never imagined. Four men walked into that mission. Only one limped out alive. But to what? To roam the subbasement corridors of the Pentagon as a creaky relic of the old space program? To raise an orphaned boy? To lose his wife and daughters as a result? Everything had been taken away from him.
Today he was taking it back.
5
Discovery
Plus Twenty-Three Days
IT WAS FREEZING IN THE FUSELAGEof the C-141 Starlifter transport when Conrad woke with a start. Groggy and sore, he rubbed his eyes. He was strapped in with two dozen Special Forces commandos sporting polar freezer suits and insulated M-16s.
He felt another jolt. For most of the flight they had soared through clear skies and over endless white. But now they were floating in some murky soup, and the turbulence grew worse by the second. The giant cargo containers in the rear shifted, straining their creaky tiedowns with each shock.
Conrad glanced at his multisensor GPS watch, which used a network of twenty-seven satellites to pinpoint his location anywhere on the globe and was accurate to within a hundred feet. But the past sixteen hours aboard various military craft must have chewed up the lithium batteries, because the longitudinal and latitudinal display was blanked out. The built-in compass, however, spun wildly—NE, SE, SW, NW. They must be nearing a polar region, he realized, most likely the South Pole.
He turned to the stone-faced commando sitting next
But damn if it didn’t feel good to be in charge again, he thought, catching a dim reflection of himself in the reinforced plexiglass window. Even now, in his sixties, he still cut a commanding figure. Most of the baby faces on the base had no idea who he used to be way back when. Or, rather, who he was supposed to have been.
Griffin Yeats should have been the first man on Mars.
TheGemini andApollo space veteran had been tapped for the job in 1968. The Mars shuttle, as originally formulated by rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun in 1953 and later revised by NASA planners, was scheduled to depart the American space station Freedom on November 12, 1981, reach the red planet on August 9, 1982, and return to Earth one year later.
If only politics were as predictable as the orbit of the planets.
By 1969 the war in Vietnam had sapped the federal budget, and the moon landing had temporarily satiated Americans’
appetite for space exploration. With congressional opposition to the mission mounting, President Nixon rejected the Mars mission and space station program. Only the space shuttle would get the green light. It was a catastrophic decision that set the Mars program back for decades, left the space shuttle all dressed up with no place to go, and cast a rudderless NASA adrift in the political backwaters of Washington without a clear vision.
It also killed Yeats’s dreams of greatness.
The desk console buzzed and broke Yeats’s trance. It was O’Dell in the command center. “Sir, we think we’ve picked them up on radar. Twenty minutes to landing.”
“Where are we with the runway?”
“Clearing it now, sir, but the storm—”
“No excuses, Colonel. I’ll be there in a minute. You better have an update.”
Yeats took another shot of whiskey and stared outside. At the time Nixon decided to scrap the Mars mission, Yeats was here in Antarctica, in the middle of a forty-day stay in a habitat specifically designed to simulate the first Martian landing. They were a crew of four supported by two Mars landing modules, a nuclear power plant, and a rover for exploring the surrounding territory.
Antarctica was as cold as Mars, and nearly as windy. Its snowstorms packed the same kind of punch as Martian dust storms. Most of all, the continent was almost as remote as the red planet, and in utter isolation a crew member’s true character would reveal itself.
For Yeats it was an experience that would forever change his life, in ways he never imagined. Four men walked into that mission. Only one limped out alive. But to what? To roam the subbasement corridors of the Pentagon as a creaky relic of the old space program? To raise an orphaned boy? To lose his wife and daughters as a result? Everything had been taken away from him.
Today he was taking it back.
5
Discovery
Plus Twenty-Three Days
IT WAS FREEZING IN THE FUSELAGEof the C-141 Starlifter transport when Conrad woke with a start. Groggy and sore, he rubbed his eyes. He was strapped in with two dozen Special Forces commandos sporting polar freezer suits and insulated M-16s.
He felt another jolt. For most of the flight they had soared through clear skies and over endless white. But now they were floating in some murky soup, and the turbulence grew worse by the second. The giant cargo containers in the rear shifted, straining their creaky tiedowns with each shock.
Conrad glanced at his multisensor GPS watch, which used a network of twenty-seven satellites to pinpoint his location anywhere on the globe and was accurate to within a hundred feet. But the past sixteen hours aboard various military craft must have chewed up the lithium batteries, because the longitudinal and latitudinal display was blanked out. The built-in compass, however, spun wildly—NE, SE, SW, NW. They must be nearing a polar region, he realized, most likely the South Pole.
He turned to the stone-faced commando sitting next
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