“That kind of drik I don’t have to listen to.”
“Now, Ab …”
“No, you listen to me. I was an infant when we started building Daedalus; worked on it as a girl and a young woman.
“I could take you out there in a shuttle and show you the rivets that I put in, myself. A half-century ago.”
“That’s my-”
“I earned my ticket, Charlie.” Her voice softened.
“Age is a factor, yes. This is only the first trip of many – and when it comes back, I will be too old. You’ll just be in your prime . . . and with over twenty years of experience as Coordinator, I don’t doubt they’ll make you captain of the next—“
“I don’t want to be captain. I don’t want to be Coordinator. I just want to go!”
“You and three thousand other people.”
“And of the thousand that don’t want to go, or can’t, there isn’t one person who could serve as Coordinator? I could name you-”
“That’s not the point. There’s no one on L-5 who has anywhere near the influence, the connections, you have on Earth. No one who understands groundhogs as well.”
“That’s racism, Ab. Groundhogs are just like you and me.”
“Some of them. I don’t see you going Earthside every chance you can get . . . what, you like the view up here? You like living in a can?”
He didn’t have a ready answer for that. Ab continued: “Whoever’s Coordinator is going to have to do some tall explaining, trying to keep things smooth between L-5 and Earth. That’s been your life’s work, Charlie. And you’re also known and respected here. You’re the only logical choice.”
“I’m not arguing with your logic.”
“I know.” Neither of them had to mention the document, signed by Charlie, among others, that gave Dr. Bemis final authority in selecting the crew for Daedalus/ Kennedy/Brezhnev. “Try not to hate me too much, Charlie. I have to do what’s best for my people. All of my people.”
Charlie glared at her for a long moment and left.
June 2076
From Fax & Pix, 4 June 2076:
SPACE FARM LEAVES FOR
STARS NEXT MONTH
1. The John F. Kennedy, that goes to Scylla/Charybdis next month, is like a little L-5 with bombs up its tail (see pix up left, up right).
A. The trip’s twenty months. They could either take a few people and fill the thing up with food, air, and water-or take a lot of people inside a closed ecology, like L-5.
B. They could’ve gotten by with only a couple hundred people, to run the farms and stuff. But almost all the space freaks wanted to go. They’re used to living that way, anyhow (and they never get to go anyplace).
C. When they get back, the farms will be used as a starter for L-4, like L-5 but smaller at first, and on the other side of the Moon (pie down left).
2. For other Tricentennial fax & pix, see bacover.
July 2076
Charlie was just finishing up a week on Earth the day the John F. Kennedy was launched. Tired of being interviewed, he slipped away from the media lounge at the Cape shuttleport. His white clearance card got him out onto the landing strip alone.
The midnight shuttle was being fueled at the far end of the strip, gleaming pink-white in the last light from the setting sun. Its image twisted and danced in the shimmering heat that radiated from the tarmac. The smell of the soft tar was indelibly associated in his mind with leave-taking, relief.
He walked to the middle of the strip and checked his watch. Five minutes. He lit a cigarette and threw it away. He rechecked his mental calculations: the flight would start low in the southwest. He blocked out the sun with a raised hand. What would 150 bombs per second look like? For the media they were called fuel capsules. The people who had carefully assembled them and gently lifted them to orbit and installed them in the tanks, they called them bombs. Ten times the brightness of a full moon, they had said. On L-5 you weren’t supposed to look toward it without a dark filter.