haven’t secured funding for the extended mission yet. If you attract enough hostility, you could get us shut down, future projects killed…”
Slowly, he realized that she meant it. She was expressing a genuine fear: that if space scientists attracted too much attention—if they sounded as it they weren’t being “responsible,” as if they were shooting for the Moon again—then they’d be closed down.
In the first decade of a new millennium, a sense of wonder was dangerous.
Discreetly he checked his watch. He was meeting Paula Benacerraf later today. Maybe he could find some new way forward, with her. And…
But Delbruck was still talking at him. “Have you got it, Rosenberg? Have you?”
Rosenberg came to pick Benacerraf up, in person, from LAX. She shook Rosenberg’s offered hand, and climbed into the car.
Rosenberg swung through Glendale and then turned north on Linda Vista to go past the Rose Bowl. For a few miles they drove in silence, except for the rattling of the car, which was a clunker.
Rosenberg, half Benacerraf’s age, seemed almost shy.
Rosenberg’s driving was erratic—he took it at speed, with not much room for error—and he was a little wild-eyed, as if he’d been missing out on sleep. Probably he had; he seemed the type.
JPL wasn’t NASA, strictly speaking. She’d never been out here before, but she’d heard from insiders that JPL’s spirit of independence and its campus-like atmosphere were important to it, and notorious in the rest of the Agency.
So maybe she shouldn’t have been surprised to have been summoned out here like this, by Isaac Rosenberg, a skinny guy in his mid-twenties with glasses, bad skin, and thinning hair tied back in a fashion that had died out, to her knowledge, thirty years ago.
“This seems a way to go,” she remarked after a while. “We’re a long way out of Pasadena.”
“Yeah,” Rosenberg said. “Well, they used to test rockets here. Hence ‘Jet Propulsion Laboratory’ …” He kept talking; it seemed to make him feel more comfortable. “The history’s kind of interesting. It all started with a low-budget bunch of guys working out of Caltech, flying their rockets out of the Arroyo Seco, before the Second World War. They had huts of frame and corrugated metal, unheated and drafty, so crammed with rocket plumbing there was no room for a desk… And then a sprawling, expensive suburb got built all around them.
“After the war the lab became an eyesore, and the residents in Flintridge and Altadena and La Canada started to complain about the static motor tests, and the flashing red lights at night.”
“Red lights?”
He grinned. “It was missile test crews heading off for White Sands. But the rumors were that the lights were ambulances taking out bodies of workers killed in rocket tests.”
She smiled. “Are you sure they were just test crews? Or—”
“Or maybe there’s been a cover-up.” He whistled a snatch of the classic X-Files theme, and they both laughed. “I used to love that show,” he said. “But I never got over the ice-dance version.”
He entered La Canada, an upper-middle-class suburb, lawns and children and ranch-style, white-painted houses, and turned a corner, and there was JPL. The lab was hemmed into a cramped and smoggy site, roughly triangular, bounded by the San Gabriel Mountains, the Arroyo Seco, and the neat homes of La Canada.
Rosenberg swung the car off the road.
There was a guard at the campus entrance; he waved them into a lot.
Rosenberg walked her through visitor control, and offered to show her around the campus.
They walked slowly down a central mall that was adorned with a fountain. The mall stretched from the gate into the main working area of the laboratory. Office buildings filled the Arroyo; some of them were drab, military-standard boxy structures, but there was also a tower of steel and glass, on the north side of the mall, and an auditorium on the south.
Crammed in here, it was
Slowly, he realized that she meant it. She was expressing a genuine fear: that if space scientists attracted too much attention—if they sounded as it they weren’t being “responsible,” as if they were shooting for the Moon again—then they’d be closed down.
In the first decade of a new millennium, a sense of wonder was dangerous.
Discreetly he checked his watch. He was meeting Paula Benacerraf later today. Maybe he could find some new way forward, with her. And…
But Delbruck was still talking at him. “Have you got it, Rosenberg? Have you?”
Rosenberg came to pick Benacerraf up, in person, from LAX. She shook Rosenberg’s offered hand, and climbed into the car.
Rosenberg swung through Glendale and then turned north on Linda Vista to go past the Rose Bowl. For a few miles they drove in silence, except for the rattling of the car, which was a clunker.
Rosenberg, half Benacerraf’s age, seemed almost shy.
Rosenberg’s driving was erratic—he took it at speed, with not much room for error—and he was a little wild-eyed, as if he’d been missing out on sleep. Probably he had; he seemed the type.
JPL wasn’t NASA, strictly speaking. She’d never been out here before, but she’d heard from insiders that JPL’s spirit of independence and its campus-like atmosphere were important to it, and notorious in the rest of the Agency.
So maybe she shouldn’t have been surprised to have been summoned out here like this, by Isaac Rosenberg, a skinny guy in his mid-twenties with glasses, bad skin, and thinning hair tied back in a fashion that had died out, to her knowledge, thirty years ago.
“This seems a way to go,” she remarked after a while. “We’re a long way out of Pasadena.”
“Yeah,” Rosenberg said. “Well, they used to test rockets here. Hence ‘Jet Propulsion Laboratory’ …” He kept talking; it seemed to make him feel more comfortable. “The history’s kind of interesting. It all started with a low-budget bunch of guys working out of Caltech, flying their rockets out of the Arroyo Seco, before the Second World War. They had huts of frame and corrugated metal, unheated and drafty, so crammed with rocket plumbing there was no room for a desk… And then a sprawling, expensive suburb got built all around them.
“After the war the lab became an eyesore, and the residents in Flintridge and Altadena and La Canada started to complain about the static motor tests, and the flashing red lights at night.”
“Red lights?”
He grinned. “It was missile test crews heading off for White Sands. But the rumors were that the lights were ambulances taking out bodies of workers killed in rocket tests.”
She smiled. “Are you sure they were just test crews? Or—”
“Or maybe there’s been a cover-up.” He whistled a snatch of the classic X-Files theme, and they both laughed. “I used to love that show,” he said. “But I never got over the ice-dance version.”
He entered La Canada, an upper-middle-class suburb, lawns and children and ranch-style, white-painted houses, and turned a corner, and there was JPL. The lab was hemmed into a cramped and smoggy site, roughly triangular, bounded by the San Gabriel Mountains, the Arroyo Seco, and the neat homes of La Canada.
Rosenberg swung the car off the road.
There was a guard at the campus entrance; he waved them into a lot.
Rosenberg walked her through visitor control, and offered to show her around the campus.
They walked slowly down a central mall that was adorned with a fountain. The mall stretched from the gate into the main working area of the laboratory. Office buildings filled the Arroyo; some of them were drab, military-standard boxy structures, but there was also a tower of steel and glass, on the north side of the mall, and an auditorium on the south.
Crammed in here, it was
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