Augie was interrupted by applause, but he raised a hand for quiet.
“This is going to be a long journey, over many generations; something that is going to take time. Now I’d like everybody to please stand up and take a good look around you.”
Waiting as they all stood up and looked self-consciously around, he could see their embarrassment at having the attention shifted to themselves.
“Do you know what I see when I look around this room? I’m seeing the astronomers, the pilots, the principal investigators, the engineers, the planetary geologists and biologists; the young men and women who will make up the space science teams of the first half of the twenty-first century.”
The kids couldn’t help but squirm, giggle a little, and whisper to one another. But Augie knew they were taking this to heart. The legendary Colonel Augie Blake was calling on them, asking them to join him in something big and exciting, something with unquestionable greatness to it.
“You are the generation who will make possible mankind’s next giant leaps in an era that will be known as the true Golden Age of Space Exploration. You are the ones who will lead manned missions back to the Moon, and on to Mars. Even out to the moons of Jupiter, to Europa and beyond. And I have to say I envy you.”
His eyes toured the pin-drop-silent room like the slow sweep of a lighthouse beam.
“Yes, I envy you. Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo did well, but you will do better. It will be you and those of your generation who will take part in a great adventure full of discoveries that will alter the course of human experience, bring us together, and peacefully change our world in the best way possible, forever.”
Augie then stood at attention and gave them a smart salute, as if addressing the first graduating class of some glorious U.S. Space Academy of the future.
“Good luck,” he said. “And Godspeed.”
It was a wow finish, one that few in the cheering group would soon forget.
Catching Augie’s eye, his NASA driver waved emphatically and held up a cell phone. Mouthing something unintelligible, she then charged out the side door.
But as Augie turned and began shaking hands with the camp counselors seated near the podium, a faint shadow crossed his face. Anyone noticing it might have thought he’d aged ten years in an instant and looked suddenly exhausted. It was not fatigue, however, but the effects of an irregular heartbeat, which he’d experienced before and which sometimes left him a little light-headed.
This episode, though, was more than just arrhythmia: he felt a long bad moment of pain shooting down his arms, and a blurring sense of displacement in time. With a kind of amused abstraction, Augie found himself wondering if he was dying.
And then, almost as quickly as it had happened, the worst was over and the pain passed. Swiping at the sheen of sweat now slicking his forehead, Augie took a look around, feeling just a little shaky.
Fuck, he thought, not sure if he’d said it out loud.
He could clearly see where he was: standing in the sun outside the Space Camp assembly building, signing autographs and shaking hands. He just couldn’t remember quite how he got there.
Well, I’m not dead. If I was dead I’d be lying down.
Looking down at the plastic ballpoint pen in his hand, Augie noticed the whoosh of the NASA logo as if for the first time, sensing some profound multilevel meaning beyond the overt graphic symbology. It was an odd sensation, mixed with a certain overall self-consciousness that was rather curious.
But in spite of everything, he somehow seemed to be carrying on, interacting in a normal fashion with everyone around him.
“Hey! What’s up? What’s your name, darlin’?”
Augie chatted and joked, and watched himself perform at the same time; listening to his own voice as if it were on automatic pilot, feeling his own smile waxing and waning as he took the children’s soft small hands into his own.
Then another unbidden sensation washed through him, like the apex of a wave, taking him to yet another subtle state of being where he could literally see himself from outside his body. Along with a heightened perception of sound, Augie began to experience a luminous color sense, as if everything and everyone around him were somehow lit from within.
But strange as it was, he felt no apprehension or anxiety. Only wonder.
If this is me, he thought, seeing himself signing a program, and this is me watching myself, then who is it that’s watching me watch myself?
It’s me, he answered his giddy tri-located self. Out of my fucking mind.
Then this experience, too, was over. And he was wholly and completely back inside his body, with the winter sun warming his face and a slight tremor in his left hand that hadn’t been there before and caused the first stab of real fear.
Stroke?
He imagined his biannual NASA physical and seemed to remember reading that signs of stroke could still be detected months after they occurred. Being forced to retire was his worst nightmare. There was so much he still hadn’t done and needed to accomplish.
If they catch it, they’ll sit you down, son. But there’s nothin’ you can do about it. So, just let it go, let it go.
Augie willed his hand to be steady; and it seemed to work. He then found himself looking up into the eyes of a sun-bleached Space Camp mom thrusting a notepad in his direction, a pretty blonde with a trim athletic body and one got-to-be-illegal smile.
“Colonel Blake? Would y’all mind makin’ that to Bonnie Jean?”
He recognized the Texas lilt riding Western-style in her voice and thought that smile was like a “Welcome Home” banner strung across his own front door.
“Would that be Houston I hear, ma’am?”
“First-word-heard,” she said, beaming with honest pride over the historic first message transmitted from the Moon: “Houston, the Eagle has landed.”
“Yes, ma’am, it surely was. Is that Bonnie with an i-e?”
And in his jaunty NASA baseball cap and top-gun mirrored shades, Colonel Augie Blake was now every inch his old self, laughing and teasing, taking pleasure in the familiar cadences of a down-home flirt.
With two quick beeps a white GM sedan emblazoned with the NASA logo pulled up to collect him. He waved his good-byes, slipped into the backseat, and was spirited away.
But not to his scheduled rah-rah at Johnson Space.
“Change of plans, Colonel,” the driver in the blue blazer said, glancing back over her shoulder and making the turn marked for Putnam Air Force Base.
“McMurdo?”
“An evac crew’s going in tonight, sir. Langley’s got equipment at Putnam Field deadheading to San Pedro. They’re holding it for you.”
Augie knew about the deteriorating situation in Antarctica: he had astronaut candidates down there on Extreme Environment Training.
“Pass me that thing, would you, darlin’?” He indicated the cell phone lying on the front seat.
Dialing the area code for Washington, D.C., Augie found himself imagining all the ways that things could be going seriously south at the Pole and felt an odd sense of release. Though concerned for his people down on the ice, if he had to choose between glad-handing journalists or jumping into a full-blown operational crisis, he’d take the crisis. It made him feel more alive.
“Where are we?” he said to whoever answered the phone, and then listened without comment. “Hell, yes. Tell them I’m filling my pockets with salt.”
Augie hung up and stared straight ahead as the NASA driver gave him a puzzled look and then put the hammer down for Putnam Field.
She didn’t know what the hell he meant about salt and wasn’t about to ask. But in the rearview mirror she noticed that Colonel Blake seemed younger than he had been only minutes before: his head held slightly higher, his eyes clear and steady with what seemed an effortless and irreducible self-confidence. An echo of the Right Stuff.
3
Once through the Oval Office door and the President’s busy anteroom, the national security a
dviser had headed directly for the antiquated White House cage elevator, his face as blank as a fresh plaster cast.
“Shit,” Winston said, under his breath.
Beneath the impervious self-possession, he was upset. Not so much with the decision-making style of the new Occupant of the Oval Office, irritating as it was. No, what was bothering him was the President’s subtly reproachful tone, especially when he had insisted on knowing “everything that might bear on this decision.” He punched at the elevator button three or four times.
“Everything . . .”
Of course POTUS had been implying that the NSA, CIA, FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and national security advisers like Winston might presume to keep some categories of “sensitive” information under wraps despite requests from their Commander in Chief. Which, historically, they had done and did do: it was practically part of the job description.
“Christ.” Winston gave up on the balky elevator and took the stairs down to the parking garage.
Customarily, nothing stamped ABOVE TOP SECRET was ever divulged, even to the President of the United States, except on the strictest need-to-know basis. This policy had evolved for many reasons, chief among them to protect the republic and the office of the President by preserving the President’s crucially important ability to credibly lie about what was known by his government and when it was known. And if a man doesn’t know he’s lying, he’s more likely to be convincing.
Withholding information, cynical as it might seem, was also a prophylactic against the plain fact that some politicians were better public liars than others. At the highest levels of government, deniability was more than a term of art. The strategic preservation of one’s own ignorance and/or the ignorance of superiors had become a basic survival skill. But it required at least tacit cooperation.
What is the correct course of action when faithfully executing a presidential order is a certain prescription for disaster?
Clanging down the interior metal stairs to the White House parking level, Winston imagined himself retired to an emeritus professorship, lecturing about his current dilemma to government students at Yale. Fact was, there were some things about defending the republic, not to mention political survival, that you could only learn by doing.
Once through the parking-level doors, he flashed his White House pass at a young white-gloved Marine who had already recognized him and began calling for his car.
As he waited, Winston became concerned that perhaps he was being maneuvered into an untenable position on purpose: if the new President was at all naive, his staffers certainly were not.
So, what the fuck is really going on, then?
Breathing the claustrophobic monoxide-heavy air of the underground garage, he tried to step back and see the big picture.
What was the President playing at? A realignment of executive-branch power? A hidden agenda he wasn’t picking up on? Some kind of loyalty litmus? Or was this just yet another professional challenge in the finessing of conflicting vital interests in the environment of White House intrigue?
Winston wondered for a moment if this particular Occupant was simply oblivious to how conflicting interests between the intel community and the Office of the President were supposed to be handled.
No, no. It’s a test, he decided. The partisans on the White House senior staff who had opposed Winston’s carryover appointment would be looking to seize on any arguable failure and use it against him.
He mentally addressed his imaginary students again.
The question then is: Where does your duty lie if your Commander in Chief demands access to highly classified information, the undeniable knowledge of which might well cripple his presidency and by extension the republic you are sworn to defend? And is the answer different in time of war than in a time of peace?
At the moment, though, these were not academic questions. Whatever action he took, if Winston was perceived as withholding crucial information from the President, the knives would certainly come out. The hypocrisy was galling, of course, but politics ain’t beanbag: divulging everything about an above-top-secret project like Orion to a new Occupant who barely had his legs yet would be almost a dereliction of duty.
“Shit,” he said, in a laconic voice loud enough to echo off the underground concrete pillars.
Then his sober black Lincoln LS was being brought up, the Marine driver leaping out and holding the door open in one smooth athletic move. Winston nodded, sliding in behind the leather-wrapped steering wheel as the driver’s-side door was shut with a vaultlike thud, the sound of Ford Motors closing some ground on the Bavarians.
Using a handcuff key, he detached the hardened briefcase from his wrist and locked the doors. Weathering the political wind shear he was flying into would require pitch-perfect finesse and a Teflon vest.
With the President’s directive to tell him everything relevant to the decision about Project Orion cycling through his mind, Winston strained to detect the smallest hint of linguistic wiggle room, but without success.
“Shit, shit, and shit.”
This was a problem. He slid the brushed-aluminum gear selector into drive and headed up to the guardhouse exit and Pennsylvania Avenue.
This was a serious problem.
4
January 28/PBS Studios/Washington, D.C.
Ensconced in a video editing suite at the Public Broadcasting building just off K Street, Angela Browning and veteran producer Miriam Kresky were busy cutting promos, eleven hours into yet another deadline-driven fourteen-hour day.
Angela, at thirty-five and very much at the top of her game, didn’t think of herself as laboring on someone else’s clock. As science reporter, on-camera host, and cocreator of PBS’s Emmy Award–winning series Science Horizon, her work had pretty much become her life.
On a Trinitron monitor, a video sequence showing an iceberg the size of Rhode Island breaking off the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica was being played back on an Avid digital editing system. Timing the assembled edits, Angela snicked a chrome mechanical stopwatch and showed it to Miriam.
“Works for me.”
“With bumpers and ten seconds for the affiliates . . .”
“Let’s cut this puppy.”
Miriam took over on the Avid keyboard. Angela stood up out of an off-black Herman Miller chair and shook out her tensed-up hands and fingers, cracking her neck vertebrae with chiropractic precision.
“Coffee?”
“Oh, yeah.”
Among the media-savvy in Washington D.C., or “Hollywood for Ugly People,” as James Carville liked to call it, Angela Browning was a beauty, though probably only a “pretty brunette” by Left Coast standards.
BOSTON DEB WEDS WALL STREET HEIR might have been her fate had it not been for an eclectic array of high school passions: writing, acting, filmmaking, and, curiously, astronomy and physics. Armed with stellar SATs and a vivid aversion to social clichés, Angela had eschewed Cornell and Columbia for a neobohemian Vassar education. And that road less traveled had made all the difference.
As the Krups machine in the tiny studio kitchen hissed itself awake, she shuffled over to her office, where a slumping mountain of letters and packages lay dumped on her desk.
“Oh, God.”
All the mail in the Capitol was routinely sanitized by Titan electron beam machines, and at her mother’s insistence, Angela still kept a Cipro prescription in her bag at all times. But fear of terrorist biotoxins was not the issue. She eyed the avalanche of snail mail: a critical mass had been achieved.
“Well, hell, Bullwinkle.”
Adjusting the posture of the Beanie Bullwinkle doll propped atop her computer, she separated out two things immediately: a baby shower announcement that made her wonder if she was wasting her life for about 2.5 seconds until she opened the second letter, an invitation to a party at the former vice-presidential mansion to celebrate International Space Station Alpha.
“Whoa! Big bash at the Blair House . . . ”
&
nbsp; The minor perk of minicelebrity made her feel instantly better.
Working her way through the stacks, she came to a manila envelope with “ATT: Ms. Angela Browning” neatly typed on a white address label but no return address. The otherwise plain envelope had already been opened and inspected in the mail room.
Angela consulted her moose.
“Fan mail from some flounder?”
Inside she found one item: a CD-ROM in a clear plastic jewel case.
“Curiouser and curiouser . . .”
Held to the light, the unlabeled disk offered up nothing more than semipsychedelic rainbows refracting off its laser-etched grooves.
“Muy mysterioso.”
The smell of dark-roast coffee began wafting its way to her work station, promising a second wind, but Angela ignored it. Loading in the CD, she let Norton Utilities scan for virus encounters of the digital kind until a single icon appeared labeled tolas.
The TOLAS file opened to reveal a high-res satellite image of the Cydonia region on Mars and its most infamous anomaly, the leonine-humanoid “Face.”
“Oh, God.” Angela rolled her eyes, but her attention was immediately drawn to a cluster of faceted objects near the Face: several four-sided and five-sided geometric shapes rising up out of the frozen Martian plain, monumental artifacts that looked for all the world like Egyptian pyramids.
“Aha.” She grinned and shook the hair back out of her face, pretty sure where this had come from. “Those Goddard boys and their high-tech toys.”
Angela keyed the speed dial on her phone.
“Hell-o, Goddard Flight. Richard Eklund, please. Thanks.”
While on hold, she searched her e-mail for new messages about this from Goddard Space Flight Labs or from NASA researcher Richard Eklund but found nothing.
The Orion Protocol Page 3
