Pillar to the Sky

by William R. Forstchen

  She pressed forward, not budging an inch to get out of Proxley’s way.

  “Senator Proxley, what would you have said to Columbus and Magellan?”

  There was no mainstream media covering this hearing; for all practical purposes, like a tree falling unheard in a forest, it didn’t exist, except for a few pro-space Internet bloggers who were holding up iPads to catch the exchange. Proxley looked at them from the corners of his eyes. Such things could go viral and without doubt he was thinking that beating up on a skinny teenage girl who had just witnessed the taking down of her parents might not be good press.

  He forced an indulgent smile.

  “If history serves me right,” Proxley replied, “Columbus was convinced he had reached China, his so-called discovery an accident which then resulted in the deaths of millions of Native Americans. And as for Magellan, nine out of ten who sailed with him died.”

  “But still they opened up an entire world and changed the stagnant economy of Europe to centuries of growth,” Victoria fired back. “The tragedy of the native population of this land I concur with, sir, but the factor of disease was unknown in the sixteenth century. As for space sir, we do not face that moral problem.”

  “And at what price this progress?” Proxley said coldly. “The mess the entire world is in today, perhaps?”

  Gary realized Proxley was maneuvering the argument into one of colonialism, of guilt over the past hobbling the limitless potential of the future that he was utterly incapable of seeing along with the technophobia that was so ironic from those who denounced technology even as their lives depended on it. It was like trying to argue with a man stranded in the desert who was futilely digging in the sand for water, refusing to see or believe that just beyond the next ridge was a flowing river of plenty, which was indeed awaiting humanity just above the atmosphere.

  “We are not debating the tragedies of colonialism, sir,” Victoria replied sharply. “This meeting was about space exploration, which you are killing—a tragedy not just for our country but the entire world. You are ignoring the potential of opening up the universe for all humanity and the finding of resources to transform our world while bringing no harm to others.”

  Victoria’s voice rose and squeaked a bit as she spoke, for after all, at sixteen she was tackling a United States senator of more than twenty years’ experience, and he knew his game well.

  “I admire your zeal for defending your parents, young lady,” he said condescendingly. “I admire idealism in youth, even if misdirected and impolite at times. As for history, I think I do know a bit more than you; after all, I did major in it as an undergraduate. Might I urge you study that a bit more when you go to college”—he paused—“and perhaps a course on showing manners to your elders and elected representatives as well.” There was a cutting edge of dismissal to his voice as he moved to step around her.

  Victoria would not be diverted even as Proxley tried to move around her, a staffer having opened the door out of the hearing room while one oversize aide, more bodyguard than assistant, tried to move between the senator and Victoria, but she refused to budge. Gary was now on his feet, and there would have been an explosion on his part if the aide had touched his proud, defiant daughter.

  “Now if you will excuse—”

  She cut him off.

  “No, I will not excuse you yet, sir,” Victoria retorted. “As an American citizen I have a right to this conversation. I recall that the First Amendment states that I have a right to petition my government for redress and, sir, you have an obligation to listen. In fact, according to your own schedule and that of this committee, you should still be here for another hour.”

  Before he could reply, she fired the next question off.

  “If you want to talk about history, Senator, what about the Roeblings, father and son, or Stevens and Goethals?”

  Proxley hesitated. Gary grinned. She had caught him on that! He had no idea who she was referring to.

  “Engineers, Senator. The Roeblings built the Brooklyn Bridge while Stevens and Goethals engineered the Panama Canal. They were told it was impossible but built them anyhow in spite of people like you. If men and women like them had listened to people like you, where would we be today? History is plagued by those like you, sir. Plagued by you.”

  Gary did wince a bit at that. Calling a senator a plague might not be the best of politics. As a NASA employee, he, of course, could never say it; but if called on the carpet about it in his exit interview, he could only shrug his shoulders and say, “Hey, I have a strong-willed daughter,” and chances were there would be subtle smiles of agreement.

  Proxley glared at her coldly.

  He looked at Victoria’s mother.

  “May I suggest, madam, that in the future this young lady’s education include some basic manners and proper etiquette.”

  And now Gary’s wife, Eva, spoke. It was doubtful Proxley understood Ukrainian. Since everything was recorded, Proxley would without doubt get the translation later.

  “Oh, yes,” Proxley sniffed, “your Russian mother.”

  Gary looked at both his wife and daughter with an expression that urged them not to respond to that insult. No one ever called a Ukrainian a Russian, and he knew it was deliberate. “Given the current state of foreign affairs, I do find it curious you even have access to our facilities.”

  A brawl in front of a Senate committee hearing was definitely a bad career ender, so he put a restraining hand on Eva’s arm and shot another restraining glance at his daughter, for she knew Ukrainian as well.

  One of Proxley’s aides, the one who opened the door, had a hand on the senator’s shoulder to guide him—or perhaps drag him—out of the room, then looked back at Gary. Was there a glimpse of a smile, a subtle nod of agreement? The door closed with Proxley on the far side, leaving Victoria sputtering with ill-concealed rage.

  Senator Dennison sighed and looked to her left and right at the empty chairs as the other senators—some nodding politely to Gary, others ignoring him—began to file out as well.

  “Since we no longer have a quorum with the absence of Senator Proxley,” she announced, “I must adjourn this meeting without a vote. I therefore declare this hearing to be closed.”

  Gary had failed. But that had been a foregone conclusion before they even walked into the room; his effort was no different from arranging deck chairs on the Titanic as it sank, and he knew that. At least his daughter had added a certain zest to it all at the very end.

  Senator Dennison stood up, came around from behind her desk, and put a gentle, calming hand on Gary’s shoulder.

  “I’m sorry, I tried every way possible to get a quorum here to support you. I am so sorry for the three of you.” As she spoke she flashed a warm smile at Victoria as if to say, Masterful, young lady. Bravo!

  She looked around the room as the last of the few spectators left. A blogger took a moment to get a few comments from Victoria, before shutting down his iPad and leaving the room. They were alone.

  “May I suggest you head back to Goddard? You have an old friend waiting for you there, and who knows”—she actually did seem to take on a mysterious air—“perhaps some new ones as well.”

  Though Dennison’s home state of Maine did not benefit much from what little funding NASA still received, she was a woman with vision and held the belief that no matter how insurmountable the cascading series of crises facing America—diminishing energy supplies; valid environmental concerns about climate change due to worldwide pollution; the ever rising cries that America was tottering toward collapse—she believed that American know-how would, in the end, come through, and had placed her political chips on NASA. For years she had worked behind the scenes to ensure that at least some marginal funding for the agency was designated for what seemed like the dreams of today but could be the breakthroughs of tomorrow. In fact, only a tiny part of the agency’s budget—less than a hundreth of a percentage point—went to Gary and Eva Morgan and the NASA Innovative Advance
d Concepts division (NIAC).

  Gary and Eva first met Senator Dennison a decade and a half earlier when they had been sent to Dennison’s office, at the senator’s request, to discuss their ideas and request funding for further research. That meeting had stretched longer than an hour and turned into an invitation to dinner at Dennison’s modest apartment just a few blocks from Capitol Hill. The Morgans came prepared for some tough questioning, and “dinner” went on until one in the morning, and a bond had been formed.

  Dennison had been an easy audience to reach. She had started out as a high school teacher of math, but—frustrated with the restraints of the education bureaucracy—she went on to do graduate work in engineering. Rather than return to the classroom, she came to the fundamental conclusion that if there was one thing Congress lacked, it was some members with a knowledge of the hard sciences. So she set out on a political career path with single-minded determination, first by getting elected to Congress and then moving on to a seat in the Senate. She played a critical role in preparing and protecting the nation’s electronic infrastructure against the destructive potential of solar storms; pushed through support for the first maglev trains (the bill disappeared in another committee); and was at times all but a lone voice in the Senate to keep an ever-dwindling NASA alive as the nation struggled to somehow rein in its crippling debt load.

  After hours of reviewing the Morgans’ plans that night, she sat back and exclaimed, “Good heavens, I think your mad scheme will actually work. I’ll see that you at least get some money for continued research; not much, but enough to keep you two—soon to be three—alive.”

  Naively he had assumed that all was a done deal, and within the year work—real work—on building a tower would actually begin.

  That was sixteen and a half years ago. Over those years the clock had ticked on and the climate continued to shift; whether due to man-made causes, a natural cycle, or a combination of both, the impacts were becoming more catastrophic. The debt had taken the nation to near bankruptcy. Conflict had escalated in the Middle East as energy production peaked, then began to dwindle as the world went to ever greater lengths to squeeze out an extra barrel amid escalating costs. A malaise seemed to be setting in as Americans began to feel that the days of their greatness had passed and would not come again.

  And today Gary and Eva’s plan for addressing these problems had come to an end.

  “How is he doing by the way?”

  Gary looked at Eva and they both smiled.

  “Professor Rothenberg?” Gary paused. “Still going strong at ninety-two, but … he is ninety-two.”

  “That old character will outlast us all,” Mary said with an understanding smile.

  “And who knows?” she added, lowering her voice as if imparting a secret, “There might still be a surprise in the wings. He’s famous for that, you know. My first visit to Goddard as a member of Congress…”

  She sighed.

  “We were still flying the Shuttle back then.” She shook her head. “He was the one who showed me around. The old guy had me absolutely charmed even then. He’s not one to give up, even now.”

  “What do you mean ‘a surprise in the wings’?” Eva asked.

  Mary shrugged, looking around as if to be certain no one was hiding in a corner of the room. Years of experience had taught her well that one never knew where an eavesdropper might lurk, recorder or just an iPhone in hand to catch every whispered word.

  “Well, one never knows, and besides, even if I did not—and I am not saying I do—it is way outside my control now.”

  “Outside of your control…?” Eva asked.

  “Oh, call it classified for the moment,” Mary replied. “And just know that, even though it looks like you lost the war today, there is no denying what happened here.”

  She looked back disdainfully at the empty chairs of the committee.

  “NASA is still in for some hard times, and you two dear friends are out of work with that beloved agency in a few more weeks, your project tossed aside like so many other opportunities we’ve tossed aside in recent decades. But I predict it ain’t over yet by a long shot. Just know that I’ll be behind the scenes, even though your program has been cut.”

  “Thank you, Senator,” Gary said.

  “Come on, we’re out of formal session: it’s Mary.”

  She squeezed his shoulder and then looked at him with concern.

  “How is your health?”

  “Just fine, no problems.”

  She said nothing in reply, then looked around and smiled.

  “That daughter of yours, she’s a fighter. I like that.”

  He looked back to where his daughter waited patiently by the doorway.

  “It’s her world I want to help shape,” he said. “We’ve pretty well had our game and not done so well by it.”

  “We can still try, so go out and do it.”

  “With what?”

  “We’ll see, and God be with you.” She kissed Eva on the cheek and at the door stopped to pause for a momentary chat with Victoria, shaking her hand and then hugging her with a compliment about her fighting spirit and congratulations on her early acceptance to college. Then she left the room.

  “Proud of you, Victoria,” Gary said with a grin. It was obvious that after her confrontation with Senator Proxley, Victoria was a bit shaken, afraid that she had gone too far. Mary’s warm compliment had reassured her and she had looked at her parents for approval.

  “At least you didn’t kick him in the shins,” Gary said, sweeping his girl into an embrace.

  “I wanted to.”

  “So did I, and a lot more,” Eva said in Ukrainian with a smile.

  “Come on you two fighters. Let’s go to Goddard and break the news.”

  * * *

  For Gary, clearing the security gate at the Goddard Space Flight Center lifted a weight from his weary shoulders. It was like coming home: he always had a flashback of the happiest summer of his life, an internship that set out the paths not just of his career but his personal happiness as well. It was here that he and Eva both came under the spell of Erich Rothenberg.

  He and Eva had, of course, missed the high glory days of the 1960s—that was half a century ago now—but at least they had been in the space program when there was still talk of returning to the moon—plans for Mars, even—and, of course, all the other less glorious but just as important research paths. Many of the old veterans of those times still walked the corridors, and Erich was one of them. But cutback after cutback had left Goddard something of a ghost town, remembering past glories, still hoping that the day would come when society again believed in positive dreams for the future and was willing to throw its backing behind it. It was like a monastery preserving dreams and knowledge in the hope of a renewed renaissance.

  There was no problem finding a parking space, and their old mentor, Erich Rothenberg, was at the door of the small office complex that housed his once burgeoning domain, as if waiting for them. He came out and, in classic European fashion, took Eva’s hand and kissed it lightly, then grasped Gary’s hand, looking straight into his eyes.

  “How the hell are you?”

  “How am I?” Gary sighed. “I think you know how I am.”

  “Yeah, I was listening to it on the Internet. That Proxley really cut our throats.”

  When Erich got angry, his German accent really came through. He was perhaps the last of the legendary breed of famed German scientists who had shaped America’s space program back in the fifties and sixties. In his office hung fading photos of him with Wernher von Braun himself, the two posing alongside an early model of a lunar landing module. But there was one big difference: Erich had been on the opposite side from Von Braun during the war that had bred the legendary team of German scientists who had led America to the moon.

  Erich was on the other side in that conflict because he was Jewish. His family had managed to get out when the Nazis took power in 1933. Erich’s father saw the future cle
arly enough, packed what they could take, and fled with his family to friends in Holland. Erich was a university student in physics in Amsterdam when the war came crashing into Holland. His father, a highly decorated officer of the First World War, still had friends and old comrades in the German Army, who pulled up to their home in Amsterdam, shouting that the SS was right behind them with arrest orders, and helped smuggle them down to the Spanish border once France surrendered. Some months later he was in Palestine, eagerly recruited by the British Army as a commando, given that he could speak perfect Berliner German.

  It was indeed a strange mix when, in the mid-1950s, Rothenberg came to the States and was tossed in with Von Braun and all the others. The bond of a dream of reaching to space transcended any past differences, which in reality were few, the German scientists were as appalled as the rest of the world when the full truth of the dark psychotic madness behind Hitler and his followers was finally revealed to the world. Together, they believed in the future of space, and that America must lead the way.

  Now Erich was the last of them. Amazingly the old man still stood sharply erect, as if a British drill sergeant just might be lurking around a corner, ready to pounce. Holding an emeritus chair in aerospace engineering, he still came in to the office at Goddard every day to check up on his “ladies and lads,” as he called them, with decidedly dated Old World charm. In a field dominated by men, it had been Eva who refused to be addressed as one of “Erich’s lads,” and he had finally broken under her determined will.

  The affection between them was genuine, as he offered and she accepted the traditional kiss on both cheeks and Victoria smiled as she received the same courtesy.

  Erich patted Victoria affectionately on the shoulder then hugged her.

  “You nailed him right between the eyes, young lady!” he cried, grinning like a proud grandfather at his newest prodigy. “I might have added a few more choice words in Yiddish and let him try to figure it out later, but, of course, that would have been improper.”