Act of God by John Maddox Roberts, Eric Kotani Page A

guy who's bright enough to embrace the whole gamut of scientific knowledge and make sense out of what he knows. Sorta the Renaissance man of science."
    "I thought the Renaissance man was an impossibility in the twentieth century," Laine said, skeptically.
    "Not impossible," Ciano corrected, "just improbable. But such people exist. I'm living proof. I gotta admit, though, there ain't enough of us in the whole world to fill a decent-sized phone booth in Manhattan."
    Ciano set to work on the cheesecake he had ordered. "Hey, Taggart, what do you say we get us a rocket jock for our panel?"
    "An astronaut?" Sam said. His eyes lit as he grasped the possibilities. "Jesus, that's a great idea."
    "An astronaut?" Laine said. "Why? Aren't they just glorified test pilots? They are highly esteemed in the Soviet Union, but mainly as popular heroes and role models for the young. Their scientific opinions would not carry a fraction of the weight of a real scientist's. Do you mean the kind who is really a scientist trained to work in space?"
    "No, Ugo's right. He means a real rocket jock, the kind who actually pilot the ships. The guys with the right stuff."
    "Right stuff?"
    "She ain't been here long enough, Taggart." Ciano dropped his Dead End Kid persona a bit in order to explain the complex piece of Americana. "You see, Laine, America's a funny place. People complain alla time about how much the space program costs, but they worship the astronauts like crazy. The first bunch, the Mercury and Apollo guys, grabbed the national imagination like nothing else in our history. Now, to most Americans, they're like just what you said; popular heroes and role models for the kids. Every American kid wants to grow up to be an astronaut. Hell," he admitted, low voiced, almost embarrassed, "I did, myself. But there's more to it than that. To achievement-oriented Americans, the upper-middle-class elite, which let me inform you is the real elite in this country, these guys represent something special. They are absolutely as expert and tops in their field as any human being can be, and it's probably the most demanding field that's ever existed. These guys gotta have smarts, they gotta think fast and move last, they got nerve that makes a marble statue look like a gibbering hysteric. They are un-questionably the smartest, toughest, most skilled and expert specialists this country's ever produced."
    "And when Ugo talks about achievement-oriented Americans," Sam added, "he's talking about the kind of people who make up the National Security Council. The kind of people who are advisers to presidents. To hell with the old East Coast money families like the Rockefellers, the real power elite in this country are middle-class men and women with ambition and ability, and for some reason they've settled on those astronauts as their heroes."
    "Exactly," Ciano said. "Most of those people we'll be trying to convince at Sam's agency and The NSC and the President's cabinet, they wouldn't know an astrophysicist from a paleontologist. But if we can put one of them old rocket jocks in front of them, and he fixes them with his patented steely-eyed gaze and tells 'em the Russkies are gonna chuck ice down our gravity well and blow Cincinnati all to hell, they'll believe him."
    "The right stuff," Laine murmured.
    "There's even a book and a movie about it," Ciano said. Laine was fascinated, not only by this peculiar look at the American mentality, but by what she had just learned about these two men. At last she had a handle on them, a single point the two wildly disparate men had in common: they were both frustrated spacemen.
    "Now," Sam said, sipping his coffee, "we need a name for this project. Now, Laine, this codename, Project Peter the Great, it refers to the entire Soviet plan to expand into space and exploit its resources, right?" She nodded. "Did the comet project have a specific name?"
    "Not that 1 ever heard. It was just one project among many, although it was