...if your career involves space science or engineering, you cannot be on record criticizing NASA. It is a monopoly, the only game in town.
-- Gregg Easterbrook
The party wasn't going well. With Constitution launched just the day before, the technicians refused to stop talking shop.
Jackson Lundy had seen it constantly in his thirty years at NASA; after all, he too possessed that mixture of intelligence and monomania mandatory for spacecraft engineers. Sending people into Space was no ordinary job.
Here he stood, though, throwing the archetypical New Year's Eve party. Balloons, streamers, loud music, animated conversation. And as with all parties filled with coworkers, the conversation inevitably turned toward work. Here a pair of balding, spectacled men punctuated their dialogue with fingertaps at each other's chests. There an attractive chemical engineer entranced a coterie of younger men and women with tales of the Good Old Days. And across Lundy's living room, Igor Svoboda sat in the apex of the cigarette-smoke-tan corner group, holding court with other malcontents.
Though the banter coruscated loudly over the music, and hands swung cigarettes and drinks in grand arcs and imperative thrusts, no one seemed to be having a good time in the here and now.
And only ten minutes to midnight.
Lundy gazed around the room. "Missile!" he called out.
A rocket's plume of red hair swirled about; an emerald lamé strapless evening gown glittered like pirate treasure; Melissa Lundy turned toward her husband at the sound of her nickname.
His wife was a beautiful woman, still in possession of the charms he had seen over a third of a century ago, before men rode in rockets. She glided toward him, a slight flush on her tawny skin highlighting her feline green eyes. She smiled.
"It's almost time, sweetheart." She slid a lightly-tanned arm around his waist, her long nails gently tickling at his midriff. She held a wine glass in her other hand and gazed at him from a height almost equal to his by virtue of her four-inch high heels.
Jack nodded, slipping an arm around her. "And no one's going to notice or care, the way things are going. Look at Iggy."
"The sourpuss." Melissa smiled. "Don't let it get to you."
"It does. It does because he's so right." He gave her a hug and pulled away, drifting toward the knot of gloom.
Igor Svoboda, almost ten years younger than Lundy, exuded a Slavic grimness that made him seem a century older. Hunched over, forearms on knees, he sat in the corner group staring at the others around him from tobacco-hued eyes buried under dark, thick eyebrows. His words grumbled out from lips framed by a black beard that refused to maintain any degree of orderliness.
"Constitution is a case-in-point," his deep voice growled. "Take this flight--"
"Please!" someone interjected.
Svoboda continued, oblivious to humor. "Two delays before launch. There is no way we can turn it around for the next liftoff in February! SSME's must be swapped, no time to refurbish the ones on the orbiter, hpu's need upgrading, SRB's are late coming out of Utah. What gives with these people?"
Lundy listened and nodded. They lived in a world of acronyms, where jumbles of letters -- meaningless to outsiders -- denoted items or systems as instantly recognizable to them as chemical symbols to a chemist, or magical phrases to a wizard.
"If Constitution can't launch," Svoboda said, "then Atlantis is delayed. Delays multiply right down the line. And blam, our launch schedule is blown to pieces."
"Whatever happened to our commitment to Space, damn it!"
The young man who made the outburst was unfamiliar to Lundy. Probably someone's date.
"It seems," the stranger continued, "that the only thing we do is make proposals to get funding and then make up excuses why things aren't happening so we can get more funding to correct the problems. Then when we get a chance to go into Space, we delay, delay, delay. It's as if we'd rather draw our pay tinkering with the damned spacecraft than launching them. When did we stop looking at the sky?"
"At about the time we started working here." Svoboda stared gloomily at the young man, then up at Lundy. "Jack! Come join the mutineers, tovarisch."
"Maybe it's best," Lundy said with a wry smile at the young guest near Svoboda, "that we delay and delay. After all, that would make sure that the UN won't get off the ground."
"Don't start me on that Interplanetary Treaty." Svoboda hefted his glass of whiskey toward Lundy while addressing the young man. "Jack here's got a twisted sense of humor. Has ever since they began conducting experiments on week-long flights to see how humans adapt to 'prolonged exposure to weightlessness.' As if they had no data from Skylab. Funny, eh? Right, Jack?"
Lundy smiled only slightly, looking down at his wristwatch. The second hand ticked toward the new year.
"Almost midnight, Iggy. It's almost the year of the fifteen-launch schedule."
The short, bearish man on the couch ran a hand through his black, straight hair, making a point of straightening up and taking a deep, shuddering breath. He held both arms aloft to stretch.
"Damn the administrators," he cried, "full speed ahead!"
"Hey!" someone said. "Fifteen seconds!"
The countdown began.
"Ten!" everyone shouted, even Iggy Svoboda. "Nine! Eight! Seven!"
"Ignition sequence start!" someone called out.
"Six!"
"SSME's functioning!" another voice hollered.
"Five! Four! Three! Two! One!"
All together, everyone shouted: "Torch the SRB's!"
Lundy shuddered. Outside, the rolling thunder of explosions reverberated.
The new year had arrived.
Barry Gibbon paid scant attention to Tammy's flight. Though responsible for her career direction and her values, he invested no time in enjoying the fruits of his patronage. He preferred to labor on the Treaty. Unlike the logical intricacies of writing subjective law, of drafting a treaty that seems to support space travel while actually seizing control of it, the emotional nature of human beings complicated matters and created challenges that kept Gibbon in a constant state of nervous anticipation, as if the wrong word here or the too-strong push there might cause his entire life's work to collapse about him.
He sat in his home in Langley staring at the dim glow of a computer screen, putting final touches on the draft of the Interplanetary Treaty that he hoped the General Assembly would approve. As close to his lifelong goal now as he would ever be, he felt the warmth of it like the glow of a candle toward which a moth is drawn.
In his youth, Barry Gibbon once made a concerted effort to help the poor and the suffering. Fresh out of high school, he spent the first two weeks of summer in a shanty town in Mississippi, helping to construct cheap shacks that were at least dry and windproof compared to the tents and corrugated steel lean-to's thrown together by black veterans who had come home from the war to a jobless future. Some rejected his assistance, pointedly suggesting that they didn't need any guilt-labor from a rich white boy to get out of their predicament, all they needed was to be left alone to work it out for themselves. Such rudely ungrateful behavior bruised his youthful enthusiasm and sent him back to Maryland with the sour impression that the collective good could not be served by operating at the individual level.
Then Gibbon discovered something incontestably immune to error, something incapable of protesting his attempts to preserve it, something unable to foil his defense of it. Barry Gibbon discovered the vast emptiness of Space.
The chance concurrence of two events captured his attention and redirected his goals. One autumn afternoon in 1945, he emerged from a Boston movie theater running a newsreel of captured German film of V-2 tests at Peenemünde. He knew all about their rain of death on London, but the images he saw of the sleek, cigar-shaped missiles shooting into the grey Teutonic sky aroused an unfamiliar excitement within him.
Then, on his way back to the dormitory, he passed a newsstand and saw -- in garish reds and yellows -- a pulp magazine with a cover illustration of six V-2's linked in a circle rocketing high above the Earth. The artist painted little cockpit bubbles on two of the rockets, totally out of proportion with what Gibbon knew to be the actual size of the missiles. It depicted a scene from a story by Rex Ivarson entitled "The Man Who Bought the Night."
A little embarrassed, Gibbon purchased the raggedy-edged magazine and snuck it back to the university to read the story with some distaste. Ivarson painted a broad picture of the near future in which a millionaire simply bought V-2's from the US government as surplus, souped them up with expanded tanks, bolted them together into a two-stage affair, twelve on the bottom and six on the top, and succeeded in orbiting a two-man spaceship. The story ended on what Gibbon interpreted as a melancholy note, since the two men had no way of returning to Earth.
The story was patent trash to Gibbon, since he knew from first-hand experience that millionaires could not see beyond the end of their wallets. All his father thought about, for example, was tires, tires, tires, as if the entire fate of America rested on how many tires his company could produce and how fast they could overcome the slump caused by wartime tire rationing. The man possessed no vision, certainly no more than this Ivarson chap who naïfly assumed that the government would surrender such awesome power to the private marketplace.
The story, though, stuck in his mind. What could the future of rocketry bring? Might it not bring an opportunity for humanity to start anew? To begin from scratch on other worlds with a single purpose and a modern political structure?
He brought these questions the next day to his mentor, Ian Mansfield-Rayne, professor of economics. It was he who convinced young Gibbon to abandon his plans for a major in architecture and enter Harvard with the new goal of a degree in political economy.
"Don't trust your own feelings on this," the leonine don told him. "Listen to others. Keep an ear open to the masses. When you detect a collective glance heavenward, then you will know it is time to act. When that time comes, give every ounce of your effort to involving as many ordinary people as possible. Only they have the mass strength to condition the intellectual class to move in a new direction."
That afternoon, Gibbon ran into Lud Woolsey, all flush with excitement over Operation Paperclip and the surrender of Wernher Von Braun.
Barry Gibbon found the pulse of the body politic.
Nearly half a century later, his thin, aged fingers raced with surprising speed over the keyboard, deleting a word here, adding a phrase there, creating an ever more subtle proposal to establish absolute hegemony over the Universe. He did not permit himself to think in such terms, however. He often laughed out loud at the idea of mere humans controlling anything so vast. A megalomaniac might envision such an ultimate outcome, but Gibbon sought a much more modest goal: to control access to Space so that only a hand-picked few would lead humanity to the stars with a single, unified, and immutable social structure. Peace and harmony, rationally guided and centrally administered. And Robertson Barrett Gibbon intended to be the architect of this new Eternal City.