Judd clanks down the grey metal stairs to ground level. He’s furious. With himself. With the sim that caught him out. With the world. He wants to get away from here as fast as he can, away from the scene of his latest, and greatest, failure. He strides past the giant hydraulic rams that support the white, angular simulator. The machine, built in 1977 for one hundred million dollars, was created to test shuttle pilots in over 6000 malfunction and emergency simulations, and to do it with hyperaccurate cabin movement, sound effects and visual representations. It was money well spent. Better to buy the farm here than fly a shuttle into the ground for real and dig a three-billion-dollar barbecue pit.
He realises, unhappily, that he is now, officially, that guy. Everyone knows one: a guy who did the most interesting and meaningful thing in his life when he was young. Judd is the one who flew into orbit once but never did it again, the aerospace equivalent of a one-hit wonder.
The harsh fluorescent lights get in his eyes as he moves along the ground-floor corridor, kick-starting a pain behind his right temple that he knows will become a migraine within the hour. He should deal with it now, head it off with a tablet of Zomig, get out of the stiflingly hot, bright-orange flight suit and take a shower. He doesn’t. He shoulders open the nearest exit and steps outside.
As he leans against the side of the building a light breeze makes his head feel a little better, but the migraine is still coming. He unzips the flight suit, reaches inside and pulls out a zippo and a Marlboro softpack. There’s one crumpled cigarette inside. He slips it in his mouth and flips open the lighter. He knows the cigarette will make him feel better, but only for seven seconds. That initial draw of smoke, mixed with the lingering aroma of zippo fluid, is heaven. Then it’s all downhill. He’ll feel sweaty and nauseous and anxious about dying of cancer, but those first seven seconds, well, they were just the ticket.
‘You can’t smoke in a flight suit.’
He turns. It’s Severson, trying to lighten the mood.
‘Oh, fuck off.’ Judd exhales, turns to Severson with an apologetic grimace. Severson nods an acceptance, does not take offence.
Judd rubs his temple, the unlit cigarette jammed between his teeth. ‘Well, we’re dead.’
‘I know, and I was a helluva guy. How’d you like my performance as unconscious copilot number one? I thought it delightfully subtle.’
‘Sorry, missed it. I was too busy crashing a space shuttle.’ Judd turns and stares into the distance, still perplexed by the turn of events. ‘Christ, how did I let that happen?’
He thinks about it and his hands ‘go Rubik’, which means they face each other and pivot, as if working an invisible Rubik’s cube. He does it unconsciously whenever he’s trying to figure something out. ‘I mean, Jesus. Autoland failure? Really? It’s the simplest thing to fix.’
Severson nods. ‘Well, yeah.’
Judd knew exactly how to remedy the situation but he’d frozen. Actually, it had been more like total brain lock.
‘Everyone’s going to find out.’
Severson nods slowly. ‘They probably know already.’
It’s true. News, especially bad news, specifically bad news about an astronaut, travels fast on the NASA grapevine. There are many astronauts and they’re very competitive, always looking for the advantage. It’s worse than dog-eat-dog. It’s ‘winner dog gets to fly into space while loser dog gets to show the honourable congressman from Dickweed, Nebraska to his seat at the launch’. Judd knows that if you want to pilot the shuttle you have to prove yourself above and beyond. Crashing the simulator, even once, won’t cut it. This was number three for Judd.
‘They handed me the keys to the castle and I dropped them in the moat.’
Severson exhales. ‘Pretty much.’
Today had been Judd’s final latte at the last-chance cafe. The crew for the last mission, slated to launch in mid-2013, won’t be announced for another two weeks. The end date for the shuttle program had originally been late 2011, but the Obama administration had extended it for two years. There were ‘misgivings’ about relying on the Russians to safely transport NASA astronauts to the International Space Station, considering the countries’ strained relations over the US-backed missile shield in Poland and Putin’s predilection for rigging elections. But now Judd’s final opportunity had evaporated because he’d screwed the pooch.
He flips opens the zippo, dinged and scarred so the brass shows through. It had belonged to the legendary Deke Slayton, one of the original Mercury 7 astronauts. At least that’s what the description said on the eBay auction.
Severson looks at him. ‘Thought you quit?’
Judd slams his thumb down on the zippo’s wheel but it doesn’t ignite. He tries again. No sale. Not even a spark. No sign of life, like his career. Judd snaps the zippo’s lid shut, frustrated. ‘I did.’
Judd stares at the ceiling. He can’t sleep. He blames Richard Nixon.
Judd’s paternal grandfather, who lived alone, deep in the woods of upstate Michigan, and never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like, once told his young grandson that if he ever needed to discover the root cause of a problem he should examine every step that lead up to it and ‘work it backwards’.
Grandpa Bernie swore by ‘work it backwards’ and used it to answer all manner of questions, from who’d been siphoning gas from the tank of his Chevy pick-up (the Johnson kids from down the way), to who really shot John Lennon (novelist Stephen King, apparently).
So, as Judd tries to work out why he can’t sleep, he dusts off Grandpa’s old chestnut and decides to work it backwards.
So why is Tricky Dicky to blame for his sleepless nights?
Work it backwards.
Judd can’t sleep because his career is on the skids. Actually, that’s too kind. His performance in the simulator today was the straw that gave the camel lumbago.
Why is his career on the skids?
He lost his nerve.
Why?
Backwards once more.
He saw his best friend die as Columbia broke up on that brisk February morning and now he’s afraid. The fear crept up on him, slipped in through a side window, just a little at first. He became used to it, made allowances for it, didn’t realise it was growing, infecting his every decision, until he could no longer make one. It’s a surprise to him because he’s never felt anything like it before.
Why is Judd afraid?
Backwards.
He doesn’t trust the machine.
Why?
The shuttle is unsafe. He watched it break apart and kill his best friend.
Why is the shuttle unsafe?
It is a flawed design.
And why’s that?
Backwards once again.
Because Richard Nixon made it that way. After basking in the success of the Apollo moon landings between ‘69 and ‘71, gladly accepting plaudits for something he had nothing to do with, the president felt, incredibly, that the public had grown bored by the feat of safely transporting human beings to and from another world and that the political advantages of manned space flight had been exhausted. Simply, he didn’t think space travel was worth the money.
So he made a decision that, at the time, was obscured by the fog of the Watergate investigation and allowed the Senate to slash the NASA budget.
Nixon also thought he might have trouble with McGovern in the 1972 presidential election. He felt he needed votes in the Sun Belt, where most of the aerospace industry was located. Without a new NASA mission there would be no new technology to design and build and test. Massive job losses, and the attendant political fallout, would follow.