She tapped on her lectern, and typed out Chalmers.

It was an immense bibliography: articles, interviews, books, videos, a whole library of his communiqués to Earth, another library of commentaries, diplomatic, historical, biographical, psychological, psychobiographical— histories, comedies, and tragedies, in every medium, including, apparently, an opera. Meaning some villainous coloratura was down there on Earth, singing her thoughts.

She clicked off the lectern, appalled. After a few minutes of deep breathing she clicked it back on, and called up the file. She couldn’t bear to look at any video or still images; she went for the shortest biographical articles in print, from popular magazines, and called one up at random and began to read.

• • •

He was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1976, and grew up in Jacksonville, Florida. His mother and father divorced when he was seven, and after that he lived mostly with his father, in apartments near Jacksonville Beach, an area of cheap stucco beach property built in the 1940s, behind an aging boardwalk of shrimp shacks and hamburger joints. Sometimes he lived with an aunt and uncle near the downtown, which was dominated by big skyscrapers built by insurance companies. His mother moved to Iowa when he was eight. His father joined Alcoholics Anonymous three separate times. He was his high school’s class president, and the captain of its football team, on which he played center, and of its baseball team, on which he played catcher. He led a project to clear the choking hyacinths from the St. Johns River. “His entry in his senior yearbook is so long you just know something had to be wrong!” He was accepted by Harvard and given a scholarship, then after one year transferred to MIT, where he earned degrees in engineering and astronomy. For four years he lived alone, in a room above a garage in Cambridge, and very little information about him survived; few people seemed to have known him. “He went through Boston like a ghost.”

After college he took a National Service Corps job in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, and here was where he burst onto the national scene. He ran one of the most successful civilian works programs associated with the NSC, building housing for Caribbean immigrants coming through Pensacola. Here thousands of people knew him, at least in his work life. “They all agree he was an inspirational leader, dedicated to the immigrants, working nonstop to help their integration into American society.” It was in these years that he married Priscilla Jones, the beautiful daughter of a prominent Pensacola family. People spoke of a political career. “He was on top of the world!”

Then in 2004 the NSC was terminated, and in 2005 he joined the astronaut program in Huntsville, Alabama. His marriage broke up that same year. In 2007 he became an astronaut, and moved quickly into a “flying administration” post. One of his longest space flights was six weeks on the American space station, alone with fellow rising star John Boone. He became head of NASA in 2015, while Boone became captain of the space station. Chalmers and Boone together rode the “Mars Apollo” project through the American government, and after Boone made the first landing in 2020, they both joined the First Hundred, and went to Mars in 2027.