Told To Moon About U Quotes

I’ll start in the air,” I said, far more steadily than I thought I could, considering. I knelt to tie the shirt around his thigh, cinching it tight above the wound; he stiffened but let me finish the knot. “The air first, the airship, and then-then I’ll dive.” “You can’t swim,” broke in Armand. “You told me that you can’t.” “Maybe I can now. If I’m a dragon.” “Don’t be an idiot! If you can’t swim, you can’t swim, Eleanore! You’ll drown out there, and what the bloody hell do you think you’re going to do anyway to a U-boat? Bite it open?” I stood again. “Yes! If I must! I don’t hear you coming up with a better-“ “You’ll die out there!” “Or we’ll all die here!” “We’re going to find another way!” “You two work on that. I’m off.” I fixed them both with one last, vehement look, the Turn rising inside me. Remember this. Remember them, this moment, this heartbreak, these two boys. Remember that they loved you. Armand had reached for my shoulders. “I forbid-Eleanore, please, no-“ “No,” echoed Jesse, speaking at last. “You’re not going after the submarine, Lora. You won’t need to.” Armand and I paused together, glancing down at him. I stood practically on tiptoe, so ready to become my other self. Jesse climbed clumsily to his feet. When he swayed, we both lunged to catch him. “Armand will take me to the shore. I’ll handle the U-boat.” “How?” demanded Armand at once. But I understood. I could read him so well now, Jesse-of-the-stars. I understood what he meant to do, and what it would cost him. I felt myself shaking my head. Above us, the airship propellers thumped louder and louder. “Yes,” said Jesse, smiling his lovely smile at me. “I already sense your agreement. Death and the Elemental were stronger joined than apart, remember? This is our joining. Don’t waste any more time quarreling with me about it. That’s not your way.” He leaned down to me, a hand tangled in my hair. His mouth pressed to mine, and for the first time ever I didn’t feel bliss at his touch. I felt misery. “Go on, Lora-of-the-moon,” he murmured against my lips. “You’re going to save us. I know you will.” I glared past him to the harsh, baffled face of Armand. “Will you help him? Do you swear it?” “I-yes, I will. I do.” I disentangled Jesse’s hand, kissed it, stepped back, and let the Turn consume me, smoke rising and rising, leaving the castle and all I loved behind me for the wild open sky.

The phrase “conflict of interest” barely begins to describe Tom Lanphier’s rabidly partisan approach to advising one of the most powerful congressional allies of the American military-industrial complex. Yet he was in good company. Air force intelligence was crammed with highly competitive analysts who believed they were in a zero-sum game not only with the Russians but also with the army and the navy. If they could make the missile-gap theory stick, America would have to respond with a crash ICBM program of its own. The dominance of the Strategic Air Command in the U.S. military hierarchy would be complete—and Convair would profit mightily. It is hardly surprising that the information Lanphier fed to Symington and Symington to every politician and columnist who would listen was authoritative, alarming, and completely, disastrously wrong. Symington’s “on the record” projection of Soviet nuclear strength, given to Senate hearings on the missile gap in late 1959, was that by 1962 they would have three thousand ICBMs. The actual number was four. Symington’s was a wild guess, an extrapolation based on extrapolations by air force generals who believed it was only responsible to take Khrushchev at his word when, for example, he told journalists in Moscow that a single Soviet factory was producing 250 rockets a year, complete with warheads. Symington knew what he was doing. He wanted to be president and believed rightly that missile-gap scaremongering had helped the Democrats pick up nearly fifty seats in Congress in the 1958 midterm elections. But everyone was at it. The 1958 National Intelligence Estimate had forecast one hundred Soviet ICBMs by 1960 and five hundred by 1962. In January 1960 Allen Dulles, who should have known better because he did know better, told Eisenhower that even though the U-2 had shown no evidence of mass missile production, the Russians could still somehow conjure up two hundred of them in eighteen months. On the political left a former congressional aide called Frank Gibney wrote a baseless five-thousand-word cover story for Harper’s magazine accusing the administration of giving the Soviets a six-to-one lead in ICBMs. (Gibney also recommended putting “a system of really massive retaliation” on the moon.) On the right, Vice President Nixon quietly let friends and pundits know that he felt his own boss didn’t quite get the threat. And in the middle, Joe Alsop wrote a devastating series of columns syndicated to hundreds of newspapers in which he calculated that the Soviets would have 150 ICBMs in ten months flat and suggested that by not matching them warhead for warhead the president was playing Russian roulette with the national future. Alsop, who lived well but expensively in a substantial house in Georgetown, was the Larry King of his day—dapper, superbly well connected, and indefatigable in the pursuit of a good story. His series ran in the last week of January 1960. Khrushchev read it in translation and resolved to steal the thunder of the missile-gap lobby, which was threatening to land him with an arms race that would bankrupt Communism. Before the four-power summit, which was now scheduled for Paris in mid-May, he would offer to dismantle his entire ICBM stockpile. No one needed to know how big or small it was; they just needed to know that he was serious about disarmament. He revealed his plan to the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union at a secret meeting in the Kremlin on

During NASA’s first fifty years the agency’s accomplishments were admired globally. Democratic and Republican leaders were generally bipartisan on the future of American spaceflight. The blueprint for the twenty-first century called for sustaining the International Space Station and its fifteen-nation partnership until at least 2020, and for building the space shuttle’s heavy-lift rocket and deep spacecraft successor to enable astronauts to fly beyond the friendly confines of low earth orbit for the first time since Apollo. That deep space ship would fly them again around the moon, then farther out to our solar system’s LaGrange points, and then deeper into space for rendezvous with asteroids and comets, learning how to deal with radiation and other deep space hazards before reaching for Mars or landings on Saturn’s moons. It was the clearest, most reasonable and best cost-achievable goal that NASA had been given since President John F. Kennedy’s historic decision to land astronauts on the lunar surface. Then Barack Obama was elected president. The promising new chief executive gave NASA short shrift, turning the agency’s future over to middle-level bureaucrats with no dreams or vision, bent on slashing existing human spaceflight plans that had their genesis in the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush White Houses. From the starting gate, Mr. Obama’s uncaring space team rolled the dice. First they set up a presidential commission designed to find without question we couldn’t afford the already-established spaceflight plans. Thirty to sixty thousand highly skilled jobs went on the chopping block with space towns coast to coast facing 12 percent unemployment. $9.4 billion already spent on heavy-lift rockets and deep space ships was unashamedly flushed down America’s toilet. The fifty-year dream of new frontiers was replaced with the shortsighted obligations of party politics. As 2011 dawned, NASA, one of America’s great science agencies, was effectively defunct. While Congress has so far prohibited the total cancellation of the space agency’s plans to once again fly astronauts beyond low earth orbit, Obama space operatives have systematically used bureaucratic tricks to slow roll them to a crawl. Congress holds the purse strings and spent most of 2010 saying, “Wait just a minute.” Thousands of highly skilled jobs across the economic spectrum have been lost while hundreds of billions in “stimulus” have been spent. As of this writing only Congress can stop the NASA killing. Florida’s senior U.S. Senator Bill Nelson, a Democrat, a former spaceflyer himself, is leading the fight to keep Obama space advisors from walking away from fifty years of national investment, from throwing the final spade of dirt on the memory of some of America’s most admired heroes. Congressional committees have heard from expert after expert that Mr. Obama’s proposal would be devastating. Placing America’s future in space in the hands of the Russians and inexperienced commercial operatives is foolhardy. Space legend John Glenn, a retired Democratic Senator from Ohio, told president Obama that “Retiring the space shuttles before the country has another space ship is folly. It could leave Americans stranded on the International Space Station with only a Russian spacecraft, if working, to get them off.” And Neil Armstrong testified before the Senate’s Commerce, Science & Transportation Committee that “With regard to President Obama’s 2010 plan, I have yet to find a person in NASA, the Defense Department, the Air Force, the National Academies, industry, or academia that had any knowledge of the plan prior to its announcement. Rumors abound that neither the NASA Administrator nor the President’s Science and Technology Advisor were knowledgeable about the plan. Lack of review normally guarantees that there will be overlooked requirements and unwelcome consequences. How could such a chain of events happen?

amount to a fart in a cyclone. His parents and their parson had tried to sell him the same message, binding him to a hardscrabble farm and a church built on strict “thou shalt nots.” Ridgway had kicked over the traces, gone out on his own and proved them wrong. In spades. Once he was rich as Croesus—no, scratch that; richer than Croesus or the Lord Himself—small minds kept after him in other ways. They told him that he should concentrate on oil and gas, stick with the things he knew, where he had proven his ability. Don’t branch out into other fields and least of all space exploration. What did any Texas oil man with a sixth-grade education know about the friggin’ moon and stars beyond it? Next to nothing, granted. But he had money to burn, enough to buy the brains that did know all about the universe and rockets, astrophysics, interplanetary travel—name your poison. And he knew some other things, as well. Ridgway knew that his country had been losing ground for decades—hell, for generations. Ever since the last world war, when Roosevelt and Truman let Joe Stalin gobble up half of the world without a fight. The great U.S. of A. had been declining ever since, with racial integration and affirmative action, gay rights and abortion, losing wars all over Asia and the Middle East. He’d done his best to save America, bankrolling groups that stood against the long slide into socialism’s Sodom and Gomorrah, but he’d finally admitted to himself that they were beaten. His United States, the one he loved, was circling the drain. And it was time to start from scratch. He’d be goddamned if some inept redneck would spoil it now. You want a job done right, a small voice in his head reminded him, do it yourself. San Antonio CONGRESS HAD CREATED the National Nuclear Security Administration in 2000, following the scandal that had enveloped Dr. Wen Ho Lee and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Lee had been accused of passing secrets about America’s nuclear arsenal to the People’s Republic of China, pleading guilty on one of fifty-nine charges, then turned around

Don’t shoot,” Tom cautioned again. “That brave in the lead has a crooked lance with a white flag. Whatever it is they’re wantin’, it ain’t a fight. You speak any Comanch’?” “Not a word,” Henry replied. “I don’t know much. If they do a lot of tradin’, they can probably talk English, but if they don’t--all we can do is hope my Injun will get us by.” Tom spat a glob of chew onto Rachel’s bleached floor. Then he bellowed, “What do you want?” Loretta’s nerves were strung so taut, she leaped. Nausea surged into her throat as the brown tobacco juice soaked into the floor. Was she losing her mind? Who cared if the puncheon got stained? Before this was over, the house might be burned to the ground. She heard Rachel crying, a soft, irregular whimpering. Terror. The metallic taste of it shriveled her tongue. “What brings you here?” Tom cried again. “Hites!” a deep voice called back. “We come as friends, White-Eyes.” The lead warrior moved some twenty feet in front of his comrades, holding the crooked lance high so the dusty white rag was clearly visible. He sat proudly on his black stallion, gleaming brown shoulders straight, leather-sheathed legs pressed snugly to his mount. A rush of wind lifted his mahogany hair, wisping it across his bronzed, sharply chiseled face. Loretta’s first thought when she saw him was that he seemed different from the others. A closer look told her why. He was unquestionably a half-breed, taller on horseback than the rest, lighter-skinned. If not for his sun-darkened complexion and long hair, he might have passed for a white man. Everything else about him was savage, though, from the cruel sneer on his mouth to the expert way he balanced on his horse, as if he and the animal were one entity. Tom Weaver stiffened. “Son of a--Henry, you know who that is?” “I was hopin’ I was wrong.” Loretta inched closer to get a better look. Then it hit her. Hunter. She had heard his name whispered with dread, heard tales. But until this moment she hadn’t believed he existed. A blue-eyed half-breed, one of the most cunning and treacherous adversaries the U.S. Army had run across. Now that the war had pitted North against South, the homesteaders had no cavalry to keep Hunter and his marauders at bay, and his raiders struck ever deeper into settled country, advancing east. Some claimed he was far more dangerous than a full-blooded Comanche because he had a white man’s intelligence. As vicious as he was, there were stories that he spared women and children. Whether that was coincidence, design, or a lie some Indian lover had dreamed up, no one knew. Loretta opted for the latter.