She ran long gold nails down the front of Remo's T-shirt and purred like a lion. "Fred will get over it. He always does."
"Not the point. I don't poach on another man's preserve."
"Hey, don't I get a say in this?"
"Sure. You get to say goodbye. Goodbye," said Remo, retreating to his seat.
"You have your date?" asked the Master of Sinanju blandly.
Remo folded his arms. "Don't give me that. You overheard every word, you old reprobate."
"I would prefer to hear the story from your own lips."
"She's married."
"I knew that."
"Goody for you."
"In this land, Remo, it is customary for a married woman to wear a gold circlet about the ring finger of the hand that is closest to the heart. This signifies a woman who is taken."
"I know that!" Remo flared.
"It is good that you did not take her."
"There are other women."
"You are going about this the improper way," Chiun warned.
"Go grow your nail," growled Remo unhappily.
"And you may jump over the moon as you chase your white cows," the Master of Sinanju said huffily.
Chapter 13
The director of operations for NASA's shuttle program was only too happy to answer reporters' questions.
Shuttle flights were so routine the press didn't bother to cover them live anymore. There was always a token media presence, of course. The Challenger disaster guaranteed that. Everyone wanted tape if another in-flight catastrophe shook the world. So the national media duly sent a sprinkling of bored reporters each and every time an orbiter was launched.
This time it was the newest of the shuttle fleet, the Reliant. It was to be her maiden voyage. Task-deploy a National Reconnaissance Office spy satellite, name and mission classified.
Usually the reporters showed up the day before launch and waited. Sometimes the wait stretched out over three or four days, and they grumbled. They always grumbled. They especially grumbled when the launch went off without a hitch. Sometimes they cursed and complained bitterly that the pictures were "always the same."
"What do you want?" the director once asked a CBS reporter. "Another Challenger?"
Without hesitation, the reporter said, "Hell, yes."
The director of operations walked away rather than clean the man's blue-bearded clock.
Today the Reliant stood on the gigantic crawler-transporter that moved her toward the launch pad, and the reporters were already here. In droves. The weather had been cold for Florida in late December. Maybe they had hopes of a catastrophic failure, the director thought angrily.
The media assembled in the director's office, which looked down over the most reinforced road in the world, with Launch Complex 39-A in the background. The crawler-transporter was rumbling along. It was a 2500-ton battleship gray converted surface coal-mining machine as big as a baseball diamond moving at a sedate three and a half miles per hour on four double-tracked tractor units. Each of the shoes that made up one of the massive treads was capable of exerting thirty-three tons of crushing force. Strapped to the gigantic external tank and flanked by the dual rocketlike boosters, the shuttle sat upright as if poised for launch, as it was borne to the launch pad.
It was an impressive sight, but since it wasn't spewing smoke and flame, the press showed no interest in it.
"Are you afraid for this mission?" asked one reporter.
"Why should I be?" the director shot back.
"If Martians did fry the BioBubble, wouldn't NASA be high on their target list?"
"There are no Martians, and there is no target list. Get off it."
"How do you know that?"
"Because I saw the Kking and Mariner probe pictures. It's a dead world."
"Then why is NASA talking about going there in thirty years?"
"It's not completely dead. There are probably lichen. Maybe some microbes or one-celled organisms."
"How do we know one-celled microbes aren't advanced enough to point death rays at Earth?" a seasoned science reporter asked.
"Because," the director of operations patiently explained, "a one-cell organism doesn't have a brain. It's a primitive lifeform." He swallowed his biting Like reporters, only smarter.
"We don't know what a one-celled Martian might be like. Maybe the cell is all brain."
"Yes, a giant brain," a reporter piped up from in back.
"If he was all brain," the director of operations said with ill-concealed impatience, "then he wouldn't have hands to point his death ray with, now would he?"
"Maybe some of his Martian comrades are just hands. Or feet. They gang up and make a whole person. Nassau'd be a sitting duck."
"It's NASA, not Nassau," he returned, correcting a sacrilegious mispronunciation reporters had been committing since the halcyon days of the Mercury Program. "And the program is not at risk. Take my word for it."
"You don't mind if we film the crawl?" one said.
"Be my guest."
Cameras were set up all around the giant transporter. They recorded every laborious inch and foot as the gigantic treads crept along. It typically took a full day to move a shuttle from the launch-assembly hangar to the pad. The media dutifully committed to tape every millisecond of the transfer.
Somewhere past midnight, after the launch director had gone home for the evening, the tireless cameras recorded the biggest disaster to strike NASA since the Challenger dropped into the Atlantic Ocean.
Floodlights bathed the gleaming white shuttle. The crawler crawled along the crawlerway with painful ponderousness, making a low mutter.
Without warning, night turned to day.