Shadow Watch

felt as if she might soar beyond the bonds of gravity without benefit of a spacecraft, knowing full well that there was still no guarantee she would ultimately be sent into space. Before that would come two rigorous years of basic astronaut training during which her skills would be developed and subject to constant evaluation. But she had attained the high ground and was, as Tom Wolfe had put it in The Right Stuff, within sight of Olympus. Nothing would stop her from going the rest of the distance.

Driven by her lifelong ambition, and aided by an innate self-discipline and passion to excel that her parents had always reinforced, she’d applied herself to the challenges of training with a kind of fierce, single-minded dedication, come through at the top of her class — right up there with Jim Rowland — and been selected for formal mission training immediately upon graduation.

Annie and Jim had flown their first shuttle mission together in 1997, he as commander, she as pilot.

Now she rapped her fingers on her desk, her eyes leaving the photo of her parents on the left end of the row for the one on the far right, an official NASA group shot of the crew on the flight that had “put her on the bronco’s hump and broken her cherry,” to quote not a famous writer this time, but rather the ever tactful Colonel Rowland. Of the seven men and women on that shuttle, two had been Turnips besides Jim and herself — mission specialists Walter Pratt and Gail Klass. It had been the multitalented, multilingual Gail, a computer scientist and electrical engineer by trade, who had designed their unique crew patch and translated the motto she and Jim had concocted into Latin… to give it class and authenticity, she had explained.

Ah, Jimmy, how I wish you were here with some dumb wisecrack, preferably one built around an obscenity… as if you knew any other kind, Annie thought. Sorrow infiltrating her smile, she studied his face as it appeared in the starch official public-relations shot. Somehow his prankish sense of humor had managed to show through the stiffly formal pose their photographer had elicited from him.

She expelled a long, sighing breath and shifted her attention to the middle picture frame, having bypassed it a few seconds earlier, precisely because she had known it would make her struggle to keep her emotions under control unwinnable.

Behind the frame’s nonreflective glass panel was a montage she had painstakingly composed from photo clippings of Mark, her children, and herself, using dozens of snapshots taken over the years, the images overlapping like the recollections they stirred within Annie. She was no Gail Klass in the creativity department, and most of her choices had been of the typical doting-mother, loving-wife sort that would have drawn afflicted little smiles had they been shown to friends or coworkers, boring them to death like nothing else besides home videos of birthday parties and backyard barbecues. Here was Mark proudly displaying a flounder he’d hooked from a fishing pier on Sanibel Island; here Linda on a playground seesaw; here the kids on a Christmas morning three years ago, still in their pajamas, wading into the presents under the tree; here the entire family at Disney World photographed by a roving six-foot-tall Mickey Mouse. And in the center…

Annie stared at the picture, transported back in thought to the night it was taken.

She and Mark had toured the British Isles for their honeymoon, a trip that had lasted almost a full month and led them from London to Edinburgh to the coastline of South Wales, with stops in a dozen villages and twice as many old castles along the way. It was at a small pub and guest house in the Scottish Highlands, where they had envisaged getting a good night’s rest before heading on to the Orkneys, that they’d wound up tossing back far too much single-malt whisky and dancing to Celtic folk music with the riotous locals, kicking up sawdust until the caller had finally lost his voice around day-break. When they had left their room late the next afternoon after sleeping off murderous hangovers — and missing their ferry out of town — the innkeeper had handed them a sixty-second Polaroid some anonymous fellow reveler had taken of them doing their eightsome reel in tweed caps that they hadn’t recalled putting on, and had never made it back to their room with them.

The combination of their goofy, plastered expressions and the cockeyed angles of the caps on their heads had made them chuckle every time they pored through their photo album, but somehow it had done more than capture a delightful memory, a rare uninhibited moment for two people who had built their lives around ceaseless discipline and hard work; it had exemplified the easy consonance between them, a lightness and looseness that neither ever had been able to share with anyone else, and was so much the essence of their marital union that she had felt the picture naturally belonged at the center of her little cut-and-paste.

Annie began tapping the desktop more rapidly, her eyes clouding up. Eight years, that was all they’d had together. Eight years before the cancer took Mark from her, making him suffer a thousand monstrous indignities as it consumed him.

But she could not allow herself to dwell on that, not now, and instead turned her thoughts to the meeting she’d had with Charles Dorset just a half hour ago. No sooner had she arrived that morning than he had summoned her to his office and, virtually without preamble, asked whether she would be interested in directing the Orion probe. The prospect had caught her completely off guard, and she had sat before his desk in silence for several moments, as if there was something about his question she wasn’t quite getting.

“Mr. Dorset, there’s a long list of people I’d supposed might be appointed to the position, and I really hadn’t imagined myself being on it,” she had said at length.

“Why is that?” He had watched her over a steaming coffee mug in his hands. “What would make anyone more eligible than you?”

Annie had shaken her head, still at a bit of a loss. “Seniority. Technical expertise. I’m not sure I would know how to begin managing such a huge responsibility.”

His broad, florid face was very serious.

“I have always believed NASA’s greatest investment is in the men and women we send into space, not the technology that carries them there. The human element,” he said. “And you have proven yourself good enough to handle the training of our astronaut corps for the past three years.”

Annie paused a moment, then said, “I’m flattered by your confidence, but it frankly doesn’t eliminate my concerns. My background isn’t in technical science. Every one of Orion’s electronic and structural systems will have to be analyzed to find out what went wrong—”

“You’ve operated a shuttle and taught others to do so, which makes you intimately acquainted with its workings. But that’s almost beside the point. Of course no one is expecting you to do it all. I’m talking about leadership. You would have wide discretion in handpicking a team of professionals from both inside and outside the agency.”

She looked at him. “I’d expect a few ranking members of the organization to be very unhappy about being passed over for consideration.”

“Leave that to me,” he said with a dismissive sweep of his hand. “If their feelings get hurt, they can come in here and I’ll hand out Kleenex, scold them, compliment their hairdos or neckties, whatever it takes to settle them down. Ninety percent of what I do, day in and day out, is play conciliator between massive egos. I can butter a bun as well as any diplomat.”

A thought suddenly crossed Annie’s mind as she listened to him.

“I have to ask you right out,” she said. “Is this whole thing about trotting me out before the television cameras again? Using me as a figurehead?”

“Fair question,” he said. “And I won’t tell you the esteem with which you are held by the public hasn’t been taken into account. They need to believe in the findings of our task force, and truth from government is a hard sell. But the fact that you go down well with television viewers is only part of it.” He paused, his eyes meeting Annie’s. “I hope I’ve already made clear that the high regard for your ability and integrity extends into this office. And you also should know that Roger Gordian is pushing like hell for you.”

The revelation left her nonplussed again. “You’ve consulted with him?”

“We were on the telephone earlier this morning.” Dorset’s lips hinted at a smile. “And I can assure you, he left no room for confusion about his preference.”

Annie felt an unaccountable twitch of nervousness as that sank in.

“I don’t know what to say,” she told him. “There are other issues. The shuttle will have to be reconstructed piece by piece, and the Vehicle Assembly Building at Canaveral’s the only facility we have that’s large enough to hold it. I’d have to be in Florida to constantly oversee things, stay on top of the progress that’s being made. It would mean uprooting my family….”

“Housing won’t be a problem. We have excellent condominiums where you can sit on your balcony under a sun umbrella and watch the manatees and dolphins swim by.”