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Chapter 29

Nicholas Glendale stood out on the landing field where, almost two years earlier, Chinook had crashed while trying to land. He wasn’t here for a landing, however. He was gazing upward to see a launch.

It was chilly on the flat desert plain, now that the sun had gone down. All the more so because they were well into autumn. Glendale pulled his coat a bit tighter. The garment was cut thin and sharply angled, which was nice from a cosmetic viewpoint, since it emphasized his slender figure. But he missed the reassuring puffy bulk of the coats he remembered from his younger years, even if the aerogel insulation of his current one made it just as warm.

Back at NASA Control, the countdown had begun. He could hear the murmur of traffic between the ground and Nike in his ear, and if he wished, his VRD would display any of a dozen views of the great ship or the control center. But for now he looked only with eyes. At an altitude of about two hundred miles, the fourteen-hundred-foot- long Nike stretched over 4.5 arc minutes—nearly a sixth of the width of the full moon. It was easy to spot coming over the horizon, if you knew where to look. Once it was up in the sky, of course, nobody could miss it.

Glendale knew where to look. He came out here often to watch her fly overhead.

He had never been interested in space travel, particularly. His own field fascinated him, and had since he was a teenager—the interaction of its personalities as much as the unearthing of ancient biological history. For whatever reason, paleontology had always seemed to attract some of the most colorful personalities ever to populate the halls of academia. Still did, for that matter.

Perhaps that very fact—having had no youthful fascination with space—had led to his current obsession.

"I was never inoculated against this," Glendale heard himself murmur. When a connection had finally been shown between Helen Sutter's problematica, Bemmius secordii, and Phobos, Glendale had been forced to really look at this utterly different field . . . and the space bug had bitten, hard.

It had not been easy, especially in the first few months after he'd realized he really was interested—intensely, passionately interested—in following the mystery of Bemmius to Phobos. For the first time in his life, Nicholas Glendale had found himself suffering—violently—from the hideous throes of professional jealousy.

Helen Sutter was, as he himself had said, the only correct choice for the mission. Not only did she already know far more about Bemmius than anyone else on Earth, but she was considerably younger than he was, at least as photogenic, and more athletic. Add to that the sudden romantic tie between her and the handsome young genius who had discovered the Phobos base—the tabloids had picked that up almost immediately—and only a complete idiot would try to bar her from the mission. The publicity alone would be worth millions in justifying the program to the public.

The fact had remained that Nicholas Glendale wasn't that old, he was well-known, respected, trusted—and, somewhat to his own surprise, he'd even passed the physical and psychological exams for space travel. Not with nearly as good a score as Helen or many of the other candidates, true, with regard to the physical tests. After all, he was sixty years old.

Still, physically, there was nothing to prevent him from going. Indeed, one of the members of the crew—the linguist, Rich Skibow— was sixty-three years old. Glendale had been astounded, and more than a little repelled, to find that he was actually entertaining thoughts of using his reputation and public leverage to force his way onto the crew. He had always detested scientists who tried to advance their personal goals over the needs of science, or over the metaphorical bodies of others. It was one of the reasons he had taken immense pleasure in dissecting that self-centered ass Pinchuk. Yet there he had been, thinking very similar selfish thoughts which would have, if indulged, resulted in shoving aside an undoubtedly more needed somebody off Nike just so he could joyride around the Solar System.

Coming up on visibility . . .

He glanced to the west, where Nike would soon appear, her orbital direction giving her an apparent retrograde motion against the stars.

Not quite yet. A few more moments.

He had managed to get his new obsession under control, finally, and he didn't think anyone else had really noticed anything. Once he had forced himself to accept that he would not be going, at least on this first mission, he had thrown his new fascination some bones. Reading voluminously on space travel—he realized suddenly that he hadn't even glanced at a paleontological journal in three months— and slightly abusing his position and reputation to get himself some actual orbital time and a visit to Nike.

NASA had given themselves, and Glendale, one other special treat, however.

There she was! A glimmer, growing into a brighter light, as Nike continued her orbit. The countdown was now nearing its end. If all went well—if nothing happened to delay or stop the countdown, now in its last seconds—Nike would begin her departure from Earth by firing her engines just about precisely above Glendale's head.

She would not, of course, be driving straight towards Mars. Instead, she would be using multiple short burns to take a more economical route by exploiting the power of the Earth's gravity well, firing subsequently as she approached perigee and building velocity in a slingshot maneuver before heading on a transfer orbit to where Mars would be in about three months. She was going to be showing off what she could do upon arrival, however. The current plans were for her to do what amounted to a brute-force braking maneuver that would park her near Phobos with a single long burn.

Nicholas Glendale would not be on board Nike. But he would watch her leave.

"I see you, Helen!"

Near orbit and increased bandwidth allowed some personal channels. "All go so far," Helen responded. "Jesus, Nicholas, I'm nervous."

"No reason to be nervous. Excited, though, that's just fine."

"That, too. I wish you were coming with us, you know."

"Not as much as I do. Perhaps next trip."

"Goodbye, Nicholas."

"Goodbye—and good luck, Helen."

The voice of Ground Control echoed on another channel. "Thirty seconds to ignition."

"Main engines all show green. We are go for launch."

"Ignition in twenty seconds from . . . mark."

Glendale blinked hard and stared upward. The sparkling not-quite-dot was almost directly overhead now.

"Ten seconds. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One . . ."

Nike suddenly blazed brighter, six NERVA engines hurling superheated gases outward at a rate of tons per second. Nicholas knew that human eyes couldn't possibly see the effect of less than a quarter-g of acceleration on something already at orbital speeds, but his hindbrain insisted that the distant spacecraft had lunged forward eagerly and was already heading towards the horizon at an ever-increasing pace. He kept his eyes fixed on Nike as she silently accelerated on her journey to another world.

He couldn't say exactly at what point he could no longer quite see her. But when he finally admitted to himself that she was truly gone, he became aware of the tears streaming down his face.

Some of them were from keeping his eyes open too long.

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Framed