So most of Roger’s work since then had been, well, diplomatic. He played golf with senators on the space committee and commuted to the Eurospace installations in Zurich and Munich and Trieste. He had a modest sale with his memoirs. He served as back-up on an occasional mission. As the space program declined rapidly from national priority to contingency-planning exercises, he had less and less that mattered to do.
Still, he was backing up a mission now, although he didn’t talk about it when he was wooing political support for the agency. He wasn’t allowed to. This new manned mission, which looked as though it would actually be approved sooner or later, was the first one in the space program that had been classified Top Secret.
We expected a great deal from Roger Torraway, although he was not much different from any of the other astronauts: a little overtrained, a lot underemployed, a good deal discontented with what was happening in their jobs, but very much unwilling to trade them for any others as long as there was still a chance to be great again. They were all like that, even the one that was a monster.
Two
What the President Wanted
The man who was a monster was on Torraway’s mind a lot. Roger had a special interest.
He was sitting in the co-pilot’s seat at twenty-four thousand meters over Kansas , watching a blip on the IDF radar slide smoothly off the screen. “Shit,” said the pilot. The blip was a Soviet Concordski III; their CB-5 had been racing it ever since they had picked it up over the Garrison Dam Reservoir.
Torraway grinned and throttled back another tiny increment. With the boost in relative speed, the Concordski blip picked up a momentum. “We were losing him,” the pilot said glumly. “Where do you reckon he’s going? Venezuela, maybe?”
“He better be,” said Torraway, “considering how much fuel the both of you were burning up.”
“Yeah, well,” said the pilot, not at all embarrassed at the fact that he had been well over the international treaty limit of 1.5 Mach, “what’s happening atTulsa? Usually they let us come straight in, with a V.I.P. like you.”
“Probably some bigger V.I.P. landing now,” said Roger. It wasn’t a guess, because he knew who the V.I.P. was, and they didn’t come any bigger than the President of the United States.
“You fly this thing pretty good,” offered the pilot generously. “Want to land it — I mean, when they let us do that thing?”
“Thanks, no. I’d better go back and sort out my junk.” But he stayed in the seat, looking down. They had begun the descent, and the patchy field of L-1 cumulus was just below them; they could feel the bumps from the updrafts over the clouds. Torraway took his hands off the controls as the pilot took over. They would be passing over Tonka pretty soon, off to the right. He wondered how the monster was getting along.
The pilot was still feeling generous. “You don’t do much flying any more, do you?”
“Only when somebody like you lets me.”
“No sweat. What do you do, anyway, if you don’t mind my asking? I mean, besides V.I.P.ing it around.”
Torraway had an answer all ready for that. “Administration,” he said. He always said that, when people asked what he did. Sometimes the people who asked had proper security clearance, not only with the government but with the private radar in his own mind that told him to trust one person and not another. Then he said, “I make monsters.” If what they said next indicated that they too were in the know, he might go a sentence or two farther.
There was no secret about the Exomedicine Project. Everyone knew that what they did in Tonka was prepare astronauts to live on Mars. What was secret was how they did it: the monster. If Torraway had said too much he would have jeopardized both his freedom and his job. And Roger liked his job. It supported his pretty wife in her pottery shop. It gave him the feeling of doing something that people would remember, and it took him to interesting places. Back when he was an active astronaut he had been to even more interesting places, but they were out in space and kind of lonely. He liked better the places he went to in private jets, with flattering diplomats and impressionable cocktail-party women to greet him when he got there. Of course, there was the monster to think about, but he didn’t really worry about that. Much.
They came in over the Cimarron River, or the crooked red gully that would be the river when it rained again, bent the jet flow to almost straight down, cut back on the power and eased gently in.
“Thanks,” Roger said to the pilot, and went back to collect his gear from the V.I.P. cabin.
This time it had been Beirut, Rome, Seville and Saskatoon before he got back to Oklahoma, each place hotter than the place before. Because they were expected at the ceremonial briefing for the President, Dorrie met him at the airport motel. He changed swiftly into the clothes she had brought him. He was glad to be home, glad to be getting back to making monsters and glad to be back with his wife. While he was getting out of the shower he had a swift and powerful erotic impulse. He had a clock inside his head that kept track of what pieces of time were available, so he did not need to check his watch: there was time. It would not matter if they were a few minutes late. But Dorrie wasn’t in the chair where he had left her; the TV was going, her cigarette was burning out in the ashtray, but she was gone. Roger sat on the edge of the bed with a towel wrapped around him until the clock in his head said there was not enough time left to matter. Then he began to dress. He was tying his tie when Dorrie rapped on the door. “Sorry,” she said when he opened for her. “I couldn’t find the coke machine. One for you and one for me.”
Dorrie was almost as tall as Roger, brunette by choice, green-eyed by nature. She took a brush from her bag and touched up the back and sleeves of his jacket, then touched coke cans with him and drank. “We’d better go,” she said. “You look gorgeous.”
“You look screwable,” he said, putting his hand on her shoulder.
“I just put lipstick on,” she said, turning her lips away and allowing him to kiss her cheek. “But I’m glad to see the senoritas didn’t use you all up.”
He chuckled good-humoredly; it was their joke that he slept with a different girl in every city. He liked the joke. It wasn’t true. His couple of generally unsatisfactory experiments at adultery had been more shabby and troublesome than rewarding, but he liked thinking of himself as the sort of man whose wife had to worry about the attentions of other women. “Let’s not keep the President waiting,” he said. “I’ll check out while you get the car.”
They did not in fact keep the President waiting; they had more than two hours to get through before they even saw him.
Roger was familiar with the general process of being screened, since it had happened to him before. It wasn’t just the President of the United States who was taking 200 percent overlap precautions against assassins these days. Roger had been a whole day getting to see the Pope, and even so there had been a Swiss guard holding a Biretta standing right behind him every minute he was in the papal chamber.
Half of the top brass of the lab was here for the briefing. The senior lounge had been cleaned and polished for the occasion and did not look like its familiar coffee-drinking self. Even the blackboards and the paper napkins that were used for scratch paper were tucked away out of sight. Folding screens had been set up in the corners and the shades of the nearest windows discreetly pulled down; that was for the physical search, Roger knew. After that, they would have their interviews with the psychiatrists. Then if everyone passed, if no lethal hypodermic turned up in a hatpin or murderous obsession turned up in a head, they would all go to the auditorium, and there the President would join them.