“This may be our only chance,” Jennifer was saying. “Laura Freyman is one of the few politicians left who remembers the Moon program and the real dreams which were behind it. If she loses the next election, we’ll have a president who doesn’t even believe in technology. If we’re going to turn things around, we have to do it now.”
History focuses in on certain moments... Larry felt it focusing in on him now. Jennifer was right about the way he used to feel. What had happened, anyway? He’d looked at the world and allowed himself to be ensnared by its seeming hopelessness, that’s what happened—a snare that eventually came to control his thinking to the point where he could no longer remember having ever thought differently. That and the years of political and academic detritus, covering his soul like so many layers of hardened dust. All of which he saw for what it was now. A fool and his career.
He realized he’d started nodding before consciously making the decision. “I’ll arrange a meeting with the president as soon as possible.” He immediately wondered if he’d just made the most important decision in history. He’d certainly made the most important one of his life.
He was still holding the globe; Jennifer reached out and held it with him, her hands overlapping his. There was a smile on her face which would have broken through any attempt at restraint, not that she was exercising any. “You’re lucky I don’t know a million ways to say thank you,” she said, “or we’d be here a long time.” She paused before saying what she said next. “It’ll be good to work with you again. Especially as we’ll finally be on the same side.”
“I wonder,” he mused after several protracted moments, “what we’ll find when we go back there again. To Mars, I mean. You know, now that I think about it I can’t help but wonder whether this was left there by an advanced civilization, a long time ago. It all seems too coincidental, our finding it just when we needed it. Where we found it. Maybe someone knew we would be needing it, and left it where we had to stretch our wings a little to find it.”
“Now you’re thinking like the Larry Kraus I used to know.” Her hands were warm against his. “I knew I was right to have faith in you. You—what’s so funny?”
It was hard to control his grinning long enough to explain. “The irony of it... if I hadn’t been wrong these last twenty years, I wouldn’t be in the position I’m in now, where I can do something about it. I don’t even know if I should apologize or not.”
“You definitely should not. I didn’t come here to look at the past.”
He nodded, yet thought of the day they broke up. It had been an old argument: her wanting a family versus his conviction that bringing children into an already overcrowded world would be criminal. This time there’d been no making-up, however: Jennifer had stayed with a friend that night, while he wandered for hours, wondering where he’d gone wrong, why of all people she had to be the one he couldn’t reach. Finally, watching a homeless person warming himself over a trash fire, he realized that it didn’t matter: he couldn’t spend the rest of his life struggling to convert one person. It was a revelation Jennifer must have had too, for she agreed instantly the next day to move out. Then when he’d graduated and took his first job at the Global Foundation, she disappeared from his life forever.
Or so he had thought.
“The time… I’ve really got to get back to the office.”
He put the globe in his pocket and followed her into the outside warmth. The walk back felt longer this time, as though he suddenly had all the time in the world, that his mind no longer had to race ahead of a tidal wave of disaster anymore. Finally he stopped completely and, eyes closed, tried to imagine what the world would be like twenty years from now. Different, yes. But how different he couldn’t quite see; it was a fog of possibilities on his mind, reaching out to many places at the same time, each one unique, each one with its own hopes and fears. But an exact vision eluded him.
Apparently he just didn’t have that facility. It occurred to him that Jennifer had always possessed it, however. Perhaps, he dared to hope; perhaps now she could teach it to him. Perhaps this time he would be ready for it.
If so, then knowing Jennifer DePaulo would be the biggest payoff of all.