CHAPTER 38

The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

4 July

Haley worked nearly twenty-four hours a day, deep under technical problems that exceeded his capacity to handle. From all around the world, though, experts recruited by Joscelyn Donahue arrived. Nearly every one of them went through three phases: a sort of angered disbelief, as if they had been conned into an illegal activity; then nervous worry, as they contemplated the enormity of what they had been hired to do; then the final stage -- a nearly giddy enthusiasm -- which appeared anywhere from a few minutes to a few days after arrival. How long it took any one member of the team to pass through these phases depended on how tangible each individual's results seemed. For the design people and modification crews, the results sprouted over the circular ditch right before their eyes. For the emigrating specialists, merely drawing up their equipment manifests and seeing the items delivered and stored in the upper reaches of the pods served to generate unbridled optimism.

For the pilots, though, who had to rehearse constantly in a simulator, the only impression was one of claustrophobic tedium unrelieved by the freedom of actual flight. And the more troubled of the two astronauts was definitely Tammy Reis.

"She's only had two weeks to dry out," Donahue said, watching test results scroll up the screen in her office.

"Oh, she's sober," Haley agreed. "As sober -- and sour -- as a judge. She performs well on the simulator, but there's no... interest there. It's as if she's waiting for something to happen."

"They're both itching to get out and fly the damned thing."

"She's not. She's listless. I think you picked a clunker."

Donahue spoke with a firm, level tone. "She's no clunker. Don't you get it? Something happened on her last Shuttle flight. Something that made her quit and sink into despair. It'll take a while for her to recover--"

"It'd better not take more than eight weeks."

"Trust me," Donahue said. "Trust her."

***

Trust her, Haley thought, watching Reis in the simulator. She performed superbly, handling the bizarre flying doughnut with consummate skill. Reis always nailed it right into orbit. So did Franck when they traded places. In Reis, though, he saw no joy at successful maneuvers, no disappointment at minor flaws. Even stranger, no alarm at any of the failure scenarios the computer threw at her. She handled everything in a machinelike manner. No emotion, just stimulus and response. Maybe that's good, he mused. Maybe she's exactly what we need: a machine with a human mind.

11-12 July

Marcus Grant -- dressed in a tropical khakis -- stepped off the Cessna to face Chad and Joscelyn. Both of them wore safari outfits and looked a bit like novices in the Great White Hunter Club. It was the first time in weeks all three had been together. Two men and one women disembarked with him, the last of the flight crew.

Grant inspected the construction site with the meticulous attention of a race-horse owner inspecting a thoroughbred. All sixteen pods now stood connected into a single unit, and the construction crew labored in the hot confines of the circular trench to install the thirty-foot-diameter tapering cones that were the plug nozzles. The nozzles were built in Germany and flown in pairs to Libya, where they sat on the runway for a few hours without inspection before heading directly to Mogadishu while paperwork indicated that they had been inspected and shipped to the Sudan as desalinating irrigation pumps. They looked the part, their interiors crammed with plumbing, the actual purpose of which was to cool the ærospike and preheat the cryogenic fuel via a heat-exchanger.

Grant was impressed. The spaceship dwarfed the cluster of mobile homes now located outside the circle, behind a protective berm.

"I sure wish we could test-fly this baby for real," Grant said. "We can't know if our simulation is one hundred percent accurate."

Donahue and Haley shook their heads almost in unison. "A test flight," she said, "would blow our cover as surely as an actual flight. We have one shot and one only. The crew understand this -- either I or Chad've explained it to every one of them. They're willing to trade the risk for whatever personal reasons they have for going up."

"And what," Grant muttered in an irritated way, "is Reis's personal reason?"

"What is your problem with Tammy? She's performed superbly."

"She's right, boss."

Grant eyed Chad, then turned his attention back to Donahue. "She's spying on us. I know it. I had a detective check out the bar she practically lived in the last few months. The owner ran a bar tab for her. A big one. It got settled the day after she left for here."

"Marc, we need her. We need Jon Franck. They have both contributed their knowledge, skill, and wisdom without any hint of... of duplicity. If she is a spy, I think she's on the cusp. I think she can be turned."

Chad cut in. "Reis and I got into a sort of argument a few days ago. She was miffed that nothing we were doing was by the book, at least not the way NASA wrote it. First, she criticized the pressure suits. I explained to her that the concept was nearly forty years old and actually developed by NASA and then dropped for political reasons: a thousand-dollar space suit couldn't win the congressional support that a million-dollar one could. Then she protested that the tools we'll be using in orbit were bought on sale at Sears. Then she objected that there was only one onboard guidance computer! I asked her how many times one of her five redundant shuttle computers had broken down. When she said nearly once every other flight, I said 'This station's only going on one flight, so we have a fifty-fifty chance that we'll make it. You can take a parachute if you're worried about not possessing the Right Stuff.' You know what she did?"

Grant said nothing. He merely stared more darkly at the younger man.

"She thought about it for a moment, nodded, and then went back into the simulator."

Grant sighed and headed toward the four-story structure. "Biting her tongue all the way, I'll bet. Didn't want to blow her cover."

"I don't think so," Haley said, following. "If that was the case, why did she bring it up in the first place? If she was going to turn us in and run, why any concern about whether we make it or not?"

Grant hesitated, unable to come up with an answer.

"Look, Marc"--Donahue laid a slender hand on his arm--"I'll try to draw her out some more. I really think she's on our side."

"Then you don't know her." Grant looked at their curious gazes, then added, "Read any interview she's ever given, damn it! Watch tapes of her on TV! I did, after you told me you'd hired her. She's as big a NASA stooge as Barry Gibbon!"

Joscelyn climbed down into the trench. Heli-arc welders illuminated the curving pit with a bright white glow. "All right, Marc. I'll feel her out."

"Wish you'd leave that to me," Chad said with a wicked grin.

"Shut the hell up," Grant muttered, turning away from them to gaze up into the shadowy depths of one of the pods. Its oxygen tank in place, engine plumbing hanging downward awaiting connection to the plug nozzle, it looked like the underside of some tentacled sea creature floating overhead. The oppressive equatorial summer heat, exacerbated by the welders, transformed the trench into a hellish bowel of torment.

Grant noted that the workers held up well under the brutal conditions, though several sat against the relatively cool earth, downing gulps of water from bota bags provided by youngsters, children of some of the native work force.

Short of sabotage by NASA spies, Grant thought, this will work.

***

Reis possessed no interest in sabotage, but she spied as much as she could, conducting her own investigation of the Grant Enterprises operation. Under the guise of agreeing to an interview with Joseph Lester, she intended to sneak in an interrogation of her own.

Hillary recorded the two in the cramped interior of the space station cockpit. Lester scrunched behind the chairs, asking questions. The pilot sat -- back horizontal, head level with feet -- in one of the two wide, padded seats, fingering a softly burnished metal buckle connected to the five-point harness she would wear during liftoff. The photographer knelt on the other seat, leaning as far back as she could to achieve a decent wide-angle shot encompassing Reis and the control panel. Light from the overhead window had been blocked out with a reflective cover in order to keep the cabin cool and protect the delicate electronics The only source of light was a pair of dollar-bill-size fluorescent panels set into the low overhead.

"On the shuttle," Tammy said as if conducting a tour, "our seats were narrow and hard, based more on the design of a John Deere tractor seat than on that of a plush airliner. They worked just fine, since you only needed them for about fifteen minutes going up and half an hour coming down. After we go orbital, though, we'll spin this baby to impart artificial gravity. Since it's small, we can't spin it at six rpm to mimic a full Earth gravity -- Coriolis forces and the gravity gradient would make us sicker than we'd ever be in free fall. At three rpm and a quarter gee -- the maximum we can safely give it -- these seats will feel pretty comfy at the end of a hard day." She looked up at the camera, inadvertently, then at Lester. "Every day is going to be a hard day up there, as far as I can tell."

"Do you miss the shuttle?" Lester asked.

"I miss what NASA was. I miss its promise."

"And UNITO?"

"If I believed UNITO could do what NASA had done, I wouldn't be here. If I believed NASA had a future, I wouldn't be here." The answer was more true than Lester knew. If NASA had a future, it would only be because she had penetrated a rival program that could show up the space agency.

"I'm fascinated about the man behind this," she said.

"Yes," Lester said, "but this interview is about you."

She sighed and leaned back in the chair. "Can we take a break?"

Kaye turned off the camera. "Good idea. I've got to switch discs anyway."

"You've both met him, right?"

They shook their heads. "We've met Haley. Grant hasn't shown his face to us."

Hillary added, "I think he's been around, though."

"Where do you think the money came from for all this?" Tammy turned onto her stomach and planted her chin on a fist. Dressed in a grey and maroon flight suit, she looked like a visitor from the future, curious about the local inhabitants.

"Black market. Grey market." Lester tried to get comfortable in a space behind the seats smaller than a refrigerator. He liked nothing more, though, than a good talk about classy crooks. "He's great at staying out of the limelight, just as a lot of billionaires do."

"So there aren't any pictures of him?"

Kaye shook her head. "None that we've seen. And Haley won't let us interview him."

"Grant is here?" Reis said slowly.

"The crew said he's been here." Lester frowned. "Wait a minute. You remember last February when we were at Mojave and Larry Poubelle got shot at? The police report mentioned that Grant was there."

Hillary's forehead wrinkled in a frown of thought. "We might have caught him on video." She reached into the equipment case by her feet. Inside were dozens of discs from the last few months.

"Any idea how old he is?" Tammy felt suddenly close to answering the riddle of the entire conspiracy. Perhaps knowing the mastermind behind the project would give her an edge, a chink in the armor that she could exploit without resorting to calling in Milton's NSA cavalry.

"Neither of us saw him," Lester said, watching Kaye riffle through the disc cases. "He must have just come and gone."

Kaye pulled a disc out and said, "Here it is." She loaded it into the videocam and set it on scan, looking into the viewfinder to watch the playback. After a few moments of searching, she muttered, "I'll be damned -- look who's there!" She handed the camera to Tammy.

"Watch as the view pans right, past Nomad. You can see Haley and Donahue, and the one in the middle with his back to us is most probably Grant."

Tammy held the viewfinder up to her eye and stared at the image within. A crisply focused, professionally smooth pan-right lingered on the graceful lines of the sleek obsidian-hued spaceplane. The black fuselage provided a background against which three people stood, silently surveying their rival's work.

She recognized the other two immediately. Haley like a mountaineer in his rain-soaked down parka, Donahue a blaze of red hair in an emerald green slicker.

Even more familiar, she realized with a shock that froze her heart, was the man in the middle. He turned to glance behind him, then frowned at the camera. Despite his prematurely grey hair and lines etched by more than a dozen added years of age, she had no difficulty recognizing the face of Paul Volnos.


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