“I figure not getting court martialed again was thanks enough,” John said. “But I’m glad it worked out ok for O’Neill and Woolsey.” He took a bite of his sandwich and chewed carefully. “You know, maybe being out in the field has helped. He’s not a bad guy, really.”
“I know.” Sam glanced up at the soaring ceiling, the windows far above letting in bright snowlight. “And I’ve got a better understanding of why we have to have those kinds of investigations, that kind of oversight, even if I don’t think that you can put a price tag on a life. It’s a different mindset. Governing is made up of those kinds of compromises. It’s just that it doesn’t sit very well with me, even if I get it.” She picked up her sandwich again. “It’s always hard to lose people. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not worth it.”
“Yeah,” John said. His eyebrows twitched. “I’m hoping that they don’t start thinking the price tag for Atlantis is too high.”
“That worries me too,” Sam said. “You can’t accomplish anything without risk. We don’t have a very high national tolerance for risk taking. Remember after Challenger how there were calls to end manned space exploration?”
“Oh yeah,” John said. “I remember Challenger. I was in my high school English class. The principal came on the PA system.” He swirled a French fry around in the ketchup. “Where were you?”
“In the White House,” Sam said.
“You were not,” John said. “What were you, some kind of seventeen year old prodigy advisor to the President?”
“No, but I really was in the White House.”
John leaned back in his chair. “Ok, this has got to be a good story.”
Washington was cold and snowy that week, the week she’d been waiting for. Sam was doing Presidential Classroom, one of the government up close special programs for gifted high school juniors and seniors. She was rolling into the last semester of her senior year already accepted to college, ready for the last five months without a lot of pressure that she’d have in a long time. All she had to do was not screw up and she was set. So she could take a week out of school to go do a special program.
Of course it snowed buckets the entire week. She was coming from Florida, from Tyndall Air Force Base, and all her clothes from when they’d been posted in colder places were long since outgrown. So Sam pretty much froze to death the entire week.
“It’ll be a great experience for you,” her dad had said. “A little taste of the best and brightest from all across the country, just like the Academy will be next year.”
If that was so, she hoped the Academy would have more science people. Presidential Classroom was full of social studies people, debate team captains and kids who read the Atlantic Monthly. Debate had never been her strong suit, and she felt distinctly outclassed. There were lots of structured discussions where you signed up to present one side or another of a topical issue and argued it to your peers, or where a group was assigned to come up with a position paper or a solution on something thorny. Thankfully, you could kind of steer what task forces you wound up on. Sam was a lot happier with strategic missile arms control than she was with migrant farmworkers.
Fortunately, her roommate, Sib, was one of those social science people, though she was way into space too. She also owned sweaters in a size that fit Sam, a definite plus since she was freezing her buns off. She was a good four inches shorter than Sam, with long brown hair all the way to her waist, and she talked incessantly. Not that it was bad. It made it easier to make friends.
“Sib is short for?” Sibling was all Sam could think of, and that was kind of a weird nickname.
“Sibyl,” her roommate said, throwing herself down on the bed in her blue and purple painted jeans. “That’s not my real name either, but one of my friends started calling me that in ninth grade and now everybody does.”
“Because you see the future?” Sam asked.
“Or the past.” Sib curled her legs up under her. “So we’re on the same team to present the pro position for the Strategic Defense Initiative at the session tomorrow night. Got anything nice you want to say about Star Wars?”
“Well, obviously a missile shield will be very expensive,” Sam said, carefully mustering her thoughts. “The number of payloads required to launch it is going to be extraordinary, even if many of them aren’t space shuttle missions. Even if they’re good old Titans launched from Vandenberg.”
“So they’re going to say it’s too expensive,” Sib said.
“How much is too expensive?” Sam asked. “Bigger than the entire budget of Strategic Air Command? Because that’s how expensive it would have to be not to be worth it. If we can spend the money on parallel weapons systems to create parity, we can spend the money on anti-missile systems to reduce threat.”
“How big is SAC’s budget anyhow? And how much are the Vandenberg launches?” Sib deferred to her on things military in a very gratifying way, having discovered she was an Air Force brat.
“Big,” Sam said. “And the Vandenberg launches are pretty affordable. I can call my dad and ask him first thing in the morning. He’ll know and then we can provide an exact budgetary comparison.”
“Cool,” Sib said. “We’ve got the White House tour in the morning, and then in the afternoon it’s small breakout sessions. Which one are you going to?”
“I don’t know yet,” Sam said. “I haven’t decided. How about you?”
“The one on Solidarity,” Sib said promptly. “The speaker is a Polish dissident who defected in Norway. It sounds pretty interesting.”
Sam flipped open her schedule. “I was thinking about the one with the Russian Air Force officer from the Russian embassy.”
“That would be smart for you,” Sib said. “It’s always a good idea to know your enemy.”
Sam had never been in the White House before. It was big and had lots of gilded things. They’d only gotten as far as the East Room when Secret Service agents came pouring out of the woodwork, herding all the kids together and talking quietly with their group leader, hands on the headsets in their ears.
“We’ve got to leave,” the group leader said. “We don’t know why.” She looked worried. She wasn’t a teacher. She was with the Department of the Interior, doing this as a special assignment for a few months. And so they hurried back out into weak sunshine, to their bus waiting a block away on 16th street.
“What do you suppose that was about?” one of the guys in the group asked Sam, possibly by way of making conversation.
“No idea,” she said, concentrating on not slipping in her summer dress shoes on the icy sidewalks.
She didn’t have winter dress shoes. Her old ones had been outgrown a long time ago, and it wasn’t the kind of thing her dad noticed. If she said anything to him about it, he’d just boggle at her. “Holy Hannah, Samantha! Buy some shoes! You’ve got the Master Card.”
And she did. She was seventeen. She could drive. She could go to the mall anytime and buy herself some shoes, or whatever else she wanted. Her dad would never notice or complain, not unless she spent a thousand dollars or something. She could buy really expensive Outback Red, or any kind of makeup or accessories she wanted. He wouldn’t tell the difference and it would be ridiculously easy to hide anything from him. He had no idea what girls’ clothes cost and he’d never notice if she left the house with her belly button showing.