“It’s not true about mad dogs and Englishmen, you know. I hate the heat. I think it’s affecting my health, actually.”
“Isn’t your office air-conditioned?”
“Oh yes. They’ve wedged me into a splendid little nook over in the electronics building. Brand-new air conditioner sitting in the window, puts frost on my tea when I turn it all the way up. But it’s the getting there that’s bothersome. I’ll have to walk half a mile in that sun…”
Thinking swiftly, Jo said, “Why don’t you work in my office for the next hour or so, until the sun goes down a bit and the afternoon breeze cools things off outside?”
“In your office? Oh, I couldn’t. All my papers and things…”
Jo took him by the arm and started walking slowly up the steps with him. “The data you’re working on is in the central computer, isn’t it? You can use my terminal and work just as easily here as at your own desk.”
“I never thought of that.”
She smiled at him. “You’re accustomed to working with paper. My generation is accustomed to working with electronics. Anything you need can be called up on the computer terminal’s readout screen.”
“Yes, but I’ll be dispossessing you of your own office.”
“I can work anywhere,” Jo said as they climbed the stairs. “Don’t worry about it. You’ll be a lot more comfortable here.”
“It’s awfully good of you,” Cavendish said.
They reached her office. Jo sat the old man down at her desk and showed him how to summon up his own work on the computer terminal.
“Marvelous,” Cavendish said, smiling.
“I even have a teakettle here, if you don’t mind drinking American tea.”
His smile lost a notch. “From tea bags?”
Jo nodded. “If you need anything, I’ll be down on the main computer floor, in the Pit.”
“The Pit?”
“That’s what the programmers call the central well of the building: the Pit.”
Cavendish’s shaggy brows rose. “Is there a Pendulum also?”
“A pendulum? Like on a clock?”
“Edgar Allan Poe’s story, ‘The Pit and the Pendulum.’”
With a shake of her head, Jo admitted, “I don’t think…oh, wait, wasn’t there a Vincent Price movie by that name?”
American education, Cavendish thought sadly.
After a few more words, Jo left him and headed back downstairs, feeling like a good daughter. Cavendish played delightedly with the computer for a few minutes, but then the headache came back with blinding force and he nearly collapsed on the desk.
It was nearly midnight in Washington. The offices in the West Wing of the White House were still lit. The national monuments were aglow, even though the downtown streets were empty. Don’t go out at night, tourists were told, and they stayed in their hotels until the sunrise drove the pimps and muggers off the streets.
NASA’s sleek, modern headquarters building was almost entirely dark. Only a few office lights still burned. One of them was the office of the Deputy Director for Manned Space Flight, Dr. Kenneth Burghar.
Jerry White pushed that door open without knocking and grinned down at his boss, who was sitting at his desk, awash in paperwork.
“Christ, I thought I was the only kook in this outfit who burned the midnight oil,” White said cheerfully.
“Budget cuts,” Burghar muttered. “OMB wants to slice another twenty million from the budget.”
White’s grin turned sour. “Here, take my left arm. I need the right one to sign my unemployment checks.”
“It isn’t funny, Jer.”
“I wish to Christ it was,” White said fervently.
Burghar pushed his chair away from the desk slightly, leaned back and rubbed his eyes. His tie was gone, his shirt sleeves rolled up. The remains of a slice of pizza decorated one corner of the desk, next to a half-empty paper cup of black coffee.
“What are you doing here at this hour?” he asked White.
“Same as you,” White replied, plopping down on the plastic couch along the side wall of the office, “trying to do the work of the guys who’ve already been laid off.”
“Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it. If they don’t give a shit over at Budget and on the Hill, why the hell do we knock ourselves out?”
“Because we’re dedicated, committed men.”
“We ought to be committed—to a funny farm.”
White shrugged. “Maybe.”
“You didn’t come in here to discuss fiscal policy, did you?”
“No, I didn’t.” White pulled a one-page memorandum from his jacket pocket and handed it over to his boss.
“What’s this?”
“From the Office of Science and Technology Policy: Sally Ellington and those West Wing geniuses must be puffing pot again.”
Burghar scanned the memorandum. “A manned mission that goes four times farther than the Moon’s orbit? What the hell is this all about?”
“Search me. The White House wants a quickie study on the problem and a report, right away.”
Burghar huffed. “Thank god they don’t want hardware. It’d take ten years.”
“Ken, I don’t even have the people to do a paper study! Where’m I going to find the manpower to…?”
“Person power,” Burghar corrected wearily. “Affirmative action, remember? And when the memorandum comes from the White House, you find the persons.”
“But what’s it for? All they say is a manned rendezvous mission with an unspecified target.”
Burghar shrugged. “They’re being secretive. Probably it’s for some military operation.”
“It’s just another goddamned idiot study that’ll go into their files and gather dust. Why the hell should we do it?”
“What can I say?”
White leaned closer to his boss. “Ken…there’s one thing. I’ve been hearing rumbles about some kind of alien spacecraft that’s been spotted in deep space. Could this be it?”
Burghar ran a hand through his scant hair. “Go ask OSTP. They won’t tell me anything, but maybe they’ll like you because your tennis game is better.”
“Sure. And Sally Ellington’s hot for my body.” White didn’t grin. “Seriously, Ken, what kind of a half-ass study can I get done without the manpower? And what’s the point of it? We don’t have the hardware to send a manned mission four times farther than the Moon!”
“We sure as hell don’t. So do the usual kind of half-ass study and give them the report they want, when they want it. Don’t get flustered about it.”
“It’s not an alien spacecraft, huh?”
“Oh, crap,” Burghar moaned. “Next thing you’ll be seeing flying saucers out the window.”
“Okay, okay…I’ll put Sally baby’s request into the old paper mill, with all deliberate speed.”
“Good. Do that. And learn to say personnel, not manpower. Save me a lecture, will ya?”
Cavendish picked listlessly at his dinner, finally gave it up. The headaches came in waves, unpredictably, and nothing seemed to help them. He had staggered from Jo’s office to the medical center and spent nearly two hours being tested and examined by a young Navy medic.
“Migraines are often caused by emotional stress,” the earnest young man had said with the look of a funeral director on his tanned face. “Perhaps you’re working too hard.”
Cavendish accepted his prescription, wadded it into a tight little ball and threw it in the first trash receptacle he found outside the medical building.
Useless, he knew.
Now he stood on the front steps of the island’s best restaurant (the scientists had rated it at only minus one star) and decided to take a walk on the beach. His headache was gone, for the moment, but the memory of it had triggered an old fear in him that coursed through every nerve of his body.