Pillar to the Sky (8 page)

Erich gave him a smile and he wondered, just wondered, if the old man was enjoying himself a bit too much at this moment.

“That’s right, Mr. Morgan. You and Miss Eva are teamed for the summer and this is now your project as well.”

“Sir?” Eva asked, looking at Erich with open surprise, but there was now a flash of anger in her eyes. “Do I not have the right to decide who I am going to work with on this idea?”

“Not here,” Erich said with a tight-lipped smile. “Remember, Miss Petrenko, you are here as an exchange guest, and there are more than a few of the old Cold War crowd that would prefer if you were not here at all. I was already informed that you were to be paired with an American intern for whatever project you were assigned to, with access only to declassified information.”

“You mean he is my KGB handler,” she muttered softly.

His features changed in an instant in a flash of anger.

“No,” he said coldly.

She lowered her head.

“My apologies.”

“Nor will there be FBI, NSA, CIA, or”—he paused, eyebrows knitted—“Gestapo following you around. This is America of the 1990s, Miss Eva. So drop that line of thinking while you are our guest.

“We are scientists working on shared dreams. But doing research in conjunction with American interns is part of your package, and I’ve just selected who you work with, and that is final.”

“Yes, sir.”

Gary looked from Erich to Eva and suddenly wondered if he should ask for a transfer after all. Any fantasies he harbored that perhaps he could work his way toward a date with Eva had just been dashed by Erich.

“Uh, sir, I am of the opinion that this idea is sci-fi at best. It will never work.”

Erich glanced at Gary and nodded.

“And that is why I am teaming you together. Sometimes the best science of all comes out of debate between those who say it is impossible and those who dream it is not. The one reaches up while the other keeps their feet on the ground.”

He smiled again.

“And maybe, just maybe, the pragmatist learns to float a bit as well and believe in dreams. In the early days of Apollo, there were damn near duels using slide rules as swords.”

“Slide rules?” Gary asked.

“Ancient instruments of calculation not requiring batteries,” Erich said and now there was a smile again.

“Now, you two get to work, and no dueling!”

3

Today

“I feel as if the last eighteen years have been a waste,” Gary sighed, gazing morosely into the teacup that Erich had filled with several ounces of Scotch.

He looked up at Erich, who was silent, the old man’s gaze steady. Erich was not the type of person to pour out a line of self-pity to. He recalled that the first time he had done so, Erich had shut him off with an angry wave of his hand and asked him if he had ever been shot, been left behind by his comrades, had a friend press a pistol into his hand with the obvious message that he would have to finish himself off, because an SS unit was sweeping the field, looking for survivors of the recent fight. The SS did not take prisoners when it came to commandos, though they did entertain themselves by extracting what information they could before finishing their prisoners off. A Yugoslav resistance fighter found him first, and it was a five-mile hike to a safe haven, where a doctor finally took the bullet out of his chest, with only a single shot of morphine to deaden the pain—a bit. For years he kept the bullet pulled out of him and that pistol in his desk—empty, of course—until firm rules were sent out that any firearm was forbidden at the center. He said that when any adversity beset him, the pistol and bullet were a reminder that he had gone through worse.

After that brief story, Gary never went for self-pity again.

Eva sat by his side, sipping her tea without comment, while Victoria, sensing the three wanted to be alone and talk freely, had taken her iPad and was sitting outside. Gary could see her outside the office window, sitting against a tree, iPad set to one side, just staring off in the distance. He felt a swelling of pride and love just looking at her. At sixteen, she was far beyond her years in maturity, already focused on following her parents, and had already been accepted at the end of her junior year in high school to Purdue, to pursue a degree in aerospace engineering as well. She was almost up to the same level as they were on the engineering that would go into a space elevator. While other girls her age had posters of the latest rock phenomenon plastered around their rooms, she had photos up from
Curiosity
, a mission that absolutely enthralled her, and the classic old photo of a wild-haired Einstein. For her birthday, they had given her a somewhat beat-up old Subaru, but what made her grin was that her parking place in their driveway had a sign with “Genius Parking Only” and a picture of Einstein on it.

“The next step,” Erich grumbled, interrupting his thoughts.

“What next step?” Gary asked, attention focused back on his mentor.

“There is always a next step,” Erich replied.

Gary did not reply. After the grilling and humiliation of this morning, he felt all their dreams had been permanently dashed.

“You have any plans for the next week?” the old man asked.

“Well, if my wife and daughter would let me, I think I’d just go home and get drunk, sir. It is the end of the road. Our positions are cut, as you know. Eva can find a teaching position, but me? You know I was never the one to stand in front of a class of freshmen and give a lecture. Write a book and try to sell the public that way? Doubt if that would work; you need a storyteller for that, not someone who juggles calculus problems in their head.”

He instantly regretted saying that. He and many others had been pestering Erich for years to write his autobiography, to which the old man growled he was not ready for that final act of retirement before fading into the night.

Again the icy stare, but this time Gary, filled with frustration, returned the gaze.

“Why do you ask if we are free this next week?” Eva interjected, putting a calming hand on Gary’s shoulder. She had caught on, whereas Gary had not, that Erich must have something up his sleeve.

Erich smiled. Almost from their first day together she had Erich wrapped around her finger, the way a father would feel toward a special daughter.

“Actually, I am thinking about young Victoria out there. Her schedule?”

“She doesn’t start college for a month,” Eva replied.

“Excellent. There is room on the flight for her as well.”

“Sir, I’m not sure I follow you on this,” Gary said.

“Go home, pack your bags.” He paused to look at his old-fashioned wristwatch. “You’ve got four hours to get to BWI Airport. A friend of ours will have his corporate jet waiting for you.”

Gary stirred from his morose mood.

“Who?”

“A friend of ours who has taken great interest in the events of today. He expected this debacle. The moment the hearings closed and it was clear that NASA would be forced to entirely drop this line of research, he was already in flight from Seattle.”

“Seattle?” Gary said, and there was now a touch of recognition.

“A friend who thinks it is time he stepped into this mad scheme of ours.”

“Who, may I ask?” Gary whispered.

Erich smiled and pointed behind his desk, where an old battered suitcase was on the floor.

“Go home, pack bags for all three of you for a week, then come back here to pick me up.”

“And do you mind if I tag along?” he added as he broke into a rather uncharacteristic grin.

Eighteen Years Earlier

“You are utterly impossible to work with,” Eva snapped, getting up so swiftly from her chair on the other side of the table that she knocked it over.

“I need some fresh air,” she announced, and stalked out of the room.

Gary yet again wondered if Dr. Rothenberg had teamed them together out of some perverted sense of humor, but as he watched her leave the room, he could not help himself. Intellectually he could barely stand to be with her for more than a few minutes, especially when forced to sit by the hour going over every tidbit of information they could dig out of the center’s archives or, worse yet, down at the Library of Congress, pulling up obscure Russian aerospace journals, which she read out loud to him on their drive back to Goddard. Her nationalistic pride demanded she first translate into Ukrainian, then into English, and often it would be so confusing, he could barely understand what she was saying.

And yet, his attraction to her was evident to anyone watching the nuances of their interactions. Dates had been far and few between, and when he did get a date, either he was bored silly or within an hour it was obvious the girl could not wait for the evening to be over. Was there not a young woman out there who might enjoy sitting up late over cups of coffee, talking about dreams of space?

It was still a time when, in spite of the rise of feminism, it was felt that “women just don’t go into math or the sciences.” What absolute idiocy: he’d die to meet such a young lady, and at both a professional and personal level wished the gender ratio were the same. As a grad student he had taught freshman-level math classes, the usual three-credit prerequisite course for all students no matter what their majors were. When he had a female student who was obviously gifted in the subject, he would appeal to her to continue in that field, but for whatever reasons few rarely did. It was a brain drain of those who could potentially be the best in the field, and it saddened him.

Granted, he did have several female friends—“fellow nerds,” they called each other—but there was never a sense of attraction like the one Eva triggered.

He got up, followed Eva out the door, stopped in the snack room to get a diet soda, then stepped outside into the boiling humid heat of a D.C. summer. To the northwest, dark clouds were gathering and there was a distant rumble, perhaps offering the momentary relief of a cooling rain, which an hour later would turn back into humid heat again.

She had sat down against a tree and just stared at nothing. He approached and held out the soda as a peace gesture.

“Thank you,” she sighed in Ukrainian, popping the lid and taking a sip.

“Why are you so damn obstinate?” she asked, looking at him, but at least without the anger of five minutes ago.

“It’s our job to ask for the hard facts,” he replied. “Your whole premise for building this tower of yours is based on a what-if.”

“It will come far sooner than nearly anyone realizes.”

“Eva, you just assume that this talk about Japanese research on nanotube carbon fibers is going to surge forward and in another decade we will have something with the strength to build the tower. A snap of the fingers and the magic material that can withstand all the forces that can rip a tower apart will appear. But they are not even halfway to the tensile and compression strength you dream of, and our job here this summer is hard science.”

“Give it ten years,” she said coldly. “We will move ahead with all the other problems to be solved, then have them cleared and be ready to go the day the material is at last available to build with.”

“All right. Let’s say for the sake of argument your dream happens and ten years from now this miracle of C-60 carbon nanotubes appears. Then what?”

She was about to snap at him again, but somehow the peace gesture of the soda stilled her frustration. She took a big gulp and offered the can back to him and he took a sip.

“Go on. I’ll listen,” she offered.

He was about to add,
You mean, listen until you disagree, then tear my head off.
But he held back on that.

“You postulate your theory on building a tower on a what-if: the expectation that someone will figure out a way to manipulate carbon atoms and build molecules—what some are calling ‘buckyball’ molecules—into nanotubes hundreds of times stronger than tungsten steel. And then, not just strands a few millimeters in length in a laboratory, but hundreds of thousands of miles of the stuff, turned out by factories that are then capable of spinning them into cables thousands of kilometers long the way they used to make cables for suspension bridges.”

“Your American history,” she retorted. “When the first suspension bridges were built a hundred and fifty years ago, they didn’t trust steel and used iron, even though it was brittle. So they overbuilt the cables to handle the stress. Fifty years later it was all steel and no one would even think of using something as ancient as iron. But they built the bridges with what they had, and that is my point.

“Can’t you dream just a little?” she continued. “Back when the people in that building we work in, Dr. Rothenberg included, were dreaming up something called Apollo, they came up against a brick wall. The lunar lander needed an onboard computer. In the final minutes of landing, they could not rely on just an onboard radar system to send the data back to earth and then send the flight corrections back. That would take several seconds at a time when the astronauts needed split-second decisions. They needed a computer on board that could do it instantly. Only problem was, the computers of 1962 were bigger than the entire landing module. Six years later they had one the size of a suitcase that could handle the job. Rather than stop the program until the computer was built, they surged ahead and fit the computer in when it was ready.”

“Barely,” Gary replied. “Remember,
Apollo 11
’s computer froze up. The famous 1201 and 1202 alarms. I’ve listened to the tapes. It was a near run thing. There was too much data overload for its forty kilobytes to handle. If not for Armstrong and Aldrin being the best pilots in the world—or should I say the moon—and keeping their cool, they would have crashed.”

“I’ll acknowledge that,” she said. “But Alexei Leonov could have pulled it off even without the computer.”

He could not help but smile at her nod to Russia’s most famous cosmonaut, the first man to “walk” in space back in the 1960s—a hero who she was proud to boast had actually come to the veterans’ hospital her grandfather was in, sat by his side, and saluted him before leaving.