“What are they planning to do about it?”
Page shook his head dolefully. “Man, you really are out of the loop, aren’t you?” When Low didn’t react, the rep continued. “The Russians are providing us with some state-of-the-art excavation packages. Really sharp stuff, minimal residual rads. Only, they’re not going to be used for widening canals or exposing deep ore bodies.”
“Kick it out into deep space?” Low inquired casually.
Page shook his head again. “Too much bang required. Probably blow it into a thousand pieces. Big, dangerous pieces. The intent is to just nudge it, stabilize the existing orbit.”
“That’s asking a helluva lot of the explosives people.”
“It’s all been worked out.” Page exuded confidence. “Even where the poppers are to be placed. Nobody expects any surprises. The operation’s already been carried out a hundred times.”
“Computer simulation,” Low murmured.
“In Houston and at Langley. Results match up every time, to enough places to reassure even the committee people. No margin for error.”
“There’s always margin for error.” Low frowned. The crab had moved on. “Be an awful mess if somebody’s figured wrong and it comes down faster.”
“They haven’t and it won’t.” Page changed approach. “The President and Congress are kind of enamored of the rock’s potential. They see it as a mile-long space station.”
Low let out a derisive snort. “I’ll bet the toy manufacturers are ahead of the station designers. So they could have a zero-gee bowling alley, so what? Unmanneds can do it safer, cheaper, and better.” His left eye twitched, but Page didn’t see it.
“Sure they can, but a big, solid platform is an easier sell. Sexier. There’s a lot to be said for it, Boston.” He leaned a little closer. “We’ve got to pacify the rock anyway. Why not try to put a favorable spin on it?”
“I suppose.” Raising his eyes, Low favored his visitor with that special gaze. The one that only people who have seen the Earth as a blue-white marble possess. It didn’t unsettle Page. He’d been the recipient of it many times before, from a number of men and women. Dealing with it, and them, was part of his job. He could handle complex equations and engineering problems, but he could also handle people. Which was why he had been sent to the coast instead of one of the others.
Besides, he’d known Boston Low off and on for more than ten years. As much as anyone could get to know Boston Low.
Like a point guard spotting an opening to the basket, the fog was starting to make its move. Soon both bridge and bay would be hidden by thick white mist, and the mournful howling of the foghorns would resound across the waters like a pride of homesick lions calling to one another in the night. He blinked at his old acquaintance.
“You want me to fly it, don’t you, Harry?”
“Not me, Boz.” Page glanced up and back toward the road, where others waited. “It’s not up to me one way or the other. They wouldn’t listen to me if I tried to talk to them about it. I was asked to come and tell you. I did try to tell them what I thought your answer would be.”
Low looked away, welcoming the fog. “Then there’s no point in my repeating it, is there?”
“It’s not that simple. This is a national, an international, emergency, and this is no ordinary shuttle flight.”
“No shuttle flight is ordinary,” Low mumbled, for lack of a better response. “Remember the Enterprise?”
“Of course I remember.” Everyone remembered Low’s second flight as commander. A mistake in fueling, contradictory calculations … to this day no one knew how the shuttle had been allowed to lift off without enough fuel to make a proper reentry. The very real possibility of burning up on approach. The near supernatural manner in which Low had adjusted, compensated, finessed and tweaked the shuttle’s trajectory, skipping it into the upper atmosphere and then out again, in and out, slowing it without the use of the nonexistent fuel, making calculations and decisions without the use of a computer, until it arrived safely at Edwards missing half its nose tiles but without anyone aboard suffering anything more lethal than a deep bruise.
It was called flying, a skill half forgotten in an age of massive parallel computing and redundant backups, of ground control and preordained flight paths. It made Boston Low a national hero. He’d accepted it all quietly and gracefully while turning down all but a few of the endorsement offers. Just enough to supplement his NASA pension.
And when the acclaim had begun to die down, when the reporters no longer camped out on his doorstep waiting for sound bites, he had firmly and without fuss retired. Not to the rolling hills of Virginia or the space centers of Houston or Canaveral, nor to the glamour of Los Angeles nor the perpetual nightlife of New York, but to a simple two-bedroom condo in northwest San Francisco, proximate not to power brokers and politicos but to panhandlers, prostitutes, tourists, illegal immigrants, and the best Chinese food in North America.
Also fog and seagulls. There was a lot of both in Boston Low.
“They want you,” he heard Page saying. “They want you bad.”
“Who wants me?” He smiled. The crab had returned and was peering up at him from beneath a rock with eyes like black-tipped pushpins.
“The agency. The project scientists and supervisors. The President and Congress.”
“I’m forty-two, Harry. I’ve commanded two shuttle missions and participated in five. Ever heard of pressing your luck? I’ve had my fill of empty space. The Enterprise did that to me. The only space I want to explore anymore is the one inside of me.” Tilting back his head slightly, he waved at the sky.
“There’s nothing up there to draw me back, and plenty to keep me here. It’s dead out there, Harry. Dead and lifeless and cold. When you gaze out and see the whole Earth floating beneath you, it’s beautiful, but when you look anywhere else, all you see is the cold empty. Black emptiness. Death.”
“Boston, listen…,” Page began.
“No, you listen, Harry.” Low used the voice that made even multiple-term senators shut up. “I’ve had enough, understand? I’m not afraid, I’m not scared. I’ve just had enough. That’s why I retired. It’s called being sensible. So it doesn’t matter who ‘wants’ me.”
He looked away, and both were silent for several minutes before Page spoke again, his voice soft hut insistent.
“Don’t tell me you aren’t even a little hit curious to see what’s up there, to see what it’s like? This is an extraterrestrial, probably extrasolar visitor. This isn’t like you, Boz. I remember you being a lot of different things, but indifferent wasn’t one of ’em.”
“I know what’s up there, Harry. I know what it’s like. So do you, so does the rest of the establishment. It’s a big chunk of rock and metal. That’s all. As dead as its immediate environment and no different from the tens of thousands that are drifting around right now between Mars and Jupiter. This one’s just a little closer, that’s all. Interesting? Sure. Special? I don’t think so.”
Another moment of reflection, then, “Look, Boston, I don’t know how to go about telling you this. As someone who’s always spoken his mind, I’m not comfortable with it at all.”
Low grinned. “You don’t speak your mind, Harry. You’re a government functionary and you say what they tell you to say. You’re a good government functionary, though. I’ll give you that.”
Page grinned back, though much of it was forced. “Okay, so I’m a professional B.S.’er. Call it what you want. As a good government functionary, listen to me. You can’t get out of this one, Boz. Even the Russians want you, dammit. And everybody, they’re going to get you. So you might as well get used to the idea.”
Low wasn’t in the least impressed. “You can make a man do a lot of things, Harry, but you can’t make him fly a space shuttle. You don’t want to make him fly a space shuttle.”
Page raised both hands defensively. “I told you, it’s not me. It’s everyone else.”
“What are they gonna do, Harry? Threaten me? What are they going to threaten me with? Death, dismemberment? The IRS?”
“I warned them they couldn’t intimidate you. I told them it wasn’t possible.”
Low nodded slowly. “Once you’ve been Out There, common, ordinary terrestrial threats no longer carry much weight. They all seem pretty much”—he searched for the right description—”weightless.”
“Why do you think,” Page responded, “they want you to lead this mission? Nothing bothers you, Boston. You’re not only not afraid of them, you’re not afraid of anything. Everything you’re telling me right now underscores your appropriateness for this project.”
Low gazed out across the water, wishing the fog would hurry up. You couldn’t hurry fog, though. “You’re very clever, Harry. Too damn clever. That’s why they sent you.”