The President smiled gently. "You do."
His Vice-President grimaced back at him. "In our business you need a long memory. And claws."
"And the video?"
"Tell the media he refused to be interviewed. Make him look like a stuck-up scientific type instead of a noble Indian trying to call attention to his people’s plight."
The President nodded slowly. It might work. And this power-hungry woman sitting across from him might just make herself the first female President of the United States. She had the fire in her gut for it. And the claws.
IN TRANSIT: BETWEEN WORLDS
1
During the long years of training, Jamie had traveled so much that he often awoke in the morning with the feeling that he had never really left Houston; some mysterious organization had merely changed the city outside his hotel window. The cities out there were gigantic stage sets and all the people in them were hired actors. Or perhaps very clever robots.
After several weeks aboard the Mars 1 spacecraft coasting toward its distant destination, Jamie began to think that all spacecraft were stage sets, too.
They all looked alike from the inside. The space stations in Earth orbit, the shuttles that carried the Mars explorers to them, the Mars-bound craft themselves — their interiors were all almost identical. Cramped compartments, narrow passageways, the constant hum of electrical equipment, the glare-free, shadowless, flat lighting, the same smell of cold metal and canned stale air. The packed-in feeling that someone was waiting in line behind you, even in the toilet.
Now that the two spacecraft had been spun up, though, there was at least a feeling of gravity. One could walk down the central corridor, sit in a chair, sleep with the solidity of a mattress and blanket that did not float away when you turned over.
There was only one place on the Mars 1 craft that was not claustrophobic: the observation port that looked out on the universe. Jamie found himself going there more and more often as the long wearisome weeks passed by. It would take more than nine months before they reached the red planet and established a safe orbit around it. Nine months of inactivity, living cheek by jowl like a dozen sardines inside an aluminum can. No, not a can, Jamie said to himself. A pressure cooker.
There was work for them to do, of sorts. And a strict schedule of physical exercises in the closet-sized gymnasium. But it was all perfunctory. Jamie put in his required hours on the exercise machines; they kept his muscles in shape, but his mind wandered — he was bored, moody, dull.
Every two or three days he received a call from DiNardo, recovered now from his surgery. The Jesuit reviewed the work going on in several terrestrial laboratories, further analysis of the rocks and soil samples returned from Mars by the unmanned robot exploratory vehicles. The various analyses differed only in the minutest details: the soil samples were sterile, although a few of the rocks contained traces of organic material, carbon-rich chemicals that might be the precursors of living organisms.
The chemicals of life might exist in those rocks, but that’s about as exciting as looking at the bottles of aspirin tablets in a drugstore display case. They haven’t found anything alive in the samples, not even an amoeba.
Nearly four months into the flight, Jamie suddenly asked, "How is Professor Hoffman? Is he involved in these analyses?"
It took several minutes for messages to travel the distance between the spacecraft and Earth. As he watched the little display screen of the communications console Jamie saw DiNardo’s swarthy face register surprise, then something else. Guilt? The priest ran a hand over his shaved scalp before answering.
"Professor Hoffman has apparently suffered a nervous breakdown. He is in a rest home in Vienna for the present."
Jamie felt the same surprise flaring into guilt that seared his guts.
"I have visited him myself," DiNardo went on. "His doctors assure me that he will be fine in a few weeks or so."
I wonder how I’d have reacted to being yanked off the mission at the last minute, Jamie asked himself. He changed the subject back to geology and concluded his conversation with the priest as swiftly as he could.
He left the communications console up on the flight deck and rushed down the length of the habitat module toward the observation port. By common custom the section housing the port was considered private. Whenever someone entered it and closed the hatch that separated it from the rest of the module, no one else in the crew would enter. It was the one place aboard the Mars spacecraft where a person could be alone.
Jamie needed to be alone, to be away from all the others. Yet as he hurried down the narrow passageway he felt a sullen tide of anger rising within him. Not guilt. Not pity. Anger. They always have to take something away from you, he heard a voice in his mind complain. They can never let you have the whole cake; they always lick the icing off first. Or piss on it. So I’m on my way to Mars and Hoffman’s in a funny farm. Great.
Then he remembered his grandfather years ago, when Jamie had been an eager young high schooler bursting to show off how much he had learned in his science classes. He had tried to explain to Al the laws of thermodynamics, throwing in terms such as "entropy" and "heat flow" and "thermal equilibrium."
"Aw, I know all about that stuff," Al had said.
"You do?" Jamie had been extremely skeptical of his grandfather’s claim.
"Sure. Comes up every day in the store. Or when I play poker. What it boils down to is, you can’t win, you can’t even break even, and you can’t get out of the game."
Jamie had gaped at his grandfather. Al had explained the concepts of thermodynamics as succinctly as he would ever hear.
"Main thing," Al said, grinning at his surprised grandson, "is to stay in balance with life. That way no matter what happens it won’t throw you. Stay in balance. Never lean so far in one direction that a puff of wind can knock you over."
What it boils down to is that you have to pay for everything you get, and the price is always more than the value of the thing you’re after. And you can’t get out of the game. Even millions of miles from Earth, you can’t get out of the game.
The hatch to the observation area was open. No one was there. Good.
The astronomers hated the spin that produced a feeling of gravity within the Mars-bound ships. It meant that their telescopes, even though placed outside the ships along the tethers connecting them, had to be mounted on complex motorized bearings that moved exactly opposite to the spin so that they could remain focused on the same distant speck of light for weeks or months at a time.
The spin had bothered Jamie, too, at first. The stars rotated past the oblong window in a slow steady procession instead of remaining fixed against the dark backdrop the way they did on Earth. But they don’t really stay still on Earth, Jamie told himself. They rotate around the sky too slow for you to notice. Out here we’ve just speeded things up. We’ve made our own little world and it spins around every two and a half minutes instead of every twenty-four hours.
It felt cold in the observation section. He knew it was only his imagination, but the cold of that deep empty darkness out there seemed to seep through the window and chill him to the bone.
Someone was already there. As Jamie stepped through the open hatch he saw the tall, lithe form of Ilona Malater standing by the long window. She was staring out at the stars, her face solemn, immobile. In the faint light her honey-colored hair looked gray, her tan coveralls nearly colorless.
As Jamie approached the window he almost felt glad that someone else was there. His desire to be alone faded beneath his need for human warmth. He realized that Ilona was tall and slim enough to be a high-fashion model. Her aristocratic face had that magazine-cover haughtiness to it, as well.