There was more laughter as the dinner group broke up into small conversations and several of the administrators took their leave. Holmquist and Tucker were talking to Scott when Don Gilroth walked around the table and put his hand on Baedecker's shoulder. 'Dick, could we take a minute? Outside here?' Baedecker followed the other man into the empty waiting room. Gilroth closed the door and hitched his belt up over his ample stomach. 'Dick, I didn't know if we'd get a chance to talk tomorrow, so I thought I'd get to you tonight.'
'Talk about what?' said Baedecker.
'About coming back to work for NASA,' said the administrator. Baedecker blinked in surprise. The idea had never occurred to him. 'I talked to Cole Prescott and Weitzel and some of the others, and I hear you're considering some other things, but I wanted you to know that NASA's interested too,' said Gilroth. 'I know we'll never be competitive with private industry, but these are exciting times around here. We're trying to rebuild the whole program.'
'Don,' said Baedecker, 'I'll be fifty-four years old before long.'
'Yeah, and I'll be fifty-nine in August,' said Gilroth. 'Don't know if you've noticed, Dick, but the shop isn't being run by teenagers these days.' Baedecker shook his head. 'I've been out of touch for too many years . . .' Gilroth shrugged. 'We're not talking about going back onto active flight status, you know,' he said. 'Though God knows with all the work comin' up in the next couple of years, anything's possible. But Harry could sure use someone with the experience over in the Astronaut Office. Between the leftovers and the trainees, we've got close to seventy astros running around here. Not like the old days when Deke and Al had to keep an eye on just a dozen or so of you hell-raisers.'
'Don,' said Baedecker, 'I've just begun work on a book that Dave Muldorff didn't have time to finish and . . .'
'Yep, know all about that,' said Gilroth and tapped Baedecker on the upper arm. 'There's no rush on this, Dick. Think it over. Get back to me anytime this year. Oh . . . and Dick . . . Dave Muldorff must've thought it was a good idea, you're coming back. I got a letter from him last November where he mentioned it. Sort of confirmed my own thinking about trying to get some of the old pros back.' Baedecker was digesting this when Tucker and Scott came through the door.
'There you are,' said Tucker. 'We were planning to take a little ride up to the pad. Want to come along?'
'Yes,' said Baedecker. He turned to the departing Gilroth. 'Don, thanks for the idea. I'll get back to you.'
'Good enough,' said the administrator and gave the three of them a two-fingered salute.
Tucker drove them in a green NASA-owned Plymouth for the eight miles up the four-laned Kennedy Parkway to Pad 39-A. The VAB, illuminated from above and below by floodlights, loomed impossibly large as they approached. Baedecker looked up at an American flag painted on one corner of the south face and realized that the flag alone was big enough to play a football game on. Beyond the assembly building, the space vehicle became visible, enclosed in a protective web of gantries. Searchlights cut beams through the humid air, lights glowed throughout the latticework of pipes and girders, and Baedecker thought that the whole thing looked like a gigantic oil derrick filling some interplanetary supertanker.
They passed through security checkpoints, and Tucker drove up the long ramp to the base of the Service and Access Tower. Another guard approached them, saw Tucker, saluted, and stepped back into the shadows. Baedecker and Scott got out of the car and stood looking up at the machine poised above them.
To Baedecker's eye the shuttle — or the SSTS, Space Shuttle Transportation System as the engineers liked to call the entire package of orbiter, external tank, and solid rocket boosters — looked jerry-rigged and awkward, an unlikely coupling of species neither aircraft nor rocket, creating a sort of interim evolutionary form. Baedecker realized, not for the first time, that he was looking at a space-faring platypus. Now it struck him with full force how much the space shuttle — that much-vaunted symbol of America's technology — already had become an assemblage of aging, almost obsolete equipment. Like the older command pilots who flew them, the surviving shuttles carried the dreams of the 1960s and the technology of the 1970s into the unknowns of the 1990s, substituting wisdom from painfully learned lessons for the unlimited energy of youth.
Baedecker liked the look of the rust-colored external fuel tank. It made sense not to burn precious fuel lifting tons of paint into the fringes of space only to have the expendable, thin-skinned tank burn up seconds later, but the effect of such common sense was to make the shuttle look more workaday, almost battered, a good, used pickup truck rather than the classy showroom models flown in earlier space programs. Despite — or perhaps because of — this new-paint-over-the-old-rust feel to the entire ungainly machine, Baedecker realized that if he were still a flying member of the team, he would love the shuttle with the kind of pure and unreasonable passion men usually reserved for wives or lovers.
As if reading Baedecker's mind, Tucker said, 'She's beautiful, isn't she?'
'She is that,' agreed Baedecker. Without thinking about it, he let his gaze wander to the aft field joint of the right-hand solid rocket booster. But if there were O-ring demons lurking there, waiting to destroy ship and crew by raking sudden tongues of flame across the hydrogen-primed bomb of the external tank, there was no sign of them today. But then, Baedecker realized, there had been no sign of them to the Challenger crew either.
Around them, men in white went about their business with the insect-intensity of technicians everywhere. Tucker pulled three yellow hard hats from the back seat of the Plymouth and tossed one to Baedecker and another to Scott. They moved closer and craned their necks to look up again.
'She's something, isn't she,' said Tucker. 'Quite a sight,' murmured Baedecker. 'Frozen energy,' Scott said to himself. 'What's that?' asked Tucker.
'When I was in India,' Scott said, speaking so softly that his voice was barely audible above background work noises and the soft chug of a nearby compressor, 'I guess, for some reason, I started to think of things . . . to really see things sometimes . . . in terms of energy. People, plants, everything. Used to be, I'd look at a tree and see branches and leaves. Now I tend to see sunlight molded into matter.' Scott hesitated, self-conscious. 'Anyway, that's what this is . . . just a huge fountain of frozen kinetic energy, waiting to thaw into motion.'
'Yeah,' said Tucker. 'There's energy waiting there, all right. Or at least there will be when the tanks are topped off in the morning. About seven million pounds of thrust when those two strap-on roman candles get lit.' He looked at the two of them. 'Want to go up? I promised you a look-see, Dick.'
'I'll wait here,' said Scott. 'See you later, Dad.' Baedecker and Tucker rode up in the pad elevator and stepped out into the white room. Half a dozen Rockwell International technicians in white coveralls, white overboots, and white caps were working in the brilliantly illuminated space.
'This access is a little easier than mounting the Saturn V,' said Baedecker. 'Had that little boom arm, didn't it?' said Tucker.
'Three hundred and twenty feet up,' said Baedecker, 'I used to lurch across that damn number nine swing arm in full pressure suit, carrying that little portable ventilator that weighed about half a ton, and hold my breath until I got into the white room. I was sure I was the only Apollo hero who was fast developing a fear of heights.'