“Wasn’t Rice University where the President made his ‘Moon Speech’ just before the war?” The Governor asked, in between sipping his coffee.
“Yes, sir,” said a senior aide standing at Miranda’s shoulder. “Something along the lines of ‘no nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in this race for space,’ and ‘we choose to go to the Moon in this decade and to do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.’ I’m sure that was at Rice last year.”
One of Miranda’s brothers, David, at twenty-seven the middle of her three elder siblings, had started a post-doctoral fellowship at Rice University in September. David had a contract with Lockheed which he never, ever talked about. The last time brother and sister had spoken over the phone, coincidentally, about a week ago, he had chatted in generalities about how he was settling into life at Houston. Rice University was not overlarge but it was notoriously picky about who it let in. It was a private, research driven institution with long-established — borderline incestuous — links with the American aerospace industry and therefore, to the Pentagon. President Kennedy had made the ‘Moon Speech’ at Rice because he had known it would go down well at Rice, an island of friendly territory in what was otherwise politically hostile country.
“A little over a month before the war,” the President of the United States of America proclaimed, the pitch of his voice dropping momentarily to a magisterial baritone, “I committed this great country to the goal of putting a man — an American — on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth by the end of this decade. As I told Congress in 1961, I believe that no single space project in this period will be more impressive to Mankind or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish. I say to you, my fellow Americans, that having passed through the valley of the shadow of death we owe it to the rest of Mankind to think the unthinkable and to fulfil our manifest destiny!”
There was a stunned mutter of applause, and then a mounting crescendo, followed by foot stamping and screaming.
“To those who say…” The clamour drowned out the President’s voice. He tried again after a few seconds. “To those who say that the great work of putting an American on the Moon is a sideshow, ephemeral to the business of reconstruction. To those who say that a Moon Program will take scarce funds away from rebuilding our broken cities. To those who say that it is our Christian duty to offer succour to our enemies before we invest in our own national destiny…”
There was a rising chant in the background.
“To the Moon!
“To the Moon!”
“All the way to the Moon and back!”
“Let me speak to the naysayers thus,” Jack Kennedy declaimed, his voice quivering with emotion and presumably, with floods of crocodile tears in his eyes. “America cannot put right every wrong in this world, nor should America feel honour bound to attempt to so do. America was attacked. America was terribly wounded. Do the naysayers honestly believe that America should forever accept the burden of the aggressor’s guilt upon itself? I tell you now that I will never apologise to the American people for doing my duty. I will never apologise for standing up to evil. I will never apologise for having met force with force even though I will carry the memory of our brave fallen with me to my grave. What, I ask you, my fellow Americans, what shall our legacy to our children and our grand children be? Will that legacy be a world in ruins or a world in which Mankind looks to the stars? Shall we forever turn our faces back to the past, down into the darkness of the valley of death, or shall we lift our eyes upwards to look upon the sunlit uplands of hope and infinite new possibilities?”
“To the Moon!”
“To the Moon!”
“All the way to the Moon and back!”
Miranda registered the shocked, disbelieving silence in the room all around her. And in that moment of numb quietness could not help but think of L. Frank Baum scribbling away, lost in some writer’s altered mind state in a room not a million miles away from where the Governor of California and his entourage now sat; imagining the World of Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion, Glinda the Good Witch of the North, Almira Gulch the Wicked Witch of the West and Professor Marvel, the Wonderful Wizard of Oz himself…
Chapter 4
Before the October War Submarine Squadron 15 had been slated to form at Apra Harbour, Guam, with its strength gradually building up between late 1963 and early 1965 as the Polaris ballistic missile submarines of the Lafayette and James Madison classes were completed.
After 27th October 1962 stationing so many Polaris boats so far from the continental United States had suddenly seemed a less good idea; and besides, the war had been won and future plans required less than half the previously projected number of SSBNs to be at sea at any given time. Therefore, it had been decided that Submarine Squadron 15, along with its designated Tender, the nineteen thousand ton newly built USS Hunley — AS-31 — should be based at Alameda, in San Francisco Bay. Moreover, while five of the ten James Madison class boats under construction would be mothballed immediately upon completion, Submarine Squadron 15 would initially comprise a mix of up to a dozen George Washington, Ethan Allen and the first batch of Lafayette class vessels.
The USS Theodore Roosevelt (SSBN-600) was the third ship of the George Washington class, the first ballistic missile submarines commissioned into the United States Navy. Although she had been laid down as the third boat of the class minor design changes and subsequent construction delays had meant she was the last of the five to actually go to sea. To speed the construction of the class the George Washingtons were designed as cut in half Skipjack class hunter killer boats with a one hundred and thirty feet long missile compartment welded between the bow section behind the control room bulkhead, and the stern section containing the nuclear reactor. In fact the lead ship of the class, the USS George Washington, used the previously laid keel of a new Skipjack class boat being built on the slipway at the Electric Boat Yard at Groton, Connecticut. This keel had literally been ‘cut in half’ and extended to facilitate the speedy construction of the first Polaris-armed SSBN.
The USS Theodore Roosevelt had been deployed with Submarine Squadron 14 at Holy Loch on the River Clyde in Scotland at the time of the October War; that summer she had returned via the Panama Canal, to San Francisco to within thirty miles of where she had been built at the Mare Island Navy Yard at Vallejo, between 1959 and 1961.
That morning found SSBN-600 moored outboard of the SSBN-609, the Ethan Allen class boat USS Sam Houston on the seaward flank of the grey slab-sided submarine tender, USS Hunley. Gangways were linked across the two submarines as they rode, virtually unmoving, on the iron grey waters of San Francisco Bay opposite the Golden Gate City. As was frequent at this time of year the fog rolling in from the Pacific had hidden the Theodore Roosevelt’s return to port from civilian view until long after she had tied up. Already, the first men from the relieving Gold crew were onboard. The Theodore Roosevelt was still a new ship and there were only minor issues on her engineering, electrical and weapons systems defect lists; therefore the forthcoming crew rotation ought by rights to be relatively straightforward affair.