Chapter 41: Kings of the High Frontier
CHAPTER 41 There is no such thing as 'luck.' There is only adequate or inadequate preparation to cope with a statistical universe. -- Robert A. Heinlein 23 July Hillary Kaye had spent weeks in one small valley in Somalia, yet she still felt like a tourist on a world cruise. She and Joseph Lester knew full well that they sat upon the fin de siècle story of the millennium. And they could not tell anyone. Not yet. Not for weeks or months. They both made up for that lack of an outlet by interviewing everyone they could, from local Somalis on the construction crew, to Reis, Franck, and the other flight crew members, all the way up to Haley, and Donahue and ultimately -- finally -- to Marcus Grant. Kaye amassed hundreds of hours of video on her Canon DigiVid II, plus thousands of digital still images with her 64-bit Hasselblad. She tried to convince Grant to permit her to take everything with her into orbit. "And I'll also need digital editing equipment." "Forget it," Grant said. "Too much mass." "How will Joe and I edit the documentary?" she demanded to know. Grant -- who seemed almost perversely cheerful of late, smiled and said, "It's all digital. All you need up in orbit is editing software to work on one of our computers. We'll store everything in a high-density memory system on the ground, you access what you want by satellite link, edit it in orbit, transmit it wherever you want." He picked up one of the camera's optical discs. "You'll only get to take up a couple of these. You can downlink the images Earthside whenever one disc is full. She travels fastest who travels lightest." Kaye photographed every phase of construction, and -- when done -- conducted a tour with Lester through each of the crew and payload sections of the pods. Because all of the workers -- in exchange for lucrative wages -- agreed to live on site until their contracts expired after launch, (though most still labored in ignorance of that ultimate event), she decided early on to test the limits of their freedom to snoop. She and Lester discovered that none existed. "What you see can hardly be called proprietary," Grant told her. "Even if I thought it was possible to 'classify' technology, I wouldn't. I want everyone to know how easy it is to get into Space. I want customers. And your coverage -- when it's released -- will net me plenty. The only reason for our isolation right now is that I don't want anyone to stop us." When he said that, he glanced toward the simulator in which Tammy Reis practiced. Lester interrupted them. "Come on. I want to shoot some inventory being sealed up for loading." Under an open-sided tent fifty feet square, workers fiddled with goods and packing containers as if trying to solve three-dimensional puzzles. The goal was to pack as much into each container as possible without crushing anything. Accomplishing this required the sort of mind that could think in terms of shape and volume. One young local emerged as the most adept and became the head of the department, issuing rapid-fire orders to fellow countrymen in crisp Somali and to others only slightly slower in English. The number of items being loaded varied impressively. Kaye attempted to compose artistic shots of the goods as workers packed them away, and managed to capture a few good ones of the souvenirs Haley intended to be their first line of profit: thousands of small postcard-sized schematics of Space Station Volnos, to be stamped in orbit with the date of the establishment of the first private space station and signed by each of the flight crew; dime-sized .999 fine gold medallions minted in South Africa with miniature versions of the same schematic; a mission patch depicting a silver-threaded S. S. Volnos in the center between Earth in the lower left quadrant and the Moon in the upper right, with the Sun radiating gold threads from the upper left quadrant. The money-making commemoratives interested her less, though, than the items the crew of Volnos included in their own personal preference packets. Each of the twenty crew members could bring fifty pounds of personal property not considered relevant to work or survival. A husband and wife team of dentist/veterinarian and welder/metallurgist -- Harry and Deanna Jakes -- took along holiday decorations, including some Christmas lights, because they wanted to enable their six-year-old daughter Clarissa to enjoy her childhood even though she would spend it in an alien environment. Clarissa, for her part, insisted on bringing fifty pounds of toys, justifying her decision to Hillary by noting that she could play with them until she outgrew them, then pass them on to the other children certain to be born in the coming years. Billy Red Eagle, eight years old and the only other child on the flight, packed a Wrist-Rocket slingshot and a sack of buckshot-sized pellets composed of a variety of metals and metallic oxides; he hoped to create his own colorful meteoric displays for friends on the ground, though he admitted having no idea of the orbital mechanics involved. His parents, David and Janet Red Eagle, (chemist/ceramics and ecosystems/hydroponics) brought Cherokee and Navajo artwork and memorabilia, as well as an extensive collection of music and literature on disc. Chad Haley showed off the bookplates he planned to sign and number in orbit, then send back to Earth to be affixed to copies of the book he intended to write about the project. Marcus Grant refused to bring anything of his own. "I'm taking the whole space station," he told Lester, "which is a lot more mass than anyone else is allowed!" Tammy Reis's personal preference payload interested Kaye most of all, consisting only of two items. She dangled a Flying A keychain before the camera and said, "I'm bringing this. It was a gift from the pilot who gave me my first flight. Her name was Winnie Mae and I only met her once, but I'll never forget her." "And what's in the makeup case?" Kaye asked. It had been an object of speculation since arriving from Brazil by a circuitous route, under the watchful eye of a personal courier. Even in the summer heat of Kismayu, the brushed-aluminum container -- slightly wider than a lunch box -- remained cool to the touch, now and then releasing a puff of ice-cold mist. Reis merely said, "It's a deferred decision." Melissa Lundy, who brought one set of The Ark Society's cryogenically stored collections of genetic material, made the connection. "I'll bet she's got a bun in the freezer," she whispered to Adrienne Oakwood, the paramedic and fitness expert. "She and I met at the liquid nitrogen tank refilling our containers." "That explains the tabloid chatter about what happened on Constitution," Oakwood whispered back. "But why would she freeze the fetus and take it with her?" Melissa shrugged. "Sentimental notion of human rights?" Lester asked crew members what he considered the most important question of all: Why leave Earth? He heard a different answer from everyone, yet each was, in a certain way, profoundly similar. Ta'Shawn Wilks, a twenty-two year-old electrical engineer/computer hacker from Chicago, told the reporter, "Living a good, decent life on this planet has become so difficult that risking mine for a chance to leave sounds like a good deal. My parents are honest, hard-working people who stayed together through thick and thin. Do you think anyone wanted to ask them how they persevered for thirty-one years in the ghetto? No. Yet every time somebody got popped in a drive-by, news folk crawled all over us to uncover every detail of the blood and the anguish. That hammered into a lot of us the message that only violence gets noticed. The other message -- that quietly building a life takes hard work and dedication -- suffocated in the attention given to the brutal end of a life." "I had become a money pimp for the university medical center," Dr. Joan McLaughlin said. "I grew more and more adept at writing grant proposals than at actual research. It reached the point where I'd be on the verge of a discovery only to shift gears and follow another tangent into some other field the government decided to fund more intensely. Research should be rewarded based upon results, not upon flashy proposals. Mr. Grant offered me freedom from those harpies. He didn't promise me success, just a chance to be left alone to work." For Lester, every answer to his question conveyed an entire life story, a summing up of years, even decades, of frustrated hopes and ambushed dreams. For one, though, the dream seemed never to have been stymied. Jon Franck spoke with no bitterness of his life, perhaps because he always knew that somehow this would happen. "It's always been my dream to live in Space. I don't think you can trace it to some early childhood experience. Some people are just born with the outward urge. It's a chance wiring of the head, you know? It's not genetic, it's not upbringing, it's... the way the neurons happened to connect while the brain's growing. Some people have neurons connected just right for playing the piano. Some people have the setup to handle higher mathematics. I wound up with the sort of wiring that when I first saw a picture of men on the Moon, said, 'that's where I'm going!' If I'd been wired differently, I might have been perfectly happy working in a fast food restaurant, or fixing cars, or being a reporter. Instead, I became a pilot, then an astronaut. Now I'm an emigrant to the stars." Tammy Reis gave Lester her cover story: "NASA betrayed its supporters and the American people," she said mechanically. "There were warnings, but no one heeded them: the way they handled setbacks, always blaming their critics and demanding more funding; the way management showed more interest in expanding the number of people under their command -- that's how their salary was calculated, you know -- than in streamlining information flow; the way they used the average American's respect and admiration for astronauts as a means to cover up their waste and outright lies." Her tone grew less measured as she spoke of her friends and compatriots. "Challenger broke up on the day I joined the astronaut corps. My first introduction to the agency was to watch the managers run around obsessed with deflecting any blame from themselves. Every bit of truth that leaked out damned them as bureaucrats more interested in prestige than in progress, more dedicated to their executive jets than to our spacecraft, more concerned with expanding their expense accounts than fixing the Shuttle." Tears welled in her eyes. She no longer spoke the lines mentally rehearsed for weeks and weeks. Something rose up from deeper within her to tell its own tale. "They put astronauts into garbage cans. Heroes... stuffed into trash bags and hauled out by truck. And I stayed with them." Tammy's fist clenched upon her thigh. "I stayed with them and fought for them and did their dirty work because I thought I could make it better. I thought I could fix it from inside. I thought their goal was good and noble and I was honorable in sticking with it." Hillary handed the camera to Joe in order to put her arm around Tammy, who seemed unaware of the gesture, lost in her own confession. "I stuck with it through the worst. I saw what they sank to, to keep their budget. Sucking up to Congress. To Woolsey. A billion-dollar joy ride for that..." She shook her head. "And he cuts our budget anyway." Tammy looked down at the floor, still shaking her head. "They kept doing the same old thing and it finally blew up in their face. In our face. In everyone's face. Two thousand dead. Because of a goddamned parenthesis. That's how complex they made it; a single parenthesis missing and everyone dies." "And you think," Lester ventured, "that Marcus Grant can do better?" She laughed weakly and ran a hand through her obsidian hair. "Marcus Grant does not respect his enemy. He has a double dose of the same sort of hubris that brings down every mad genius." "So he underestimates NASA?" "He has NASA pegged," she said with a grim smile. "He underestimates, however, what an unforgiving adversary Space can be. We'll make it to orbit, but I don't think we'll survive there very long." It took Lester a moment to digest what she implied. "If you think this project is... doomed," he asked, "why are you in it?" Reis gazed at the massive space vessel. "Because to trade death for even a minute in Space is preferable to spending a life in bondage to small minds and venal souls." Proceed to Chapter 42 Return to the Table of Contents