“Mac” was McCauley Stokes, the sixtysomething cable talk show moderator popularly known for his folksy interviewing style, ever-present ten-gallon hat, and gold clasped string tie, as well as his string of twentysomething silicon-enhanced wives — all of which served as trademark reminders of his virile, high-in-the-saddle Texas cowboy heritage. The rough-rider routine, however, was as ersatz as his current bride’s outrageous bustline. For while Stokes had been born in Texas, it was to parents who had been the third-generation beneficiaries of an oil family fortune, migrated to the exclusive blue blood community of Greenwich, Connecticut, when he was four years old, and raised and educated him in an atmosphere of pampered gentility, where the closest he’d ever gotten to a horse had been the viewing stands of the local polo grounds.
“Hey, I’m not just being polite, Annie, you really are something else. A woman to be admired in every way.” He tipped his hat. “We’re gonna cover a lot of ground with you tonight, a whole lot, I say…”
My God, he’s doing Foghorn Leghorn.
“… but before we get to Orion, let’s play catch-up, hear how you been holding up on the home front. Last time you were a guest, you’d just returned from six weeks in space, remember? That was back in, what, late ’99?”
“I believe so, Mac. It was after my third and final mission.”
“And since then we know you’ve suffered the loss of your husband, Mark.”
She inhaled, looking at Stokes in the monitor that, in this particular instance, had been provided to her by the studio technicians.
“Yes, that’s true. Mark died just over a year ago.”
“A woman like yourself — two children, high-octane career — it must be tough trying to lead an active social life. Have you dated anyone since Mark passed?”
Deep, deep breath.
“My professional and maternal responsibilities are very fulfilling, Mac. And about all I care to handle right now.”
“But a lady with your beauty, smarts, and class, with all your verve, catch me, has gotta have scores of young bucks locking antlers—”
Bucks? I don’t believe this.
“Mac, forgive me for interrupting, but I’m sure my personal affairs are of less interest to your viewers than the progress we at NASA are making with regard to the Orion investigation.”
“Then I just better put my tongue in a tooth corral and let you do some talking. But first, how about the lowdown how NASA’s gonna convince Roger Gordian to change his mind about bailing out of Brazil…?”
* * * The place where Orion had been delivered into the world had become its morgue.
At nine-thirty P.M., an hour after her appearance on McCauley Stokes Live—which had concluded with a leering wink from the host, and was, blessedly, her final media engagement of the day — Annie Caulfield stood alone inside the Vehicle Assembly Building at the KSC, a structure that spanned eight acres at the north end of the Cape and rose 525 feet into the air, proportions that made the VAB the only indoor facility in America able to house the space shuttle’s orbiter, solid rocket boosters, and external fuel tank both before and after they were mated into a vertical stack.
About a month ago, one of the center’s two crawler-transporters had borne Orion across the three and a half miles from the VAB to Launch Pad 39A, its engines guzzling 150 gallons of diesel fuel per minute for the entire five hours it took to reach the pad. Earlier today, that same tracked vehicle had conveyed the spacecraft’s remains back to the building before the solemn eyes of NASA personnel like a funeral wagon for a slain Colossus. And now the charred and twisted segments of Orion lay spread across the floor of High Bay 1, smelling of smoke, burned fuel, and melted plastics — the acrid, resinous odor seeping into the processed air of the facility so that it stung the inside of Annie’s nose and made the lining of her throat feel swollen and irritated.
Why had she driven here tonight in her UpLink-leased Saab, making a detour to the Cape before heading back to her condo from the television studio, calling ahead to let her kids’ nursemaid — Sown in from Houston with her family, also courtesy of Roger Gordian — know she’d be an hour late getting home? She scarcely needed to be reminded that her trip to Florida was no all-expenses-paid dream vacation won after a bouncy performance on The Price Is Right, or a knock on the door by someone from Publisher’s Clearinghouse. She had been here at Canaveral only the week before, when the scorched wreckage in the aisles around her was still a commanding, majestic vessel about to pierce the upper limit of the atmosphere. When Jim Rowland had pointed to the Turnip patch on his chest, mouthing their old training class motto to her, flashing his crooked little grin before entering the silver bus that had carried him to his death. When Orion had been something other than a name that would be forever synonymous with tragedy and irrevocable loss.
Terra nos respuet.
No, she did not need any reminders about the reason she was in Florida.
Annie looked around the vast floor of the room, her brows drawn into a contemplative M above her eyes, deep grooves bracketing the comers of her mouth. If the explosion had occurred even seconds after Orion began its ascent, the debris would have been scattered across the bottom of the Atlantic, which would have made its reclamation a prolonged and arduous task requiring a flotilla of recovery ships and scores of divers. But because the fire had taken place prior to liftoff, almost every part of the craft — from the smallest, still-unidentified scraps of scorched metal, to the gigantic bolts that had held the stack together, to large sections of the Orbiter’s delta wings and fuselage — had been salvaged from the launchpad area, then brought here to be tagged and audited like bodily remains awaiting a coroner’s exam. What word could she use to describe her feelings about that? Encouraged? Thankful? It seemed obscene to use either in a context of such utter grimness and heartache.
The segments of the craft and equipment numbered in the hundreds, a few of them relatively unscathed, most damaged by flames and smoke. Tomorrow she would run herd over the first group of forensic specialists to inspect these parts that could never again add up to a whole… no, not even if every last screw and inch of wiring had been recovered. There would be a fresh round of interviews with newspeople, mountains of paperwork, a long list of phone calls — including Roger Gordian’s promised briefing on the Brazilian incident. She needed some rest. A shower, a peek in at the kids, then bed.
So why on earth hadn’t she gone directly home instead of coming to view this terrible, oppressive scene after everyone but the uniformed men in the gatehouse had left for the night?
Annie frowned, trying to think of an answer to her own question — and then suddenly realized that her need to do some thinking might very well be the answer. Or most of it anyway.
If she’d been asked to grade her own first-day-on-the-job media performance, Annie believed she might at best find herself deserving of a C minus. The coverage had veered in a direction she had not meant for it to take… and worse yet, had been torn from her grasp by the newshounds and begun to feed off their intentional and unintentional distortions. What had originated with Gary HoneyVanilla’s offhand question about the possibility of Roger Gordian withdrawing from Brazil had led several media outlets to assert there were “rumors”—plural— of an UpLink pullout by midday, a word that hardened into “reports” at her afternoon press conference — thank you, Allen Murdock — giving the story a false legitimacy, and inciting fervid debate about its ramifications for ISS on Crossfire and kindred early evening shout fests some hours later.
Insofar as Annie could continue tracing its genesis, the next permutation of the story occurred when one of the early evening network news broadcasts blended an analysis of the day’s speculation into its overall coverage, creating an ambiguous muddle of fact and fiction that was later used as source material by yet another national news program. It had all culminated with the rootin’-tootin’ McCauley Stokes asking Annie how NASA meant to stop UpLink’s pullout as if it were an actuality rather than something that had sprung from Gary HoneyVanilla’s imagination.
Hence, the story had incredibly gone through seven distinct stages over the course of a single news cycle, and Annie had needed to spend most of her air time with Stokes addressing the compounded
