1
Eighteen Years Earlier
Goddard Space Flight Center
“Dr. Rothenberg?”
Erich Rothenberg, director of the division of advanced propulsion designs, and who oversaw interns assigned to the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts, looked up over the top of his wire-framed glasses. There was no welcoming smile, just a cool gaze as Gary Morgan stood nervously in the doorway.
“So you are one of my new interns for the summer?” Erich asked. “I already told them there is no need for interns here—at least, those who want a solid future. May I suggest you just go back to the personnel office and ask for a different assignment.”
Gary didn’t move. He had been warned by “veterans” who had served as interns with Dr. Rothenberg that this was his typical greeting, the first winnowing-out process in which more than one graduate student had taken him at his word and fled.
He stood his ground.
“I volunteered for this division, sir. It is why I came to Goddard for the summer and asked to be assigned to you.”
“Oh? Pray tell why.” Still there was no welcoming gesture to take a seat.
“I’ve read most of your papers, sir, at least the unclassified ones: your prediction that Apollo would turn into a political dead end after the first landing, objections to the space station rather than an effort on advance propulsion systems and setting Mars as the next goal…”
“I sail against the wind,” Erich said gruffly. “Not a good path for career advancement.”
Gary didn’t move.
“Oh, damn it, come on in and sit down,” Erich sighed. Gary was smart enough not to show any emotion; he had at least passed the first test. He was, at least, literally through the door and into the office. Very few ever made it that far.
Leaning back in his chair, Erich pulled out a battered Zippo lighter adorned with the faded insignia of his old commando unit and puffed his pipe back to life. It was now a violation of the new no-smoking rule for the facility, but like all such rules, Erich had a few choice words in reply, either in High German or Yiddish, depending on who he was addressing—though he did compromise by keeping the door closed and a noisy air purifier running.
“Let us skip the sentimental formalities of greetings,” Erich announced. Gary had yet to learn it, but beneath the tough exterior of a German disciplined in war with nearly six years of service with the British Army, he was a sentimentalist at heart. His forty years of marriage to his recently departed wife had never produced children, and thus the ebb and flow of young interns and wide-eyed graduates had become his extended family. The honor of admission to this special club, “Erich’s Dreamers”—or, as some called them behind his back, the “Warp Factor Club”—meant guidance, late-night sessions at his modest home just outside the gate, and dreams of what was and what should be.
The mainstream of work at Goddard now was on the beginnings of the international space station and post-Challenger recovery, and start-up on work for a second-generation shuttle design. There were even teams waiting for the word to develop a return to the moon and some talk that the president might even ask for funding of preliminary plans for Mars. But as for Erich’s team, they were off in a far corner, their work buried deep in the yearly budget. They had been written off as dreamers …
Some wag, as a prank, had pinned a picture of Yoda on the door with the name “Erich” printed across it. Rather than tear it down, Rothenberg laughed softly and let it stay. It was now faded but still there.
“Erich’s Dreamers.” In their cramped quarters and with their marginal budget, they kept alive visions of ion drive; of solar sails that would actually use the minute pressure of sunlight and that theoretically could accelerate a payload up to a sizable fraction of light speed; of hypersonic and ramjet engines mounted on first-stage airplane-like “carriers” that would lift rockets to the edge of space and launch from there … They even had plans—seriously worked on back in the 1950s and now at times tweaked a bit—to use nuclear power microburst engines that could cut the transit time to Mars from months to just weeks.
This had become Erich’s domain after Apollo slipped away with barely a whimper.
For any ambitious graduate intern, when offered a variety of choices, the advice was to stay away from this collection of fantasists who read too much sci-fi and had seen too much Star Trek and could lip-synch every episode. Better to stick with the programs that had a real future, such as the next generation of the Space Shuttle, if they wanted to advance.
For Gary (who would not admit he could lip-synch every episode of the original Star Trek series), that was a challenge, not a warning, and he had specifically requested the assignment. Of the fifty-five graduate student internship applicants that summer, only two had been advised on how Erich would greet them. Before making the long trek to this office in a small out-of-the-way office complex, he knew that Erich had at least approved the interview, along with the only other intern’s, the first exchange intern from the Ukraine, now a former member of the collapsed Soviet Union. That had caused a bit of a stir, and during his placement interview earlier in the day someone sitting in on his interview (who never identified herself) casually suggested that if he noticed anything unusual with this other intern to let security know.
Erich pointed to a chair, took Gary’s dossier, thumbed through his transcripts for several minutes without comment, then started into his typical Germanic grilling.
“Why in hell do you want to get into aerospace engineering when thousands of my old coworkers have been laid off and are trying to land jobs as high school teachers, and the rest are just praying to make it to retirement?”
Before Gary could even form an answer, Erich fired off the next question.
“Why are you even here in this office? Bright young man like you should try for the Jet Propulsion Lab out in California, or one of the private contractors like Boeing or Lockheed, and angle for a job once you graduate.”
“Your work intrigues me, sir,” Gary finally replied, a bit nervously.
Erich sat back and shook his head, and laughed softly as he continued to thumb through Gary’s file.
“Why?”
“Because I believe a day will come when humanity realizes space is the only answer left to us if we are going to make it to the twenty-second century.”
“Why care about the twenty-second century? You plan to live that long?” Erich laughed softly. “I sure as hell don’t. I’ve seen enough in this century to fill half a dozen lifetimes.”
“No, sir, but maybe my children will. My great grandparents came to America eighty years ago. Before my grandfather died, he said they came here because of me.”
Gary fell silent with that. He knew it sounded sentimental, and he had yet to realize how sentimental Erich truly was. But it was true. Three of Gary’s four ancestors had come through Ellis Island and all spoke of the dream that brought them there: it was always about a better world for their children and grandchildren and how he should dream the same. Though only twenty-two and with all four of his grandparents gone—along with both his parents, lost in a small plane crash two years back—he knew that his reply to Erich’s question would have been theirs as well.
His father had been a navy aviator who even tried for the astronaut corps in the mid-1960s—and almost made it—and this had encouraged Gary’s fascination with flight. He actually should have been with his parents on the day they died, but a chronic sinus infection kept him home. His dad promised they’d go up together the following week, but there was no following week. An idiotic accident—a pilot pulled out onto the active runway just as they were touching down—had taken both his parents. As usual with such things, the fool who caused it walked away with barely a scratch.
Perhaps that was why he had tried to learn to fly—although, on the advice of his instructor, he had given it up. He didn’t have the “instinctive” feel his father had, and frankly he was always on edge when aloft: that could be dangerous. Though grounded in a literal sense, his dreams were still “up there.”
* * *
Gary’s paternal grandfather—his beloved “Tappy”—had taken over as parent until he slipped away just the year before his internship interview, truly leaving Gary alone, at least in a physical sense. Yet all of his grandparents had instilled in him “the dream.” Tall, gangly, rather uncoordinated—branded a nerd by many when that term was not the compliment it would become in the Internet age—Gary lived in a world of devouring works on aviation and space history, and at least found a few friends in the realm of fantasy gaming. Girls? That was something that left him tongue-tied and self-conscious; his friends even joked that maybe he should join a monastery, since that was the way he seemed destined to live. A favorite novel of his, Walter L. Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, did involve a religious order devoted to science, and he actually thought at times that if such an order existed, he would just give up on the rest of the world and join it.
Erich Rothenberg, who was five foot seven, wiry, and at best 145 pounds soaking wet, also had something of the nerd look as he continued to gaze at Gary over the rims of his glasses. But then there was the other, legendary side of the man, a commando wh...