worked for NASA, even now, were pretty much space nuts.
NASA insiders were just the type to love crazy ideas like going to Titan. And NASA’s overenthusiasm had, she knew, caused a kind of collective lapse in good political judgement many times before. NASA insiders had a vision that the rest of the world, she told herself brutally, generally didn’t share.
And, she thought, nor did Jake Hadamard, which was why he had been appointed.
She knew that Hadamard would perceive grave risks, for the Agency and himself, in taking such an extravagant option. Giving the Shuttle orbiters to the Navy for gunnery practice was cheaper, and would cost no lives. And if failure were to come, she knew that the reaction would be that anyone should have known better than to undertake such a hubristic mission.
It would be Hadamard who would have to answer such charges. Working out her approach to Hadamard was the key part of Benacerraf’s planning.
She moved a camp bed into her office at JSC. Sometimes, she didn’t go home to Clear Lake for days on end.
From the air, Jiang Ling thought the Houston area looked like the surface of another planet, occupied and systematically bombed, perhaps, by malevolent aliens. The coastline was riddled with bays, canals, lakes, bayous and lagoons, all filled with oily water. A perceptible smog hovered over the glittering refineries around Galveston Bay.
Her NASA host pointed out Galveston Island, where she could make out a long, clear yellow slice of coastline: evidently a fine sandy beach, with what looked like a bulky oil rig, out to sea. The NASA person told her that the rig was there to dredge up sea-bottom sand, and pump it to the shore. The beach used to be stony, and the sand was only about eleven years old! Jiang was startled by the note of pride in the woman’s voice at this comical monument.
The plane – an ageing Cathay 747 – began its descent.
She was bustled off the plane and processed briskly through customs. The terminal building felt cool – chill, in fact. Jiang wore only a light jacket and trousers; she wished briefly she had brought something heavier. But when she emerged from the terminal building into the full strength of the July noontime Houston sun, the heat and humidity hit her as if she’d walked into a wall. The air was tangibly moist, the light intense, great polarized sheets of it bouncing into her eyes from the soft-looking asphalt surface, and the glinting metal carapaces of the cars which clustered here.
Waiting for her was a limousine, jet black, with a big softscreen panel, bearing a message which scrolled across the doors and wing. WELCOME JIANG LING, CHINA’s NUMBER ONE SPACEWOMAN. The message was repeated in Spanish, Chinese and English.
She clambered into the back of the limousine. It was like climbing through a long, padded corridor. There was a little drinks table, moulded into the upholstery, with champagne glasses and a decanter, and there were tiny TVs and softscreens. Waiting for her was a Chinese: Xu Shiyou, a senior Party official attached to the Embassy here, who would chaperon her. He was a fat man – American-diet fat, she thought – and his bald head was a round, sleek globe. Jiang was used to such meticulous planning and control; she was prepared to accept that she was a valued asset of the Party now, who required careful management.
It was a price she would pay, as she worked her way through these ceremonial duties, en route to space once more, some time in the imagined future.
The door was closed behind her, cocooning her in a little bubble of glass and new-smelling leather upholstery. The driver was sealed off by a partition; Jiang could only make out the back of the woman’s head.
The limousine pulled away. The windows of the car were clear, but Jiang became aware of a faint rippling effect, as the landscape slid past. The glass was thick, no doubt bullet-proof. She shivered, not just from the cold. Though she had circled the Earth in the Lei Feng Number One, she had never before travelled outside China. Now she wondered how she, as her country’s first space traveller, was going to be welcomed here in the home of Glenn and Armstrong.
The airport was on the northern outskirts of the Houston conurbation, and Jiang’s limousine, at the heart of a little cluster of cars, swept down the freeway towards downtown. The traffic was heavy, the smog thick in the air.
The land was hot, flat, the conurbation sprawling. The infrastructure – the layout of the roads – was clean and functional. And yet she had an impression – not of newness – but of middle age. Much of Houston’s growth, she knew, dated back to the space program growth period of the 1960s, and the oil boom of the 1970s. But those times were decades gone, and Houston was starting to age, to slump back into the plain.
Much of the time her view was obstructed by the roadside ads – huge, colourful, many of them animated – which battered at her senses, exploiting their slivers of competitive advantage. Most of the signs and ads were in Spanish.
There were water towers on the horizon, rusted, dominating. The land was greener than she had expected, but park-like, with orderly trees and thick-bladed grass; there seemed to be water sprinklers buried everywhere, many of them in full operation – even now at high noon, when much of the water would be wasted. Jiang looked at those glittering fountains, the shining green lawns, imagining the tons of water vapour being lost to the air each second, all over this baking city.
She remarked on this to Xu Shiyou. The contrast with the water shortages suffered in her own country was marked, she said severely. And it was a global problem: the growth in the population and the demands of the industrializing nations – including China – was poised to outstrip the planetary supply of fresh water which fell from the sky …
Xu smiled. ‘That is of course true,’ he said. ‘But until we can build pipelines to link the aquifers of Texas with the parched gardens of Beijing, there is little we can achieve by complaining about it.’
Jiang had the disquieting sense that Xu was mocking her.
‘You are nevertheless right in your perception,’ said Xu Shiyou, comfortingly. He waved a hand at Houston, beyond the car window. ‘America is a crass, empty-headed culture. And – look at that! – in the middle of this shower of advertising, you have their God, great neon crosses and beaming preachers, sold with the same methods as hamburgers.’
She looked out of the window anew. Xu was right, she saw; the ads for hair products and soft drinks and face implants were punctuated with immense crucifixes, images of Jesus.
‘Americans are free,’ Xu Shiyou murmured. ‘No intelligent person would deny that. But freedom is the minimum. I have lived and worked here for three years, and it is obvious to me that the Americans don’t understand the world beyond their borders – that they fear it, in fact.’ He looked through the window; animated electronic light glimmered in his eyes.
She stared out of the car as he lectured her. The office blocks of downtown Houston thrust out of the plain like a collection of launch gantries, grey in the mist and smog.
The Big S, JSC’s trophy Saturn V, was cordoned off from the public tours today and encased in scaffolding. Under Benacerraf’s instruction the bird was being surveyed, to see if it could indeed be made operational once more. But Marcus White had been asked to host the Chinese space girl, Jiang Ling, on her brief tour of JSC, and he couldn’t think of a better item to show her. So he got hold of a couple of hard hats and escorted Jiang inside the fenced-off rectangle that contained the booster.
Besides, he wanted to see the Big S for himself. He figured he may as well combine this makeweight
