Pillar to the Sky (47 page)

He paused and was truly his old self again.

“Even for the years while Kiribati was my place of residence, I still paid my taxes as an American citizen. You already know, as you have it in front of you.”

Proxley nodded, making a show of shifting through some of the papers on the table before him, then turning back to an aide sitting behind him, who shuffled through her briefcase and produced a folder. Proxley opened the folder, scanning through the first few pages.

“And I see that while others lost billions on your scheme, you seem to hold well over a billion dollars still in personal assets.”

“My net assets prior to the creation of Pillar Inc. were just over sixty-two billion, sir,” Franklin retorted. “It is down to less than a billion now. I do not see this line of questioning, sir, as an exploration of how I profited from what has transpired.”

“And yet you still retain more than a billion dollars while others who believed in you are filing bankruptcy. I do think that when these hearings are done that the IRS should look into this.”

“Be my guest, sir,” Franklin shot back. “And note as well then where that final billion goes. Yes, my friends and backers—for example, those in New Mexico whose financial records I expect you have as well—have lost well nigh on to every dime they put into this. Dr. Fuchida, who is not even a citizen of our country, is sitting on a stockpile of manufactured ribbon that he could sell on the open market for billions, but for some interesting reason—dare I call it patriotism?—is refusing to do so and is giving it to Pillar Inc. on credit with no payment date defined. And need I remind you that I own 20 percent of his company?”

“That is not the point here, sir. I am pointing out that you get others to invest in this scheme of yours and yet you still walk away with more than a billion. Is that ethical?”

Franklin stood up.

“Senator Proxley,” Franklin snapped. “I started with nothing and built company after company in what used to be called ‘the American Way.’ I ventured all on a dream inspired by the woman sitting next to me, her husband, their daughter, and an old friend now long gone. I lost nearly everything I have in it but I have no remorse as an American other than the loss of the life of a trusted friend, the loss of others by this accident, and the financial ruin of those who trusted me. Is that not enough of a burden without you accusing me of far worse?”

Proxley sensed the kill and moved in on it.

“Yes, sir, it does require more.”

With that, Victoria stood up.

“How dare you,” she snapped, and the room fell quiet, all cameras shifting to her. Even Proxley was caught off-balance by this sudden display of anger.

“Young lady, I ask that you resume your seat or I shall ask the sergeant at arms—”

“Go ahead and tell your sergeant of arms to haul me out of here,” she shouted back, “and let the whole world see your tactics! How dare you attack this decent man, who gave all he had for a dream for our entire world—a dream for which my father gave his life. And if my family had it to do over again, we would tell him to go forth and do it, because dreams involve risks and indeed the sacrifice of lives, even that of my father.”

There were no tears, only cold rage.

Proxley, for once, was absolutely flustered. To order Victoria’s forceful eviction from the hearing would make him look like a domineering fascist. But to allow her to continue … how would that look on camera?

“I understand you are emotionally distraught, young la—”

“Do not call me ‘young lady,’” she said, cutting him off. “I am
Doctor
Morgan, a title earned by me the same as my parents before me, and you shall address me by that title in the same way I shall address you as ‘Senator.’ As to emotionally distraught, do not dare to cast me into some sexist stereotype of the hysterical young woman.”

Proxley’s face reddened.

“Do we understand each other”—she paused—“
Senator
Proxley?”

Another pause.

“Yes…” and now it seemed as if the words would not come. “Yes, Dr. Morgan.”

She turned away from him and faced the chair of the committee.

“I understand under the rules of this meeting I may request, as an American citizen, time to speak, and I request a vote on that now if Mr. Franklin Smith will cede what he sees as his time as well.”

Proxley started to object, but the chairperson, Senator Dennison, reached over, put a hand on his forearm, leaned in, and whispered something. Proxley reddened again.

“The chair moves…” Mary Dennison, who had most likely waited years for this moment, paused. “… that Dr. Morgan be given the time remaining that had been allotted to Mr. Franklin Smith, to address this committee if Mr. Smith so agrees.”

Senator Dennison looked around at the other committee members to count hands. None dared to vote against her, not even Proxley, and she nodded.

“Dr. Morgan, you may proceed.”

Victoria threw a quick glance over at Franklin, who had already sat down and was actually smiling at her as if saying,
OK, kid, go for it.

Dear God,
she thought,
what have I gotten myself into?
She hesitated.

“Dr. Morgan, your time has started.

And then she thought of her father, and his final words to her:
When I am afraid, then it is OK for you to be afraid.

She was not afraid.

“Members of this committee … humanity is at a dead end.”

She paused, her attention no longer fixed on Proxley but on all the others, including the woman from Maine who she recalled long ago had been supportive of her father and was now smiling, as if with pride.

“We cannot deny it. We’ve had a gut sense of it for at least a generation or more. That two lines on a graph, if you will, were converging. One line is the ever-increasing population around the world, with each of us—whether born in America, Nigeria, India, or even Kiribati—desiring a better life, a safer life, a life free of the fear, war, pestilence, and starvation that has haunted humanity for millennia. That line is going upward.

“And the other line on the graph: the means to provide such things for our planet, the precious resources of our earth—the soil to grow our food, clean water for all, the minerals to be transformed into everything from structures to live within to miracles of science and medicine, and above all else the energy to power that—that line is moving downward.

“They are crossing now, in our generations. Perhaps it happened a decade ago, perhaps not for a few decades hence but they have crossed and the time of reckoning is indeed upon us. Drill deeper, farm more and more marginal land, dig and claw, but there is only so much that can be taken from this cradle, this earth, until at last we turn upon each other to fight over what is left, and that fight will make the conflicts of the previous century pale in comparison.”

Now she looked sidelong at Garlin.

“In the early 1970s a work came out titled
The Limits to Growth
. It postulated that humanity had reached its maximum growth potential, given the resources of this planet, and there were but three alternatives. The first: cut back on all demands for resources to stretch them out. The second: force a decline in human population, though the authors were vague on how to do that other than by the most draconian and fascist and eventually racist of means. The third, the natural outcome if we do not rein ourselves in: war and plagues would settle it.

“Their predictions, as with nearly all such predictions, were off by many decades. Their prophecies, which shaped many of the generation of the 1970s and ’80s”—again a sharp look over at Garlin and Proxley—“caused the emergence of the green movement, which I applaud to a certain degree, but conservation alone only postponed for a few generations the eventual paradigm of that work. Their thesis is that ultimately for those of us on earth it is a zero-sum game and then someone loses.

“But there was another answer all along and my father quoted it. It came from Tsiolkovsky.”

She now looked to her mother. Though Ukrainian and not Russian she still took deep pride in the fact that the first “dreamer” had come from her part of the world, his statue dominating the landscape in front of the university where she had studied.

“Earth is our cradle. We have grown past our infancy with the industrial revolution that started more than two hundred years ago. And now it is time to decide our future, and that deciding starts today, here and now, with this committee and its decision whether to resume support for the one agency above all others that can see the potential of a positive future ahead … and that is NASA.”

She paused to scan each of them with her gaze.

“In your hands, ladies and gentlemen, senators all, representatives of our blessed free republic, now rests that future if you have the guts to transcend the politics of the moment and reach for what is not just a dream but a reality that my father died for.

“Transform your thinking. Would you want the railroads of 1850 to be as far as we have advanced and how we live; or have the airplanes of 1927, when Lindbergh was hailed as a hero for daring to cross the Atlantic alone, but have us go no further; or trust in what today seems like the medieval torture of the open-heart surgery of the 1960s in contrast to what is now a one-day outpatient procedure without even a scalpel, and that grants decades more to our lives?

“I think not.

“The math of orbital mechanics is as immutable now as it was 2,000 years ago when Aristotle tried to make sense of it all, when Hypatia of Alexandria was tortured to death for daring to try to explain how the universe worked, Galileo locked away, and then men like Newton, Huygens, and Kepler, followed by Tsiolkovsky, Goddard, and Von Braun, found the means to at least begin to touch the universe.

“But the laws of orbital dynamics remained, and ever since the 1950s we have been locked into believing that rocket ships, though dramatic and awe-inspiring as was
Apollo 11
on the day it left for the moon, carrying the dreams of humanity with it, were the only way to reach the heavens.”

Again she paused.

“At a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars per pound. It is a logic that imagines that we build an entire 747, with airports in New York and London, fly the plane but once, then throw the entire aircraft aside and build another.

“I present to you a new paradigm this day, first conceived by Tsiolkovsky of Russia; then, I must say, with humbleness and pride, in the immediate days after the Cold War it was a thesis worked on by my beloved mother and father, who, at the Goddard Space Center, as part of the NASA team, found a guide in a German who had been forced to flee the land of his birth because he was Jewish. That dream was denied funding…”

She paused and could not resist it, having waited years for this moment:

“Denied funding by some in this very room, who scoffed at it,” and she stared directly at Proxley as she spoke.

“But then this noble man by my side, Franklin Smith, born into segregation and poverty and who transcended that to dream of a future, not of closing off and ending dreams, but of opening up to limitless growth, and put all he had on the line for that. He put together a team that built the first tower. My father died trying to save that tower. I now challenge this committee to pick up the task, to provide for NASA what it needs to again take us to the ‘high frontier,’ as President Kennedy once called it, and see it to completion. And that, Senator Proxley, is why I object to your line of questioning and your tone of questioning this day to my noble friend and mentor Franklin Smith and feel compelled to speak up in reply.”

She fell silent. The room was silent as well.

“Dr. Morgan, your time is up,” the chair of the committee announced, then looked at the other committee members arrayed to either side of her.

“I move to offer to Dr. Morgan an additional five minutes to express her conclusion. Are there any who oppose?”

There was no formal vote, only a nodding of heads. Proxley said nothing.

“Thank you, Madam Chairman,” Victoria said with a smile.

“Dare I say this?” she said softly, looking at Franklin, for now she was venturing into something they had talked about obliquely but never directly, firmly, with the usual lawyers present and contracts as thick as an old-fashioned phone book on the table.

He looked up at her and smiled.

“Go ahead, I’m all ears,” he said softly. “You got the floor.”

“Pillar Inc. is near bankruptcy. Even if my friend Franklin Smith still holds some personal assets, he has, to date, lost over 98 percent of all that he owns, yet he gladly placed that on the line for what he believed in.

“How dare you, Senator Proxley, not reveal the full truth: that in his will Smith leaves all his assets”—she paused, fearful of emotion taking hold—“to create a foundation for my mother’s continued work in both the sciences and arts to the sum of $100 million, and the rest to a foundation which I have been asked to head, to work on the development of a means to harvest solar energy from space for use on earth as described in my dissertation.”

She paused for a moment, because she did have to struggle for emotional control after all.

Whispered comments now flooded the gallery. Franklin looked at Victoria; he was visibly angry that she had broken a confidence.

“Apologies,” she whispered to him.

“I just might write you and your children out,” he whispered back.

“It will be worth it,” she replied, leaning over to embrace him.

“Can I speak now for Pillar Inc.?” she asked.

He gazed at her and smiled.

“What the hell, you’ve come this far.”

She looked straight at Proxley now.

“For nearly fifty years NASA has paved the way to the future, and we all believed in that dream. My parents—even my mother, who was on the other side of the Iron Curtain on that fateful day—spoke with tears in their eyes of the dream as they watched
Apollo 11
climb to the heavens, the moon the first stepping-stone to the stars.

“NASA fueled their dreams throughout the years of the shuttle, in spite of the tragedies of
Challenger
and
Columbia
. NASA enthralled the world when it turned
Hubble
from a source of mockery because of a misground mirror to an elegant capturer of beauty, bringing images of the distant reaches of the galaxies to us. It was NASA that gave us two rovers, little bigger than toy cars, that first scraped back the soil of Mars and told us that water, that bringer of life, existed elsewhere, and then the stunning triumph of
Curiosity
. And what an honor when the NASA staff elected to name the
Curiosity
landing site after that dreamer of dreams, Ray Bradbury.