What was wrong with her? She had thought that one over
a lot and decided the answer was nothing. She had dark Greek eyes, olive skin, and a figure that would stop a clock— a perfect size eight. But it got better. She had the best legs in the world. The absolute very best. If they wouldn't necessarily stop a timepiece, they'd sure as heck slowed a lot of traffic over the years.
No, her problem was opportunity. Whereas on paper this island was every single girl's dream—males trapped here by the carload—all the attractive/interesting men were either too young or too old or too dumb or too married. Moreover, those in the control room—mostly Ph.D.'s in their late twenties—saw her only as Dr. C. A. Andros, Director-in-Charge. There seemed to be an unspoken rule around Control that you didn't make a move on the boss lady. Anybody who could run this project had to be treated with the distance befitting authority. Especially since they believed all she really cared about was work.
Thanks a lot, whoever dreamed that one up.
The sickest part of all, though, was they were half right. She did not wish herself anywhere else in the world right now, men or no men. She occupied the center of the universe, was poised for the winner-take-all shot she could only have dreamed about five years ago, back when she was still fighting the mindless bureaucrats at NASA. With Project Cyclops she was running a half-billion-dollar gamble for the last big prize of the twentieth century. If she lived to be a hundred, she would never be handed anything this terrific ever again.
Born Calypso Andropolous thirty-four years ago, daughter of strong-minded Greek farmers, she had learned to believe in herself with a fierce, unshakable conviction. Until now, though, she had never really had the opportunity to test that faith. Until now.
It had not been an easy journey. After getting her doctorate in aerospace engineering from Cal Tech, she had struggled up through NASA's Kennedy Center bureaucracy to the position of chief analyst. But she had never achieved more than a desk job. She had wanted more, a lot more. Now, thanks to SatCom, in three days she would have it. Using a fifteen-gigawatt microwave laser nicknamed Cyclops, she was about to put SatCom in the forefront of the private race for space.
Ironically, the company had built its spaceport barely three hundred kilometers from her birthplace on the island of Naxos. She often thought about life's ironies: sometimes you had to return home to change the future. She barely remembered that rugged little island now; the images were faint and overly romantic. Those times dated back to when the junta of right-wing colonels had seized power in Greece. Soon thereafter her parents had emigrated; they and their nine-year-old daughter joining a large exodus of freedom-minded Greeks to New York. They had been there only three months when her father died—the hospital said it was pneumonia; she knew it was mourning for Greece and all he had lost. He had loved it more than life. She was afraid, down inside in a place where she didn't visit much anymore, that he loved it more than he had loved her. So along the way she tried to forget all of it, to bury her memories of Greece. And now here she was back again. In New York, Cally Andropolous had, in spite of herself, thought incessantly of Greece; back here now, all she could think about was New York.
The strongest recollection was the third floor of a walk-up tenement on Tenth Avenue and Forty-ninth Street, a section of town widely known as Hell's Kitchen—and for good reason. The schools were designed to make sociopaths of all those trapped inside; only New York's famous Bronx High School of Science, one of the finest and most competitive public institutions in the nation, offered an escape from their horror.
Accepted when she was thirteen, Calypso Andropolous graduated third in her class. For her senior science project, she created a solid-fuel rocket, using, as the phrase goes, ordinary household chemicals. And she did it all by herself, with a little help from a skinny French Canadian boy named Georges LeFarge, who lived with his mother in Soho.