by Ben Bova
Jake got out of the sedan. Somebody in the Cadillac opened its rear door. Jake climbed into the capacious car, sat down, and pulled the door shut.
The man sitting beside him on the rear bench was big, like a retired football player, with thick wavy gray hair, heavyset, wearing an expensive-looking suit of dark blue. On the jump seat facing Jake was a young woman, sharp-faced, peroxide blonde, in a tailored white blouse and forest-green jacket with short sleeves.
“Hello, Dr. Ross,” said the big gray-haired man, smiling broadly as he extended a meaty hand toward Jake. “I’m Bernie Untermeyer, Governor Hackman’s chief of protocol.”
Untermeyer’s voice was heavy, gravelly, with more than a hint of a Dixie accent.
Jabbing a thumb toward the woman, he went on, “This here is Louise Anderson, my assistant.”
Nodding, Jake said, “Pleased to meet you.”
“We’re happy y’all could come down and meet with us,” said Untermeyer.
“Senator Tomlinson was very pleased that you suggested this meeting,” Jake replied.
“Good. Good.” Untermeyer patted Jake’s knee, making him flinch with surprise.
Louise Anderson said, “Your Senator Tomlinson is doing quite well in this campaign.” Her voice was sharp, like a dentist’s drill, making Jake feel still more uncomfortable.
“Which our governor is not,” said Untermeyer, with a sad wag of his head.
“What are the governor’s plans?” Jake asked.
Untermeyer glanced at Anderson, then replied, “He’s pretty disappointed in the Iowa results. And the New Hampshire situation doesn’t look all that cheerful, either.”
“Of course,” Anderson cut in, “he expects to do better on Super Tuesday. All those southern states are much more inclined toward him.”
“I suppose so,” Jake noncommittalled.
Untermeyer retook command of the conversation with, “But the governor’s a realist. He’s wonderin’ if he shouldn’t cut ’is losses, withdraw from the race, and urge ’is followers to vote for somebody else.”
“Somebody else,” Jake echoed.
“Could be your Senator Tomlinson,” said Untermeyer, with a toothy grin spreading across his heavy-jowled face.
Jake said, “That would be fine with us, I’m sure.”
“Point is, what would the governor gain from throwin’ his support to your man?”
Jake held his tongue for a moment, then asked, “What does the governor want?”
Again Untermeyer looked over to Anderson. Jake got the impression that she was actually running the show, and this bulky gray man was merely a stalking horse.
“Governor Hackman’s made a strong issue out of immigration policy,” Untermeyer said at last. “Whoever he backs has got to come down against lettin’ all these Latinos and A-rabs enterin’ this country.”
Jake got a mental image of the Statue of Liberty lifting her torch beside the Golden Door. But he said, “Stronger immigration policy.”
“And more jobs for the state of Tennessee,” Untermeyer added.
Anderson leaned toward Jake and said sharply, “This space program of yours. You’re talking about a million new jobs. We need some of those jobs in our state.”
“I see,” said Jake.
“And more federal assistance for welfare,” Untermeyer resumed. “Our state’s being spent into bankruptcy by fed’ral welfare mandates that we’re forced to pay for!”
Jake said, “And if Senator Tomlinson backs these issues…?”
Bringing out his toothy smile again, Untermeyer replied, “Why, if your senator promises to back those issues, I’m sure the governor will urge his backers to vote for your man.”
“Super Tuesday is less than a month away,” Anderson reminded.
Jake nodded. “I understand.”
“Good. Good.” Untermeyer patted Jake’s knee again. This time Jake managed to resist the urge to recoil.
“I’ll explain your position to Senator Tomlinson and we’ll see what his reaction will be.”
“There is one more thing,” Anderson said.
“Oh?”
“The governor would like to be invited to be in the new president’s cabinet,” she said, slowly, carefully. “Maybe secretary of energy?”
Jake heard himself reply, “That’s an area that’s very close to Senator Tomlinson’s heart.”
“And your own,” Untermeyer jumped in. “You drafted the senator’s energy plan, didn’t you?”
“That was six years ago…”
“But it was a good plan. It’s workin’.”
“Governor Hackman will make a fine secretary of energy,” Anderson said.
Jake spread his hands and replied, “I’ll see what the senator thinks about all this.”
Untermeyer made a soft little chuckle. “Good. You do that. Personally, I’d hate to see th’ governor’s votes go to Sebastian.”
“So would I,” said Jake—the first unreservedly genuine statement he’d made since climbing into the Cadillac.
Reactions
“Tighter immigration control,” said Senator Tomlinson, “space jobs for Tennessee, more federal assistance for welfare programs—”
Kevin O’Donnell added sourly, “And the secretary of energy’s job for him.”
“That’s what he’s after,” Jake said. “I got the impression we could finesse the first three if we promised him the energy job.”
The three men were sitting in Senator Tomlinson’s office in the Hart building, reviewing Jake’s visit to South Carolina.
O’Donnell muttered, “Oak Ridge is in Tennessee. Nuclear power.”
“And TVA,” the senator added.
“Huntsville, Alabama’s just across the border,” O’Donnell added.
“The Marshall Space Flight Center.”
“It’s a lot to think about,” O’Donnell muttered.
“I’ll talk to Pat about it,” Tomlinson said. “Getting Hackman’s support could be a real boost to us.”
O’Donnell shook his head. “It’s not so much getting his support, Frank. It’s keeping his support out of Sebastian’s hands.”
Suddenly Jake felt like one of the politicians who hammered together the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, redrawing the map of Europe, creating new nations. They ended World War I—and sowed the seeds of World War II.
Jake left the impromptu conference and made his way back to his own office.
His administrative assistant looked up from her computer screen. “Mr. Piazza called again. Twice.”
Jake sighed. Nick Piazza was getting paranoid over the accident to the Astra Super, insisting that it had to be the result of sabotage. In the ten days since the accident he had phoned Jake every day, often more than once a day.
Wearily, Jake plopped down on his desk chair and called through the open office door. “I guess we’d better talk to him, Nancy.”
* * *
Piazza looked calmer, but his boyish face still had a hard edge to it.
“Jake, could you talk to the guys running the FBI?” Before Jake could reply, he went on, “I mean, their guys from the local office here in New Mexico did a perfunctory examination of the wreckage—”
“I thought they called in their experts from Washington,” Jake interrupted.
“Yeah, they did. And the NTSB people looked over the wreckage too.”
“And they found no evidence of sabotage?”
“Not yet. They’re still working on it.”
Jake tried to keep the exasperation out of his voice as he asked, “So what do you want the FBI to do now?”
“Trace the people in the launch crew,” Piazza replied without an instant of hesitation. “One or more of them fucked up my rocket!”
“Nick, rockets do blow up sometimes.”
“Not mine!” Piazza snapped. “We haven’t had a failure in years. This accident is going to raise my insurance rates through the roof, unless we can show that it was sabotage.”
“And how ca
n you show it was sabotage?” Jake asked.
“Get the FBI’s top people down here! Get NASA’s accident investigation people down here. For god’s sake, how can we operate when there’s a saboteur on our team? Maybe a whole squad of terrorists?”
“A terrorist group would’ve taken credit for the explosion. Nobody’s said a word.”
“Not yet.” The expression on Piazza’s face was strained, angry, frustrated. But Jake realized the man was right. How can he launch his rockets if there really is a terrorist on the launch crew? Or more than one terrorist? Nobody’s going to invest billions of dollars just to finance disasters.
“Nick,” Jake heard himself say, “I’ll get the senator to call the FBI’s director. We’ll see what we can do.”
Piazza looked as if he was going to break into tears. “Thanks, Jake. Thanks so much. The future of all our hopes depends on this.”
Nodding, Jake agreed, “I suppose it does.”
* * *
That evening, as Tami was chopping raw fish for their dinner, Jake told her about Piazza’s fears.
Without lifting her eyes from the chopping board, Tami said, “We’ve been getting plenty of calls about the accident.”
“Still?”
“Yes. I thought they’d die away by now, it’s been more than a week. But the calls keep coming in: What progress has the investigation made? Will Astra try to launch another one of their Super birds? Is it safe for people to go up in Astra’s rocket?”
“What do you tell them?”
Tami put down the thick-bladed knife on the wooden work surface next to the kitchen sink and turned to Jake with a shrug. “What can we tell them? The investigation is in progress. Plans for another crewed launch are on hold until the investigation is concluded.”
Jake went to the cabinet where they stored the liquor, muttering, “It’s enough to drive a man to drink.”
“It’s worse than that,” Tami said. “They want the senator to make a statement. They’re starting to interview kooks who claim that space flight is too dangerous for human missions. They’re saying the whole space plan ought to be scrapped.”
“I haven’t heard anything like that!” Jake snapped.
“Not yet,” Tami said. “But it’s coming. I’ve been trying to convince Earl that he ought to be preparing the senator for a grilling at Thursday’s debate, but he’s been shoving the matter under the rug.”
“Holy Christ,” Jake muttered. “This could be real trouble. With the New Hampshire primary next week.”
“And the third debate in two days.”
“We’ve been hoping to get Governor Hackman to throw his support to us,” Jake said. “But this could blow everything clean to hell.”
Tami said, “Earl would rather look the other way. He says we should be positive, not get defensive about the accident.”
Jake reached into the liquor cabinet and pulled out a half-empty bottle of Chardonnay. With a shake of his head he said to Tami, “This isn’t going to be enough.”
The Third Debate
The auditorium was packed. Even though the temperature outside in the dark New Hampshire night was close to zero, the site of the Republican Party’s third presidential debate was warm, even steamy, from the press of bodies.
Jake sat just behind the trio of news media stars who would moderate the proceedings, his winter overcoat folded on his lap. Up on the stage, hot with spotlights, were three lecterns for the three candidates.
All of Senator Tomlinson’s people had been disappointed that Governor Hackman had not yet thrown in the towel. No decision had come from the governor’s campaign headquarters about whether he would quit and, if he did, who he would give his support to: Tomlinson or Sebastian.
Jake had personally vetted Hackman’s qualifications to be secretary of energy. The governor had visited the Oak Ridge National Laboratory back when he’d campaigned for reelection, more than three years earlier. He’d given a speech at one of the TVA power dams a year before that. That was it. Hackman had never made a public pronouncement about energy policy, as far as Jake could find. Of course, energy was largely a federal issue, although the energy industry provided plenty of jobs in Tennessee.
“Tell him you’ll name him,” Pat Lovett had urged Senator Tomlinson. “We need his votes.”
Tomlinson hesitated. Perhaps fatally, Jake thought. Kevin O’Donnell quite openly resisted the idea of handing the Energy portfolio to Hackman. “The man’s a lightweight,” O’Donnell insisted. “Frank’s supposed to be strong on energy policy. Putting Hackman in the energy seat will detract from Frank’s reputation.”
Jake found himself agreeing with both men: Hackman was a lightweight, but he had a block of votes that could help get Tomlinson the nomination.
A roll of applause rose from one end of the auditorium to the other as the three candidates strode onto the stage, each of them smiling at the audience and the moderators, then shaking hands with one another as if they were truly friends.
The questions from the three moderators started with softballs, Jake thought. Balancing the federal budget, a favorite piece of campaign mythology. National defense: none of the candidates was in favor of cutting down the defense budget, as the Democrats had been talking about.
“As long as we have terrorists and guerrillas on our southern doorstep,” intoned Senator Sebastian, “we must keep our soldiers and sailors and airmen at the peak of their efficiency.”
Tomlinson and Hackman said much the same, in slightly different words.
Then came the shot Jake had been worrying about.
The female moderator—well groomed, perfectly coiffed, keeping her sculpted face unsmilingly serious—asked Senator Tomlinson:
“Senator, in light of the recent disaster at Astra Corporation’s last launching attempt, there have been some experts who have done mathematical analyses that show that rockets are inherently unsafe, especially too risky to carry human crews. Do you agree?”
Tomlinson put on the smile he used to gain himself a moment to think.
“Dorothy,” he replied, still smiling, “there have been mathematical analyses that show that bumblebees can’t fly. Yet somehow the little creatures buzz around beautifully.”
“Come on, now, Senator—”
His expression growing serious, Tomlinson said, “The point is, Dorothy, that we can launch a hundred rockets without a hitch, but one failure starts the boobirds yowling.
“Planes crash,” the senator went on. “Thousands of people are killed every year in car accidents. People fall down stairs and break their bones, for god’s sake!”
“But rocket explosions are dangerous,” the newswoman insisted.
Raising a finger, Tomlinson said, “May I point out that the rocket launcher had a crew escape system built into it and that its escape system performed as designed. Nobody was hurt, except for a couple of black eyes and a chipped fingernail.”
“And the loss of a multimillion-dollar rocket launcher.”
With a sad shake of his head, Tomlinson said, “You’ve often heard me compare our drive to open up the space frontier to the nineteenth-century expansion of our nation across the frontier of the old west. Did those pioneers turn back when they were hit by a dust storm? Or attacked by Indians? Or when a wheel fell off one of their wagons? No! They overcame those adversities and pushed on. That’s what we’re doing in space.”
Jake jumped to his feet, clapping his hands as hard as he could. Slowly at first, but then like a growing avalanche, the entire audience rose to their feet and applauded.
And Tomlinson hollered into his microphone, “We’re not turning back! We’re going to open up the space frontier!”
* * *
“A damned good performance,” Patrick Lovett was saying, a tumbler of whiskey in one hand and a confident smile on his face.
Senator Tomlinson’s hotel suite was jammed with campaign workers, aides, visitors, hangers-on, all of them talking, gesticulating, jabbering at once. Jake w
as standing in front of the theater-sized TV screen, watching a cable news channel. It was muted, and he probably couldn’t have heard the commentators’ chatter anyway, there was so much noise in the suite, but their words were scrolling along the bottom of the big screen.
Preliminary polls of people who had attended the debate and others who had watched on television were similar: Tomlinson had pretty much squelched the rocket-safety issue. But Sebastian still held a six-point lead over him.
And Hackman was a distant third, further behind than he had ever been.
“When’s the sumbitch going to make up his mind?”
Jake turned his head to see Kevin O’Donnell standing beside him, in his shirtsleeves and conservative black suspenders, his eyes focused on the TV screen.
“Hackman’s done for,” O’Donnell went on, pointing at the poll numbers on the screen. “When’s he going to throw in the towel?”
Jake said, “As soon as somebody gives him the secretary of energy job, I guess.”
O’Donnell snorted contemptuously. “Big pain in the ass.”
Suddenly the scene on the TV switched to a crowded hotel suite festooned with Hackman banners and balloons.
“Oh-oh,” O’Donnell said. “This could be it.”
The room fell silent as Jake turned on the TV set’s sound. Everyone focused on the screen. Senator Tomlinson and his wife came up silently between Jake and O’Donnell. Lovett, Earl Reynolds, everybody stood waiting, hoping.
Governor Hackman strode into view, still in the suit he’d worn for the debate, with his wife and two of his grown children alongside him.
“This is it,” O’Donnell whispered.
“Folks, I have an announcement to make,” Hackman said, with a brave smile. He was a good-looking man, tall, trim, his hair thick and silvery, his red and black striped tie pulled slightly loose from his collar.
“Although we’ve fought as hard as we could to win our party’s nomination,” he said, in a clear rich tenor voice, “the poll numbers have been disappointing.”
His smile dimming, the governor went on, “I frankly don’t see any point in continuing this struggle. It’s taken a toll on my family, and it’s taken a toll on my responsibilities as governor of the great state of Tennessee.”
