by Unknown
“What can I do for you, Dr. Hill?”
Standing behind his desk, Stith regarded Travis with enforced placidity. Taylor Stith’s hair was fine, straight, mousy brown, cut in the boyish, white-sidewalled style of an earnest young Methodist minister, an impression reinforced by pale gray eyes that peered unblinking from beneath sparse eyebrows. Their coldness gave the lie to his smile. On a minister such a combination of features could have been a warning: Brother, I have brought you the Good News, and if you don’t like it, eat fire. But Stith’s religion was systems analysis; it had less to do with penitence than with PERT, less to do with forgiveness than with Zero Defects, less to do with faith than with Fail-Safe.
“Five minutes of straight talk, Taylor.”
“Please, sit down.” With his tweed jacket (useful in these frigid air-conditioned interiors) and button-down broadcloth shirt and wool tie, Stith strove to project a classic image. It was a look even more typical of southern fraternities than of the Ivy League—Stith’s engineering degrees were from Vanderbilt, his business degree from Purdue.
Travis sat in the hard chair that faced the desk, ignoring the goose bumps that formed on his bare arms below the short sleeves of his plaid sport shirt. Travis was a southern boy too, but the Texas hill country is a different South than central Tennessee. Despite a fondness for tooled leather and flashy belt buckles—and in Travis’s particular case, a gold I.D. bracelet on his right wrist, with his first name spelled out in five-point diamonds—the descendants of the Irish and Scottish and German settlers of that dry country tend to grow up stringy and raw, preferring simple issues, holding firm opinions, and keeping their religion firmly and simply in its place. Gilt and incense and crepe paper were for Hispanics, and none of this Deep South ecstasy and paranoia.
Travis was not so stringy as some of his cousins, but there was no fat on his two-meter frame. Much of the twenty-eight years since he’d learned to crawl had been lived in the sun, and the creases around his eyes and beside his mouth would have made him look older if they hadn’t fixed in place an appearance of optimism, a cheery mask. His mahogany tan set off green eyes and auburn hair cut close to the scalp in the manner of cowpokes and fighter pilots, of each of which Texas had bred more than its share, but although Travis owned a horse and got on the horse from time to time, he was by inheritance and training a petroleum geologist. The degrees were from the University of Texas and Princeton; the calluses and the sunburn came not from chasing cows but from roughnecking in the Permian Basin. His family owned not a single well, but his father’s patented methods for extracting the last reluctant drops of crude from depleted oil fields were worth more than mineral rights.
“Ball’s in your court, Trav,” said Stith. He was still standing, fussing with the magazines on his credenza.
“My last three research proposals have been stalled, and two of them canceled at the last minute. All but one of the missions I’ve been scheduled for since my jump have been reshuffled, and somehow I always get assigned off. You got the guts to tell me the truth?”
Stith paused. His lips were set in that pleasant curve which to the unwary suggested good humor. He gazed steadily at Travis out of the window’s glare, meaning to convey that he had the guts to say whatever he wanted, and that he had no intention of letting Travis Hill stampede him into statements damaging to the agency.
Recently promoted to assistant administrator for Manned Spaceflight Operations, Johnson Space Center, a title that rated a secretary and a largish space on a middle floor of JCS’s Project Management Building, Stith was shrewd enough to keep his decor strictly GI, enlivening the bare walls only with a couple of color photos of launch vehicles, and on the credenza some snaps of the wife and kids and a silver-framed eight-by-ten holo, boldly autographed, of himself shaking hands with Ted Purvis. He now adjusted it minutely—it had been taken three years earlier when Purvis, the president-elect, was a space-enthusiastic Florida senator. Then, at last, Stith sat down.
The message wasn’t particularly subtle, but it was clear. Stith was on the first string. Travis, on the other hand, wasn’t even a team player. Stith had clout—the soon-to-be-president had pressed his flesh—while as Stith well knew, the strongest card in Travis’s hand, now that his notoriety was beginning to fade, was a booze-loving uncle who had been too long in the Texas state senate.
“Travis, we can go into fine detail if you want. The record will show there’s nothing personal, not a thing.”
“That’s what the record will show?”
Stith nodded pleasantly. “As we see it, the way the program has been shaping up over the last couple of years, it looks as if your expertise will be of great value to the folks down here on the training end. Meanwhile we’ll continue to welcome your scientific input, of course.”
Travis surprised him by showing a row of white teeth in what looked like a genuine grin. “Okay, I guess that’s plain enough. Want to hear my offer?”
Stith cocked his head a couple of millimeters. “Your?…”
“I sure as hell hate to deprive the training office of my expertise,” Travis went on amiably, “considering all the expense the agency has gone to on my behalf and so on—but fact is, I’m thinkin’ my work might benefit from a shift to the private sector.”
“If that’s really the way you see things…” Stith’s eyes widened with ill-disguised glee.
“Especially if the project I have in mind gets the kind of government support I’m sure you’re gonna agree it deserves,” added Travis.
Stith’s eyes narrowed again. Was he being hustled? He fingered a pressure switch on his lapel comm. “Julie, Dr. Hill and I don’t want to be disturbed.”
Her voice came through a desk speaker. “Okay, Chief. You’re isolated.”
“So what’s this bullshit about ‘support’?” Stith demanded. “What are you trying to pull?”
“I wish you guys weren’t all a bunch of chickenshits, Taylor, but you are and there’s nothing I can do about it. Okay, I’m getting out, that’s what you want. I’m setting up a private center for asteroid study. And I’m going to launch it with NASA’s blessing.”
Stith sneered. “Christ, another one. Another one of these little independent hobby club tax write-offs kibitzing Congress to tell us our business.”
“A research center. Doing science. Exogeology is the four-bit word, what you hired me for in the first place.”
“You can go or you can stay, Dr. Hill, but there will be no agency support for your private schemes.” Stith put his palms flat on his green blotter. “I’d say it’s been about five minutes.”
Travis didn’t move. He could look more relaxed than most men, even in a hard steel chair, and his eyes were no stranger to glare, which rather defeated the purpose of Stith’s office arrangements. “What I want from NASA is a research contract. I want infrared satellite time—”
“Satellite time!” Aside from launch vehicles, there was no more precious commodity in NASA’s coffers than access to its oversubscribed scientific satellites; universities and other agencies were wait-listed years in advance.
“Not a long-term commitment,” said Travis. “Just a few minutes a month, for a year or two. And I’ll give you an impeccable target list. You won’t have to apologize to anybody.”
“Impossible.”
“It’s okay to wait until next fiscal year.” Travis was calm, almost comforting. “It will take me that long to get my ducks in a row.”
Sullen now, realizing his yelps had served only to encourage Travis, Stith said hoarsely, “Say what you’ve got to say.”
“Well, then. I’ll be calling on my new acquaintances in the media, tradin’ on whatever meager fame I’ve got left to get my little center launched.” Travis talked as if outlining his plans to an interested investor. “Now there is somethin’ to be said for the adversary slant”—he nodded, as if the idea had been Stith’s—“those reporters and writers really go for a shoutin’ match. One side says, ‘What are we suppo
sed to do? The guy wouldn’t cooperate.’…The other side says the first side is, oh, cowardly and incompetent, stuff like that…you know how it goes. But personally, I don’t think that’s smart. What’s a little extra publicity weighed against a year’s satellite time?”
“Nobody could do that, put you at the head of a list that’s three years long already.” Stith tried to sound stern, but his objection was a confession of weakness.
Travis, who had not missed the shift from whether to how, abruptly stood. “Hey, looks like I’ve taken more than five minutes. Don’t worry about giving me a quick answer. A hard copy of my resignation’s in your in-box, but I don’t expect anything to be official before the first of the month.”
“Travis, for Christ’s sake…!” Stith swallowed the rest.
Travis’s gaze shifted to the holo of Stith and the president-elect grinning past each other, clutching paws. “You got a great reputation for getting things done, Taylor.” He sauntered to the door and paused, his crinkled grin stopping just short of a wink. “Don’t even bother to tell me if the answer’s no.”
The atrium bar of Houston’s Bolivar Hotel was a meander of potted ficus trees and etched glass panels, crowded with loud conventioneers and singles from downtown office buildings getting an early start on the weekend. But Travis spotted Bonnie within seconds; his radar homed on her frequency.
And hers on his. She was leaning forward, waving eagerly, about to stand when she caught his eye. He moved through the crowd of three-piece English worsteds and fancy-stitched twill ranch jackets, through stifling clouds of perfume—Thai Stick de Montrachet, Sweet Death, and others with similarly inviting monikers—without registering anything except Bonnie’s blue eyes, the shaggy blond wings of her cowgirl-style hair, the clinging champagne silk of her tailored blouse.
He got to the table and said, “God, you look so good,” just as she was saying, “You’re sure lookin’ good, Travis,” which made both of them laugh. He slid onto the cushioned bench and sat at right angles to her, not quite touching her nyloned knee with his corded one. They gazed at each other a moment, on the verge of laughing again, saying plainly enough in mime what they wouldn’t say out loud. Then Bonnie’s smile pulled at the corner of her wide mouth and faded away, as she sat back against the bench.
He leaned away too, in time to catch the eye of a harassed, scurrying waitress. “Jack Daniel’s, if you’d be so kind. Straight up, water back.” Bonnie raised a blond eyebrow. Travis caught the look. “I’m on vacation,” he said. “Your husband joining us here?”
“He said he’d catch up at the restaurant. He cornered the mayor of Iraan”—she pronounced it Ira Ann, the way the natives did—“up in our hospitality suite.”
Travis chuckled. “I know that fella. He’s the biggest leaser in the basin. I guess he’ll be signin’ for a couple of laser pulse drills before he wriggles himself out of Sam’s clutches.”
“Well, someday we’ll make money on those things, Trav.”
“Hope so. I hate it when Sam tells me ‘I told you so.’”
Travis’s drink arrived and he held out a card toward the waitress’s tray, but she refused it. “The lady said put it on hers, sir.”
He shrugged and withdrew his card. “I guess business is good,” he said to Bonnie.
“As you’d know if you would read our quarterly reports. Anyhow, it’s the same pockets.”
“Here’s to the family pockets.” He clinked his glass against her tulip of champagne and smiled at her. “First time I met you, you were sneezin’ your head off on that stuff.”
“At that party for the neighbors your daddy threw…”
“Which Ma made him throw…”
“The first time I ever tasted champagne. Sixteen years old.”
“The first time I met the girl next door. A real girl, my Lord. The first night I ever laid awake the whole night, hot as a pistol, just thinkin’ about—”
“You’ve recited your lewd adolescent fantasies before.” Bonnie laid a cool hand on his, her fingertips brushing his diamond-studded name bracelet. “Maybe once or twice too often.”
“That’s what comes of puttin’ young boys in military schools, they grow up sex maniacs.”
Her laugh came from the back of her throat. “They do anyway.” She moved her hand away, back to her champagne. “Besides, you always had more important things on your mind. Stars and meteors and stuff.”
He sipped his whiskey. “Wish to hell my daddy’d sent Sam off to polish brass for a few years, instead of me.” His face darkened. “I respect him for what he can do with the business. But I never did like him always gettin’ in first—just because he was born first.”
“I’ve heard this before, too,” she said warily.
“He took advantage of my absence.”
“Well, you never tried to take advantage of your presence. Until much too late.”
“Divorce my brother and marry me.” He smiled at her, a wide smile that was meant to be inviting but showed more hunger than he intended.
Her voice was steady. “Travis, you know how I feel about you. But I love Sam and I love my little girl.”
“Just kidding.”
“Then I guess the subject is ended.” Her nylon thighs whispered as she hitched herself sideways on the bench, away from him. “What kind of vacation you on?” Her tanned fair skin was pinker now.
Travis pretended not to hear the question. “Are we expectin’ Jim and Manuela at the restaurant?”
“They’re invited.” She didn’t have to say the rest, that Jim, his younger brother, newly out of the medical school at Rice with ambitions to be a heart surgeon, inevitably found pressing business whenever other members of his family were in town.
Travis took another sip of his drink before looking Bonnie in the eye. “Matter of fact I’m not on vacation. I put in my resignation.”
“Travis…” Her concern was simple and unguarded, but this time her soothing hand kept its place on the oak table top.
“Nothing abrupt. I’ve been talking with the university folks in Austin for a few months. They’re glad to put me on as an associate professor in planetary studies, tenure track, good prospects. And I’ve raised, uh, private money for a new research center. I believe I’ll get NASA’s cooperation to get myself started”—he showed his teeth again, within that rictus that passed for a smile—“since I explained it to them so carefully.”
“That sounds…good,” she said, making it sincere. “Something new. A challenge.”
“I’ve been away from real science too long. Fact is, NASA never can put science up front. Not really their fault, it’s a structural problem. No big organization can plan for the unexpected.”
She looked at him, not understanding from his oblique and choppy remarks precisely what he was talking about, but understanding what he meant. “I just want you to know I…support you, Travis.”
He drained the bourbon and stared at her. “You’d best support me out of this here saloon, sister-in-law. Before I have another couple of these and make up my mind to try something biblical.”
“Biblical?”
“Cain and Abel. David and Bathsheba. Something like that.”
She laughed again, that throaty chuckle, genuine and happy. “I doubt you’ve spent a Sunday in church for quite some time.”
On the first day of the following month, August, Travis’s sporty white Mistral whirred over a ragged blacktop ranch road that looped through limestone hills north of Bandera, leaving shimmering air in the wake of its turbine.
Travis always liked the homeward drive. To his mind, Houston, with its mosquitoes and skinny pine trees, was barely Texas. In the hill country west of San Antonio the bony yellow Cretaceous seabed is patchy with tough grasses that burst into colorful flower for a month or so in the spring, then wither to brown beneath the mesquite and prickly pear. Twisted live oaks dot the hillsides, and shaggy jumpers, known locally as cedars, ooze perfumed resin in the dry heat of summer. In this cru
sty land the diamondbacks are ancient and sly, the deer quick and delicate, and the buzzards, often found squatting in convocation beside the road, seem almost the size of small aircraft, their dusty black color scheme not intended for stealth but as a morbid reminder, perhaps, of the end of all flesh.
Where the road came down beside the river a grove of stately pecans announced the beginning of Hill Ranch property, the spread his mother had inherited and that his father had insisted on buying from her—independent cuss that he was—with the money actually going into trusts for their sons.
Travis turned off the road where two whitewashed cedar posts supported a wooden crossbar with the name “Hill” scripted in strap iron. His low-slung Mistral bounced over a rusty cattle guard and nosed into a water-sculpted limestone stream bed, dry at this season, but flanked with two-meter-tall black-and-white flash flood markers. The drive to the ranch house wound up and along an aisle of huge cedars draped with Spanish moss.
The new house was long and low, faced with yellow-white fieldstone and roofed with Mexican tile. It sat in a carpet of Bermuda grass bigger than JSC’s central campus, three acres of it sloping gently toward the banks of the green Medina River. Beyond the clipped lawn, edged with whitewashed rocks, the ground was bare and stony; a few placid Herefords roamed the oak thicket between the new house and the old one, which had accumulated around the Kreuger’s original dog-trot cabin of 1855.
From the vicinity of the half-hidden barns and stables of the working part of the ranch, voices speaking Spanish fitfully disturbed the still, hot air; they belonged to the Martinez family, hereditary residents since before Travis’s mother was born, and the only real ranchers left on the place.
Travis left his car between a white Cadillac hydro and a Chevy ATV in the carport, and toted his single canvas bag toward the kitchen door.
“Ma?” The house was cool; an air conditioner hummed somewhere in the shadows. He went through the sunny deserted kitchen and dining room, past shadowed halls, down polished cedar steps to a big room spread with Navajo and Zapotec rugs, furnished in hide-upholstered knotty pine. He dropped his bag beside the steps.