BOUNDARY(90)

Helen waved her hand around the spacious bridge. "Let me guess. More political and publicity design compromises."



Hathaway nodded. "Not so much compromises as just overkill again. You could really run Nike from a single enclosed room, if you had to, with nobody at the controls. We don't really need a crew to fly this ship, although having one certainly acts as a failsafe. But . . . well, it just looks better this way. The public feels like they're getting their money's worth, and they ponied up a lot of it.



"The design is completely functional, too. You could in fact fly this ship on manual from the bridge, not that I'd ever want to see anyone try it. A.J., your station is right there." He pointed to a console area in the front and to the right.



As A.J. floated himself over to the indicated area, Hathaway added: "The equipment isn't a waste, either. Like almost everything else in the ship, it can either be used right where it sits or unshipped and brought down to Phobos."



"Hey, this thing already ties right in with my VRD!"



"Of course it does, A.J. They took the coding straight from your personal station at NASA."



"Neat! I don't even have to tweak it!"



Helen took another slow, admiring turn to examine the whole bridge. "I agree with you, Ken. It might be silly theatrical overkill in some ways—but this really is a ship. You can feel it."



"Yes, you can." Hathaway's gaze was focused out the huge viewport. "And she's about ready to fly."





Chapter 29




Nicholas Glendale stood out on the landing field where, almost two years earlier, Chinook had crashed while trying to land. He wasn't here for a landing, however. He was gazing upward to see a launch.



It was chilly on the flat desert plain, now that the sun had gone down. All the more so because they were well into autumn. Glendale pulled his coat a bit tighter. The garment was cut thin and sharply angled, which was nice from a cosmetic viewpoint, since it emphasized his slender figure. But he missed the reassuring puffy bulk of the coats he remembered from his younger years, even if the aerogel insulation of his current one made it just as warm.



Back at NASA Control, the countdown had begun. He could hear the murmur of traffic between the ground and Nike in his ear, and if he wished, his VRD would display any of a dozen views of the great ship or the control center. But for now he looked only with eyes. At an altitude of about two hundred miles, the fourteen-hundred-foot- long Nike stretched over 4.5 arc minutes—nearly a sixth of the width of the full moon. It was easy to spot coming over the horizon, if you knew where to look. Once it was up in the sky, of course, nobody could miss it.



Glendale knew where to look. He came out here often to watch her fly overhead.



He had never been interested in space travel, particularly. His own field fascinated him, and had since he was a teenager—the interaction of its personalities as much as the unearthing of ancient biological history. For whatever reason, paleontology had always seemed to attract some of the most colorful personalities ever to populate the halls of academia. Still did, for that matter.



Perhaps that very fact—having had no youthful fascination with space—had led to his current obsession.



"I was never inoculated against this," Glendale heard himself murmur. When a connection had finally been shown between Helen Sutter's problematica, Bemmius secordii, and Phobos, Glendale had been forced to really look at this utterly different field . . . and the space bug had bitten, hard.



It had not been easy, especially in the first few months after he'd realized he really was interested—intensely, passionately interested—in following the mystery of Bemmius to Phobos. For the first time in his life, Nicholas Glendale had found himself suffering—violently—from the hideous throes of professional jealousy.



Helen Sutter was, as he himself had said, the only correct choice for the mission. Not only did she already know far more about Bemmius than anyone else on Earth, but she was considerably younger than he was, at least as photogenic, and more athletic. Add to that the sudden romantic tie between her and the handsome young genius who had discovered the Phobos base—the tabloids had picked that up almost immediately—and only a complete idiot would try to bar her from the mission. The publicity alone would be worth millions in justifying the program to the public.



The fact had remained that Nicholas Glendale wasn't that old, he was well-known, respected, trusted—and, somewhat to his own surprise, he'd even passed the physical and psychological exams for space travel. Not with nearly as good a score as Helen or many of the other candidates, true, with regard to the physical tests. After all, he was sixty years old.