by Jo Graham
“Ok, yeah,” John said. “The airmen don’t exactly eat with me either.”
“Then I guess we get to be the geek table,” Sam said. She glanced at him keenly. Rodney was captured and Teyla gone. Ronon… Who knew where Ronon was? There had seemed to be a certain amount of tension between him and John lately.
“Suits me,” John said, pulling his chicken sandwich apart to put mayonnaise on the bun. “You think we’re going to get Woolsey back?”
“I don’t know.”
John looked at her, his head to the side. “What’s the problem between you and Woolsey anyway, Sam? I get the feeling it’s more than you being relieved in Atlantis. That was the IOA, not him personally, and he didn’t want this job anymore than you wanted to go home.”
Sam sighed. “Yeah, it’s more than that.” She picked up her sandwich. “About six years ago he led an investigation of the SGC, an investigation of a mission where one of my best friends was killed. You didn’t know Dr. Janet Fraiser. She was before your time. But she was killed in action in the field, trying to medevac an enlisted guy who’d been wounded.”
“I’m sorry,” John said quietly.
Sam shrugged, her eyes on her sandwich. “He did a report, basically putting a dollar value on all of our lives. The airman’s life wasn’t worth the expense and risk of getting him out.”
“Bull honkey,” John said.
“Yeah, that’s what I said too.” Sam looked up. “Less politely, I think. And then a couple of years later when Daniel was compromised by the Ori he wanted Daniel put to death so that he wouldn’t pose a security threat. Not very efficient, to keep him alive and hope it would turn out ok.”
“We don’t do things like that,” John said frostily. “Do we?”
“We do.” Sam pursed her lips. Of course she knew he was thinking about Rodney. “Apparently we do.”
“What happened?”
“Jack laid down the law, of course. They’d preemptively execute one of his people over his dead body. And it’s worth running the risk to extract your people, no matter what.” She took a drink of her iced tea, raised it in mock toast to John. “Turns out, just a few weeks later Woolsey had an object lesson in being on the other end of the stick. Nice of you not to leave him to the Replicators!”
“That wasn’t about Woolsey,” John said. “Or O’Neill. That was about Atlantis.”
“Yes, well.” Sam shrugged. “I still owe you for that one.”
“I figure not getting court martialed again was thanks enough,” John said. “But I’m glad it worked out ok for O’Neill and Woolsey.” He took a bite of his sandwich and chewed carefully. “You know, maybe being out in the field has helped. He’s not a bad guy, really.”
“I know.” Sam glanced up at the soaring ceiling, the windows far above letting in bright snowlight. “And I’ve got a better understanding of why we have to have those kinds of investigations, that kind of oversight, even if I don’t think that you can put a price tag on a life. It’s a different mindset. Governing is made up of those kinds of compromises. It’s just that it doesn’t sit very well with me, even if I get it.” She picked up her sandwich again. “It’s always hard to lose people. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not worth it.”
“Yeah,” John said. His eyebrows twitched. “I’m hoping that they don’t start thinking the price tag for Atlantis is too high.”
“That worries me too,” Sam said. “You can’t accomplish anything without risk. We don’t have a very high national tolerance for risk taking. Remember after Challenger how there were calls to end manned space exploration?”
“Oh yeah,” John said. “I remember Challenger. I was in my high school English class. The principal came on the PA system.” He swirled a French fry around in the ketchup. “Where were you?”
“In the White House,” Sam said.
“You were not,” John said. “What were you, some kind of seventeen year old prodigy advisor to the President?”
“No, but I really was in the White House.”
John leaned back in his chair. “Ok, this has got to be a good story.”
Washington was cold and snowy that week, the week she’d been waiting for. Sam was doing Presidential Classroom, one of the government up close special programs for gifted high school juniors and seniors. She was rolling into the last semester of her senior year already accepted to college, ready for the last five months without a lot of pressure that she’d have in a long time. All she had to do was not screw up and she was set. So she could take a week out of school to go do a special program.
Of course it snowed buckets the entire week. She was coming from Florida, from Tyndall Air Force Base, and all her clothes from when they’d been posted in colder places were long since outgrown. So Sam pretty much froze to death the entire week.
“It’ll be a great experience for you,” her dad had said. “A little taste of the best and brightest from all across the country, just like the Academy will be next year.”
If that was so, she hoped the Academy would have more science people. Presidential Classroom was full of social studies people, debate team captains and kids who read the Atlantic Monthly. Debate had never been her strong suit, and she felt distinctly outclassed. There were lots of structured discussions where you signed up to present one side or another of a topical issue and argued it to your peers, or where a group was assigned to come up with a position paper or a solution on something thorny. Thankfully, you could kind of steer what task forces you wound up on. Sam was a lot happier with strategic missile arms control than she was with migrant farmworkers.
Fortunately, her roommate, Sib, was one of those social science people, though she was way into space too. She also owned sweaters in a size that fit Sam, a definite plus since she was freezing her buns off. She was a good four inches shorter than Sam, with long brown hair all the way to her waist, and she talked incessantly. Not that it was bad. It made it easier to make friends.
“Sib is short for?” Sibling was all Sam could think of, and that was kind of a weird nickname.
“Sibyl,” her roommate said, throwing herself down on the bed in her blue and purple painted jeans. “That’s not my real name either, but one of my friends started calling me that in ninth grade and now everybody does.”
“Because you see the future?” Sam asked.
“Or the past.” Sib curled her legs up under her. “So we’re on the same team to present the pro position for the Strategic Defense Initiative at the session tomorrow night. Got anything nice you want to say about Star Wars?”
“Well, obviously a missile shield will be very expensive,” Sam said, carefully mustering her thoughts. “The number of payloads required to launch it is going to be extraordinary, even if many of them aren’t space shuttle missions. Even if they’re good old Titans launched from Vandenberg.”
“So they’re going to say it’s too expensive,” Sib said.
“How much is too expensive?” Sam asked. “Bigger than the entire budget of Strategic Air Command? Because that’s how expensive it would have to be not to be worth it. If we can spend the money on parallel weapons systems to create parity, we can spend the money on anti-missile systems to reduce threat.”
“How big is SAC’s budget anyhow? And how much are the Vandenberg launches?” Sib deferred to her on things military in a very gratifying way, having discovered she was an Air Force brat.
“Big,” Sam said. “And the Vandenberg launches are pretty affordable. I can call my dad and ask him first thing in the morning. He’ll know and then we can provide an exact budgetary comparison.”
“Cool,” Sib said. “We’ve got the White House tour in the morning, and then in the afternoon it’s small breakout sessions. Which one are you going to?”
“I don’t know yet,” Sam said. “I haven’t decided. How about you?”
“The one on Solidarity,” Sib said promptly. “The speaker is a Polish dissident who defected in Norway. It sounds pretty interesting.”
Sam flipped open her schedule. “I was thinking about the one with the Russian Air Force officer from the Russian embassy.”
“That would be smart for you,” Sib said. “It’s always a good idea to know your enemy.”
Sam had never been in the White House before. It was big and had lots of gilded things. They’d only gotten as far as the East Room when Secret Service agents came pouring out of the woodwork, herding all the kids together and talking quietly with their group leader, hands on the headsets in their ears.
“We’ve got to leave,” the group leader said. “We don’t know why.” She looked worried. She wasn’t a teacher. She was with the Department of the Interior, doing this as a special assignment for a few months. And so they hurried back out into weak sunshine, to their bus waiting a block away on 16th street.
“What do you suppose that was about?” one of the guys in the group asked Sam, possibly by way of making conversation.
“No idea,” she said, concentrating on not slipping in her summer dress shoes on the icy sidewalks.
She didn’t have winter dress shoes. Her old ones had been outgrown a long time ago, and it wasn’t the kind of thing her dad noticed. If she said anything to him about it, he’d just boggle at her. “Holy Hannah, Samantha! Buy some shoes! You’ve got the Master Card.”
And she did. She was seventeen. She could drive. She could go to the mall anytime and buy herself some shoes, or whatever else she wanted. Her dad would never notice or complain, not unless she spent a thousand dollars or something. She could buy really expensive Outback Red, or any kind of makeup or accessories she wanted. He wouldn’t tell the difference and it would be ridiculously easy to hide anything from him. He had no idea what girls’ clothes cost and he’d never notice if she left the house with her belly button showing.
But she didn’t. Sam was responsible. She was really, really responsible. And her mom wouldn’t have liked it if she’d done that, taken advantage of Jacob’s ignorance and inattention. After all, it wasn’t easy for him, trying to raise two kids by himself. Mark had only been nine when it happened. He was fourteen now and an athlete. Sam made sure he had lunch money and always took his cleats to school on the right days, that his gym clothes were clean and that his laundry was done. She wasn’t sure what was going to happen next year when she was gone. But Mark would be fifteen. He could maybe do his own laundry.
Also it hadn’t occurred to her she’d need winter dress shoes. And her dad would frown at that. “Samantha, it’s DC in January! What were you thinking?”
Well, she wasn’t. But she’d better start, because nobody was going to do her thinking for her.
They went to McDonalds at the corner of New York Avenue. Their group leader couldn’t think what else to do with them for about two hours, but they could hang around McDonalds while she called people and tried to find out if she was supposed to take them back to the Shoreham or what. Sam sat in the window munching on a sausage biscuit, looking out at the late morning business people rushing by in the dress for success uniforms of professional DC. She might be here for real someday, assigned to the Pentagon, working on a top secret project. That would be pretty cool.
Sib was scribbling in a notebook she carried everywhere in her purse, her head bent over her sparkly purple pen.
“What are you doing?”
“Notes about SDI,” Sib said. “For the debate tonight. I’m trying to get the main ideas down to three points. What’s the biggest reason you support SDI?”
Sam folded her hands around her coke. “Because it’s inevitable.”
Sib looked up. “Well, it is. But we’ve got to do better than that. Elaborate.”
“I guess…” Sam considered. “It’s not like nuclear weapons are going to go away. I mean, unless we do nuke ourselves back to the Dark Ages, it’s not like the entire field of nuclear physics is going to be forgotten. There are always going to be nuclear weapons, and there are always going to be situations where somebody thinks it’s a good idea to use one. The only way, in the entire history of warfare, that we’ve ever gotten rid of a weapon is to render it obsolete.”
“Ok,” Sib said. “That’s point one. The only way to get rid of nukes is to render them obsolete.”
“A missile defense would do that,” Sam said. “I mean, eventually. What’s the point in building dangerous things that are really expensive if you know that whether you launch them on missiles or use strategic bombers they can be shot down from space before they can deliver their payloads? They become like fortifications — big, expensive, clumsy things that don’t give you a tactical advantage. We don’t build castles anymore because they don’t do any good. They’re a waste of money and time. If nukes were just a big waste of time, there would be no reason to maintain an arsenal.”
“That works for me,” Sib said, scribbling away. “So why SDI? They’re going to say that a space based missile defense system is impossible. It’s sci fi. And that this is just a big bonus for the defense contractors, since it doesn’t work.”
“It doesn’t work yet,” Sam said. “No technology works the minute you think of it. It may take fifty years to work completely. Dramatic changes in the balance of offensive and defensive weaponry tend to take a while.”
Sib looked up. “I totally see why you’re going to the Air Force Academy.”
Sam shrugged. “I think this stuff is fun.”
“So do I.”
“You guys!” A guy at another table stood up, a geeky guy with longish hair who looked totally out of place in his dress code blue blazer. He had a walkman on his head, holding the earphones against his ear in the loud restaurant. “You guys, the space shuttle just blew up!”
“Yeah, right Darryl!” One of the guys at his table laughed. “Way to put us on.”
“No, for real.” Sam twisted around in her seat, a sudden cold in the pit of her stomach. No. It wasn’t a joke, not with that expression on his face, not with that look in his eyes. “It really blew up.”
“Was there a launch today?” Sib said quietly as four or five people started asking questions.
“Yes,” Sam said. “The one with the teacher in space. It was supposed to be about forty five minutes ago.” She always watched the launches if she could. She’d known she was going to miss this one, with Presidential Classroom and the White House tour. “Oh my God.”
“What?’
“That’s what happened at the White House.”
Sib looked at her, and Sam thought her face must have the same stricken look.
“It’s on the radio,” the guy said, as all around him the restaurant went still, construction workers with their thermoses frozen at the counter, business people stopping in their tracks. The woman on the register drew a deep, shaky breath. “About two minutes into the launch,” he said, repeating what he was hearing. “The booster tanks separated. They don’t know what happened.”
No one spoke. No one said a word. Not anybody in the McDonalds. Everyone stood as though turned to stone, listening to this geek with his walkman, repeating word for word what he was hearing, his voice firm and unshaken as Edgar R. Murrow reporting from London.
“We have to see.” They went straight back to the hotel. Sam ran through the lobby as fast as her summer heels would allow, Sib right behind her, through the silent Edwardian lobby with its chandeliers and parquet floors, past rooms where people had danced for Teddy Roosevelt’s inaugural ball. Up the elevator. So slow. All up and down the hotel halls doors were banging open, televisions going on.
She sat on the bed, watching the clip replaying over and over, booster rockets looping wildly in the bright blue sky, the anchor’s voice going again and again to shock and dismay.
And then back to the beginning again. “Good roll program confirmed. Challenger heading downrange. Engines beginning throttling down now. At 94%.”
Sib reached over and squeezed her hand. “Oh my God,” Sam whispered.
“Altitude 4.3 nautical miles.”
“Roger, go at throttle up.”
And then silence.
Rockets streaking soundlessly across a blue sky. Over and over and over.
“This is the end,” Sam whispered.
Sib shifted on the bed, tears rolling down her cheeks. “I mean, maybe not. You know, for them. If you believe in God…”
“Not for them. For us.” Sam felt her face flaring with shame even as she said it. “It’s the end of space. This is the end. It will be years before we go back into space. We may never go again in our lifetimes. People won’t risk it. We won’t take the chance, not with more lives. Even if there are plenty of people who would do it.”
“Would you?”
Sam nodded, her jaw hard. “Yes. I’d get out there tomorrow and say light the candle. But I’ll never get a chance now.” She lifted her arms, the heels of her hands against her eyes. “I’ll never get the chance.” Tears were choking in her throat, but she wasn’t going to cry. She never cried.
There was the sound of Sib shifting on the bed, hunting through her bag. Sam took her hands away. “What are you doing?”
Sib pulled out the blue notebook, scrubbing the tears off her face with one hand. “We have to work on our SDI presentation.”
“There is no SDI,” Sam snapped. “There is no space. Don’t you get it? We’re done. We’re through. The shuttle program is over. There won’t be any national will for it. You can forget about a missile shield or an international space station or any of that stuff. It’s like my dad says about Vietnam. Once we lose the national will to do something, it doesn’t matter if we could do it.”
“Who makes the national will?” Sib lifted her chin. “Who besides us?”
“We’re kids.”
“No, we’re not,” Sib said gently. “In six months you’ll be in the Air Force and I’ll be at college. We haven’t been kids for a long time. We just didn’t know it. We make the national will.” She looked out the window at the trees in Rock Creek Park below, the city somewhere beyond. “That’s the real debate that’s going to be going on all over town. What does this do to everything? We have to hold up our end of it.”