Malenfant felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.
It was he who had produced the first back-of-the-envelope sketch of a Big Dumb Booster like this, sketches to show how Shuttle technology could be warped and mutated to manufacture a heavy-lift launcher, a remote descendant of the Saturn V, for this one-shot project. With Nemoto’s backers in place he had led the way in fleshing out the design, based on ancient, never-funded studies from the 1970s and 1980s. He had overseen the computer-graphic simulations, the models. His fingerprints were all over the whole damn project.
But it was not until now, this oddly mundane moment here on this hillside, in a cheap car with jabbering Paulis and taciturn Xenia, that he had actually set eyes on his BDB: his Big Dumb Booster, the spaceship whose destiny would shape the rest of this life, one way or the other.
But it was Paulis who had got the thing built.
Even after Malenfant had been given presidential approval, such strict limits had been placed on budget and schedule that the NASA brass had soon realized they would need input from the private sector. They had turned to Boeing, their long-term partners in running the Shuttle, but Paulis had been quick to thrust himself forward. Frank J. Paulis had made his fortune from scratch; unusually for his generation he had made most of it from heavy engineering, specifically aerospace. He had made promises of impressive funding and the use of his design, manufacture and test facilities around the country — in return for a senior management position on the BDB project.
NASA had predictably rebuffed him. Paulis had handed over his money and facilities anyhow.
But after a couple of months, when the first calamities had predictably hit the project and the schedule had begun to fall apart before it had properly started, NASA, under pressure from the White House, had turned to Paulis.
Paulis’s first public act, in front of the cameras, had been to gather an immense heap of NASA documentation before the launch pad. “This ain’t Canaveral, and this is not the Shuttle programme,” he’d told his bemused workers. “We can’t afford to get tied up in a NASA paper trail. I invest the responsibility for quality in you, each and every one of you. I trust you to do your jobs. All I ask is that you do it right.” And he set the documentation heap alight with a flame-thrower.
There were some, raised all their careers in NASA’s necessarily safety-obsessed bureaucracy, who couldn’t hack it; Paulis had had a twenty per cent drop-out. But the rest had cheered him to the Pacific clouds.
After that, Paulis had proven himself something of a genius in raising public interest in the project. A goodly chunk of the booster when it lifted from its pad would be paid for by public subscriptions, raised every which way from Boy Scout lemonade stalls to major corporate sponsors; in fact when it finally took off the BDB’s hide would be plastered with sponsors” logos. But Malenfant couldn’t care less about that, as long as it did ultimately take off, with him aboard.
Paulis, remarkably, was still talking, a good five minutes since Malenfant had last spoken.
“…The stack is over three hundred feet tall. You have a boat-tail of four Space Shuttle main engines here, attached to the bottom of a modified Shuttle external tank, so the lower stage is powered by liquid oxygen and hydrogen. You’ll immediately see one benefit over the standard Shuttle design, which is in-line propulsion; we have a much more robust stack here. The upper stage is built on one Shuttle main engine. Our performance to low Earth orbit—”
Malenfant touched his shoulder. “Frank. I do know what we’re building here.”
“…Yes.” Nervously, Paulis dug out a handkerchief and wiped sweat from his neck. “I apologize.”
“Don’t apologize.”
“It’s just that I’m a little over-awed.”
“Don’t be.” Malenfant was still studying the somewhat squat lines of the booster stack. “Although I feel a little awe myself. I’ve come a long way from the first rocket I ever built.”
At age seventeen, Malenfant was already building and flying model airplanes. With some high-school friends he started out trying to make a liquid-fuelled rocket, like the BDB, but failed spectacularly, and so they switched to solid fuels. They bought some gunpowder and packed it inside a cardboard tube, hoping it would burn rather than explode. “We propped it against a rock, stuck on some fins, and used a soda straw packed with powder for a fuse. We spent longer painting the damn thing than constructing it. I lit the fuse at a crouch and then ran for cover. The rocket went up fifty feet, whistling. Then it exploded with a bang—”
Paulis said, reverent, “And Emma was watching from her bedroom window, right? But she was just seven years old.”
Malenfant was aware that the girl driver, Xenia, was watching him with a hooded, judgmental gaze.
Weeks back, in the course of his campaign to build support, he’d told the story of the toy rocket to one of his PR flacks, and she had added a few homely touches — of course Emma hadn’t been watching; though she had been a neighbour at that time, at seven years old she had much more important things to do — and since then the damn anecdote had been copied around the planet.
His life story, suitably edited by the flacks, had become as well known as the Nativity story. His feelings of satisfaction at seeing the booster stack evaporated.
He really hadn’t expected this kind of attention. But just as Nemoto had predicted, and just as Vice-President Della’s political instincts had warned her, Malenfant and his brave, lunatic stunt had raised public spirits at a time when many people were suffering grievously. In the end it wouldn’t matter what he did — people seemed to understand that there was no conceivable way he was going to “solve” the problem of the Red Moon — but as long as he pursued his mission with courage and panache, he would be applauded; it was as if everybody was escaping the suffering Earth with him.
But the catch was they all wanted a piece of him.
Paulis was still talking. “That thing in the sky changed everything. It didn’t just deflect the tides. It deflected all our lives — mine included. When I woke up that first day, when I tuned my “screens to the news and saw what it was doing to us, I felt — helpless. Swapping one jerkwater Moon for another is probably a trivial event, in a Galaxy of a hundred billion suns. Who the hell knows what else goes on out there? But I’ve never felt so small. I knew at that moment that my whole life could be shaped by events I can’t control. Who knows what I might have become if not for that, knocking the world off of its axis? Who knows what I might have achieved?”
“Life is contingent,” the driver, Xenia, said unexpectedly. Her accent was vaguely east European. She reached back and covered Paulis’s hand. “All we can do is try our best for each other.”
“You’re wise,” Malenfant said.
She sat gravely, not responding.
“On our behalf, please go kick ass, sir,” Frank Paulis said.
“I have less than twelve hours before I fly back out of here, Frank. Tell me who it is I have to meet.”
The car pulled away from the viewpoint and headed towards the sprawling base. Malenfant took a last long breath of the crisp ocean air, bracing himself to be immersed in the company of people once more.
Shadow:
Shadow huddled under a tree, alone.
Claw came stalking past, panting, carrying yellow fruit in his good hand. She cowered away from him, seeking to hide in the deep brown dark of the tree’s thick trunk. He hooted and slapped her. Then he stalked on, teeth bared.
Flies clustered around her hand. The webbing between her thumb and forefinger had been split open. Her inner thighs were scratched and sore. Her belly and breasts were bruised, and a sharp pain lingered deep inside her.