by Ben Bova
“Visitors?” Thrasher wasn’t expecting anyone.
“A Colonel Polk, Dr. Velazquez,” she badly mangled the Hispanic pronunciation, “and Dr. McQuinn.”
Thrasher felt his guts somersault. “They’re here?” he squeaked.
“Yessir, here in the lobby. Shall I show them up, sir?”
He felt as if he wanted to run away and hide. But Thrasher said, “Yes, show them up.”
Then he rushed to the lavatory and relieved himself. By the time he washed his hands, the door chime sounded.
They must have come up by rocket, Thrasher groused to himself.
“Come on in,” he yelled as he stepped out of the lav.
Polk led them in, looking grim. Velazquez was right behind him, his lean face set in a dark-eyed scowl. McQuinn followed them, serious, somber.
Before Thrasher could invite them to sit down, Polk said, “We hear you want to bounce Nacho from the mission.”
“I don’t want to,” Thrasher said. “I’ve got to.”
“To make room for the Aussie showboat,” Polk said.
Thrasher gestured to the sitting room’s chairs. As the three astronauts sat tensely, he explained Dougherty’s demand to them.
McQuinn said, “Has it occurred to you that replacing Nacho with an inexperienced man could endanger the safety of the mission?”
“He’s not totally inexperienced,” Thrasher said.
“Jumping out of balloons isn’t the same as piloting a spacecraft,” said Polk.
“I know, but—”
Velazquez blurted, “Christ! First I get squeezed out of the NASA program and now you’re squeezing me out of the Mars mission? I didn’t think you’d stab me in the back, Mr. Thrasher.”
The kid looked as if he would burst into tears, Thrasher thought. As calmly as he could, he replied, “Nacho, the important thing is to get us to Mars. I—”
“Us,” Polk said. “Not the Aussie.”
“Us,” Thrasher repeated, “meaning the human race. If I have to bump Nacho to get the job done, that’s what I’ll do.”
“You can’t bump Nacho. I need him to co-pilot the landing vehicle. Dougherty isn’t a pilot, Nacho is.”
“But—”
“Bump one of the scientists,” McQuinn said. “Train Dougherty to operate that person’s equipment.”
“Like they did on Apollo,” Polk agreed. “Armstrong, Aldrin, Alan Bean . . . the only real scientist to walk on the Moon was Jack Schmidt, on the last mission.”
“Apollo Seventeen,” Thrasher murmured.
“Bump one of the scientists,” McQuinn repeated.
Thrasher looked at Velazquez again. He was holding himself together, but just barely. He looked like a little boy who’s just been told there’s no Santa Claus.
It’s a helluva Christmas present I’m giving him, he said to himself. Snatching away his chance to go to Mars.
“Look,” he said, as reasonably as he could, “I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place. Dougherty’s sweat blood for us to get the Woomera facility up and running. His price for doing that was a seat on the mission. If I try to bump one of the scientists there’ll be hell to pay with—”
“There’s hell to pay right here and now,” Polk said. He didn’t seem angry to Thrasher. Worse. He was grimly determined. “If Nacho doesn’t go, I don’t go.”
“Nor me, either,” said McQuinn.
Forcing a weak smile, Thrasher said, “What is this, a rebellion?”
“Call it whatever you want,” said Polk. “The three of us are a package deal. Bump one of us and you bump all of us.”
“Like the three musketeers.”
“One for all and all for one,” McQuinn quoted.
Sucking in a deep gulp of air, Thrasher said, “Okay, you’ve got me over a barrel.”
Velazquez lit up like a Christmas tree. He grabbed Polk’s and McQuinn’s hands. “Thanks, guys!”
Pointing to McQuinn, Thrasher said, “Judine, bumping a scientist is your idea. You find the one to bump, the one whose job Dougherty could most easily do. Then you get the poor sap to bow out gracefully. Okay?”
She looked doubtful, but nodded slowly and agreed, “Okay. I’ll be your hatchet man.”
Nice turn of phrase, Thrasher thought.
14
LAUNCH
It was hot in the Outback.
Most of the board of directors had flown out to Coober Pedy with Thrasher and spent the night in that town’s underground hotel, where it was cool and dark. Most of the town was underground, carved out of the soft opal-bearing rock by generations of miners. There were some buildings up on the surface, and in the center of the town stood a pair of pathetic, wilted trees that the locals called “the jungle.”
Thrasher bought an opal ring at a discount jewelry store up on the surface. The stone was milky white, translucent. He had never thought much of opals: diamonds are a guy’s best friend, as far as he was concerned. More bang for the buck.
He had been pleasantly surprised by the quality of the restaurant where Dougherty had arranged for them to have dinner. Emu, lamb and Australian wine. Even sour old Jenghis Kahn would have been pleased if he’d made the trip, Thrasher told himself. But he couldn’t help adding, not!
It was impossible to tell when the Sun rose from the hotel’s underground rooms, but they were awakened by the staff, fed a hearty breakfast, and packed onto buses headed for the launch site before ten a.m.
Now, in the sweltering heat of late afternoon, they stood in the shade of the Woomera range’s biggest building—the two-story concrete administrative center—and watched the gleaming Delta IV rocket standing on its launch pad nearly two kilometers away.
“How can those people work in this heat?” Will Portal asked rhetorically. “It must be close to a hundred degrees out in the sun.”
Alan Dougherty laughed. “It’s not high summer yet. That’s when it gets really hot.”
Portal mopped his sweaty brow with a handkerchief.
Thrasher stood riveted, watching the final few minutes of the countdown. A pair of news reporters—an attractive Australian blonde and a cadaverously thin young man from the States—flanked him on either side. Vicki hadn’t come; probably Global News wouldn’t pay for a jaunt to Australia, he thought. They’ll pick up the American kid’s report.
Dougherty had arranged for the range’s public relations people to give their camera footage to all the major news outlets, Thrasher knew. Suddenly he wondered if he should have included a reporter on the Mars crew. No, he told himself; we’ll have one embedded digitally with the crew, that’s good enough.
“One minute and counting,” boomed the loudspeakers, in a discernibly Australian accent.
The liquid oxygen hose dropped away from the rocket. Two other lines feeding electrical power to the first and second stages remained in place.
Something wrong? Thrasher felt a pang of anxiety. Then the power lines dropped away and he breathed again.
“Thirty seconds and counting.”
“How does it feel, Mr. Thrasher?” asked the blonde reporter. She wasn’t bad looking, but Thrasher resented the stupid question.
“Better than sex,” he snapped. “Almost.”
She blinked at him.
“Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . .”
In his mind’s eye Thrasher saw the launch at Cape Canaveral, saw the bird blow itself apart all over again. Haven’t heard a thing from Ramona Perkins, he realized. Probably paying her for nothing.
“Two . . . one . . . ignition!”
Clouds of steam billowed from the base of the rocket and it began to rise, slowly, regally at first. Then it smoothly accelerated and climbed into the cloudless bright sky.
The sound came washing over them, a pulsing, thundering roar that rattled every nerve in his body. Higher and higher the Delta IV climbed, while the small crowd sent up a ragged cheer. Out of the corner of his eye Thrasher saw even Greg Sampson raising both his fists and bellowing, “Go! Go!”
He
flinched when the bird suddenly flashed flame. Solid rocket booster separation, he told himself. Still, his pulse fluttered.
And then the Delta IV dwindled to a dot too small to see against the glare of the sky.
“Good launch,” said Bill Polk, with a satisfied nod.
Dougherty was grinning hugely. One by one, all of the directors standing there began to applaud. They all turned to Thrasher—even Charles Kahn and Sampson—and clapped.
As if I did it, Thrasher said to himself. But he bowed graciously and accepted their applause. It worked, he told himself. The move to Woomera worked. We’re on our way.
YEAR
FOUR
1
PORTALES
It was Memorial Day. All across America cities and towns were staging parades, families were having picnics and barbeques, the Yankees were in first place and the Mars One spacecraft was being assembled in orbit by a team of astronauts and tech specialists led by Bill Polk.
We’re on our way, Thrasher thought, smiling with satisfaction as he watched the final section of the Mars One craft being carefully, tenderly deposited on a special double-sized flatbed truck for its ride to the airport and thence to Woomera.
Too bad we can’t use Rutherford’s Astrolaunch rocket, he thought. Cross the Pacific in half an hour. The airlifted rocket had made three flights from the company’s Mohave base to Sydney and one to Perth, all without a hitch, but the FAA had refused to grant the firm a commercial license. They wanted more data, more test flights. Goddamned government, Thrasher grumbled to himself. Nothing but red tape. The Australian government seemed much friendlier to the idea of making it easier for people to reach their shores.
He had thought about basing the Astrolaunch operation in Australia, but without an FAA approval the rocket couldn’t land legally in the United States without special permission. Goddamned government, he groused to anyone who would listen.
At least the assembly of the Mars One craft in orbit was going smoothly. Mars, Inc. was launching teams of technicians from New Mexico’s Spaceport America on a regular schedule. Things there were going so smoothly the news media barely mentioned it when a new launch took off.
Once the final Mars One segment was loaded and the truck’s diesel engines rumbled to life, Thrasher headed back to the cubicle he used as his office in the former warehouse.
Linda was still in Houston, minding the store while he was in Portales, but they were in touch by Skype and e-mail.
He noticed that Linda was wearing the opal ring he had brought her back from Australia. It looked good on her finger as she ran through his morning’s agenda.
“. . . and a Dr. Herzberg wants to see you,” Linda was saying. “He says it’s urgent.”
“Herzberg? Who’s he?”
“He’s the head of the National Academy of Sciences. He seemed pretty upset.”
“Oh-oh,” said Thrasher. “The scientists’ union.”
“Trouble?”
“Big time.” Thrasher knew that Judine McQuinn had been wrestling with the problem of which scientist to disinvite from the Mars mission. None of them agreed. All of them wailed bloody murder.
“He wants to talk to you. In person.”
Drumming his fingers on his desktop, Thrasher asked, “When’s my next trip to Washington?”
Linda tapped at her keyboard, then replied, “End of next month.”
He nodded, thinking. “Okay. Call Herzberg and set up a meeting then.”
“I don’t know if he’ll wait that long.”
“Then he can come to Houston.”
“All right,” Linda said. “I’ll tell him that.”
“Anything else?”
Linda’s face contracted into a puzzled frown. “That Ramona Perkins called yesterday. She said she needed to talk with you.”
“Okay.”
“Isn’t she there in Portales? Why did she call the Houston office?”
Thrasher grinned at his assistant. “I don’t post my comings and goings on the bulletin board. Down at the level she’s working, she must’ve figured the best way to reach me is in Houston.”
Linda looked dubious.
“I’ll call her,” he said.
“She’s pretty young, isn’t she?”
Thrasher realized that Linda thought there was a romantic angle. Laughing, he said, “Very young. Too young for me, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“Really?”
“I may be a reprobate, kid, but I’m not a cradle robber.”
“Really?” Linda repeated. But this time she smiled.
Thrasher realized that his reputation with women actually provided a good cover for his meeting with Ramona. Let them think I’m chasing the kid. I can invite her out to dinner and nobody will know what we’re really talking about.
But when Ramona Perkins walked into the hotel restaurant that evening, she looked stylish and quite adult in a brown leather mid-calf skirt and short-sleeved white blouse, with her light blonde hair swept to one side of her perky face. With a pang, Thrasher realized that it had been months since he’d had sex.
“I didn’t know you were here in Portales,” Ramona said as she slid into the booth opposite him.
“I come and go,” he said.
Without preamble, she said, “My appointment with the DEA finally came through. I’ll be leaving in two weeks.”
“I guess I’m glad for you.”
“I appreciate the job you gave me. It helped me bridge the gap. Otherwise I’d have a big hole where my savings used to be.”
Thrasher waved a hand. “Nothing to it.” But he was thinking that he’d paid her for nothing; she hadn’t found a saboteur in his team.
Ramona reached into her pocket-sized handbag and pulled out a jewel box containing a compact disc. “I wish I had more concrete evidence to show you, but everything I found is circumstantial.”
Taking the jewel box from her hand, he asked, “Circumstantial? You mean you found something?”
With a pert little nod Ramona said, “Just some bank accounts that had a sizable spike in the weeks right before and right after the accident. And a few e-mail messages back and forth.”
“Bank accounts? E-mails?”
“It’s nothing that would hold up in court,” she said, her face very earnest. “But it’s got all the earmarks of a payoff.”
“Who? How much money?”
A waiter approached their table. “Would you care for a cocktail, or some wine, perhaps?”
Ramona looked up at him with her baby blues and replied, “A club soda, please. With a couple of cherries.”
“Does the bar have ginger beer?” Thrasher asked.
“I’ll see.” The waiter stalked off, obviously unimpressed with their drink order.
“Who?” Thrasher repeated. “How much money?”
“He works for Thrasher Digital, but he’s high enough on the totem pole to—”
“Who?” Thrasher demanded.
“His name is Egan.”
“Vince?” Thrasher felt it like a body blow. The chief engineer of Thrasher Digital had been with him since the firm’s beginning.
Ramona said, “It’s nothing concrete. I could be totally wrong.”
But Thrasher was asking himself, Why would Vince skunk me? What did I do to him to make him stab me in the back?
The waiter arrived with their drinks. Thrasher absently took a sip, his mind in turmoil. He didn’t even notice that it was ginger ale.
2
JEREMIAH HERZBERG
Dr. Jeremiah Herzberg was smiling as he sat before Thrasher’s desk in the Houston office. He was short but thick-bodied, barrel-chested, built like a fireplug, his skin dark as burnt parchment with a fringe of white beard that made Thrasher think of an old-time pirate. Despite his affable smile, Herzberg’s light gray eyes were cold as ice, steely.
Thrasher had spent the previous evening looking up Herzberg’s biography on various Internet sites. The man had been a plasma physicist�
�whatever that was—at Cornell University and had won a potful of scientific awards and accolades before being installed as head of the National Academy of Sciences.
Once Linda had served them drinks—bourbon on the rocks for Herzberg and the inevitable ginger beer for Thrasher—the two men looked each other over from opposite sides of Thrasher’s desk.
“I’m delighted that you found time to come to Houston,” Thrasher lied.
“I didn’t really have much choice,” said Herzberg, in a smooth, deep voice. “The matter we’re faced with is quite urgent.”
“I agree.”
Still smiling, Herzberg said, “Quentin Hynes is an outstanding geologist, one of the best in the world. You can’t toss him off your Mars mission.”
With a helpless little shrug, Thrasher said, “I’m afraid I’ve got to.”
“He’s a former student of mine, you know.”
“It can’t be helped. There’s only room for seven people on Mars One. We need the three astronauts, so that leaves only four slots for scientists.”
“And Dr. Hynes is one of them.”
Shaking his head, Thrasher said, “I’ve got to make room for Alan Dougherty. He’s been invaluable to us, and he wants to go on the mission.”
“You can’t dump a man you’ve already invited,” Herzberg said, his voice hardening.
“I’ve got to make room for Dougherty, that’s all there is to it.”
Herzberg picked up his glass of bourbon from the folding table beside his chair and took a sip, his eyes never leaving Thrasher.
“You’re going to drop a scientist who’s in line for the Nobel Prize to make room for a . . . a stunt man?”
“A stunt man who made the Woomera launching center available for us,” Thrasher explained. “I owe him, and a place on the mission is the price he asked for.”
“It’s intolerable!” Herzberg burst. “It’s a slap in the face to science in general and Dr. Hynes in particular.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way, but there’s really nothing I can do about it. I gave my word to Dougherty; he’s been tremendously helpful to us.”