Nemesis (31 page)

Webb stood up. “Another time.”

“And our honey is famous. You must see our apiary.”

“Thank you. Unfortunately I have to get away.”

“Our beekeeper is Father Galeno. He is very old, and wanders a little, but he is a most interesting man to talk to. I said as much to your colleague.”

My colleague?
Webb made for the door. “Thank you. Time doesn’t permit.”

The Abbot said again, “Our apiary, Mister Fish. Father Galeno is a very interesting man.”

God I’m thick
, Webb told himself. The Abbot made the sign of the Cross and Webb said thanks for your help.

The Apiary was a square of grass the size of a small field beyond the bell tower. It was lined by dozens of box-shaped hives painted in bright primary colours. A monk, wearing a plastic hat with a protective veil, was bent over a hive with
a metal bucket and a long, flat piece of metal. The air buzzed as Webb approached.

“Father Galeno?”

The Father Apiarist turned. He was a tall, thin man, in his middle eighties. He spoke in Italian and Webb was grateful for the six months he had spent in Rome some years previously. Bees were crawling over the monk’s white robe and his veil. His sleeves were tied with string at the wrists. “Would you like to buy some honey?”

“Not today.”

“Then you are here to be shown the wonderful life of the bee.”

“Unfortunately I have no time,” Webb said.

“No time. Now that is sad. We can learn much from the world of the bee.”

Behind the veil, Webb saw dark eyes, a curious mixture of vacancy and sharpness. Instinctively, he felt that an oblique approach was called for. “Tell me, Father,” Webb asked, “In your experience, is a bee conscious of its own existence?”

The man’s eyes lit up. “Undoubtedly. While the bee can see and hear, its real world is one of chemistry. It responds to smell and touch. Its mind cannot therefore be understood by us, whose world is sight and sound. True, it is deeply controlled by instinct in its daily toil, but yes, of course God in His wisdom has given it the ability to experience life in its own way.”

“But it has no reasoning power. It hasn’t the brain.”

There was a high-pitched cackle. “In that respect, does it differ from most of humanity? Only human arrogance makes us even try to understand the world as perceived by the bee. The essence of its consciousness will forever be a mystery to us, but not to the bee, and not to the Almighty.”

Webb tried to look pious. “Father, I’m here because of a book.”

“The bee does not learn its dance. It has been given to it by the Creator. Could blind evolution have taught a bee how
to dance? What chemicals could combine to make a small insect dance an intricate code?”

“A book, Father.”

“Could blind chance make flower and bee come to depend on each other for their very survival? The functions of queen, worker and drone interlock so perfectly?”

“It’s a very old book.”

The voice became truculent. “You must speak to our Father Librarian.”

“It was taken from a train by partisans at the end of the Second World War.” Webb tried a shot in the dark: “And you were one of the partisans.”

The old man looked at Webb with surprise. “Now that is very strange.”

Webb waited. Bees were crawling over his exposed legs.

“This book: it is a volume by the heretic Vincenzo?”

Webb spoke quietly. “Father Apiarist, where can I find this book?”

The shutters came down, the eyes became vacant. “I cannot say.”

“Cannot?”

“Will not. I said this also to the other.”

A honeybee was crawling up Webb’s thigh. He tried to ignore it. “Why not?”

“Discussion of the matter is impossible.”

“Father, I don’t want to take it away, only to study it for a few hours. It is of the utmost importance.”

“No.”

“I have to see it.”

A bee had found its way under the old monk’s veil and was crawling over his lips. He had a face like a stubborn child. “Memories are long in the hills.”

“Memories?” The bees were thick on Webb’s shirt.

“It is your bright colours. They think you are a flower. Stand still or you will make them angry and they will sting your eyes.”

Webb tried again but he knew it was hopeless. “Father, please. I ask only to see this book by Vincenzo.”

The apiarist shook his head and turned to a hive. He pulled out a frame dripping with honey. The air filled with angry bees and Webb moved hastily back. “A young man with no time? Nonsense, you have all the time in the world. Come back when you can spare some for the bees. They can teach us much.” He banged the hive with the bucket and the sky blackened with insects.

Crazy old fool, Webb thought, flying for his life, with the high-pitched cackle of the Father Apiarist almost drowned out by the angry buzz of the honeybees swirling around his head.

The taxi dropped McNally at the main gate. He spoke briefly to the security guard, who provided him with a visitor’s badge, and so NASA’s Chief Administrator entered the Johnson Space Center unannounced.

The Center was almost deserted; it was after all the day before Christmas. He was gambling on workaholism amongst the senior staff, but if necessary he would simply summon them from their families. He strolled alone through the rocket park, sparing the Saturn V booster a longing glance as he passed, and continued on along the Mall, past the administration buildings, the simulation and training facilities, the laboratories and warehouses which he ultimately controlled. At the far end of the mall was the Gilruth social and athletic center; it was a long walk. He entered the Center unrecognized and extracted a can of icy Coke from a machine. Then he climbed some stairs and looked down with pleasure at two teams of fifteen-year-olds playing basketball. A white-haired grandmother in a blue tracksuit was running around, whistle in mouth.

McNally made a couple of internal calls and returned to the game.

The Chief Engineer, a bulky, bearded man, appeared in two minutes and twenty seconds. They shook hands and he sat on a chair next to the NASA boss. “You into basketball, Jim?”

“I hate all sport. No, I’m into security. We can’t talk in our offices just yet.” The Engineer pulled a face.

Twenty seconds later the Deputy Administrator arrived, looking bemused, and sat on the bench in front of them. “My secretary told me you’re on vacation, Jim.”

McNally dispensed with social preliminaries. “I intend to mothball Deep Space Four. I expect to replace it with the European Vesta, which should arrive at White Sands in a C-14 within the next few days. The Albuquerque people will reconfigure it to be launched on an Air Force IUS, probably the same booster which we used for the Galileo probe. Frontiersman will take it up to two hundred miles. I want the Shuttle astronauts retrained. At least two Mission Specialists will be on board, a nuclear physicist and an astronomer. Neither will have any background in astronautics. I’m not yet at liberty to tell you what this is about. What I can say is that Vesta will go through as a Defense item. This package has to be ready to go in one hundred days maximum.”

“How many was that?” the Chief Engineer asked.

“One hundred. Maximum.”

Lesser men would have howled in outrage, protested the obvious impossibility. But the instruction was so preposterous, the autocratic decision so out of keeping with the consultative spirit of the NASA hierarchy, that the executives, senior and experienced men, immediately realized that only some grave situation could lie behind it.

“The Russians are supposed to be launching Vesta. What do they think about this?” the Assistant Administrator asked.

“They don’t know yet.”

The Chief Engineer stroked his beard thoughtfully. It was a mannerism which had started many years ago as a joke and had gradually become second nature. He itemized the points with his fingers. “Let’s look at this, Boss. Suppose we divide the problem into (1) crew training, (2) mission planning and (3) hardware development.”

McNally nodded.

“Take Item One. You know how the Mission Operations Directorate works. Crew training is so meticulous they practically tell the astronauts when they can go to the john. You’re well aware that training in a hundred days is impossible even for an experienced pilot, and that you can’t let a couple of rookies loose on a Space Shuttle.”

McNally bowed his head to indicate agreement.

There was an outburst of shrill screaming from below, echoing painfully from the gymnasium walls. The Chief Engineer let it die out before he continued: “Okay, now look at the broader mission-planning aspect, Item Two. For example, think about the documentation alone we need to create for the operational support. Transportation and flight rules, command plans, communication and data plans, mission control and tracking network plans, system operating procedures, operations and maintenance instructions, flight control operations handbooks, new console handbooks, software documentation. Hell, I’m running out of fingers and that’s just the documentation.”

McNally bowed his head again.

The Assistant Administrator said, “A lot of the MOD’s load will fall on their Flight Design and Dynamics division.”

McNally bowed.

“So. In a hundred days you expect them to carry through a flight design analysis leading to the development of flight design ground rules, develop the guidance, navigation and control software as well as design and construct any new hardware required, rig the MCC and the SMS’s for the flight in question, come up with performance analyses for the ascent, orbit manoeuvring, payload deployment, proximity operations—with rookie specialists carrying out EVA—plan the descent and landing phases, create new in-flight programmes for SPOC and develop integrated checklists for all of this. In a hundred days.”

“Maximum.”

The Engineer scratched his head. “What payload accommodation category are we talking about? Dedicated, standard, mid-deck?”

“We’ll be launching Vesta plus IUS plus four or five tons.”

“Jesus. Dedicated.”

The Assistant Administrator attempted reason. “Okay Jim, since we’re in Wonderland, we may as well take a broad-brush look at Alex’s Item Three, the hardware timescale. Look at the performance milestones for Cassini, starting say from the moment the Huygens probe was delivered. It took three months to test and integrate the probe with the spacecraft, right? Another four for JPL to integrate and test all the instrumentation. The probe was in our space simulators for another seven months. Then after it was delivered at Kennedy it took another six months to complete integration with the Titan/Centaur launch vehicle. If I’ve counted my fingers right that’s twenty months. And you’re looking for the same progress in three. Let’s inject some realism into this, Jim.”

McNally brushed the monstrous problems aside. “Look at Clementine One. From concept to system design was three months. Acquisition planning overlapped with that. Sure it was another year for the systems engineering and test, but the Europeans have done most of that work for us already. We had the spacecraft integrated with the ground subsystems in a couple of months. Look, the only thing that matters is the integration of Vesta with the launch vehicle, a standard Air Force IUS which will go up with the Shuttle. All it needs is a launch vehicle adaptor. We can do it in three months.”

The game below was getting noisy. McNally added, “For reasons of security I want to confine this to Johnson and Canaveral.”

“Where is this Vesta headed?” the Chief Engineer wanted to know.

“I don’t know.”

The Assistant Administrator laughed outright. McNally had now crossed the boundary from the preposterous to the insane. The Chief Engineer tried to keep his voice level, but it had an angry quiver to it. “Jim, I’d like you to explain something to me. How are we supposed to plan a mission if we don’t know where we’re going?”

McNally opened his mouth to reply, but the Deputy cut in. His eyes were icy: “Alex is right. What do I tell my MOD? With no destination, what is there for them to plan?”

“They plan for a high-speed, maximum precision flyby of an as yet unspecified interplanetary target, using the onboard radars for last-minute course correction.”

“You’ll never get off with this, Jim,” said the Chief Engineer. “MOD will refuse to issue a commit-to-flight certificate. Or somebody will trigger the yellow light system and force an internal review. And rightly so. This could be shaping up to another Atlantis disaster.”

“The responsibility for technical readiness is yours. I expect you, and your Safety and Mission Assurance Office, to deliver.”

“Jim, you’re asking me to send up half-trained astronauts on a string and sealing wax lash-up. I won’t do it. I won’t be responsible for the deaths of five or six people and the loss of a Shuttle.” The Chief Engineer stood up. “You’re forcing me to resign.”

McNally looked the engineer squarely in the eye. “Some guys who look like telephone engineers will be fixing your office phone shortly. That’s so the phone call you’re about to receive from the President of the United States is secure. That call will have three consequences. First, you’ll find out what this is about. Second, you’ll wish you hadn’t. And third, you’ll make the deadline if it kills you and I mean that in its literal sense. Similar calls will be going to Art and Jackie this afternoon. Until these calls are made, I have no authorization to tell you what this is about.”

If McNally had slapped the Engineer, the effect could
hardly have been more startling. The man stared, amazed. He seemed to have lost the power of speech.

The Assistant Administrator recovered first. “If some major disaster happened at Byurkan, and Vesta had to catch a gravity assist window, that could justify our stepping in to help with a crash programme. Either that or a target of opportunity. It would have to be a joker, like a new comet. There would be no case to trigger a yellow light; they’re usually for cost overruns anyway. Which is it, Jim? Is Byurkan about to have a big disaster, or does some comet have to be intercepted real soon?”

That’s the trouble with these Princeton types. Too damn smart
. McNally tried to adopt a poker face.