by Ben Mezrich
Thad smiled as he listened to this part of Gibson’s speech. In his lab, just a few floors away, he had been practicing the techniques that would be used to prepare those moon rocks. He was part of the NASA machinery, part of the fraternity of scientists who made such science possible. When Gibson added, almost as an aside, that these samples were also infinitely valuable in nonscientific terms, Thad barely registered the thought. That someone had once tried to sell a single gram of illegal moon rock for $5 million—that really didn’t mean anything to Thad, at the time. The value of those lunar samples went well beyond money. They represented the greatest human endeavor in history.
Once Gibson shifted his talk away from lunar rocks, Thad did not believe the man could somehow refocus the audience’s attention, but then Gibson shocked them all by reaching behind the podium and lifting up a small glass vial. From the front row, Thad could actually make out what was inside—a glassy-looking piece of rock, almost volcanic in nature, but certainly something that he had never seen before. Gibson smiled at the crowd as he said the object’s name:
“ALH 84001. Recovered from the ice in Antarctica in 1984, this little thing has been the focus of my life for nearly a decade now. In 1996, I published the scientific results of my studies in Science magazine. I’m sure some of you have read it. This meteorite, which is over four billion years old—we believe it came from the planet Mars. And this meteorite contains within it evidence of past biological activity. In other words—this meteorite suggests, unequivocally, the possibility of life on Mars.”
Thad reacted with the rest of the audience, awed and amazed. He glanced around himself, saw the raptured faces of the co-ops around him; it was one thing to impress a swimming pool full of college-age kids with a story about a trip on the Space Shuttle Simulator, Gibson had shown an entire amphitheater evidence in support of life on another planet. The man had held in his hands moon rocks from every landing in human history—and here he was, holding a piece of Mars itself, dredged up from the deep ice of Antarctica.
Thad may have been in the process of reinventing himself as a social leader of the JSC co-ops, but Everett Gibson was a fucking rock star.
…
After the lecture had ended, and the audience had filed away toward the various labs, cafés, and workstations that dotted the NASA campus, Thad lingered behind. He waited until Gibson had packed away his notes—and the Mars sample—into his leather-bound, NASA briefcase, before approaching the edge of the stage. Helms was a couple of rows back, chatting up a pretty coed from the University of Texas. Even so, Thad could see, out of the corner of his eye, that Helms was partially watching him. Helms, it seemed, was always watching out for him, maybe worried that Thad had the capacity to push things too far, take too many chances. Thad was amused by the thought. NASA was a dream come true; he had no intention of ever doing anything to ruin that dream.
All he wanted to do was introduce himself to the man who had just opened his eyes. Eventually, Gibson noticed Thad at the edge of the stage. Gibson strolled over, his gait casual, if a little stiff. He leaned down so Thad could shake his hand.
“I’m Thad Roberts. I work in the building. I’m on my first tour.”
“I recognize the name,” Gibson said, smiling amiably, “and I look forward to getting to know you better during your time here at NASA. You enjoying yourself so far?”
“I feel more alive than I’ve ever felt,” Thad started, realizing he was talking way too fast, maybe even bordering on a speed that could be described as manic. But he couldn’t help himself. “I can’t believe I’m shaking hands with the man who discovered life on Mars.”
“Science is a group effort here at NASA. A lot of brilliant people put in a lot of time to make discoveries like this, as I’m sure you’ll learn. Nothing happens here overnight. And it’s more important to be part of a brilliant constellation than try and go it alone.”
Before Thad could respond, a group of older co-ops sidled in front of him, capturing Gibson’s attention. Thad found himself bumped and jostled away from the edge of the stage—until he was nearly back at the front row of seats, watching the brilliant scientist holding court. He could still feel Brian Helms’s gaze on his back, but he didn’t yet turn around.
Deep down, he understood what Gibson had told him, that being part of a brilliant constellation was what a place like NASA was all about.
What Thad didn’t realize yet—but would soon learn—was that being just one bright star in a constellation simply wasn’t in his nature. Men like Everett Gibson—and Brian Helms—could be content being shiny parts of this historic solar system. But Thad would always need something more.
He wanted to be the brightest star—the one everyone saw when he or she looked at the sky. And the scary thing was, it didn’t really matter if that star was bright because it was the biggest—or because it was just about to go supernova.
* * *
My Dear Rebecca,
The seasons have swayed back and forth, but time has flowed beyond me—left me alone as I gaze into the horizon where your memory still shapes the entire world. The wind blows in the other direction constantly interrupting me, the rest of the world has moved on, all things are destined to decay. But the wind has never known its center, it dances out the curse of ever-grasping, always passing everything by. All it knows is the sad song of moving on.
I once knew a beautiful young woman that didn’t believe in forever. She became my forever.
* * *
10
“Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven—”
“Look at his eyes! He’s not going to make it!”
“Six. Five. Four!”
“Come on, man, almost there!”
“Three—”
Thad let out a sudden howl. His right arm shot forward, almost involuntarily—and he desperately grabbed for the oversized yogurt shake in the center of the round wooden table. He was halfway out of his chair, his other hand gripping the edge of the table so tightly his fingers were almost the same color as the shake. His knees were trembling, and there were beads of sweat running down his bright red cheeks. He nearly knocked over the massive platter of tandoori chicken as he fought to pilot the shake toward his blistering lips.
“And I really thought he was going to make it,” someone groaned.
Thad collapsed back in his chair to a chorus of applause, laughter, and even a few catcalls. There were only six people at his table in the back corner of the tastefully, if somewhat inauthentically, decorated Indian restaurant, but a few of the other nearby tables had joined in on the fun. No doubt everyone in the place—from the group of women seated at a ridiculously ornate, canoe-shaped bar in the far corner of the restaurant to the scattered parties of middle-aged men at the imitation hookah stations throughout the interior of the brightly curtained Indian dive—was a NASA employee of one sort or another. One week into his second tour, Thad guessed that some of them recognized him, some of them didn’t. But certainly they knew the other faces at his table, because Thad was in the process of being tortured by some of the greatest minds of the modern day.
“Don’t worry about it, kid,” the man directly across from him said with sympathy as Thad took large gulps of the strange, unpronounceably named yogurt. “I had Sanjay mix something a little special into the tandoori. I don’t even think Saumya could have gone ten seconds—and he was born with a hookah in his mouth.”
A fifty-something Indian to Thad’s right slapped him on the shoulder.
“It was a noble effort. And you’ll have a chance to redeem yourself in the next course. If you thought the tandoori was hot, wait until you taste the bhindi masala. It is simply outrageous.”
Thad laughed, despite the tears pooling in the corners of his eyes from the spices. The Kashmir Express was really a terrible restaurant, but for some reason it had become the favorite weekly meeting place for a large faction of the JSC elite. Certainly, proximity played a factor, but there were many—and far better—restaurants withi
n five miles of the sprawling campus. Something about the kitschy, overspiced mock-up of a Bombay hot spot, located in a desolate corner of the South Houston strip mall, somehow connected with the lab rats who shared Thad’s predilection for adventure.
The ritual of the Monday lunch had certainly not been Thad’s idea; he was just thrilled to have worked his way to an invitation from such a prestigious crew. All of the men at the circular table worked in Building 31, but Thad was the only co-op in the group. Most of his interactions with these prestigious scientists had taken place in the hallways, elevators, and stairwells of the life sciences building. But even so, Thad had impressed them and—beginning the last month of his first tour, and somehow carrying over through the three months he had spent back at the University of Utah—he had become part of the weekly lunch crew.
If Thad had once felt like he didn’t really fit in with the other co-ops—he was little more than a shadow on a wall with this crowd. The six scientists spanned a multitude of disciplines—geology, physics, astronomy, engineering—but the thing that bonded them was that they were all world-famous. If Thad had walked into any bookstore in the country and looked up popular books on Mars, he would’ve found their names. Although Everett Gibson wasn’t at this particular lunch, he had joined the group at the Indian restaurant a number of times before. These were Gibson’s colleagues, his contemporaries, and Thad—twenty years younger than the youngest among them—felt utterly blessed to be invited, even while they were torturing him with potentially deadly levels of Indian combustibles.
The cool yogurt finally doused the invisible flames terrorizing the membranes of his mouth, and Thad refocused on the spirited conversation that enlivened the table. Usually, the Monday lunch session was an opportunity for the scientists to try to impress each other, but today one of the more senior geologists from Building 31 was trumping them all; he had just returned from an Antarctic rock-collecting mission, the very sort of mission that had led to Everett Gibson’s work on the Allan Hills meteorite.
“You’d be surprised at how upscale base camp is becoming,” the geologist was saying, gesticulating with a piece of chicken. “Hell, I’ve stayed in worse places in New York. It might be thirty below, but at least there’s room to stretch out.”
As the man spoke, Thad could see himself swaddled in the latest state-of-the-art snowsuit, roving around the ice floes on a souped-up snowmobile, scouring the glacial plains searching for meteorites. He knew that the Antarctic glacier was basically a big ice sheet that worked like a conveyor belt. Snow fell and collected in the mountain areas, moved down into the ravines, pushing more and more rocks into natural collection areas. The NASA geologists made annual journeys to search these natural collection areas, where they were more likely to find meteorites that had fallen thousands, and even millions, of years ago.
The geologist at the table hadn’t found anything quite as significant as Gibson’s evidence in support of life on Mars, but he had come home with a pair of small meteorites that would lead to a few pretty good papers in the scientific journals. The other men at the table were clearly envious, but in a good-natured way. Like Gibson had said, NASA was about the constellation, not the stars.
After the man had finished, the conversation shifted in Thad’s direction. Like the Indian locale itself, Thad’s co-op reports had become an important part of the ritual. Just as he lived vicariously through the stories told by the elite scientists, the older men lived vicariously through Thad’s experiences with the youngest members of the NASA family.
Beginning shortly after the pool party, Thad had begun arranging excursions for his co-op class. Growing up in backwoods Utah, he had always felt most comfortable outdoors—and he learned very quickly that the other NASA co-ops had very little experience with nature. So Thad had morphed into a de facto social chair, arranging adventures that ran the gamut of his expertise—from rock climbing to bungee jumping, and everything in between.
“This weekend wasn’t anything special,” Thad began, underplaying it just right. “Only a little skydiving down around the Galveston shore …”
He embellished as he went, not that it was really necessary. He’d found that as impressive as the scientists were, it was easy to thrill them with stories—as long as he included plenty of scenes with voluptuous first-and second-year co-ops, and a little bit of life-threatening adventure. Rock climbing, scuba diving, hang gliding, whitewater rafting—all things Thad had been enjoying for years with Sonya, but were totally new experiences for the JSC employees.
Everett Gibson seemed especially charmed by these tales of adventure. Thad remembered how the man had positively lit up when he had described what it was like to line up next to two terrified teenagers—who’d never jumped off the lowest branch of a tree, let alone off the top of a thirty-foot cliff—for a dive they’d remember for the rest of their lives.
In fact, most of the co-ops had never even been camping before, let alone cliff diving. Thad had given the interested ones a short lesson in survival skills, everything from starting fires to climbing trees. He had thought it was ridiculous that these brilliant kids had never done these things, and Gibson obviously agreed. Thad guessed it was because Gibson himself had once been quite adventurous; he’d told Thad that during college he’d been a river guide in the Grand Canyon, and he was also an accomplished hiker.
In Thad’s mind, Dr. Gibson had really taken a shine to him. And truthfully, Thad had become a little obsessed with the famous scientist. He’d read up on the man, fascinated by Gibson’s work on the ALH meteorite—something that had really begun and ended back in the eighties although it hadn’t been published until later. At the same time—and perhaps this was just fantasy, a concoction of his mind to build himself up to his idol’s level—Thad had begun to suspect that in some ways, Gibson might even have envied him, because Thad was still in the adventurous phase of his life. Thad liked to think that Gibson had once lived like Thad, and now he gave speeches to co-ops.
Still, Thad knew it wasn’t fair for him to compare himself to these men who had already accomplished so much. He’d only been at NASA a total of three months and one week. Maybe his enthusiasm level was a little too extreme; he knew that his vivid attitude was sometimes like a force of nature. It drove him to expect things to happen more quickly than they possibly could.
He wondered if that enthusiasm was also the source of the friction that he and Sonya had begun to experience over the past couple of months, before he’d returned for his second tour at NASA. Being at home, back in his classes at the university, daily life had seemed like a distraction. He couldn’t wait to get back to Houston, back to the lab and to these scientists. Home, and even Sonya, couldn’t begin to compete with what he had here.
As a pair of Indian waiters began stocking the table with strange-looking desserts on flimsy magic carpet–shaped serving platters, Thad tried to convince himself that the friction with Sonya was all in his head. It certainly wasn’t her fault. It was just … well, being away from NASA was like standing still. He had never been able to stand still.
He was glad that tomorrow Sonya was going to get a chance to see for herself what NASA meant to him. She was flying down to stay for the weekend, and Thad had promised himself that he was going to show her why this place was so amazing. He knew she would understand, and that his enthusiasm would rub off on her. Her life at home, her dreams of becoming a model—the castings, the clothes, the nightclubs she had begun to frequent with her modeling friends—would pale in comparison with the incredible magic of the JSC.
Thad smiled as he dug into a spicy dessert that put new tears into the corners of his eyes. Meanwhile, in his mind, he pictured Sonya hanging on to his waist as he piloted a massive snowmobile across an Antarctic glacial field. He could see her red-blond hair flowing behind her, her long, chiseled legs clinging to the roaring beast beneath them. And even as his tongue burned like the heart of India, he could feel the spray of ice against his cheeks.
11
There was only one word for it.
Power.
Thad stood in a shadowed patch of grass a few feet beyond the stone path that encircled the beautiful monster, craning his neck to peer up at the closest of the five conical thrusters. Each of the thrusters was twice his height in diameter, hollowed out and stacked on top of one another in a fierce pentagon that jutted out of the base of the first cylindrical fuel stage. The thrusters were, in every curve and groove of their being, symbols of pure unadulterated power.
Thad stood alone at the base of the Saturn V rocket, even though it was deep into the afternoon and there were at least three different tour groups from Space Center Houston wandering around the rocket’s park. But the tourists seemed much more interested in the long, impressive fuel stages, and the nose cone—the Apollo lunar lander that the rocket carried on its tip—where the astronauts were to have traveled. To the tourists, the thrusters were ugly and utilitarian. But Thad only had to close his eyes to see them in their raw beauty, spewing huge bursts of fire and massive plumes of smoke, breathing pure, catalyzed rocket fuel like a dragon roaring through the sky.
It was the first time Thad had actually paused in front of the Saturn V, admiring its magnificence. He had walked by the rocket a few times, when he’d needed to decompress from a long day at the lab, but he’d never just stood there before, contemplating the thing itself. It didn’t matter that the heat was already starting to rise off the manicured blades of grass beneath his feet. Or that the humidity was drenching his NASA polo shirt and flattening out the curls in his hair. He felt at peace, at rest—which was a fairly unusual feeling for him.