The Tranquillity Alternative (39 page)

Taylor shook his head. “Sorry, Commander, but you’ve got to remain here so long as we’ve got the press aboard. You can’t …”

“Naw. Don’t worry about them.” Laughlin sauntered over to the bed and gave Parnell a fond slap on his bare knee. “We’ve put them in the VIP area. Soon as they’re gone from this section, Gene can stretch his legs a bit.”

He winked broadly. “In fact, I think can get him to my office without being seen. A little R&R is just what the patient needs, don’t you think?”

Taylor looked uncertain. He was under orders to keep Parnell and Ryer under close watch until the heat died down. Before he could protest, however, Laughlin grasped his friend’s arm and helped him off the hospital bed. “C’mon, buddy … put on your trousers and I’ll buy you a drink.”

“Commander Laughlin …” Taylor began.

Old Joe gave him a look that shut the young man up. “He needs a drink and a walk,” he said softly. “So just go empty a bedpan or something, okay?”

The CIA officer didn’t like it, but he wasn’t in command of the station. Besides, he needed to moderate Ryer’s press appearance. There was little he could do to physically prevent Parnell from being sneaked out of the infirmary. Taylor nodded his head, then exited the room.

Once Gene was dressed, Laughlin escorted him through a hatch and down a ladder, where they followed a vacant corridor through Level B. “Nice touch,” Parnell said softly as they walked through the upward-curving hallway. “Take me to your office, indeed …”

Laughlin grinned. “Couldn’t have been done in the old days. Remember when we had resident spooks aboard?” He shook his head. “These young ones couldn’t find the john without a map.”

He stopped at the hatch leading to the Earth Observation Center. He laid his hand on the handle, but didn’t open it. “But you’ve got to promise me one thing,” Laughlin whispered. “When they put you under the bright lights, you don’t breathe a word about what I’m going to show you. Understand?”

Mystified, Parnell nodded. No longer smiling, Laughlin opened the door and led Parnell into the dimly lit compartment.

Old Joe went straight to the bank of TV monitors. “You know where I keep the bottle. Help yourself.” He checked his watch, consulted the clocks arranged above the screens, then began to work the ISPY master control panel. “We’re right on time.”

Parnell hesitated, then opened the locker and pulled out the Maker’s Mark and a pair of shot glasses. One of the wall clocks told him that it was about 9:25
P.M.
in North Korea. According to the little that Taylor had told him, the Zenith had landed just eight hours ago at the hidden rocket base in the country’s northern highlands, shortly before he and Ryer had managed to guide
Conestoga
safely back to its orbital hangar. The spacecraft was probably back in its assembly building, where technicians were unloading the nukes its crew had stolen from the Teal Falcon silos.

However, ISPY wasn’t over Southeast Asia. According to its ground track on the electronic map board, the orbital telescope was above the western United States, its footprint swinging down across northern California into southern Nevada. Long morning shadows stretched out across the Sierra Nevada; according to the clock, local time was 7:35
A.M.
RMT.

Parnell’s hand paused on the cap of the whiskey bottle. What the hell … ?

As if he could read his thoughts, Laughlin spoke softly from the console. “You must have heard of this place,” he said, not looking up from the keyboard and dials. “Groom Lake. Area 51. Dreamland … whatever you want to call it, it’s there. One of the best-kept secrets in the free world. At least that’s what they say.”

“Yeah. I’ve heard about it.” Parnell watched the screens as ISPY’s cameras swept across the high-mountain desert northwest of Las Vegas. Everything from the U-2 and the SR-71 spy planes to the F-117 and the B-2 Stealth attack craft had been flight-tested from there. Not so much of a secret now, after the press had blown the lid off a couple of years ago, with reports of odd noises coming from the secret landing strip.

“What about it?”

“Wait a second … okay.” On the high-resolution screen, a long airstrip had appeared. The camera tracked across paved tarmac, passing rows of hangars, offices, and warehouses.

“Now,” Laughlin said, pointing at the bottom of the screen. “Look there, quick.”

Parnell stepped closer to the screen, peering at the spot where Laughlin was pointing. Captured for a few moments within ISPY’s focal lens was a large, dartlike shape …

Or, rather, two shapes: a silver form similar to an F-117, mounted atop a larger, black craft which vaguely resembled an SR-71. “That’s
Aurora
,” Laughlin said, tapping the screen with his fingertip. “The bottom craft is the mother ship,
Senior Citizen
. It takes the bird on top up to high altitude, where it lets go. The little bastard on top is code-named Thunder Dart … it climbs to suborbit with scramjets.”

Parnell nodded. “The new recon plane. I’ve heard the stories …”

“C’mon, Gene. You think we’d scrap the Blackbird just to build another recon plane?” Laughlin stepped away from the console, picked up the whiskey bottle, and poured himself a shot. “It’s capable of reaching low orbit in minutes, and it can be anywhere in the world within an hour. Usually they only fly it at night, to avoid anyone getting a good look at it. Now, why do you think they’d haul it out of the hangar in broad daylight?”

Parnell stared at the image on the screen. No, it didn’t make much sense to wheel
Aurora
out of its hangar at this time of day if it was just another test flight. Dreamland’s secrecy had already been compromised by too many curious people watching from adjacent foothills; when the Air Force wanted to test one of its black planes, it did so under the cover of darkness.

He looked up at the clocks again. But over in North Korea, it was a dark, moonless night …

“Now let me ask you something else,” Old Joe said. He poured a shot of liquor into another glass and offered it to Parnell. “Doesn’t it seem peculiar, knowing all that we do now, that the CIA ignored everything I told them about the North Korean launch site?”

Parnell accepted the glass. On the screen, Area 51 was already passing from sight, lost as ISPY began to fly over Utah. “Maybe not,” he said, not accepting the lie even as he repeated it. “They might have known about it, but just didn’t let on.”

Laughlin shrugged. “You got a point. They didn’t trust me. But does it make sense that British and German intelligence caught wind of this conspiracy, but didn’t let the Americans know?”

He tossed back the shot of whiskey and hissed between his teeth. “SIS went so far as to put Leamore on this mission. Do you really believe, for even a second, that the Brits wouldn’t let our guys know that they thought someone wanted to steal some American nukes?”

Laughlin picked up the bottle and poured another shot. “When Dr. Z told me about what Gabrielle Blumfield had told him, I went straight to the CIA. They ignored me. Poppa Dog saw something lift off from Earth when y’all launched from orbit. He told me about it later, and I tried to tell NASA and the CIA, and they still ignored me. Now … do you really think all those sharp minds back home are that stupid?”

Parnell didn’t reply. He tried to sip his own whiskey, but his hand was trembling too much. It splattered across his chin, and he wiped it off with the back of his left hand. “Maybe they were …”

He stumbled, unable to complete the thought that had entered his mind. It was too much, the idea that so much had been risked, so many lives had been put in danger—and ultimately lost—simply because of the same old games that had been waged and lost before.

And yet, and still …

The shot glass slipped from his fingers.

He barely noticed when it hit the floor, splashing liquor across the carpet.

“They knew,” he murmured. “They knew about everything.”

Both men were silent for a moment; then Laughlin bent down and picked up the glass. He refilled it from the bottle and passed it to his friend. “The plan was rigged from both ends,” he said quietly. “The Koreans weren’t the only ones carrying an ace up their sleeve. Sometime today or tomorrow, we’re probably going to hear about an oil refinery in North Korea blowing up. Lots of lives lost. Very tragic …”

Laughlin sighed as he settled down in a chair. “Y’know, though, the real bitch isn’t whether or not some third-rate country gets the bomb or not. These days, anyone can do that. That’s simple stuff. But the fact that the same technology we could have used to take back the Moon, put a colony on Mars, maybe even …”

“I know. You don’t have to lecture me.” This time, Parnell managed to drink his whiskey without spilling it. Nonetheless, it took a lot of courage just to swallow past the bile which had risen in his throat.

He had just caught a glimpse of an aircraft that was capable of rendering NASA’s space fleet obsolete. It remained a classified secret, tucked away in a hangar on a desert airstrip.

Games within games. Lies within lies. Meanwhile, the future is slowly lost, like one speck of sand moving past the last one, through an hourglass that can never be set upright again.

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to get on a high horse.” Laughlin reached for the bottle. He offered it to Parnell, who shook his head. “Still, it kind of makes you wonder,” he continued, pouring another finger of whiskey into his glass. “I mean, what might have happened if things had gone differently.”

“That’s bullshit.” Gene finished the half-inch of brown liquor in his glass. He looked over his shoulder at the TV screen, watching as Earth passed serenely beneath his feet. It was a moot point, the type of question only a drunk old man would raise.

History can’t be changed.

4/12/95 • 2031 EST

A
NOTHER BEACH, ANOTHER HOUSE,
another party: this time not a pre-launch barbecue at the Cape, but a small evening get-together with a couple of new friends at Gene Parnell’s home on Captiva.

As the Gulf sunset tinted the waters of Pine Island Sound with color like autumn leaves, Gene grilled swordfish on the patio hibachi, watching Cris and Laurell as they stood lookout on the beach for the dolphins that sometimes played in the inlet at sundown. They had driven down from Titusville the day before, and although he and Judith had offered them the guest room, the two women had politely demurred, preferring to stay at a hotel on the mainland. They said that it was because they wanted to catch a Cardinals spring-training game in Fort Meyers on Saturday and had to leave early Monday morning in order to make their flight to Germany out of Orlando later that evening.

Still, Gene couldn’t help wondering if it was because Cris felt uncomfortable about having Laurell with her, even though he and Judy had invited them both.

“Don’t worry about it,” Judith murmured, reading his mind. She stood nearby, tossing salad in a wooden bowl. “They’re a young couple, that’s all. They want their privacy.”

“Helen never had any problem bringing her boyfriend here …”

“That’s because Helen’s your daughter,” Judith said. “Look at it this way … wouldn’t you have felt strange about having your girlfriend spend the night with you at the boss’s house?”

“Ex-boss, you mean,” he replied.

A sudden shout from the beach brought his head up. Cris and Laurell were pointing to where a dolphin had jumped. Cris glanced over her shoulder at him; she was letting her hair grow out, and in that instant when the breeze caught it and blew it in front of her smiling face, he realized what a beautiful woman she was.

“And in my case,” he added, still watching her, “it would have been my boyfriend …”

A stifled giggle from Judy. He caught a glimpse of her grin before she covered it with her hand. “Why, Gene,” she whispered. “You never told me you swung both ways.”

If they didn’t have guests present, he might have thrown his spatula at her.

As nervous as he had been about meeting Laurell—Judith had no reservations whatsoever—the evening went smoothly. Before dinner they sat around the patio table, sipping Scotch-and-water and watching the sun go down through the palms, chatting idly about the Cards, a minor hurricane that had hit Key West last week, the alligator that sometimes paid a visit to the Parnells’ backyard from the nearby swamp. Over blackened swordfish and Italian salad they discussed Cris’s upcoming job interview in Germany; if Koenig Selenen offered her the job, she and Laurell planned to temporarily relocate to Bonn for her training period, then eventually move to French Guiana, where they would live near the launch center.

That was as close as they got to talking about space, though. Cris avoided any mention of NASA or her old job, and when talk of Koenig Selenen inevitably wandered toward the Tranquillity Base mission, Judith tactfully changed the topic to the burgeoning real estate development on Captiva. Which turned out to be an unfortunate
faux pas
, since Laurell’s law firm was representing a developer who wanted to buy seventy-five acres of wetland on the island’s gulf shore and transform it into a condominium complex. But at least it was safer than discussing space.

Eventually, though, the subject had to come up again.

Gene had already told his wife what he meant to do, and Judy took her cue when he asked about key lime pie. When she stood up to collect the dinner dishes, Judy asked Laurell if she would like to help serve dessert, and Laurell followed her into the kitchen. That left Gene on the patio with Cris for a few minutes.

Alone for the first time since they had returned from the Moon two months ago, neither one of them knew quite what to say. Cris gazed silently across the bay at the small cluster of house lights on Pine Island while Gene searched for the right words. Although he had been mentally rehearsing a little speech for several weeks, now that it was time to deliver it, his mind had gone completely blank.

Finally, he gave up. Clearing his throat, he said, “I’ve got something for you.”

Cris looked around as he dug into the pocket of his trousers and pulled out a small velvet box he had retrieved from his office desk a little while earlier. “It’s not much,” he said as he slid it across the patio table to her, “but … y’know, maybe it’ll come in handy, next time you …”