real contrast to his predecessor, Jim Webb, whom Michaels had greatly admired. Webb was a real political operator – he had known where the bodies were buried, up on the Hill – and he had actively avoided long-term planning. NASA was bad at it anyhow – long-range plans always got bogged down in infighting between the centers – and Webb believed that long-term plans were just hostages to fortune, a distraction for budget authorizers and NASA managers.
Paine couldn’t seem to see that the real problem right now lay in holding NASA together, in the tough times to come, not starting up new programs.
It just wasn’t the way Michaels would run things.
Agronski said, ‘Fred, forget your huge space stations, your fifty men on the Moon in 1980. The President wants what he’s calling, in private, a “Kennedy option.”’ He tapped the document again.
‘In this statement he was going to pick out one element from the Task Group’s report, the Space Shuttle, on which to focus. But what if he were to choose something else – a more visible, major goal – to achieve as quickly and as cheaply as possible?’
Muldoon was staring at Agronski, evidently baffled.
But Michaels understood. He’s speaking obliquely. In code. He has to. But Kennedy is evidently making his point. Nixon wants to save money. But he doesn’t want to be the President who killed the space program, not with Kennedy bleating in the background.
‘You’re thinking about Mars,’ he said to Agronski. ‘After all that bullshit about the Manhattan Project and Earth Day, you’re here to talk about going to Mars. Aren’t you?’
Muldoon looked startled.
‘What does Paine say about this?’
Agronski looked at him carefully. ‘Let’s think about Doctor Paine later,’ he said.
I knew it. They’re forcing Paine out. He’d heard the rumors from within the White House. Not only was Paine not cooperating, he was being seen as undermining the President. We need an new Administrator who will work with us and not against us, and will reflect credit on the President, not embarrass him … Paine was a dead duck. And now – from the way Agronski was studying him – Michaels understood that he, Fred Michaels, was being offered the chance to succeed, in preference to George Low, Jim Fletcher.
Mars, and the post of Administrator, all in one day. Games within games. But I’ll have to give Agronski something to take home with him, the bones of a cheap Mars option. And there is sure as hell going to be a price to pay, and I need to find out what it is.
The talk was affecting the astronaut differently. There was a look of hope on Muldoon’s face, Michaels recognized; a delicate, fragile hope, as if Muldoon thought this magical possibility – we might go to Mars – might melt away if he longed for it too warmly.
He wondered how much, if anything, Muldoon was aware of what was really going on here, under the surface. Looking at Muldoon’s angry, open face, Michaels felt vaguely ashamed of his calculation. In fact, Muldoon’s presence seemed to be working on him the way he’d hoped it would work on Agronski.
Joe Muldoon felt scared to say anything, to disturb this difficult, mysterious process of negotiation. In case he made it all somehow go away.
Mars. They’re still talking about Mars. If Fred Michaels says and does the right things now, the road to Mars might actually be opening up, for us.
For me.
And Joe Muldoon would have something to do with his life again.
The months since his return from the Moon had been as bad as Muldoon had expected.
His most recent PR jaunt had been to some place called Morang, in Nepal. He’d given his standard-issue schoolkids’ talk. When I was on the Moon …
‘When I was on the Moon, I couldn’t see Earth so well. Tranquillity Base was close to the Moon’s equator, and right at the center of the face of the Moon as you look at it. So Earth was directly above my head, and it was difficult to tip back in my spacesuit to see it.
‘The sunlight was very bright, and, under a black sky, the ground was a kind of gentle brown. It looked like a beach, actually. I remember looking at Neil bounding around up there, and I thought he looked like a beach ball, human-shaped, bouncing across the sand. But the colors of the Moon aren’t strong, and the most colorful thing there was the Eagle, which looked like a small, fragile house, done out in brilliant black, silver, orange and yellow …’
His attention had kept drifting from his words, to the hiss of warm rain on the school’s wooden roof, the coin-like faces of the children sitting cross-legged on the floor before him, the teacher’s odd, suspicious frown.
Once, his brief couple of hours’ walking on the Moon were the most vivid thing in his mind, colorful as an Eagle on the flat, tan expanse of his memory. But in the endless goodwill tours which had followed the splashdown, he’d given all his little speeches so often, already, that he felt the phrases, the underlying memories, had gotten polished smooth, like pebbles. Eventually the tale would be rendered trivial by the retelling.
Hell, but I’m a long way from the Moon now. And with all these damn cuts I’m never going back. All I can do is talk about it. Damn, damn.
When he’d done, the Nepalese schoolkids had started to ask questions. The questions seemed strange to Muldoon.
‘Who did you see?’
‘Where?’
‘On the Moon. Who did you see?’
‘Nobody. There’s no one there.’
‘But what did you see?’
Muldoon started to understand, he thought. Maybe his American-flavored images of beach balls and sand were too foreign for these kids, their level of education not what he’d been prepared for. He needed to be more basic. ‘There’s nothing there. No people, no plants or trees, no animals. Not even air, no wind. Nothing.’
The children looked at each other, apparently confused.
The rest of the talk, the questions, rambled into nothing.
At the prompting of the teacher – a slim girl – there was some polite applause for him, and he gave out little American flags and copies of the mission patch.
As he left the little school house, he heard the teacher say, ‘Now, you mustn’t listen to him. He’s wrong …’
Back in his hotel room, he’d started working his way through the mini bar.
It turned out that the Nepalese believed that when you died, you went to the Moon. Those kids had thought the spirits of their ancestors, their grandparents, lived up on the Moon, and Muldoon should have seen them when he was there. He’d been telling them there was no heaven. No wonder they had been confused.
He’d walked on the Moon. And now, in that corner of his own Earth, he’d been confronted by rows of kids in a wooden shack who were still being taught – despite his actual presence, despite his eye-witness account from the Moon itself – superstitious fairy tales.
It made the whole damn enterprise seem futile.
Just before coming over to JSC to do his capcom shift today, he’d gotten a package in the post. It was a script for a credit card commercial. Do you know me? Last year I walked on the Moon. That doesn’t help me though when I want to reserve an airline seat … Goddamn garbage.
It was for more money than he’d make in five years. He could only do it if he retired from the Agency.
Jill would surely welcome it. Jill wasn’t like some of the other wives. She didn’t have a military background; Jill had never gotten used to the flights, the dangers, the dilute bullshit that NASA doled out during a mission …
And