“I hardly remember any of that.”
“I suppose. But it doesn’t matter.The thing is, if you insist on this, it’s going to kill you. I don’t want to be responsible for that.”
Reese shook his head.“It’s not your responsibility. Okay? It’s something I want more than anything. More than anything.That means I take the risks I have to in order to get it.”
Kane put his glasses back on.“Okay,” he said.
Reese left him there. He was suddenly tired and took a taxi back to the hotel to pack. In the nearly empty room he found the scrap of paper with his hexagram and followed the change line: the old yang would move to a yin, becoming Kuei Mei, the Marrying Maiden. It was, in a vague sort of way, supposed to be his future.“Undertakings bring misfortune. Nothing that would further.” Too late now, he thought, dropping the book into his bag.
They caught an Estrella de Oro bus for the short ride to Mexico City; from there Kane had them booked on an evening flight to Houston.
Reese sat back in the plush red seat of the airliner, relaxed, watching the lights moving below him. It was almost, he thought, like checking into a hospital. He was no longer making decisions, had been relieved of responsibility for his own existence for the first time in eight years. He’d heard of ex-convicts who’d deliberately put themselves back in jail, and for a second he understood the logic.
The flight came in to Houston Intercontinental a little after ten pm. Kane had left his car in the parking lot, a large V-8 gasoline-powered sedan.To Reese it seemed almost as cumbersome as the aircraft they’d just left. He sank helplessly into the heavily cushioned seats and flinched as Kane power-locked the doors.
He hadn’t seen much of the city during his brief stint at Pulsystems, had not, in fact, spent any time there since his nasa days before his first Mars flight.The changes were sweeping and dramatic.
Kane drove them over a nearly deserted Gulf Freeway, avoiding gaping holes in the overpass and the worst of the broken chunks of pavement.Twice he swung off the freeway altogether and sped past collapsed interchanges.The barricades blocking the mounds of shattered concrete and twisted rebar were themselves falling apart, obviously temporary precautions that had become permanent.
“From the riots,” Kane said as Reese turned to stare out the rear window. “There’s probably a hundred people in each of those piles.
Kids set off some bombs at rush hour.That was about the last rush hour
Houston ever had.”
“You were here then?”
“Hospital,” Kane said. Reese raised an eyebrow but didn’t want to press him.“It was right after North Africa. I was laid up for a while.”
Reese’s memories superimposed themselves on the dark screen of the city: streetlights that burned all night long, the brilliant, tangled geometries of the Houston skyline at night, the hundreds of thousands of cars—now rusting and abandoned at the edges of the expressway.
Reese could see no details once they passed through the deserted downtown, only a few ragged pines and collapsing tilt-wall warehouses blurred by the speed of their relative motion.They passed South Houston and the old white-on-green signs for nasa shot by with increasing frequency. Finally, after nearly an hour in the car, they roared off at the nasa/Alvin exit and screamed left onto nasa Road 1. Kane’s driving had the intensity of a compulsion, but with the scarcity of cars on the road it seemed harmless, almost childish.
Clear Lake City had virtually dried up and blown away. Reese remembered the long lines of convenience stores and gas stations, burger joints and boutiques that had lined the highway. Hardly a pane of glass had survived.
Finally they swung left into the Johnson Space Center, past the paint-flecked Saturn V shell, then right past Visitor’s Parking and into the restricted lot behind Building 1, the Project Management Building.At nine stories it was the tallest in a matched set of concrete-and-smokedglass boxes scattered over the 1600 acres of the complex.
“No security?” Reese asked.
“Surveillance,” Kane said. “They know we’re here.”
Kane released the locking mechanism and Reese got out of the car.A breeze from the lake, a few hundred yards to his right, touched his face and rustled the high grass all around them.
“The place has gone to hell,” Kane said.“But cut grass doesn’t launch a shuttle.” He brought Reese’s bag around from the trunk, and Reese took it absently. How long had it been? Nine years since he left Mars, and they didn’t even debrief him when he got back from that one.A year on Mars and almost another year getting there, so that made it eleven.
It had all happened so suddenly. He hadn’t had time to prepare himself, to anticipate these sudden attacks of memory. He wanted a bath and a drink and a chance to meditate.
Kane unlocked the door of the building and led the way to the elevators.At the top floor they got off,and Kane pointed to the end of the hall.“The last office on the left has been fixed up for you.There’s a shower in the bathroom next door, refrigerator and hot plate in the room.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. Somebody will call us in the morning for a briefing.”
Reese tried the door of the room, found it unlocked.The air inside was stifling. He flicked on a light and went straight to the window, letting in more thick, humid air. It wasn’t until he threw his suitcase on the bed that he noticed the man in the far corner of the room.
“Hello, Reese,” Morgan said. He slouched in an armchair, legs stretched out in front of him, and Reese saw with some relief that he wasn’t going to offer to shake hands. He looked just as Reese had remembered him, over six feet tall with the physique of a drugstore cowboy: broad shoulders, no hips, and a convex stomach with a belt cinched underneath. His dyed hair shone like black patent leather.
“So,” Reese said,“you’re the welcoming committee?”
“We need to talk.”
The furniture, Reese noted, was plain but comfortable.A double bed, chest of drawers, and a portable closet. He took a stack of shirts out of his suitcase.“Then let’s talk.”
“I want you to know I’m serious about this.We have all the hardware we need, and I’ve got a lot of the old Mission Control people back on board.We can pull this off.”
“Maybe you can.The question is why you want to bother.You don’t think they’re still alive up there, do you?”
Morgan stood up and walked over to the window, hands at his waist, theatrically straightening his back.After a long moment he said,“No. It wouldn’t be realistic to expect to find any survivors. But there are reasons enough to put a mission together without any of that. Hell, man, the climatology alone paid for that first Mars mission, paid for it when they broke that drought in the Midwest. Look at history, look what happened to the Chinese when they shut themselves off back in the fifteenth century. If a company the size of Pulsystems stops growing and stops taking chances, it dies in its tracks. Christ, Reese, I don’t have to tell you how important it is to have a space program.”
Reese finished unpacking and closed up the suitcase.“Only if you intend to keep it going,” he said.“And that’s a hell of an investment for one company to take on.”
“What if I told you,”Morgan said,“that I’m prepared to take that risk? Things have been stable for almost five years now. The corporations have divided up the world, and it’s back to business as usual. Somebody needs to make a gesture, to take the lead, to try something new.What if I told you that once things got rolling,other corporations will want in, that the momentum will take us...well, as far as we want to go.”
I’d say, Reese thought, that you were lying.
“There’s another reason,” Morgan said, sitting down in the armchair again, twisting sideways and throwing both legs over the arm.“The Russians seem to be over their hard times as well. It looks as though Aeroflot is going to be trying for Mars too.”