There was a younger woman already talking with the reporters, a pert blonde who had an outdoor, all-American look to her. She introduced herself as Edie Elgin, a newcomer to the New York scene- and a personal friend of James Waterman.
Brumado’s internal defenses flared at Waterman’s name.
“How is he?” Edith asked. “They haven’t let me talk to him since he landed on Mars.”
“You are a reporter?” Brumado asked.
Edith smiled her best Texas smile. “I’m a consultant with the news department. To tell the truth, Dr. Brumado, I’m looking for a job.”
“You knew Dr. Waterman in Houston?”
“We were very close friends. And now they won’t even let me talk to him.”
Her smile warmed Brumado, melted his suspicions. “You don’t want to interview him for the media?”
“I just want to talk with him for a few minutes, to see if he’s okay and… well, to see if he still…” Edith let her voice dwindle into silence.
The mission administrators can’t hold the man incommunicado, Brumado told himself. He smiled back at Edith. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Oh, thank you! You’re the kindest sweetest man in the whole Mars Project!”
WASHINGTON: Alberto Brumado liked the idea that a pretty young woman considered him kind and sweet. And influential. But he did not truly believe that he was a Very Important Person. “There are no indispensable men,” he had often said. “If I had not led the effort for the Mars Project, someone else would have.”
Yet both the Japanese and Soviet project directors easily agreed to come to Washington to meet with their American counterpart and Dr. Brumado-not only because they had an urgent problem to discuss, but because they actually desired to save Brumado from another long intercontinental flight. Hypersonic aircraft could cross half the globe in two hours, but the human passengers they carried suffered from jet lag all the same. The Russian and Japanese project directors decided, simultaneously and independently, to save their revered mentor from such fatigue.
Fresh from his television interview in New York, Brumado flew to Washington to meet them at the office of the American project director, in the old NASA headquarters building on Independence Avenue. As government offices go, it was not much: a room large enough to house an oblong conference table butted against a broad mahogany desk like the long arm of a T. The walls were covered with maps and photos of Mars and other photographs of rocket boosters lifting off on tails of flame and smoke. Behind the director’s desk was a table covered with more personal photos showing the director with the high and mighty: presidents, ministers, even television personalities.
The American director of the Mars Project had once been an excellent engineer, many years ago. Now he was an excellent politician, crafty in the ways and means of surviving in the Washington jungle and keeping the lifeblood of money pumping into his project. He did not look like the archetypical “faceless bureaucrat,” however. He wore utterly comfortable snakeskin cowboy boots below his rumpled gray business suit and a conservative blue tie. His fleshy face was florid, his hair thick and still fiery red despite the streaks of gray running through it. Behind rimless glasses his eyes gleamed with fervor; he still cared about what he was doing. Mars was not a program to him, it was a life’s work.
“I ‘preciate your coming here to my humble domain,” he said to the others, with the trace of a south Texas twang in his gravelly voice that even years of testifying before Congress had not quite erased.
He was leaning back precariously in his chair on one side of the conference table, boots on the table and tie loosened from his collar. Brumado sat beside him. The Russian and Japanese project directors sat primly on the other side of the table.
Neither was smiling; both wore carefully tailored business suits with neatly knotted ties; but there the similarities ended. The Russian was bald, sallow faced, lean, and unhappy. He reminded Brumado of a melancholy movie actor from his youth who always portrayed émigrés pining for Mother Russia. The Japanese was a compact bundle of barely suppressed energy, his dark eyes darting everywhere, his fingers drumming nervously on the tabletop.