“Nobody is talking about failure.”
“That’s why we’re here to make sure there are no glitches, so that when the satellite is transferred to the pad tomorrow and strapped aboard your space ship we’ll all have a reasonable expectation that everything works like it’s supposed to.”
Kimura was angry, Ripley could feel it, but the Japanese showed no emotion whatsoever. “This is not Cape Kennedy.”
“Nor is Freedom a Japanese space station, it’s international. And three of my people will be flying aboard her soon, so I have a vested interest to make certain everything is right.”
“There are two Japanese astronauts aboard at this moment, so I too have, as you say, a vested interest in making certain that all goes as it should.” Kimura ran a hand across his forehead, a gesture so unlike him that Ripley had to think it was simple theatrics. “These last days have been trying.” He cracked a faint smile. “Prelaunch jitters, I believe you call such nervousness.”
Ripley kept his surprise from showing. They were the same words he’d said to Maggie this morning. A term he’d never heard the Japanese use. “Then we can do the tests?”
“Naturally, though it will cost us additional time. But we want this mission to develop fully without glitches as much as you do.”
“Okay, I’ll get my people on it right away, maybe we can cut the time, and get the bird out to the pad tomorrow on schedule. We’re willing to work with your team all night if it’s necessary.”
“Major, I want you to understand that, like you, I too must follow orders. Sometimes I may not necessarily agree with what I am told, but then neither of us knows everything. Seeming contradictions may not be in fact so.”
“Let’s just get Hagoromo II into orbit and then we’ll get out of your hair. Make everybody happy.”
Kimura nodded.
“Oh, you said you had a message for me?”
“Thomas Hartley would like you to telephone him in Houston.” Hartley was NASA’s Freedom Foreign Missions Project manager and Ripley’s boss.
“Fine, I’ll get my people started on the diagnostics and run over to my office.”
“You may call from here.”
Ordinarily Ripley would have taken him up on his offer, it would save time because his own office was in a separate building near launch control two miles away, but he wanted to have some privacy. “That’s okay, I’ll probably have to pull out a couple of files.”
“I can send somebody over for whatever you need.”
“Don’t bother, Hiroshi.” Ripley took the test manual, nodded curtly and went downstairs to the main assembly bay. After he got his people started with the tests, he headed across the base, wondering what the hell was going on.
Ripley parked in front and went up to his second-floor corner office that looked across a complex of pipes and electrical conduit toward the low, circular launch control facility. Admin was busy this morning, but no one said a word to him; it was as if he didn’t exist.
It was a little past four in the afternoon in Houston when Ripley got through. Hartley seemed out of breath, as if he’d just run up a flight of stairs. Like a lot of men in key positions at Houston and the Cape, Hartley was an ex-astronaut. In the eighties and early nineties he had amassed more shuttle time than any pilot or mission specialist before or since. He’d logged more EVA (extravehicular activity) hours than anyone else, and when he found out that he had developed a heart murmur, and would never get a chance to fly again let alone spend time on Freedom, he slid not so easily into a desk job. He became a gourmand, and almost overnight his weight shot up to nearly three hundred pounds. The running joke was that Thiokol refused to design and build a new solid rocket booster that would be necessary to lift his increased bulk into orbit because of the lack of funding so the only thing open was a ground job. He took it good-naturedly most of the time, but every time the shuttle launched he went into a funk for a couple of days afterwards. He wanted space.
“How’s it going, Frank?” Hartley asked.
“Everything is looking good. We’re running some final diagnostics on the bird today, but she should be ready to load on schedule tomorrow.”
“Is the H2C on the pad yet?”
“It’s going out this morning, providing the weather holds, which it looks like it will.” Ripley glanced out toward launch control. A lot of cars were parked in the lot. “So, what did you want to talk to me about this morning?”
“About you and the mood over there,” Hartley said almost too casually. “Are you running into any difficulties?”
“What kind of difficulties?”
“Oh, I don’t know specifically. Are you getting full cooperation? The diagnostics are looking good, no one messing with anything?”
Ripley turned away from the window so that he could watch the corridor through his open door. He wished he’d closed it. “What the hell are you talking about?” he said lowering his voice.
“I flew up to Washington last night with Unger for one of the damnedest meetings I’ve ever attended in my life.” Carl Unger was the director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. He spent more than half of his time in Washington because his job was more political than scientific or technical even though he was a Cal Tech physicist who’d run Los Alamos until his appointment to NASA.
“Meeting with who, about what?”
“That’s the hell of it, Frank, we met in Unger’s conference room, but I didn’t know half the people there, and no introductions were made. But the topic of conversation was you and the launch in three days. Will it go off on schedule?”
“If we can finish the diagnostics over night, there should be no delays,” said Ripley. “Now do you want to tell me what you’re talking about? In English.”
“I’ve got to ask you one more thing first. And believe me, Frank, I’m just as mystified as you’re going to be, because no one explained it to me. I was just told to ask and report back to Unger. Have you noticed any change in attitudes by the Japanese over the past forty-eight hours or so? Anything, any incident no matter how slight that has struck you or the others as out of the ordinary?”
“Nothing slight about it, Tom. It’s as if we’ve all been infected with HIV. No one wants to come near us, let alone talk to us. What’s going on?”
“Can you give me a for instance?”
“I think they’re bugging our conversations,” Ripley said. He explained Kimura’s uncharacteristic use of the term prelaunch jitters so soon after Ripley had said the same thing to Maggie.
Hartley hesitated for a beat, then he laughed, but it wasn’t like him. Nor was his too-jovial tone of voice. “You’ve been away from home too long, Frank. I told them they were barking up the wrong tree. The Japanese have always been tight on security. I can’t blame them. We seal the Cape up a few days before a launch. It makes sense, considering all the crazies out there.”
It was a stupid mistake on his part, speaking his concerns on an open line, and Ripley felt like a fool. If someone was monitoring his conversations, they would certainly have a bug on his telephone. But he was an astronaut not a spy.
“You’re right, we have been here too long. But the problem is that Unger has become too much of a politician. He’s trying to make points on the Hill. He’s probably trying to convince anybody who’ll listen that the Japanese couldn’t pull off this launch without NASA’s help. My guess is those guys you met with were reporters, and Unger promised them some kind of a scoop. You know, ex-astronauts saving the Japanese bacon.”
“That’s about what I thought,” Hartley said too loudly. “When you get back, Jo and I will have you guys over for a barbecue and a couple of beers.” Hartley despised backyard cookery and hated beer. Ripley figured that Hartley was telling him that he understood something unusual was going on out here. Engineers had a hard time with hidden meanings.