Starfire

by Unknown

  Robin must have been like that when she first stormed NASA, Jimmy thought, complete with Melinda’s legs-braced, Annie Oakley, I-can-do-anything-better-than-you-can stance toward the world. Pintsize Melinda hadn’t been blessed with Robin’s unshakable inborn determination, but she made up for it with bravado. Luckily for her self-image, Melinda’s intellectual quickness meant that she really could do things better, lots of things.

  At that physical edge where Melinda’s intellect made her cautious, Spin, by contrast, seemed to lack a reasonable sense of self-preservation. He didn’t risk other people’s lives, but there were times when he seemed to think of himself as a piece of expendable machinery. Jimmy wondered how much that contributed to the fact that Spin was the best pilot Jimmy had ever met.

  Two years ago, flying a chase plane, Spin had led a space shuttle with a freaked-out guidance transponder to a night landing in a thunderstorm, precisely duplicating the shuttle’s glide rate with his tiny jet while staying close enough in front of the big unpowered glider for the shuttle commander to follow him down visually.

  That adventure had passed into legend. Only once had Jimmy seen—on a piece of ancient sixteen-millimeter film transferred to chip—a piloting feat to match it; it was a clip of Neil Armstrong testing an early, crude version of the original lunar lander. Armstrong rode an ejection seat on an open platform, steering by joy stick. The horribly unstable machine rose fifteen or twenty meters above the concrete pad on its rocket exhaust and suddenly flipped upside down and fell. But Armstrong was gone in the millisecond before the thing tilted quite halfway over, ejecting himself sideways to a bone-crushing landing—the kind pilots call good, one he could walk away from. Had he waited to think, Armstrong would have shot himself headfirst into the ground. Spin had reflexes like that—faster than thought. And like Armstrong, he wasn’t always very quick with his sentences.

  Back at the barbecue kettle, Linwood’s wife, Jeri, had joined Linwood beside the still-swirling flames. Jeri was a skinny, tanned woman who often got a mischievous look in her eye when she peeked at Linwood; Jimmy wondered if they really were what they seemed, that mythical rarity, a lasting couple still much in love.

  They were talking to one of their daughters and her husband; more precisely, the young husband seemed to be delivering himself of a speech. The younger couple—Jimmy had just met them and had already forgotten their names—were of a different cut than Linwood and Jeri, both of them doughy and pale, their sour expressions reminding Jimmy of his own wife; he knew they disapproved of Linwood zipping about in space at his advanced age.

  Jimmy nodded and smiled. “Here you go, maestro,” he said, handing Linwood the beer during a second’s pause in the lecture. Linwood inclined his head toward Jimmy but said nothing. His close-mouthed expression indicated the discussion in progress was one he intended to stay out of. “If you folks are thirsty, I’ll be glad to make another trip to the cooler,” Jimmy offered affably.

  “Thanks, Colonel, but we’re just on our way,” said Linwood’s chubby daughter, tugging at her husband’s arm.

  “You’re not going to skip dinner!” Jimmy feigned disappointment. “I made enough sausages to feed an army.”

  The daughter ignored his implied invitation. “Your girls have been wonderful with Jean and Marcel.”

  “Nice of you to say so. Course, they love it. No boys their age to chase—playing with little kids is the next best thing.”

  At which the sallow son-in-law appeared affronted. “That seems to suggest that women have a rather limited set of roles to play in life, Colonel Giles.”

  “Did I say that?” Jimmy recalled too late that the young man was a newly licensed psychiatrist. He glanced at Linwood. “Maybe I’d better defer this matter to our commanding officer.”

  “A remark in itself suggestive of the peculiar personality dynamics of this group,” the son-in-law said vehemently to Linwood, as if scoring a point. “Really, sir—”

  “Henry, please,” said the daughter.

  “Where is Robin?” Jeri inquired pertly. “I thought I saw her drive into the parking lot ten minutes ago.”

  “I’ll check,” Jimmy said. “Nice to see you folks.” He cleared out fast. Jogging up the slip face of the nearest dune, carrying his beer, he trudged through wiregrass to the sand-drifted edge of the asphalt parking lot. Sure enough, there was Robin’s silver Porsche with its rear end open, and she with her head stuck under the engine cover.

  “That you, James?” she muttered as he joined her behind the car. She already had the turbine’s cowling off and was inspecting the compressor rotor.

  “What’s the trouble?”

  “I’ve been hearing a little whiffle at high r.p.m.’s. Erosion on the blades, I think.” She looked up at him as if this were a matter of pressing concern.

  “Hold it right there,” he ordered. “You have grease on your chin.” He fished a linen handkerchief from the hip pocket of his shorts, wet it with beer, and rubbed her face. Then, leaning across the hot metal, he kissed her.

  “Mmm,” she said. “Now we both smell like a tavern.”

  Early on, observing Robin from afar, Jimmy had shared in the consensus around JSC that Robin Braide was calculating and hard, an unsmiling pragmatist. Working with her, however, he had found that this impression—while not wholly inaccurate and even, in part, deliberately fostered by Robin herself—missed the point.

  Which was that Robin wasted no time trying to get people to like her. Indeed, she sometimes seemed to prefer not to deal with people at all, unless together she and they could make progress on some specific task. Her immediate superiors were essential to that effort, of course, as were the pertinent technicians and managers on any mission—but most important of all was her crew. To understand, to get inside each member of her crew on a deep level was, to her, a primary task, one that made all other tasks doable.

  For those in her inner circle Robin’s curiosity and warmth and advice could be overpowering, and some privately minded persons assigned to her past crews had proved unequal to the intense demands of the relationship; they got divorced. But Jimmy, to his consternation, responded quite differently. He fell in love. Against every sensible instinct and consideration of logic, so did she.

  Jimmy was a Catholic, a serious one, and after the first rush of sensation and emotion he was left with an awful residue of guilt. He considered resigning Robin’s crew, resigning his NASA assignment. What could he give as a reason if not the truth? The priest to whom he finally and so desperately confessed was moved to take matters firmly in hand and insist that Jimmy not confess to his wife. That he was heartily sorry for his sins and intended not to repeat them was enough for now. Later, when things had cooled off and there was no danger that the marriage would be destroyed, Jimmy could tell all if he felt he must.

  The advice was necessary because, as the priest suspected, things were nowhere near cooling off. Robin and Jimmy met in bars in Houston or Galveston to have one-last-mature-adult-conversation, conversations that inevitably ended in hotel rooms. Robin herself began to learn the meaning of guilt, watching its effect on her lover. She had had disastrous affairs before—all her affairs, and marriages, could rightly be called disasters—but never had she foolishly allowed one to so closely approach the center of her professional life.

  In Robin Jimmy found a bold and caring sensuality he had never experienced, a judicious disregard of unexamined values, a celebration of the flesh; in him she found a probing concern that awakened dependencies she had long suppressed. She knew she could not depend on him in the small ways that mates need to depend on each other, even as she knew he would stake his life for hers. What had begun in thoughtless attraction had developed into emotional addiction.

  They kissed again, quickly, and she put her head down and started busily remounting the engine cowling. “Good news, James,” she said, as if nothing had passed between them.

  “What would that be?”

  “We’re it.”


  “We’re…?”

  “We’ve got the ops flight. Our crew. Taylor called me into his office this morning.”

  Straightening, he banged his head on the hood. “That’s great! That’s just great!” He let out a long whoop and holler and jumped up and down. “We showed ’em! We showed ’em all! Good for you!”

  She raised her head and shushed him. “Strictly confidential. Pretend I didn’t tell you first, okay? I want to tell everybody at once.”

  “Darn, you’re good! Robin, that’s the greatest news. The greatest.”

  “I think so too,” she said simply.

  His enthusiasm was boundless. “I feel like my life is really going to be worth something now, you know what I mean?”

  “Jimmy, your life is worth everything.” Her response was quick, intense. “Go slow.”

  At that, he calmed. “Okay, I’m overdoing it.”

  “Yes, you are. Things can change.”

  “I know things can change, maybe better than you. But Starfire…we’re the first string. No matter what happens.”

  “Yeah.” She ducked her head down. “Help me put this two-hundred-thousand-dollar pile of scrap back together, will you?”

  “Sure.” He stuck his head back under the hood. After five minutes of greasy work he asked, “How do you afford German iron, anyway? On your salary.”

  “I don’t eat out much. I wash my uniforms in the sink.”

  Shadows lengthened, a breeze ruffled the Gulf, and the sun was a broken egg yolk running into the dunes.

  The astronauts and their families sat around a campfire in the park-approved fire pit, which was fueled with chemically impregnated, compressed sawdust—there being no significant quantities of driftwood on these shores. Jimmy’s daughters made the rounds of the circle showing everyone the treasures they had collected, pebbles that needed to be wet to show their subtle colors, broken crab shells, shattered urchins, one tiny but perfect sand dollar. Their mother sat by herself in the shadows.

  Jeri’s mood was apprehensive; her attention seemed far away. She and Linwood were huddled beside the fire, clinging silently, like two wet monkeys in a rain forest.

  Spin and Melinda sat on opposite sides of the fire, avoiding each other. Spin had inadvertently dragged Melinda over a sandbar, and she was still angry from the fright of looking down and seeing the fin of her slalom ski skidding a centimeter above packed sand that, had it caught, would have sent her flying and likely broken her neck.

  They all peered into the flames and sipped at their coffees or beers or sodas and whispered and laughed or thought their private thoughts, until Robin got up and said she had an announcement to make. “But only if everybody here swears to keep the secret.” She looked at the Giles girls and they nodded solemnly.

  Then she told them that theirs would be the first crew to drive a manned spaceship to the inner solar system, to launch satellites at the sun, to soar above the clouds of Venus. Some were excited by the news, some were made pensive. But Jimmy’s exultation was fierce, untrammeled by fear. For months the grip of Earth and its obligations would be loosened. He would leave his guilt behind.

  The Rock

  6

  The western sky was rosy with the glow of sundown; the lights of the nearest cities, sprawling El Paso and Juarez 200 kilometers to the west, were far beyond the arid horizon. The headlights of a new Mistral convertible swept jackrabbits off the lonely road as it climbed one of the higher of the stumpy volcanic buttes Texans are pleased to call the Davis Mountains.

  To escape light—the lights of cars and billboards and all-night hamburger stands and, especially, suburban street-lamps—ground-based observatories in the late twentieth century had fled to the loneliest mountains on Earth, to Hawaii, Chile, Peru, and elsewhere, until only two good optical observatories remained in all of North America: one in lonely Baja; the other, the University of Texas’s McDonald Observatory in the Davis Mountains. Mount Locke was a diminutive peak, but one blessed with a transparent sky.

  Inside the car, a weary Travis Hill was making an effort to keep his mind on an amiable debate with his passenger, a young science reporter named Harriet Richards, who had been sent out from Washington by National Public Video on a year-end astronomy roundup. Richards had a smooth round face capped with fashionably short black hair; short as it was, her hair still sprouted wayward stiff strands which she was forever swiping at or patting down, gestures that tended to undercut her efforts to play tough. She was new at her job, fresh from six months as a science reporter on a West Coast fax daily, and her news editor at NPV had given her a safe place to start—Travis Hill was a colorful public figure with a pretty picture book on the best-seller list, always a good interview, who never turned down publicity for his Asteroid Resource Center.

  Travis had gone down to greet the young woman at the heliport in the dude-ranch resort town of Fort Davis a couple of hours earlier, treating her to a prime rib dinner with persimmon pie for dessert, trying to soften her up with Texas jokes and NASA war stories and a bottle of Rio Grande Valley red. But she was a grinning skeptic, this kid reporter, wise to him, bright and quick to nail anything that smacked of press agentry. “Why waste public money flying to an asteroid?” she persisted in asking, probing the sore spot, phrasing it a little differently each time she asked.

  In the car, she phrased it like this: “I read somewhere that the mass of all the asteroids easy to reach from Earth wouldn’t amount to the top two or three centimeters of the continents.”

  “Miz Richards, you got any idea what a layer of Earth dirt two centimeters deep would be worth, if you could process it economically? Or even two centimeters of ocean. Processin’ the asteroids would be a hell of a lot cheaper and easier. Some are damn near pure nickel and iron, and some are rich in metals, especially in the platinum group, that are rare on Earth’s surface but abundant in asteroids.”

  “How do you know what the asteroids are made of if nobody’s been to one?”

  “Nobody’s visited, in person, an asteroid that’s freely orbiting the sun. But we do have samples of Phobos and Deimos from the Mars expeditions—both of Mars’s moons are asteroids, captured by the planet. And Navigator II brought back samples of Phaethon. And we’ve been collectin’ meteorites for a couple of centuries now, some of them pretty well protected from the weather—the ones exposed on the Antarctic glaciers. We look at the spectral characteristics of these samples in the laboratory, and sometimes we see the same spectrum coming through the telescope from an asteroid—bingo, we’ve got a pretty good idea what it’s made of. I’ll show you some of that work, by the way, that’s what we’ve been doing up here for the last three days.”

  “So some of them are valuable. Unique, even. Maybe the asteroids should be preserved, declared a space wilderness area?”

  Travis glanced at the crop-headed youngster, whose raised eyebrows suggested mischief. “You moonlightin’ for the Sierra Club?”

  “Just asking questions,” the reporter said primly.

  “So happens I agree with you. Certain asteroids should be set aside, left untouched, for historical and scientific reasons. Ceres, the first to be found, and Phaethon, the one that most closely approaches the sun—others like that. Which is not to say that we shouldn’t visit them. As for exploitation, what I’m proposin’ at this stage is purely exploratory. We need to survey that wilderness.”

  “I’ve read that some asteroids are easier to reach than our own moon. If they’re so important, why haven’t we sent a human expedition to one yet?”

  “Excellent question, and I hope you’ll address it to the highest levels at NASA. The answer you’ll get will be in terms of launch windows and priorities. At times Phaethon is very easy to get to, even with primitive rockets. But somehow there’s always been somethin’ more important for NASA to do when the launch window comes around.”

  “You’d like to change those priorities.”

  “You bet your ass…uh, ma’am.”

  “The maj
or benefit of asteroid mining would not be to Earth,” the young woman persisted, unperturbed. “Isn’t the principal reason for surveying the wilderness, as you put it, to get ready for expansion into space?”

  “Miz Richards, the point is to preserve the environment of the home planet. We probably oughta stop breedin’ and eatin’ and diggin’ and pollutin’, but it might also help to expand into space. So the point is to do both at the same time.” Despite his weariness, Travis was getting heated. “And that’s why we need to survey the asteroids, dammit!”

  Richards was silent a moment, and Travis glanced at her suspiciously. She was fussing with her recorder; caught, she looked up and patted a strand of black hair. “Excuse me, Professor Hill, but that’s the first time this evening you’ve cut the charm. Said how you feel so I believed it. I just wanted to make sure it was on the record.”

  Travis sighed and settled back. “Call me Travis. Kid.”

  The first stars gleamed in the clear southwestern sky as Travis parked the Mistral beside a lime green fire truck beneath the biggest dome on the peak. He led the way into the control room of the 272-centimeter reflector, where a man and woman sat, wearing wool shirts and down jackets against the rapidly cooling December night. Travis introduced the man as the observatory’s telescope driver and the woman as an associate from the Asteroid Resource Center. Then he excused himself and went back outside.

  Doris from ARC was a large blonde who wore pink plastic-rimmed goggles. “We’re looking at spectral data from specific Trojan asteroids,” she explained, waving at a jagged graph on a flat screen, “for a couple of reasons. Trying to pin down their chemical constituents by comparison with laboratory samples. Also trying to determine their rotational periods. The base-line work on this was done back in the eighties, but a lot of fancy algorithms have come along since then, so we’re having another look.”