Stephen Leigh - Card Sharks

Hannah broke in as Dearborn's gaze drifted away. "I'm very sorry, Mr. Dearborn. Would you know where Margaret might be now?"

"Lord, no," Dearborn answered. "After … we didn't really keep in touch. I think we were all ashamed. Too much mud got slung around and a lot of it stuck. Do you know about it? Really know about it?"

"No, sir. Not very much. Would you take a look at this other picture?" Hannah interrupted. "It's taken much later, around 1982."

Dearborn looked closely at the photograph, holding it up to the lamp alongside the couch. "Why, that's Peggy, too. Older and heavier, but I'd recognize that face and that smile anywhere. So she did get back into nursing…. Where was this taken? Looks like Africa somewhere."

"Kenya," Hannah told him. "You're certain that's Margaret?"

Dearborn glanced at the photo again, then handed it back. "Positive." Dearborn frowned. "You said you were some kind of investigator. Is she in trouble again? Is she dead?"

"In trouble again ?"

Dearborn sighed. A flash of pain seemed to run behind his eyes. His lips tightened and he groaned. "Mr. Dearborn?" Hannah asked. "Is there something I can get for you?"

"Pills," he said. "On the table in the kitchen. No," he said as Hannah started to get up. "Let me get them. It's one of the things I won't let myself do — I'm not going to give in to the pain and let someone take care of me. I take care of myself. Always have, always will." He moved off into the kitchen. Hannah could hear him running water, drinking. "I'll be back in a minute," he said, and his footsteps moved away into another hidden room.

Hannah heard a door open and the sound of boxes being moved. A few minutes later, Dearborn came out again with a cardboard carton. He set it down on the coffee table and looked at her. "No one really knows what happened," he told her. "No one. Not even Wolfe. I was never one to write things down, but Thayer was. His lawyer sent me this stuff after Thayer's car wreck — it was in the will that this went to any surviving member of the project. Poor guy: six months out of prison and he loses control on a curve. I never really looked at the notebooks; that wasn't a period in my life I particularly wanted to remember. But Thayer wrote it all down, the way he saw it, anyway. There's stuff about Peggy in there…."

Dearborn pulled the box open. A yellowed newspaper clipping wafted out. Dearborn plucked it from the air and gave it to Hannah….

( From The Los Angeles Herald, Monday, April 12, 1958: )

U.S. TO TRY ROCKET FLIGHT

BEFORE RUSSIANS?

ROSAMOND, CALIFORNIA. ( Herald exclusive) The United States may attempt a manned rocket flight in the next few weeks in an attempt to beat the Russians into space, it was learned here today.

Officials at the Muroc Lake Test Site of the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics referred this reporter to the USAF office here, which declined comment. NACA's Muroc Site is part of the larger, restricted access Tomlin Air Force Base.

Nevertheless, it is known that six Air Force and NACA test pilots are training for flights in a winged rocketplane known as the X-11A. Several of these pilots are reported to have taken part in as many as five unpowered free flights of the X-11A, in which the Northrop-built vehicle glided to a landing on the dry lakebed at Tomlin.

The planned orbital flight would reportedly see the X-11A take off from Tomlin to rendezvous with a specially-modified Boeing tanker at 30,000 feet. Following re-fueling, the X-11A would rocket into orbit on its own power, returning to Tomlin after making a single orbit of the earth.

The existence of the American orbital program, long rumored, comes three weeks after the announcement by the Soviet Union that it hopes to launch a manned spacecraft known as North on its own orbital mission sometime later this year …

( From the notebooks of Edgar Thayer: )

In those days — which seem quite long ago, as I write, but were actually less than five years in the past — the Muroc Lake facility of the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics wasn't on any maps. This had less to do with security concerns (NACA was a civilian agency, anyway) than with the general lack of formality, or even public interest. Nevertheless, as I waited for the phone call in the ratty motel in Rosamond on the morning of April 12, I didn't need directions: I already knew where to find it.

I was fourteen years old and living in a small town in southern Minnesota when the wild card struck. Although we were not isolated — we had CBS radio coming through loud and clear on WCCO — we were not directly affected. For years I thought of the plague as less important than polio, which had crippled one of my classmates.

What fascinated me was the proof that there was life on other planets. I was already a sporadic reader of comic books — sporadic only because the vagaries of distribution didn't often bring them to St. Peter — and became a devotee of Heinlein's Tak World books. I discovered the first one, Eclipse , in the St. Peter High School library my junior year, and made such a fuss over it that my parents bought the next one, Fire Down Below , $2.45, for me the following Christmas.

They faithfully sent me each new one, all through my time at the University of Minnesota, and even during my first two years in the Air Force. I can remember eagerly unwrapping The Sound of His Wings , the 1955 volume — the last in the series, alas — while sitting in an office at Kirtland Air Force Base looking out on the very hangar where the Takisian ship Baby had been based before being moved to California.

So I was one of the few — very few — who still believed that humans might have a destiny in space. Who weren't ready to give up the dream just because someone had found us first.

My work in the Air Force was as an analyst with the foreign technology division. It consisted of taking captured German and stolen Soviet weapons — in my case, missiles — out to New Mexico and firing them off to learn how they worked. It was fascinating, and my experience in the infant field of launch operations got me assigned later to Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, where I worked on Pied Piper, our first satellite program.

That April morning in Rosamond I was twenty-eight years old, having left the service after completing my ROTC committment. I had spent the intervening year at Aerojet in Pasadena, working on the rocket engine that would later be used in the X-11A. My background as a launch controller had come to NACA's attention, however, and I had been summoned to the high desert in great secrecy for an assignment of unlimited duration.

It was greatly upsetting to my wife, Deborah, who was left in the apartment in Pasadena, pregnant and caring for our five-year-old daughter.

For me, however, it was a dream come true.

***

They started early at Muroc in those days. The phone call from Dr. Rowe's office came before six … by seven I was at the administration building (shack would be a better word) thirty-two miles away, having passed through three successively picky Air Force checkpoints, while driving through the flat, trackless waste that was Tomlin.

(There had been a late spring rain that year, and the usually dry lakebeds were covered with an inch-deep sheen. Rising over the Tehachapis, the sun and its reflection effectively blinded me: never the best of drivers, I could just as easily have driven off the road, rolled the car, and drowned in an inch of water.)

By nine I had been badged and cross-examined by a security officer named Battle, who had the air of a parochial school nun. Then I was taken into my first briefing.