The car, parked in a Building 30 space, was a hired stretch limo with a bar in the back. It was pleasantly cool, a relief after the heat of the day. Lee got in and lit up a cigarette.
Cane nodded to the driver, and the car pulled smoothly away.
Lee eyed Cane. “Not like you to be so extravagant, Art.”
Cane shrugged and loosened his tie. “I’m an old man, JK. What can I say? I can’t put up with this Texas heat; I need the air-conditioning.” Cane folded his jacket neatly on his lap, and then put his hands together over the jacket, one on top of the other. “Now, look here, JK. You know the pressure we’ve been under.”
“Sure.”
“That goddamn tiger team thing. And the CARR on 009, and the delays in shipping the bird to the Cape, and those problems with the busted fuel tanks. And now that business in orbit.”
“But that’s all resolved, Art.” Lee launched into a bubbling description of how the whifferdill problem had already been diagnosed to a mis-set switch in the MEM’s cabin. “…When the ascent engine fired, the switch told the abort guidance system it should start looking for the Command Module, to get a lock on for a fast emergency docking. But of course the Apollo was miles away at the time.” He laughed. “So the MEM just started tumbling, looking for that old Command Module for all it was worth…”
Cane held up a hand, the skin on it so loose it reminded Lee of a plucked chicken’s claw. “Yeah,” he said. “But it wasn’t a crew mistake, was it? I mean, they thought they’d set that switch correctly. We had mislabeled the switch. So it was our fault, not theirs.” He shook his head, looking gaunt and old. “Jesus Christ, JK, how in hell did you let something like that out of the factory? It could have killed those guys.”
“Oh, come on, Art. It wasn’t so serious. It’ll be trivial to fix. All of the problems we had were trivial. Finding problems is what proving flights are for. Now, I can take the D-prime records and transcripts and test results back to Newport Beach, and we can begin raking out the remaining flaws in their hardware.” He felt enthusiastic, energetic, renewed by the flight of his machine. “Why, I want to set a new record, coming out of this. I want 010 to show the smallest number of defects in its preflight checkout of any craft of any generation ever shipped to the Cape. Why the hell not? We’re going to make history, Art. With the D-prime behind me, I’ll hit the next one out of the park—”
Cane cut him off. “Listen to me, JK. There are some things you just don’t understand about this business. I’m not talking about specific problems. I’m talking about” — he waved his hands vaguely — “a cumulative effect.”
Lee was uneasy, but baffled. “Cumulative?”
“Things kind of pile up, one on top of another. It’s an image thing. There’s been a lot of comment about the performance of the Apollo hardware — the proven stuff, which brought the astronauts home flawlessly — compared to the problems of the MEM. Maybe the contract should have gone to Rockwell after all, is what they’re muttering. With talk like that around, before you know where you are you can’t do anything right. Even fixing what’s wrong, specifically, isn’t going to help. When you’re in this kind of mess all kinds of questions get asked. Queries about the basic competence of my company.” Lee heard frustration and anger in Cane’s thin voice. “Once they’ve decided you’re dogshit, you’ve had it.”
He turned to Lee, his face crumpled with anger and sadness, his rheumy eyes shining. “And that’s what’s happened to us, JK. NASA, Congress, the press — they’ve decided we’re dogshit. That I’m dogshit.”
The pain in his words tore at Lee. “Oh, Christ, Art, it isn’t as bad as that.”
“You know they’re talking again about moving the contract away.”
“They can’t do it,” Lee said vigorously. “You know that. Not without abandoning the schedule altogether.”
Cane was growing angrier. “They’re talking about reassigning a lot of the MEM work to Aerojet, Boeing, GE, McDonnell, Martin, maybe bringing in Rockwell project managers to Newport—”
Lee laughed. “All the usual suspects.”
“This isn’t a fucking joke, JK,” Cane snapped. “Maybe NASA won’t do it. Maybe they can’t. But they’re talking about it. And that’s the point. Goddamn it, don’t you understand any of this? NASA is trying to show us — and Congress and the press — how seriously it’s taking all of this.
“And heads have been rolling in NASA. Did you know that? Guys who’ve been jerking off instead of keeping a hawkeye on us.” He rattled off a list of names, people at Marshall and Houston.
“Yeah, but look, Art, those guys are mostly administrator types. It won’t make a damn bit of difference if they go or stay. It’s engineers that count. You know that.”
“But it doesn’t matter what I think. Don’t you see it, JK? It’s all a demonstration of intent. It might seem abstract to you, all a game, but believe me, up on the Hill, it’s real. And now, in response, we have to make our own gesture.”
And suddenly, through his euphoria, Lee did see; he saw it in a flash of comprehension, all of it. “Oh, Christ, Art. Oh, no. You can’t do this.”
Cane reached out and spread his long fingers over Lee’s arm. “I’m sorry, JK. I think I have to. I’m looking at schedule and budget overruns. Shoddy manufacturing practices. A test flight that turned into a fiasco, almost a goddamn lethal fiasco at that.”
Lee looked at the back of the driver’s crew-cut head, at NASA Road One sliding by beyond the car windows. He tried to focus on the here and now: the leather smell of the upholstery, the air-conditioning’s crisp coolness. But he felt numb, as if he were insulated within some pressure suit, like Adam Bleeker and his crew.
“I almost gave my life for this goddamn project, Art.” And my marriage. “You know how close we are to the finish line, don’t you?”
“Yes, JK, I—”
“That close.” He held up thumb and forefinger a fraction apart. “And it’s me who got you there. The whole damn concept, the MEM design based on the old Apollo shape, all of that was mine, Art. And it’s me who’s been holding everybody’s feet to the fire ever since. Now we’ve built it, and it’s going to be the finest spacecraft ever flown. And you’re yanking me out of the saddle, all at the behest of some bunch of do-nothing jerk-offs in Washington who couldn’t find their asses with both hands—”
“Cut it, JK.”
“Who’s going to replace me? Bob Rowen? Jack Morgan, maybe? Or -
“No. Nobody internal. JK, I’ve decided we need a heavyweight program manager to follow you. A top guy, to step into your shoes—”
“Who? Who are you giving my job to?”
Cane looked away. “Gene Tyson.”
Lee stared at him, then laughed out loud. Tyson: the slick, fat veep from Hughes who had laughed Lee out of his office during the MEM bid. “Gene Tyson. Are you kidding me?”
“Gene’s a fine engineer, and a good man.”
“Sure, Art. But he’s no -
Cane looked at him. “No what? No JK Lee?”
“That’s right, damn you. Anyhow, it wouldn’t work. My people wouldn’t work with him. They wouldn’t—” Betray me.
Cane coughed and avoided his eyes again. “Tyson has already agreed to take the job. And I’ve spoken to your people.”
“I… you’re kidding me.”
“Morgan and Xu and Lye and Rowen and -
“And they agreed to go along with this?”
Cane shrugged. “I wouldn’t say they were happy about it. But—”
But they accepted it. And the sons of bitches never said a word to me.
“Listen to me, Art. Don’t do this. We’ve got a fine ship there. And a fine manufacturing process. All we have to do is fine-tune a few items, and we can keep right on course, keep on doing what we’re doing, all the way to Mars. Nothing needs fixing, Art. I really believe that.”