Free Voyage by Stephen Baxter Page A

Module, the standard of cuisine would improve, York knew. But while they were stuck inside this Apollo they had to make do with squirting water into color-coded plastic bags of dehydrated food. Still, she wasn’t about to complain. The Command Module was like a cute little mobile home, with its warm water for food and coffee, and toothpaste, even a system for the guys to shave.
    Gershon came floating up with a handful of gold-painted bags. ‘Hey. I found these at the front. None of us is coded gold, are we?’
    Stone smiled. ‘Nope. I had those put there for you to find.’
    York studied the bags. ‘Beef and potatoes. Butterscotch pudding. Brownies. Grape punch.’ She looked at Stone. ‘What’s this? None of this was in my personal preference. In fact, I hate butterscotch pudding.’
    ‘I thought it was kind of appropriate. This was the first meal the Apollo 11 crew ate in space. Straight after trans-lunar injection, after they left Earth orbit for the Moon.’
    ‘All
right,’
Ralph Gershon said, and he pulled a hose out ofthe potable water tank and squirted the spigot into his bags with enthusiasm.
    York looked at the bags again.
Butterscotch pudding, in memoriam
. Bizarre.
    But maybe, after all, it was appropriate.
Monday, April 13, 1970
Manned Spacecraft Center, Houston
    Chuck Jones snapped closed his visor and tugged at the umbilicals on his pressure suit, testing their fittings.
    He stepped to the edge of the tank. It was a big blue rectangle, like a swimming pool. T-shirted divers were already moving through the water, playing around the sim like dolphins; cables trailed through the water, around the blocky white shape of the sim itself.
    It’s like a fucking kid’s game
, Jones thought.
Sims. How I hate sims
.
    He turned to see his partner, Adam Bleeker. Because his suit was so stiff, Jones had to hop around like a rabbit. ‘You okay, kid?’
    Bleeker seemed to start. ‘Sure. Yeah, sure, Chuck.’
    Jones snickered to himself. He knew he could put a bug up the ass of a raw kid like Bleeker, just by smiling at him. ‘Good boy. Welcome to the Weightless Environment Training Facility, here in sunny Texas. Beautiful sight, isn’t it?’
    Bleeker turned to the water. ‘I think I’ve got a kind of Monday morning feeling about this, Chuck.’
    ‘So do I, Adam; so do I. I hate this fucking fish tank. But we gotta go through with crap like this, or they won’t let us fly their beautiful birds. You all set?’
    ‘Let’s do it.’
    His breath loud in his ears, Jones stepped onto the white platform before him. Now he was suspended over the pool. With a whine of hydraulics, the platform lowered his clumsy, umbilicalled bulk into the water.
    The divers loaded him up with weights that would neutralize his buoyancy, and so simulate weightlessness. Then they got hold of Jones’s suited arms, and began to drag him through the water toward the sim. The water was hot, for the benefit of the divers.
    The WET-F, pronounced ‘wet-eff,’ was one of the largest simulator facilities here at MSC. The pool was set at the center ofBuilding 29, a big circular building that had once served as a centrifuge. Now, a sleek ambulance stood beside the pool, and there was a decompression chamber nearby. Big clunky white pieces of kit, simulators for other exercises, stood beside the water; cranes running along the roof would lower them in when required.
    Jones hated the WET-F. He could never forget the presence of the water around him: the resistance to every movement, the clammy light, the glopping of bubbles, the shadowy forms of the divers.
    Conditions more different from the ice-cold stillness of space it was hard to dream up.
    Looming ahead in the water he could see the sixty-feet-long hulk of a mocked-up S-IVB, a Saturn third stage, with the mouth of its single engine bell gaping at him. The Multiple Docking Adapter was a squat cylinder fixed to the front of the S-IVB, and a crude, open-ended mockup of a docked Apollo Command