'We're a little closer to the ground here,' said Tucker. 'Evening, Wendell.' Tucker greeted a technician with earphones connected to a cable jacked into the hull of the shuttle.
'Evening, Colonel. Going inside?'
'For a few minutes,' said Tucker. 'I want to show this old Apollo fossil what a real spacecraft looks like.'
'All right, but wait just a second, please,' said the technician. 'Bolton's on the flight deck running the communications check. He'll be coming down in just a second.' Baedecker ran his hand across the skin of the shuttle. The white tiles were cool to the touch. Close up, the spacecraft showed signs of wear — subtle discolorations between the tiles, flakes of black paint missing, a well-used polish to the fittings on the open entry hatch. The used pickup had been washed and waxed, but it was still a used pickup.
A technician emerged from the round hatch and Wendell said, 'Okay, it's all yours.' Baedecker followed Tucker in, wondering as he did so what had become of Gunter Wendt. The old-hand Mercury and Gemini crews had held Wendt, the first white-room 'pad führer,' in such esteem that they had coerced North American Rockwell into hiring him away from McDonnell when the Apollo program came in.
'Watch your head, Dick,' said Tucker.
They crossed the middeck and climbed to the forward seats on the flight deck. To someone trained in Apollo, the shuttle interior seemed huge. There were two additional couches set behind the pilot's and copilot's seats, and a ladder had led to a single seat on the lower deck.
'Who gets the lonesome spot down there?' asked Baedecker.
'That's Holmquist and he's sick about it,' said Tucker as he slid into the horizontal command pilot's couch. 'He's done everything but bribe one of the other two for a window seat.' Baedecker edged carefully into the right seat. In his center seat in the Apollo Command Module, clumsiness would just have gotten him stuck. A slip now would drop him five or six feet to the windows and instrument bay below him at the rear of the flight deck. He pulled the shoulder harnesses on out of habit, secured the lap belt, but ignored the wide crotch strap.
Several trouble lights hung from hooks, throwing a bright light on the instruments and shadows into the corners. Tucker clicked one of these lamps off and activated several cockpit switches, bathing them both in a red-and-green glow. A cathode ray display directly in front of Baedecker lit up and began running through a litany of meaningless data. The quickly changing lines of data reminded Baedecker of the PanAm passenger shuttle with its flashing cockpit graphics in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Dave had insisted they see that movie a dozen times during the winter of 1968. They had been putting in fourteen-hour shifts supporting Apollo 8, and then in the evenings they would drive pell-mell across Houston to watch Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, HAL, and the austro-lopithecines perform to the sounds of Bach and Strauss and Ligeti. Dave Muldorff had been quite irritated one night when Baedecker had fallen asleep at the beginning of the fourth reel.
'Like it?' asked Tucker.
Baedecker ran his gaze over the console. He set his hand lightly on the rotational hand controller. 'Very elegant,' he said and meant it.
Tucker tapped at the computer keys on the low console that separated them. New information filled all three of the cathode displays. 'He's right, you know,' Tucker said.
'Who's right?'
'Your boy.' Tucker ran a hand over his face as if he were very tired. 'It is sad.' Baedecker looked at him. Tucker Wilson had flown forty missions over Vietnam and shot down three enemy MiGs in a war almost devoid of aces. Wilson was a career Air Force man, only transferred to duty with NASA.
'I don't mean it's sad that the services are finally flying missions,' Tucker said. 'Shit, the Russians have had a pure military presence up there in the second Salyut station for . . . what? Ten years at least. But it's still sad what's happening here.'
'How so?'
'It's just different, Dick,' said Tucker. 'Back when you were flying and I was on backup, things were simpler. We knew where we were going.'
'To the moon,' said Baedecker.
'Yeah. Maybe the race wasn't all that friendly, but somehow it was more . . . shit, I don't know . . . more pure. Now even the size of the damn bay doors back there was dictated by the DoD.'
'You're just carrying an intelligence-gathering satellite back there,' said Baedecker. 'Not a bomb.' He remembered his father standing on a darkened dock in Arkansas thirty-one years earlier, searching the skies for Sputnik and saying, 'If they can send up something that size, they can put up a bigger one with bombs aboard, can't they?'
'No, it's not a bomb,' agreed Tucker, 'and now that Reagan is history, chances are we won't be spending the next twenty years ferrying up SDI parts either.' Baedecker nodded and glanced toward the windows, hoping to catch a glimpse of the stars, but the special glass was shielded for the launch. 'You didn't think it would work?' he asked, referring to the Strategic Defense Initiative — what the press still called, with some derision, Star Wars.
'No, I think it would,' said Tucker. 'But even if the country could afford it — which we can't — a lot of us feel it's too risky. I know that if the Russians started orbiting X-ray lasers and a bunch of other hardware that our technology couldn't match in twenty years . . . or defend against . . . most of the brass I know would be calling for a preemptive attack on whatever they put up.'
'F-16-launched antisatellite stuff?' asked Baedecker.
'Yeah,' said Tucker. 'But say we didn't get everything. Or they replaced it faster than we could shoot it down. What would you advise the president to do, Dick?' Baedecker glanced at his friend. He knew that Tucker was a personal friend of the man who had just won the election to replace Ronald Reagan. 'Threaten surgical strikes of their launch sites,' said Baedecker. The entire shuttle stack seemed to sway slightly in the evening breeze, making Baedecker feel a hint of nausea.
'Threaten?' said Tucker with a grim smile.
Baedecker, knowing from his childhood in Chicago as well as from his years in the Marines just how useless threats can be, said, 'All right, launch surgical strikes against Baikonur and their other launch facilities.'
'Yeah,' said Tucker and there was a long silence broken only by the creaks and groans of the 150-foot external tank lashed to the orbiter's belly. Tucker flicked off the cathode displays. 'I love the Cape, Dick,' he said softly. 'I don't want it blown to shit in a game of tit for tat.' In the sudden darkness, Baedecker breathed in the smell of ozone, lubricant, and plastic polymers; the cockpit smell that had replaced ozone, leather, and sweat. 'Well,' he said, 'the arms deals the last couple of years are a beginning. The satellite you're carrying back there will allow a degree of verification that would've been impossible even ten years ago. And killing ICBMs with good treaties — before the weapons are built — seems more efficient than putting a trillion dollars worth of X-ray lasers in space and hoping for the best.' Tucker laid his hands on the console as if he were sensing with his palms the data and energy that lay dormant there. 'You know,' he said, 'I think the president-elect missed a bet during the campaign.'
'How so?'
'He should've made a deal with the American people and the Soviets,' said Tucker. 'For every ten dollars and ten rubles saved by negotiating away missiles or cutting back SDI, the Russians and us should put ten rubles or ten bucks toward joint space projects. We'd be talking tens of billions of dollars, Dick.'