Cold War - Jerome Preisler [55]
“It’s sort of complicated,” she said. “Gord wanting me here is the truth, but he’s the one to give you his reasons. As for myself, there were personal issues.”
“They involve Bob Lang?”
“Yes,” she said. “I preferred not to share them at the time.”
He nodded. Their eyes remained locked.
“And now?”
“I’d still rather not.”
“You change your mind, I’ll be ready to listen.”
“I know, Pete,” she said. “And thank you.”
He nodded again and sat there quietly finishing his espresso.
She reached out, touched his arm.
“Are we okay, Pete? Settled, I mean.”
“Settled.”
They were silent another minute, her hand still on his arm, squeezing it gently.
“All right,” he said then. “Coffee’s done. We should discuss the helicopter.”
She nodded, reached down into the kangaroo pocket of her bib-alls, and extracted a connected Palm computer.
“All the luxuries of home,” he commented.
Megan slipped the computer’s stylus out of its silo and tapped its “on” button.
“We try to be with it,” she said with a shrug. “Now hush, I need to jot out an e-mail. We’re presently short-handed as far as pilots go, but I’ll explain that later. Meanwhile, I think I’ve figured out how to kill two birds with one electronic stone.”
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Greenbelt, Maryland
The men were known as Ketchup and Fries.
These were of course not their given names.
Ketchup was really Jonathan Ketchum, a sixty-year-old project scientist at the Experimenters’ Operations Facility in Goddard’s Building 26, the operational nucleus of the SOHO project. He had been with the EOF’s permanent MDI/SOI team since its establishment in the mid-nineties, and was considered one of its top men by the principal investigator.
Fries was Richard Frye, another member of the MDI/ SOI team. At twenty-six, he was its most recent addition, regarded as a babe in the woods by senior group members. This is the embedded reflex of those with tenure who are protective of their own status. Ketchum saw in Frye an inquisitiveness and joy of discovery that was like a bright reflection of himself as a young man. He knew Frye was already a better scientist than most, and had potential to be the best by far.
Ketchum had taken Frye under his wing from the start of the young man’s NASA employment, but their student-mentor relationship soon grew into an intellectually stimulating bond of equals. Ketchum imparted a maturity of understanding to Frye; Frye helped recharge Ketchum’s sense of wonderment daily.
Together they had become a team within a team.
Ketchup and Fries.
Nobody could say with any certainty who had cooked up the nickname. Because its ingredients included a heaping measure of disparagement, and perhaps a pinch of envy, credit went unclaimed and unassigned.
In the beginning they found the label vexatious. Eventually, however, they came to bear it with a certain defiant fondness. At some point their feelings became almost proprietary. Ketchup. Fries. What would one be without the other?
Besides, just look at the crap the visiting observers regularly threw at them.
The Auslanders, as they’d been tagged (again without attribution), were a group of scientists from institutions in France, Switzerland, Germany, the U.K., and a handful of other European Space Agency nations who had either contributed to the design and construction of SOHO’s gadgetry or were involved in studying its returns. All SOHO’s participants could retrieve this information from an archived, indexed, easily searchable electronic database without ever leaving their respective countries, but guest committees from abroad would sometimes show up at Goddard during research campaigns that engaged several of the observatory’s instruments at once.
Ostensibly their motivation was pure and unselfish, springing from a desire to help foster a spirit of international collaboration and share in the immediacy and excitement of these campaigns. The real, dirty scrub was that the Web curators of “collaborating” institutions often delayed inputting e-base updates about major discoveries, while their