III
Dr. Clarence “Butch” Patterson sat in his office looking through a water-streaked, plate-glass window at the Washington, D.C., skyline. It had been raining, and right now it looked as bleak and overcast as a winter day. It matched his frame of mind.
Patterson looked the part of the distinguished scientist and administrator that he was. He fit the public image. In some part, that fact had aided him in his rise through the National Office of Science and Technology, and through NASA. Not that he wasn’t a good scientist, he was, and a good administrator too, but he had learned long ago that he had a flair for office politics. His was a natural, untrained charm—an easygoing personality that instilled confidence and trust. The crinkle at the corner of his eyes when he smiled, the automatic conspiratorial wink he unthinkingly injected into every conversation with peers and subordinates alike—these were habitual traits that made people feel warm and personal with him, as if they were his closest confidants. He was well-liked by most of his staff and associates, and worshipped by the secretary of ten years whom he had taken with him in his last two promotions. He was generally known for his honesty, ready smile and laid-back nature. He wasn’t smiling now though, and the unusually accentuated lines of his face made him look considerably older than his fifty-five years.
To Patterson, the position he had attained this past January, as Director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, was the epitome of career achievement. It was his life’s ambition, and it had come true. It meant that his name would be added to the annals of human history. His life had mattered. He had helped to shape the world and left a legacy that people of future generations would read about. He loved the stature, but God, he hated the social scene in today’s Washington.
Nothing he had ever done had prepared him for the life of a Washington bureaucrat. It was insane. interoffice spying was routine. It was like a pack of rats, scrabbling for an advantage, and woe unto him who let his guard down. Not even your own staff could be trusted beyond a certain point, he thought. You certainly didn’t build intimate confidences.
The work he had trained for and loved all his life—agency business—was suddenly of secondary importance to everyone but him. Petty incidentals were all that mattered. His calendar was filled with important meetings about trivial stuff—protocol alerts concerning visits from minor VIPs and foreign dignitaries, and innumerable state functions with which he had nothing to do—and it seemed that the only thing ever accomplished at those meetings was establishing the time and elate of the next meeting.
He was learning that, unlike science, nothing in cabinet-level politics was straightforward. Politics, to Patterson, was an elemental thing. It was making people like you. It was an emotional thing that worked best when it was a natural gift, as it was with him. A kind of subliminal cajolery that swayed most people, and if applied over time, eventually got you what you wanted. He knew what he was doing, and when he was doing it; it wasn’t totally unconscious. He picked his targets, people who could give him a leg up on his career ladder, and he knew that he wasn’t quite the sincere and caring man he pretended to be. The inner man wasn’t particularly proud of himself, but he also knew he didn’t belong among the blatant brotherhood of thieves that made up the woof and warp of Washington’s social fabric, Washington was a place of grand buildings and edifices, monuments to great ideals, but these days, it was peopled with all the utterly selfish of the land. Here, the only aspect of government business that mattered was who profited from it. Office politics consisted of getting the dirt on other people, even amplifying on their minor mistakes, while keeping one’s own transgressions safely hidden.
In a way, he felt ashamed of his ingratitude. The newly installed President Vanderbilt had personally appointed Patterson, lifted him above his equally deserving colleagues and peers in the space sciences community, and set his name down in history. Lately though, the first flush of pride and pleasure in the appointment was waning, and he had begun wondering, why me? He had been director of the Johnson Space Center at Houston, and as such, certainly in line for the position, but somehow it just didn’t feel right. In the past few months, he had come to understand that everything done in Washington was done for a reason other than the one publicly expressed. If someone benefited, a payback of some sort was generally taken for granted. Vanderbilt had shown no reticence in pointing it out.
Patterson hadn’t “known” anyone in particular. He knew that Vice President Joseph Miller had lobbied for his appointment, but he didn’t know why. He had never met the man. Why had Miller championed him? Why had Vanderbilt acceded? Had he just slipped through the cracks? Was his appointment an accident, a decision made by a man who was tired of thinking about all the minutiae of moving into his office, and who momentarily had no better candidate in mind? If not, if there was a hidden motive, what payback was expected?
It had begun to haunt him. A niggling doubt that hovered always on the fringe of consciousness, clouded his perspective, pulled his thoughts aside, inhibited the clear, free-flowing logistical thoughts of mission, people, tools and money that he was used to. His dream had begun turning sour.
And now this! Only six months into his administration, and out of nowhere, Joe Dykes had handed him a political hot potato to top them all. His dream of a long and productive tenure was rapidly becoming a nightmare of being the first NASA chief to be fired in disgrace.
“God, let it be just another paperwork foul-up,” he prayed. “Just another innocent package that got coded wrong and pulled by mistake.”
He didn’t believe it, even as he thought it. As Dykes had said, there were too many matching factors for it to be coincidental. What would his historical legacy read if NASA had unwittingly orbited a weapon of some sort, someone else’s weapon, to be used against the United States? And how to react?
In a normal environment, it was his duty to tell the President. The Commander in Chief should be informed of any potential threat to national security. But these days, it wasn’t a normal environment in Washington. He had seen enough heads fall in the past six months to know that if he told the White House, it would be on the evening news. Not even a ghost of a doubt. The first thing they would do is wash their hands and make him the sacrificial goat. Even if it turned out to be some sort of innocent error, he would be painted a fool, at the very least, and his career finished.
If he was a heartless bastard, he could “uncover” the foul-up himself, and destroy the lives of a few select people in the agency to save himself. He couldn’t bring himself to do it. NASA and its people had been his life, and he loved it too much to subject it to that kind of fallout. Security would get so tight that a person wouldn’t be able to visit the bathroom alone, and the already paper-mired process would become so impossible that NASA couldn’t launch a paper clip. It would filter out into all the support contractors and research groups until nothing substantive would get done. The agency would become just another budgetary black hole, and might even end up as part of another agency consolidation as Congress put on one of its shows of austerity for the American public. They might even put it under military command. It was already regulated by the military to some degree.
He had admonished Dykes not to let the news leak, and he thought he could rely on him. With that thought, his resolve hardened. He would keep it quiet until the issue went away, or blew up. He would be no worse off in any event. He wasn’t about to carry an ax over to the White House and bare his neck.