DOSSIER: C. DEXTER TRUMBALL
NO MATTER HOW WELL HE DID, NO MATTER WHAT HE ACCOMPLISHED, Dex Trumball could never satisfy his coldly indifferent father.
Darryl C. Trumball was a self-made man, he firmly proclaimed to anyone and everyone. One of Dex’s earliest memories was his father cornering a U.S. senator at a house party and tapping him on the shoulder with each and every word as he declared with quiet insistence, “I started with nothing but my bare hands and my brain, and I built a fortune for myself.”
In truth, the old man had started with a meager inheritance: a decrepit auto body shop that was on the verge of bankruptcy when Dex’s grandfather died of a massive stroke in the middle of his fourth beer at the neighborhood bar.
Dex had been just a baby then, an only child. His mother was pretty, frail, and ineffectual; totally unable to stand up to her implacably driven husband. Dex’s father, blade-slim, fast and agile, had attended Holy Cross on a track scholarship. He never graduated; he had to take over the family business instead. His dream of going to the Boston College Law School, as he had been promised, was shattered, leaving him bitter and resentful.
And filled with an icy, relentless energy.
Darryl C. Trumball quickly learned that business depends on politics. Although the body shop was practically worthless, the land on which it stood could become extremely valuable if it could be converted to upscale condominiums for the white-collar types who worked in Boston’s financial district. He pushed feverishly to get the old neighborhood rezoned, then sold the shop and his mother’s house for a sizable sum.
By the time Dex was ready for college, his father was very wealthy, and known in the financial community for his cold-blooded ruthlessness. Money was important to him, and he spent every waking hour striving to increase his net worth. When Dex expressed an interest in science, the elder Trumball snorted disdainfully:
“You’ll never be able to support yourself that way! Why, when I was your age I was taking care of your grandmother, your two aunts, your mother and you.”
Dex listened obediently and registered anyway for physics at Yale. His high-school grades (and his father’s money) were good enough to be acceptable to Harvard and half a dozen other Ivy League schools, but Dex decided on Yale. New Haven was close enough to Boston for him to get home easily, yet far away enough for him to be free of his father’s chilling presence.
Dex had always found school to be ridiculously easy. Where others pored over textbooks and sweated out exams, Dex breezed through with a near-photographic memory and a clever ability to tell his teachers exactly what they wanted to hear. His relationships with his peers were much the same: they did what he wanted, almost always. Dex got the brilliant ideas and his friends got into trouble carrying them out. Yet they never complained; they admired his dash and felt grateful when he noticed them at all.
Sex was equally easy for him, even on campuses electrified by charges of harassment. Dex had his pick of the women: the more intelligent they were, the more they seemed to bask in the temporary sunshine of his affection. And they never complained afterward.
Physics was not for Dex, but he found himself drawn to geophysics: the study of the Earth, its interior and its atmosphere. His grades were well-nigh perfect. He was a campus leader in everything from the school television station to the tennis team. Yet his father was never pleased.
“An educated bum, that’s what you are,” his father taunted. “I’ll have to support you all my life and keep on supporting you even after I’m gone.”
Which suited Dex just fine. But deep within, he longed to hear one approving word from his father. He ached to have the callous old man smile at him.
His life changed forever at a planetarium show. Dex liked to take his dates to the planetarium. It was cheap, it impressed young women with his seriousness and intelligence, and it was the darkest place in town. Very romantic, really, sitting in the back row with the splendors of the heavens spangled above.
One particular show was about the planet Mars. After several failures, an automated spacecraft had successfully returned actual samples of Martian rocks and soil to a laboratory in orbit around the Earth. Now there was talk of sending human explorers there. Suddenly Dex stopped fondling the young woman who had accompanied him and sat up straight in his chair.
“There’s more than one planet to study!” he said aloud, eliciting a chorus of shushing hisses from around him, and the utter humiliation of his date.
Dex spent that summer at the University of Nevada, taking a special course in geology. The next summer he went to a seminar on planetary geology in Berkeley.
By the time the first expedition had returned from Mars, triumphantly bearing samples of living Martian organisms, Dex had degrees from Yale and Berkeley. He went to the struggling Moonbase settlement for six months to do field work on the massive meteorites that lay buried deep beneath Mare Nubium and Mare Imbrium.
Much to his father’s dismay.
“I give the government fortunes of tax money for this space stuff,” the old man complained bitterly. “What damned good is it?”
Dex’s father was a real-estate tycoon now, with long fingers in several New England-based banks and business interests in Europe, Asia and Latin America. He kept in touch with his far-flung associates through satellite-relayed electronic links and even leased space in an orbital factory that manufactured ultrapure pharmaceuticals.
Dex smiled brightly for his father. “Don’t be a flathead, Dad. I want to be on the next expedition to Mars.”
His father stared at him coldly. “When are you going to start bringing some money in to this family, instead of spending it like it’s water?”
Challenged, wanting to please his father and win his approval for once, Dex blurted, “We could make money from Mars.”
His father fixed Dex with an icy, disbelieving expression in his flinty eyes.
“We could, really,” Dex said, groping for something that would convince the old man. “Besides, it’d make your name in history, Dad. The man who led the way back to Mars. It’d be your monument.”
Dairyl C. Trumball seemed unmoved by thoughts of a monument. Yet he asked, “You think we could make money out of an expedition to Mars?”
Dex nodded vigorously. “That’s right.”
“How?”
That was when Dex began planning an expedition to Mars that would be funded by private donors. To be sure, a good deal of taxpayers’ money went into the pot. But once Dex enlisted the interest and drive of his profit-oriented father, funding for the Second Martian Expedition came mainly from private sources.
Dex was determined to make the expedition profitable. He wanted his father’s praise, just once. Then he could tell the old man to go bust a blood vessel and drop dead.