Collision

by William S. Cohen

  A member of Anderson’s staff led Taylor to the witness chair and reminded him that he was still under oath. Then Anderson rapped the gavel and said, “I believe you realize, Mr. Taylor, that, although you describe yourself as assistant director of the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum, you no longer are actively carrying out your duties.”

  Falcone turned first to Taylor and then toward Anderson. Falcone was angry but not surprised. Anderson was part of the tag team.

  “In point of fact, Senator,” Taylor said calmly, “I am on administrative leave, which is a temporary leave from a job assignment, with pay and benefits intact.”

  “So, Doctor, does that mean you are ill?” Anderson asked with a mean grin.

  “I am very well, thank you, Senator. My status is a personnel matter. And I am obviously able to carry out the assignment I have today, which is to testify about asteroids.”

  Before Anderson could respond, Taylor continued to speak: “Natural disasters—such as volcanoes and tornadoes and earthquakes—are difficult to predict, but we know a lot about them. That knowledge leads us toward understanding them and developing ideas about how to predict the seemingly unpredictable. That is what we need about asteroids and other near-Earth objects. We’ve—”

  “Hold on there, Mr. Taylor. I haven’t asked a question.”

  “I’m simply responding to what the hearing was supposed to be about—‘activities regarding asteroids.’ I tried this morning to read—”

  “And you were warned that the material you were attempting to reveal is classified. Now, I—”

  Taylor, acting as if he had not noticed Anderson’s sputtering, continued to speak, rapidly and emotionally: “With increasing regularity, we are discovering asteroids and comets with unusual orbits that take them close to Earth. We have made a start on gaining knowledge—scientific knowledge—about asteroids. Today, with what we know, we can say that the possible collision of an asteroid with Earth is the one potential catastrophic natural disaster that we believe we can do something about. I call it defense of the Earth. That is—”

  “Collision. That is exactly what I am talking about,” Anderson said, his voice rising. “You seem to automatically connect the word ‘asteroid’ with the word ‘collision.’”

  “I beg to differ, Senator. In lectures I have given and, indeed, in testimony three years ago before your committee, I—”

  “At which time I was not the chairman, and—”

  “Yes, but you were a member. And I said then, and as I say again this afternoon, NASA has done an excellent job in finding and tracking asteroids and near-Earth objects. Today, we know the location and orbits of about ten thousand NEOs, as they are labeled. About one thousand of them are about one-half mile in diameter, or larger. The unofficial, unscientific name for them is ‘civilization killers,’ and—”

  Anderson, banging down his gavel, loudly proclaimed, “The witness is flouting this committee! ‘Killers’! I instruct you, Mr. Taylor, not to test our patience any longer. You will confine yourself to answering statements, not issuing manifestos.”

  Falcone whispered to Taylor, then glared at Anderson. Taylor leaned back in his chair, his face expressionless.

  As a florid-faced Anderson looked as if he was about to speak, Senator Lawrence bent her head toward her microphone and said, “Mr. Chairman, a point of order.”

  The camera swung to her, drawn as much by her words as by her telegenic face, which could shift in a moment from serene to appalled, from cover-girl pretty to dragon-lady fury.

  Anderson, without looking at Lawrence, said, “And what may that point of order be, under Senate rules?”

  “Mr. Chairman, according to the call for this hearing, witnesses were to begin their testimony by reading initial statements,” she began, her voice primly stern. “Since Senator Collinsworth this morning unilaterally decreed the opening statement classified, I believe, as a matter of fairness, that Doctor Taylor should be allowed to tell us what he, as an expert witness, believes to be a matter of national security.”

  Anderson, with a glance and a nod toward Collinsworth, said, “With all due respect, Senator Lawrence, we have a lot of ground to cover, and I believe that our needs would be best served through an ordinary question-and-answer procedure.”

  Anderson turned to look directly at Taylor and said, “You have testified that you are on administrative leave in regards to your position at the Air and Space Museum. I would like to ask you about a television show that you produced with taxpayers’ money. Would you please state the title of the show?”

  “The title is ‘An Asteroid Closely Watched,’ Senator. I am a coproducer with NOVA. And I would like to note that almost the entire budget for shows like this comes from viewers’ contributions.”

  “Forgetting for a moment the annual congressional appropriation for public television, Doctor, is it not true that the show is in fact not going to be broadcast? That it has been essentially scrapped?”

  Falcone and Taylor both looked stunned, as did Darlene and Bancroft. Falcone turned and whispered, “Jesus! What the hell is this?”

  “I am unaware of any change, Senator,” Taylor said, looking puzzled.

  “Well, I am,” Anderson said, holding up a sheet of paper. “I have here a joint statement from Stephanie Sinclair-Hardy, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, and Conrad LaSalle, chairman of the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, announcing that your show, ‘An Asteroid Closely Watched,’ has been indefinitely postponed.”

  Taylor did not respond. Falcone leaned into the microphone and said, “Dr. Taylor has no knowledge of this cancellation, Senator. May we see the document?”

  “You are interrupting this hearing, counselor. If you persist in such interruptions, you risk the possibility of being held in contempt of Congress,” Anderson said. He paused. An aide handed him a note. He glanced at it, and said, “I’ve just been advised that the majority leader has scheduled six consecutive votes that begin in five minutes. Accordingly, this hearing will now stand in recess until nine a.m. tomorrow. And, counselor, your client will not be recalled. But he must remain under subpoena to this committee.”

  48

  As soon as the hearing ended, Falcone led Ben, Darlene, and Sam Bancroft to a side door into an anteroom. One of its walls was lined with chairs, which Falcone arranged in a cicle. Darlene smiled, remembering how, in the third grade, Miss Templeton arranged the chairs in fours.

  “Tomorrow is your call, Ben,” Falcone said when all four were seated. “There’s no real need for you to be here. It’s going to be another act in the senators’ circus. They’ll be giving Hamilton a televised platform to tell the world what he has to say about asteroids.”

  Falcone turned to Bancroft. “It was gutsy for you to show up in uniform today. But please take my advice and don’t appear tomorrow. There’s no need for backup then.”

  “It’s a free country,” Bancroft said. “It sounds like it will be a good show, and I want to be there.”

  Through the closed door they could hear the scuffles and muffled sounds of the hearing room closing down for the day. Taylor looked at Bancroft and nodded. “I agree with Sean. But, like you said, it’s a free country.”

  Darlene leaned forward and touched her father’s folded hands. “And what about you?” she asked.

  “I wouldn’t miss it for a million dollars,” Taylor said.

  “Great. I give good advice and nobody takes it,” Falcone said. “I’ll meet you at the entrance tomorrow morning. As for you two”—he nodded to Darlene and Sam—“I suppose you’re both as stubborn as he is.” He stood, adding, “You’ve seen enough of me today. I’m off to clean out my office. Then home for a tall drink and a long night’s sleep. See you all tomorrow.”

  Falcone kissed Darlene, patted Ben on the shoulder, shook hands with Bancroft, and left via the door to the marble hallway.

  The Taylors and Bancroft sat in silence for nearly a minute. Then, as she had been doing si
nce childhood, Darlene asked a question that seemed to come from nowhere. “Dad,” she said, “how come you know Sean so well?”

  “Well,” Taylor said, “we met when I was at Goddard and he was a senator on the Science Committee. I filled him in on NASA projects. He was always hungry for solid information. That’s how we met. I mean it could have been one of those Washington things where people become, you know, contacts for each other’s business. But, somehow, right from the beginning, we had a friendship.”

  “You mean you both just hit it off? That’s it?” She sounded exasperated.

  “I’ve never thought about how we became close friends. I guess, when I look back now, it was Vietnam. He never told me about what had happened to him there. But I read about it one day, and he became a real hero to me, and, I guess, that was part of it. Being a hero.” He looked toward Bancroft, who remained a witness to what had suddenly become a father-daughter dialogue.

  “Vietnam,” Darlene said. “It’s not part of our generation. But heroes? Show me the hero and I’ll—”

  “I know,” Taylor interrupted, smiling. ‘write you a tragedy.’”

  “Hey, I thought you had your head stuck in physics books! You know Fitzgerald?” Darlene asked.

  “MIT did have some English courses, you know. And an art and literature journal. I wrote an essay for it contrasting the writings of Stephen Vincent Benét and Fitzgerald.” He smiled at her dumbfounded response. “You’ve always underestimated me.”

  He looked at her, his smile waning, and said, “Sean … Yeah, Fitzgerald would understand Sean Falcone. There’s tragedy in him. And heroism seems to come easy to him—Vietnam, taking on that gunman.”

  “And, Dad, the way he quit today. You know: Bam! He makes a decision in a second. I had a psychology prof who lectured us once about what we know from hero studies.”

  “About what studies?” Bancroft asked. He spoke instinctively, then seemed embarrassed that he had injected himself into the dialogue.

  “Heroes. They intrigue some psychiatrists,” Darlene said, looking at Bancroft for the first time. “The consensus seems to be that heroes are born, not made. They instinctively act in an instant. You know that awful shooting at the movie theater in Colorado a couple of years ago? Three women who survived the shooting said they had been saved by their boyfriends. The men had shielded their girlfriends with their own bodies. And they were shot to death.”

  Taylor paused to let several thoughts sink in and then asked, “Is that what attracted you to Sam?”

  Bancroft squirmed in his chair, hands in his lap, the fingers of one hand nervously running around the rim of his uniform cap.

  Darlene looked away from Bancroft and, after a moment, said, “I … I never thought of that. Hero? If I had to pick a word about you, Sam, it would be ‘integrity.’ But that sounds so pompous. I don’t know. I just think … that”—she reached for Sam’s hand—“that you’re a wonderful man. And, well, that sounds silly.…”

  “‘Integrity,’” Taylor said. “That’s a good word for Sam. Fine word. And Falcone sure has that, too. Maybe your hero studies will show that to be a hero you have to have integrity,” Taylor said.

  “I … I had never heard that Fitzgerald quote before,” Sam said, hesitantly. “Tragedy. I guess that, for me, anyway, tragedy is when you want to save somebody … and … I just don’t know, Ben. Tragedy is big, impersonal. When I think about … about loss in combat, I think heartbreak.”

  “What’s that song?” Taylor asked. “‘The hurt doesn’t show but the pain still grows.’”

  “I have no idea,” Darlene said and, deciding she had heard enough about tragedy, added, “Must be on one of your seventy-eight-rpm albums.”

  Taylor went on as if he had not heard her: “He got beaten up pretty bad in Vietnam. Lost his wife and kid while he was in prison.”

  “My God! I never knew that,” Darlene said.

  “He’s a great guy, a wonderful guy. But he’s uptight about himself, his life. I think he’s always blamed himself for not being home to protect his family.”

  “Loved his country more than his family? That kind of guilt?” Bancroft asked.

  “That’s part of it, I think.”

  “There’s more?” Darlene asked.

  “Yeah, the torture part of it.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The pain he suffered was pretty intense. One day it got to be too much. He signed a confession, admitting that he had committed war crimes against the Vietnamese people. They broke his body and then his will.”

  “Doesn’t everyone break under torture? Everyone would understand the confession was made under duress,” Bancroft said.

  “True. But you don’t know just how proud and stubborn a man Sean is. He was angry with himself and started to cause so much trouble for his ‘interrogators’ that they kept him in solitary confinement for most of the time. They told him that Karen and Kyle had been killed. They told him that they’d let him out—an early release—so he could attend their funeral. He refused. More to be guilty about.”

  “Why would he do that?” Darlene asked.

  “I guess he didn’t believe they had died, and he didn’t want to be a pawn in the Vietcong propaganda plans. But I think it was more than that. A code of honor. No cutting in line no matter what the reason. He’d leave when his turn came up. Not before.”

  “And that’s what he did? Refused to leave?”

  “He was among the last to be released at the very end of the war. He came home on crutches with a shattered hip and broken arm that had gone untreated for four years.”

  “So,” Darlene said in her pupil-with-the-answer voice, “he feels guilty for not being home to protect his family and not being there to bury them.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Sounds like he did open up for you. How come?”

  “Well, we were talking one night—a couple of drinks at his big empty place on Pennsylvania Avenue,” Taylor said, looking first at Darlene, then at Bancroft, hesitating and then deciding to plunge on. “And I mentioned … your mother … and how I missed her still. And all of a sudden it all came tumbling out.”

  “Guilt … Is that why he’s never remarried?” Darlene asked. She instantly touched a hand to her face, feeling guilt herself for asking a question she had often wanted to ask her father.

  “Who knows? Maybe.… Maybe he just doesn’t want anyone to enter the prison that he’s never really left.”

  Tears were glistening in Darlene’s eyes and on her cheeks. “It’s the same for you, isn’t it, Dad? I mean in some way something stopped. Mom’s death. Something stopped.”

  “Maybe it did—something. But I have a fine life. There’s, most of all, you. And my work. Anyway, I stick to exploring space and all its mysteries. It’s less complicated than what’s down here on Earth. I think we’d better go before they turn off the lights.”

  Bancroft was the first to the door. He opened it and stood back to let father and daughter exit, holding hands.

  49

  Senator Anderson banged his gavel and paused for the silence that slowly descended over the room. He cleared his throat, and said, “Before resuming this hearing today, I wish to give my distinguished colleague, Senator Kenneth Collinsworth, the opportunity to say a few words.” Anderson turned his head and beamed at Collinsworth.

  He began his opening statement by praising SpaceMine for its “trailblazing venture that brought American free enterprise to space.” He also called on the U.S. Air Force to return to its 1958 proposal for an underground base on the moon. In his rambling speech he chided NASA for scrapping an old plan for the Neil A. Armstrong Lunar Outpost, which he called a prelude to American colonization of the moon. Obviously, his heart wanted to go back to the moon and claim it as U.S. territory. But his campaign treasury wanted the contributions that came from Hamilton.

  Collinsworth concluded his statement by beaming back at Anderson and saying, “Thank you, Senator Anderson, for thi
s opportunity to speak.”

  “It is now my privilege,” Anderson said, going on without a break, “to welcome America’s great visionary, Robert Wentworth Hamilton.”

  A slight frown swiftly came to and disappeared from Collinsworth’s round pale face. Privilege? Goddamn it. I thought we agreed that I would do the welcoming. But Anderson was chairman today and got his way. He, too, was a beneficiary of Hamilton’s campaign-fund largesse.

  Hamilton slid into the witness-table chair, with Sprague at his left. Both had that poised look of witnesses called before a friendly committee.

  Before Anderson could continue his scene-stealing, Collinsworth leaned into his microphone and said loudly, “And may I add my warm welcome? Many distinguished Americans have appeared in his historic room, and all of them came here to give witness to accomplishments on Earth. In Mr. Hamilton we have the first witness of achievement beyond Earth to the Heavens.”

  Before Anderson could interrupt this rapturous paean to Hamilton’s genius, Collinsworth went on: “Perhaps you could tell us about the inspired events that led up to SpaceMine’s rocket roaring off to Asteroid USA.”

  Hamilton’s usual proud bearing seemed to melt away as he somehow created an illusion, making himself look modest and unassuming.

  “That rocket did not reach Asteroid USA because of the efforts of SpaceMine alone, Senator,” he began. “We had, first and foremost, the help of God, Almighty God, who has blessed our work. We also had the help of top-layer scientists. They came from NASA, from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and from several private corporations that wanted to join this pioneering utilization of space resources.”

  “Could you give us an example of the research that led to this historic milestone?” Collinsworth asked.

  Hamilton theatrically frowned and said, “I must respond carefully, Senator, because there are certain proprietary matters that are covered by nondisclosure agreements.”