Starfire

by Unknown

  One wall of the room was slatted glass overlooking the back patio and lawn, an overbright backdrop in the afternoon light. His mother was walking across the patio flags, holding garden shears in her right hand, an opulent scarlet rose in her left. Edna May Hill, née Kreuger, was a thin woman of erect carriage who looked taller than her 163 centimeters; knotted silver hair rode like Athena’s helmet on her patrician head.

  She nodded as she entered through the screen door he held open for her—

  “Good to see you, Ma.”

  “And you, Travis.”

  —but she did not smile or offer her cheek to be kissed until she had settled the cut rose in the vase of black glass she had prepared for it.

  “I trust you had a pleasant trip.”

  “Sure I did.”

  “Sit down, then. Ice tea?”

  “Thanks.” Travis settled into the depths of a calf-hide armchair. Sometimes his mother’s moods could only be waited out, and he had learned to let her serve him when she was determined to do so.

  Edna May moved to the pine sideboard, where a sweating pitcher of ice tea and two glasses waited, placed there at her order by Maria, the cook. “Lemon, no sugar,” she stated, not asking.

  “Did I tell you I saw Sam and Bonnie in Houston? There for the drilling and mining convention.”

  “No, you didn’t tell me. Sam did, however.” Along with the tea glass, she handed Travis an envelope. “This came by fax. Naturally I read it.”

  The letter was addressed to Travis Hill, Ph.D., President, Asteroid Resource Center, in care of the Hill Ranch’s open code. The originating code block identified NASA headquarters in Washington. It was a request for proposal, tersely inviting the new research corporation to bid on a whole-sky search for undiscovered small bodies of specific orbital characteristics and spectral signatures. The wording of the RFP was familiar; Travis had drafted it himself. Among those few companies invited to bid, only one, his own, would fill the bill.

  “That didn’t take long,” he said, pleased, folding the letter.

  “You pulled a fast one, boy. That what you think?” His mother perched on the edge of the couch facing him.

  “I got what I wanted.”

  “In return for a promise to shut your mouth?”

  “To shut my mouth?” He smiled, but her glittering eye told him he couldn’t bluff the woman who had taught him more than his father had about driving a bargain. “Put it this way—I’ll get data they wouldn’t let me have when I was inside.”

  “They’ll cut you off when it’s too late for you to say anything against them.”

  “I figured on that. I’ll get enough data from these observations to keep a team busy for five years.”

  She was silent a moment, and he had the uneasy feeling she was listening to that part of his thoughts he himself didn’t want to hear. “You shouldn’t have quit, Travis,” she said quietly. “That’s not our way—and it was a blunder. A tactical blunder.”

  He blushed, his dark face suffusing with blood. “Dammit, Ma—”

  “Respect,” she said.

  “Beg pardon, but listen to me one minute.” With effort he kept his voice even. “They canceled my missions. They deliberately tore up my proposals. They were going to assign me to training!”

  “So you did what they wanted. You quit.”

  “I made them give me what I wanted.”

  Her eyebrows shot up. “Oh? When do you go back into space?” she asked, as if genuinely interested.

  His blush deepened. “There’s no way I’m going back into space, Ma. Ever. I got what I could, more than they thought they’d have to give me.”

  “Maybe they are the damn fools you say they are. I say, you cut a poor deal. You could have stayed inside, made trouble, leaked nasty rumors all over the place, used the good offices of Uncle Albert—”

  “Al? That lush!”

  “—and waited for the wind to shift, while you still had wings. But you’re a civilian now, boy. You’re a washout.” Her steady look was not without pity, but there was no sympathy in it; her spare bones, clothed in regal blue rayon, were unbending in the hot light. She sat on a throne of calf-skin and stared her son down.

  Travis, twenty-eight tough years old, capable of being reckless with his life, felt tears burn inside his eyelids. He looked away and swallowed hard against the hot lump in his throat.

  “Travis, son,” his mother said gently, “I don’t want you, or any of my sons, ever to make the mistake their daddy made. Smart, and bold when luck was running his way—”

  “Ma, don’t.”

  “—a quitter when things went bad on him.” She paused, letting it sink in, the primitive lesson she had forced them all to learn more than once, each time she had judged the matter under discussion to be a matter of survival—not of the individual but of the family and its code. For the Hills had their own version of the system. Its bluntest object lesson was the shotgun Travis’s father had used to blow out the back of his skull at a time when oil prices had been down for three years and looked like they were never coming back. They did come back. Therein resided the lesson.

  The shotgun itself resided in a rack on the wall behind Travis’s head, still pressed into use occasionally whenever the deer became too fond of the roses.

  One day, Travis thought—and perhaps that day was near—his mother would realize she could no longer count on her sons accepting her version of the tragedy without their voicing some blunt questions; there had been more to his father’s death than economic despair, and they all knew it.

  “You don’t like what I did. You would have done it differently.” He took a long sip of tea; it cooled his panic. “What’s your advice?”

  “I want what you want, Travis.” She pretended not to hear the undercurrent of sarcasm in his question, wasted no energy reprimanding it, for she too recognized the approaching watershed, the last battle between the generations that she could not win. “Starting from now, we’re going to make this little company of yours count for something. It may take ten years. Or twenty. But by God, we’re going to put you back into space.”

  Half a year after Travis Hill walked out of Taylor Stith’s office for what the NASA bureaucrat sincerely hoped was the last time, a new president ushered in a new administration. Another half a year passed after the inauguration, and one morning Taylor woke before dawn to confront the grim reality of a career choice.

  The air conditioner in Taylor’s bedroom labored hoarsely but was unequal to the strain of the muggy summer darkness; Taylor knew he would not sleep again before sunrise. He got up in the half-light and went barefoot to his den, leaving his wife sleeping heavily in their king-size bed, her lower legs bound in sweaty sheets like a half-wrapped shroud.

  The Stiths’ brick ranch house nestled in the piney suburbs bordering Clear Lake, near the Johnson Space Center, and through the Oldey Englishey diamond-paned windows of his darkened den he could see ground fog creeping among the pines, eerily lit by scattered streetlamps—like dry ice vapor in a cheap horror movie. He turned on his brass desk lamp with its green glass shade. The walls of his den were solid with shelving, dense with collector’s items: fine large-scale working model steam engines made of brass, and fully rigged sailing ships, and old cars, and gold coins framed under glass on black velvet, and albums of stamps boxed in acid-free hardboard portfolios, and picture books—books about crystal, about china, about antique furniture, about guns, about arms and armor, about jade and netsuke and Cycladic figurines and Uncle Scrooge comic books—about almost every class of object worth collecting. Taylor’s enchantment with things, severely censored from his public persona, flourished here.

  On his antique green blotter lay a lavishly printed color folder displaying a holo of President Purvis’s newly appointed NASA administrator—a hard-copy reprint of an interview which had appeared two weeks earlier in Newstime, the national weekly newsfax. Office couriers had delivered signed copies of the reprint to everyone in the agency ab
ove the rank of G-20; Taylor’s was inscribed in a scrawl that was meant to be bold, perhaps, but which looked more nearly incontinent: “Tayler [sic]—glad to have you on Our Team, yours Truly, Rosie.”

  Taylor was irked by the misspelling of his name, but that’s not what had cost him his sleep. It was what “Rosie” had to say about the agency’s future, particularly the section helpfully headlined “The Importance of Revolutionary Technologies.” Taylor drew his blue terry-cloth robe closer and settled into his mahogany captain’s chair, pondering the words.

  “While I intend, in general, to pursue the policies honed by my predecessors,” the new administrator was quoted as saying, “I won’t rule out changes in what football coaches call ‘tendencies’—my tendencies might be to decide in favor of exploiting the more revolutionary, rather than evolutionary, approaches to space-vehicle development. I mean, exploiting the advantages of advanced technology by taking a great leap forward.”

  If there is anything bureaucrats hate it is great leaps forward, for when the leaps fall short of greatness, middle-management heads roll.

  Rosie’s speech was in bureaucratic code, of course, and Taylor, shivering in the heat, knew exactly what the administrator was talking about. Recently several aerospace firms had submitted conceptual designs for a new kind of spacecraft. Taylor Stith had had nothing to do with the craft’s inception or technical development, thank God; still, he knew that NASA’s continuing credibility and prominence within the government depended upon developing some kind of solar-system workhorse. In the past decade a half-dozen return visits to the moon, plus a single manned expedition to Mars (in awkward cooperation with the Russians), had all been patched together from miscellaneous bits of hardware, some old, some special-purpose. Congress was showing impatience with NASA’s incessant requests for ad hoc missions; the alternative was to go to the Hill with one big request—a ship that could fly again and again, to the planets and beyond.

  Similar promises had been used in the selling of the first space shuttle a third of a century earlier. One lesson of that flawed program had sunk in: there would be no fleet of ships until an experimental version had rigorously tested and proved the underlying principles. Spaceships were much too expensive for fly-offs between competing designs, as the Air Force and Navy were sometimes privileged to do with their experimental aircraft, so a few people in NASA were going to have to stick their necks out and make a choice—well, since the thing would only be a flying test stand, it was a limited choice—still, a choice on which careers would rise and fall. Given his role in mission planning, Taylor was one of them. He was in a key position to emphasize a new craft’s weaknesses or tout its strengths, but whatever he decided, he could not afford to appear wishy-washy.

  A dispassionate second-order analysis of institutional politics, suppressing the merits of specific issues, shows that nay sayers are always right: nothing ever works the way it is supposed to. Thus bureaucracies fill with people who are rewarded for doing nothing new, while enthusiasts often get themselves fired. Still, as Taylor understood, the best chance for rapid promotion in any organization is to be almost right about something new that looks like it is going to work.

  Staring at the holo of his polyester-suited boss, Taylor sweated out a decision in the humid dawn. Lockheed-Rockwell-Martin’s design, still on the CADD screens, had emerged as a leading contender. Friendly Rosie hadn’t actually fingered LRMCo, but scuttlebutt was, he was leaning in their favor.

  Reluctantly, Taylor decided he’d do better to gamble his career than to let it stagnate.

  The Ship

  3

  Five men and women in the blue uniforms of working astronauts were gathered in the ready room of Archimedes Station. Assisted by white-coveralled launch technicians, they donned portable oxygen packs, then moved quietly, in weightless single file, down a long pressurized tube that extended to the spacecraft secured in the launch bay.

  Their silent concentration was broken by the thud of an unseen hatch. A technician punched worn steel buttons; air pumps engaged with a whine. Lights flickered from red to yellow to green as air pressure equalized between the station and the ship. The boarding tube’s internal hatch swung in and out of the way with a sigh, opening upon an air lock padded in white canvas, big enough to hold two people. The launch technician entered first and popped the ship’s inner hatch up and away. He turned back to those waiting. “All set.”

  “Let’s go.” The commander’s cheeks were rosy, her eyes bright; an astronaut pilot’s wings were sewn above her embroidered name patch, which read “Braide.” She ran a small, strong hand through strawberry hair cut so short it was almost a brush.

  The young man beside her also wore astronaut’s wings, although he had an uncharacteristically long body for a pilot; his name patch read “Calder.” The commander waved him ahead, and he moved his length with weightless grace through the air lock and into the ship.

  A young woman followed close behind him, her tight cap of flyaway curls stirring in the breeze of her passage. “Wooster” read her name tag. At her hip, strapped low like a gunslinger’s iron, she carried a submicro video camera.

  A fiftyish man with a gray crew cut pushed off past the launch technician, steering from surface to padded surface with practiced applications of pressure, fingertips here, toes there, producing the minimal, minute delta-vees he needed to steer himself against his body’s inertia; the name on his uniform was “Deveraux.”

  The last man was tagged “Giles”; he was tanned, fit, forty, and he turned to wink at the commander—his broad, handsome face folding into ruddly wrinkles—before he dove into the hatch.

  Commander Braide followed quickly. Once through the inner hatch she was in a narrow corridor threading the axis of the crew module. Steel staples formed a ladder along one side of the cylindrical corridor; this corridor would be a vertical shaft when the ship was accelerating, opening at its top onto the flight deck, ending below in a second air lock. Below that air lock other, more twisted pathways led to the service module, the fuel tanks, and the propulsion system.

  Vertical was a word without meaning just now, but on occasion knowing up from down would become important, so where the walls of the corridor provided enough flat surface, stenciled yellow arrows pointed to the ship’s stern. The commander traveled mentally upward, against the arrows’ bold thrust, past walls bristling with multiple extrusions of pipes and pumps, fans and filters, worklights and video cameras, air sniffers and fire-suppression nozzles; past sleeping quarters, tiny private closets hung with sleep-restraint bags; past the prissily designated “personal hygiene facility”; through the padded white wardroom with its green plants and galley and wide-screen monitors; past cramped and crowded laboratories and workstations where the other members of the crew were settling in; arriving finally at the flight deck.

  Commander Braide slipped into the left-hand couch and pulled her harness over her. To her right the pilot was already strapped in, studying his checkpad.

  Two launch technicians in white coveralls arrived—babysitters come to see that everyone was tucked in, that emergency oxygen masks dangled beside each rosy face, that the strap-on escape system was wired for arming, ready to blow the crew and service modules away from the fuel tanks in case of catastrophic accident. Such accidents were less likely to occur in orbit than on Earth, where shuttles astride balloons of explosive were launched in an oxidizing atmosphere, and even less likely to occur in this ship, where coaxing the main engine to start was more problematic than shutting it down. Nevertheless, this was a test flight. Anything that could go wrong…could go wrong.

  Moments later the main hatch thudded shut as the launch technicians left the ship. There remained many hours of final check and countdown, during which Commander Braide would be busy only occasionally. Unbidden there came the recognition that this was one of those fleeting moments—no matter what unimagined disasters might lurk in the future a second from now, an hour from now, a year from now—when
she was perfectly happy. She settled deeper into her couch, inhaling fresh artificial air.

  To the commander there was something subtly, inexpressibly arousing about the smell of good machinery, especially new machinery. A brand new spacecraft was far sexier than a new car; there was that citrus aroma of machined brass and welded steel, undulled by oxidation; the spice of machine oil, not yet rancid from heat; the fresh candy odor of vinyl seats as yet unstaled by sweat and intestinal gases; even the clean taste of the oxygen mask’s plastic cup, unsoured with spit. The ultimate in sensual pleasure was to hurtle through vacuum at astonishing speed, safely enclosed in a warm, dark, new machine.

  The flight deck console in front of her boasted huge “windows” looking fore and aft and to the sides, which were actually high-resolution pixel arrays. Mounted below them was a bank of similar screens, smaller and more numerous, and dials and meters and additional graphic displays. One row of video screens, separate from the others, monitored the ship’s interior spaces; on them the commander could look into the televised faces of her crew. Spin Calder. Melinda Wooster. Jimmy Giles. Linwood Deveraux.

  “Good morning, everybody. Let’s count off.” Her voice carried on the comm channels to every corner of the ship.

  “Pilot prepared to commence launch preparatory procedure,” said Spin Calder, spitting out the exact words of the script written on his checkpad screen.

  “I’m ready too,” said Melinda Wooster.

  “Propulsion control ready,” said Linwood Deveraux.

  “Ready for prelaunch, Robin,” said Jimmy Giles.

  “Archimedes launch control, we are go for prelaunch,” said Commander Braide.

  “Copy, Robin. The count is T minus four hours and counting.”