by Unknown
“Hold on,” she muttered, and he braced himself reflexively as she popped the clutch and laid rubber in reverse. He was still scrabbling with his seat belt as they left the parking lot in a cloud of tire smoke.
It was a straight kilometer of empty blacktop to the nearest gate, and Robin hit well over 200 klicks before she stood on the brake. The tires wailed a long chord in a minor key. The exceptionally stable little car was still pointing straight ahead when it jerked to a stop beside the guardhouse.
“Blowing out the carbon,” she said to the guard.
“Yeah. Not on the public highway, astronaut,” said the guard.
“Wilco.” The Porsche leaped away from the guardhouse with a rubbery burp, but Robin held its speed down. Soon she joined the traffic on NASA Road One, the speed-controlled skyway heading west, and put the car in Greyhound mode. She took her hands from the wheel but continued to stare straight ahead.
“You’re either in a very good mood or a very bad one,” said Jimmy, when the silence began to stretch.
“Right the second time.” She looked away from the hazy, featureless green horizon and into Jimmy’s eyes. “I’m about to do one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.”
“Oh? Don’t we usually have this conversation in a bar?”
“I’m not talking about you and me. Not directly. Although that goes down with the wreck.” Her throat was dry, her voice husky. “I’m talking about you and the crew. You’re off.”
He laughed. Not that he thought she was joking—it was just that the news was so comically unexpected. His face started to tingle, and he realized that all the blood had drained out of it, and he couldn’t think of anything to say.
She was talking again. “It is you and me, actually. Those weeks in space with a hard job to do. The rest of them sitting on top of us like a bunch of teenagers. We won’t be able to stay away from each other—”
“I didn’t expect we would.”
“—and we won’t be able to hide it—”
“I didn’t think we could.”
“—and I’m…not willing to be compromised that way. My authority undermined. My attention distracted by…by personal considerations.”
“This doesn’t sound like you, Robin.”
“You know something? In the days of sailing ships women were Jonahs. I resented that when I read about it, but I understood the problem. You’re the Jonah on this trip, Jimmy.”
“We’ve talked about this—how many times? It’s not the twentieth century, you know.”
“That’s beside the—”
“So were you lying before, when you said we could handle it?”
“I wasn’t lying to you. I was lying to myself.”
“Jesus Christ.” He looked away from her out the window, and tears came into his eyes. The Porsche was locked in loose formation with other autopiloted cars, all proceeding west along the skyway at precisely ninety kilometers per hour. A woman in a Sybo coupe looked at Jimmy curiously. He turned away. “I think I want to get back to the office.”
Robin punched keys on the console. “We’ll turn around at the interchange.”
“I think I want to file a protest.”
“I’ve already discussed it with Stith.”
“I can still file a protest.”
“And make it harder on all of us. Yes”—she sighed wearily—“you can probably make a discrimination charge stick. Even harassment. So if you want, you can keep me off this mission. And the others with me. Is that what you want?”
“I want to be a part of a mission I’ve devoted half my working life to achieve. That I won’t get another chance at.”
“You can’t be a part of it.” The voice was tired; the words were iron.
The Porsche automatically negotiated the interchange loop at I-45 and headed east again. They did not speak during the rest of the trip, even when Robin drove into the parking lot near the astronaut offices and rolled to a stop. Jimmy got out and walked away from the car without looking back.
Robin sat in the immobile Porsche and let the air conditioner vent cold air on her burning face, watching Jimmy’s square, compact body march stiffly across the grass. She had lied to him, lied as best she could. A hell of a way to break it off, Jimmy. But someday we had to break it off.
Meanwhile, this Travis Over-the-Hill. Something else to break: his ass.
“I’ll file a protest,” she had said to Stith. “The asteroid rendezvous—great. But Travis Hill, for all the respect I have for him—that everybody in the corps has for him—is not an asset to our crew.”
“You may file a protest.”
“Taylor…I don’t want to do that. Because I think I can make it stick.”
“Maybe. Indeed, it’s not unlikely. I would come out of it looking very bad indeed.” Stith rubbed his hands over his eyes. “Meanwhile, it will take time. Dick Crease’s crew will be assigned to the mission, while the various review boards straighten things out.”
“You’re telling me—”
He snapped at her bitterly. “No, you’re telling me—that it’s either you or him. That’s your two-bit ultimatum, Commander Braide. Well let me just warn you, don’t overestimate yourself. It’s him and you. Or you don’t go. No matter what happens to me.”
“God, Taylor, somebody must be leaning on you so hard—”
“You are out of line!” Stith turned away from her, trying to hide more distress than she had ever seen in him. Not that he was noted for grace under pressure. “That’s all we have to discuss for now. Call my secretary when you want to see me again…”
Had Taylor Stith not had all those tortured second thoughts after his lunch with Jack Fassio, had he not dawdled and sweat, had he made his mind up one week earlier, he could have nipped Travis’s wavering ambitions in the bud—caught him in Mexico with alcohol still in his system, entertaining severe doubts of his own worth. But he waited too long.
Always, the hard part is making up your mind. But Taylor was a good enough administrator to know that once you’ve decided to do it, you do it fast. Otherwise it’s blood all over the walls and ceiling. That’s why he hit Robin hard. That’s why Robin—it only took her half an hour to make up her mind—hit Jimmy hard, and why she announced the decision to the rest of her startled crew the same afternoon.
Taylor had to scramble to catch up with her. He released the revised mission profile first. That gave the science-news people something to play with—STARFIRE TO RENDEZVOUS WITH ASTEROID—and the next day he named two astronaut scientists in addition to Travis Hill as candidates for addition to the crew. He and Robin were the only ones who knew they didn’t have a chance, unless Travis obliged them all by publicly screwing up.
9
Harriet Richards had her sharp white teeth in a story. She went in to see her news editor, an ex-fax man who still harbored the notion that print was superior to moving pictures. Although he didn’t do much about this conviction except hang out at the press club bar, wearing galluses and polka-dot bow ties in an attempt to blend in with the other old hands, occasionally he would go out of his way to bring good fax reporters like Harriet into the viddie biz.
Harriet’s priorities were different. In her opinion, a minute or two of hard-hitting video was worth five or six columns of meandering faxese. Length was not the determinant of quality; putting the significant facts in the right order was.
She consulted a list of notes she’d whispered into her wordwriter. “Item: Travis Hill wants to go back into space. Item: Travis Hill’s uncle is a senator from Texas. Item: the other senator from Texas heads the committee that oversees NASA. Item: the NASA administrator is rumored to be retiring. Item: the Texas senator who oversees NASA was seen taking a long lunch with the director of the Johnson Space Center, a man who hates Travis Hill’s guts. Item: two weeks after this cozy lunch the guy that hates Travis Hill’s guts names him to the crew of Starfire.”
Her boss heard her out, then asked, “So what?”
“So what?
” She was fired up this morning, ready to go to the mat. “So, if you want to give me time for background and color, I can make a case that Travis Hill’s mother practically bribed the governor of Texas to put Albert Kreuger in office, that Kreuger had made some kind of deal with Jack Fassio, supporting positions Kreuger opposed when he was a state legislator, and that—get this—Travis Hill comes back from two weeks in a ritzy Mexican hideaway drying out from too much booze a few days before he gets invited to join the crew of one of the most important space missions of the century.”
Her boss tugged his impressively gray-streaked black beard. “So what does all this suggest to you?”
“I really have to spell it out?”
“I think you’d better.”
“Bribes, bribes, bribes. Travis Hill’s mother bribed the governor to make Al Kreuger a senator, with her money. Al Kreuger bribed Jack Fassio to get behind Travis Hill, with his political support. Jack Fassio bribed Taylor Stith to assign Travis Hill to Starfire, by promising to get Stith named administrator of NASA.”
“What if the current administrator doesn’t want to resign?”
“What if the president wants to fire him?”
“What makes you think so?”
“I hear the current administrator thinks that himself.”
“You got anybody that will give you independent confirmation? Somebody on the White House staff, for example?”
Harriet was silent.
“Harriet, I heard that rumor too—when the administrator’s office called me to deny it. Then the president’s media secretary called me to deny it. It’s been denied to every fax and video outfit in the country.”
“And that doesn’t send a message?”
“Maybe, but what message? Look at what you’ve got: a couple of senators do each other favors. So? Astronauts and NASA administrators don’t like each other. So? Some astronauts are drunks; Washington is full of rumors. So? So? Harriet, if any of this seems like news to you, you’re younger than I thought.”
“I think the public has a right to—”
He waved her to silence. “Save that tired speech. Maybe commercial video puts coincidence and rumor on the cables, but here at NPV, we don’t.” He rocked back in his chair and snapped his galluses. “Just keep on it.”
Try as they might—which was not that hard, in fact, for many reporters owed Travis Hill a colorful quote or two—the commercial feeds couldn’t nail down enough facts to field a story either. Thus, attended only by friendly news reports, Travis went through the mill that had been an aspiring astronaut’s lot since the beginning, the perverse tests that had seemingly been selected for the amusement of NASA’s hired medicos. They poked things down his throat and into his nose and ears and up his urethra and colon, stuck him full of needles, leaned weights on his eyeballs and flashed lasers at him, injected him with nauseating and disorienting drugs, scanned him by PET and CAT and NMR, made him talk to robots and psychiatrists for hours at a time, shook him and whirled him and bounced him up and down and plunged him into cold water, took samples of everything he circulated or excreted. He’d done all this before. He knew when to keep his mouth shut, when to open his bladder.
At last they found him to be a robust male human in his mid-thirties, with no obvious deficits. He wasn’t quite as fit as a robust male human in his mid-twenties, but they couldn’t find any a priori reason to keep him out of astronaut training.
Among other things, they made him learn how to put on a spacesuit. He knew how to put on a spacesuit. They made him learn how to use a parachute. He knew how to use a parachute. They made him learn how to deploy a life raft and climb aboard it; he pointed out some potential problems they’d overlooked.
The day Stith confirmed Travis’s assignment Robin got nervous. She started to do then what she would have done with any other candidate six months earlier: she tried to find out who he really was. But beneath his bred-in propensity to say “sir” and “ma’am,” Travis had grown stringier and rawer and more reticent than ever.
The Mission
10
Among the clustered, now mostly abandoned domes of the observatory on Kitt Peak in southern Arizona stood one odd telescope unaffected by the spreading lights of civilization, one that still benefited from the usually clear air of the desert mountains. This quaint telescope was not housed in a dome. Its only visible moving part was a gimballed mirror, mounted where two white metal towers met at an odd angle above a spur of rock—the vertical tower of the two, over thirty meters tall, supported a diagonal tube that angled off to the south for 140 meters, burrowing deep into the rock for much of that distance, exactly parallel to the Earth’s axis of rotation.
Each morning, before dawn, three lonely astronomers drove their station wagon up the mountain to the ruins of the great observatory and entered the subterranean chamber below the leaning tower, where they programmed the mirror to catch the rising sun—the only star this telescope was built to see. Until the heated air of midday rendered the atmosphere too turbulent for good seeing, they could study the image caught and reflected down the tube by the tracking heliostat: like a luminescent jellyfish laid out for dissection, the almost meter-wide solar disk writhed in silent agony on a table in the observation room, its granular photosphere seething in filtered light. Peering through welders’ glasses, the astronomers saw a solar surface frequently pocked with sunspot lesions, sometimes breaking into rashes of prominence, occasionally ruptured by pustulent flares.
This day the astronomers had arrived even earlier than usual, leading a second vehicle, a van driven by a NASA technician and filled with communications gear. The basic equipment needed to establish a video link to JSC had been installed in the preceding days, but several hours of nervous tweaking remained. All morning the voice of a NASA public affairs officer reverberated in the underground room, and as the minutes ticked past, the astronomers stopped trying to get any work of their own done. They stood back and quietly watched as the NASA engineers took over.
“…the launch director has given the go to pick up the count and proceed to launch,” said the NASA PAO’s voice on the audio feed. “The launch events are now being controlled by the orbital launch sequencer here on Archimedes Station, and will be from now until the T minus twenty-five-second point, when we’ll switch to the on board redundantly set launch sequencer. The computers on board are checking primary propulsion systems, capacitors, fuel injectors, and so forth, and all launch requirements are in proper mode. And the launch countdown proceeds toward an on-time launch at ten-fifty-five Houston time, at T minus two minutes…”
The solar astronomers had put their telescope at NASA’s service in hopes of catching a rare spectacle. The resulting video images would have more publicity value than scientific value, but then the budgets of all the agencies concerned—not just NASA, but the NSF, the DOE, the DOD, even the Office of Education—depended on public enthusiasm.
In the confined space the NASA PAO’s drone was constant, time-filling: “Pilot Spin Calder is performing the auxiliary power unit prestart, which consists of positioning a number of switches and verifying that they are in the proper position…”
But as local noon approached on this particularly hot July day, the watchers saw what they had been waiting for: across the bright wavering disk of the sun the black shadow of a dart-shaped object was slowly drifting: Starfire.
“There she is,” one of the technicians breathed, “right on schedule. That’s wonderful, right on schedule, we’re actually going to catch this after all. Christ, I hope the video circuits don’t fail us now.”
“They won’t. Let’s just hope there’s no hold in the count.”
“Yeah, we’re stuck in this hole and half of North America is out there looking at the sky.”
“If the count goes all the way, we’ve got the best view on the planet.”
The black silhouette fell in a smooth curve, angling upward across the boiling disk—
“Turn up the audio feed
, will you?”
“Four…”
“Three…”
—until the sleek dart was almost centered, still sliding in its inexorable orbit.
“Two…”
“One…”
It happened, but for the radio, in eerie silence—
“Power.”
“Ignition.”
—a terrific stream of punctuated fire bursting from Starfire’s magnetic blast nozzle, the ship drawing a molten wire across the noonday sun.
“Oww, what a ride!” a technician shouted.
The telescope lost sight of Starfire within seconds; the recorded image would join the nation’s archives.
In space, the brilliant glow of Starfire’s exhaust, brighter than the sun, glared through the heavily filtered windows of Archimedes Station. The only sound in the launch control room was the clicking of recorders and the muted cascade of numbers read off by robot voices, speaking from a dozen radio receivers. As control of the flight passed to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, the suave commentary of JSC’s public affairs officer fed the aether: “Still at fifteen percent of rated thrust, and the spacecraft’s bright exhaust of unfused hydrogen and lithium ions, perfectly collimated by the main engine, is plainly visible here in the western hemisphere on Earth, even at midday. Engine performance nominal at twenty seconds into the flight…”
Starfire pulsed and tingled with life. Its black radiator wings glowed dull red, fast brightening to orange. No one would ever hear the unimaginable racket of the reactor’s hundreds of thermonuclear explosions each second, for that repetitive holocaust was occurring in perfect vacuum. But the engine screamed with the efforts of high-speed pumps and centrifuges and nozzles and valves to keep vital fluids circulating through the ship’s fiery heart. To those on board, the noise was astonishing, a mad audio engineer’s mix of Niagara Falls with a cageful of hungry tigers. Slow beats of interfering high-frequency vibrations rolled through the crew module. On the flight deck the reflected images of glowing green and red instrument displays phased in and out of multiple exposure on the clear faceplate of Robin’s flight helmet.