The Throne of Saturn, page 2
To them and to you I submit this novel: hoping that the story of Connie Trasker, his friends, and his enemies, and how they all became involved in the flight of Planetary Fleet One of Project Argosy to the planet Mars, will stay awhile in memory.
—Allen Drury
Book One
Chapter One
The satellite whirled around the globe; a tiny silver bubble lost in the sky’s infinitude. With the perfect precision built into it by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Pasadena, it photographed on every pass the changing features of the busy earth below. Nothing escaped it, as nothing escaped its many brothers from many lands, which also followed, each in its particular equatorial or polar orbit, the activities of the nations that launched them and the activities of those nations’ enemies. All were on guard, and on this day, as on many other days, the vigil was rewarded, secrets were discovered, and warnings were conveyed to important people whose responsibilities and suspicions required them to keep an eye on one another.
The calendar was pushing toward the eighties, and on the Earth and in the sky, there was, as always, little peace and less good will, toward men who had conquered almost everything but Man.
To see Connie Trasker walking toward the Astronaut Office across the vast green esplanade at Manned Spacecraft Center, Houston, was to see the nearest thing to a Space Age Casanova: or so said Bob Hertz, director of flight operations, as he watched Connie’s triumphal progress from his vantage point in the office of the director of MSC, on the ninth floor of the Project Management Building.
It was a bright, sunny, non-windy day, a rarity in Houston in spring; and it was almost noon; and a lot of secretaries were on their way to the cafeteria; and many of them were obviously very much aware of Connie Trasker; and so, Bob said it again.
“The nearest thing,” he repeated, “to a Space Age Casanova. Look at that. It’s a disgrace to the space program.”
The director, whose name was Dr. James Cavanaugh, laughed.
“You’re just jealous. Colonel Conrad H. Trasker, Jr., is the happily married father of three and Jane trusts him implicitly. With, I am sure,” he added somewhat wryly, “perfect cause.”
“Is he going to be commander of Piffy One?” Bob Hertz inquired.
“Why not?” Jim Cavanaugh asked, a trifle blankly. “Bert Richmond and Hank Barstow think he’s great. And you know the Astronaut Office: what those guys say, goes. Why don’t you like him? They do.”
“Oh, so do I,” Bob Hertz said. “He’s the most perfect All-American Boy since Frank Borman, and Neil Armstrong, rolled into one. I think he’s beautiful. However: are you sure we should send all that to Mars? Can the secretarial staff let him go? Will Houston ever be the same?”
“Piffy One,” the Director said, suddenly somber, “has a long way to go. Did you see the Houston Post this morning?”
He held it up.
“PLANETARY FLEET ONE IN TROUBLE,” its headline said. “PRESIDENT FACES FIGHT IN CONGRESS ON FIRST MARS VENTURE. FATE OF SPACE STATION MAYFLOWER LINKED TO DEEP SPACE JOURNEY AS NEW RUSS PROBES HINTED. U.S. MAY LOSE LEAD.”
“‘US May Lose Lead,’” Bob Hertz echoed with something of the director’s somber unease. “Do they mean we still have it?”
“And do they mean he will really fight for it?” Dr. Cavanaugh wondered. “That’s what worries me at the moment.”
“He has so many priorities,” Bob Hertz murmured, not without a trace of acid. “The Blacks—the students—the cities—the peaceniks—the warniks—the demonstrators for this—the demonstrators against that—the North—the South—the East—the West—”
“—the Moon, the planets, the stars, and us,” Jim Cavanaugh finished for him. “And we come last, I sometimes get the feeling.”
“He has to make everybody happy,” Bob Hertz said. “There’s always an election coming, and the cautious man, forethoughted and forearmed, fighteth with the strength of ten. I think,” he added flatly, “he’d cut us in half in a minute if he felt he dared. There is some sentiment on the Hill, as noted. And there are all those pressure groups.”
“Fortunately, not too vigorous where we’re concerned,” the director said. “But we’ve been lucky.”
“Damned lucky,” Bob Hertz agreed. “How are you going to the meeting in Washington tomorrow morning?”
“Hank and Bert are going to fly me over. Why don’t you go with us?”
“Connie’s already invited me,” Bob Hertz said. “But I suppose we could combine forces and take one of the bigger planes.”
“Let’s,” Jim Cavanaugh said. “We can organize our strategy before we have to face Hans Sturmer and the Huntsville Happybund.”
“To say nothing of the empire-building sun-worshipers from the Cape,” Bob Hertz remarked.
“Are you implying there are frictions and jockeying for power within the National Aeronautics and Space Administration?” Dr. Cavanaugh asked dryly. “Never let it be said.”
“Never let it be said outside,” Bob Hertz amended. “It spoils the NASA image. Anyway, we’ll work it out the way we want it—Houston usually does, doesn’t it? We have a few years, after all.”
“Targeted for the mid-eighties,” the director said thoughtfully, “if everything works as it should.”
“And that’s a big if,” Bob Hertz remarked. “I suppose Huntsville will have some good excuses why the NERVA nuclear engine isn’t going to be ready for testing until next year. They always do.”
“And the contractors will be full of explanations as to why the modified planetary spacecraft aren’t quite ready for testing yet either, but will be, any moment now.” Dr. Cavanaugh sighed. “Everybody has his reasons, I’ve found, after a good many years in this outfit.”
“I sometimes think the main reason is too many meetings,” Bob Hertz said, “but of course that’s treason and I mustn’t even think it, let alone express it aloud. Why is it necessary to have another grand review right at this particular moment?”
“There really isn’t any I can see,” Dr. Cavanaugh said. “On the whole, everything seems to be progressing satisfactorily in spite of a few headaches here and there. We’ll make launch date and no trouble, in my estimation. Connie’s on his way to talk to Hank and Bert about the crew right now, in fact. Hopefully, they’ll come to some decision today and we can have at least the first four or five names of the projected twelve to tell headquarters at the meeting tomorrow. That will be one thing nearing readiness, anyway.”
“So, he is going to be commander,” Bob Hertz said. “I’m glad it’s all right for me to know.”
“Your ears only,” the director said cheerfully. He smiled. “Hank only phoned and told me about two minutes before you came in.”
“I sometimes think it’s great, the way the astronauts run the program,” Bob said with a mock wistfulness. “Why do they keep the rest of us on, I wonder?”
“Oh, we all contribute,” the director said. “But they’re the ones who seem to have the most fun. As well as the most danger, of course.”
“I think the fun makes up for it,” Bob Hertz said. “After all, they’ve been given the greatest toy in history to play with.”
“Haven’t we all?” Jim Cavanaugh asked with a smile. “And don’t we all love it?”
“We do that,” Bob Hertz agreed with an answering smile. “Yes, I can’t deny we do that.” His expression changed, became again concerned and uneasy. “As long as it lasts, that is.”
And that, he thought as he returned in musing silence to his own office overlooking Clear Lake at the opposite end of the building, was what concerned them all: as long as it lasts.
How long would it?
Looking back on almost two dramatic decades, Bob Hertz, who had been in the space program since the early days of Sputnik and the headlong drive to beat the Russians to the Moon, reflected that he had rarely known morale throughout NASA to be quite as blah as it was at the moment. It wasn’t exactly low, it wasn’t exactly depressed, the basic spirit was still strong, the protective we-against-the-world unity was still there, but some essential ingredient was missing, some essential impulse to keep everything going and hold everything together: “blah” seemed to him the right word. And this despite the valiant official attempts following the lunar conquest to arrive at a delicately calculated balance among the aspirations of man, the skills and energies of America, the desire for national prestige and security, the beckoning marvels of the universe, and the practical requirements of a budget torn ten ways from Sunday by the demands of a confused, contentious, potentially explosive yet still basically hopeful society.
He did not know exactly who was to blame for this—perhaps, he told himself wryly, the Russians, for just not being technologically good enough at the moment to provide the kind of competition that had largely been responsible for sending Americans with a single-minded dedication into space. But that it was a fact, he knew with a sometimes quite disheartening certainty.
“If we only had a goal,” his colleagues constantly complained. “We wouldn’t mind marking time if we knew we were going somewhere worthwhile at the end of it,” the astronauts told him on numerous occasions. “We’re losing all our best men and we don’t know when we’ll be able to get such a good team together again,” his friends among the contractors reminded him almost every day. And he, and all of them, passed the word to headquarters in Washington. And from his office at 400 Delaware Avenue SW, the administrator no doubt passed it on to the president. And the president thought it all over and came to the conclusion that he couldn’t give them a goal as dramatic as they wanted.
And so, the blahs remained and, in many cases, became worse.
Not that he could blame the chief executive, of course, who did indeed have more priorities than mortal man should have to contend with. It was just that Bob Hertz felt—as the astronauts felt and the administrator felt and nearly everyone else involved in the upper echelons of the space program felt—that theirs was the one priority that should take precedence over everything but sheer national survival (and they were convinced that it included that, too). They could be sympathetic, as an intellectual exercise, toward the unhappiness of the minorities, the plight of the cities, and sometimes even the restless outcries from the campus; but when it came to what they really considered important above all, there was no contest.
“The program,” they called it without other identification, as though after all, what other program could there be, worthy of men’s deepest dedication and concern?
In that spirit they had carried America to the gates of the planets—and there they had been stopped. Or if not stopped, at least slowed to a pace that to many of them seemed the equivalent of stopping, so drastically had it reduced their resources, caused the inevitable attrition of many of their major talents, substituted for one clear-cut and shining aim a slow, methodical, inch-by-inch progression toward what might or might not be a valid and viable triumph when it was finally achieved.
He could give the president’s predecessor high credit for doing the best he could with the funds and the political climate he had to deal with, but a space station for an immediate goal, and Mars off in the distance at some less controversial and more easily funded time, did not strike Bob Hertz as worthy of what America had done in the past or equal to what she could do now if all her potentials were once again unleashed. The goal of a Moon landing in a decade had grown out of a dismayed executive’s desperate search for some bauble to distract his increasingly critical countrymen from the disaster of his foreign policy at the Bay of Pigs, but still it had contained within itself the sort of inspiration that far transcended its initial rather hapless and forlorn motivation. It proved to be one of those quick decisions, based upon desperate political need, which amazingly transform both those who initiate and those who fulfill. The Moon, riding pure and high in the eyes and imaginations of mankind, imparted some of its purity to the program: and while (carefully shielded from public view) there had been impurities, uncertainties, faulty decisions, waste, incompetence and sheer, inexcusable stupidity in many aspects of Project Apollo, there had also been sufficient purity, dedication, skill, devotion and fine, unassailable genius at work to give the nation not only a triumph unsurpassed in history but a spirit of accomplishment and national unity sorely needed in a trying time.
This no Space Station Mayflower, vital though it was to future planetary explorations, could quite provide. Nor could a careful, cautious, step-by-step approach to Mars ever match that first dramatic, heart-lifting, mind-soaring goal of a landing on the Moon. Perhaps there could only be one such leap across space capable of seizing the spirits of men; perhaps inevitably all else, no matter how far the voyagers from Earth might travel down the distant highways of the galaxies, could only be, in some indefinable way, anticlimax. Perhaps nothing could ever again match the Moon.
And yet, Bob Hertz wondered as he riffled through the incoming calls his secretary had left on his desk and then swiveled around to stare down across the deceptively blue, polluted lake—who could know for sure, if it hadn’t been tried? And was it quite fair to the astronauts who would venture there, to all in NASA who would work to send them safely on their way, and to Mars itself, to make the red planet in some sense second best?
He knew there were those, and many of them inside NASA’s own jealously guarded citadel, who were quite content with the situation as it existed. One was his own brother, Dr. Vernon Hertz, director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Out at JPL, at Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California, at Goddard Space Center near Washington, D.C., at Lewis in Cincinnati, and at the granddaddy aerospace research center of them all, Langley Field, Virginia, the mood was not at all averse to just poking along in a leisurely fashion through the solar system, gathering scientific information via unmanned satellites, comfortably digesting its implications into an endless series of papers, reports, seminars, and studies. The great division within NASA between the manned and unmanned sections, which had existed from the start of the program, continued unabated. For the moment, aided by the now definitely scheduled “Grand Tour” of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, the scientists who managed the unmanned program seemed to be in the ascendant. Their one basic argument—why risk men when our technology will allow us to do the same experiments as well, and sometimes better, with our instruments?—had a powerful appeal in an era of tight budgets and heavy domestic demands.
It was bolstered further by the information that came steadily back from their increasingly extended probes of Earth’s neighbors. Mars looked like the Moon, its only life apparently amoebic or bacterial, if it existed at all. Venus was too hot—Jupiter too gaseous—Mercury and Pluto too cold—and so on. The landscapes out there looked uniformly harsh, unfriendly, and unproductive.
There were ways of correcting all these deficiencies, given time, sufficient skill, and sufficient billions; but they were not the sort of projects that a public thrilled and cajoled by the immediacy of the Moon could be expected to support over the long haul. They were the sort of projects that had to grow in their own good time, as decades passed and it became obvious that man’s destiny still, as always, lay forever outward from whatever safe center he had managed to establish. Many never wished to abandon the safe center, but fortunately there had always been those who were willing to dream and adventure. So, the boundaries of the safe center were forever expanding, and would forever do so, as long as “forever” remained a concept man himself did not destroy.
In a semi-holding operation such as the manned program had now been forced into, the guardians of the unmanned sector were riding high. Send out our little gadgets for a tenth the cost and bring back at least ten times more, they argued, with the active support of his scientific adviser, to the president. Get more bugs for the buck. Don’t send those nice clean-cut types out into the solar system to risk their handsome necks and superior brains: let a little piece of metal do it for you. Keep the boys at home!
The effect this had on the boys, Bob Hertz thought with a wry smile, was enough to drive some of them halfway up the wall. Over in the astronauts’ building, where their memento-cluttered offices marched neatly side by side down the long white corridors, some of the vivid language lavished upon the scientists of the unmanned program would give the public an entirely new concept of the Model Astronaut, if the public ever heard it. Also, some of the comment on the public for being so gullible as to listen to the argument that machines could do the job better than men.
For some of the astronauts, Bob knew, a lot of things were riding on the program: not only patriotism, dedication to service, and the great satisfying adventure of it, which were paramount with most, but also such more humanly measurable things as the desire for fame, fortune, and future preferment. Several had departed for highly lucrative civilian employment. Two already sat in the United States Senate, secure in the calm inner conviction that they would rise in due course to the White House. The rest were profiting in many ways, personal and professional, from their association with the program. It was one of those “trade-offs” so beloved of NASA: all they had to do was put their lives on the line and the world would respond with many glittering rewards. It was not the major motivation, but for most of them, filled with more than the usual share of drive and ambition, and under the goad of such practical considerations as how best and most comfortably to raise a family and advance a career, it was certainly a practical and compelling impetus.
