“Yes, sir.”
The speaker squawked, followed by a voice. “Dr. Perlman, the President of the United States orders you to vacate this site immediately. If you don’t, we will have no recourse but to blast our way in. We cannot be responsible for your safety if that happens.”
Perlman frowned. It seemed to him they’d already tried to blast their way in, down through the sand chute. What other way was there? Through the blast doors? How big a detonation would that take from the outside? The blast doors were six feet thick, built of tempered steel and reinforced concrete. It would have to be a blast so huge, he thought, it would probably kill him and Charlie in the process, probably wreck the entire place, for that matter, all by itself.
Perlman shuddered. They wouldn’t do that, would they?
He stared upward, looking at the dangling speaker. It sat mute, as if awaiting an answer. There was probably a receiver/transmitter in it. “What do you think, Charlie?” he whispered.
“We done okay not talking to the bastards so far, Doc. Don’t see no reason to start now.”
Perlman marveled at the machinist. He was starting to believe, even though he knew the best scientists in the entire world, that Charlie Bowman was the smartest man he’d ever met. A genius indeed!
THE LETTER
Taurus-Littrow
Jack was there. He’d gotten lost twice and nearly run into three deep craters, but he’d made it—Shorty Crater at last. To save Rover power he stopped at the crater’s base and trudged up the slope. At the top he looked across the crater, estimating it to be a little over one hundred meters in diameter and perhaps fifty meters deep, a football stadium on the moon. Its walls were steep, much too vertical for someone in a spacesuit to climb out, so he kept his distance from the rim.
Apollo boot-prints led around to the northwest and stopped at a work site. Jack spotted the telltale hole left from a drive tube and walked to it. There, about three feet away, lying serenely, was the canister tube he’d wondered about practically from the day he had met Kate. Jack slowly knelt and picked it up. His heart pounded in his ears, as if he had found and touched a holy relic. He ran his glove down its side, savoring the moment so long in coming. The canister had a cleverly engineered latch made for the heavy gloved hands of an astronaut. The initials “K.S.” were just below the latch—Katrina Suttner. He gently pushed the latch and it sprang open. He extracted what was inside—a sheet of notebook paper—and held it up to his helmet. There was her message, just as she had told him it would be, written in a girlish hand he still recognized as hers, sent to the moon by her adoring parents and uncles and the great Dr. Wernher von Braun himself. It was her message across space and time to him:
To my future husband—
My name is Katrina Suttner and I am ten years old.
But you know that. You know all the things I do not.
I wonder—
Will you find this and bring it back to me?
Or will our brave astronauts of the future return it?
Or will I be the one to carry home my message to you?
And I wonder—
Will you be handsome?
Will you be kind?
Will you be smart?
Will you always take care of me?
Will you always love me as I will love you, always and forever?
A tear found its way down his cheek. “Yes,” he whispered to her. “Yes.”
THE ELSIE-2 RELEASE
SMC
On the next flyby the word from Huntsville was go. The OMS boys also gave Sam the high sign. The OMS would be fired remotely from Houston, Virgil too engrossed in the ATESS to do it from Columbia. As planned, Starbuck would make the release call to Penny.
Sam stood. He simply could not stay seated. He hadn’t felt such pride since Apollo. No, damn it. He felt more pride now. Those damn yuppies in the trenches were performing magnificently. No matter what happened, NASA was at least going out in grand style. Impulsively, he picked up the telephone and called his wife. When she answered, he said what he should have said long ago. “Geraldine, life hasn’t been easy for you, I know. Me gone all the time over here, pulling these long missions, then all those hours of sims while you were at home with the kids. How have you ever put up with me? I can’t figure it.”
Geraldine laughed. “Well, it’s simple, Sam. Kinda goes like this. From the moment we met, I have always loved you.”
A crooked smile on his weathered face, Sam slowly hung up. His wife loved him. It shouldn’t have been a revelation and it wasn’t, not really. What it was was a goldurned miracle and so very nice to hear.
Low Lunar Orbit
Columbia came batting over the rim, gravity flinging it down the front side of the moon along what the mission controllers were calling the Taurus-Littrow corridor. Penny’s dome swung a thousand feet above the surface. As the highlands approached, the distance began to decrease, not because the tether was being let out but because the terrain was rising. If all went according to plan, a small circular lava bed named Mare Crisium would come into view just moments before the landing site. Past that was the big circular Mare Serenatis, the dry sea that contained the landing site of the Challenger Lem.
SMC
“Ignition!” Sam cried.
Columbia poured out her inertia as her OMS fired for one minute, two minutes, then three minutes. Her velocity dropped to two hundred miles per hour. Her RCS jets fired, yawing her one hundred and eighty degrees. Gravity exerted its inevitable influence. Columbia began to fall. When the Elsie-2 dropped below nine miles altitude, the OMS fired again to lift it back up. It didn’t work. Columbia kept falling.
“She’s not holding!” one of Tate’s Turds yelled. “OMS firing levels under the call.”
“Huntsville?” Sam called smoothly. “Your MEC boys ready?”
“We got it,” the POD answered. From the MEC back room Sally Littleton sent the command to Big Dog. It fired abruptly.
“Whooee!” Virgil called down. “That knocked me right out of my footloops!”
Columbia stopped her fall and held steady. But it was only a matter of moments before even Big Dog couldn’t hold nearly one hundred tons in level flight at two hundred miles an hour, nine miles above the moon.
Farside Control
Mare Crisium was suddenly on Starbuck’s screen and the computer blinking its demand. The small Mare had surprised him. “Release, release, release!” he screamed into his mike, a fraction of a second late.
The Elsie-2
Penny heard the call and pulled with all her strength. She felt two pins come loose but the third stuck. As the Elsie-2 dropped away, she kept pulling. Then she felt the cable give way and the lander go into a spin, probably imparted by the snagged pin. Penny was in the center, her feet and arms pulled outwardly by centrifugal force. She was going down and she was out of control.
THE AG VISITS THE VEEP
Vice President’s Residence
When the vice president of the United States went to his residential office after lunch, he was surprised to find the attorney general waiting for him. “I just got the word somebody hired a private little army up in Montana to smoke out some sort of secret project. They used federal money to do it too. That’s so illegal, it’s not even funny. I’ve got FBI agents on the way to stop it.”
Vanderheld eased into his chair. “How are you, Tammy? Or has common civility died since we last talked?”
Hawthorne sat up, smoothed her dress. She had been slumped into the chair as if somebody had poured her there. “Common civility doesn’t attack private property, Mr. Vice President. You’ll have to excuse me if I’ve got my panties in a wad. This outfit did a couple of other things too. Did you know they’ve shut down the space center in Houston?”
“Your intelligence is dated. Mission Control’s back up. I ordered it so.”
She nodded. “Have you ever heard of Puckett Security Systems, sir?”
Vanderheld looked thoughtful. “No. I can’t say
that I have.”
“Not surprising. It’s the kind of outfit that mostly operates offshore, an ass-kicker bunch for the oil companies.”
Vanderheld felt very tired and old. “I see.”
The AG scuffled her feet on the rug, looked down at her lap. She seemed to be debating something with herself. The veep waited patiently. At length she raised her plain face. As usual she had forgotten her makeup. “I had some visitors yesterday in my office,” she said. “Jones and Rowe, couple of NASA comptrollers. You know them?”
The veep folded his hands on his desk. “No.”
The AG looked dubious. “They came in on their own. They’d been ordered to do something that didn’t seem right to them. They told me they got sent an order that opened up the floodgates on the Space Station account, about a hundred million dollars’ worth. All that money’s gone, vanished. Some of it went down to Belize, a private account down there. We saw a bunch of it heading over to Russia into the Russian Space Agency account, but it was after the fact. We couldn’t stop either transaction. On paper it was all legal.”
Vanderheld looked at the picture on the wall above Hawthorne’s head. It was a painting of Harry Truman holding his fedora in his hands, standing in front of the Washington Monument. Truman was looking into the distance and slightly up, as if envisioning the future. That’s what the future was supposed to be—always in the distance, slightly up. It was never supposed to be here and now and straight up. “Why don’t you ask the comptrollers who sent them this order?” he asked placidly.
Hawthorne shook her head. “Not that simple, I’m afraid. The order came in to them electronically from NASA Houston. It looked like the JSC director had authorized it. They didn’t know at the time Bonner was killed in that car wreck, so they let it go. All the charge numbers were correct, all the codes. Jones and Rowe had no reason to question it except it seemed damn strange to be spending that money on the Space Station during this shuttle crisis. Then they heard about Bonner and started to scratch their heads.”
Vanderheld nodded. “Yes. I can understand why they might have questions.”
Hawthorne crossed her legs, wiggling her foot. She was wearing white sneakers. “You ever hear of an outfit called the January Group?”
Vanderheld tilted his head. “No.”
She nodded. “Yeah, I didn’t think so either. I looked it up, didn’t see it on your list of memberships in Who’s Who. ”
“I’m not a member,” Vanderheld said.
Hawthorne pursed her lips. “Well, Mr. Vice President, from what I can tell, it’s not the kind of outfit you pay dues to every year, get a slick magazine, anything like that. The January Group just kind of popped up on my radar screen. You know how? You’ll like this, sir. You know the Russian breeder reactor that pooped radioactive crap all over Europe? Well, turns out the KGB, or whatever the hell they call it these days, decided somebody sabotaged that little old reactor. They asked us to help because they thought it was this January Group. We started looking into this outfit. It’s big, sir, really big. The Russians supplied us with a long list of members.”
Vanderheld sat stiffly. “I’m no longer part of the January Group.”
“Why not, sir?”
“Because it changed,” Vanderheld said quietly. “It used to exist to insure that at least some tranquillity remained in the world, and to end wars by ending want. And competition.”
“Don’t think I heard that last one, sir.”
“And competition !” Vanderheld spat. “The January Group was dedicated to an orderly exploitation of the earth’s resources for the benefit of all mankind.”
“How’d it get its name?”
Vanderheld shrugged. “It’s named after Janus, the two-faced god who looks forward and back at the same time. It also happened to be organized in the appropriate month.”
“So you good old boys just got together every so often and figured out how things were going to run across the world as far as who did what with what? What did you have to do to be a member? Have some real clout, right? Be a senator or the president of an oil company? You’d sit there at one of your little meetings, look out across the broad old planet, and figure out how things were going to be run, I guess. Oil was your energy of choice, right? Anything else raise its head like solar energy, or nuclear, you’d make sure it failed, one way or the other, huh?”
“It wasn’t quite like that. The nuclear energy industry did themselves in. It needed no help from us.”
“But you’d make sure of that, wouldn’t you, sir? You started out being all noble and trying to help your fellowman but then you just ended up being in the pocket of the oil outfits, didn’t you? You got used to their millions for your campaigns, all the little perks you got. And then, every so often, a million ended up in your bank account overseas, didn’t it?”
“I never took a penny!” Vanderheld raged. “Twenty years ago I walked away from them.” He shook his head. “That was when the drug cartels started to come in. They were blatant. They wanted stability above all else—not for peace, or to assist the poor, but so they would have a world they knew was safe for their narcotics. They didn’t want anything to change.”
“You know what else I’ve learned, sir? This came from your researcher, Shirley Grafton.” At his surprised look she nodded. “She thought there was something strange going on, sent her information to me the same time she gave it to you, I guess. We already knew some things. Her research filled in pretty much everything. Did you know that the January Group funded an energy outfit in Montana? Dr. Perlman’s the name. Maybe you’ve heard of him. Funny thing is we think the January Group’s also behind this paramilitary outfit that’s been trying to blow up Perlman’s plant. Now, that’s a mystery.”
“Typical of them.” Vanderheld shrugged. “They like to carry energy technology research as far as it will go, then pull back before it goes commercial. That way they’ll have the technology when and if they need it. They know that someday we’ll run out of oil. They want to be ready, be in the catbird seat when we do, bring it on nice and slow so the planet’s not disrupted.”
“Perlman got ahead of their curve,” Hawthorne said.
Vanderheld nodded. “Something like that.”
“Or maybe they’re squabbling. What do you think, sir? Maybe there’s an internal struggle going on? Some of these January folks want Perlman to succeed; others want him and the folks out at the moon dead. Got an opinion on that?”
“No.”
Hawthorne peered at Vanderheld through her big thick glasses. “Who else could have sent those codes to the NASA comptrollers, sir, if it wasn’t Bonner?” When he didn’t answer, she stood up, walked to the window, looked out on Washington, the people going about their business, unaware of the struggle within their government. “Is the President a member of the January Group?”
“No.”
“Who, then?”
Vanderheld shook his head. “Bernie Sykes.”
Hawthorne turned. “How long has he been blackmailing you, Mr. Vice President?”
“Sykes?” Vanderheld shrugged. “It wasn’t always him. Lots of Bernies over the years.”
“What did they have you do?”
“Cajole this official or that. Argue for this bill or that. Whatever they wanted.”
Hawthorne sat back down. “So you’re a victim.”
Vanderheld nodded. “I’ve done my best to resist them for the last twenty years. I brought up Mission Control in Houston when I realized it was probably them manipulating events. And, yes, I think there’s an internal struggle. The old Janists want to keep things as they are. The new ones are after something different.”
“It’s going to be nasty if I bring any of this out.”
Vanderheld looked down, showing his shame. “Yes, I know. What are you going to do?”
Hawthorne shrugged. “Pursue it to the ends of the earth. What did you think?”
Vanderheld nodded. “I hoped you’d leave me out of it. I’
ve tried to do my best.”
“You let evil happen by saying nothing.”
“I wasn’t a Nazi or a Communist, Tammy. I wanted the best for the world.”
“Sir, at least the Nazis and Commies were out front with what they wanted to do. You January guys did everything the sneak way. That ain’t right.”
Vanderheld twisted in his chair, let her see his humiliation. “But I just told you I’m no longer a member.”
Hawthorne opened her briefcase, took out a sheath of papers, slid them across the desk to the vice president. He looked at them quizzically. “Bernie Sykes’s deposition. We corralled him in Iraq. He opened up like a ripe cantaloupe after somebody tried to kill him in his hotel room. Lucky the Secret Service was around.”
The vice president stared at the document. “Any surprises?”
“One. We found out the January Group knew about the Columbia hijacking well in advance. They weren’t too worried about it, though. Sykes says he was told to do what he could to stop it but it was bound to fail, anyway. He said they had decided it was useful, that they’d use the incident to allow you to shut the entire shuttle program down. Put space out of reach forever—or at least until you wanted it.”
“Me?” The vice president visibly gulped.
“Sykes says you were the one who’s been calling the shots to him. Says you were blackmailing him, not the other way around. Had to do with some misappropriated White House funds for his mistress. And I believe him, despite all your passionate denials. You are a very accomplished liar, sir. You know what I think? I bet you’re vice president because those old January boys figured they owed you one after all these years of service. I guess that included shutting down old Apollo, too, didn’t it, sir? You claimed everybody was bored with it, cost too much money, money that was needed for the poor, for education, all the usual eyewash. I’ve talked to Shirley Grafton. She helped me figure it out. The real reason was that stuff they found up there, that helium-3. The fat cats in the oil business knew what the hell that stuff could do to them.”