I wasn’t connected to operational radio communications, so if a message arrived from Lucy, I wouldn’t know about it until someone told me. And so, during the first few hours after Calkin’s call, I was constantly asking whether we’d heard anything. I could see that everyone was coming to regard me as a nuisance, and finally Morris promised to let me know if the situation changed. “Immediately,” he added.
Late that afternoon, he came back from a conference. “Sara,” he said, “I can’t promise anything, but you and I are headed for the Cape.”
A technician came in and disconnected me. That eliminated my visual capability, though I could still hear what was going on around me. Morris wrapped me in plastic and put me in his briefcase. Then we took the elevator down to the first floor. “A car’s waiting for us,” he said.
“Are Mary and the kids coming?” I asked.
“No, Sara. We didn’t want to pull the guys out of school. I’ll bring everybody out in June.”
An hour later we boarded a small jet with two other passengers and headed for the Cape.
The other passengers knew about the Coraggio. They were being called in to run tests on the Excelsior.
Once in the air, Morris took me out of the briefcase. “Morris,” I said, trying to sound perfectly cool, “what are my chances?”
He shook his head. “I haven’t pushed for it yet, Sara. But you wouldn’t have any kind of chance at all if you’re not there when the decision gets made.”
“Okay.”
“We can’t rush this.” He put one hand on my casing. “I’ll keep you informed.”
“Make sure Calkin knows I took the Coraggio out to the asteroid belt.”
“He knows. I’ve already reminded him.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
“It’s beautiful out there,” he said.
At first I thought we were still talking about the asteroid belt. Then I realized he was looking out the window. I couldn’t see him, of course. Anyhow, it was only an attempt to change the subject. One of the other passengers, a woman with a soft voice, had apparently overheard us talking and asked about me. He introduced me, and we began discussing NASA’s current state. The President, in his weekly press conference, held while we were headed for the airport, had denied that more cuts were coming. The Coraggio story broke while he was still onstage. Somebody asked what had happened. Another reporter wanted to know whether it wasn’t time to quit on the space program and stop wasting money. The President tried to sound reassuring.
I didn’t really know what I was hoping for. Lucy reporting back that she was okay? Or a blown drive unit and me riding to the rescue? It seemed unlikely they’d give me a chance to do that, though I thought it would have been the right move. We took to making small talk, which I’m not good at. So I focused my attention on the radio. We were already the prime topic on several talk shows. On NPR’s Afternoon Bill, the host predicted that even if we found the Coraggio, wholesale changes would ensue at NASA. A reporter from the Washington Post thought we should be closed down: “Let’s face reality, Bill. Space flight’s expensive, and we get no benefit from it. It’s time to back off.”
The Jake Wallace Show had Marvin Clavis as a guest. Clavis had done the breakthrough work to put together the fusion drive. When asked for his opinion about what might have gone wrong, he admitted that, at this stage, everything was guesswork.
But he had a prediction: “If they haven’t heard from the Coraggio within the next few hours, they’ll never find her.”
I doubted that twenty percent of the population had even heard of the Coraggio, and maybe half that many who might have known about her mission. This despite the fact that the program had been wildly successful…until now, of course.
But no human beings were aboard, and if the VR-2 ever did leave for Barnard’s Star, nobody would go along for that ride either. So why would anyone care? With the fusion drive, the VR-2’s were allegedly capable of getting up to six percent of light speed on a full load of fuel. An incredible velocity, and an achievement that, a few years earlier, had seemed hopelessly beyond reach.
Eventually, according to plan, each of the three vehicles would receive a destination, Barnard’s Star, Wolf 359, and Lalande 21185. The closest projected launch date, to Wolf 359, was six months away. The other two would happen during the following year. Incredibly, some people still wondered why we weren’t headed for Centauri.
The flight to Barnard’s Star, nearest of the three, would require fifty years. Even had Captain Future been aboard, nobody was going to get excited. Call me later.
I knew Morris pretty well. Despite what he said, he wasn’t prepared to accept the possibility that the program would ever shut down. Not now, especially after President Ferguson had managed to put together the Global Space Initiative. After Clavis and his team had provided the fusion reactor. When success seemed so close.
Ed Sakkinen, on Coffee With Ed, was outraged. “Why are we spending so much money to send a robot ship to visit a rock anyway? I still don’t get it.”
Rita D’Esposito, NBC’s White House correspondent, tried to make sense of the project: “Ed, a lot of people think that, unless we establish ourselves on Mars, or somewhere, eventually the human race will take a fatal hit. Maybe by an asteroid, or a nuclear war. Or climate change. Something will take us out.”
“When’s the last time that happened?” Ed asked.
She sighed. “It only has to happen once.”
Sakkinen laughed.
“Listen,” she said, “a rock crashed in Siberia near the beginning of the last century. It didn’t do much other than knock down a lot of trees. But if it had been maybe a half-mile wider, it would have been goodbye, baby, for all of us.”
A political consultant on the show sounded annoyed: “Some people argue that if we don’t go to Mars and set up, I don’t know, malls out there somewhere, we’ll just wind up hanging out on the front porch.”
Senator Armand Hopper, on Round Table, demanded to know how many more damned ways the government could find to waste money. Simultaneously, he was beating the drums for a military intervention in Uzbekistan.
Fortunately, it was a short flight to the Cape, and when the Political Roughnecks began arguing that the space age was over and it was time for us all to grow up, Morris told me that we’d begun our descent into the spaceport. He noted that this was the first time he’d been flown into the space center. “It’s nice to be a VIP,” he added.
We touched down on the skid strip, and Morris said something about welcome to Cape Kennedy. When the plane stopped moving he put me back in the briefcase. “Sorry, Sara,” he said. “I’ll get you connected as soon as I can.”
It wasn’t a problem. I was glad to have gotten that far.