Fifty thousand years ago in Arizona:
Friction with the air makes the surface incandescent as the oxygen in the atmosphere blowtorches the iron. From this great flying mass, sputtering chunks as large as houses fly off as the meteoroid, travelling at a low angle, nears the ground. A huge cylinder of superheated air is forced along by the meteoroid and, as it strikes, this air is forced across the surrounding countryside in a fiery blast that instantaneously scorches every living thing for a hundred miles in every direction.Frank W. Lane, The Elements Rage (Chilton, 1965)
Leonilla Malik scribbled a prescription and handed it to her patient. He was the last for the morning, and when the man had left her examining room, Leonilla took the bottle of Grand Marnier from her lower desk drawer and poured a small, precious glass. The expensive liqueur was a present from one of her fellow kosmonauts, and drinking it gave her a delicious feeling of decadence. Her friend also brought her silk hose and a slip from Paris.
And I've never been outside Russia, she thought. She let the sweet fluid roll over her tongue. No matter how I try, they will never let me go.
She wondered what her status was. Her father had been a physician with a fairly good reputation among the Kremlin elite. Then had come the "Doctors' Plot," an insane Stalinist delusion that the Kremlin physicians were trying to poison The Revolutionary Leader of Our Times, Hero of the People, Teacher and Inspired Leader of the World Proletariat, Comrade Josef Vissarionovich Stalin. Her father and forty other doctors had vanished into the Lubianka.
One of her father's legacies was a 1950 copy of Pravda. He had carefully underlined every mention of Stalin's name: ninety-one times on the front page alone, ten times as Great Leader, and six as Great Stalin.
He should have poisoned the bastard, Leonilla thought. It wasn't a pleasant concept; there was a long tradition about that. The Oath of Hippocrates wasn't taught in Soviet medical schools, but she had read it.
As the daughter of an enemy of the people, Leonilla's future hadn't seemed very bright; but then had come a new era, and Dr. Malik was rehabilitated. By way of reparations, Leonilla had been rescued from secretarial work in an obscure Ukrainian town and sent to the university. A liaison with an Air Force colonel had resulted in her learning to fly, and from that, weirdly, to her ambiguous status in the kosmonaut corps. The colonel was now a general and long since married, but he continued to help her.
She had never been in space. She had been trained for it, but she had never been chosen. Instead, she treated flyers and their dependents, and got in flying time when she could, and hoped for a lucky break.
There was a tap at the door. Sergeant Breslov, a young man of no more than nineteen years, proud to be a sergeant in the Red Army; only, of course, it wasn't the Red Army anymore and hadn't been since Stalin had been forced to rename it during what he had to call The Great Patriotic War. Breslov would have preferred the Red Army. He often talked of carrying freedom across the world on the point of his bayonet.
"There is a long message for you, Comrade Captain. You have been transferred to Baikunyar." He frowned at the bottle which Leonilla had forgotten to put away.
"Back to work," Leonilla said. "That is worth celebration. Will you join me?" She poured a glass for Breslov.
He drank standing at stiff attention. It was one way of showing disapproval of officers who drank before lunch. Of course, many of them did, which to Breslov was another indication of how things had gone downhill since the Red Army days his father boasted of.
In three hours she was flying toward the spaceport. She could hardly believe it: urgency orders, authorizing her to fly a jet trainer, her belongings to be sent after her. What could be so important? She pushed the question from her mind and reveled in the joy of flying. Alone, in the clear skies, no one looking over her shoulder, no other pilots eager for their chance at the stick: ecstasy. Only one thing could be better.
Could that be why they'd sent for her? She knew of no space missions. But perhaps. I've been lucky for a long time. Why not more luck? She imagined being in a real Soyuz waiting for the big boosters to roar and fling the spacecraft up into clean space, and for the hell of it she flipped the jet trainer into a series of aerobatics that would have got her grounded if anyone had been watching.
A sudden gust across the San Joaquin Valley shook the trailer slightly, bringing Barry Price to instant wakefulness. He lay still, listening for the reassuring sound of the bulldozers, his crews were still at work on the nuclear power plant. There was light outside. He sat up carefully to avoid waking Dolores, but she stirred and opened one eye. "What time is it?" she asked, her voice heavy with sleep.
"About six."
"Oh, my God. Come back to bed." She reached for him. The covers fell away, revealing her tanned breasts.
He moved away, avoiding her, then caught her hands in one of his and held them while he bent to kiss her. "Woman, you're insatiable."
"I haven't had any complaints yet. Are you really getting up?"
"Yes. I've got engineering work to do, and we've got visitors later, and I've got to read that memo McCleve sent over yesterday. Should have got to it last night."
She grinned muzzily. "Bet what we did was more fun. Sure you won't come back to bed?"
"No." He went to the sink and ran water until it was hot.
"You wake up faster than any man I've ever known," Dolores said. "I'm not getting up at the crack of dawn." She pulled the pillow over her head, but she continued to move slightly under the covers, letting him know she was awake.
Still available, Barry thought. Yo ho! Then why am I putting on my pants?
When he was dressed he pretended to think she was asleep and quickly left the trailer. Outside he stretched in the morning sunshine, breathing deeply. His trailer was at the edge of the camp that housed much of the San Joaquin Nuclear Project work force. Dolores had one far away, but she didn't use it often these days. Barry walked toward the plant with a grin that faded as he thought about Dolores.
She was wonderful. And what they did in their copious free time hadn't affected their work at all. She was more administrative assistant than secretary, and he knew damned well he couldn't get along without her; she was at least as important to his work as the operations manager, and that terrified Barry Price. He kept waiting for the possessiveness, the not unreasonable demands for his time and attention that had made life with Grace so unpleasant. He couldn't believe that Dolores would remain satisfied simply to be his . . . what? he wondered. Mistress wasn't right. He didn't support her. The idea was funny: Dolores wasn't about to let any man have that kind of control over her life. Make it lover, he thought. And enjoy it and be glad.
He stopped to get coffee from the big urn at the construction supervisor's shack. They always had excellent coffee. He carried a cup up to his office and took out McCleve's memo.
A minute later he was screaming in anger.
He hadn't calmed down when Dolores arrived about eight-thirty. She came in with more coffee to find him pacing the office. "What's the matter?" she asked.
Another thing I love about her, Barry thought. She never demands anything personal at the office. "This." He lifted the memo. "Do you know what those idiots want?"
"Obviously not."
"They want me to hide the plant! They want us to bulldoze up a fifty-foot earth embankment around the whole complex!"
"Would that make the plant safer?" Dolores asked.
"No! Cosmetics, that's all. Not even cosmetics. Dammit, San Joaquin is pretty. It's a beautiful plant. We should be proud of it, not try to hide it behind a lot of dirt."
She put the coffee down and smiled uncertainly. "You have to do it?"
"I hope not, but McCleve says the Commissioners like the idea. So does the Mayor. I'll probably have to, and dammit, it messes hell out of the schedule! We'll have to pull men off the excavations for Number Four, and—"
"And meanwhile, your PTA ladies are due in fifteen minutes."
"Lord God. Thanks, Dee. I'll compose myself."
"Yes, you'd better do that. You sound like a bear. Be nice, these ladies are on our side."
"I'm glad somebody is." Barry went back to his desk and his coffee and looked at the piles of work he still had to do, and hoped the ladies wouldn't take long. Maybe he'd get a chance to call the Mayor, and just maybe the Mayor would be reasonable, and then he could get to work again . . .
The plant yard buzzed with activity. Bulldozers, forklifts, concrete trucks moved in an intricate, seemingly random pattern. Workmen carried materials for concrete forms. Barry Price led the group through this maelstrom almost without noticing it.
The ladies had seen the PR films, and they'd dressed sensibly in slacks and low shoes. They hadn't made any fuss about wearing the hard hats Dolores got for them. So far they hadn't had many questions, either.
Barry took them to the site of Number Three. It was a maze of steel girders and plywood forms, the dome-shaped containment only partially finished; it would be a good place to show them the safety features. Barry hoped they'd listen. Dolores said they'd seemed very reasonable to her, and he was hopeful, but past experience kept him on his guard. They reached a quieter area where there weren't any construction workers at the moment; there was still noise from the bulldozers and the carpenters putting up forms, boilermakers welding pipes . . .
"I know we're taking a lot of your time," Mrs. Gunderson said. "But we do think it's important. A lot of parents ask about the plant. The school's only a few miles away . . ."
Barry smiled agreement and tried to show her that it was all right, that he knew their visit was important. His heart wasn't in it. He was still thinking about McCleve's memo.
"Do all those people really work for you?" one of the other ladies asked.
"Well, they're employed by Bechtel," Barry said. "Bechtel Engineering builds the plants. The Department of Water and Power can't keep all those construction crews on permanent payroll."
Mrs. Gunderson wasn't interested in administrative details. She reminded Barry of himself: She wanted to get to the point, and quickly. An ample woman, well dressed. Her husband owned a big farm somewhere nearby. "You were going to show us the safety equipment," she said.
"Right." Barry pointed to the rising dome. "First there's the containment itself. Several feet of concrete. So that if anything does happen inside, the problem stays inside. But this is what I wanted you to see." He indicated a large pipe that ran into the uncompleted dome "That's our primary cooling line," he said. "Stainless steel. Two feet in diameter. The wall thickness of this pipe is one inch. There's a cut piece over there and I'll bet you can't pick it up."
Mrs. Gunderson went over to try. She hefted at the four foot piece of pipe but was unable to move it.
"Now, for us to lose coolant, that would have to break completely," Barry said. "I'm not sure how that could happen, but suppose it did. Inside the containment the men are putting in the emergency cooling tanks now. Yes, those big things. If the water pressure from the primary cooling lines ever falls, those dump water at high pressure directly into the reactor core."
He led them through the structure, making them look at everything. He showed them the pumps which would keep the reactor vessel filled with water, and the 30,000-gallon tank that would contain makeup water for the turbines. "All of that is available for emergency cooling," Barry said.
"How much does it take?" Mrs. Gunderson asked.
"One hundred gallons a minute. About what six garden hoses can put out."
"That doesn't seem like very much. And it's all you need?"
"All we need. Believe me, Mrs. Gunderson, there's nobody more concerned about your children's safety than we are. Most of these so-called accidents we prepare for have never happened. We have people whose job it is to think up strange accidents, silly things that we're sure will never happen, just so that we can prepare for them." He let them wander through, knowing they'd be impressed by the massive size of everything. So was he. He loved these power plants; he'd spent most of his life preparing for this job.
Finally they had seen everything, and he led them back to the visitors' center, where the PR people could take over. Hope I did it right, he thought. They can help us a lot, if they want to. They can hurt us, too . . .
"One thing still concerns me," Mrs. Gunderson said. "Sabotage. I know you've done all you can to prevent accidents, but suppose somebody deliberately tried to . . . to make it blow up. After all, you won't have that many guards here, and there are a lot of crazy people in this world."
"Yeah. Well, we've thought of ways people can try," Barry said. He smiled. "You'll excuse me if I don't tell you about them."
They smiled back, uncertainly. Finally Mrs. Gunderson said, "Then you're satisfied that some bunch of nuts can't harm the plant?"
Barry shook his head. "No, ma'am. We're satisfied that they can't harm you by anything they can do to us. But nobody can protect the plant itself. Look at the turbines. They turn thirty-six hundred revolutions a minute. Those blades are spinning so fast that if drops of water got in the steam lines, the turbines would break apart. The switchyard is vulnerable to any idiot with dynamite. No, we can't stop them from wrecking the plant, but then we can't stop them from setting fire to the oil tanks at a fossil plant. What we can do is see that nobody outside the power plant site gets hurt."
"And your own people?"
Barry shrugged. "You know, nobody thinks it's remarkable that police and firemen are dedicated to their work," he said. "They don't hear so much about power workers. They'd think different if they ever saw one of our apprentices standing up to his waist in oil to turn a valve, or a lineman up on a pole in the middle of an electrical storm. We'll be on the job, Mrs. Gunderson. If they'll just let us."
* * *
The wind was warm and the skies clear in the Houston suburb of El Lago. The rainy season had ended, and a hundred families had come out into their backyards. The local Safeway was almost sold out of Coors beer.
Busy, hungry, and happy to be home for a whole weekend, Rick Delanty scooped hamburgers off the grill and slid them between buns. His fenced backyard was warm and smoky and noisy with a dozen friends and their wives. From the distance they could hear the children shouting as they played some new game. Children get used to glory, even if they don't see it very often, Rick thought. Having Daddy home wasn't such a big deal to them.
". . . nothing new about the idea," his wife was saying. "Science fiction writers have been talking about big space colonies for decades." She was tall and very black, and she wore her hair in the tiny braids called corn rolls. Delanty could remember when she straightened her hair.
"For that matter, Heinlein wrote about them," Gloria Delanty said. She looked to Rick for confirmation, but he was busy at the grill, and remembering his wife when they were both students in Chicago.
"It is new," said a member of a very exclusive club. Evan had been to the Moon—almost. He'd been the man who stayed in the Apollo capsule. "O'Neill has worked out the economics of building these giant space colonies. He's proved we can do it, not just tell stories."
"I like it," Gloria said. "A family astronaut project. How do we sign up?"
"You already did," Jane Ritchie said. "When you married the test pilot there."
"Oh, are we married?" Gloria asked. "I wonder. Evan, can't you people in the training office ever manage to keep a schedule?"
John Baker came out of the house. "Hey, Rickie! I thought I had the wrong house. There wasn't any sign of action from out front."
There was a chorus of greetings, warm from the men who hadn't seen Colonel John Baker since he went off to Washington, not so warm from the women. Baker had done it: got divorced after his mission. It happened to a lot of the astronauts, and having him back in Houston set the others to wondering.
Baker gave them all a wave, then sniffed. "Do I get one of those?"
"I'll take your order, sir, but unless there's a cancellation . . .
"Why is it you never serve fried chicken?"
"I'm afraid of being stereotyped. Because I'm—
"Black," Johnny Baker said helpfully.
"Eh?" Rick looked at his hands in apparent dismay. "No, that's just hamburger grease."
"So who are they picking for the big comet-watching flight?" Evan demanded.
"Damned if I know," Baker said. "Nobody in Washington's talking."
"Hell, they're sending me," Rick Delanty said. "I have it on good authority."
Baker froze with his beer half opened. Three other men nearby stopped talking, and the wives held their breath.
"I went to a fortune-teller in Texarkana, and she—"
"Jesus, give me her name and address, quick!" said Johnny. The others smiled as if hurt and went back to talking. Johnny whispered, "That was a terrible thing to do," and giggled.
"Yeah," Rick said without shame. He began turning the hamburgers with a long-handled spatula. "Why won't they tell us earlier? They've had a dozen of us training for weeks, and still no word. And this'll be the last flight for anyone until they finish the Shuttle. Six years I've been on the list, and never been up. Sometimes I wonder if it's worth it."
He set the spatula down. "I wonder, and then I remember Deke Slayton."
Baker nodded. Deke Slayton was one of the original Seven, one of the first astronauts to be chosen, and he never went up until the Apollo-Soyuz handshake in space. Thirteen years before a space mission. He was as good an astronaut as anyone, but he was better in ground jobs. Training, mission control; too good on the ground. "I wonder how he stood it," Johnny Baker said.
Rick nodded. "Me too. But I am the world's only black astronaut. I keep thinking that's got to be worth something."
Gloria came over to the grill. "Hi, Johnny. What are you two talking about?"
"What," Jane shouted from near the beer cooler, "do astronauts always talk about when there's a mission planned?"
"Maybe they're waiting for the right moment," Johnny Baker said. "Race riots. Then they can send up a black man to prove we're all equal."
"Not funny," Gloria said.
"But as good a theory as any," Rick told her. "If I knew how NASA picks one man over another, I'd be on every mission. What the hell brings you back from the five-sided funny farm, anyway?"
"Orders. Start training again. I'm in the pool for Hammerwatch."
"Hmm." Rick poked at one of the burgers. Almost done. "And wouldn't that do it," he said. "Two in a row. You'd have a first."
Baker shrugged. "I don't know how it works either. Never have understood how I got on the Skylab—"
"You'd be a good one," Rick said. "Experience in space repair work. And this thing's being cobbled up fast, no time for all the tests. It makes sense."
Gloria nodded, and so did the others, who weren't quite listening to them. Then they went back to their conversations. Johnny Baker hid his expression of relief by draining the Coors. If it made sense to them, it probably made sense to the Astronaut Office at Houston. "I do bring some word from Washington, though. Not official, but the straight stuff. The Russians are sending up a woman."
Odd, how the silence spread in a growing circle.
"Leonilla Malik. An M.D., so we don't have to take a doc." Johnny Baker raised his voice for a wider audience. "It's definite, the Russians are sending her up, and we'll dock with their Soyuz. My source is confidential, but reliable as hell."
"Maybe," said Drew Wellen, and he was the only one talking, "maybe they think they have something to prove."
"Maybe we do too," someone said.
Rick felt it like a soft explosion in his belly. Nobody had promised him anything at all, but he knew. He said, "Why is everybody suddenly staring at me?"
"You're burning the hamburgers," said Johnny.
Rick looked down at the smoking meat. "Burn, baby. Burn," he said.
* * *
At three in the morning Loretta Randall followed strange sounds into the kitchen.
Yesterday's newspaper was spread across the middle of the kitchen floor. Her largest rectangular cake pan was in the middle, and was filled with a layer of flour. Flour had sprayed across the newspaper and beyond its edges. Harvey was throwing things into the cake pan. He looked tired, and sad.
Loretta said, "My God, Harvey! What are you doing?"
"Hi. The maid's coming tomorrow, isn't she?"
"Yes, of course, it's Friday, but what will she think?"
"Dr. Sharps says that all craters are circular." Harvey posed above the cake pan with a lug nut in his fingers; he let it drop. Flour sprayed. "Whatever the velocity or the mass or the angle of flight of a meteor, it leaves a circle. I think he's right."
The flour was scattered with shelled peas and bits of gravel. A paperweight had left a dinner-plate-size circle now nearly obliterated by smaller craters. Harvey backed away, crouched, and hurled a bottle cap at a low angle. Flour sprayed across the paper. The new crater was a circle.
Loretta sighed with the knowledge that her husband was mad. "But, Harvey, why this? Do you know what time it is?"
"But if he's right, then . . ." Harvey glanced at the globe he had brought from his office. He had outlined circles in Magic Marker the Sea of Japan, the Bay of Bengal, the arc of islands that mark the Indies Sea, a double circle within the Gulf of Mexico. If an asteroid strike had made any one of those, the oceans would have boiled, all life would have been cremated. How often had life begun on Earth, and been scalded from its face, and formed again?
If he could explain succinctly enough, Loretta would lie awake in terror until dawn. "Never mind," he said. "It's for the documentary."
"Come to bed. We'll clean this up in the morning, before Maria gets here."
"No, don't touch it. Don't let her move it. I want photographs . . . from a lot of angles . . ." He leaned groggily against her, their hips bumping as they returned to bed.