“Preaching to the choir.” Nicole smoothed the pages of her book, then reached for her martini. She took a sip of it before she continued. All of us—it wasn’t just me—were staring at her, waiting to see what she was going to say. “But. There are members of Congress—and, in fact, of the UN—who only respond to questions of military threat. So if having a military component to the missions is useful in getting funding and keeping the program going, then that’s what my husband will do.”
“That’s … Why are people so stupid?”
Nicole shrugged and unbuttoned her blouse by one. “Hormones. And if men are going to be led by them, then I’m happy to play my part.”
Ida raised her glass. “Hear, hear!”
“How are you ladies doing this evening?” Poor Senator Wargin chose that moment to wander into the living room. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t used to a roomful of women laughing at him, but he didn’t seem to mind.
“Does anyone know what a MITTS is?” Jacira looked up from the binder she had been studying. She’d stretched out on the floor with her legs kicked up behind her.
“Um…” That was all I could offer.
“Mobile IGOR Tracking Telescope System,” Ida said, without even looking up from the book she had open. She tapped the pencil against the edge of the page as she read.
“Seriously? An acronym within an acronym?” I tilted my head back to glare at the ceiling. “I’m trying to remember what IGOR means.”
“Intercept Ground Optical Recorder.”
Why the hell wasn’t she in the astronaut corps already? I mean, besides the color of her skin. “You should be in the program.”
Ida snorted, but didn’t look up. Her pencil beat a faster rhythm on the pages.
“The application rules are such obvious baloney. If they could bend them for Violette and Betty, then—”
“Elma…” Nicole shook her head.
“Come on.” All the frustration of the past months rolled out of me. “Violette barely had a hundred solo flight hours when she applied.
Ida dropped her book. “You did not just say that.”
“Yeah. You want to give Dr. King some ammunition? You tell him to look into the flight records of Violette Lebourgeois and Betty Ralls. Violette’s in because she’s French and her husband is one of the astronauts. Married couple in space makes a nice story, right?”
Nicole closed her book. “You’re not wrong. And you’re not right, either.”
“It’s discrimination, pure and simple.” It was, too. “Betty’s only in because they wanted to control the publicity, and Life gave them a way to do so. Those two spots should have gone to the most qualified candidates.”
“You think I was the best candidate they saw? You think you were?” Nicole shook her head again, her eyes glittering. “I’m good. I qualified. But my husband is also a senator, and one who’s been backing the IAC since day one. Jacira was a beauty contest queen—”
“With a master’s in engineering.” I didn’t like where she was going with this. She was undercutting the very real qualifications these women had. And … and I didn’t want her to get to me.
From the floor, Jacira pushed up to sit and crossed her legs in front of her. “Yes. But I was not the only Brazilian woman with a pilot’s license and an engineering degree. Granted, there are only four of us, but I was not the one with the most flight time.”
“And I was Mr. Wizard’s Lady Astronaut.”
“It’s all about the story that the IAC wants to tell.” Nicole shrugged and took a sip of her martini. “That’s what politics is. Stories.”
“And the story that they want to tell doesn’t include black people?” I winced, realizing I’d cut Helen out of the equation. “Or Taiwanese? Just white people.”
Ida shrugged and closed her book with a thump. “Same old story. Just another chapter.” She stood up and stretched. “I’d better call it a night.”
A chorus of yawns and agreements met her, and the party broke up. As I put on my hat and pulled on my gloves, I kept wanting to rant about the unfairness of it. But I didn’t. Ida had made it pretty clear that she was done with the topic.
And then there was the other nagging thought. The thing is … I don’t know how much of my anger was a desire to help the black cause, and how much was because I wanted to get Violette and Betty out of my way.
THIRTY-SIX
DR. KING CHARGES IAC WITH DISCRIMINATION
Special to The National Times.
KANSAS CITY, KS, Nov. 22, 1957—Amid allegations that two of the so-called “Lady Astronauts” were not qualified for the program, a Southern Negro minister has charged the International Aerospace Coalition with discrimination. The United Nations governing committee has convened a special hearing to discuss the truth of the charges. Director Norman Clemons has stated that the two women were part of a pilot program to see if “mission specialists” could be trained for the space program without the rigid requirements of the early astronauts—something that would be necessary, he said, for the establishment of colonies.
The MASTIF is at once a joy and a bane, and not just because it’s another acronym. The Multi-Axis Space-Test Inertia Facility, or gimbal rig, is a giant thing that a mad scientist designed.
I might even mean that literally.
Certainly, it would look at home as a torture device in some underground lair. At the moment, Nicole was strapped into the chair at the heart of it. The rigid plastic chair was a replica of the Artemis astronaut couches, except that her head was strapped in a fixed position.
Surrounding the chair were aluminum tubes that formed a three-axis gimbal rig. I say “aluminum tubes,” but they were really more like cages. Each one could move independently of the others, tumbling the chair over on the roll, pitch, and yaw axes.
Right now, Nicole was rotating at a leisurely 15 rpm, but the thing could get up to 30 rpm. In theory, it gave us a sense of the sort of tumbling that might happen during a space mission, although if anyone were ever tumbling at 30 rpm, something would have gone terribly, terribly wrong.
I leaned against the wall of the control room, waiting with Jacira and Betty for our turn. An actual scientist ran the test, but our evaluation was done by one of the other astronauts, which is why Parker stood at the observation window with a stopwatch in one hand.
Betty stood next to Parker and tried to seem relaxed, but she had too much makeup on, which did nothing to mask the puffy bags under her eyes. I gathered from watercooler chatter that her testimony at the UN hearings about the discrimination charges had been rough. It was hard not to feel bad for her.
A nitrogen-gas jet hissed as Nicole tried to cancel out the rotation. It looked like she was going for pitch first. The jet popped and fired again.
A whole series of cameras chattered along with it. I’d left the Miltown at home because I couldn’t risk having my reflexes slowed for this test. My stomach turned knots even before I got into the chair.
At least they’d made the reporters stop using flashes in here, though I suppose you could argue that the strobing would be good practice for being disoriented in space.
My right hand twitched, trying to anticipate the amount of gas and the timing Nicole would need to slow the pitch down.
Jacira pulled her hair back from the nape of her neck. “Hey, boss, how much is this really like space?”
Parker shrugged. “Not much.”
“So why do we have to do it?”