The Orion Protocol (3 page)

In the brief moment alone, before Mrs. Travis, the President’s longtime secretary, could leap to the task of getting him back on schedule, the inner radar screen of the most powerful elected leader in the world raised a small intuitive alarum.

He found himself wondering if the carryover appointment of R. Cabot “Bob” Winston might not have been his first presidential mistake.

Then the intercom buzzed and he decided it was too soon to tell.

2

NASA Space Camp/Houston, Texas

“Now I’m gonna need a few volunteers.”

Eager hands throughout the bleacher crowd of Space Camp kids shot up in the air as former Apollo 18 astronaut Augie Blake shielded his eyes from the overhead lights and peered out into the auditorium.

“Colonel Blake! Colonel Blake!”

The chorus of young voices called out to him as Augie quit the lectern and ambled down front swinging a shiny Halliburton briefcase. A hundred pairs of arms were straining to be chosen by the time he set the metal case down on a folding table and opened it up.

“Senior Director of Astronaut Recruitment and Training” is what it said on his NASA business card, but some days he felt like just another full-of-shit military-industrial lobbyist trading on past triumphs to hustle the space program for a living. And some days maybe he was. But not today.

Today, in his tailored NASA jumpsuit and baseball cap, he was Colonel Augie Blake, bona fide American Space Hero and the best living cheerleader for human exploration of the solar system on the face of the Earth. Today he was having fun.

“Okay, four people.” Augie looked out among the open-faced ten- to twelve-year-olds, quickly choosing two girls and two boys. As the volunteers came up, he shook hands with each one, smiling into their upturned faces as he learned their names and handed each of them an object extracted from his foam-padded aluminum case.

“Tasha, Stacy, Erik, and Josh are going to bring around four different samples. You’ve probably already guessed what kind of rocks these are . . . ”

“Moon rocks!”

A buzz of anticipation circled the room as Augie dispersed his new assistants, who carried the lunar rock samples like they were the Crown Jewels.

“These specimens were brought back from the Moon by Commander Jake Deaver and me in 1973 on the Apollo 18 mission.”

He watched the wonder in their faces as the kids tentatively reached out to touch the Moon rocks.

“Touching is okay! Go on ahead.”

Augie glanced at his watch. This was not the only stop on his itinerary. He had a group of movie execs expecting a VIP tour through the Johnson Space Center. And a rah-rah, closed-door speech after that for NASA employees only, followed by an interview with a gaggle of Chinese journalists at Houston/Hobby about the latest additions to the International Space Station and future science plans involving U.S. astronauts and China’s “taiko-nauts.” If he was lucky, he’d be heading back to Andrews Air Base and his home in Washington, D.C., by about midnight.

“Okay, now, you notice how worn and smooth these Moon rocks are? Sort of like the rocks you find by a river or by the ocean, right? But river rock is worn smooth by water erosion. Are there any rivers or oceans on the Moon?”

“No!” a volley of voices answered back.

“That’s right. So, what else could make them smooth? What about wind erosion? Is there any wind on the Moon?”

“No!”

The space campers shouted it out, responding in unison now.

“Whoa. You guys know your stuff, don’t you? So, no air, no atmosphere, no wind. In fact, you see that picture back there?” He turned and pointed upstage.

On a screen behind him, a famous photo had been projected showing Colonel Augie Blake and Commander Jake Deaver standing proudly on the lunar surface, with an American flag between them
and a tiny blue image of Earth reflected in each of their shiny gold visors.

“See how that flag is sticking out, like a breeze is blowing it? Well, we had a real problem with a little folding aluminum-bar dealie that was supposed to hold the top part up. I mean, just getting that dumb flag to work was one pain in the butt, let me tell you.”

Augie got the cheap laugh he expected: “He said butt!”

“However, what makes these rocks smooth is something called cosmic rain. Tiny little grains of dust called micrometeorites are constantly raining down on the Moon from space at thousands of miles an hour, and this cosmic rain slowly wears down all the hills and rocks until everything is smooth as beach glass. All right, let’s give a hand to our volunteers.”

Collecting the rocks as the kids applauded, Augie could feel that they were more at ease with him, more comfortable with the larger-than-life face in front of them, which they had recognized from video documentaries here at camp and from history books at school.

He was familiar with people’s initial awkwardness around him. It was part of the mixed bag of being an American space hero: respect, celebration, opportunity, and social access, excruciatingly wrapped-to-go with painful public scrutiny, inhumanly high expectations, and fierce collegial jealousies, all finally amplifying an already larger-than-life into a rock and roll of alcoholism, substance abuse, and divorce.

Wholesome now, even inspiring in the spotlight on this Space Camp stage, Colonel Augie Blake, the Last Man to Walk on the Moon, had been no exception. Lurching through his own fifteen-rounds-with-fame hell and its suburbs, he had survived; single, sober, and more often than not glad to be alive.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw his blue-blazered NASA driver giving him the ten-minute high sign from the nearest exit. He grinned noncommittally and turned back to his audience.

“Now, I did promise your counselors not to keep y’all too long.”

“No! No!”

The room erupted, shouting him down with a fired-up dose of unalloyed energy and enthusiasm which Augie thought of as his reward for
every other Space Agency dog-and-pony show he had to slog through. And he was in no hurry for it to be over.

“Okay, two more questions. What’s your name?”

He pointed at a tall twelve-year-old girl with braces on her teeth and a NASA-logo’d T-shirt.

“Melissa.”

“Go ahead, Melissa.”

“Um, Colonel Blake, I was wondering. Are we really going to send astronauts to Mars, and if we are, how soon?”

“Great question. Yes, about the time you hit grad school we should be interviewing for the first Mars mission. In fact, we have an astronaut training facility at the South Pole because the environment in the Antarctic is the closest thing on Earth to what it’s like on Mars. Would you go to Mars, Melissa?”

“Yes!” she said, blushing at her own intensity of feeling.

“All right! Anybody else want to go?”

Everybody, counselors included, raised their arms and cheered.

“Well, I guess we won’t be short on candidates. One more question.” Augie nodded to a stocky twelve-year-old boy showing a downy hint of what would soon enough become a mustache. “Yes, go ahead. What’s your name?”

“Fernando.”

“Yes, Fernando.”

“I just wanted to know uh, since you were on the Moon and everything, did you see any, like, UFOs or anything up there?”

Fernando sat down amid a wave of giggles, some of the space campers rolling their eyes as if it was so not cool. But Augie maintained eye contact with the boy and handled it as a straightforward question.

“Well, Fernando, I have to say no, I didn’t see any extraterrestrials on the Moon. I wish I had.”

There was a light laugh as Augie then addressed the larger group.

“That doesn’t mean we might not have space-faring neighbors somewhere out there. Maybe some that are much older and far more technologically developed than we are. In fact, the odds are looking pretty good that we are not alone in space.”

Augie heard the hush of their curiosity, both about what he was saying and at the sense of gravity with which he was saying it.

“Think about it this way. Thanks to the Hubble Telescope, among other instruments, we now know there are sunlike stars throughout the Milky Way galaxy where we live. And across the universe there are billions of galaxies each filled with billions of stars. Now, if only one out of a million stars had planets like Earth, and only one out of every million of those Earth-like planets had intelligent life, that would still mean there are thousands of planets out there populated by intelligent beings like ourselves, just waiting to be known.”

The Apollo alumnus paused to let that sink in and then continued.

“The fact of this presents us, as a species, with a tremendous challenge. First, exploring our own neighborhood, our own solar system; taking up the search for life in whatever form we may find it on the other worlds nearest to Earth. And then, using everything we have learned from traveling in space and surviving in inhospitable places like the Moon and Mars, taking that knowledge and going further. Because ultimately, I think we as human beings have an even greater destiny to fulfill. I believe it’s our magnificent destiny that we take our place among all the other intelligent species in the universe which God has created. To know and to be known. ‘To add our light to the sum of light.’ And to do that, we must reach for the stars.”

Augie was interrupted by applause, but he raised a hand for quiet.

“This is going to be a long journey, over many generations; something that is going to take time. Now I’d like everybody to please stand up and take a good look around you.”

Waiting as they all stood up and looked self-consciously around, he could see their embarrassment at having the attention shifted to themselves.

“Do you know what I see when I look around this room? I’m seeing the astronomers, the pilots, the principal investigators, the engineers, the planetary geologists and biologists; the young men and women who will make up the space science teams of the first half of the twenty-first century.”

The kids couldn’t help but squirm, giggle a little, and whisper to one
another. But Augie knew they were taking this to heart. The legendary Colonel Augie Blake was calling on them, asking them to join him in something big and exciting, something with unquestionable greatness to it.

“You are the generation who will make possible mankind’s next giant leaps in an era that will be known as the true Golden Age of Space Exploration. You are the ones who will lead manned missions back to the Moon, and on to Mars. Even out to the moons of Jupiter, to Europa and beyond. And I have to say I envy you.”

His eyes toured the pin-drop-silent room like the slow sweep of a lighthouse beam.

“Yes, I envy you. Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo did well, but you will do better. It will be you and those of your generation who will take part in a great adventure full of discoveries that will alter the course of human experience, bring us together, and peacefully change our world in the best way possible, forever.”

Augie then stood at attention and gave them a smart salute, as if addressing the first graduating class of some glorious U.S. Space Academy of the future.

“Good luck,” he said. “And Godspeed.”

It was a wow finish, one that few in the cheering group would soon forget.

Catching Augie’s eye, his NASA driver waved emphatically and held up a cell phone. Mouthing something unintelligible, she then charged out the side door.

But as Augie turned and began shaking hands with the camp counselors seated near the podium, a faint shadow crossed his face. Anyone noticing it might have thought he’d aged ten years in an instant and looked suddenly exhausted. It was not fatigue, however, but the effects of an irregular heartbeat, which he’d experienced before and which sometimes left him a little light-headed.

This episode, though, was more than just arrhythmia: he felt a long bad moment of pain shooting down his arms, and a blurring sense of displacement in time. With a kind of amused abstraction, Augie found himself wondering if he was dying.

And then, almost as quickly as it had happened, the worst was over and the pain passed. Swiping at the sheen of sweat now slicking his forehead, Augie took a look around, feeling just a little shaky.

Fuck
, he thought, not sure if he’d said it out loud.

He could clearly see where he was: standing in the sun outside the Space Camp assembly building, signing autographs and shaking hands. He just couldn’t remember quite how he got there.

Well, I’m not dead. If I was dead I’d be lying down.

Looking down at the plastic ballpoint pen in his hand, Augie noticed the whoosh of the NASA logo as if for the first time, sensing some profound multilevel meaning beyond the overt graphic symbology. It was an odd sensation, mixed with a certain overall self-consciousness that was rather curious.

But in spite of everything, he somehow seemed to be carrying on, interacting in a normal fashion with everyone around him.

“Hey! What’s up? What’s your name, darlin’?”

Augie chatted and joked, and watched himself perform at the same time; listening to his own voice as if it were on automatic pilot, feeling his own smile waxing and waning as he took the children’s soft small hands into his own.

Then another unbidden sensation washed through him, like the apex of a wave, taking him to yet another subtle state of being where he could literally see himself from outside his body. Along with a heightened perception of sound, Augie began to experience a luminous color sense, as if everything and everyone around him were somehow lit from within.

But strange as it was, he felt no apprehension or anxiety. Only wonder.