Shadow Watch

dependability here that Nordstrum, who had left his Czech homeland, a White House cabinet appointment, a D.C. town house, possessions, lovers, and most recently his multifaceted career behind with a lightness of foot equal to Fred Astaire sliding across a dance floor, found impressive and reassuring. It wasn’t as if time was standing still — Gord’s hair was a little grayer and thinner than it used to be, his once-petite secretary had filled out around the hips, and on the positive side, both had managed to stay reasonably in line with current fashions. But through tide and tempest, Gord’s office was Gord’s office.

“So,” Gordian said. “How’s temporary retirement agreeing with you?”

Nordstrum raised his eyebrows. “Temporary? You need to check your sources.”

“Spoken like a true journalist,” Gordian said. “Alex, you’re under fifty and one of the most competent and knowledgeable men I know. I’d just guessed you would eventually want to get back to work.”

“I won’t reject the compliments,” he said. “Fact is, though, that after the crypto brawl, and almost being hijacked aboard a nuclear submarine, and getting frozen so far out of the White House that its gardening staff fends me off with hedge clippers if I get too close, I don’t feel the urge to be anything but a couch potato.”

Gordian sat there without comment for several moments, Mount Hamilton visible through the window behind him, thrusting high above San Jose’s urban development, extending the atmosphere of benign yet unassailable permanence beyond the confines of the room.

“I know you were at the Cape for the shuttle launch,” Nordstrum said. “I’d tuned in to watch it on CNN.” He shook his head. “A god-awful tragedy.”

Gordian nodded.

“Not something I’ll ever forget,” he said. “The sense of loss… of personal grief in that control room can’t be described.”

Nordstrum looked at him. “I’ve been assuming,” he said, “that Orion’s why you got in touch.”

Gordian met his gaze and slowly nodded again. “I was conflicted about it,” he said. “While I respect your wish to stay free of involvement, I could use your advice. A great deal.”

“Every time I think I’m out of it they pull me back in,” Nordstrum said.

Gordian gave him a thin smile. “Thanks for sparing me the full Pacino impression.”

“Don’t mention it.”

There was another pause. Gordian steepled his fingers on the desk, looked down at them, then looked up at Nordstrum.

“You wrote an analysis of the Challenger disaster for Time magazine back in the eighties, before we knew each other,” he said. “I never forgot it.”

“And I never knew you read it,” Nordstrum said. His brow creased. “That was my first major piece. If recollection serves, we met a month or two after its publication.”

“At a Washington cocktail party thrown by one of our mutual acquaintances,” Gordian said.

“Coincidence?”

Nordstrum waited.

Gordian didn’t respond.

Nordstrum sighed, giving up.

“After Challenger went down, the media struck up the tune that NASA and the space program were finished,” he said. “I remember hearing this constant rattle about how an entire generation of children had suffered permanent emotional scarring from having viewed the explosion on television, and innumerable comparisons between that event and JFK’s assassination, and predictions that we would never be able to recover or muster the will to go into space again.”

“You very strongly attacked that notion.”

“Yes, for a whole list of reasons,” Nordstrum said. “It allows a terrible accident to be packaged as a neat blend of pop psyche and sensationalism for the nightly news and the Oprah show. It completely discounts human resiliency and says we’re compelled to act as we do by external forces that are beyond our control. Maybe worst of all, it assumes failure to be a given, and then relieves us of responsibility by promoting a linear fiction, a simplistic cause-and-effect explanation for that failure. ‘Don’t blame me, blame my psychological deficits.’ In my opinion, nothing could be more misleading and demoralizing.”

Gordian looked at him. “You see why I miss having you around, Alex,” he said.

Nordstrum smiled a little.

“Lay a soapbox at my feet and that’s what you get,” he said after a moment. “At any rate, the central point of my article was that blaming Challenger for the loss of public confidence in NASA was getting causes and symptoms totally mixed up. We all grieved for the astronauts who died aboard that spacecraft, but the agency’s tarnished reputation after the accident didn’t result from a national trauma. It was a consequence of institutional problems that had been developing and compounding for quite a while, and the ugly blame game that erupted when the Rogers Commission, and later the Augustine Report, brought them to light.”

“Concluding that NASA’s internal bureaucracy had gotten so large there was a total disintegration of authority and decision-making procedures,” Gordian said. “Each manager had become lord of his own kingdom, and their feuding had broken down vital lines of communication.”

“That’s the short version, yes. But it misses too much that’s really disturbing. Information about the O-ring weakness and other potential launch hazards was suppressed — consciously, actively suppressed — because those managers were looking out for their own competitive interests to the exclusion of everything else. Funding needs, political pressures, and production deadlines drove agency officials to lower the bar on safety practices. A lot of people were worried about the launch, yet nobody wanted to be the one to stand up and make the decision to scrub. It wasn’t that they intended to put the astronauts at increased risk, it was that they’d succumbed to a kind of organizational group-think that conditioned them to see the risks as being less serious than they clearly were. With every launch, they became more like problem gamblers, telling themselves their luck would hold and everything would work out okay. They made their mistakes with their eyes wide open.”

Gordian had been watching Nordstrum quietly as he spoke. Now he crossed his arms on the desktop and leaned forward over them.

“Alex, it isn’t the same with Orion,” he said. “The space agency is a different entity these days. More cohesive and goal-oriented. More transparent in its internal operations. Its standards have been restored. I never would’ve committed UpLink’s resources to ISS if that hadn’t been demonstrated to me.”

Nordstrum looked thoughtful.

“Gord, you may be sold,” he said. “But the currency of trust NASA built up with the public during its Mercury and Apollo years is almost depleted. Selling them is going to be a problem.”

“You aren’t sounding very sanguine.”

Norstrum expelled a breath. “The accident creates uncertainty even for those of us who believe in space research. And long before Orion, a great many taxpayers, maybe a majority, considered the program a wasteful frittering away of their money. For its critics, a forty-billion-dollar international space station, with hundreds of millions going to bail out the Russians — who couldn’t pay for their end despite Starinov’s pledges to the contrary — is emblematic of that waste. They haven’t seen any practical value in it and nobody’s done an adequate job of making them feel otherwise. And now, with the death of Colonel Rowland…” He spread his hands. “I wish I could be more optimistic.”

Gordian leaned further across the desk.

“Okay,” he said. “What do we do?”

Nordstrum sat quietly for several moments before answering.

“I’m not your paid consultant anymore. Not a newspaper columnist. I can only speak to you now as someone who sees the workings of government and big industry as countless other people in this country do, from the outside through shaded windows, and maybe that’s a good place to come at this from, maybe it makes it easier to be their voice.” He paused. “Convince them, convince me, that the Orion investigation is going to be completely aboveboard. I don’t want to hear about its progress from some evasive media spokesman who believes his primary responsibilities are to spin the facts and keep me mollified while those in the know go about their work in secrecy. I’m sick of those types and am going to hit the clicker the instant they show their faces