Encounter with Tiber [v1.0]

by By Buzz Aldrin

  I had no idea what he meant, but I was glad to have him there, so I said, “Maybe I don’t understand.”

  “Well, like, think about the American West, in, oh, say, 1848, right after we’d grabbed it from Mexico. Neither the Spanish nor the Mexicans had been able to do much of anything with any parts of it except Texas and California. So you have this whole huge area, the Great Basin and all the surrounding mountain ranges, full of all kinds of species in abundance, and with all kinds of different people for the anthropologists to talk to, and an immense array of interesting things for geologists—and what did we do with it? Dammed the rivers, grazed cattle all over it, killed off most of the big predators, destroyed all the cultures that weren’t ours, and covered it with trashy places for trashy people—whole towns full of hoodlums like Tombstone and Deadwood, get-rich-quick places for bums and dreamers like Bozeman and Cripple Creek, and later on, of course, tourist traps like Vegas and Aspen. We had this whole big beautiful place for discovery, and all we could think of to do with it was wipe out everything that made it worth discovering.

  “Well, I look at the way space is going, and I find myself thinking, it’s pretty similar. More than half the Starbirds that have flown so far have been for your mother’s husband’s ShareSpace Global, taking people up joyriding. Most of them don’t do a lick of real science. Now we’re going to make electricity in space, but you can’t get a dime for the Hubble III or Hubble IV to see deeper into the universe. We’re going to the Moon, but only to go treasure hunting, and once we’re there it probably won’t be long before we’re taking soil that hasn’t been disturbed for four billion years, bulldozing it up in carloads, and pumping it through helium extractors. I wonder when they’ll open the first casino up there. Probably within my lifetime.”

  He sat there in the dark so quietly for so long that I started just looking around at the summer stars, something he’d taught me to do. Vega, overhead, seemed very bright tonight. As I often did, I pretended I was on my way to the star directly above me and imagined myself to be falling toward it in the last part of the journey . . . any moment now the point of light would expand to a tiny disk, and then the disk would swell as I fell into the new solar system . . .

  “No one wants to go to space for any important reason,” my father said, “but that’s not what I needed to talk to you about. I’ve got another mission coming up, Jason.”

  “Will I be staying with Mom or with Aunt Lori?”

  “With your mother. This could be a long one, longer than the time I went to ISS three years ago, when the message came in.” He stretched and then slapped himself. “Houston, the perfect place to relax if you’re a mosquito. Not that you’ll see any fewer of them in D.C. Here’s the story: they’ve put me on the second manned mission, along with a Chinese woman pilot who’s supposed to be kind of a hotshot. Her name is X-I-A-O B-E, and they pronounce that ‘showe bay,’ like to rhyme with ‘cow day’ or ‘now pay.’ I talked to her on the phone just yesterday and she seemed like an okay person. Peter Denisov is going, too, so at least I’ll have a friend on the mission, and François Raymond’s in the backup team. Lori’s a pilot for mission nine, if they ever get that high.”

  “Isn’t there a fourth on your mission?”

  “Another Chinese. Jiang Wu. He doesn’t have any real obvious specialties or skills that they’ve told us about, so we think he’s with the secret police, deadheading on this ride so that even on the Moon they’ll always have someone watching every PRC citizen.” He yawned. “Hope he doesn’t distract Xiao Be in all this; there’s a lot to get done, and since we won’t get much work out of him, she’s going to have to pick up the slack. Anyway, it’ll be nice to fly with that Russian grump again. But the important thing is, Xiao Be and I are the stayovers—which means I might not be back for months, maybe not till after Lori leaves. So you’re going up to stay with Sig and your mother for a while. I guess I should say the usual stuff—behave yourself and don’t let me hear that you were any trouble.”

  * * * *

  7

  MOM AND SIG’S PLACE WAS LARGE AND COMFORTABLE, AND THERE WAS A room already set up for me there; the biggest problem I’d had with going up to Washington for sixth and seventh grade was that I wouldn’t have as many friends on my Little League or Pop Warner teams. Times before, when I had stayed with Mom and Sig in Reston, I had sometimes attended school there, so I did know some kids from Aldrin Elementary, and I liked them well enough. On the other hand, where I was in Texas, you had to be in seventh grade before you got out of elementary school and into junior high; in Washington there was a middle school, and I would be going to sixth grade there. So I never did get a year of being a “big kid.”

  The biggest difference, I discovered, was that what was cool and what was passé changed drastically. Around Houston, there were plenty of astronaut brats, and plenty of kids whose parents worked at NASA. So my dad being who he was was no big deal. In Sig’s neighborhood there were plenty of congressional brats and kids of rich people, but an astronaut’s son was a rarity. It meant a certain amount of teasing and a certain amount of strange second-hand hero worship; I ignored both. I had already learned that there were a lot of occasions when the best thing to do was to shut up and excel other people.

  That got more useful, because where in the Houston area the rumor mill revolves around the personal lives of people in the astronaut corps, in Washington it turns around power, who has it and who gets to keep it— and around the art of the deal, who gave up what for what. Consequently, trying to come up with some way or other to relate to me, a surprising number of kids went out of their way to pass on whatever they heard from their parents, who tended to be congresspeople, Washington lawyers, and top-level bureaucrats.

  The favorite one seemed to be that there was a lot of tension with the Chinese about the expedition to recover the Encyclopedia. They were said to be hard to deal with and constantly making demands, and every so often there was a rumor that safety was being compromised over this or that Chinese demand.

  I could have told them more about it than they were telling me; Sig was up to his neck in dealing with the Chinese, and not happy about any of it. There seemed to be an infinite number of additional nice things to which the Chinese were entitled without further payment, because they were “implied” in the contract. Since the U.S. government was making up the difference between what Sig was losing in building orbiting solar power stations for China and what he could have been making with the same resources used as he normally would, NASA officials didn’t hesitate to get involved in deciding which of these demands was valid and which wasn’t, thus which ones they would pay for and which they wouldn’t. The trouble was that when the Chinese didn’t get their way, it was Sig’s crews and equipment rather than NASA’s that tended to get held (discreetly, of course) as hostages. So every couple of days I’d hear Sig snarling into the phone as he tried to disentangle some problem or other and get one more step farther toward completion.

  The whole system at the new house took a little bit of getting used to, too; Sig was home almost every evening, and Mom worked regular hours as well. That meant I was subject to a lot more routine adult supervision than I was used to; besides, the woods were too far away and the parks were kind of scary. I turned into a somewhat better student, just out of boredom.

  About once a month Dad would get enough time off to come up and visit. Sig and Mom would have been perfectly happy to have him stay in the house, but he stayed at a hotel anyway. We’d go to a ball game or take a couple of long walks or something. Every now and then he’d bring along Grandma, and that was fun, too.

  Even so, I was perfectly happy going back to school on Monday. I had heard plenty of horror stories from other kids about their divorced parents, and I knew Dad and Sig weren’t crazy about each other, but the fact was that everybody involved did a pretty decent job of taking care of me and I didn’t have to worry much about who was going to look after me. That let me concentrate on importan
t issues, like model rocketry, sports, and my gradually increasing awareness that there was another gender out there and that I approved of the fact. Probably the biggest trauma I can remember from the time when Dad was away in training (first learning the Starbird at Sig’s launch site near Edwards AFB, then learning the modified Pigeon lunar lander, and finally off to China to cross-train with Xiao Be, Peter, and Jiang Wu) was that I couldn’t quite get up the nerve to ask a girl to the seventh-grade Valentine dance, and I didn’t make the starting team in cadet basketball—too many other guys were getting their growth ahead of me. On the whole, it was a quiet time of life—and speaking as a quiet guy, I was already learning to appreciate that.

  I don’t know when it happened—it must have been one of the times my father got to Washington while I was still in school and therefore had an afternoon in the city—but I know it did, partly by what happened later and mostly because, when I was much older, Sig told me about it. I think he thought I would feel good knowing about it, and I guess he was right.

  Anyway, my father got off the plane, made his way to Sig’s office, and met Sig for lunch, a “special appointment” that neither Mom nor I knew anything about at the time. They sat on a sunny balcony at a pricey place, where no one would be so gauche as to recognize a celebrity, and chatted politely until the food came; then, after some silent eating, my father said, abruptly, “This is going to sound very strange, but I just don’t feel lucky about this trip.”

  “Oh?” Sig said, setting down his fork and looking intently at Dad. He was good at just letting people say what they were thinking.

  “Well, it’s going to be my fifth trip up. It is the first trip on one of your Starbirds, but I don’t think that’s what I’m nervous about. And Xiao Be’s a good sort and I’d trust her with anything. And we’re using a good old proven-out Pigeon to go there. I’m sure I shouldn’t feel this way, but for some strange reason I do; I’m just plain convinced that I’m not coming back. It’s dumb and I want a chance to laugh about it later, but there it is. I never felt this way before, certainly not before the Endeavour mission, and I’m hoping it’s just some weird phase.”

  Sig nodded and said, “Go on.”

  “Well, it’s something for Jason. I took out an additional life insurance policy—just a cheap term life policy that will pay enough, in the event of my death, for one ride into orbit on a Starbird, so that he can go see what it’s like up there. I don’t want him to think of space as that black void that killed his old man, if you see what I mean. I don’t want him to be unnecessarily afraid of anything, and if I were to die on this trip . . . well. A kid could get ideas. He might not realize at his age that crossing the street is dangerous, too, and you can’t let fear run your life. So I’d like to have him have that ride . . . and I’m all paid up on the policy, and put all that in the will, but I wanted you to know about it so that if anything happens, you can tell Jason and explain it to him.” Then Chris looked down at his plate and took a couple of large bites; this was probably as near to being embarrassed as he ever came in his life.

  Sig nodded. “Of course I’ll carry out your wishes in this matter. I’m sure you know Jason’s college and so forth are taken care of, too—one of the advantages of my having this pile of money is that I can use it for things like that. But let’s not bury you before you’re dead; perhaps your premonition is only a premonition, without any foundation at all.”

  “I can hope so,” Chris said. “And to tell you the truth, it’s a bizarre experience for me; I’ve never felt anything like it before and I’ve always prided myself on my rationality.”

  Sig nodded, topped up the wineglass for both of them, and said, “Well, if I may venture a thought—?”

  “Sure.”

  “I think you know I’m about as cold-blooded a businessman as they make. I have to be—if you’re in a visionary game like space exploitation, you have to think in terms of justifying each little step. The thing that used to kill a lot of start-up space ventures was that they were trying to launch some kind of ‘Universal Space Lines with Service to Six Planets Daily,’ right off the bat, or they had figured out something that they were sure people would pay for and they thought all they’d have to do was offer it. But figuring out how to stay in business once you’ve got decent suppliers and an adequate customer base—that’s always the easy part. Once a business is taking in more than it has to pay out, week to week or year to year, all you have to do is maintain. What’s hard is to get to that point.

  “And speaking of getting to the point, listen to me. Babbling on. All I meant to say was, I have to be very rational and think pretty hard about the micro-level things, what we have to do this week to be where we want to be in a year, that sort of stuff. And I have hunches all the time and I never ignore them. I don’t always follow them—a lot of times I dismiss them—but I never ignore them. I give them my thought and attention and decide to follow them or dismiss them. Figure it this way, Dr. Terence: maybe you don’t always remember everything you know. Maybe there’s a thing or two bothering the back of your head that you won’t or can’t say to yourself. So since it can’t come to you in words, it sends you a hunch. That can be like an inside tip from your subconscious. You have to at least look at it. So, no, I don’t think there’s anything silly about your taking your hunches seriously.”

  Chris sipped the wine and said, “Uh—and these hunches of yours— how often are they right?”

  “Oh, about what you’d expect from chance,” Sig said, grinning. “But the ones I follow are right more often. Seriously, I think you’re wise to pay attention to it, and I think if this is important to you, then by God I’ll make sure that Jason gets that opportunity. You could have just asked, you know, and I might’ve just done it anyway, no charge and so forth. Any son of any wife of mine who needs a ride into space to get his confidence back ...”

  Chris looked down and said, “Um, well, you can imagine I wouldn’t have liked coming here cap in hand. And besides it’s a cheap thing to do— fifty grand of coverage for a couple of years, just to cover an unlikely accident in space, isn’t all that expensive. I could probably have gotten it cheaper by taking out a bet with a bookie that I was going to die.”

  “And bookies are less hassle than insurance companies,” Sig agreed, “not to mention that when they don’t pay, they lose business, unlike the insurance companies. Still and all, I’d have to say that. . . hmm. Tell you what. I’ll make you a bet: if you come back alive, you let me chip in toward Jason’s maintenance while he’s with you, like I’ve always wanted to do. Not to spoil him, but if he wants to try a sport or take lessons in something, a little extra so it doesn’t come out of your life. And if you don’t, I’ll not only send Jason to space to get a taste of it, I’ll also start insuring all our astronauts on the same terms: if they die out there, a free ride for their kids.”

  Chris laughed. “Kind of a Gomez Addams bet, isn’t it? If you win, you pay more money, and if you lose, you pay more money.”

  “Ah, but it’s a bet because I’d a lot rather buy Jason a hockey stick or piano lessons than I would help him get over your death. I still have one side that I hope wins.”

  Chris nodded. “Well, call it a bet, then. I’ll take the terms. How’s he doing up here, anyway? His grades are looking better.”

  “We don’t have as many distractions—or rather, we don’t have any we can safely let him get into. The poor kid is probably bored. Unfortunately, the kind of excitement we have up here is not what I want for him.”

  “Me either,” Chris agreed. “Is he making friends?”

  “In his own way. Not like you or his mother would make friends, a roomful at a time. But enough for Jason.”

  They chatted about me for a couple of hours, according to Sig, but he never talked much about the particulars. I’ve had a life full of miracles, I guess you could say, but there’s one that few people would notice: my father, who thought business was dirty and grubby when it wasn’t just plain croo
ked, and my mother’s husband, who thought of science as an amusing hobby for people who couldn’t do anything serious, were perfectly capable of sitting down with each other over lunch and a couple of drinks and making sure that I was getting what I needed. I guess things like that aren’t in most people’s definition of love. They’re in mine, though.

  * * * *

  It’s been a strange feature of the age of spaceflight that two successful crewed launches in a row seems to make everyone assume that spaceflight is perfectly safe and routine—until the next disaster. The crew for the Tiber Base stayover expedition (officially called “Tiber Two”) was in danger for a long time before the accident actually happened, just because they were in space and riding on rockets, but because things went so smoothly, there was little news coverage. I have watched the little bit of film of my smiling father getting into the Starbird, as mission commander; I have seen the way that he and Xiao Be worked together, and it looks flawless to me.