by John Olson
To prevent that, this person Henderson was violating regulations. Bob had no choice but to blow the whistle.
Except for one thing. He didn’t have any evidence. None that he could have obtained legally, anyway. He had no way to blow the whistle. It would blow up in his face.
Catch-22, Kaggo. You’re hanged if you do. Hanged if you don’t. Have a nice day.
* * *
Thursday, August 30, Year One, 10:00 A.M.
Valkerie
“Valkerie Jansen?” Harrington’s secretary looked up from her monitor. “Mr. Harrington got called away. He should be right back. Would you like to wait for him in his office?”
“Oh, um ... sure.” Valkerie stepped into Nate’s office. Both visitor chairs were six inches deep in papers. Valkerie perched on the arm of the chair closest to the door and glanced nervously about the room. What was she going to tell Harrington? She shouldn’t have promised Josh. And she should have asked for more time. They couldn’t possibly expect an answer so soon.
Valkerie stood up and walked across the office to look at the mission photos that lined the wall. It would have been so much easier if her father had said no, but he was surprisingly supportive on the phone—once he was able to say something besides “I can’t believe it.” He’d said he was proud of her, but how proud would he be if she quit halfway though the training? How proud would he be if the media found out about her freshman year?
“Valkerie?”
Valkerie spun around.
A tall man in a gray suit stood framed in the door.
“Bob? Oh, my goodness. I almost didn’t recognize you.”
“Yeah, I’ve been meaning to get a haircut for a long time.”
“And that suit. You look fan—um, nice.”
Bob grinned and stepped uneasily into the office.
“Nate’s not here yet. He’s supposed to be back soon though, if you want to wait.”
“Actually, I was hoping to see you ... to welcome you to the team. I think you’re ... I mean, I just talked to Josh, and he and I both think that they couldn’t have picked a better person to take his place. I really mean that.”
“Thank you. But what if ...” Valkerie bit her lip. What was she going to do? She couldn’t take Josh’s place. The media would tear her apart.
“Are you okay?” Bob was across the room in a heartbeat. He stood over her awkwardly, clenching and unclenching his hands.
“I don’t know.” Valkerie’s vision went suddenly blurry. “I don’t know if I can go through with it.” She looked down at the floor.
“It’s okay, you’ll be fine. If I can do it, anybody can.”
“It’s not that. It’s just ...” Valkerie felt a light touch on her shoulder.
“It’s just what?”
Valkerie blinked back her tears and looked up into Bob’s eyes. “The newspapers. All the reporters. You’ve been in the limelight. You know how personal they get. Do they ... dig into your past?”
Bob looked surprised. “Not really. A little, maybe, but certainly nothing that you’d need to worry about. I’m sure you’re Mother Teresa compared to Kennedy.”
Valkerie shook her head. “Bob, I’ve made a lot of mistakes. I’ve done so many stupid things. I’d just die if—”
“It’s okay. We all have. Hey, I wet my pants in seventh-grade gym class. What could be worse than that? But nobody cares. What they care about is what kind of person you are now. That’s what matters. On that score, believe me, you’ve got nothing to worry about. The press will love you.”
Valkerie closed her eyes, and hot tears streamed down her cheeks. She looked at the floor. “You don’t know that. You don’t know me. Bob, I can’t do it. I just can’t.”
“Valkerie, it’s okay. You don’t have to go. They can get someone else.”
“But Perez said they’d cancel the mission. All the work. Billions and billions of dollars. I don’t have a choice. I’ve—” A tide of emotion welled up inside her, shaking her body in its irresistible wake.
“It’s okay. Don’t worry about Perez. It’s your decision.”
Valkerie buried her face in her hands.
“Would it help to talk about it?” Bob’s voice was timid. Gentle.
Valkerie took a deep breath and held it for several seconds. “When I was a freshman ...” She dabbed at her eyes. “Bob, I was such a geek in high school. When I went off to college, I was so desperate to fit in, to make friends. I ...” Valkerie looked up at Bob. His eyes were intense. “Bob, I’ve never told this to anyone. Promise me you won’t tell anyone. Please, promise me.”
Bob nodded soberly. “All right.” His voice was a whisper. “I promise.”
“You see I met this guy. Sidney Nichols. He and I—”
“Sorry, I’m late, but—” Nate Harrington burst into the room.
Valkerie jumped away from Bob and ran a hand across her eyes.
“Bob ...” Nate stopped. “I ... wasn’t expecting to see you here.”
“I just came by to congratulate Valkerie.” Bob moved uneasily toward the door. “But, I, uh, Valkerie and I can finish our conversation later. Okay, Valkerie?” Bob looked her in the eye. “Okay?”
Panic rose inside her. Should she ask him to stay? Could she go with him?
Bob nodded slowly and walked out the door.
“Well.” Harrington cleared off one of the office chairs and motioned for her to sit down. “What’s your decision?”
“I was just telling Bob that I was worried ... about ...”
Nate sat down on the edge of his desk and waited. “Maybe I exaggerated the risk yesterday. In a lot of ways, it’s safer than the Apollo missions. Just a lot longer, that’s all. But every piece of technology on this mission is space tested. We’ve put gigabucks of research into this baby. You’ll be fine.”
Valkerie took a deep breath. All that money. All that work, and she was worried about a tiny blow to her ego. This is the right decision. It’s the opportunity of the century and if I say no, I’ll be kicking myself for the rest of my life. “Mr. Harrington, my worries aren’t that important—not compared to the mission. I’ve decided to join the Ares 10 team—if you’ll still have me.”
* * *
Thursday, August 30, Year One, 8:00 P.M.
Bob
Bob paced his living room floor. Valkerie had decided to join the mission. She was on the team.
He grabbed the phone. Maybe if they talked things out, they could pick up again where he’d dropped the ball. Nine-nine-two ... He slammed the phone back down. What was he thinking? They were co-workers now. Good grief, they’d practically be living together—for two and a half years. One flimsy partition away from each other.
He stormed back across the floor. They’d have to be just friends. Like he and Lex were friends. Oh, brother, what was he going to do?
Bob flung himself onto the sofa and grabbed his laptop. “Valkerie Jansen.” He pounded the name into the search engine and scanned the list of sites. Journals, symposiums, proceedings ... Not exactly what he was looking for. Drop the “k.” Valerie Jansen. The third entry jumped off the screen at him: www.EdwardJansen.com. Wasn’t her father’s name Edward? Where had he heard that? He followed the link. Robots, Eurobotica.com, Family ... “Family.” The link brought him to a page covered with photographs. Valkerie as a baby, Valkerie as a child ... A mischievous grin was painted across almost every picture. She had been so incredibly cute. He followed the links slowly, soaking in each stage, each nuance. Valkerie in elementary school. Valkerie winning the RobotWars championship. Valkerie in high school. Going off to college ... Wow. He hit the Print button as if in a trance.
Bob hurried over to his printer. Valkerie smiled back at him under the mortarboard cap of her graduation picture. She was ... stunning. He carried the photo back to the sofa. So she had gone to Yale ... Right, she’d told him that, hadn’t she?
I met this guy. Sidney Nichols. Bob did a search for “Sidney Nichols” and “Yale.” Sixty-nine ent
ries. Mostly zines and news archives. He looked up one of the news articles, which dated to the end of Valkerie’s freshman year.
A photo of a young man carrying a sign materialized. Dark hair. Piercing black eyes. Way too good-looking. Bob read the headline. “Yale Students Barricaded in Fetal Tissue Cloning Lab.” Quarks and bosons! Bob’s heart pounded in his throat as he scanned the article. They had gotten caught trashing a research lab. They were barricaded inside the lab. Threats of a bomb ...
Bob clicked on the next article. “Yale Student Killed in Standoff With Police.” Sidney Nichols, a third-year political science major, was killed in an explosion ...
Bob picked up Valkerie’s graduation photo. Nate said she was kosher, so she had to be kosher. When the time came, she’d do the science and she’d do it well.
But she came from a world he would never understand. She hung out with the kind of people he despised. She wasn’t just Sarah. She was Sarah 2.0.
The picture started to shake. Taking a deep breath, he tore the photo slowly in half.
The two halves blurred into one as the room dissolved into splotches of yellow and gray.
* * *
Friday, August 31, Year One, 10:00 A.M.
Valkerie
Valkerie squinted into the lights. Teague Auditorium was filling fast with reporters. Videocam operators pressed their way to the foot of the stage, jockeying for position.
Valkerie swallowed against the lump in her throat. Bob sat rigidly next to her at the long table on the stage. She leaned forward and smiled at him, clearing her throat to get his attention. He stared determinedly ahead. Probably nervous. He didn’t seem to like the limelight any more than she did.
Josh sat on her right. He nodded and flashed her a big smile. He was completely in his element. The whole world was coming out to see him, and he was the master of the occasion.
Kennedy Hampton and Alexis Ohta walked in, followed by Steven Perez. The roar of the crowd instantly dropped to a low murmur. All eyes focused on Perez as he took his place behind the podium.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m sure you have lots of questions, so I’m going to make this brief. As you all know by now, Mission Commander Josh Bennett will be stepping off the Ares 10 flight crew in order to direct the mission from the ground as prime Capcom. Pilot Kennedy Hampton will move up to Commander. Mission Specialist Alexis Ohta will become Pilot. Dr. Valkerie Jansen will join the crew as Mission Specialist. Valkerie earned an M.D. from Johns Hopkins University and a Ph.D. in microbial ecology from the University of Florida. She ...”
Valkerie cringed. Why was Perez talking so much about her? Everybody loved Josh Bennett. They were going to despise her. She sank lower in her chair as Perez rambled on and on. Her face burned as he told about her “interview” in Alaska. Murmurs. Silence. Laughter.
“At this time I’d like to open up the floor for questions.”
The room exploded in a cacophony of shouted questions and raised hands.
Valkerie looked to Josh, relieved that he would finally take control. He was a master of the media. His confident smile and witty Bennettisms had been filling the airwaves for years.
Perez pointed to a reporter in the back of the room.
“Dr. Jansen, Dr. Lyons at Johns Hopkins is quoted as saying that you’re one of the most brilliant med students he ever graduated, yet you quit medicine to take care of your father after your mother died. Could you comment on that?”
Valkerie turned to Bob in confusion. They knew about her father. They knew about Dr. Lyons. They probably knew about Yale too. Valkerie swept the room with wide eyes.
Every eye was fixed on her. They all knew, every one of them. The room sparkled in a blinding eruption of electronic flash pyrotechnics.
“Thank you for your concern. My father is much better now. He’s the dearest man in the world. He loved my mother so deeply, so completely. I’ve never seen a purer or more passionate love. The year she passed was hard for all of us, but especially for him. The time I got to spend with him in his grief was a great privilege. A whole universe opened up to me that I didn’t even know existed. If I’m ever loved half so much as my mother was, I will count myself the second most blessed woman that ever lived.”
Silence hung over the auditorium. Reporters stared up at Valkerie with frozen, astonished faces.
A pair of hands clapped slowly in the back of the room. More hands. More, until the whole auditorium shook with applause.
Valkerie looked down at the table and sighed with relief. They could have made her the villain, but they had chosen to make her the hero instead. For now. How many mistakes would they allow her before they changed their minds?
Part Two
Launch is a high-risk enterprise no matter what safety features the engineers design into the launch system and precautions management has taken, no matter how thoroughly and meticulously the rocket has been prepared, and no matter how well-trained and competent the crew. Sitting on top of a bomb is and will always be a dangerous venture.
Jerry Linenger, U.S. Astronaut, Mir Cosmonaut
NASA exaggerates the reliability of its product to the point of fantasy ... For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
Richard Feynman, Nobel laureate physicist, on the Challenger disaster
Space is a completely unforgiving environment. If you screw up the engineering, somebody dies (and there’s no partial credit because most of the analysis was right ... ).
Dave Akin
Chapter Ten
Monday, December 9, Year Two, 11:00 A.M.
Bob
A MONSTROUS FORKLIFT LUMBERED ACROSS the runway and up the ramp into the belly of the Super Guppy. Kennedy was helping direct it. Not necessary, but never mind. It gave the photographers a focal point. Behind Kennedy sat the Hab on a titanium pallet, encased in a triple layer of plastic to maintain its clean-room integrity. A perfect shot of the Ares 10 and its commander. Just perfect.
Forty-seven days until launch, and Bob felt ready. The last year had been murder. Final checkouts on the Hab. Flight sims. Machine-shop training for the entire crew. Underwater work in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab to simulate weightlessness. Splashdown training. A solid week with the crew locked alone in the Hab, simulating light-time delays in communications with Josh and the other Capcoms. Desert training. The Mars Arctic Research Station on Devon Island.
They were ready to rocket—Bob knew that. Believed it. But late at night, when the rational side of him was sleeping, the irrational side lay wide awake, staring at the ceiling with pounding heart and screaming imagination. This wasn’t a moon mission—three days out, three days back, with a day or two of flags-and-footprints photo-ops against a silver-cratered backdrop. This was Mars—five months out, five months back, with a year and a half to survive in a hostile alien land. Earth would be ten to twenty long minutes away by radio.
NASA had never tried anything like this before. And if anything went wrong, nobody would try it again for a long, long time.
But they were ready. Josh was the perfect Capcom. Kennedy would be a good commander—not the Picard Josh would have been, but a decent Riker. Lex, still the best man on the crew, was running a 10-K every morning just to warm up. Valkerie had zipped through training in record time. And when Lex dislocated her shoulder the previous summer, two days into isolation training in the Hab, Valkerie relocated it in all of about five seconds. Kennedy hadn’t complained about having an M.D. on the crew since. She was an awfully good microbial ecologist too, judging by her new Science article on thermophilic bacteria from that volcano in Alaska.
They were a smooth, sharp, professional team. Professional. Bob meant to keep it that way. It was embarrassing, the way some of the media people leered at you in an interview. Two men, two women? Wink, wink. Off the record, Dr. Kaganovski, what are the prospects for a relationship on this mission?
If they only knew. Lex had always been aloof—ever since Bob ha
d known her. But in the last year, she’d grown even more distant. You had to wonder sometimes if she was in the same time zone. Sometimes she’d disappear for days on end and come back vacant and moody. Despite a horrible article about her in one of those junk men’s magazines, despite her stunning good looks, she was anything but the goddess of love. Which was fine with Bob. He was on this mission to do a job. Period.
And Valkerie? Sure, she was pretty—some would say gorgeous—but Bob wasn’t susceptible to that kind of thing. Not that she had time for any kind of social life, anyway. She had spent the last fifteen months training hard. Hard, even by NASA standards. So the media had her pegged as an upright, clean-living John Glenn type. And for once, they were right. She was a good, hard worker. And smart. A great pick for the mission. Very professional.
Kennedy, however, was a different story. He was a navy pilot, and it was no secret that he had been living the high life straight out of The Right Stuff. Flying and drinking, drinking and driving, drinking and groupies. The NASA brass overlooked all that. Let him get it out of his system now. There wouldn’t be any groupies in space.
Except ...
Six or eight months ago, Bob and Kennedy had been playing pool at the Outpost. They were both about six brews into the evening, and Kennedy had a local honey hanging all over him. After missing a shot, he turned to Bob with a sloppy grin and said, “Dibs on Valkerie.”
That’s all. Just that one comment. Very unprofessional. Bob hoped that Kennedy had been kidding, that it had been the alcohol talking, but deep down inside he knew better than that. Maybe the Hampster was an officer, but he sure as heck wasn’t a gentleman. There would be only two women on that ship. One was sweet, young, attractive. The other was Fort Knox. A guy like Kennedy wouldn’t have a lot of choices.