The launch date continued to approach inexorably. Man's Hope was mated with the Energia core stage and moved to the launch tower, and ships began delivering tanks of fuel; refined kerosene, known as RP-1, for the Zenits, liquid hydrogen for the core stage, and liquid oxygen as oxidizer for both.
Frank and Dr. Ternayev had considered converting the core stage to use RP-1 instead of the much harder-to-handle liquid hydrogen. But they had decided that since they would be unable to launch test flights, any such modifications would be an unjustified risk.
Frank was in his office poring over load reports when a young man in a white jacket stuck his head in the door. "Senhor Weatherly?" he asked.
Frank nodded and replied "Yes." Suddenly there was a large pistol in the man's hand. Frank groped for his "panic button" just as there was a "chuff" sound, and Frank looked down to see a tranquilizer dart in his shoulder. He started to speak, but collapsed, unconscious.
Frank awoke on the floor of his office. His head was resting in Susan's lap, and he reflected that it was a nice place to be, before he remembered the man in white. "What . . . ?"
Susan looked at him with eyes shiny with unshed tears. "Frank!" she cried. "Oh, Frank, I was so worried . . ."
A pair of uniformed legs came into his view, and Frank looked up to see General Genesa. "Ah, you are awake," said the General. "We have the man. He actually does work here; that is how he could get access. He had a wheelchair in the hall, and an ambulance at the door. You did well, managing to hit your panic button before you passed out."
Frank started to sit up, but he was still groggy. "Who sent him?" he asked.
The General shrugged. "I doubt we will ever know. All the man knows is that he was to deliver you to a boat in the Baia. His description could fit anyone, even me. The boat is gone, of course."
The grogginess was fading. "Damn!" Frank said angrily, "That means we'll have to enhance the security again! I hate having guards everywhere."
The General grinned sourly. "Still, I am afraid we will have to place guards on the entrances of any building you or Ms. Andrews occupy. Perhaps once the launch is complete in a few days, we will be able to relax a bit."
Frank nodded. "I hope so, General," he said dispiritedly. He put an arm around Susan and led her out of the now-crowded office.
They passed David in the doorway, as he came pounding down the corridor at a dead run. Frank just gave him a weak smile and led Susan down the hall to their room.
General Genesa came out the door. He nodded to David and then stared down the hall at the receding figures. "It must be very difficult to know that your own government considers you an enemy, and would try to kidnap you."
David nodded. "Especially if you're an American. Our traditions, our core beliefs make it almost impossible for an American to conceive of such a situation. Hell, I would never have believed it, until now. I'm afraid we're going to have some very depressed Americans around here for a while, General."
By the time they reached their quarters, tears were streaming down Susan's face.
"It's all right, Susie," said Frank. "I'm all right. Everything is under control.
She whirled on him. "NO!" she cried. "Everything is not all right. Everything is not under control. My country, the damned United States of America, just sent someone to kidnap one of their own citizens!"
Frank grabbed her shoulders. "No!" he said in an intense tone. "It wasn't your country that sent that man. It was not the United States. It was the government of the United States. A collection of bureaucrats who have lost sight of what America is about, and what America means. You have to remember that, Susie. You have to believe that one day that vast, sleeping horde of people will wake up and see what has been done to the founder's dream. Then, I suspect, there will be a second American Revolution. I pray that it will be a revolution at the ballot box; that suddenly nearly every incumbent federal and state officeholder will be thrown out, and dedicated people who want America back will take over. That they will fire nearly every senior bureaucrat in the system, and replace him or her with people dedicated to the greatness of America. I pray that's the kind of revolution we will have, Susie. But I very much fear that there will be another, bloodier kind. That frightens me, because that could easily lead to tyranny, and the actual fall of the American Empire."
She looked annoyed. "Empire? We don't have an empire."
He shrugged. "Ask your Brazilian friends. Ask Anton, or Sergei. Ask Ron Mbele. Our experiment in freedom has led us to greatness, dear, but it has also led us to empire. And empires have life spans. Rome achieved greatness as a republic; but Augustus, for the best of reasons, of course, seized power and turned it into a dictatorship. Four hundred years later, Gauls were sacking Rome.
"I'm afraid that a bloody second revolution would lead to an American Augustus seizing power, for the best of reasons, of course.
"But if we quit now, if we give up on America, then all hope of a world of free men will be gone. Along with Man's Hope, America stands for man's dream of Freedom. Don't give up on America yet!"
Susan's eyes were shining, but tears no longer marred her cheeks. She sniffed. "You give a nice speech. You ever thought of running for office?"
He grinned. "Nope. I don't qualify. I wasn't sitting in the front row when my parents got married."
But things were too hectic to worry about political philosophy. Within an hour both Frank and Susan were deeply embroiled in the frantic launch preparations. The space suits, designed and manufactured in Japan, had to be tested, and tested, and then tested again, this time on the spacers that would be wearing them. The spacers themselves had been training day and night in a swimming pool on the launch site, with weights strapped to them to provide exactly neutral buoyancy, and air delivered through umbilicals to helmets designed to resemble those of the space suits.
In one way, though, David decided that the Man's Hope crew had it easier than NASA's astronauts did.
NASA's missions are largely scientific and experimental in nature. NASA astronauts were continually being poked, prodded, and monitored by medical staff.
Here, they were simply given comprehensive physical examinations to make certain they were in good health, and their medical records fed to Raoul's tablet computer. David reveled in the lack of sensor pads stuck all over his body all the time.
The tablet computers had been purchased from Japan. They were top-line off-the-shelf models, though with enlarged memory capacity. But the ship's computers had been designed to interface with them through the SD card slot each possessed. Unplugged, they were simply the tablets they had started out to be. In fact, each spacer had a stack of SD cards in his meager baggage allowance, each crammed with music, movies, books, or whatever else took the owner's fancy. But plugged into the adapter, the tablet became a workstation on the ship's intranet. Each spacer had a private partition on the main system, tailored to their needs. Raoul's contained the psych profiles and medical histories of the crew, as well as medical references. Dolf's and David's contained the most storage; Dolf's full of astronomical data and orbit-calculation software, and David's with much of the same software, but packed with details about the operation and maintenance of the ship, as well as the complete psych profiles of the crew instead of the astronomical data.
But each partition also contained space for the spacers to record occurrences, observations, and anything else they cared to add. A single docking station was provided for those who felt more comfortable with a conventional keyboard than the touch screen.