“We’re about to lose out on an historic opportunity, Jake. We’ve already lost the inner Solar System. Despite the panic, the rush to invest in space since the crash, I don’t see any way to avoid that. We’ve spent too long looking inward, retrenching, cutting back, to change now.”
Actually he agreed. Decadent, he thought. That’s what we are now. We deserve to be overtaken, by younger, more vigorous economies.
She said, “But, right at this moment, we have the ability to get to Titan. And if we do that, we’ll have control of a world of resources that are scarce in the rest of the System. Do you get it, Jake? We’ll have just that one little island in the sky, but it will represent the high ground. As a nation we will still be in the game, in the medium and far future.”
He grunted, unimpressed. “Is that all you have? This visionary crap?”
“No. I have a lot more visionary crap.”
“Such as?”
“Jake, here you are on the surface of the Moon. Or as near as damn it. I’ve brought you here for a reason.”
He laughed. “To sway me with flashy Disney-Coke virtuals.”
“No. Well, maybe. Look, Jake, there are whole generations out there much too young to remember Apollo. If we don’t give them this, they’ll be left with nothing more than the memory of a Shuttle crash. We’ll deserve to sink back into all the anti-rational garbage that’s threatening to drown us. But if we act, now… You could be a hero, Jake.”
Her voice, over his VHP loop, was thin, persistent, scratchy.
A hero. In fact, that had already occurred to him.
He wasn’t about to tell Benacerraf this, but he hadn’t in fact dismissed the Titan proposal out of hand, when it first came across his desk. On reflection, he’d calculated, it was possible that a lot of constituencies could be brought to unite behind this bizarre proposal: for instance there would be plenty of work, at least in the short term, for the NASA centers, which were engaged in their usual turf wars over the latest set of cutbacks. This last project could help in the management of the final decline and shutdown much of NASA faced.
The USAF would be more problematic. But even they — or most of their internal warring factions anyhow — could be brought into line, Hadamard thought, if it was pointed out that this exercise would at least destroy the Shuttle fleet, just as surely as using the orbiters for destructive tests or advanced-weapons target practice.
And meanwhile, inside the White House, there was — he had perceived — some pressure to keep NASA flying. Unusually, this Administration was trying to think ahead, beyond its own expected political death in 2,008, They feared for the future of the country if — when — Xavier Maclachlan came to power, a future in which it seemed America was likely to lapse into fundamentalism, and isolationism, and a kind of high-tech Middle Ages.
A huge technological program already underway when Maclachlan took office — an immense deep space mission lasting years, perhaps even spanning beyond Maclachlan’s term — might be a way to keep the spark of rationalism alive. Surely even Maclachlan wouldn’t be able to justify closing down the new launcher program if it meant stranding astronauts among the moons of Saturn.
And, Hadamard reflected, he himself could indeed become some kind of popular hero. When this was over — even if the mission failed in space, even if it failed to get off the ground altogether he could present himself as more than a cost-cutter, a man who could combine the fiscal targets of his employers, even the final run-down of NASA, with a genuine sense of vision.
He could move from NASA, afterwards, to his pick of jobs.
Benacerraf’s proposal, all this crap about the higher ground, was just a ridiculous power fantasy to him, one in a long line of such dreams to emanate from the centers of NASA. But maybe he ought to back it, even so; maybe it could even be made to serve his own personal objectives.
And maybe it would even work. Maybe it would turn a few young heads back towards engineering, instead of aromatherapy or goddamn homeopathy.
And by the time it all failed, as it surely must, he would be long gone.
A part of his mind wondered if Benacerraf knew what he was thinking, if she wasn’t as naive as she seemed. Maybe she was manipulating him on some level he didn’t recognize. If so it didn’t matter; all that counted, when it came to his decision, was the coincidence of this proposal with his own interests.
And, he sensed, the decision was shaping inside him, as the various factors slotted into place in his subconscious.
Perhaps Benacerraf would never know how. But, he suspected, she had won her argument today.
He, Jake Hadamard, was going to send astronauts to Saturn.
Good God. He’d come a long way since he took this job.
A soft chime sounded in his ears, reminding him that he was holding up the VR immersion. For a moment he forgot his lines; then the prompter scrolled across the bottom of his visor. “Uh, I’m at the foot of the ladder now. The LM footpads are only depressed in the surface about one or two inches. Although the surface appears to be very fine, fine grained, when you get close to it, it’s almost like a powder. Down there it’s very fine…”
Eagle looked like a gaunt spider, looming above him in the glaring sunlight, a filmy construct of gold leaf and aluminum, standing on this broad, level plain. He found it hard to concentrate, with Benacerraf standing there, tilted slightly forward under the weight of her backpack, watching him. A grandmother on the Moon was definitely not a part of Armstrong’s original experience, he thought.
He got hold of the ladder with a gloved hand, and turned to his left and leaned outward. “I’m going to step off the LM now.” Carefully, he raised his left boot over the lip of the footpad, and lowered his blue overshoe to the dust. He felt his heartbeat rise, and he felt foolish, knowing he was being monitored by invisible techs just a few feet away.
He felt as if he had stepped onto snow; the surface seemed to crunch as it took his weight. But then, a fraction of an inch in, he reached firm footing.
There he was, one foot on this angular machine from Earth, the other on the Moon itself.
It was time for the line.
“That’s one small step for a man…”
Christ, he thought. He had a lump in his throat.
If only it hadn’t been Armstrong, he thought. If only it had been someone less thoughtful, a bullshitter like Pete Conrad, who would have cracked a joke and whooped as he somersaulted down the ladder of the LM. Then we could all have dismissed the whole thing for what it was, a stunt, and got on with the rest of our lives.
Damn Neil Armstrong.
The lunar surface dissolved. The blocky walls of the immersive VR tank — the centerpiece of the visitors’ center here at Kennedy — coalesced around him, breaking through the dark lunar sky. The harness suspending him relaxed, and his full weight descended on his shoulders once more, heavy and eternal. That feeling of buoyant lightness dissipated, and he was trapped on Earth.
So, he thought, it had all been a dream.
He felt a deep, sharp stab of regret, of loss.
Benacerraf called them all to a meeting at JPL. Rosenberg wanted to review landing sites. In the end, such were their commitments to the accelerating refurbishment and training programs, only Mott and Benacerraf could make it.
To Benacerraf, Rosenberg seemed more isolated than ever from his JPL colleagues. She’d expected some kind of excitement here at the heart of planetary exploration, now that Hadamard had announced the Titan program formally. But as they made their way through JPL’s corridors, lined with pictures of Mars, hardly anyone acknowledged Rosenberg — though some of the natives, ageing hairies, stared curiously at Benacerraf herself, the most media-friendly survivor of Columbia.