"Landis, Geoffrey A - Shooting The Moon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Landis Geoffrey A)

Shooting the Moon
by Geoffrey A. Landis

Yeah, kid, I've heard of you, or, anyway, I've heard of your organization. So you're going to do a moon-flight, are you. No, I'm not laughing at you—I believe that just maybe you can do it. The technology is there. It's been there for thirty years, we both know that.
How'd you hear about me, anyway?
Really? That old son of a bitch.
Okay. Maybe you can. It's not the technology that's going to trip you up, though. The technology is a piece of cake. I mean, it will be hard, it will be harder than anything you can think of, but it will be easy in one sense: with technology you know where you stand, you can figure out what's the best way to do things.
With people, it's not so simple, kid, take it from an old man: the hard part, the goddamn hard part, is the people.
You think you know it all, don't you? You think it's going to be easy. You don't know a goddamn thing.
I'll tell you a story. That's what you came here for, isn't it? To hear a story from the old man. You heard, somehow, about what we did, about what we tried—or maybe you heard some, and you guessed some. And you heard that we fucked up, and you want to know why. I can see that you really don't think anything I can say will apply to you. You think you're golden and you can't fail, and deep down you're sure that there's nothing that you can learn from screw-ups like us—no, you didn't say that, but I was young once, I know how you feel. We were young once, too, and we thought we knew what we were doing.
We did the calculations, yeah, the same ones you did.
This was back in the '70's. The Apollo program had come to a dead end, and we were a bunch of hot-shit aerospace engineers scraping out a living, but we had a dream. We were going to the moon. Not sending somebody, we were going to go ourselves. Forget the government projects; we were a little disillusioned with government—nothing against NASA, but we were the generation that saw Richard Nixon cancel the Apollo moonflights, and scrap three working Saturn rockets, and we didn't exactly trust big spaceflight projects. We were going to the moon, and we were going to get Hollywood to pay for it.
Yeah, sure you've heard this story before. It's true now, and it was true back then—there's enough money in the entertainment business to pay for a space program out of petty cash. To Americans, spaceflight is entertainment—science is just a sidelight, an excuse for the spectacle.
Okay. Shut up. Here's the story.


· · · · ·


Project Moon was going to be the greatest spectacle ever filmed, a spectacle to out-spectacle Star Wars; a real moon landing, filmed live on the moon.
It was Mr. Rich and the Gecko that thought of it, mostly. They dragged me into it, and we refined the ideas over more than a few beers at the Thirsty Ear. "I figure the Apollo spacecraft had a factor of two margin on the lunar surface," the Gecko said. "That's huge. We can cut corners, leave behind the redundancy, get rid of the margin—we can do it for a quarter of the launch mass."
There's an obscure law, you probably haven't heard of it, said that scrap government property can be claimed for cost by any company which has a legitimate business use for it. Far as I know, it's still on the books.
At the end of the Apollo program, NASA scrapped three complete Saturn rockets. You can see them, rusting away on display, one in Huntsville, one in Houston, one at the Cape. Lousy thing to do with a rocket, my opinion. We couldn't get them—the damn museums at the Space Centers refused to declare them excess. But we found out that the engines and avionics for Apollo 21—the long-lead-time parts, all the important stuff—had been manufactured before the mission was canned. They were still there, in perfect shape, stashed in climate-controlled warehouses in Alabama and California. We got dibs on them.
The Gecko was a tall gangly guy with an unpronounceable Polish name. You've never heard of him, but he was an orbital mechanics wizard, which was really something back in those days when a computer was a big hunk of temperamental iron that took up a whole air-conditioned room. I had never seen him wear anything other than a white button-down shirt, not even to the beach. Somebody called him the Gecko because he moved like one, stock still for minutes, and then suddenly—blur—he was somewhere else. The name stuck, even if the guy who tagged him couldn't hack it and left the program.
Mr. Rich, that's Ricardo Capolongo. He was short, dapper, and always wore a suit with a vest, even when vests were out of style. It was Mr. Rich tracked down the spare Apollo parts, and Gecko who said, with no trace of drunkenness in his voice, that if we could find backing, he could land us safely on the moon, no problem.
We'd all read Heinlein. "The Man Who Sold the Moon," great story. It was our inspiration. We could do it. There was money could be made in space, and the entertainment industry was the place to make it.
So we made a pact. We were solemnly sober about it. We pledged to the project everything we had: our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.
We bought tickets west, and hit the streets of Hollywood. I had our financial statements all worked out, knew how to talk knowledgeable about gross, net, up-front money, shooting ratio. We were ready to show how the venture could make money: just give us a billion dollars to put together a mission to the moon, I could guarantee a profit: if not on television and first-run film rights, then on the plastic models and Vue-Master and product endorsements. We had all our T's dotted and our I's crossed, and we started right at the top of the list.
We got laughed at. Kubrick we couldn't even talk to. Altman was too busy to talk, this week and for the rest of the next decade. We moved down the list. Once word started getting around Hollywood about the three nerds with their wacko pitch, we had problems even getting in the door. Roddenberry told us to shove off. We kept on pounding the pavement, moving down the list. Roger Corman loved it, couldn't get the money together. Then further down yet. Finally we scraped the bottom of the barrel, and when that didn't work, we went lower yet.
We ended up with Danton Swiggs.
No, I don't doubt that you never heard of him, although he produced two, maybe three hundred feature movies. He's known well enough in Hollywood, though. Let's just put it this way—Swiggs Productions never had to worry about the budget for wardrobe, since for the most part his actors didn't wear any.
To understand Swiggs, the king of sleaze, you gotta first understand Chicago. In the late '60s, it seems, there was this masseuse who massaged her clients in some places which Chicago's finest thought she shouldn't ought to be touching. The masseuse in question appealed, and Illinois Supreme Court had ruled that the question of which parts get massaged was a private matter between the masseuse and her client, and the police had nothing to say about it.
Swiggs had seen the business potential released by that decision. Within two months, he had opened up a series of massage parlors to employ busty women in skimpy clothes to rub their lonely male clients a little bit below the buckle, for a hundred bucks a pop. Heck, for all I know, some of 'em might have even known how to give a massage.
Danny Swiggs made a moderate fortune at the massage business, and got out of the business right before the bottom line went south from cut-rate competition. He moved into magazines, the type you don't see at family newsstands, and made money at that. From there he invested in Nevada brothels, and when he made a pile at that, he went on to movies. He already had the connections in the sleaze business. The laws about what you could show on screen were loosening up. Films like Last Tango In Paris were stretching the limits, making sex into art. Swiggs, he stretched the limits too, just in the other direction.
When we got to Swiggs, he'd made his bundle and was trying to go legit. He wore a magnificent wave of hair (none of it his own), a cream-colored polyester shirt open down to his navel to show off his thick gold chains, and lizard-skin platform shoes. Hanging from his gold chains was a crystal the size of a baseball. "Pure quartz," he explained to me proudly. "One hundred percent natural crystal"—expecting, no doubt, that I would be impressed. Guaranteed to balance his Chi, he said. Double his virility.
He had a girl on each arm. Not the type of woman I'd be interested in, even if I hadn't been married; the type that were designed with the word "ornament" in mind, the kind with too much mascara and clothes that were too few or too tight.
Swiggs Productions was going mainstream. He was looking for a project to establish him in Hollywood as a legitimate name, a by-god don't-call-me-I'll-call-you producer—in a town where producers were treated with about the same regard as lawyers or agents, only not quite so high class. But his first attempt at a legit film was a dog, twenty million spent in production and maybe twelve people actually paid money to see it.
That just whet his appetite. He had the cash, and he was looking to find the score.
The room was full of girls, girls just lounging around in mini-skirts and extremely tight sweaters. Even back then mini-skirts were years out of fashion, but he just liked the look. "Hey," he said, and winked. "You take a fancy to any of 'em, you give me the word."
Now, I know a lot of aerospace engineers, and all of them (back then) were men, and all of them were married. The astronauts get the publicity and the chicks; the engineers make the rockets work, and go home to their wives and children. "I'm married," I said. "Got two kids in high school."
He looked at me without any real comprehension. "Say, you think I can't be discreet?" He nudged me with an elbow. "No problemo, stud, it's under cover. Go ahead, your little muffy will hear nothing from me, word."
The Gecko would have walked out right then, but we couldn't. We just couldn't. We'd sunk every dollar we'd had or could borrow into Project Moon. Swiggs was the last human being left in Hollywood who would even let us in the door. We had absolutely no choices left.
"So tell me something I want to hear," said Swiggs, leaning back in his leather chair behind a mahogany desk about the size of Idaho. "Give me the pitch that will make me come in my pants."
We held our noses and pitched the concept. Mr. Rich explained how we could scrounge old Apollo hardware. Gecko explained how we could land on the moon, really, no kidding, this is not a scam. I explained how during the Apollo program the sales of television commercials during the TV specials would have easily paid for the whole project. Project Moon could be the story of the century, the story of the underdogs, Horatio Alger times ten.
We ran out of words, and fell silent.
Swiggs had his eyes closed, his face all scrunched up. Suddenly he stood up and pointed a finger at me. "Baby!" he said. "Yes, fucking yes, and I mean, yes. I've got a hard-on, I'm coming in my pants, this is the E-ticket ride of the century. The Moon Mission. No, wait, more class—The Moon Odyssey. No, I got it, I got it: Adventure: Moon. I can see it. This is big, guys, I mean big."
Gecko looked at me, raised an eyebrow, ventured a tiny smile. I winked and gave him a covert thumbs up. At long last, could we finally have hooked a producer? Now if we could only reel him in.
"Just one thing," Swiggs said, and we wilted silently. He looked at me. "Convince me you can do it. I'm a simple kind of dude. That Apollo thingie cost 25 billion bucks. Explain to me in words I can understand just why you think you can do it cheaper."
I relaxed fractionally. This was a question we were ready for. "We're private," I said. "That means we're just plain more efficient than the government. We don't have to deal with politics, don't have to answer to Congress—when we need a decision, we make it. No committees, no reports, no justifications. When we need to buy something, we'll buy it—no government specifications, no fifty pounds of paperwork. We use off the shelf technology instead of custom made. Use electronics designed for televisions, at ten cents each, not aerospace parts at a thousand dollars a pop. And we know it can be done. Most of the technology is already developed, we can get it surplus."
"And, face it," Mr. Rich added, "we tolerate a little more risk. Danger sells."