She was as much sorry for him as angry, though; the poor man simply did not know how to protect himself.
"Overkill" indeed! The Department of Defense was represented there too, and the DoD had a long memory. Some congressman somewhere, with a couple of airfields and an electronics plant fattening payrolls in his district, was going to pay off his IOUs by pulling a few feathers out of one of Sonderman's projects some day. Whatever the project was. It was too bad, but that was the way the game was played.
The other way the game was played was that you took advantage of any breaks you could get. Tommy Pedigrue's squeezes on her forearm were definite pluses. Rainy had no objection in the world to taking advantage of the fact that she interested men; it was the little extra vigorish God had given her. If she had been born male, no doubt she could have had a different kind of edge, like the kind you got from mingling with the mighty in saunas and whorehouses. God had denied her that, but given her sexual attractiveness instead. Rainy did not feel it demeaned her status as a scientist to accept Her gift. It was not her fault that Sonderman didn't use his assets—whatever they were. Good heavens, he had an easy job! All he had to fund was geology! Geology was how you found uranium ore and oil domes and all those good things that everybody not only wanted but knew they wanted. Not like astronomy!
They were at the meeting building now, and she had not really heard a word the man had said. A quick look at her watch showed that she had five minutes leeway; she excused herself by pointing to the ladies' room and escaped to freshen up and get her act together.
She left Tommy Pedigrue looking a little surprised, because he had just been telling her about the current international crisis. But the nerve endings in her crisis centers had long since been anesthetized. Not just in hers. In her whole generation's. To the young people born in the 1950s, the world had cried wolf one time too many; they no longer heard the alarms.
Rainy Keating had been born in the year when Eisenhower was re-elected and John Foster Dulles began easing troops into Vietnam. She lived through fallout-shelter drills in nursery school. She reached menarche the day of the riots at the Chicago Democratic convention. That night she saw a face she recognized on television: it was her cousin Ron, clubbed bloody in Grant Park. She was eighteen when the Palestinians shot up the Munich Olympics and twenty when, every day in the newspaper, she studied pictures of starved babies in the Sahel. The father of her best high-school friend was hijacked to Cuba, and the Iranian mobs swarmed over the U.S. Embassy while she was on her honeymoon. It had all been like that. It was too much. Ayatollahs and Nixons and Idi Amins came and went, and after a while Rainy—and her generation—simply looked away.
Or looked into the mirror, to make sure she was ready for the big event. The hair was all right. The eye makeup still fine, in spite of the muggy heat. The three-piece suit, though—no. It was a little too much, even for a pretty young female astronomer who wanted to be taken seriously. She took the necktie off, opened the top two buttons of the shirt and then, satisfied, entered the meeting room to check her equipment.
She still had a few minutes. She spent them worrying.
The messages from Newton-8 should be coming in right now. They were the most distant messages ever received on Earth; every second they grew a few thousand yards more distant still, as, far away, that half-ton chunk of metal called Newton-8 was taking its slow departure from the Sun.
It had come a long way. It had left the east coast of Florida, just over the horizon from where they were now, on a plume of thundering fire a few years earlier. It had slipped through the dust storm of the asteroid belt, taken aim at the planet Jupiter, and sailed among its brood of moons. The powerful tug of that giant planet whipped it into a new orbit that grazed Saturn; then Saturn, too, contributed some of its own immense momentum to speed the spacecraft outward. At each point it had done all of its jobs. It had returned thousands of pictures from each, taken in blue light and in red, narrow angle and broad, along with temperature readings, charged-particle counts, magnetic field intensity measurements, and scores of other data.
Then its assignment was complete.
Newton-8 had added a fraction of a percentage point to the growing store of human wisdom, at a cost about equal to one week's production of nuclear missiles. The spacecraft was through—but it didn't die. With most of its instruments powered down forever, since there would be nothing near enough for them to observe for a good many millions of years, it climbed toward the wide, empty spaces between the stars. In another decade or two it would pass the orbit of Pluto, the outer limit of the solar system.
But Newton-8 had had an unusually lucky flight. Its first course approximations were almost dead on the money; mid-course corrections were infrequent and small. It came to the end of its planned life with a substantial store of propellant still unspent. It was still receiving inputs from its radio and optical eyes, and so the engineers at JPL coaxed it tenderly, and it lived on. Its targeting systems could still find the planet Earth, and its attitude jets could still point its transmitter right on target. It continued to trickle information back to the great listening ears of the Deep Space Network, three posts on three continents that among them girdled the world. Then they became the property of a doctoral candidate named Georgia Raines Keating.
And the telemetry on her control equipment showed that they were doing it faultlessly still. Supremely confident, Rainy turned from her assistant and faced the audience.
She had a full house—every one of the senators and congressmen, most of their aides, nearly all of the news- people. Tommy Pedigrue, sitting between his brother and fat, moonfaced young Senator Marcellico, winked at her from the front row. Rainy took a deep breath—partly for air, partly to give those top two buttons a chance to do their work—and nodded to her assistant. As Marguerite pulled back the drapes from the old model of the Newton-8 spacecraft, Rainy began.
"That's my baby. Its name is Newton-8, and it is right now—mark—" she raised her hand and leaned forward to read the counter over the keyboard—"one billion three hundred sixteen million sixty-four thousand and about two hundred miles from us—now." She dropped her hand. "We have about eight minutes before it observes Jupiter transiting the sun, so I'd like to tell you a little about it. What you see is a quarter-scale model. That long thing sticking out is the magnetometer—the important one, that is still working; with that one we expect to be able to measure the sun's magnetopause, which is to say to find out just how far the sun's magnetic influence extends into space. The round thing sticking out on this side, that looks like a wok—that's the little brother to the big dish outside here, the parabolic radio transmitter. On the real spacecraft it's about eight feet across, which gives you an idea of size. The whole thing weighs about as much as a motorcycle, say five hundred pounds plus, and it is the farthest outpost of the human mind right now." She thought for a moment and added, "The Russians have nothing like it. All the data they have on transmartian space they get from us, and a lot of the best of it is what we get from Newton-8."
They were quiet, and seemed attentive. She paused for a moment, to let the people absorb the faint trills and clicks and peeps from the instruments and to see the wave forms displayed on the CRTs. "Over here at the console," she went on, "that big screen at the top is going to show us the first pictures ever of the planet Jupiter as it crosses in front of the sun. No human being has ever seen that before. We in this room will be the very first—yes, Senator Marcellico?"