CHAPTER 28

Ideas are the factors that lift civilization. They create revolutions. There is more dynamite in an idea than in many bombs.
-- John H. Vincent

14 April

Rex Ivarson stared blankly at the equally blank screen before him. His hands hovered over the keyboard for a moment, then dropped back into his lap. He ran a thin-fingered hand over his nearly completely bald scalp. Then he took a long slug of coffee and savored the cocoa Grace had added to the mocha.

"Got to try," he muttered to the empty room. "Come on, rat-brain."

Aged eyes experienced some difficulty focusing on the dark screen, despite the glasses he wore -- his "cheaters," he called them. Fingers positioned over the keyboard, he slowly typed

MURDER IN THE SKY

He stared at the green glowing letters for a long time before taking another sip of chocolate coffee. Then he killed the line. He typed again.

ICARUS DESCENDING

Rex Ivarson -- at eighty-nine -- looked his age and more. The scar left behind by the implant operation covered a quarter of his skull. He sat at his cluttered desk in comfortable old chinos and a crisp, clean Hawaiian shirt. Outside, the chirping around Grace's birdbath filled the air with hope. Right now, though, Ivarson felt a little hopeless.

Staring again at the screen, he leaned forward to type

MASTERS

Masters, he thought angrily. Masters sitting in Washington and New York on executive leather thrones plotting to seize the high frontier and then screwing it up, killing good men and women who thought they were helping to build a future in Space.

He shook his head, slugged down another gulp of coffee and felt woozy. He typed three more words.

OF THE SKY

Now that is a proper use of the word 'Masters,' he mused with a snort.

"Not the masters of people," he muttered, "but the masters of nature. Of science. Of Fate itself." He peered at the screen again.

MASTERS OF THE SKY

Okay, he thought. Okay. I won't write about how they screwed up. I'll do something else. About how it would have been if they hadn't betrayed the dream. If they hadn't screwed up.

He took another sip. What if Goddard hadn't let the war interfere with his plans? What if Von Braun, Oberth, and Ley had escaped from Hitler's clutches? What if Tsiolkovsky had lived long enough to meet them in a Parisian exile? Korolev... What if he had escaped the GULag?

He began to type:

MASTERS OF THE SKY
by
Rex Ivarson

The sun rose over Peenemünde with a crimson glare that bathed the land in blood. Wernher Von Braun felt no warmth from the new dawn. Instead, a cold feeling like liquid oxygen ran through his veins -- burning him without warmth, searing without comfort.

He had come to build rockets. That was all. He suppressed the odd sensation in his stomach, forcing down the queasiness that came whenever he thought about what the rockets would carry, where they would fly.

He had come to build rockets. To prove his theories. To show the world the machines of a new age. Nothing more. He was a scientist. Global politics were not his expertise -- the war confused him and filled him with terror as much as it did anyone else.

It would be after the war that his vision would see its triumph. For now, he had to cooperate. Who else, after all, could pay for such a mighty effort?

An icy wind blasted at him, cutting through to his bones.


He paused to stare at what he had written. Not bad.


Five thousand miles away, in Roswell, New Mexico, Robert Hutchings Goddard spoke animatedly to the Army Air Force colonel. The colonel shook his head with an air of tolerance hardly concealing his contempt.

"Mr. Goddard," he said with only minor condescension, "Your rocket is quite impressive, but a rocket with a two mile altitude can hardly hope to match a B-17. I really can't see what you're getting at."

Goddard explained one more time. "These are just models I am working with. There is no upper limit on the power or range of rockets. They could become an irresistible force that might turn the tide in the war. The nation that masters rockets could--"

"Rule the world?" the colonel asked with a smirk. "Every inventor I talk to has a touch of the mad scientist in him."

"Free the world, Colonel. Liberate it. Isn't that what the war is all about?"

The colonel made a dismissing motion with his hand. "I hear you've been offered contract work from the Navy."

Goddard felt as if he were arguing with a tar baby. There was no way to put any pressure on this man.

"It has little to do with rockets." Goddard folded his arms. "You're saying, then, that the Army also has no interest in my work?"

"I'm instructed to tell you to keep it up, Mr. Goddard. After all, you've got that Guggenheim grant." The colonel rose to leave. "Maybe Lucky Lindy will fly one of your rockets to liberate Paris, eh?"

"They would not only be weapons," Goddard said. "Rockets would be an entirely new form of transportation."

The military man stood in the doorway of Goddard's home. "You really believe that moon man stuff, huh?"

Goddard bristled at the use of a nickname he found irritating in the extreme. "I believe I've had enough. Good day, Colonel. Good day."

As he watched the back of the man's uniform, Goddard marveled at the stupidity of the world. The wastefulness of war. The shortsightedness of the military mind, always planning to re-fight the most recent war.

And I stood here offering to contribute to that waste. He shook his head. Never again. I have a different path to follow.

He turned to face the woman who had walked in from the living room. "Esther," he said, "We're leaving Roswell."

"For Annapolis, dear?"

"No..." He paused, deep in thought. "For Pike's Peak, in Colorado."


Rex Ivarson grinned a grin that made him look decades younger.

"Dear?"

Ivarson turned. Grace rarely entered while he was working. "What is it, darling?"

"There's something on TV I think you'll want to watch."

"Can't you tape it?"

"I am," she said. "But I think you'll want to see it as soon as possible."

***

Thousands of miles away from Ivarson another pair of aged hands hovered above a keyboard. Swiftly, deliberately, passionately they struck the keys in a creative scherzo.

The Orbital Settlers' Guide
by Luna Celeste

Just as Christopher Columbus, supported by the Spanish State, made four relatively meaningless trips to America, so the Apollo project, supported by the taxes of the American State, made six relatively meaningless trips to the Moon. Both series may have scored historic firsts, but neither made any lasting contribution to settling their respective frontiers. Columbus left avaricious Spaniards and brought back not much more than a few Indians for the amusement of his financiers. That, and syphilis. The astronauts left millions of dollars worth of litter and brought back a few pounds of rock.

Who truly settled America? The malcontents. The misfits. The ones who rejected the States that claimed power over them and sought a new world, free commerce, and private property. Some may have had baser motives -- we can never be rid of them all. And many may not have understood or respected the property and rights-to-life of the Indians. The vast number of people, though, who flooded into early America were those who made it there under their own power, with not a cent of money expropriated through taxation.

So shall it be with Space.

Various governments have visited Space, have timidly trod upon Luna. It will be the people, though -- free men and women -- who break the bonds of Earth and State to sail en masse across the sea of stars.

And this time, we shall not carry the myth of the State with us.

***

"Ace" Roberts fiddled with the old television set until the picture improved. The makeshift connection to his small satellite dish made the image jump every now and then. He stepped back to his cluttered workbench and alternated glances at the screen with his work on the instrument panel for his rocket. The newspaper accounts of the preemption of regular GSN broadcasting to bring a special report on the Constitution disaster caught his interest. For weeks now, the networks and cable stations had been fumbling for some sort of a handle on the tragedy. Most had lost their finest science reporters in the explosion. For once, the news people had been as stunned and speechless as the ordinary people in whose faces they stuck microphones and camera lenses.

***

Poubelle flew out with D'Asaro, Lester, and Kaye to William Braverman's GSN office to watch the program air. Braverman's office took up half of the top floor of the GSN building in downtown New Orleans. Entirely decorated in exotic woods and fine antiques, it could have been an Edwardian drawing room but for the presence of the most sophisticated HDTV viewing room between the two coasts.

They sat in plush, wide theater seats from another era, along with Braverman's family and staff. To the side of the movie-screen-sized HD panel stood the InstaRate Incremental Viewership Monitor, which delivered the minute-by-minute ratings for the show.

***

The first seventy-eight seconds of the program consisted of Challenger's fiery flight: the magnificent liftoff, the seemingly flawless ascent, the sudden sputtering of flame between the orbiter and the fuel tanks, the squawk of static accompanying the flash, then the horrifying long shot of the explosion, the orange-pink cloud of flame and vaporized fuel, the twin solid rocket boosters flying crazily onward, their payload obliterated, their fuel still burning unquenched.

The familiar image faded, replaced by another familiar one -- the publicity pose of the seven Challenger astronauts. The announcer's voice intoned their names gravely.

"Mission Commander Francis R. Scobee; Mission Pilot United States Navy Commander Michael J. Smith; Mission Specialists Judith A. Resnik, United States Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Ellison S. Onizuka, Ronald E. McNair; Hughes Payload Specialist Gregory B. Jarvis; Teacher-in-Space Christa McAuliffe." He paused for a short moment.

"Seven men and women from all walks of life, many races, many creeds, all Americans. Seven adventurers on their way to the unknown. Seven lives destroyed in a fiery instant. Seven heroes in America's space effort."

The image was replaced by that of Constitution cartwheeling across the Florida marshes.

"As if every generation requires a spaceflight tragedy, last month saw the fiery immolation of thousands in the destruction of the sixth Space Shuttle, Constitution. A nation, a world watched with horror as the fury of Hell consumed America's Space City. To name the victims would take this entire show, and we have much more to tell you."

An image of the multi-national Constitution astronauts faded, replaced by the image of the announcer. He was an old man, with dignified grey hair; an aging news anchor with a deep, theatrically mellifluous voice. He walked a few steps toward the camera amid a set (created within the depths of The Net's supercomputers) decorated with backlit photographs of scenes from the U.S. space program. Here Alan Shepard waved at the crowd. There Neil Armstrong stepped on the Moon. To his left, Sally Ride floated through a hatchway. John Glenn gave a thumbs up, Gus Grissom gazed forward with a hangdog face, Ed White walked in space above a blue and gorgeous Earth.

"Good evening," the host said. "I'm Truman Collings. For most of the nearly four decades of NASA's existence, I have covered the American space program with pride and enthusiasm. Tonight, though, I want to take you on a voyage of a different kind. A journey behind the veil of lies created by NASA's efficient public relations machine to the facts about America's spaceflight disasters. Tonight, we will discover whether such heroes as the Apollo trio or Challenger seven or the Constitution thousands were victims of unavoidable catastrophes or pawns sacrificed in the deadly gambits of bureaucratic and political intrigue."

***

William Braverman watched the program from the front row of the three row theater. He was a small, round man with a fringe of white hair around a bald melon of a head. His soft, unlined pink skin gave one the impression of an old elf from Santa's workshop. This elf, though, could have bought and sold Santa a dozen times over. "More brandy?" he asked his guests.

Poubelle waved away the offer. Lester nodded, holding out his snifter, as did Hillary. Chemar sipped at her Coke. Braverman reached to refill the glasses, then gazed at the InstaRate.

"Viewership's acceptable," he said, gazing at the screen, "but not thrilling. As I suspected, not many people are interested in this stuff."

Poubelle lit up a thick cigar. "Just wait," he said.

***

Truman Collings continued as the camera slowly dollied in. "Tonight we'll ask the tough questions. The questions no other reporters dared to ask. And you'll get the answers."

The scene dissolved to photographs of a gutted, blackened space capsule.

"Constitution was not NASA's first space-related disaster. On January 27th, 1967, Virgil I. Grissom, Edward H. White II, and Roger B. Chaffee died in a fire that consumed Apollo One during a rehearsal for the first flight in the race for the Moon. Gus Grissom was the second American to travel into Space. Ed White was the first American to walk in Space."

***

No one said a word inside The Ablation Room at Ed Laird's Heat Shield. Tammy Reis -- allowed in for the somber affair -- leaned forward to stare at the big screen. Jon Franck leaned back, taking a long drag on his cigarette, alternating exhalations of smoke with sips at his glass of bourbon.

"I can't believe they're showing this," Reis muttered.

"It's about time somebody kicked the suits in the ass," Franck said.

Someone in the back muttered, "Don't trust it. I hear Larry Poubelle's paying for the whole show."

***

"While ground testing, the Command and Service Module was filled with one hundred percent oxygen at sea level air pressure," Collings explained. "And nearly every available surface inside the Apollo capsule was covered with Velcro, which had proven so useful for securing small items during the Gemini flights. It proved to be a deadly mixture, though. Some wiring, placed where its insulation could be abraded by a storage-compartment door, generated a spark. In the pure, high pressure oxygen atmosphere, nylon webbing under the crew's seats caught fire, igniting the Velcro and everything else in a flash, killing the astronauts with heat and choking, toxic smoke."

Ancient newsreel footage of NASA management rolled.

"The official word from NASA mimicked the official reports that initially followed the Challenger explosion and now are flowing forth in the wake of Constitution. They said that the Apollo astronauts died instantly, painlessly, burned beyond recognition in a raging fire that they could not have escaped under any circumstances."

Collings stood before a matted-in image of the Apollo capsule. It looked as if the capsule was right there on the set. "NASA lied. The astronauts died of asphyxiation, not burns. NASA kept lying until the New York Times revealed that tape recordings existed of their final moments. Gus Grissom's widow Betty filed a lawsuit to force the truth out of them. Then it was revealed -- safely, quietly, long after any national grief might have turned to outrage -- that Grissom, Chaffee, and White suffered for over a minute and a half, screaming and pounding on the spacecraft hatch, before they died. Those screams were heard by hundreds of NASA employees over an open microphone. They had been forbidden to reveal publicly what they all privately knew."

Collings reached behind the image of the capsule to withdraw a fancy wrench. "The three-layered hatch, once sealed, could only be opened by using this ratchet. It would normally take ninety seconds or more to undo the hatch from the inside. In the smoke and panic, it is easy to see how that might not have been possible. Opening the hatch from the outside took over five minutes. By then, the astronauts were dead."

Collings walked slowly over to an image of Challenger's flight deck. For a geriatric newsman, he possessed an actor's understanding of how to play to an empty set so that it looked as if he wandered among actual artifacts.

"NASA officials lied outright, then defended the lie by implying that the truth would have been too devastating for the astronauts' families and for a nation mourning the loss of its heroes."

The camera slowly zoomed in on Collings. "Too devastating? For a nation already mourning tens of thousands of heroes dead in Viet Nam? Or, perhaps, too damaging to NASA's image of competence, to its tradition of placing the safety of its astronauts first and foremost? Might there have been -- instead of concern for the astronaut's families -- an atmosphere of panic and bureaucratic coverup and blame-shifting?"

***

Braverman glanced at the computer. "Ratings are climbing."

Poubelle smiled. "People are calling other people, telling them to watch. Everybody loves to see scandals exposed."

Lester said nothing, simply smiling and watching the television with a producer's pride in his creation.

Braverman grunted. "I just wish we could have gotten some advertisers other than our own internal spots and your ads for Dædalus."

Poubelle shook his head, still smiling. "You think anyone would want his company sponsoring this duck shoot? You might as well have commercials during an impeachment."

"I would," Braverman muttered.

***

The images around Collings changed suddenly from the familiar NASA photographs to those of crude-looking rockets standing on barren plains.

"As tightly as NASA hoped to keep lids on the facts about its various failures, all of them took place under the watchful eye of public scrutiny. However, the United States was not the only government involved in space-disaster coverups. Even more adept, due to the military nature of its space program, was the former Soviet Union. In October of 1960, in a distant place called Tyuratam in the Soviet republic that is now the independent state of Kazakhstan, more than three hundred rocket scientists and technicians died in a launch pad explosion of a Mars-bound spacecraft.

"The engine failed to ignite. Because of political pressure to launch the rocket during Premier Nikita Krushchev's visit to the United Nations, the program's top military official, Field Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin, violated a major safety precaution by ordering an inspection of the failed rocket before the fuel had been unloaded. While surrounded by the cream of Soviet space experts, a worker mistakenly plugged a second-stage umbilical cord into the wrong connector, opening a fuel valve on the second stage. The engine ignited, setting off fuel trucks, killing nearly everyone in an explosion as devastating to the Soviet program as Constitution is to ours."

Collings stared directly into the camera lens to say, "How often has political pressure -- or merely the perception of pressure -- caused government space bureaucrats to order unsafe launches? Apparently every single time. This happens regardless of nation or form of government, as we shall see when we return after this."

***

"Turn that thing off!"

It was well after dawn on the outskirts of Rubcovsk, just a few miles from the Russian/Kazakhstan border. At 51° 33' latitude, it was as far south as the renegade Colonel Tuchapski was going to get after his hasty departure from Novosibirsk. He was in no mood to hear the small television with its jury-rigged parabolic antenna picking up a signal from some European satellite.

His fellow thief, Capt. Sergei Brajnikoff, responded to his superior's request by saying, "This show, it mentions Tyuratam and Nedelin!"

"Good for them. We have work to do." Vlad lit a cigarette. "The grain silo is topping off today. Once it is done, we can move the missiles in and assemble them."

Brajnikoff turned away from the commercials to face his leader. "We know when to avoid most Russian satellite surveillance, but we know nothing of current American intelligence."

"That is why God made cloudy nights."

***

"In the aftermath of both shuttle explosions," Collings said, "NASA repeated its Apollo history to the letter. The Challenger crew, the Constitution crew, and all the victims on the ground, they flatly stated, died instantly. The astronauts never knew what hit them. It was an almost ethereal death, a sudden blaze of light and fire, an instantaneous, painless end. That was the way heroes -- if they must -- should die.

"America and the world grieve, but are comforted."

The scene shifted to footage of recovery ships. Collings voice was low and filled with scorn.

"What would not have comforted them was to discover that the Challenger astronauts had survived the explosion, that they lived to experience a horrifying plunge downward into the Atlantic. That they were fully aware of their fate and that, rather than dying instantly in a blaze of fiery glory, the Challenger Seven died when impact with the water shattered the crew cabin, when the harness straps across their laps, legs, and over their shoulder dismembered their bodies and scattered the pieces across the ocean floor."

***

Tammy stared at the screen. During Collings's last few words, her heartbeat began to race, her breathing grew short and rapid. Her incessant nightmare had reached into the waking world to envelope her in fear. Blood pounded against her ears. A swirling prism of multi-faceted colors pulsated in her field of vision. Falling, falling.

She felt the impact, but at first did not realize that her head lay against the table. Nervous macho laughter jackassed somewhere far away. Jon lifted her up and back into her chair.

"Tammy?"

"A-OK," she said softly. "I just had a bit too much to drink." She marveled at how pervasive lying had become.

***

"Challenger had no emergency locating transmitter," Collings said, "something that costs a few hundred dollars and is required equipment on every aircraft that flies over American soil. While this would not have saved the astronauts, it would have sped recovery of the bodies. An ELT weighs ten pounds. NASA, ever concerned about excess weight on the shuttles, did not include one, nor have they included any on subsequent shuttle flights.

"What did they include on Challenger?"

A series of photographs kept pace with Collings' list.

"A deflated soccer ball; 700 embroidered mission patches; sixteen hundred flags of various sizes from various states and foreign countries; medallions, patches, pins, and ornaments. And a frog. But no emergency locating transmitter."

Collings looked grim. "For an organization that paints itself as being overwhelmingly concerned about safety, the absence of an ELT belies such concern. And it is worse than that."

He stood now beside a model of the shuttle.

"Something that actually could have saved the astronauts' lives was proposed but never added to the shuttle, for reasons of budget. However, at a cost of two hundred-seventy million dollars over the entire life of the shuttle program, a small kick motor here"-- he pointed to an area just below the three main shuttle engines --"could have served two purposes. First, even at a two percent weight penalty, it would not have been dead weight, for it could have been used in every flight to give the shuttle a final push into slightly higher orbits. Second, in an emergency, it could have been used to throw the shuttle clear of the boosters and external tank, a capability that could have saved seven lives and the half-billion dollar Challenger. Yet this simple device was not on Challenger, nor was it installed on any of the other orbiters, including Constitution, despite the fact that it might have saved the orbiter and crew in this disaster, too. Why? Where is NASA's concern for safety when it comes to such a simple solution?"

***

Gerry Cooper stared at the TV screen set up in the Freespace warehouse, transfixed. Finally, after all these years, he was seeing the lid blown off NASA, exposing the worms that crawled inside. If any remaining humor had lurked in his soul, he would have laughed with glee. Instead, he simply shook his head and watched, feeling the wasted years spent believing in the space program slip through his fingers and away from his life.

Sherry put an arm around his shoulder. She knew what pain this was for him. Even though he sought to compete with NASA -- and NASA sought to neutralize him -- his sincere fondness (nostalgia, perhaps, she thought) for the space program died a slow and painful death over the years. This show merely hammered the final stake through its heart.

***

Collings turned his attention toward the shuttle boosters. "NASA officials knew since the first flights of the Shuttle that the booster O-rings had a tendency to burn through. Simple burn-through wire sensors wrapped around each segment joint in the booster -- had they been installed-- could have alerted computers to abort the flight. A pyrotechnic charge that blows open a vent in the top of the boosters -- had it been installed -- would have neutralized the thrust, allowing the shuttle to break free with the abort motor -- had it been installed. And those same thrust-negation devices might have saved thousands of lives last month, rendering the Solid Rocket Boosters incapable of propelling Constitution toward the viewing stands."

Collings looked scornfully toward the camera. "Monday morning quarterbacking, you ask? Easy to find solutions to problems after they become apparent? Well, McDonnell-Douglas's proposal for a booster back in 1972 took O-ring burn-through into consideration and suggested exactly the sort of sensor and thrust-negation devices mentioned here. In 1973, Aerojet Solid Propulsion Company suggested building a booster in one solid piece, rather than in segments, totally avoiding the problem of gaskets, O-rings, and burn-through. Since the resulting booster would have been too big to transport by train, Aerojet proposed building the rockets in Florida and shipping them to Cape Canaveral by barge. Yet Aerojet lost the bid to Hayes Polysulphide, far off in Utah. Why?"

Collings shook his head as if all the evils in the world could be summed up into his next revelation.

"NASA claimed that the Hayes bid was the lowest of four bids. Well, maybe that's the reason that it was picked even though it also ranked as the least desirable of the four. NASA denies that Senator Ludlow Woolsey of Utah -- chair of the Senate committee controlling NASA's budget -- unduly influenced the decision. Nor did NASA administrator Joe Feather, an ex-president of the University of Utah whose wife hailed from Hayes Polysulphide's home town of Young City. In one case, though, seven lives were snuffed out in a horrifying plunge into the ocean. In the other, hundreds of innocents died because of a chain of anticipated and avoidable decisions. Decisions that would never have been made in any organization with any degree of accountability."

***

Braverman turned toward Lester. "You have all these facts on file? My lawyers are probably sweating missiles."

Lester nodded. "It's all there and only you had the guts to help me point at the emperor's wardrobe."

Chemar pointed at the InstaRate. "More people are tuning in. The more Collings goes into the coverup, the higher the ratings go."

Braverman nodded. "Good. Good. Look! We're even pulling them away from pay-per-view!"

***

Collings stood beside footage of the Constitution disaster, followed by news video of a subsequent press release. "Even now, NASA repeats the same mistakes and identical contempt for the truth. Within hours of the destruction of Constitution, the surviving members of the agency's press relations team issued assurances that the crew died instantly, painlessly, unaware of their fate. Anyone who watched the slow, inexorable fall of the spacecraft knew otherwise. Even as the press liaison spoke, crash crews struggled to extinguish the fires and release surviving crew members Samantha Madison and Nikolai Gagarin from their partially intact crew cabin.

"Both crew members are still alive, though barely so, and hospitals along the eastern seaboard strain under the burden of hundreds of the severely injured. How could it have happened, in light of the managerial changes wrought by the Challenger investigation years before?"

The camera closed in on Collings's face. "Challenger Flight 51-L was the twenty-fifth shuttle flight. Since then, there had been more than twice as many successful flights. NASA management believed that its reputation for safety had once more been recaptured. So when a mid-level engineer named Jackson Lundy questioned the safety of the new SRB ignition sequence program, he was directed into a maze of overlapping and contradictory jurisdictions.

"And what did Lundy discover that extinguished the lives of over two thousand innocents?" The camera zoomed in until Collings's face filled the screen. "A left parenthesis in one line of code was missing. One solitary character out of hundreds of thousands. Yet its absence threw the entire ignition sequence off by a fraction of a second, and in that blink of an eye, America's space program ended in flaming tragedy."

***

Melissa Lundy sat alone in the darkness of her home, staring at nothing. When the telephone rang, she answered it with a deadened voice. One of her friends spoke softly on the other end to tell her that a TV program just mentioned her husband's name. She quietly thanked the woman and returned the phone to its cradle.

It had only been a week earlier that the mystery of her husband's death had been solved. She watched the destruction of Constitution from the causeway. She hoped against hope that he had somehow survived. When her son called her on the car phone, though, she knew that Jack must have done something desperate. She knew he was dead.

A crash investigator visited her a month later, with the news that Jack's scorched ID badge had been found beneath a body on the road to Launch Complex 39. Pride and anger overcame her: Jack had died trying to save his beloved shuttle, and it made not an iota of difference.

She refused to watch the news reports, working instead on her DNA project with The Ark Society. Her only concession to grief was to add a digital record of Jack's DNA to the Ark's database. In some dimly distant future day, her husband would live again.

***

Collings continued after a station break. "Space Command Lieutenant Colonel Alan Lundy -- Jack Lundy's son -- has verified that he received a frantic call from his father moments before the disaster. No one in Washington or at Kennedy would interrupt the countdown. Why? Some survivors blame President Crane, who, they allege, desired to have the shuttle orbiting Earth to coincide with a speech he planned to give the following day to representatives of the United Nations Interplanetary Treaty Organization. The President, however, cannot order a launch against the wishes of Launch Control. The highest levels of NASA management are to blame, as they were in the Challenger disaster. The major difference between then and now is that after Challenger, no one in upper management was fired. The destruction of Constitution resulted in the death of nearly every high-ranking NASA official, except for a handful who were in Washington, DC, at the time.

"What changes this portends for NASA -- indeed, for the entire American agenda in Space -- is impossible to predict. It remains to be seen what further truths can be recovered from the ashes of Kennedy Space Center, and what those truths will mean to a nation mourning the shattered ruins of the final days of the Space Age."

Collings's funereal voice lightened just a bit to say, "When we return, a look at an alternate future in Space for America. A future far removed from NASA's way of doing business."

***

"Here comes the payoff for sitting through all the scandal," Davy Crockett said, passing a bowl of popcorn to Bernadette. She ferried it over to Swami Sam, who seized a hefty handful to cascade into his mouth. They sat in their South Bronx warehouse, surrounded by other members of the NYU conspiracy, plus a few minions of SBX-13: Crush 69 ran the popcorn popper; Maus, a diminutive crony who happened to be heir to a weapons-company fortune, doled out the product.

"God," Penny Giannini said, "I had no idea they dragged the astronaut's bodies around in garbage cans. That's gross beyond belief!"

"Think they'll mention us?" Sam asked through a mouthful of corn.

Crockett laughed, then turned to look toward their creation. The pencil-stub shape of the rocket stood twenty-five feet tall at the far end of the warehouse. Though the rotor and blades had yet to be attached, most of the interior work on the upper section had been done, and the lower two thirds -- where the fuel tanks were -- was still an open framework skeleton.

Crockett wondered what Dr. Gibbon would think of it. The old man looked as if he had been cut adrift when Constitution consumed his blessed UNITO crew. Gibbon had spoken of the flight's symbolism. Davy wondered what he thought of symbolism now. Gibbon had rushed from NYU to DC moments after witnessing the devastation and had not been seen or heard from since. The university subsequently canceled the seminar series.

"Ooh," Bernadette said, leaning forward. "Here comes the neat stuff!"

***

"Does the end of NASA mean the end of the dream? Or have we awakened from a nightmare to the cool, hard light of day?" Collings walked over to the images of Nomad, Aurora, and nearly a dozen other bizarre and beautiful spacecraft models.

"There may in fact be a new dawn for space travel, if any one of these dreamers can put their creations into orbit. What you see here are designs from members of the Experimental Spacecraft Association, founded by billionaire space enthusiast Laurence Poubelle in reaction to the tremendous response to his announced half-billion dollar prize for the first person to orbit the Earth in a spaceship built entirely with private funds. Some of these spaceships exist only on paper, or in a computer. Others, however, are in the construction phase and should be ready to fly by the end of the year, if not earlier."

He described each design quickly and simply, sometimes with the studio shot giving way to footage of the actual spacecraft under construction. That done, he painted a broader picture of people living and working in Space, "not, as suggested by some, thirty years from now, but within the next two or three years. Living in orbit is not difficult, as the makeshift Skylab and the clunky Mir space stations proved. And if the simple space habitats are supported by people who want to live there, instead of temporary residents with a home on Earth, genuine progress will be astonishingly swift."

Collings faced the camera and looked as sincere as he ever had. "I've been reading a script for the past ninety minutes, but what I'm about to say are my own words. When I agreed to preview this program, it was with great hesitation. I have supported the space program for over half my life, and as a boy in the midwest used to gaze in wonder at the night sky and dream of someday living there. Even though I have a photograph of me dressed in a Shuttle uniform, I knew back then that I had no real chance of getting into Space on a NASA vessel. One of these spirited adventurers, though"--he waved a hand at the spacecraft models--"might have room onboard for an old workhorse willing to sign any waiver necessary. So if you see me broadcasting once more someday soon, don't be surprised if I've managed to beg, buy, or barter a ticket to the New Frontier."

He raised his left hand in his traditional signoff, which made this more than just another narrating stint for him and his viewers. "And that's the way I see it. This is Truman Collings -- Good Night."

***

Marcus Grant turned toward Chad Haley to say, "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

"Not seriously."

Grant pointed to the HDTV screen. "Bring along whoever produced that documentary, a cameraman, and Truman Collings. Hell, we could make the biggest box office hit in history: 'Filmed entirely on location in Outer Space!' "

"I really think," Joscelyn said, "that we need every bit of available space for supplies and crew. The design was not intended to carry much -- if any -- payload. The original idea was to orbit the station, then supply it via the Saturn Five. We've been able to improve the performance and reduce the dry weight of the station enough to permit a crew, life support, and some machinery. You put me in charge of the personnel requirements and I've come up with--"

"Is this going to turn into a meeting?" Grant asked, shutting down the entertainment center with a single squeeze of the remote.

"You saw all those projects the ESA has going." Donahue tossed her long hair over a shoulder and continued. "I don't want to overinflate the time factor here, but if any one of those small-scale efforts gets up before we do, we can kiss the element of surprise goodbye."

Grant shook his head. "It may not matter. The feds actively look for smuggling and only catch a small percentage. The counter-economy is more resourceful and quick to adapt than the governmentis to react and respond."

"Still, it's nothing to spit at. Half the pods are finished and are arriving in Kismayu. With Chad's assistance, I've created manifests for each pod. We'll split the personnel up among the sixteen pods, one each, except for the cockpit pod that will contain the pilot and co-pilot. The opposite pod will hold extra machinery as ballast."

"No navigator?" Grant asked.

"Navigators," Chad interjected, "are obsolete. We'll be hooked in to the same Navstar, Glonass, Inmarsat, and other GPS systems everybody else uses. The launch itself is all up to the computers anyway."

Donahue continued. "So we'll have twenty people up there, who each ought to have multiple skills we can exploit. I presume the three of us will be going, so that reduces the remaining crew to seventeen. The two pilots bring it down to fifteen. We absolutely require a doctor/paramedic pair. Of the remaining, I've decided we need some space-agriculture people, since we're going to have to grow our own in the absence of any restocking flights; an electrical engineer to hook up the solar panels and keep everything else working; a metallurgist, preferably one who can also do welding; a vet to tend the rabbit warren, our only source of fresh meat; an expert in zero-g manufacturing for both the crystal bath and the high-temperature furnace; a chemist for the peptide unit and other mini-factories; and I think we should also have at least one expert on military communications and weaponry, just in case we have to face that threat."

Grant nodded.

"Systems engineer, nutritionist, city planner, radiation experts--"

"Whoa! City planner?"

Haley smiled. "You intend there to be a Grant Two, Grant Three, and so on, don't you?"

"Yes," Grant said. "But a city planner?"

Donahue nodded emphatically. "There are a few who don't spend their days plotting land scams and taking bribes. Some actually understand how cities evolve and have the brains to channel that evolution rationally. Most of them don't work for city planning commissions, though. Think of them as macro-architects."

Grant raised a hand. "Fine, fine. Who else?"

"Computer programmer, maintenance, general handyman. Oh, and one space law specialist."

"We're going to despoil outer space with lawyers?" Grant sounded full of disgust.

"No, Marc. I said a specialist. That could be anyone with the knowledge."

Grant mentally reviewed the count and said, "That's more than twenty."

"I'm looking for people with dual skills. A doctor who's a chemist, or an electrical engineer who can program."

"No astrophysicists or spaceflight experts?"

Donahue nodded. "I was hoping that one or both of the pilots would be former astronauts."

Grant's face suddenly pinked. "No. That's out. No NASA pilots. Ex-ground personnel, maybe, but no astronauts."

Haley frowned. "Why not? No one else is more familiar with--"

"No one else," Grant said, reddening, "has been as hypocritical in their support for an agency that kills their own kind. Anyone who stayed or became an astronaut after Challenger is either monumentally stupid, irrationally suicidal, or in it just to climb the ladders of power. Forget them. We don't need their poison." He emphasized his position with a slap of his hand against the chair arm. "Just forget they exist."

Joscelyn pondered this facet of Grant's personality. She had never known him to grow furious over anything, and though his interest in Space was apparently long-suppressed and now given vent, his antipathy to NASA bordered on the pathological. She had been to the astronaut watering hole, and the level of discontent there was high. Especially in one ex-astronaut named Tamara Reis. If she could reach that bitter wretch and revive her with a new vision and goal, she would be, Joscelyn suspected, a most enthusiastic member of the crew.

She would have to work behind Grant's back, though, until the deal was done. She gazed at the man sitting silently at his desk, fuming, and feared what his reaction might be. I hope I'll be able to make my case for astronauts before he strangles me. And them.


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