“About a month before the balloon went up, wasn’t it? ‘No nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in this race for space,’ or words to that effect. ‘We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard…’
“Yes,” Tom Harding-Grayson mused aloud, wishing he’d written that line himself.
Rice University wasn’t overlarge but it was very picky about who it let in. It was a private, research driven institution with well-established — some believed incestuous — links with the American aerospace industry and to the Pentagon. Kennedy had made the ‘Moon Speech’ at Rice because he’d known it would go down well on that particular campus situated in what was otherwise generally hostile political territory. Now he’d gone back to Houston and returned to drink at the same well. Why on earth would the little monster do a thing like that?
A sardonic smile began to form on Tom Grayson’s lips.
“What’s so funny all of a sudden?” Henry Tomlinson inquired.
The Permanent Secretary to Her Majesty’s Foreign Office put down his glass. He didn’t begrudge his old friend his unlikely rise to the top of what survived of the Home Civil Service. He was admirably suited to corralling the rag tag chaos of competing vested interests within the United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration and more important, he got on famously with the Prime Minister whom Tom Grayson had always, on a personal level, detested. Moreover, the Chiefs of Staff of the three armed services trusted Henry and the trust of such men was not to be underestimated in these times, when even small disagreements in the Government over ways and means were horribly likely to result in coups and putsches. All things considered Henry Tomlinson was the safe pair of hands the country needed in this strange tormented era into which they’d been consigned by the paranoia and the unbridled folly of their so-called friends in the lost colonies.
“They plan to wash their hands of us,” Tom Harding-Grayson said ruminatively. “All of us.”
“…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 sonorously, 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…”
Henry Tomlinson almost choked on his brandy.
“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 absolute silence.
A mutter of applause, then a mounting crescendo.
Followed by foot stamping and screaming.
“To those who say…” The clamour drowned out the President’s massively amplified voice. He tried again after ten 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,” 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. American 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!”
Chapter 3
“Take a pew, Peter,” Commander David Penberthy directed, not looking up from his narrow desk beneath the compartment’s single porthole. “I’ll be with you in a moment.”
Peter Christopher sat in the one available hard chair at the bow end of the Captain’s table, fingering his cap, trying not to stare at the Old Man while he finished studying the open file before him. The cabin was like its owner. Everything had its place and everything was in that place. There were few adornments, just framed photographs: of a passing out class at Dartmouth in the 1930s, the fast minelayer HMS Manxman anchored in the Grand Harbour at Malta, a battered, weather beaten Flower class corvette, a slim woman in front of a sailing boat, his dead wife. The noise of the engine room blowers was a mere whisper, the distant turning of machinery, generators so far away as to be no more than a barely perceptible tremor transmitted via the stiff fabric of the destroyer.
Talavera was still closed up at ABC Condition 1 and would remain so for another few hours even though the radiation monitors on deck stubbornly continued to indicate ‘normal’ radiation levels. Or rather, new post-war ‘normal’ levels of contamination. The Jeremiads had predicted ten or twenty or even fifty times higher long-term increase in background radiation. Most of the science, so far, was showing increases in the range of two to three times higher than pre-war. It was cold comfort. The most pernicious fission products contributing to the raised background levels; Strontium-90, Iodine-131 and 133, had half-lives measured in tens of years. Mankind was embarking on a huge and potentially disastrous millennia long physiological experiment in living with what previously had been regarded as high short-term dosages of radiation exposure to which would have permanently disqualified any worker in the nuclear industry from ever working with radioactive substances again. Peter’s visceral terror of the unseen poison in the air, the sea and on any firm ground he was ever likely to step upon had slowly subsided over the months but the idea of living in a world that was forever irredeemably blighted never really went away. It helped that he’d spent most of the last year overseeing the overhaul and trialling of Talavera’s radar and electronics suite. He and his people — many of whom he’s come to regard as brothers and close personal friends as much as men he commanded — had buried themselves in their work with a one-eyed determination that sometimes, enabled them to forget the tragedy of their old world. Of course, there had been those who couldn’t come to terms with the new reality. One by one they’d been sent ashore; one in ten of the destroyer’s crew had been lost thus. When a man lost hope, surrendered to despair there was no saving him. Several men had committed suicide in the days after the cataclysm. Two had simply disappeared over the side of the ship and others occasionally, since…