Crammed in here, it was evident that the only way JPL had been able to build was up.
Rosenberg said, “That’s the von Karman auditorium. A lot of great news conferences and public events took place in there: the first pictures from Mars, the Voyager pictures of Jupiter and Saturn—”
“What about the glass tower?”
“Building 180, for the administrators. Can’t you tell? Nine storeys of marble and glass sheathing.” He pointed. “Executive suites on the top floor. I expect you’ll be up there later to meet the Director.”
The current JPL Director was a retired Air Force general. “Maybe,” said Benacerraf. “It’s not on my schedule.” And besides, she’d had enough Air Force in her face recently. “I wasn’t expecting quite so much landscaping.”
“Yeah, but it’s limited to the public areas. I always think the place looks like a junior college that ran out of money half way through a building program. When the trees and flower pots appeared, the old-timers say, they knew it was all over for the organization. Landscaping is a sure sign of institutional decadence. You come to JPL to do the final far-out things, not for potted plants…”
She watched him. “You love the place, don’t you?”
He looked briefly embarrassed; it was clear he’d rather be talking at her than be analysed. “Hell, I don’t know. I like what’s been achieved here, I guess. Ms Benacerraf—”
“Paula.”
He looked confused, comically. “Call me Rosenberg. But things are changing now. It seems to me I’m living through the long, drawn-out consequences of massive policy mistakes made long before I was born. And that makes me angry.”
“Is that why you asked me to come out here?”
“Kind of.”
He guided her into one of the buildings. He led her through corridors littered with computer terminals, storage media and printouts; there were close-up Ranger photographs of the Moon’s surface, casually framed and stuck on the walls.
But those Moon photographs were all of forty years old: just historic curios, as meaningless now as a Victorian naturalist’s collection of dead, pinned insects. There was an air of age, of decay about the place, she thought; the narrow corridors with their ceiling tiles were redolent of the corporate buildings of the middle of the last century.
JPL was showing its age. It had become a place of the past, not the future.
How sad.
He led her out back of the campus buildings, to a dusty area compressed against the Arroyo and the mountain. Here, the rough-hewn character of the original 1940s laboratory remained: a huddle of two- and three-storey Army base buildings — now more than sixty years old — in standard-issue military paintwork.
Rosenberg pointed. “Even by the end of the war there were still only about a hundred workers here. Just lashed-up structures of corrugated metal, redwood tie and stone. See over there? They had a string of test pits dug into the side of the hill, lined with railroad ties. They called it the gulch. You had to drive to the site over a bumpy road that washed out in the rainy season… It was as crude as hell. And yet, the exploration of the Solar System started right here.”
“Why are you showing me all this, Rosenberg?”
He took off his glasses and polished them on a corner of his T-shirt. “Because it’s all over for JPL,” he said. “For decades, as far back as Apollo, NASA has starved JPL and space science to pay for Man-In-Space. And now — hell, I presume you’ve heard the scuttlebutt. They’re even going to close down the Deep Space Network. They’re already talking about mothballing the Hubble. And Goldstone will be turned over to the USAF for some kind of navel-searching reconnaissance work.”
“It’s all politics, Rosenberg,” Benacerraf said gently. “You have to understand. The White House has to respond to pressure from the likes of Congressman Maclachlan. They have to appear in control of their space budgets. So if they are throwing money at new launch vehicles to replace Shuttle, they have to cut somewhere else…”
“But when we all calm down from our fright about the Chinese, they’ll just cut the launcher budgets anyhow, and we’ll be left with nothing. Paula, when it’s gone, it’s gone. The signals coming in from the last probes — the Voyagers, Galileo, Cassini — will fall on a deaf world. Think about that. And as for JPL, those sharks in the USAF have been waiting for something like Columbia, waiting for NASA to weaken. It’s as if they’re taking revenge. They’re going to turn us into a DoD-dedicated laboratory. The NASA links will be severed, and we’ll lose the space work, and all of our research will be classified, for good and all. The Pentagon calls it weaponization.”
“Rosenberg—”
He looked into the sky. “Paula, in another decade, the planets are going to be no more than what they were, before 1960: just lights in the sky. The space program is over at last, killed by NASA and the USAF and the aerospace companies…”
No, she thought automatically. It’s more complex than that. It always was. The space program is a major national investment. It’s been shaped from the beginning by political, economic, technical factors, beyond anyone’s control…
And yet, she thought, standing here in the arroyo dust, she had the instinctive sense that Rosenberg was right. We’ve blown it. We could have done a hell of a lot more. We could have sent robot probes everywhere, multiplied our understanding a hundredfold.
Lights in the sky.That phrase snagged at her. She thought of the forty-year-old Moon photographs. At the LAX bookstalls she’d found rows of astrology books, on the science shelves. Was that the future she wanted to bequeath her grandchildren?
The sense of claustrophobia, of enclosure, she’d felt since returning to Earth increased.
“Rosenberg, what is it you want?”
He put on his glasses and looked at her. “I want you people to start paying back.”
“I’m listening.”
He guided her back towards the main campus. “If you had a free choice, which planet would you choose to go to? The Moon is dead, Venus is an inferno, and Mars is an ice ball, with a few fossils we might dig out of the deep rocks if we sent a team of geologists up there for a century.”
“Then where?”
“Titan,” he said. “Titan…”
He led her to his cubicle in the science back room. It was piled deep with papers, journals, printout; the walls were coated with softscreens.
He sat down. He cleared a softscreen and dug out a Cassini image; it showed the shadowed limb of a smooth, orange-brown globe, billiard-ball featureless. The Cassini-Huygens results have already taught us a hell of a lot about Titan,” Rosenberg said. “It’s a moon of Saturn. But it’s as big as Mercury; hell, it’s a world in its own right. If it wasn’t in orbit around Saturn, if it had its own solar orbit, maybe we would have justified a mission to Titan for its own sake by now…”
Rosenberg brought up a low-altitude image, taken by the Huygens probe a few hundred yards above the surface. The quality was good, though the illumination was low. It was a landscape, she realized suddenly, and Rosenberg expanded on what she saw.
…A reddish color dominated everything, although swathes of darker, older material streaked the landscape. Towards the horizon, beyond the slushy plain below, there were rolling hills with peaks stained dark red and yellow, with slashes of ochre on their flanks. But they were mountains of ice, not rock. An ethane lake had eroded the base of the hills, and there were visible scars in the hills’ profiles.
Clouds, red and orange, swirled above the hills and flooded the craters…
It was extraordinarily beautiful. Benacerraf felt she was being drawn into the screen, and she wanted to step through and float down through the thick air, her boots crunching into that slushy surface.