A chance in a thousand. But yesterday it had been a chance in a million. A few months ago a chance in a billion, or no chance at all.
No, I didn’t blame my hands for trembling.
«The conditions?» I asked Ellen Gallagher.
«Let’s have the amenities first. May I offer you a drink, Max, to fortify you?»
«The conditions, woman. Quit stalling.»
«First, a degree in rocket engineering. You said you could get one if you wanted it. Can you get one before the project appointments are made? Say within a year?»
I groaned. «I can, but it will mean some tough slogging. I’ll have to pass examinations in about ten subjects. Six of them I can pass as of right now, but four will take me some pretty heavy studying. They’re things I know from the practical side, but I’m going to have to absorb some theory. Yes, I can do it in a year. Maybe less. And what’s the other condition?»
«That you get into administrative work, now. And between now and the time the appointments are made work yourself up to as high a spot as you can.»
I groaned again.
She said, «Here’s why, Max. The project will be set up so the project director appoints his own assistant—but it will have to be subject to presidential approval; you have to look good to pass that.»
I said, «But if the President appoints the director, how’ll you swing any weight as to who the director makes his assistant?»
She smiled. «Because it will be a deal. I’ll pick my figurehead for director—someone with a big name but out of a job and looking for one—and I’ll offer to recommend him for the job on the condition that he appoint you his assistant. If he wants the directorship badly enough, he’ll agree—up to a point. But I still won’t be able to sell him a simple, barefoot rocket mech, Max. You can see that.»
«I’m afraid I can. How high will I have to get?»
«The higher the better. But any responsible administrative job with a big rocket port ought to do it. That and your being an accredited rocket engineer. Not to mention the glamour of your being an ex-spaceman.»
«And if I go through all that and then the President does his own picking out of a project director?»
«A chance you take. But I think I can make my recommendation stick—by the simple expedient of picking a man who’ll be completely acceptable to the President, whom he might pick anyway if I didn’t make a recommendation. And there are other angles. Complicated to explain—but I’m pretty sure I can swing it. If you can get that degree and get yourself into a job with a good sounding title. Can you?»
«I can,» I said. «I fear that I can. Any other conditions?»
«No.»
«Then I’ll have that drink you offered me. I need it. Where is it?»
«In that cabinet in the corner. Make anything you want and please pour me a glass of the sherry.»
I took sherry too. I had some heavy thinking coming up.
I said, «Los Angeles Rocket Port is my best bet. It’s one of the biggest, for one thing. For another, the superintendent there is a friend of mine, the closest friend I’ve got among the brass. He came up from being a mech himself and we talk the same language.
«And he’s been heckling me for years to wash the grease off my hands and get into the office end. He’ll start me in as a department head if there’s an opening. If there isn’t, he’ll give me the best thing open and swing me up as fast as he can. I might, with luck, even get to be assistant superintendent within a year. In fact—»
I thought a minute. «In fact, if we want to be Machiavellian about it, and why shouldn’t we, I can tell him the score and why I need the title for a front. And he can probably fix it for me to be holding the title temporarily just while the appointments to Project Jupiter are being made. Hell yes, he’ll do that for me. And by then I can have saved up enough so we can give his regular assistant a month or so off with my paying his salary for the period I hold his job for a front. Sure Klockerman will do that.»
«Assistant superintendent would be fine. Even your being a department head might be enough. How soon can you. start?»
«A day or two, I guess. Luckily we’re slack on work at Treasure so I won’t be leaving Rory in a jam—and even if I was, he’d understand when I tell him the score. Sure, I can leave here tomorrow. I’ll call up Klockerman tonight after I get home and talk to him. And I’ll see Rory tonight and catch the first jet out.»
She laughed a little. «The thing I like about you, Max, is that you don’t do things by halves. Returning favors aside, I really want you to run Project Jupiter. You’ll do a good job of it.»
«I’ll do my best,» I said. «Damn you, Senator, I ought to hate you for making the next year of my life the miserable one it’s going to be, but I love you instead. How soon are you going to be well enough for me to make a pass at you?» She laughed again. «You’d do even that for a chance to ran the project?»
«I’d do even that,» I said. «But we’ll postpone discussion of it now. And let’s consider my plans settled and quit talking about me. Tell me something about the project, about the rocket itself. Bradly had it all figured out?»
«To the last decimal, Max. A detailed prospectus. But the prospectus is in my safe in Los Angeles and you can see it after I go back home there. I could tell you a few things about it, but I’ve no head for technical details and I might get some of them wrong. You might as well wait till you can read the prospectus and get the whole thing at once.»
«All right,» I said. «How soon will you be in L.A.?»
«Within a month if I keep on improving as fast as I have, and with no setbacks. About the first of March, maybe. As soon as you’re settled there, write me so I’ll have your address and phone and can let you know when I’m coming.»
«Fine,» I said. «Will do. But won’t you tell me even a few simple things about the rocket now, so I can be thinking about them?»
«Please don’t ask me to, Max. I’m getting tired now and you’ve stayed pretty long. If we get started talking about the rocket now it’ll be hard to stop. And everything about it is in Brad’s prospectus that you’ll be seeing. It was Brad’s baby.»
It was Brad’s baby, and she was carrying it. I wondered if that meant anything and decided it was none of my business if it did. I’d just been kidding about making that pass. Or had I been kidding? She was a damned attractive woman.
I went straight to Rory’s instead of back to my room, and as soon as I’d told Rory the score I phoned Klockerman. It was okay. He wanted me. Best he could do right off was to give me charge of the tool room but he had a couple of department heads who weren’t too satisfactory and he thought that within a month at the outside he could move me up. I didn’t, over the phone, tell him my real reason for switching from mech work or how high and fast I wanted to rise. Time enough for that later, over a drink or two.
I offered Rory the optical blanks I’d started to grind; it takes a lot of evenings to grind a good reflector for a scope and my evenings were going to be busy for a long time.
I still wanted a scope to look at Jupiter with but now I’d have to buy one instead of making it. Rory wanted the blanks and drove me to my room so he could pick them up. He waited while I packed and then took me to the square where I could catch a helicab to the stratojet field on Angel. I was in Los Angeles by midnight.
February, March I worked days, studied nights.
But I was making progress both ways. At the rocket port I was head of a department, maintenance. Dull stuff, but it gave me a title. And I gave it all I had and was doing well; it looked like I might get that first assistantship honestly, without finagling, and within the year. I hadn’t leveled with Klockerman yet; I’d decided that if I could get as far as that assistantship on my own, finagling might get me even farther. If I got to be his assistant honestly, before I told Klocky what I was really working for, then he might let me pull a real coup by taking a month or so off at the crucial time and leaving me as acting superintendent of the third largest rocket port in the world.