Chapter 1
AS HUGE AS IT WAS lonely, it looked like a great folded umbrella, with three cylinders as long as football fields clustered alongside the forward end of a mile-long plastic beam; not yet darkened with the dust that slowly darkens the universe, it gleamed in the light of the snowcapped planet below. On the forward, and only, spherical module (the bridge) was a painting of a woman with high-button shoes and an umbrella. In the manner of the NASA projects of the time, the painting had cost $114,750.36 even though it was only standard Chevy van-grade airbrush work. Unlike most orbiting objects, the ship was absolutely stationary, gyro-locked so it would neither roll nor pitch nor yaw nor turn. It toiled not, neither did it spin. Its fans were silent, its shafts were dark, its batteries were cold and its 115,867.12 miles of wiring waited for orders. It swept the heavens perfectly aligned, because if it turned, its refractive index would change and it might be seen by one of Earth’s inquisitive astronomers, and only 618 people on the planet knew of its existence. And they had all been sworn to secrecy.
1,235.3 miles below, one of the 618 was feeding his dogs when he heard the unmistakable, unexpected sound of a car coming up the hill. He didn’t bother to look up. There was only one speed a car could go on the rutted dirt road, and only one spot on the road where it could be seen from the house. At precisely the right moment he set down his bag of Hunter’s Horn Premium Hound Chow, straightened up and looked down the hill. Bass’s eyes as well as his timing had outlasted his career, and in the 1.7 seconds it took for the car to cross the bare patch a quarter of a mile away, he saw that it was a Jeep la Ville 4wd limo. An unusual car for the western Kentucky hills. Bass dusted the dog food off his hands and headed toward his house trailer. Like all truly solitary people, he loved company.
“They don’t bite,” Bass said from the porch. “You can get out of the car.”
The driver, a young man in snappy new livery, got out and opened the back door of the limo. Nobody got out. After a moment, Bass realized he was expected to get in.
“Phone call for you,” the driver said.
Bass stuck his head in. The back of the limo was cool and dark; it smelled of leather and electronics. There was a bar and a camera-monitor combo circuited into a cellular phone. On the nine-inch screen, a man sat behind a desk in front of a big window. “Rocket Man Bass,” he said, rising, with a wide smile and narrow eyes like a preacher.
It wasn’t a question, it was a statement.
“They don’t exactly call me that around Allen County,” Bass said. “That was twenty-five years ago. What’s this, is People magazine doing their where-are-they-now issue?”
“My name’s Markson. I was told you never come into town, and since you don’t have a phone—”
“He hired me to drive all the way from Nashville,” the driver said proudly. He was kneeling to rough up the dogs. Bass could see he knew hounds.
“Well, here you are. More or less. What do you want? I’m better paid not to talk about the space program,” Bass said, “than you could ever pay me to talk about it.”
“Don’t want to just talk about it,” Markson said. “Talk won’t get me to Mars.”
“Mars?”
“Mars. The red planet Mars.”
“Will that phone thing move?” Bass asked the driver. “You can follow me if you want to. I got to feed these hounds.”
Carrying the monitor/cam/speaker/mike unit in one hand, and a cigarette in the other, the driver followed Bass up the concrete block steps and into the trailer. While Bass filled a milk jug with water, the driver panned around the interior: one wall of books,
one wall of guns. On Markson’s desk three thousand miles away, the monitor showed a chuffing kerosene-powered refrigerator (“Ain’t smelled that smell since I was a kid,” the driver said) with a snapshot of Earthrise over the Moon’s horizon taped to the door. The kitchenette table was neatly divided between a plastic “Kentucky Lake, Fisherman’s Heaven” placemat and an ancient, yellowed Apple IIe. Skillfully operating the screen door with their noses, dogs walked in and out at will.
“What’d you say your name was?” Bass asked the video unit.
“Markson.”
“You with the government?”
Markson laughed. “You of all people ought to know better than that. No government in the world could afford such a venture as I propose—not since the Grand Depression. No, I represent something quite different. An industry that has the vision to undertake such a voyage. The ability to make it happen. And the money to finance it—”
Definitely preacher material, Bass decided. “I got to water the hounds out back,” he said. “You can come along if you like.”
“Movies!” said Markson’s image to Bass’s departing back.
The driver followed Bass around the house, trying to keep his red, gold, green and black Acme boots out of the mud. Hoping to get a response out of Bass, Markson was using his most potent incantations: “Cinema. Motion pictures. Hollywood.”
“Mars is a long way off, I seem to recall.”
“As you know, the space station you used to fly out of is still used regularly; it’s in fact the only working vestige of the NASA space program—”
“Turned over to the National Parks Department twelve years ago,” Bass said. “Then sold along with Wildlife Management to Disney-Gerber, along with the other national parks. Then unloaded on—”
“Do I detect a trace of bitterness?” said Markson. “No wonder, it was your life’s work! At any rate, my company, Pellucidar Pictures, a wholly owned subsidiary of Greyhound-Thermos, is booked for Nixon Orbital Park in exactly five weeks”—he pressed a button on his watch—“four days and eleven hours.”
“What does that have to do with Mars? And what does that have to do with me? If you booked the station, you booked the shuttle.”
“The shuttle’s been sold off, haven’t you heard? We’re taking our own shuttle up and we want you to fly it. For starters.”
At the side of the barn they stopped in front of a stainless steel hulk in the weeds.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” said the driver.
“I pulled it up here with a tractor,” Bass said. “I crank it up once a month just
to keep the rings free. They’re the only things on the whole car that can rust.”
“Very interesting,” Markson said as the driver kicked a tire. “But a DeLorean won’t take you back into space.”
“Maybe not. But a shuttle won’t take you to Mars, either. Even if you could find some damn fool to fly it.”
“We’re talking with one other flight officer, an old friend of yours. Do you remember a Natasha Kirov?”
Bass’s eyes narrowed. “Since when did it become your business what I remember and what I don’t? Now look, mister—”
Sensing that his time was running out, Markson played his trump. “The Mars ship is already built, even if only you and a few hundred others know about it.”
Bass bent down and looked directly into the monitor/cam’s glowing eye. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the Mary Poppins.”
Chapter 2
“MADAME KIROV,” the waiter said rather than asked. The blond woman in the yellow jumpsuit nodded and the waiter put the brass-inlaid mock Regency phone monitor down on the glass-topped table and retreated.
“Captain Kirov,” said a tiny voice in English. “Please forgive the intrusion.” Natasha Kirov bent over and looked down. On the three-inch screen there was a man sitting at a desk. His face was smaller than a pencil eraser but his desk was huge, the size of a matchbox. Through the window, on a hillside in back of him, a giant sign spelled HOL YWOOD with one “L” missing.
“Who are you and what do you want?” asked Kirov, never one for beating around what the Americans called the bush.
“Does the name Mary Poppins mean anything to you?”
Kirov didn’t miss a beat. “You have perhaps confused me with Julie Andrews?”
“Can we speak directly? As you know, the Soviet-American Mars voyage…”
“That’s ancient history. The project was dropped twenty years ago, when the Grand Depression hit. No one has ever been to Mars, and I suspect no one ever will.”
“The project was canceled, yes.” The man dropped his voice dramatically as his image grew in the screen to the size of a walnut. “But not, as we both know, before the ship was built. Do you mind if I smoke?”
Kirov shook her head slowly while her caller lit a cigar.
“As only a few hundred people in the entire world know, it’s in a secret holding orbit right now—mothballed, they say, but abandoned, as you and I know, because there will never be a joint US-Soviet project now, and neither country will allow the other to use it.”
“Science fantasy, Mr. uh—”
“Markson. And my colleagues and I think not. We know, to be precise, that the Mary Poppins is in orbit 1,988 kilometers above you at this very moment. In addition to being hidden behind the nuclear waste belt, where no one ever goes, it is protected by a special null-reflective foil that makes a six-billion-dollar spacecraft bigger than the Queen Elizabeth look like a small hole in the ozone layer. We know that it is stocked with food and water that after twenty years will still be usable, even tasty.”
“Even if such a phildickian fantasy were true,” said Kirov, “it could have nothing to do with me. That was twenty years ago, and according to your own figures that would make me sixteen at the time.”
“Twenty-one,” Markson corrected, and for the first time Kirov blushed. “We know that there were three twenty-one-year-old trainees on that project. One of them later went mad; one was killed in a traffic accident; the third, the only woman and the most promising of all, they say, married a doctor after the program was shut down, taught at the University in Leningrad, separated three years ago, and…”
“Divorced,” Kirov said.
“This hypothetical person is now flying Tupolevs into Antarctica for Sikorsky-Reebok, and currently vacationing in Salvador, Brazil, during layover. Lunching at the beautiful Axe Bahia overlooking the bay.”
Kirov didn’t say anything.
“Wearing a yellow jumpsuit. The one person in the world with the ability, and now the opportunity, to take the Mary Poppins to Mars.”
Natasha Alyosha Katerina Ivanovna Kirov carefully folded her napkin and got up from the table. As always when she was angry, she spoke English with a Texas accent. “Of all the goddamned nerve!” she said. “That you and your colleagues, whoever the hell they are, think that I would even consider working for the Americans.”
“Please, please, please. Sit down,” Markson said. “Be assured. After the Grand Depression, no government on Earth could take on such a project, even if they were to admit its existence. However, there is an industry that has the vision to finance such a voyage. The resources to make it happen. And the
ability to go ahead with it.”
“Go to Mars to make a movie?”
“Exactly! Everyone on the planet would want to see it. The romance and fascination with space flight hasn’t died. Even before allowing for licensing and royalties, our P&Ls show that an investment of less than fifty million would bring a guaranteed return of—”
“Supposing there were such a spacecraft,” Kirov interrupted. “Even supposing it were still operational. Even supposing I could operate it. The trip to Mars is eighteen months each way. No crew could be sustained physically or mentally for that long. Certainly not a bunch of movie stars, grips and hairdressers.”
“Suppose, however, that that problem, also, were being solved,” Markson said smoothly. The telltale on the monitor glowed, alerting Kirov that he was pulling her in for a close-up. “Does the name ‘Ursula’ mean anything to you?” ...
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