The throne of saturn, p.10
The Throne of Saturn, page 10
Immediately, things began to move; and as always with NASA, the first instinct was to hold a meeting. By 2 pm the administrator was conferring at headquarters with the Associate Administrator for Manned Space Flight, the Program Director for Project Argosy, the Director of Space Science and Applications, the Director of Engineering and Development, the retired Air Force General who was Department of Defense representative to NASA, and the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission.
In Huntsville, Hans Sturmer was leaning over the drawing board with six of his top colleagues chattering happily in a torrent of English and German as they swiftly sketched, swiftly destroyed, and swiftly sketched again the ideas that came tumbling headlong for the final details of the new engines and the modification of the three launch vehicles.
At the Cape, Albrecht Freer was meeting in a state of jovial excitement with the Cape’s manager of Project Argosy, the director of procurement, the director of engineering, and the director of public affairs. They too were eagerly studying designs and drawings, maps of Kennedy Space Center, sketches of Launch Complex 39, the projected site for Pad C.
At North American Rockwell in Downey, California, at Boeing in Seattle, at IBM in Huntsville, Bendix in Fort Lauderdale, McDonnell Douglas in St. Louis, and at several hundred other contractor and subcontractor plants and factories throughout the country, managers, engineers, technicians, and directors of personnel were busily making plans to advertise for workers, rebuild their crews, retool their production lines, put the aerospace industry back into gear again.
At the Jet Propulsion Lab, at Goddard, Ames, Langley, Lewis, and all the allied and associated research centers at more than 150 universities and colleges that did contract work for NASA, scientists, doctors, and engineers prepared to resume or hasten experiments slowed to a walk by insufficient funding, and began to make serious plans for planetary flight, and for the really thorough study of Mars that at last seemed feasible.
And in Houston, the director met with Bob Hertz, the director of space science and applications, Houston’s manager of Project Argosy, the director of engineering and development, the director of procurement, the director of public affairs, Hank Barstow, Bert Richmond, and Connie Trasker, to discuss with a revived and enthusiastic confidence, the great challenge and how they planned to meet it with the efficiency, skill and expertise that had always been the pride of the Manned Spacecraft Center.
All of this, which NASA had been unable to achieve in years of patient pleading with a cautious president, a critical press and a penny-pinching Congress, the Soviet Union had achieved in twenty-four hours.
Such is the marvelous nature of American foresight.
At day’s end, most of the machinery required for the emergency launch of Planetary Fleet One was either under way or in an advanced state of preparation.
Only the president’s final word to the country remained to make it official.
Chapter Three
You really believed him, then,” Jane said as they waited for the broadcast in the comfortable house in El Lago. “You don’t think he’ll let you down.”
“My wife,” Connie Trasker explained elaborately to Pete Balkis, who was lounging on the enormous sofa that stood along the two-story window looking out upon the garden, “is one of those inveterately suspicious women who give flesh to the clichés about marriage.”
“She’s cute, though,” Pete pointed out with his cheerful grin. “You have to admit that.”
“Yes,” Colonel Trasker agreed, “I do admit that.”
“It’s one of those nice things he does,” Jane said with a comfortable laugh. “It keeps me under control when the kids go on the rampage, or he has to stay up in Mayflower for a month’s training, or he goes to the Moon for a couple of weeks. The little wife is happy at home, basking in the warmth of her lord and master’s distant—but cordial, mind you—approval.”
Pete Balkis smiled.
“I think he really means it, you know. He really does.”
“Oh, I know he does,” Jane said. “I just can’t avoid a little space-wives’ dig once in a while.” She smiled. “Fortunately, I don’t dig as deep as some.”
Pete’s expression changed and for a second his usual outward ebullience was shadowed a little.
“I know,” he said gravely.
“I’m sorry,” Jane said quickly. “I know you do.”
“This program is very rough on wives,” Connie remarked, twirling the ice in his glass and staring thoughtfully at the floor. “It asks an awful lot of them.”
“The first year’s the hardest,” Jane said. “Some adjust and some don’t.”
“Helen didn’t,” Pete said.
“I know,” Jane said. “But maybe you didn’t either. Maybe the program was just an excuse. Anyway,” she went on more lightly, as again some subtle sadness briefly touched his usually amiable and engaging face, “I can go through the Clear Lake communities right now and find you a dozen households held together by nothing more than devotion to the program. Along with many more, of course, that hold together because the husbands and wives really want them to.”
“Almost no divorces,” Connie remarked, “in almost two decades. Rather far,” he added dryly, “from the national average.”
“I was one of the bad boys,” Pete remarked.
“Or one of the honest ones,” Connie suggested.
Pete looked thoughtful.
“I’m surprised I got in, after being divorced. If it hadn’t been for Vernon Hertz, I probably wouldn’t have. Now,” he added quietly, “I’m not so sure I’m glad I did.”
“Why?” Connie asked with a genuine concern. “I didn’t know you were unhappy here.”
Pete shrugged.
“I don’t tell everybody everything.” He grinned suddenly and his tone lightened. He reached over and slapped Connie’s knee. “Not even you, old Daddy Confessor.”
“Connie really thought you were eating it up,” Jane said. “I can’t remember how many times he’s told me how well you were fitting in. I’m surprised, too.”
“He’s been very helpful,” Pete said. His tone became completely serious, he looked straight at Connie. “Really, very kind.” Then he smiled again and spoke more lightly. “A real great troop, as you military types in the program put it. No, I have no complaints about the way I’ve been received here. Everybody’s been great to me. I just want to get busy and do something to justify all my training, that’s all—and there just isn’t anything to do. So, I’m thinking very seriously about getting out.”
“But things are going to change,” Connie objected. He gestured toward the television. “The whole thing’s going to pick up again. This is no time to run out on me.”
“It wouldn’t be running out on you, would it?” Jane asked, quickly and pleasantly. “It would be running out on the program, wouldn’t it?”
“I’m not running out on anybody,” Pete said before Connie could reply. “I’m just going to take my abilities, such as they are, where they’ll be more appreciated and more used. It’s a quite impersonal decision.”
“Well, whether it’s running out on me or the program or whatever,” Connie said firmly, “this is no time to go. Sit tight, buddy. A lot of things are going to start happening as soon as we hear from our friend in the White House.”
“Which,” Jane said with a smile, “is even higher than Mars. Connie, why don’t you get Pete another drink before the president starts?”
“Just time,” her husband agreed. Pete gave him a level, searching look as he relinquished his glass.
“So, you think I ought to stay around.”
“I’m sure of it,” Connie said quietly.
“I’ll want a refill, too,” Jane said, rising also and moving to the television set. “Just time for both of us, Conn, if you’ll hurry.”
“Yes,” he said with a certain dryness in his voice as he went to the bar in the corner. “I’ll try.”
“I think,” Jane said, concentrating on the television set, “that with a little luck we should be able to get a really good picture.”
“You’ve got one of the three-dimensional ones,” Pete said in a politely interested tone. He got up and came to stand beside her. “How does it work?”
“Quite well,” she said, flashing a smile up at him. “Want to try it?”
“No,” he said, smiling back. “I’m content to be just a watcher.”
“I wasn’t quite sure.”
“Oh, yes,” he said, his eyes holding hers. “Watchers have their place. Otherwise, no admiring audience. Otherwise, no show.”
“And this show,” she said, turning back to the set, “is a good one.”
“The greatest,” he said, as Connie returned with their drinks.
“I’ll drink to that,” Jane said, raising her glass.
“I, too,” Pete said, touching his glass to hers.
“And I, too, whatever it is,” Connie Trasker said.
His wife gave her merry laugh.
“‘The program,’” she said. “Isn’t that what it always is—‘the program’?”
“If you say so,” Connie said with a rather puzzled smile. “Now, hush, everybody. Your great leader is about to address you.”
“My,” Jane remarked as they sat down in a dutiful row on the sofa, “he is a handsome man, isn’t he?”
And so, he was, as the Great Seal of the United States faded slowly from the screen and his confident head and massive shoulders took its place. The hushed tones of the announcer introduced him, he folded his hands calmly on the desk before him, looked straight into the cameras and began in his usual direct and informal way—“just like he was a friend sitting right there in your own house,” as so many of his admiring countrymen put it to one another after each performance.
“My fellow Americans,” he said, “as you know, your government has received intelligence which indicates that the Soviet Union is planning a major space launch, probably to the planet Mars. In fact”—and he smiled comfortably—“we have received enough intelligence so that we know beyond any doubt that the goal is Mars.
“This has prompted us to re-examine some decisions of the past, and to make some new decisions for the future. I want to tell you about them now.
“First of all, we were confronted with the basic decision: should we, as some propose, simply ignore this new challenge in space and continue the low-key but ultimately certain time schedule that would in due course put us on the planet Mars in the mid-1980s—several years after what now appears to be a likely Russian landing there?
“Or should we institute an immediate crash program in an attempt to overtake and hopefully surpass our Russian friends, and so once again achieve the sort of national triumph we had when we landed first on the Moon?
“Most of us can still remember the great thrill of that first step on the Moon. I don’t believe it takes too difficult a stretch of the imagination to think how we would have felt if that had been a Russian step, a Russian flag, a Russian telecast.
“We have only to match it against what we actually feel now when, as a result of past decisions that deliberately cut back our space efforts, we see Space Station Stalin pass over our country, as it has for almost two years, every couple of hours.
“It is not a comfortable feeling, even though there has to date been no overt Soviet attempt to use the space station to threaten us, either on Earth or in space. It still is not very pleasant to look up there and see that large object passing over, trailed by our little Mayflower.”
He paused and took a drink of water, then returned with increasing gravity to his statement.
“I do not think Americans like to be second best. With Mayflower we made a deliberate decision to be second best. At the same time, we made a decision that we might be second best with Mars. But that decision can still be reversed.
“I think,” he said, and he gave the famed defiant toss of the head that always thrilled so many, “it should be.
“Now!
“I am assured by my advisers in the space program that we have on hand the scientific knowledge, the technology, and the brave men—”
“Yaaaayyy, team!” Pete Balkis murmured, and Jane said, “You’re being disrespectful!” with a muffled giggle. Connie asked rather sharply, “What’s with you two?” and looked, for a moment, quite offended, before he decided to relax and smile a little.
“—to do the job. And to do it—fast.
“I have accordingly asked the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to be ready to launch Planetary Fleet One of Project Argosy on or about a date eight months from today.
“For this mission we have decided to select a crew of four men. They will be launched on three modified Saturn V vehicles from Kennedy Space Center. The mission will consist of a Command-Service Module, a Mars Landing Module, and a Medico-Scientific Module. They will dock in space and then proceed in tandem, with a scheduled landfall on Mars approximately eight months later.
“Our intelligence tells us that this target, if successful, will put us on the planet perhaps a month before the Soviet Union. But whether it does or not”—and again the vigorous, challenging toss of the head—“at least they will know they have had some competition!
“They won’t know it if we sit placidly by—and wait for their launch—and do nothing about it.
“For this purpose,” he said, “I have decided to allocate—”
“Here it comes,” Connie Trasker said with a sharp intake of breath.
“—out of emergency funds available to me, the sum of five hundred million dollars.”
“That’s ridicu—” Jane began indignantly.
“Listen!” her husband commanded.
“I have also decided,” the president said, “to send to Congress tomorrow morning a special message requesting the sum of one billion five hundred million dollars.”
“Hot damn!” Pete said. “How’s that for dropping the other shoe?”
“It’ll be tight,” Connie said happily, “but we can do it.”
“Added to this year’s budget of three billion, three hundred million dollars,” the president went on, “this will provide NASA, with reasonable economies, somewhere in the neighborhood of four and one-half billion to devote exclusively to the scheduled launch of Planetary Fleet One eight months from today.
“I am confident this can and will be done.
“I will say,” he went on, and his tone changed to one of more earnest discussion, more emphatic candor, “that there might be one way to avoid such a new space race, which is inevitably going to be very costly to both the Russians and ourselves. And that is for us to do it together.
“However, I must say to you, my fellow Americans, that there is virtually no evidence on the historical record of the past three decades that the Soviet Union has the slightest desire or intention to cooperate with us here on Earth, in any way. This is equally true of space. It would be nice if this were not so, and I know that many of you wish desperately that it were not so. But it is so, and no amount of sentimentalizing or wistful, wishful thinking can change the fact. They have never been overtly or actively hostile to our program—so far as we know—but also, they have never been anything but secretive—exclusive—closed-off—completely uncooperative.
“They did sign the space treaty. So did many nations, including our own. Immediately thereafter they began systematically violating its provisions by testing bomb-delivery systems in space. They have continued those tests to this day.
“That is the historical fact.
“Therefore, with real reluctance, but acting on the situation as it faces me, I have decided that there would be little point, as things stand now, in issuing any invitation to the Soviet Union to join us in this effort.
“In space,” he said, somewhat bleakly, “as on Earth, it seems to be their preference to go it alone. So be it.
“Somewhat earlier than we planned, but still well within the capabilities of our present technology,” he concluded gravely, “we are outward bound for Mars. I know you will all join me in prayers for the safe conclusion of this venture, and for all the brave and dedicated men who will, with God’s good grace, turn the dream into reality.”
And to the strains of the national anthem the distinguished, determined face faded from the screen.
“Specious, specious, specious!” Percy Mercy said angrily at Kennicutt Williams’ plush bachelor apartment at the Watergate. And, “Specious, specious, specious!” said all of Percy’s friends in the editorial offices of the Times, the Post, the other newspapers that agreed with them, the magazines and the networks. And, “Specious, specious, specious!” said all the cautious, the earthbound, the unventuresome, the timid, and the hostile, who for reasons monetary, self-interested, or political, opposed the flight to Mars. “Oh, specious, specious, specious!”
“I told you he was for us one hundred percent,” Connie said with satisfaction.
“Never let it be said,” Jane murmured, “that he was the man who deliberately let us fall behind the Russians.”
“Do you think that’s all it is?” her husband demanded. “Just politics? You should have been in that meeting yesterday. There wasn’t any doubt about his commitment.”
“Oh, that’s obvious.”
“Then what is it?” Connie asked with some exasperation. “Why are you so suspicious?”
She shrugged. “Just put it down to woman’s intuition, I guess.”
“You have it, doll,” Pete said, and for just a second a wry little expression crossed his face and hers. He got up abruptly and stretched his arms full length above his head with a yawn and a whoop. “Thanks for the drinks, y’all, hear?” he said in an exaggerated Texas accent. “Ah’ve got to ru—uhn.”
“Don’t do that,” Jane suggested. “Stay for dinner.”
