Space

by James A. Michener

  Two of the couriers drove Jake and Chris to Baton Rouge and then southwest to Plaquemine, where a man named Thibodeaux had a packing plant and a sleek brown Lear jet with extra-large tanks. After the drivers of the car stole a large truck, which they placed across the roadway to forestall pursuers, Jake and Chris moved swiftly to the unguarded Lear, opened the locked door with a skeleton key, and slipped into the pilots’ seats. Checking all systems with extreme care, Jake satisfied himself that the jet had sufficient fuel to get him into Mexico, where a [738] dozen clandestine fields operated, then switched on the ignition.

  It was imperative that once the engines roared into life, the takeoff proceed without a moment’s delay, so while the various systems hummed with life, Jake checked one last time: “Looks good, old buddy.”

  “Take her up,” Chris said, and with a deep breath Jake applied power, heard the engines respond beautifully, and moved swiftly to the far end of the little runway. With a breathtaking U-turn to the right he reached takeoff position, poured on the gas, and roared down the runway. It was a perfect escape, and as soon as the plane was well into the sky, the two men in the automobile were speeding west to the safety of Lafayette, where traffic would absorb them.

  In Colombia it was Mott who took charge. In jail he had learned Spanish, anticipating the day when his cloudy operations might require that language, and he dealt boldly with the brigands who controlled the heroin-cocaine market, offering them what funds he had collected in the States and assurances of a much heavier payoff if the smuggling succeeded. At first the Colombians were disposed to protest the relatively small amount of hard cash they were receiving up front, but when Chris railed at them, showing them his own empty pockets and reminding them of the great risks he and Jake and the others in the States were taking ... “Where do you suppose we got this plane? We heisted it, right off an airfield in Louisiana.” And he showed them an American newspaper he had purchased while waiting in Mexico so they could read for themselves about the daring robbery at Plaquemine. Fortunately, the account carried a photograph of the stolen plane and a description of its number and brown-painted body.

  “Leave the jet with us,” the brigands suggested. “One million, two million dollars.”

  “What would we fly in?” Jake asked, but before the Colombianos could even reply to this stupid question Chris stepped in: “Fools! You could sell the jet for maybe two hundred thousand. We’re talking about eleven million.

  Iron-hard, he kept everyone in line. He had brought less money than the brigands had expected and now he was taking out of the country a plane on which they might [739] have made a substantial profit, but the convinced everyone that this was the only way. For one bad moment he suspected that the brigands might try to kill him and Jake and sell the jet to some South American customer, but he forestalled them by drawing his own revolver and indicating to Jake that he must do the same. Nodding to the heroin providers, he backed slowly to the Lear, sent Jake in ahead of him, waited till the engines coughed, then dashed in, slammed shut the big door, and waited breathlessly as Jake took the jet down the rough runway and into the air.

  “I thought they might have a machine gun somewhere.”

  “I’d’ve headed this beauty right into the trees,” Jake said. “They’d have found themselves with zilch.”

  “And we’d have been dead.”

  “Sure, but we’d have had the laugh on those bastards.” The load was so extremely bulky-bales upon bales of marijuana plus the smaller cartons of the heavy drugs-that there was scarcely room to move if one sought a drink of water or any of the beer in the packing company’s icebox, so Chris stayed in the copilot’s seat, staring at the dark waters of the Gulf as the sun disappeared. Their route would take them over the western end of Cuba and onto the Florida peninsula south of Naples, and as night fell Chris asked, “You feel confident we can drop low enough to confuse the Cuban radars?”

  “That’s my job,” Jake said.

  “If they did have a machine gun, and they got you,” Chris said, “I was going to take this baby up. Or die trying.”

  “You’ve never flown a plane.”

  “I’ve watched you.”

  “Could you land this baby? If anything happened?”

  “I could sure try.”

  Jake asked him ten or fifteen questions and was startled by the cleverness of Mott’s responses. “Maybe you could get this tub down. Wouldn’t be worth much after you did, but you just might make it.”

  “Our boy in Louisiana will get his plane back just about as good as when he lost it, won’t he?” Chris asked. He was always fascinated with possibilities, with alternate ways of doing things, and he was known among his fellow convicts, in jail and out, as the man to have with you if the risks were great.

  [740] “What’s your old man really do?” Jake asked as the Lear purred over the water.

  “He’s a mahoof with NASA. You know, the outer-space stuff.”

  “What’s he think about your operation?”

  “Distressed.”

  “You tell me once you had a brother?”

  “He’s an interior decorator.”

  “For real?”

  “I think he runs a bar in Denver, but he’s an interior decorator.” They flew in quietness for about fifteen minutes-one hundred miles covered by the jet-and then Chris added, “Millard, that’s his name, he wrote to me while I was in jail-offered me a job. I think Pop got to him, suggested it. I’m sure as hell good old Millard didn’t want me around. I didn’t bother to answer.”

  They slipped across Cuba without incident, edged their way up the western coast of Florida keeping very low then darted inland south of Fort Myers and headed west-to-east for the spacious airport at West Palm Beach.

  They came in low, as planned, saw the lights of the town, looked for the southern edge of the strip, and came roaring down just as another private jet lifted into the air for a flight to a meeting of a corporation board in Chicago. The two powerful jets, one brown, one a pale blue, smashed head-on eight feet above the ground, exploded, and fell it a blazing tangle.

  The six men in the five fast cars who waited on Route 98 watched in awe as their precious cargo vanished in the intense flames. One driver suggested: “We better get out of here. The cops might ...”

  “Jesus,” another said as he and his partner crept back to their car, “eleven million bucks!”

  The NASA high command was one of the most compassionate in government; for decades they had worked with high-strung scientists and for years with sensitive astronauts, and they appreciated the psychological tensions to which their personnel were vulnerable, so when tragedy struck in Florida they knew the Motts needed help. But by an unlucky chance, while dispensing sympathy they had to require Mott to confront an additional blast of bad [741] news, and they decided to tackle the problem directly.

  “Stanley, this is one hell of a time for me to say this, but you know your obligatory retirement takes effect on the last day of this year.”

  “I’ve been aware of that,” he said dully. “For some years ...”

  “But we appreciate enormously the way you defended the agency during the bad days with Shuttle. You were a man to be proud of.”

  “Look!” Mott snapped. “I’m retiring. Let’s not make a big deal of it.”

  The administrator did not alter the level of his voice. “We wanted you to know that even when you do retire ... well, we’ll still want to call on you for consultations. You have a decade of hard work ahead of you.” Mott nodded. “And to prove our appreciation, we want to headquarter you in California ... work with the press on the Voyager 2 fly-by of Saturn in August.”

  When Mott showed obvious relief at this unexpected good news, the administrator breathed more easily, and smiled approvingly when Mott spoke: “You understand, Clarence, I’ve been preoccupied with Shuttle. I haven’t kept up with all the great things the Voyagers have already accomplished.”

  “We’re aware of that. But a man
like you, fresh to the program, enthusiastic, might provide just what the press needs to make this operation sing.”

  “I would like that. I’d like a chance to catch up.”

  “And, Stanley, we think you ought to take Rachel along. Get her involved.” Mott could not respond-the past weeks had been horrible-so the two men just sat there, and after a while Mott said very quietly, “It’s thoughtful of you to suggest that, Clarence. You know, she had to identify the boy’s body from dental fragments.”

  This assignment to Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory would be his final job with NASA, not out among the shadowy galaxies, but at least with the great planets, so he and Rachel packed their car to the brim, and during the long drive west talked and rediscovered each other. They stopped at Clay to chat with Professor Pope, then on to Boulder to consult with the Sun Study people, and into the mountains to visit briefly with Millard in his ski shop, where to their amazement his partner told them, “Some [742] of the Skycrest businessmen are thinking of running your son for mayor!”

  By the time they reached California the dull ache of their son’s death had somewhat diminished; the wonderful therapy of driving across America had asserted itself once again, and Stanley was eager to leap into the middle of preparations for the fly-by. Both he and Rachel were caught up in the euphoria which permeated the place. There were no loose tiles here, no soul-searching, for this was the kind of meticulous preparation and supervision that NASA had always done so well. There were no sleepless nights over Saturn.

  Each morning he and Rachel met with the sixty or seventy experts responsible for the mission, and as soon as he began assembling technical details for the press, he fell under the enchantment of this last great planetary exploration, and he appreciated the sadness with which some of the men worked: “You should stress, Mott, that this is our culminating effort. When Voyager 2 leaves Saturn it will head for Uranus, arriving in January 1986; then to Neptune, August 1989. After that, there’ll be no more probes, no more landings. The American effort to explore the planets will have ended ... for this century.” So the nation’s fantastic adventure in far space was ending just as his personal career was drawing to a close; whenever he looked at the marvelous duplicate of the spacecraft, he felt as if he were seeing himself, and he prepared his materials with special reverence:

  In 1967, fourteen years ago, a band of visionaries saw that if they could launch the right kind of vehicle into space at the right time with the right velocity, it would fly in a beautiful arc to Jupiter, where the gravity of that giant could be used to whip the vehicle on toward Saturn. Indeed, these far-seeing men argued that it would be possible to fly within a few thousand miles of the great rings of Saturn and to decide once and for all what they were composed of and what they signified in the grand design of our universe.

  The data of this bold dream still amazed him: straight line distance from Earth to Saturn, about 1,000,000,000 [743] miles, depending on where the two planets happened to be in their respective orbits; distance of the actual route to be flown, 1,400,000,000 miles; time required for the trip, four full years less eleven days; average speed during that time, about 40,400 miles an hour.

  Ten years ago he had asked those early gnomes with their primitive calculators, “But what can you see if you do get to Saturn?” and they had jolted him with their answer: “We’ll cram onto our vehicle eleven subtle instruments, the like of which the world hasn’t seen before. Special scanners to provide us with pictures. Devices to measure radiation, magnetic fields, plasma particles, cosmic rays. We’ll do spectroscopy, and photopolarimetry, and all kinds of radio science. Things you don’t even know about yet.”

  They had shown him a mock-up of the spacecraft, and once again he was startled by the realization that even though it would be flying through space at enormous speed, there would be nothing in space to impede it, so it could have wonder machines dangling from it at any desirable attitude or spot: “Looks like a flying bedstead.” And they countered: “Four of our complex devices aren’t attached yet.” And he asked, “Where will you put them?” they replied, “We’ll hook them on anywhere.”

  The magnetometer had captivated Mott, for it symbolized what science could achieve in this radically different environment. When he first saw the contraption it was a forty-foot length of filmy epoxy glass resembling a spiderweb and not much firmer. A breath of wind would disturb it. He was perplexed by a rather heavy instrument attached to one end, for obviously the web could not support it, but he watched as men from JPL coiled their gossamer into a tight package, storing it in a canister like ones that hold tea and placing the heavy magnetometer on top. Far out in space the top of the canister would be blown off, the spring-loaded gossamer would uncoil, and Voyager would have a long rigid arm supporting the Earth-heavy instrument. It was quite miraculous, but the inventor assured Mott: “In space that gossamer arm’ll be as rigid as a steel beam here in California.”

  “But how do we get the commands from Earth to the spacecraft?” Mott had asked in those early days, and the project manager had explained: “We’ll build three [744] maximum-efficiency computers into the craft, and while they’re still on Earth we’ll fill them with instructions-roll after roll of the most intricate things to do. “Point your scanner the other way.” “Switch your focus from the star Canopus in Carina to Deneb in Cygnus.” “Increase the speed of your read-out.” “Take away the blue filter and move in the red.”

  “When the computers are crammed with instructions, we establish a radio link from them to the ground, but it’s not like a telephone. Not a bit. Because of the vast distance, it takes our radio instruction-traveling at the speed of light-eighty-seven minutes to reach Saturn, and takes Saturn’s answer eighty-seven minutes to get back. What does this mean? I say in the telephone, “Hello, who’s there?” Then I wait three hours to hear you say, “Stanley Mott.”

  “So we construct a special language of about 1,300 words and we transmit those, and each word cues the computers to set a prearranged sequence of events into operation. Dr. Mott, how many radically different commands do you suppose we’ll be able to send our spacecraft?”

  “You mean, from JPL to Saturn?”

  “Exactly.”

  “You have 1,300 command words, I suppose each one controls ... what? Ten ... fifteen functions?”

  “We can send 300,000 different, specific orders.”

  Mott had stared at the man for almost a minute, trying to absorb this astonishing fact, and slowly, as if he were a child in school, he repeated salient data: “After four years of remote travel, after a billion and a half miles on the road, with a system that requires an hour and a half to exchange one word ... you can deliver 300,000 intricate orders?”

  “Yes. With a likelihood of success. By that I mean, the craft will receive the new order and be in working condition to obey it-90.3 percent.”

  From time to time during the following years Mott had been in touch with what the people in charge of Voyagers 1 and 2 were doing: 1972-1976, building the spacecraft and their various appendages; 1976-1977, frantic simulations to be sure things would work; 20 August and 5 September 1977, two perfect launches; 1977-1979, four hundred experts biting their nails; 5 March and 9 July 1979, glorious arrivals at Jupiter; 1979-1980, more [745] nail-biting; 12 November 1980, triumphal photographing of Saturn by Voyager 1 ...

  Now, in the anxious interval before 25 August 1981-the hoped-for arrival time at Saturn of Voyager 2-his job was to check with the mavens at Jet Propulsion to ensure that usable photographs would be supplied to the hungry media, and he said to Rachel, “You must see what these miracle workers can do.” When he took his wife to the laboratories, one of the men directing the overall flight told her, “We threw this baby into the air four years ago with every intention of getting it into position to take the Earth’s best pictures of Saturn. You see on the wall what Voyager 1 accomplished last November.” As Rachel studied the dazzling photographs, he said, “When those rings come in
to closer view, we’ll do even better.”

  “How can you be so confident?” she asked, and he said, more quietly now, “I’m positive we’ll deliver the camera to the door of Saturn. What happens when it peeks through, that’s Template’s headache.”

  When Mott heard this familiar name he cried, “Rachel, you’ve got to meet this character. If NASA has a verified in-house genius, Template’s it.” And when the Motts reported to that man’s cluttered office, Stanley said jovially, “My wife is hoping to see some really great pictures. What can I promise her?”

  “Mrs. Mott,” the enthusiastic young fellow cried, “you’re going to see a miracle. When we started with Mariner 4-back at the dawn of the space age, you might say-”

  “It was only 1964,” Mott reminded him.

  “Like I say, at the dawn of exploration. Our equipment then could deliver to Earth about six bits a second. This time, 44,000 bits a second! Think of it-44,000 clear, distinct pieces of information come at us each second from 1,000,000,000 miles.”

  “You feel confident it’ll still produce good pictures?” Rachel asked.

  Template ignored the question, which he deemed irrelevant; his burning interest was in the process he and his associates had devised, not in the end results. “Mrs. Mott, Mariner 4 required an entire week to send us 21 lousy pictures, exciting in that primitive time, but lousy. This baby will bring us 18,000 photographs in a jiffy. Right [746] here in River City, I’ll receive 184,000,000,000 bits of information from Saturn. Enough data to keep the scientists of the world guessing for ten years.”