Big institutions, if unwatched and unchallenged, make big mistakes.
-- Ralph Nader
Too many variables, Jack Lundy thought. Too many different things being changed all at once. It was almost like the old days before Challenger. President Crane wanted to make a big deal of the quick turnaround time on Constitution, seeing it launched next month, less than six weeks after the end of its Enduro flight. Whatever happened on that previous flight remained a mystery to Lundy, who only knew that Congressman Woolsey maintained his seclusion after ten days and the shuttle commander, Tammy Reis, quit the program to become a drunken fixture at The Heat Shield. Rumors spread like a plague, and he knew of at least seven different theories concerning her plight, all of them fraught with sexual implications. Though the gossip threatened to distract many technicians from their duties, Lundy kept his attention planted squarely on his work.
With changes to the firing-sequence programming and the delivery of the latest solid rocket engines and the dizzying turnaround for Constitution, Lundy feared that safety was once again taking a back seat to political necessity. Crane had a point to make about the Shuttle and the Interplanetary Treaty. NASA management apparently concluded that UNITO might choose one launcher to be the sole transportation system for the entire planet, and they hoped to influence the choice -- among the STS, Europe's Ariane 2000, Japan's N-2, and Russia's venerable Proton -- with a good showing in the next few months. President Crane concurred, hence the sudden acceleration in launch schedules and the attempt to reinstate the "can-do" enthusiasm of the 1960's.
Lundy knew better. He gazed out his office door at the people walking to and fro. Career bureaucrats, half of them, who boasted of management skills while almost proudly professing their ignorance of engineering. The rest... burnout cases such as he, dinosaurs from the growingly distant Space Age, hanging in there for the pension or trying to rescue a scrap or two of the dream. There may have been a handful of young people who possessed some vision of humanity living in Space, but they burned out even faster, leaving within a few years to pursue positions at foreign launch efforts for lower pay, or using what skills they may have picked up at NASA as résumé filler in search of higher-paying work in the domestic private sector. Some simply vanished completely, apparently leaving ærospace altogether.
He looked once again at the thick printout of programming for the launch sequence. The recently redesigned rocket motors required new sequencing commands. New commands required new programming. New programming demanded meticulous debugging. Debugging consumed time. And President Crane let it be known in his State of the Union message that time was something NASA would not be allowed. The UN vote could not have come at a more inconvenient time.
The SRB ignition sequence alone consisted of over ten thousand lines of code. Jack realized that he would have some evening and weekend reading ahead of him.
The phone buzzed. "Hello?" he muttered to the speaker grill.
"Dad!" The voice over the speaker was deep and strong.
"Alan!" Immediately, Lundy's face and voice brightened. "How are you, son?" He unconsciously sat up straighter, his shoulders squaring with pride.
"Fine, Dad. Guess what -- the promotion came through! You're talking to Lieutenant Colonel Alan Shepard Lundy, United States Space Command." Even with his masculine baritone voice, he sounded like a kid to Jack, as if his son had come running home with news of a home run that won the game.
"Alan, I'm very proud of you. And I know your mother will be, too."
"Where is she? I tried calling her over there, but they said she was on vacation."
Lundy laughed. "She's in California. At the San Diego Wild Animal Park for the Ark Society. Up to her elbows in white rhino semen, no doubt--"
"Dad!"
"--she and crazy friends. Did you hear that they found a female passenger pigeon in some old guy's freezer in Vermont? They're all agog about finding a viable strand of DNA to clone. I told her 'as if we need more pigeons,' and she--"
"Father."
Jack paused. Alan only used the term to get his attention. "What?"
"I've been transferred to Vandenberg. I'll give you my number when I'm settled in."
"Are they taking the Shuttle launching facility out of mothballs?"
"I can't tell you that, Dad. It's a big step up for me, though."
"That's great son. I'll tell your mother."
They chatted some more, then said their goodbyes and disconnected. Jack pondered the meaning of his son's transfer. The Vandenberg launch site had never been used for Shuttle flights. It was one of the most expensive boondoggles in history: the military cared nothing for the STS but demanded a piece of the action in an effort to control the spacecraft's design and use. The Air Force insisted on all sorts of modifications, such as the capability to land practically anywhere on the planet despite a notable lack of suitably long runways; such changes raised the cost and delayed launches from the mid-Seventies until the early Eighties. The west coast launch site cost way over a billion dollars, back when that was a huge sum of money. Never used, it was summarily mothballed after the destruction of Challenger when the military abandoned any publicly professed interest in manned space travel.
Now it jumped suddenly to the front burner again. Lundy could see no other reason for his son to be promoted and moved to Vandenberg. As far as the world knew, Space Command was nothing more than a debris-tracking service for NASA and the military, keeping tabs on the thousands of satellites, living and dead, and the boosters, fragments, nuts, bolts, and paint chips circling the planet in the Sargasso that was Low Earth Orbit.
Lundy frowned. Little more than a week after it passed the UN, this happens. He tried to make sense of it, but his mind simply had no capacity to generate conspiracy theories. That was more Igor Svoboda's hobby. He turned back to the printout. It would be a long six weeks.
The six weeks passed for Tammy Reis in a fog of alcoholic incoherence. Far from being flooded with calls from clandestine space colonization cabals, she had not even received a single call back on the résumés she had faxed to ærospace companies in the first week of her unemployment. After that, her visits to The Heat Shield became more frequent. It was her attempt to drown out the incessant dreams. Doused with liquor, the dreams either never surfaced or were forgotten upon waking, she was never quite sure which. She did not want to be sure of anything ever again.
Had it all been an act -- former astronaut Tamara Reis hits bottom -- it would have been superb in its realism. Tammy, though, was in a tailspin out of which even her friends could not pull her.
"Shuttle's actually going to go up next week," Jon told her as she sat on a bar stool among the bar's non-spacefaring clientele, well outside The Ablation Room.
"Who cares," she muttered. " 'Nother Sputnik!" she yelled at the bartender.
Ed Laird slid the drink, a vodka highball, to her, a sour expression crossing his Captain Nemo face. "Listen, Reis, you're downing these things as if you've taken out a contract on your liver. Ease up or I'll jettison you on your retro."
"Ed, shut up with that stupid space lingo. God, ten years I've been coming here and you still talk like someone from a stupid comic. It was stupid when I first heard it and it's stupid now and it'll be stupid when I'm..." She lowered her head and started to cry.
"Jon?" she said. "Is Sam around?"
He shook his head. "She's in training, Tammy. She's mission specialist on the flight next week. You're not remembering anything anymore. You're not aware of anything."
"Aware." Her crying turned to a disdainful snort. "I'm aware of one thing." She downed the Sputnik in three pained gulps. "Samantha's not here?"
Franck shook his head.
"Damn. This is girl stuff."
"What girl stuff?" he asked in a cautious tone.
"You know," she said, her speech slurring as the alcohol fraction of her blood continued to increase. "Like, whether getting blasted every night makes you miss your period or is it just a body fat thing?"
Something akin to vertigo seized Jon. The edge of the bar became a precipice from which he clung in fear. "You missed your... ?"
She could see enough of him to tell that he was counting backward.
"No," she said weakly. "No, that's not it. It's gotta be body fat. I read it somewhere. I haven't been keeping food down, so I must've lost weight."
"Tammy, you've got to see a doctor. This could be--"
"No!" she screamed, sliding off the bar stool and pushing away from Franck. "I've gotta be here! NASA needs me! I'm part of the team, don'cha unnerstand?"
Franck looked at Laird. The barkeep nodded and came around to help the astronaut strongarm Tammy back home.
The interlude did not go unnoticed by the patrons of the establishment, including one who had more than a tabloid reader's interest in the fallen angel.