Actually, everything is a countdown.
-- Alan B. Shepard, Jr.
Reis handed the camera back to Kaye, saying nothing, speechless with the sudden knowledge that more was at stake than her seat on an upcoming shuttle flight, more than thwarting an upstart rival to NASA hegemony.
Paul Volnos -- Marcus Grant -- constituted a different, far greater class of enemy.
She knew Paul, knew his past, and knew that in the last decade something must have driven him to this point, and -- having come this far -- nothing would stop him, not even she.
Security cameras discreetly placed around the inner, outer, and underground periphery of the toroid allowed Grant to view every part of the operation on his office computer screen. At the moment, he scanned the entire area, admiring the sleek, orderly operation. The scaffolding had been removed from the last pod and all work proceeded below ground level.
Each pod's upper section contained seating for either one or two crew members, along with as much cargo as they could safely carry. The engineering tolerances were few: the design optimized the trade-off between number of spheres and engine nozzle geometry. He might have added or subtracted a few pods, but the requirements of weight and wall thickness (even using modern materials), volume and engine nozzle area all converged on the dimension of the flying ring he saw before him. And it would carry into Space what Grant told everyone would be the mainstay of the orbital city: a free-flying microgravity manufacturing platform. He envisioned it floating unattached smack in the center of the rotating space station, visited only when necessary by the crew, but always within easy reach and safe from attack.
Marcus Grant worried about attack, especially from the US, though he rarely allowed all his fears to surface. He rubbed his eyebrows and gazed at the screen. Coming out of the boarding hatch of pod number one -- the cockpit -- Tammy Reis gazed around her at the magnificent machine entrusted to her. She stepped into the cherry-picker lift at the end of a crane that served as their elevator. Behind her followed the reporter and photographer Haley had taken on to chronicle the project.
Grant zoomed the security camera's view in on Reis.
She was just as beautiful as the day they turned their back on each other. Up until that day, Space -- and Tammy Reis -- had been his life.
The morning called to Paul, urging the five year old to come out and play. Great thick rays of yellow gold beamed into his bedroom, touching his pillow, piercing his dreams. Dust motes in the air sparkled like stars and his eyes opened to the sight. For a moment, his dreams traveled with him into waking and he watched the stars flow around him as he floated freely in Space.
It was Friday. A school day for his older sister, Patty, but not for him yet. He heard her stirring in the other bed. Then the door burst open.
"Who wants to stay home," their father bellowed like a boisterous Russian bear, "and watch Gemini blast off?"
Then the realization hit him. Today was the day. Everything in his short few years of life, it seemed, had led up to this moment, and he was here -- awake and alive -- to see it, feel it, live through it.
Paul could not remember a time when he did not love Space. Nor could he remember just when or how he fell in love with it. Ever since he was small, the heavens struck him with a wonder the same way other people were stricken upon entering cathedrals or museums. The stars and planets were shimmering gems he desired to touch, the Moon, a gleaming white pearl he sought to hold in his hand.
Paul's parents told him that his first spoken word, aside from the obligatory "mama" and "dada," consisted of the Russian word for satellite: sputnik. His mother and father, who spoke Russian at home, found nothing unusual in his choice of the language, but drew great amusement from his choice of that particular word. Aside from meaning "companion" and "satellite," it also meant "fellow traveler," something the Volnoses -- White Russians to the marrow -- most certainly were not.
He bounded out of bed, throwing the covers aside in a heap and slipped into his scratchy, deep plum robe with the white piping -- a smaller version of the one Daddy wore. Carefully lifting his Col. McCauley Space Helmet from its red, white, and blue box beside his dresser, he bounded from the bedroom into the hallway. This was it! It had been two months -- two months! -- since the last Gemini rocket launch. This one -- Gemini 12 -- ended the program. At his age, two months spanned an eternity, and the concept of something being the last of its kind was too enormous to grasp. He only knew that his father loved to watch the rockets go up and so did he.
Paul's father, mother, and sister (until she lost interest) watched every rocket launch since Alan Shepard went up half a decade before. He bounced his toddler son on his knee when Wally Schirra's Mercury-Atlas 8 flight occurred on October 3, 1962.
Television. What a wondrous invention. It had been with Paul all his short life, like a window on the world. It took him inside Mickey Mouse's own clubhouse, it showed him exotic realms on Passport to Adventure, and it plunged him into the most exciting universe of all in his local channel's reruns of Men into Space.
And once more he watched real men shoot into Space. Paul knew that his TV hero -- Col. McCauley, USAF -- was just an actor named William Lundigan. And though he thrilled to the tales of the conquest of Space and wished he could be there himself, he knew that Col. McCauley was nothing more than a character in a story. These men, though -- the Gemini crew -- were astronauts. A new breed of man. The future of mankind.
Paul would be an astronaut, too. He knew it and felt it with every fiber of his being. He would be riding his own column of fire someday. He would be a part of the American space program, part of the incomparable National Aeronautics and Space Administration and its noble mission. He believed this with every fiber of his young being.
The television image of the Titan rocket looked like a blowtorch burning furiously. The sound of the engines came over the speaker as a flaming crackle.
Paul Volnos watched the greyish ghost on the screen. His heart pounded. This was the greatest adventure that could ever be! Man was actually taking another step toward the Moon.
"Gospodi polimoi!" his mother cried when a billow of smoke punctuated the rocket's slender exhaust trail. She sat behind him with his father. His sister, Patty, had walked to school that morning rather than play hooky to watch something as passé as a rocket launch.
"Don't worry, Mommy," Paul said. "It hasn't blown up. That's just staging."
"Well," she said, "I don't see why they have to scare us like that."
"That's just the way it works," her husband said. Even though Lev Igorovich Volnos had emigrated from Russia at the same time as Pavlovna Alexandrovna Abakonovich, his accent was virtually absent. He sounded like any other liquor store clerk at Ernie's Cork 'n' Keg, which suited him, Ernie, and the customers just fine.
They called him the Mad Russian, though, to get his goat.
That morning, Leo and Paula Volnos and their son Paul sat before the TV screen in the living room, as did so many other American families, and watched two fellow Americans plunge into space.
"Ochen krassnaya," Paul's father muttered. Like Paul, he was fascinated by the beauty of space travel. Paul suspected, though, that if Daddy were offered the chance to jump aboard a spaceship, he would hesitate. Paul had no doubts. He would go up in an instant.
Another Friday, less than three months later.
The end of Gemini brought close on its heels the promise of Apollo and a manned mission to the Moon by the time Paul would be seven. That's what President Kennedy once said, before his birth, and Paul knew that presidents never lied. Paul raced around the house, awaiting his sister's arrival from school and then -- several hours later -- his father's weary return from the liquor store.
The television filled the living room with its glow. His mother ironed while watching a late afternoon soap opera. On his next lap through, Paul realized something had changed. His mother sat before the television set, her eyes intent. For a moment, he was not sure what was happening. A network newsman spoke onscreen, his voice somber. His mother turned to gaze at him with a look of concern.
"Paul," she said, "come sit here."
He sat and stared at the screen as she draped an arm around him to pull him close, to protect him as best she could from the brutal intrusion of the real world into her little boy's dreams.
The reporter continued in a stunned monotone. "The crew testing the Apollo capsule -- Virgil I. Grissom, Edward White, and Roger B. Chaffee -- died instantly in the fire on launch pad 34."
Son and mother listened and watched as the horrifying news trickled in.
"At least," his mother murmured quietly, "they died instantly." Her Russian accent made everything about the moment surreal and bizarre. His Russian parents despised everything Soviet. They gave birth to the archetypical American son, who now watched in horror as America stumbled in its space race with Russia, immolating its effort in a towering pyre.
Paul Volnos began to weep along with his mother. Too young to associate names with their histories, he only understood that they were astronauts and they were dead.
"Will they be coming back, Mommy?"
"No, Paul. I'm sorry." She knew for whom she was crying. For Gus Grissom, who had suffered more grief as an astronaut than anyone else. For Ed White, who had been the first to walk in space (she was sure the Soviets had lied about Leonov). And for Roger Chaffee, a rookie who had died without ever reaching space. To die was terrible. To be an astronaut, though, in the glorious Space Age and to die without ever having a chance to touch the heavens was an unfathomably cruel jest. It was evil.
"Why did it happen?" Paul asked. "Why did it burn up?"
"Accidents happen," she said quietly. "Even to astronauts." She hugged her son tightly. "At least they didn't suffer."
It was only months later -- long after other events in a young boy's life had supplanted conscious thought of what was now called Apollo One -- that investigative reporters and the widow Betty Grissom finally forced NASA to release tape transcripts revealing that the trio died hideously, screaming and banging on the cockpit for nearly a minute and a half.
Unknown to Paul, a man named "Ace" Roberts grew disgusted with NASA over the revelations and resigned from his position at Kennedy Space Center to move to Saratoga, California -- far from Cape Kennedy but still in the ærospace environment near Moffett Field.
The Saturn 1B roared into life. A flaming spear of destiny, it broke free from its earthly bonds to blast upward into the sky.
Paul lay on his stomach in front of the TV set, pounding the blue-grey carpet with his fists.
"Go! Go!" he shouted. He had waited an eternity for this. Nearly two years had passed since Apollo 204. Twenty months brought such milestones as the beginning of school, and a growing consciousness of the world around him, of how truly vast and wonderful it was.
As usual, his mother and father watched with him. His sister, Patty, left for school. Five years older than he and very pretty, other items filled her personal agenda.
He sipped at a glass of fresh orange juice through a straw. The glass rested on a blue paper napkin that rested on a china saucer that in turn rested on a larger plate. His mother intuitively understood the need for multiple redundancy in unstable systems.
The juice tingled his throat. He had tried to acquire the taste for the artificial orange juice Tang, since the astronauts drank it, and wondered whether liking it was a prerequisite for spaceflight. He hoped not.
The spear of crackling fire wavered on the TV screen as the camera struggled to keep the distant, moving image centered. Paul wondered with whom he would travel into space.
It wouldn't be anyone he knew, that was for sure. He had friends, but they seemed now to express only a cursory interest in space. When Paul talked or thought about it, though, it was always Space, spoken with either wild enthusiasm or reverent awe. His friends -- schoolmates, neighborhood kids, contemporaries encountered at stores and the beach -- viewed Space as one more fantasy adventure from their childhood, discarded and picked up periodically like the Old West or Sherwood Forest or the world of spying. They once had played at being Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon or Colonel McCauley or Captain Kirk with as much true belief as they had when they had played Davy Crockett or Robin Hood. Now, though, they no more thought about someday living in Space than they seriously considered moving to the middle ages or the wild, wild West.
Paul was seven years old, watching the fiery pinpoint on the screen and dreaming of being a thirty-year-old astronaut, confidently riding that column of terrifying power to burst free of earthly bonds and float above the clouds among the stars.
On TV, the image of the rocket brightened suddenly, accompanied by a billowing plume of smoke.
"Bojemoi!" his mother cried out. "What's happening?"
He turned to look at her sourly. Won't she ever figure it out? "That's the first stage separating. Everything's nominal."
She sat back in the easy chair. "Why do they have to do it like that? I thought they'd blown up."
Paul laughed and sipped some more juice. Imagine being startled by staging, he thought. Doesn't she listen to the voice of the capsule communicator?
"It'll happen again when they drop the second stage," he said aloud, "but by then they'll be out of camera range."
"Well," she said, folding her arms grumpily, "I don't think they should scare people like that. What if they had really blown up? How would we know?"
Dad snickered. "Your mother," he said. "Always the optimist."
Paul watched the screen, sucked his orange juice, and tried to imagine the thunder of the engines.
Within the span of his seventh year of life, Paul witnessed a breathtaking blur of activity in Space. The Apollo program sped -- in a matter of months -- from a brief orbital flight to the first circumnavigation of the Moon. It was the greatest Christmas present anyone could have received, and he knew he was a member of the luckiest, most blessed generation in the history of humanity.
The next year brought an even greater triumph. The greatest triumph of all time. Just days before Paul's birthday, Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot upon another planet. Paul made a solemn vow that day that he would be the first man to set foot on Mars.
"That's one small step for... man," the static-distorted voice said from the lunar surface, "one giant leap for mankind."
Paul's father frowned. "Man and mankind are synonymous. What did he mean by that?"
Paul's mother shrugged. "Maybe he said 'a man' and we just didn't hear it."
"Maybe he blew his lines," Patty said, running a brush through her long golden hair. She was home for this one. Everyone on Earth was home for this one.
Paul thrilled at the moment, his gaze glued to the blurred, black-and-white image beamed from a quarter of a million miles away. He knew all about Neil Armstrong, how he had once flown that most beautiful of airplanes, the X-15; how he and Dave Scott survived a wild spin during the flight of Gemini 8; how he escaped from a nearly fatal malfunction of the "flying bedstead" lunar-landing trainer. This man was a hero of classic proportion.
Paul only wished his hero could describe what he saw without continually resorting to the word "fantastic."
The perfect end to his seventh year on Earth -- and the perfect beginning of his eighth -- arrived in the form of a birthday gift two weeks after the triumphant return of Apollo Eleven. The gift was a model rocket kit. Not just a plastic model kit such as the ones that littered the house, but an actual working rocket complete with a series C motor!
In less than a week, he had it built and took it out to Oak Meadow Park with his father for a Saturday flight. The morning -- bright, clear, and hot -- echoed with his shout of "Fire in the hole!" He pressed the ignition switch, and watched as a part of him, a creation of his own hands and mind, flew into the sky.
He launched rockets all the time, but most fervently during lunar missions. With the first lunar landing came a slowing of the frenetic space race to a more stately progression, with five more landings over the subsequent three years.
Paul remembered Apollo 204. When Apollo Thirteen made its unlucky flight around the Moon and back to a tense return to Earth, Paul once again encountered a crisis of faith. How could NASA fail to keep its astronauts -- the most important people in the world -- safe from harm? His parents patiently explained that space travel was a difficult and complex undertaking. He accepted that, and the fact that it was better to fly into Space in something unsafe than not to go at all. Yet instead of admitting the obvious, NASA always seemed to blame their critics and declare that if Congress gave them more money, all would be well.
And then -- like a clock unwinding -- all motion and momentum ceased. Apollo Seventeen climaxed the Apollo program, even though at least three more flights had been planned. NASA pulled the plug in a series of political maneuvers of which Paul Volnos -- and the rest of the nation -- remained completely unaware.
Man abandoned the Moon, with only the dimmest promise of return. Someday.
Paul, disappointed in NASA's behavior -- which he likened to that of a dog that constantly chased cars until, having finally caught one, suddenly realized it had no idea what to do next -- continued to refine and build larger model rockets.
It was a year after the Skylab era that Paul, a lanky thirteen year old, met little Tammy Reis, someone who shared his intense interest in Space. More important, she gloried in the novelty of it all. He became her mentor, forging between them a bond that they both thought impossible to rend. With young Tammy in tow, he moved up from series C to series D rocket motors, multiple stages, multiple motors, then onward to the mainline for rocket junkies: series G and H motors as a member of the High Thrust Rocket Society.
The Skylab project once again had exposed Paul to the dark side of the space agency. With the three Saturn rockets left over from Apollo, NASA decided to establish a space station. Paul thought it a magnificent effort, to put into orbit a habitat the size of a three-bedroom house and staff it with astronauts. After more than three years of nothing but robot probes shot into Space, here arose another grand effort to establish a foothold in orbit. Perhaps from there would grow a larger space station, then perhaps a return to the Moon. Paul thought that perhaps he could become an astronaut and make it to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. At one time he had feared that he was too young, that someone would make it to the red planet before he was old enough to qualify. Then, with the end of Apollo, it seemed as if he might grow old and die before anyone ventured out into the void again. Now -- with Skylab -- a new hope filled him that perhaps the timing would be just right. That a renewed space program might have the pacing to put him on Mars by the time he was thirty.
Then the news from Space turned sour. The first two Skylab crews complained of long hours, endless pushing from the scientists Earthside to perform scores of pet experiments. The third crew, though, showed Paul something he had never imagined before: open rebellion against NASA. The reports coming from Space astounded him. The Skylab Three astronauts went on strike when faced with overwhelming workloads. This might have occurred in one of his cherished science-fiction books, but nothing prepared him for the video image of bearded, wild-looking astronauts peevishly denouncing their managers and the scientists they were ordered to serve.
NASA tried to keep a lid on things, but even popular comic strips mocked the fiasco.
Paul, who at thirteen could look at NASA with an eye jaundiced by years of disappointment, saw the episode as something akin to the American Revolution, with the space colonists in revolt against their distant oppressors. Tammy -- five years his junior and with less awareness of past incidents -- thought the astronauts behaved with extreme ingratitude toward those who labored mightily to loft them to their exalted orbit.
Neither had any idea how their childhood disagreement would carry over into their adult lives.
Tammy sped up Ace's driveway in a rattletrap racing-green 1954 MG and screeched to a halt. Sixteen now, she had matured into a young woman who regularly turned heads at every airport she visited. She still dressed in shuttle-blue jumpsuits, though now her nubile body curved lusciously above and below the slender belt line.
"I did it!" she cried with glee, jumping over the car door and running up to Ace, Paul, and four other volunteers.
Paul pointed a wrench at her, grinning. "And on the first date, too, I'll bet."
"Gutterbrain," she said gaily.
"You passed you're exams," Ace said. "Right?"
Her dark eyes twinkled with excitement. "Yes! I'm graduating high school two years early--"
"Say!" someone said. "Today's the twentieth anniversary of the first woman in Space. Twice the reason to celebrate!"
"And that's not all!" Tammy pulled an envelope from her thigh cargo pocket and withdrew the letter. "With the help of my career advisor, Mr. Woolsey, I'm going to college courtesy of the Robertson Barrett Gibbon Space Scholarship!" She practically squealed with joy.
Paul's expression darkened. "Gibbon? And his NASA fan club?"
"Paul!" She sounded genuinely wounded. "NOSS is the biggest group of space fanatics in the world. And Dr. Gibbon is the most dedicated man. He's been at this for nearly forty years--"
"Yeah. Promising every generation that the next generation will be living in Space. NOSS is just a money pump for Gibbon. Have they built one single rocket with all their millions in club dues? Have any of their members pooled their life savings into trying what Ace is trying? Or do they pay their dues, buy their stupid pins and thumb through their monthly magazines looking at pretty color pictures content that Barry Gibbon has everything planned out for them? Woolsey's dad and Gibbon are old buddies. I wouldn't put it past Lud the Pud to have pushed you for the scholarship so he can get his pothead hands on you and--"
She stuffed the letter back in her pocket. "Paul Volnos, that is the meanest, most paranoid lunacy I've ever heard you spout!" An angry finger pointed toward the summer sky. "The Shuttle is flying. Right now! There are people in orbit around the Earth as we speak, and I am not going to stand around here tinkering with a... a... ground-bound bottle rocket when there's a functioning space program on the verge of building the first real space station--"
"Don't forget Skylab," someone interjected.
"Or Salyut or Mir," another said.
Ace quietly ignored Tammy's assessment of his effort, and calmly continued to tinker with a small attitude jet.
"You people," she said slowly, "are the most self-absorbed, negative-thinking wet blankets I've ever known, and--"
"You say that about us?" Paul threw his wrench down at the driveway so hard that sparks flew. There flared in his gaze a furious anger, a volatile mixture of dread and revulsion at her decision. "What about you? You've bought into the whole NASA fraud. How can you ignore the figures? With what it costs just to launch one shuttle flight, Ace could have put a whole space station into orbit on a Leviathan! The shuttle's a fraud -- an expensive fraud -- and Gibbon's role in all this proves that he is not dedicated to space migration."
The others watched the pair go at each other, not knowing if they should or could choose sides. Most of them objected to NASA, but not with the vehemence expressed by Paul. And if any one of them had been offered the chance to join the astronaut corps, they most likely would have jumped at it.
"You're a loser, Paul. All your ideas about bootstrapping into Space, they've been shot down. The Shuttle is the only key to Space. NASA's won. They're doing what you only dream about, and that's what blows your mind. You can't admit that they're back on track while you're stuck in the mud!"
"You are not going to get into Space working for NASA," Paul said with the grave certainty of prophecy. "You will either disappear into bureaucratic nothingness or be incinerated by statist incompetence. Don't forget Grissom, Chaffee, and White!"
Tammy stared at Paul with her mouth partway open in shock at his death sentence. In a voice low with dispirited pain, she said, "I would never wish that on you," and strode to her car. Without a look at Paul or Ace, she gunned the engine, backed out, and turned at the base of the driveway.
He never saw her again, at least not face-to-face, until Donahue brought her to Somalia. Now he watched her walk purposefully away from the toroid toward the office mobiles, a grim expression on her face. She disappeared inside Haley's office. A moment later, the phone outside Grant's office warbled for attention. He punched up the line with a smile and -- switching on the voice-alteration unit -- said, "Marcus Grant."
The woman on the other end said, in a clear, steady voice, "Paul."
His heart pounded. For a long moment, hung out in time like meat on a hook, he said nothing. Then, clicking off the voice distorter, he said, softly, "Come over."
He did not move from his chair as he heard her footsteps ascend the uncarpeted steps to his double-wide mobile. She knocked on the door with a single firm tap.
"Come in, Tammy."
She entered to see a man sitting in an expensive black leather executive swivel chair, palms down on the rich, dark walnut desktop. The place looked like an executive suite in downtown Manhattan, not like the inside of a poorly air-conditioned mobile home in the middle of an African coastal desert. His grey hair was even more startling to see in person, the judgmental gaze of his blue eyes piercing through her as they had nearly half her life ago. He rose, apparently without conscious thought, as she approached him.
"If anyone could have done this," she said, "I knew it would have been you."
"Why are you here?" he asked.
She shook her head. "No. My life is public. You know why I'm here. Why are you here?"
He gestured toward a chair and spoke after she gracefully sat. "I'm out to make my fortune."
"You'll hardly break even given what I've seen here."
"Overhead is low in the counter-economy. No taxes, no regulatory costs, minimum wages, or mandated benefits."
Not even a hint of amusement crossed her face. "Isn't that canceled out by the cost of bribes?"
"I'll ask you again, Tammy, why did you come here?"
She stood suddenly to lean over his desk, fists planted vehemently on its surface. "I came here to see if there really was such a thing as an underground space movement. I didn't think it was possible to marshal the money, the expertise, the material, and the secrecy to do so. I wanted to find out if it was true. And maybe I thought I'd find an answer to a mystery."
Grant merely raised an eyebrow in inquiry.
"Why you stayed with Ace instead of coming with me."
"We've been through this before. I--"
"We could have both been up there, Paul. I've been into Space three times--"
"And came back every time!" He rose to meet her eye-to-eye. In his expression was something inscrutable: not rage, not pain, not anger, not hatred, but a firm conviction that had endured years of struggle. "Don't you see? You followed a course that took you to the place of your dreams, then yanked you away again and again. And now, you'll probably never see Space again. NASA's in ruins and there's no way UNITO's going to revive it. I stuck with Ace because he was building a spaceship without one cent of government money. He didn't force anyone to support him. He didn't have to beg for funding from drooling cretins whose definition of public service is screwing their constituents!" He frowned at seeing a shudder come over her, then said, "I stopped working with Ace the day he received notice from the Department of State denying him an export permit on his rocket components. He wasn't exporting it anywhere but to orbit, so the ruling was a bald-faced attempt to frustrate his plans or bankrupt him if he tried to fight it in court. I learned the nature of the beast that day. I realized -- finally -- that all the talk about the pioneer spirit and free enterprise was just a smoke screen. The people in power didn't want any of that. They wanted us to believe it just enough to work hard for their corporations, keep our savings in their banks, invest in their stocks, and pay taxes to their treasury. But the moment anyone tried to create his own success, strike out into a frontier they don't -- they can't -- control, down came the mailed fist."
Tammy's heart raced and her palms sweated. She had brought that fist down at least once -- on Gerald Cooper. She unknotted her hands and sat again, releasing a pent breath and gazing at Grant levelly. "What did you do? Where did you go?"
He sat, laughed bitterly, and turned to look at the wall to his right. On it were hung photographs of the Moon and the planets. "What did I do? I gave up. Of the only two people I'd called my friends, one was hitting his head against a bureaucratic stone wall and the other had leapt the battlements to join the other side. So I surrendered to superior force." He turned to stare at her. "Guess where I went. Forget it, you won't. I went to Lud Woolsey and bought some LSD from him. I liked the irony of that. I hated Lud, so I rushed to him first thing for the means to escape the world his father and friends had made. He was more than happy, even a bit smug, selling me the finest stuff he had. I chose to retreat to inner space rather than face a planet of cowards who could not accept the enormous possibilities of outer space."
Tammy said nothing, simultaneously shocked and mesmerized by his confession.
"I surrounded myself with beautiful things: my model rockets, those photos there, music that evoked in me the same emotions that Space did. I put a square of blotter acid on my tongue, tasted its sting, and swallowed it. Immediately, I felt the way you must have felt on your first shuttle flight, when the SRB's ignite and there's no turning back. I knew that nothing could stop what was to happen to me.
"It took nearly an hour. I'd gone through Beethoven's Ninth and was listening to the Blue Danube when the photographs seemed to become more than pictures. They moved, they radiated some incredible emotion that cut me in half. I obsessively examined every step of my life. I roamed around the room playing with every space toy I still owned from childhood. I cried with joy at the memories. I huddled in fear that I'd be discovered, locked up and never allowed off this world."
"It was a bad trip, I take it." Her voice was cold and distant.
"No," he said with frank simplicity. "It was a very good trip. It had all the elements of beauty and thrill and adventure. That was when I realized that I didn't need Space to be free. I could be free anywhere I wanted to be. So I became a pioneer -- of the inner frontier. And I became a free enterpriser -- in the underground economy. I never looked at the stars again."
Her fingers tapped against the chair arm. "Until?"
"Until I met Chad Haley. He reminded me of me, of my true dreams and highest aspirations. He forced me to realize that as long as I stayed on Earth evading the laws of the power élite while still within their grasp, I simply played their game in their sandbox. I had fooled myself into thinking that the cop-outlaw game is somehow superior to the master-slave game. It isn't. They merely set the rules I would break instead of the rules I would obey. Soon"--he glanced down at the image of the space station on his desk monitor--"the only law I'll be breaking is the law of gravity." He gazed across at her. "Let me show you something no one has seen yet. Not even Chad or Joscelyn know all my plans."
They walked past the space station's base. In the trench swarmed scores of furiously busy workers. Tammy nodded toward the pit. "What sort of air-movers will you be using during fueling?"
Volnos looked puzzled.
"For the pit," Tammy added. "To evacuate the hydrogen."
"Hydrogen is lighter than air," Paul said. "It'll just float away."
Tammy sighed and shook her head. "This is why you need astronauts, Paul. Why you need me." She waved broadly at the trench and said, "Cryogenic hydrogen is denser than air. It will fill the trench and suffocate any workers down there, or mix with the oxygen vapors and explode at the smallest spark. You've got to bring in some positive-displacement blowers with sealed motors designed for use in Class B explosive atmospheres."
He stared at her, wondering how to receive the benefit of her experience. "Duly noted," was all he said.
The pair stood in a mobile adjacent to the construction site, gazing into pitch blackness. Paul threw a panel of switches to illuminate the area. Tammy saw two large objects on aluminum support racks. One looked like a small version of the Centaur booster the shuttle once carried aloft to kick satellites to synchronous orbit or to send robot craft on planetary missions. The other, which looked as if it could mate with the booster, was an ungainly hodge-podge of tool cases, parts boxes, and tethers sprouting from behind a cylindrical balloon less than eight feet wide and ten feet long.
"The crew cabin's an inflatable Kevlar-web supported balloon. Just a big space suit you can live inside. It's a two-seater," he said matter-of-factly. "Low mass, small payload volume. Once we're in equatorial orbit, we deploy and inflate it. The booster can take a crew up to geosynchronous orbit where they can repair satellites or recharge them, using fuel salvaged from the maneuvering units of other satellites too far gone to be fixed. The computer has a database on every geosynchronous satellite and its needed repairs. We know to the ounce how much and what kind of fuel is out there, what work needs to be done. We'll repair the first satellite on spec -- to advertise our service -- and then broadcast our rates. These communication and data satellites cost hundreds of millions. What their Earthbound owners will pay for repairs will cover subsequent flights, plus a hefty profit. That ought to make Space Station Volnos a successful venture from the first week."
"Volnos, huh? I thought it was called Grant One. Going public with your true identity?" Tammy reached out to run a hand along the side of the space taxi, an emotion stirring within her that she refused to acknowledge.
"In good time," he said.
"You could also hold satellites for ransom with this thing, threatening to kick each one out of alignment or saw off their antennæ."
He gazed at her in amusement. "I could, but I won't. I'm a businessman, not a terrorist."
"There are some who think the two equivalent."
"There are some," he replied, "who confuse politics with progress. I'm not one of them, which is why I'm here."
"Did your hair turn grey from all that philosophizing? Or was it the drugs?"
For a moment, he said nothing. Then he laughed lightly. "It's colored this way. I thought looking more like an old alpha-male would help me in the business world. I think it has. The lines you see, though, they're real and I earned every one, courtesy of the joys of high finance."
"What makes you think," she slowly asked, "that any government would allow you to keep money paid to you on Earth for your work in Space?"
Grant said nothing. Sliding his hands in his pockets, he gazed at the two pieces of space hardware as if reviewing the entire process that brought him to this point. Then he smiled a deliberate, forced smile. "I plan to make them customers, too. I'm certain they'll accept. They have their own satellites that desperately need repair or placement in proper orbits, and NASA can't do anything for them, now. I can."
"And you don't consider that to be dealing with the enemy?"
His smile grew more relaxed. "No. I consider it selling to all sides without prejudice. That is the open-handed nature of the market. My dealing with those who try to destroy me can only strengthen me and weaken them, for the corrupting influence of free trade is more powerful than the destructive impulses of power and monopoly."
"Is that what you are? An agent of corruption?"
"Only to those in power. To corrupt evil is to twist it toward good."
Something within Tammy -- deep within her soul, beneath a decade of patience and compromise -- stirred. She felt it, fought it, blurted out another question.
"So NASA is the evil and Paul Volnos is the good?"
"Functionally, yes. NASA's funding comes from taxes, money taken at gunpoint. My funding comes from my profits. I don't force anyone to pay for my efforts. What better definition of evil and good can there be?"
For his part, Grant waged his own internal battle. Part of him -- the conscious, thinking part -- answered her questions, offered ripostes, met logic with logic. Another part of him -- the realm from which grew his passion for Space and from which flowed the strength to persevere -- burned like a rocket's blazing flame.
She turned away from him to examine a detail on the small spacecraft. "I think you've made a valiant effort, but the hubris you display may well be your undoing."
She turned back. He stood close to her. Heart-stoppingly close.
Without a word, he grasped her arms to pull her closer still. For an instant, a chill seared through her, a rapid-fire replay of all that had happened onboard Constitution. Then, as if breaking the sound barrier, all the pain and degradation fell from her in one shuddering instant and she threw her arms around Paul to press close, burying her face into him, inhaling his scent, feeling the heat of his body, the passionate pressure against her.
He whispered her name with an urgency she longed to hear so many years ago. She heard the same sound, she suddenly realized, whenever one of his model rockets sizzled up into the sky. It was he, calling her name in love and desire. She knew now that she had felt it even then.
And here he stood, holding her, kneeling with her to the floor, hands tearing at clothing, swiftly releasing all restraints. Outside, the sound of evening wind beat against the building. Inside, a cyclone of desire threw her to the ground and pinned her there.
Time ceased to have meaning. He gazed at her and simultaneously saw her and the young woman she had been. There existed no gap, no separation in time or space between then and now. Every struggle, every setback, every betrayal and failure along the way no longer existed; such petty obstacles faded into unimportance. The universe consisted only of their union's loving fury, and the world they forged together in their crucible of desire.
She whispered his name into his ear, then kissed him deeply as they united. Every movement became exhilarating acceleration. She surrendered utterly to emotions she once thought slain and dead within her. Now they resurrected, erupting again like the flames of an engine that could move the world.
She succumbed to the fire.
At the blazing instant of shuddering release and shattering awareness, he knew why he had turned away from the night: she had not been in it. Now that she lay there in the night with him, the universe exploded with possibility. Arms wrapped around each other, ecstatic captives of passionate yearning and boundless love, they bridged their years of separation and grew closer than they had ever been.
She whispered something in his ear.
"What?" he whispered back.
"I said I've been sent to destroy you."
"You can't," he softly murmured. "Not now. Not ever again."
"Yes, I can," she insisted, pushing away from him to grasp at her clothing. "I was sent by the NSA. I'm a spy."
He smiled at her with genuine warmth. "I know. I've always known. I had Joscelyn scan your belongings. Your shuttle pin's a homer."
His equanimity suddenly frightened her. "You knew? And you still--?"
"Forget the NSA." He pulled the clothes away from her and drew her close once more. "Forget NASA. Forget your masters. Here you're free. Once we're orbital, you need never fear anyone again."
She searched his face for any sign of self-deception, any hint of his own fear. She saw none. She saw in Paul Volnos, in this man now called Marcus Aurelius Grant, an incomprehensible rectitude, an impossible confidence, and a terrifying optimism. "You don't understand, Paul. They can do it. They can stop you now that they know where you are. You're facing the combined forces of the mightiest superpower in the world!"
Paul laughed. He leaned back on his knees, knuckles on hips, and let loose with a fiercely mocking roar that frightened her with its purity. He was that thirteen-year-old boy once more.
"Am I? Is it?" he asked with a piratical grin. "The whole government's against me? That would amuse a few senators whom I occasionally rent and an agency head I've leased with option to buy. It would bring a good laugh at CIA or FBI headquarters -- they loathe the NSA and each other. And Space Command may ally with NASA now and then, but I know they would love to see each other screw up."
He stroked her soft cheek and shook his head. "No, my love, I'm not facing a monolithic leviathan. I'm up against living, breathing human beings, each one a victim of his own dreams and fears, each one constructing his own little schemes for power. I can turn them against one another with equal doses of misinformation and truth, of bribe and threat. Why, I even know of one or two people still in NASA -- still alive in NASA -- who think what I'm doing will revitalize the agency by giving it a new space race in which it can compete. They think the UNITO monopoly would destroy what little incentive remains."
"People in NASA know... about you?"
His grin grew cocky. "Maybe a few. Maybe a little. Maybe enough to give them hope."
"Hope?" She sat up and began to dress. "The hope of a world can be destroyed by the actions of just a few."
He handed her a shoe. "If that were true, humanity would not have progressed beyond the cave. I've come to realize that the actions of a few -- even of one -- can realize the dreams of millions."
She reached for her other shoe. He playfully held it back. "I see now," he said, "why we chose the paths we did. We both made our choices out of fear. We both feared that NASA was too big to fight. You chose to join it rather than forsake Space. I chose to forsake Space rather than surrender. Neither choice was right because fear drove the decision. I saw that eventually. You'll see it soon."
"Now, though," she said, tapping a finger against the shuttle pin. "Right now they know where you are."
He ran a fingernail along the gold plating of the pin. "You think that knowledge of a single fact confers total awareness of a situation and galvanizes action. It might, in someone such as you or I. These people, though, these... pitiable vandals..." He shook his head and smiled in a lovingly didactic manner. "They can't act on their own initiative. They fear that most of all. Why else would they survive and thrive in a cumbersome bureaucracy? They won't act. They can't, not without creating a dozen contingency plans and developing ways to cover their own asses. And that takes time, something I'm not inclined to give them."
"If nobody in government can take action, wars wouldn't happen."
He stood. "Wars happen, my love, because they take action too late." He helped her up and slapped her bottom lightly. "If they could act decisively, without trying to second-guess what clandestine plots hidden agendas, and secret alliances obsess their superiors, there would be more assassinations and fewer wars. If they really wanted to stop me, they would not have sent you. They would have sent someone with a poison dart."
"What makes you think they haven't?"
"Not you. They don't trust you. That's why they're tracking your movements." He tapped at the pin. "This is a beacon and a leash. They fear you even more than they fear me."
She raised an eyebrow while buttoning her blouse. He slipped into his slacks and nodded with a wisdom she had never seen in him before, the wisdom she had sought vainly in others.
"I mean it," he said. "They trained you, they feel they created you, and they know that even so, you owe them no allegiance. I'm a cipher to them, something to be studied before they act. You they've observed for years and still they can't comprehend what makes you tick. They fear those who have the courage to sit on top of a gigantic bomb and ask them to light it up. They would not entrust their own lives to any such as they, and are baffled that you would. It scares them that you love Space enough to trust them to send you there. You confuse them. That's your strength."
"I can't betray them. I have a family. I don't know what danger they might be in..."
Volnos shrugged. "My family's safe. I can provide whatever level of protection--"
"I can't betray them because they may be right!" She turned away from him to look at the small orbital tug. Its ungainly shape, useful only outside the atmosphere of Earth, reminded her of illustrations from old space books, the books she devoured as a child, books filled with astounding predictions and heady optimism. She used to climb into small, tight spaces in closets and under tables to imagine what it must be like in the confines of a rocket ship. A claustrophile, that's what she was, though sometimes while flying she adjudged herself an agoraphile. An astronaut had to be a lot of both. Self-trained to be comfortable anywhere -- including the lonely reaches of Space -- she felt supremely ill at ease with the man she sought for years to destroy: the man she loved above all else.
"I always thought it was impossible to stand up to NASA."
Paul smiled. "Nothing is impossible to the man who has money and the will to use it constructively." He took her arm in a courtly fashion and walked her out of the storage mobile back to his office. "Okay. You remain the spy in our ranks." His tone remained confident, indulgent, very nearly condescending. "We'll let reality be the final arbiter. When we achieve orbit, I'll expect a formal apology and a change of allegiance. Deal?"
Tammy said nothing, more troubled than ever.