Rosenberg, half Benacerraf’s age, seemed almost shy.
Rosenberg’s driving was erratic – he took it at speed, with not much room for error – and he was a little wild-eyed, as if he’d been missing out on sleep. Probably he had; he seemed the type.
JPL wasn’t NASA, strictly speaking. She’d never been out here before, but she’d heard from insiders that JPL’s spirit of independence – and its campus-like atmosphere – were important to it, and notorious in the rest of the Agency.
So maybe she shouldn’t have been surprised to have been summoned out here like this, by Isaac Rosenberg, a skinny guy in his mid-twenties with glasses, bad skin, and thinning hair tied back in a fashion that had died out, to her knowledge, thirty years ago.
‘This seems a way to go,’ she remarked after a while. ‘We’re a long way out of Pasadena.’
‘Yeah,’ Rosenberg said. ‘Well, they used to test rockets here. Hence “Jet Propulsion Laboratory” …’ He kept talking; it seemed to make him feel more comfortable. ‘The history’s kind of interesting. It all started with a low-budget bunch of guys working out of Caltech, flying their rockets out of the Arroyo Seco, before the Second World War. They had huts of frame and corrugated metal, unheated and draughty, so crammed with rocket plumbing there was no room for a desk … And then a sprawling, expensive suburb got built all around them.
‘After the war the lab became an eyesore, and the residents in Flintridge and Altadena and La Canada started to complain about the static motor tests, and the flashing red lights at night.’
‘Red lights?’
He grinned. ‘It was missile test crews heading off for White Sands. But the rumours were that the lights were ambulances taking out bodies of workers killed in rocket tests.’
She smiled. ‘Are you sure they were just test crews? Or –’
‘Or maybe there’s been a cover-up.’ He whistled a snatch of the classic X-Files theme, and they both laughed. ‘I used to love that show,’ he said. ‘But I never got over the ice-dance version.’
He entered La Canada, an upper-middle-class suburb, lawns and children and ranch-style, white-painted houses, and turned a corner, and there was JPL. The lab was hemmed into a cramped and smoggy site, roughly triangular, bounded by the San Gabriel Mountains, the Arroyo Seco, and the neat homes of La Canada.
Rosenberg swung the car off the road.
There was a guard at the campus entrance; he waved them into a lot.
Rosenberg walked her through visitor control, and offered to show her around the campus.
They walked slowly down a central mall that was adorned with a fountain. The mall stretched from the gate into the main working area of the laboratory. Office buildings filled the Arroyo; some of them were drab, military-standard boxy structures, but there was also a tower of steel and glass, on the north side of the mall, and an auditorium on the south.
Crammed in here, it was evident that the only way JPL had been able to build was up.
Rosenberg said, ‘That’s the von Karman auditorium. A lot of great news conferences and public events took place in there: the first pictures from Mars, the Voyager pictures of Jupiter and Saturn –’
‘What about the glass tower?’
‘Building 180, for the administrators. Can’t you tell? Nine storeys of marble and glass sheathing.’ He pointed. ‘Executive suites on the top floor. I expect you’ll be up there later to meet the Director.’
The current JPL Director was a retired Air Force general. ‘Maybe,’ said Benacerraf. ‘It’s not on my schedule.’ And besides, she’d had enough Air Force in her face recently. ‘I wasn’t expecting quite so much landscaping.’
‘Yeah, but it’s limited to the public areas. I always think the place looks like a junior college that ran out of money half way through a building program. When the trees and flower pots appeared, the old-timers say, they knew it was all over for the organization. Landscaping is a sure sign of institutional decadence. You come to JPL to do the final far-out things, not for pot plants …’
She watched him. ‘You love the place, don’t you?’
He looked briefly embarrassed; it was clear he’d rather be talking at her than be analysed. ‘Hell, I don’t know. I like what’s been achieved here, I guess. Ms Benacerraf –’
‘Paula.’
He looked confused, comically. ‘Call me Rosenberg. But things are changing now. It seems to me I’m living through the long, drawn-out consequences of massive policy mistakes made long before I was born. And that makes me angry.’
‘Is that why you asked me to come out here?’
‘Kind of.’
He guided her into one of the buildings. He led her through corridors littered with computer terminals, storage media and printouts; there were close-up Ranger photographs of the Moon’s surface, casually framed and stuck on the walls.
But those Moon photographs were all of forty years old: just historic curios, as meaningless now as a Victorian naturalist’s collection of dead, pinned insects. There was an air of age, of decay about the place, she thought; the narrow corridors with their ceiling tiles were redolent of the corporate buildings of the middle of the last century.
JPL was showing its age. It had become a place of the past, not the future.
How sad.
He led her out back of the campus buildings, to a dusty area compressed against the Arroyo and the mountain. Here, the roughhewn character of the original 1940s laboratory remained: a huddle of two- and three-storey Army base buildings – now more than sixty years old – in standard-issue military paintwork.
Rosenberg pointed. ‘Even by the end of the war there were still only about a hundred workers here. Just lashed-up structures of corrugated metal, redwood tie and stone. See over there? They had a string of test pits dug into the side of the hill, lined with railroad ties. They called it the gulch. You had to drive to the site over a bumpy road that washed out in the rainy season … It was as crude as hell. And yet, the exploration of the Solar System started right here.’
‘Why are you showing me all this, Rosenberg?’
He took off his glasses and polished them on a corner of his T-shirt. ‘Because it’s all over for JPL,’ he said. ‘For decades, as far back as Apollo, NASA has starved JPL and space science to pay for Man-In-Space. And now – hell, I presume you’ve heard the scuttlebutt. They’re even going to close down the Deep Space Network. They’re already talking about mothballing the Hubble. And Goldstone will be turned over to the USAF for some kind of navel-searching reconnaissance work.’
‘It’s all politics, Rosenberg,’ Benacerraf said gently. ‘You have to understand. The White House has to respond to pressure from the likes of Congressman Maclachlan. They have to appear in control of their space budgets. So if they are throwing money at new launch vehicles to replace Shuttle, they have to cut somewhere else …’
‘But when we all calm down from our fright
